The Wind Done Gone Page 5

  The driver say, "Dey ack jes lak brutha 'n sista now, not lak how she usta ack." There's a new understanding between them, and I'm not the only one to see it.

  I take my rest in the overseer's house. Miss Priss watches Dreamy Gentleman's children. Lord have mercy! Other's son and daughter keep quietly to themselves. For the boy, born after his father died, every funeral is his father's funeral. For the girl, so young when her father was killed riding out with the Klan, every funeral is her father's funeral. And though their fathers were different men, this grief, more than their mother's blood, has become the bond between them.

  Soon they will all be deeply asleep, sleep they need, asleep for the whole long night. After all this sorrow, God knows they need the comfort of Garlic's soup. And if God doesn't know, Garlic knows. And I need the house to grieve.

  27

  We were sitting together at the kitchen table, me, Garlic, Mrs. Garlic, and Miss Priss. The rest of them had gone to sleep, won't wake till morning. Was Mrs. Garlic's kitchen now. Mammy's cap and Mammy's apron had been removed, and were already washed, folded, and put away; she had been sick a spell. Eating cornbread straight out of a skillet, drinking coffee from cracked cups. These events had never occurred in Mammy's kitchen. Chitlins on the stove were stinking up the place. If Mammy had ever wanted to eat chitlins, she would have cooked them out in the cabins. Freedom had a flavor, and we were tasting it. I breathed in the pungent aroma of change.

  I had to ask. Everything was different, so maybe now was my chance. "Tell me about those little boys buried out there under the tree? Lady's boys."

  "What dey der da tell?" asked Mrs. Garlic, handing me a steaming bowl of pig entrails.

  "You tell me," I said, hands still limp in my lap. My hunger for knowledge was sharper than my hunger for midnight food. I looked—forlornly, I hope—into Mrs. Garlic's eyes.

  Miss Priss's arm shot out; she grabbed the first bowl for herself. Between noisy chomps she declared, "You should a figured it out already."

  I am still hungry. I wanted to slap Miss Priss. Slap her hard. But I didn't do it. It always been this way with me. I'll call another girl "bitch" before you blink, but I don't like to hit a woman. I guess it always felt like too much of a man to do it. Strange enough. Strength always seemed to rob the girl out of me, so I always take care to keep it hid. I let my eyelids rest heavily upon my eyes and close.

  Garlic's chomping down on his bowl of tripe. "Yah shouda' akse me."

  "Would you tell me?"

  "I knows all about it."

  Garlic was playing with me like a cat batting at cobwebs, and I was dissolving and falling to the ground with each bat. I hate to be denied. I don't ask for things I can't have. I couldn't say more. But I was racing 'round the furniture in my mind, trying to find a chair to sit on. Why do I always think of it just that way? Is thinking truly like house cleaning? Finally I stumbled into an observation of Beauty's: "It's like a bad taste in your mouth to be the only person who knows something, something good or something bad. Being the only one is bitter. Being one of two is sweet." "I'll keep your secret with you," I offered.

  Garlic say nothing.

  I rose as if to walk away. I said, "It's like starting to disappear at your beginning end. Ain't it?"

  "What?"

  "Forgetting. If I forget what happened to me in Charleston and you don't know it to remind me, it's gone. A year of my life gone like termites eating out the middle of a wood board, vanished into a mouth and flown away. Gone with the wind."

  "When ebrybody knowed what happened and why is dead."

  "You remember who I used to be. I got nobody in 'lanta to do that for me."

  "Now you admittin' that it you what needs me. I'm surrounded with memory." Garlic pulled me by the arm into his life, pushing me into a closer chair.

  "We've spent enough time in this kitchen," said Mrs. Garlic. Wife and daughter got up and left us alone.

  28

  I've always been afraid of Garlic. He never treated me warm-like. I remember seeing him toss other children on the place—black and white—into the air to catch in his powerful arms. I remember seeing him sneak lumps of sugar to Jeems when he was about the place, but not to me.

