Blue Asylum (26 page)

One day in March, nearly a year from the day Iris stopped Almon’s whipping, she was summoned to the slave quarters by the old woman, Mattie. Rose was in labor. She’d been bucking and screaming for hours and needed a doctor. Iris saddled up the sorrel pony herself and went to find a doctor, knowing that Robert would object to the expense, but she was unwilling to let the girl suffer anymore. The doctor scolded Iris: “I have better things to do than deliver a slave baby,” he said, but came reluctantly and used the forceps to finally make the delivery. Rose had stopped screaming and was quiet when the baby came out. Her blood soaked the sheets. Her head was thrown back and her lips were pale. Only the movement of her eyes and her jagged breathing proved she still was alive.

The doctor cut the umbilical cord and tied it off with twine. The baby screamed lustily. Covered with slime and annoyed by life. The doctor’s lip curled. Iris could read his thoughts. A white baby born to a black slave. She wondered which parent he blamed. He packed his medical bag and left without a word.

Rose’s mother cleaned the baby and put it on Rose’s chest. Her father’s face was a mask of confusion. Anger and pride and wonder. The tiny boy should have been Almon’s baby, brown as cinnamon. And yet, he was still his first grandson. Rose’s eyes focused on the baby. She studied it, smiled a little. The hours spent in the coach house belonged to the master, but the baby was hers. She stroked the wet hair. Kissed the pale cheek. Mumbled something into the nape of his neck known only to mother and child. Perhaps not even a word. A feeling.

Before she left the cabin, Iris asked to hold the baby. Rose looked at her mother for permission. She nodded and Rose handed him over. Iris hadn’t held a baby in years, was surprised at his weight. He wrinkled his face as though to cry and then stopped, growing complacent as she rocked him. It had never occurred to her that the first white baby she held on this farm would not be hers. And yet, he was still so precious. The circumstances of his creation hadn’t taken the miracle away. It clung to the baby, was part of him, and you couldn’t remove it any more than you could scrape the yellow away from a fire. Rose had on a full smile now, made sleepy by the new fever the baby had brought.

“What was his name?” Ambrose now whispered as he lay in bed with her, in the darkness of the room.

She was silent a moment, let the name separate from the story that birthed it, let it gather on her tongue. It hurt her heart to say it, but it felt at home in the darkness of the room.

“Solomon.”

“Solomon,” he said, and she loved him for repeating it.

A few hours after the baby was born she heard a high-pitched scream from the direction of the slave quarters. She dropped a china plate and ran outside in her apron, following the sound of the scream to Rose’s cabin.

Rose was hysterical, her mother trying to calm her. Her father was talking about killing someone; Jackson, the blacksmith, was attempting to reason with him. They turned their heads when Iris rushed through the door.

“What’s happened?” she demanded.

Rose looked at her, eyes streaming. “They took my baby!”

Iris gasped. “Who took your baby?”

“The overseer! Mr. Sender!”

Iris ran back out the door without another word, straight to the overseer’s house. She pounded on his door but he did not answer. She screamed his name, panic rising inside her. She rushed around the plantation, asking frantic questions of the workers she saw. Clyde Sender had taken the baby and ridden away with it under his arm. That’s all anyone had seen.

When Robert came through the door later that afternoon, Iris hurled herself at him. “Where is the baby?” she screamed. “Where is the baby?”

Robert pushed her away, went to his room, and locked the door. Daylight faded and there was no word. The next morning, though, Robert and the overseer were gone again, and this time one of the young boys came to Iris’s door and led her toward the slave cabins. He walked with a purpose, his head up as though fulfilling a manly duty. She asked him questions but he wouldn’t answer her. He veered away when he approached the slave quarters and instead took a different path, one that led to the edge of the property. Up ahead, Iris saw the cemetery for pets and Negroes. A group of slaves had gathered inside the rail fence. As she approached, she saw one of the field hands digging up a new grave. Rose and her parents knelt beside it, watching. The crowd saw Iris and moved aside to let her pass.

She hovered near the grave, unable to speak, unable to move, filled with the horror of the possibility that was in the air but left unspoken. A few more shovelfuls of dirt and the shovel found the edge of a white sheet. The field hand threw the shovel aside and began digging in the dark, loose soil with his hands, pawing out the dirt, the others watching as though frozen.

