Wash (30 page)

Wash

I woke up in the pitch dark with Pallas long gone. I lay there knowing whatever I needed to do to get me some more of her, then so be it. I knew my needing to see Pallas gave Richardson the kind of leverage he ain’t never had over me, but right in that same minute, I knew this was a rope I wasn’t about to cut.

∞

Richardson

I’d heard about Pallas soon after somebody left her on Phoebe’s doorstep over at Miller’s place. Saw Miller at a party that next night and he told me about her. Same old story. Baby left in a basket with no note. Somebody white lay down where he shouldn’t have, then sent his troubles packing.

Even as we wondered who the father was, we knew there was no telling. Not yet anyway. Miller said he’d decided to leave it alone. Said he’d have chosen his Phoebe to raise her anyway and there was nothing wrong with free money. We drank some more and worked on what he should name her. I was the one who came up with Pallas Athena, which turned out to be perfect.

I didn’t hear much about her for a long time. Miller did say she grew up so lovely he’d had to send her over to Drummond’s for a while just to keep his own boys off of her. Said he was trying to follow my example. Draw some kind of line in the sand, no matter how shifting.

But on that day when I sent for Pallas to see about Wash and she came, I saw immediately why she’d ended up on Phoebe’s doorstep in her basket. Now that I got a good look at her, I could see she’d sprung right from her father’s high forehead. She had him written all over her face. Especially those eyes. I’d met that striver from South Carolina during the war. He’d wanted to be governor but he couldn’t stay out of his own quarters and it had started to matter.

Pallas would have been the last straw, so he must have sent her as far from his wife and his critics as possible. And that’s how she’d landed at Miller’s place. But things seemed to have worked out all right for her. She was all grown up and carried her spear and her armor well. Gray eyed goddess indeed.

Still, I’d love to know how it had happened. Somebody must have known somebody. But that’s almost four hundred miles. Lots of links in a long chain.

Quinn fretted continually about what he called their network, insisting that the negroes had woven a web of trade among themselves which spread across the entire South East. And not just cowrie shells and mojo. He claimed they were stockpiling knives and guns as well. He couldn’t ever produce any proof but he’d worry that bone whenever I’d listen so I stopped.

But it was seeing Pallas grown up into the spitting image of her father that made me start to believe in Quinn’s network. How else could she have come such a long way?

Wash

Everybody round here had some kind of story. I decided early on to try leaving Pallas alone about hers. Even before we started talking, I decided to let her tell me any old thing she wanted about who she was and where she came from. And I’d just stand there with her, not pulling on her, and see how it felt. I knew she’d like it, with the way she kept slipping from folks’ grasp everywhere she went.

She tried to hide her shape under lots of cloth but it stayed giving her away. Seems like it was calling out to me and if it was calling out to me, Lord knows who else had already heard it. Sure enough showed in her eyes. She didn’t get to say this is not yours, this is mine, to those boys over at that Drummond place, but she sure as hell wasn’t gonna let none of us get up on her without asking.

God help the man who reached out to take hold of that skirt, trying to pull her round the corner of a cabin with him, thinking she just needs a little persuading. I’ve seen em start to try and I’ve seen that look in her eye. She carried her satchel to draw poison out of people, I bet she could put some in without missing a beat. Made my hands fall open thinking about it.

What surprised me was she had heard about my mamma. At first, all Pallas wanted to do was listen to me talk about her and for once, it was all right with me.

Some folks are better to talk to than others cause they give you a chance to tell things to yourself. Talking to em can bring you new words. Some folks feel like a deep pool and you can drop anything in there and you aint got to worry about it coming back at you some kind a way. Pallas was like that. Once I started telling her my stories, then she was carrying me with her, and it mattered to me what happened to her.

I didn’t know much about her in the beginning but I knew enough to watch my step. She was like a colt been slapped too often. Can’t settle down unless people stay good and away, so I did.

Made me think of one time back at Thompson’s place when we opened a crate of glass those boys ordered all the way from Baltimore for windows on the big house. By the time that crate made it out there and we got it open, it was full of shards and flakes. Some big enough to cut yourself on but most too small to even pick up. All scattered and shining like frost, driven into the dark nap of that velvet they came wrapped up in. Bigger pieces sliced holes right through the cloth. I can still hear those boys cussing and kicking that crate once they saw inside it. Made that glass break some more and fall, crackling then thumping.

With Pallas, I had to see whether we should try putting the big pieces back together till we had enough to see through, or should we just go on and crunch em down to small enough pieces so we could lie on em without getting cut up too bad.

Course Pallas knew better than I did, she wasn’t the only one broke enough to need fixing.

Pallas

I didn’t have a story. Or if I did, I didn’t know what it was. There’s different parts I’d heard from different people and there’s some I made up to fill the gaps. All I know is they found me and that’s what I’ve had to do too.

Phoebe kept telling me stories about animals bringing me here and I do remember believing her at first. I know none of the women round here was my mamma, and nobody talked about my daddy except to shake their heads.

“Wonder which white man it is she looks too much like?”

“Somebody told somebody the baby died and they buried her real quick before anybody could see.”

“Buried her right here on Phoebe’s doorstep is where they buried her.”

And Phoebe laid her palm all warm and soft on my head, saying yes ma’am, right here on my porch step where we found her screaming her head off is where they buried her. And look at her now, coming up so nice.

I was a child who died and was reborn. I do know I remember most all of everything I’ve ever seen, even from real early. I’m bundled up and moving moving moving. Looking down and seeing way down, looking over somebody’s arm from up so high, like riding on a horse, with the ground slipping past and tree branches spidering overhead.