  Garlic poured a lot of milk in a cup, into which he stirred sugar, then a splash or two of coffee. Something in the way he slurped disturbed me. His lower lip poked so far out, it grabbed at the cup as if it were a third thumb. "How many time I sit in dis kitchen with huah when all de house sleep?"

  "How many times?"

  "You think you smart?"

  "I hope I am."

  "Dat's da trufe. When we brought ya Mama to de house, it was huah and me late nights in dis kitchen. First you was coming, I hoped you were my baby. But then you came with what dey called peridot green eyes. Pallas cried when she saw you wrapped in the little blanket. You were so clear white till your color came in. As little of it as you got."

  He laughed. I had never heard Garlic laugh before. It was a rolling, gutbucket cough of a laugh, like the clacking together of bones in a jar.

  "What was it like when you first came here?"

  "I didin know nothin' but slavery times. I was born in this here country. All I could see to lifting me up was pulling real close to a powerful man and teasing him into thinking my thoughts was his own. Your daddy was the man I found. Together we found Pallas. That was your mother's name. She had already found Lady. Now Pallas, she had it kinda easy, but it's easy what will corrupt you. Lady was cut from a strange cloth, and I guess it was Pallas what cut her."

  Pallas. My mother's name is Pallas. Not Mammy. Pallas.

  As he told the story, Lady was fifteen years old, a heart-heavy virgin, when they came upon her. "A heart-broke child, something just like her first girl is now." Other, he was talking about. "It was a stroke of good luck that boy bein' kilt."

  "Good luck?"

  "Feleepe, dyin'. Lady loved her some Feleepe, and Mammy sho did love Lady. But Feleepe had money, and slaves of hid own, and he want to live right up dere in Savannah. If Lady a married him, Pallas a been a slave. When he got kilt, Pallas was sorry for Lady, but she saw her own good chance. If Lady married a man on a lonely place, a man with no people, Pallas could run the place, and she'd be free, free as she was going to be. And I knew me a man just like that."

  Mammy put the idea of the convent in one of Lady's ears and the idea of Planter in the other. Then she took her chance. Lady was leaning toward the convent. But her Daddy, he hated the Catholic Church more than he hated Catholics, and Planter was one. He couldn't bear to see his little gal given over to the Catholics. So she married Irish Planter, and if she didn't care, it was because Pallas kept feeding her something by the spoonful that didn't make your pain go away but made you stop caring that you hurt.

  "I rode wid 'em up country. It was me and Mammy up front with Planter and Lady behind."

  On the honeymoon, Planter came to the room and found Lady knocked out, completely drunk, sleeping in Mammy's arms. "I wa' standin' right outside the door in case things didn't go right," Garlic told me. He said, "Mammy say to Marse, 'Do yah bidness and git out.'" He didn't see what happened, and the room was quiet. Later, Mammy told him. She washed Lady's body and carried her back to her bed after she, Mammy, change the sheets. Then Mammy went to Planter in his room and gave him what he wanted in his bed. She gave it so good, he never complained. Mammy say Lady came to think of her baby as an immaculate conception like the priests in Savannah gabbled about. Between them, they called Lady "Virgin Mary." She like to pray, and she got her babies without ever knowing a man.

  That's all I can write down now.

  29

  The bottle I took from the sideboard is almost empty. If I stay here much longer, I'll need another one. I've got to write this down. But I don't want to.

  "What did she say when she found out they sold me?"

  "She didin know."

  "She didin know." Those three words mean more to me than "I love you." And they just
as hard to believe. Garlic would lie for Mammy. Love. Ignorance. Lying. How you supposed to know anything? God? Springs of faith? Weed patches of blindness with pretty little dandelions growing in them? I like to think, I would like to think, she didn't know. I see into this thing too deeply. Maybe she sent me away, for me. Once I was gone, she had to forget me, or she, Pallas, would a died of pain. I know all about it. Didn't I do the same? Forget or die of pain. Die of pain while I learned to forget?