He reached into the grave and pulled out a small bundle wrapped in a sheet and tied with hemp. He fumbled at the knots and then Rose’s mother reached over and undid them with sure, narrow fingers. The crowd moved inward. Iris felt a small hand on her waist, someone’s breath on her back.

The field hand unwrapped the sheet.

Rose fainted.

The boy was perfect and whole, more beautiful in morning light than in the candlelight of the cabin. His hands balled, eyes closed. Knees drawn up. Put the boy on his mother’s breast, and you’d think he’d start to suckle. So nearly alive that way.

That was the story, told for the first time. Born whole, the cord still attached. “We ran away three days later,” Iris said to Ambrose. “None of us could stand to stay there anymore.”

She did perform one final act the last night before they fled. When darkness fell, she stole out to the slave cemetery with a spade and dug that baby up. Carried him over to the beautiful family cemetery of the Dunleavys and reburied him there.

The rain began an hour after the eight of them had run away. She imagined the empty grave the next morning, there in that patch of land that held the bodies of Negroes and dogs. A hole in the earth, filled with rainwater, reeking of quicklime and reflecting the clearing sky.

Wendell had no canoe, so he couldn’t travel by water to feed his lamb. He had to take the long way through the jungle, wading in sloughs and struggling through briars. It was impractical, and even he could concede it was dangerous. He needed to bring the lamb home, and to do so, he had to win over his mother. Since his father had left the island, her mood had alternated between childish gaiety and great bouts of weeping.

“Am I pretty?” she would ask Wendell between sobs.

“Of course you are, Mother. Very pretty.”

Wendell used his innate sense of timing, the exquisite natural rhythm a boy uses to predict the weather and the best time for catching frogs, to introduce his new pet during the high point of one of his mother’s mood swings. Indeed, Mary was sipping tea on the living room sofa, and in good spirits, when Wendell came through the front door and, with some gentle pulling on the leash, beckoned the lamb into the house.

“It’s a lamb,” she whispered. She put down her china cup and clapped her hands together. “This is wonderful! Wendell, you are the best son in the world to bring this lamb to me. We can have lamb stew tonight!”

The creature blinked his long eyelashes at her, seemingly unmoved by the suggestion. He had the same vague smile he had always had. A lamb-smile that meant a certain languid acceptance of every turn in the road.

“No, Mother. This lamb is not for eating. This lamb is our friend.”

Mary let out a laugh. “Oh, Wendell, don’t be silly. Where I come from, lambs are for supper.”

Wendell led the creature closer to the sofa. He took his mother’s hand and guided it into the stiff wool, moving her hand back and forth.

“Not supper.
Friend,
” he said with the same gently instructive cadence the bookkeeper used when she taught him algebra.

“But it would taste so good!”

“No, Mother. Friend.”

The old Indian didn’t blink when the rock landed in front of him. Another rock landed near his knee. Another rock, thrown a bit harder, hit him in the arm. He simply stared straight ahead.

Ambrose and Iris had been walking hand in hand on their way to the creek. Iris felt his hand stiffen in hers. He swiveled his head around, looking for the source of the stones. Three men loitered on the front porch of the trading post, dusty and hard-traveled. One of them drank from a bottle of whiskey and passed it to the others. They had the wicked laughter sometimes employed by the strong in the company of the helpless. One of them—long, red hair under his beaten hat and a thick red mustache—picked up another stone.

Ambrose let go of Iris’s hand.

“No, Ambrose,” she said, but he was already striding up to the man with the stone in his hand and Iris could do nothing but follow, watching the squaring of his shoulders and the deliberateness of his gait. She could not help but feel a flush of pride even though the prickle of fear made her dress moist under the arms.

“Ambrose,” she said again, but Ambrose had reached the red-haired man.

“Stop it,” Ambrose said.

He smiled. “Stop what?”

“He’s a harmless old fellow and he’s never done anything to you.”

“Might be good for you to mind your own business.”

Ambrose kept his voice even. “You throw one more rock at him and you’ll be sorry.”

The red-haired man turned to the others and said, “You hear that?”