I knew these pictures were from my beginning but I learned not to talk much about them. Folks got spooked. But my memories stayed good to me, even the bad ones. They gave me some room to walk around inside my life. Somewhere for my mind to go.

That’s what I had. No story. Just my memories and how I felt about things.

I got feelings about things as clear as somebody telling me something. That and I kept waking up staring at people. Seemed like whenever I laid my eyes on somebody, they could feel it and trace that line of sight right back to me. They’d stomp off mad or else knock me out of my haze, yelling damn, quit staring at me girl. Put your hands to work or I will for sure.

I wasn’t trying to do nothing but pass the time and you can’t sleepwalk through your whole day. But I started to learn. Turned my eyes down and let em run across the ground, from the soft pearly cool dust at my feet to the hardpacked dirt of the barnyard to the blue green grass growing so thick between the cabins and the springhouse.

I was wanting to move and go and see and do from as far back as I can remember. When I was a baby, walking drunk and weaving and slow, I’d reach for something and get jerked back. Even after I was old enough to run through the patterns of bright sun falling through trees, old enough to run giggling in circles until I fell down in the grass panting, everybody kept telling me just be still.

Said they stayed too busy to see about me, so they started tying me up to keep me from wandering off. Told me they had to after all the crazy things I did and kept on doing. Found me one day inside the bull pen. I was standing right in front of him. One hand resting on his knee and the other reaching up, patting his soft dewlap moving as he chewed, his breath warm on me.

Another time, I had headed across the creek. Far side branches was shaking from a hawk trying to rob that jay’s nest. I started picking my way cross the rocks to go see. They called after me but that high spring water was too loud. Next thing I know, some big man snatched me right off that rock, carried me back squeezed too tight under his arm, and all of them yelling at me about how I need to quit heading out like that. Don’t I know I can’t go nowhere?

I just wanted to get a good look at those birds. But they said they can’t spend the whole day watching after me so they tied me to the corner of Phoebe’s porch. Said they’d have to tie me good till I could learn to do right and stay close to home.

I still slipped away sometimes but those times got fewer and fewer until, by the time I got to be a bigger girl and could likely untie my own self, all I could think about was getting jerked back. So I learned to sit and wait and watch. Feast on what was close and let the rest of it go on by.

I’d count the rings of the trees in the cut end of the planks edging the porch. And I’d snuggle close with the hounds in the cool dust underneath, laying so still most folks forgot I was there. I caught me some good stories that way. I’d run my palms along those hounds’ long lanky sides while they lay dead asleep, whining and twitching from hunting in their dreams. Those dangly ears so soft I had to keep touching em to believe it.

I’d stay under there all day, leaning my back against the cool stones holding Phoebe’s cabin off the ground, with my elbows wrapped around my knobby knees, running my fingertips along the smooth edges of my two big front teeth as they came in, darting my tongue in what empty spaces I had left. Sometimes, I’d just sit there with both my hands wrapped around one of the biggest stones. Those smooth round river stones stayed cool even when it got real hot. I’d sit there with my palms wrapped round that rock till I could hear the river roaring around me.

It was like my hands were thirsty and touching things was drinking. I’d get caught up in looking at something with my hands, then I’d start to feel folks’ eyes on me, watching me. Usually women. Most slapped at my hands, muttering and murmuring to themselves about me being touched like it was a bad thing, bringing us nothing but trouble.

But there was a few I’d catch watching me like they just remembered a dream they had. Those few stayed sweet to me, giving me soft or shiny scraps they knew I’d like, and somehow I knew to keep it to myself. After a while, I didn’t hardly look at nothing with my hands unless I took it under the porch with me.

Almost everything that happened when I was little, I can still see it. A group of us sitting between the two rows of cabins. Everybody in from work. Resting, visiting, cooking. And us sitting small between the grownups’ feet with everybody talking and teasing. Then quiet falls over us, smooth as the shadow of a cloud. Somebody white standing on the edge of our circle.

I never knew what the man said, but looking back on it, I can see he usually came to tell us what else to do with time we didn’t have. Or else he came to tell us about a sale coming up. But everybody looked at the ground so all that white man saw was the tops of peoples’ heads and the smooth curves of downcast eyes.

Everybody except me. I was too busy watching him to notice nobody else was. I was running my eyes over him, trying to sniff him out. Who was he? How did he know all those words? And what did he have his hands clenched around in his pockets?

I remember thinking I was doing good because I was sitting so still. I had quit running right up to all kinds of people like I used to, quit trying to touch their raggedy cuffs or the velvet edges of their jackets. Phoebe said that might have been cute once, and white folks did stop to pet me, but then she popped me and told me not to do it no more. Said I was making everybody nervous as a cat walking past dogs.

I learned to sit quiet and I traveled with my eyes instead. But it turns out, I was supposed to quit even that. And sure enough, that white man caught me looking at him one day. I was eating him right up. The way his collar was buttoned tight but worn to shiny, and the way his top lip pressed down hard on his bottom one till I couldn’t see either one.

He looked at me like he’d never seen me before and Phoebe jerked me close, stuffing my head into her armpit, then Joe says to him yes, yessir, trying to pull the man’s eyes away from me.

After he was gone, they start yelling at me, telling me I best learn to keep my eyes to myself instead of letting them wander all over East Jesus, putting us in hot water. I remember asking Phoebe how much can my eyes weigh anyway, can’t be that much, and Phoebe saying plenty, honey, they can weigh plenty.

I do know whenever something really bad happened, like a tornado coming or a mad dog on a rampage, whatever makes everybody grab their people right quick and get inside or underground, I’d be the last one left standing there. Nobody grabbed me except on second thought. I remember that feeling real well. Kind of like standing after the music stops and no place left to sit down. Just a big empty quiet rattling all around me.