  Miss Priss came back to the kitchen for her cup of coffee. Miss Priss looked at me hard. She asked if she could read my palm.

  "What do you see?" There's something sly and intelligent about Miss Priss, but the whites don't see it.

  "Not'ing, I see not'ing."

  "Why you shivering?"

  "It gives me the heebie-jeebies to stand out in that graveyard. It's strange, all those little boys buried right next to your Mama."

  "Why strange?"

  Garlic tried to silence Miss Priss with a look, but she kept carrying forward, and he just banged out of the room, taking a cup of coffee out to his wife in the parlor. Miss Priss let her voice drop real low, low in pitch and low in loudness. She kind of hissed into my ear. "Your Mama killed those boys soon as they were born."

  "Why would she do that?"

  "What would we a done with a sober white man on this place?"

  30

  Me gone to sleep and got up again. The house, Garlic's house, is cold, silent, dark. It feels so different to know this was Garlic's dream and not Planter's. Not my father's.

  Garlic pulled the string, and Planter danced like a bandy-legged Irish marionette. Everything but the horseback riding. That was his. There was always something African about Planter, and Garlic was it. Even Planter's love of the land had something African in it. Black people are ancestor worshippers. And they have the sense of sacred places. Me heard the stories. My heart is still crick-crack-breaking. There's a bright bitter feeling snaking down my chest. I don't feel my heart beat, but I want to.

  My forehead sweats hot beads, my hands sweat cold. My nose is beige and my mother's black. I look at my fingers and sometimes I think the tips of them are purple. I look at my face and see a faint redness on the cheeks, as if a scarlet butterfly landed on my face while I was sleeping and left its rouging flying-dust.

  Now what has Garlic told me? That he helped Planter win him in a card game by poisoning his old master, Planter's opponent. That he chose to work for Planter because Planter was an impotent man. Oh, God! What God do I now imagine in heaven? Where are his hair of gold and eyes of blue? My Daddy's eyes. The only God I knew built Cotton Farm, ran the slaves on this place. Now that ain't Planter. Ain't Daddy. Now what? Now Planter was a man without position or land who Garlic manipulated with his black hands into winning our land from another white man in a card game. Garlic the poisoner. I would laugh if it were not so sad. I would laugh if every laugh didn't jostle loose bitter burps of knowing, leaving vinegar vapor on my tongue, the only vestige of the illusion of my father's power.

  31

  I am leaving here today. The place where I was born. I wish I had not come back. The three little graves, the boys' graves, the heirs' graves. It's like this—Mama kill those children? Or not. Ain't sure which way I want it to be. I think I don't want her to have done it. And then I feel, if she did it, I know for sure she loved me. Loved me enough to kill. And it hard for someone who ain't a killer to kill.

  Miss Priss told me long time ago of how Other and Mealy Mouth killed the soldier. Knifed him to death, on the steps, with his own sword. They pretended like they hadn't. But dark eyes see everything on a place like this. Or do they see nothing? I've seen nothing. I know how every inch of this place smells, and you can't change a place without changing its smell. I kinda loved her for killing that soldier. All of them did. They said he needed killing and couldn't be no black to do it, so they was glad Other did it. Mama rested easier with the smell of murder gone from the place. That's how we all knew Other wasn't a natural-born killer. And Mama and Garlic weren't neither, for the smell of killer was gone from the place when the soldier died.

  How happy can I be? Must I cry? I believe I must go, and keep going. There is nothing left for me here. I've had no word from R.; she's had two formal, kind missives. What will I find back in Atlanta upon my return? An abandoned house? A place to work at Beauty's? What?

  Garlic will make arrangements for me to leave. It will be easier for them when I am gone. And it will be easier for me.

  32

  Jeems rode me back to Atlanta behind his horse, Hannibal. It's strange to think of Jeems driving his own horse and not one belong to the Twins or to their place. It's stranger than the Twins being dead. We all knew one day they would die, but no one knew one day Jeems would drive his own horse. Jeems is a good-looking man. I wonder I ain't seen it before. I guess it's what a fine-looking man he's become. I wonder what he would have been if the Twins had survived the war. Something less.