They crowded in closer. Their laughter had died. They had guns in their belts.

Iris took her lover’s arm.

“Let’s go, Ambrose.”

But Ambrose ignored her, staring his enemy down in the way that men do, judging strength and valor upon things just outside of a woman’s awareness: a blink, a twitch, a jump in the pulse or a muscle in the jaw. Who has something more to lose in his eyes.

“Please, Ambrose.” She tightened her grip enough to break some kind of spell, and Ambrose relented, allowing himself to be ushered down the street, but not before giving the man a steely look and saying, “You leave him alone.”

“It’s such a pleasant day, Ambrose,” she said, angry at the bully but fearful of a confrontation in this wild and violent town. “Let’s forget we saw such a thing.”

They had been on their way to the creek to take advantage of the cool water, but the argument over the Indian had taken away their easy mood, and they shuffled to the edge of town and through the broken field of goldenrod in silence. They’d forgotten, in the bubble of their courtship, how easy war or its fragments could come and get them. The creek was clear and slow and inviting, but this time they stayed on the bank, a few feet apart, backs resting against two different trees. That new-lover spell, when the world must be right because their joy wills it so, was broken, replaced by the sullen realness of the day, when a creek was pretty without being magical, and birdsong was pleasant but not transcendent, and shadows and light make puzzles but not revelations.

Iris looked over at Ambrose. He leaned back against the tree, eyes closed, trousers dirty at the cuffs, his shirtsleeves unbuttoned. His shoes untied but not removed. It was time for them to leave this town. They were running out of money. You could get lost in this town. You could also get shot. You could rest and die. You could love and lose. And yet there was nowhere to go. She could not take him to her father. He could not take her to his.

She stayed in that position, thinking those thoughts, looking at Ambrose, until a knurl of bark had pressed against her back long enough to hurt. She shifted, rose. Crouched and took his cold hand, squeezing until his eyebrows moved, and he stirred and mumbled.

“We should go back to town,” she said.

He opened his eyes and sighed. “Very well.”

“Were you sleeping?”

He didn’t answer. He rose, and they walked away together, hands at their sides.

The old Indian was dead. He lay on his back in the street, a bullet hole in his forehead, the same unfriendly look on his face, except the fire in his pupils had been replaced by milk. A cigarillo was still in his mouth, the ash burned down to his lips. Death had come too quickly for him to contemplate it at all. He had simply been an old man and then a dead body, stiffening in the sun. No one was gathered around him. People simply slowed down, sidestepping him, getting an eyeful, and then moving on. He was no one’s business and in no one’s care.

Iris did stop and knelt. She went to touch him but jerked her hand back. Lice were flowing off the old man’s body, abandoning the cooling host. She leaped up and backed quickly away from the stream of vermin, open-mouthed in horror.

“Those bastards killed him,” Ambrose said. “They just shot him like he was nothing.” He turned and looked toward the trading post. The men were gone. Lost somewhere in the forever of the town.

“The poor fellow,” Ambrose murmured.

“Isn’t someone going to bury him?”

“Who would? It’s no one’s job.”

“It was no one’s job to shoot him, either.”

Ambrose glanced at the hotel. A man with one leg sat on the front steps, playing cards with a boy.

“Go to the room,” he told Iris.

“But what are you—?”

“Just go.”

Iris obeyed, climbing the steps to the hotel, passing the boy and the man, who reeked of tobacco. She felt a lurch in her stomach and pinched her nose against the odor. She went upstairs to their room and moved the curtains aside so she could look up the street. The Indian was still lying there, and the second glimpse of him was nearly proof to her that he had always been dead, always a part of the scene like the milling cattle and the pie carts. A terrible feeling had started in the pit of her stomach and had grown the last few hours. Once, as a little girl, she had stopped by the side of the road and looked into the front yard of a green house. Under a blue sky, a perfectly yellow butterfly perched upon a red spider lily, and something about that scene, the crisp perfection of the colors and the simplicity of the action, seemed foreboding to her. She couldn’t remember now if anything dire had happened, but something about the scene she saw through the window—the Indian’s repose, a horse hitched to a post nearby, and the dust rising in the street—reminded her of that sight. They were saying the same thing, the spider lily and the dead man.