  He's built a house for himself and a church for the community, he tells me while we're riding, but did I see he's not settled? Did he seem less each time he swung down from the horse? And don't he look fine with reins in his hand? A hammer give not quite the same effect. But he's a farmer during the week and a preacher on Sunday. He milks his cow every day, and don't ride enough.

  He told me all this and I laughed and tried not to laugh too hard. Ever since I heard Garlic's laugh, I've been laughing too much, off and on, all the time, like crying. Jeems, he watched me laugh.

  "Ever think on getting married, gal?"

  "You asking me?"

  "Why should I akse you?"

  I laughed again. There was no reason he would ask me. I knew and he knew I knew it. So he surprised me when he said, "Maybe I'm aksing you." I didn't laugh. The words jangled in my head like pennies in a jar—not enough to buy something with but enough for the sound to strangle thought. Nobody ever put that question to me. And I didn't expect to ever hear it on a ride down from the country to the city. From a man I ain't kissed. I'm greedy for a second serving of those words. I want a dessert of those words, a soup, a salad. I wanted to salt those words and snap them in like peanuts. But Jeems is a friend back to sugar-tit days.

  "Don't ask me."

  "I'm asking you. Will you marry me?"

  "I'm not the marrying kind."

  "You not or he ain't?"

  "I ain't. My Mama never married. We don't marry."

  "Too bad," Jeems said and he clucked the horse on.

  We walked on down the road. "How's Miss Kareen?"

  "Miss...?"

  "Kareen."

  "She's in a convent."

  "I know that. In Charleston. How she be?"

  "Why you ask 'bout her?"

  "She was the one we really liked."

  The words fall on me hard, like a blow—a smack across the face, a slap on my rumpass, leaving the bright red blood tattoo of a hand. "We—you mean the Twins?"

  I thought it was Other they sniffed after. I thought the homefolks thought Kareen's moaning over B. was some kind of too much sorry-for-yourself play-acting.

  "We all loved Sugarbaby. B. was fixin' fo to marry hua. Woulda, 'cept for Gettysburg. S. was sweet on yo' sister."

  "I don't have a sister." I didn't get the words out to say S. nor any other Southern gentleman would marry a nigger, when Jeems interrupts with one sly, snarled word: "Yeah."

  I was ashamed for Mama and ashamed for not knowing he knew. I knew who he meant. And I knew he knew I knew. Why do I get stuck in these little circles?

  Mammy didn't marry; I suspect I won't either. He asked me if I had a reason. And I just stared at him, letting him take the answer to be no. But it's like this. Long ago. Long ago. How long ago? I don't even know. I stopped letting myself want anything I could not have.

  Hours later Jeems pulled the carriage up in front of my house and I got out.

  33

  R. wanted to know who the boy was who had brought me back
from Cotton Farm. I wanted to wince when he spoke "boy," but I answered, "Jeems," and gave him my smile. For the first time, the first time ever, I'm wondering what it was he did remember about before Emancipation. "You remember the Twins Other was sweet on?"

  "Those big red-haired boys?"

  "Them."

  He nodded, but there was an unspoken question hiding in his smile.

  "Jeems was their tenth birthday present. He was ten too."

  "The Twins are dead now."

  "Yeah, they are."

  "Gettysburg."

  "Gettsyburg."

  Already R. had lost interest. He wasn't interested in slaves. I tried another smile, but my mouth sort of stuck to my teeth, and all I made was something that looked like snaggles peeking through half a moon. My face was changing. I wondered if he could see it yet. I smiled the half-broken smile that conceals. I achieved a fraction more. The edges of my lips were heavy, and I could feel the inside of my lips sticking to my teeth. Always, when I'm awkward or clumsy, I'm grateful for beauty which causes men not to notice my other imperfections.

  I wanted to ask R. if he was grateful for my beauty, but I did not. Questions like that can only be written here. They can't breathe. Is he ever grateful for anything I do?