In An Arid Land (6 page)

The huge lips of the man stopped moving; the still-strong muscles eased in the face, the shoulders, even the legs. He had finished. Belching first, he said, "Care for coffee?"

"Ain't got time today, Mr. Hick. "Without a word the old man rose from the pew, disappeared into the cabin and then, after a short while, returned. There were two cups in the hands that led the huge stooped body from the darkness of that deep never-seen interior to the lighted porch. The boy took the offered cup without saying a word, for his mother did not yet allow him to drink coffee. They sipped quietly and the coffee warmed them and opened their thoughts.

"So today's it, huh."

"Yessir."

"Going to Houstontown."

"Yessir."

"The big old city."

He grinned shyly.

"Never to return."

The boy hesitated before saying it. To lie even about deep, unspoken intentions was to sin.

"Yessir," he said again.

Had his mother, his father, his brother, his sisters, his uncles, his aunts, his neighbors in Karankawa ever heard him say "yessir" to any black man but this one, he would have been beaten (mildly: a slap, a push, a cuff, with taunts) and his mouth washed out with soap. So he said it self-consciously, always aware that he was saying it. But Mr. Hickory was . . . was different.

"Your daddy well, how's he doing?"

"Out of bed now."

"But still out of work too . . . ."

"Yessir."

"Pity. What a pity. A man at the prime of life and with all you little responsibilities."

The boy was silent over this, listening, watching.

"Takin' you to Houstontown."

"Yessir."

"Thinks there's work there, does he?"

"Yessir, he does."

"And gonna give up all this one-hundred and sixty acres of East Texas bottom land that's his for the waiting, nothing more."

The man sipped his coffee and shook his head over the absurdity of it, and the boy looked around as if he could see all of the quarter-section of land that the old man owned, had owned for five of the boy's puny lifetimes, had come by in the same way he came by his freedom at the age of twelve. "A gift." That's how the boy's people put it. He had heard the stories all his life, passed back and forth between the adults in disbelief: how a colored man, a colored man, mind you, who couldn't read or write except for the scratching of his name on official documents (R. Hickry) had so faithfully served the local doctor in the years after the war in which the boy's grandfather had fought with "honor" and "distinction" and "cunning" for the South yes, the South, they called it the war in which his grandfather's brother who remained behind in Indiana had betrayed, betrayed them all, by fighting what, where, how? He remembered only, Blue Belly. And then the slaves were free. And Mr. Hickory served the doctor in ways the boy never understood, not until so many years later when he thought he understood everything. And the stories said, in the voices of disbelief: ". . . and the doc gave that old nigra the best piece of land for fifty miles around." Left it to him, they said. Willed it to him. Can you believe? Just imagine. The doc was out of his head by then.

And there was the secret story too. It was the reason he had come to the cabin that morning, had come to the cabin every morning for four of his ten short and swift years.

"You tell no one, and I'll tell no one," the old man had said that day. "They'll know it all soon enough, when I'm gone."

It was a secret and even to think of it made the boy afraid, afraid that he, like his grandfather's brother ("Your Great Uncle Henry") would betray. And so always the thought of it came to him in the voice of the old man on the porch above him.

"I am old," he had said, speaking to the boy's father and mother, standing below that other porch, the porch of the boy's family's rented house on the outskirts of Karankawa, the house fewer than two miles away from the woodsy Negro smell of the cabin whose porch he now stood below. "An old man," the black voice had said to the boy's parents and he paused then as if considering the enormity of the idea. "I haven't long to live, I'm sure." Though he could not read or write he spoke that day as if he could, in the voice of a preacher or a town Negro who'd gone away and come back educated. "And I have this to offer you." Again he paused and the boy, only six then, clutching his mother's skirts, knew even then that the man was reconsidering it one last time before making the commitment that both races would consider an outrage. "I have no one to care for me . . . ."

The boy's father spoke up then, as he seldom did, quiet, slow, thick-tongued: "That's none of our concern, Rufus."

The old black face smiled. "Not yet it ain't. But listen." The face went serious. "You care for me, feed me, see that I live my days to their fullest potential . . . ." Again he paused before the commitment, and the boy's parents looked at each other, wondering, the boy was sure now, over the word (potential?). ". . . You do that for me, and when I'm gone, the land is yours."

Only the four of them knew. The boy knew only by the circumstance of his age; he was the youngest and just happened to be there on the porch that day, clutching his mother's skirts.

Now Rufus Hickory, sitting on the pew on the porch of his cabin in the meager clearing in his beautiful woods, said this: "I have the paper your daddy wrote out. The will, it is called," and the boy remembered that day too, the day after the bargain was made when Mr. Hickory had returned with two others and in the kitchen of the boy's parents' house had signed the paper (R. Hickry) and had said, "Now, you two witness it; put your marks there" (he pointed for the one) "and there" (he pointed for the other) "but don't read a word." The three of them glanced at each other and Mr. Hickory said, "Cain't read no-how." The two signed the paper and Mr. Hickory gave each one a dollar.

"You tell your daddy for me," said Rufus Hickory to Walter McIntyre Jr. "You tell him that tomorrow morning I gonna walk that trail you walk every day to bring me my breakfast . . . I gonna walk it to see. You tell him this: If there ain't no smoke rising from your chimney, I'll burn the paper. I'll have to." He paused, almost sipped his coffee. "He'll understand."

II

The long period of silence had ended. The pronouncement had been made and thought given to it by the two humans the large old black one and the small young white one there in the meager clearing. The sun was up completely now and the coffee dregs in their cups lay still and cold. The boy had to go; he fidgeted and fought the impulse to turn, to run.

"You'll tell him?" asked Rufus Hickory.

"Yessir," said the boy, knowing this was not quite true, for it was his mother waiting on him with her cold stony eyes.

"Make it clear for him that I don't want to but I got to," the man said. "Your daddy always been good to me."

"Yessir, I will."

The old man nodded his white head gruffly in conclusion and they went silent. Rufus Hickory tried to think of the best way to say goodbye to this white boy he had come to know and love over the past four years, the swift years, swifter for him than for the boy. Every morning, every evening: the talk, brief but enough, the imparting of elusive wisdom from age to youth, the imparting of forgotten innocence from youth to age. The boy had been the man's contact with that other age, that other world, one of which he had lost in the natural progression of time, the second of which he had given up for the solitude of these woods, this cabin, after the years of work that had led him nowhere, and the death of his wife. But a man cannot forget entirely and the boy with his news of births and deaths and marriages helped make it real for him again, gave him a life outside the cabin.

The boy searched for an argument, the words to ask: would you not burn the paper? The land, these woods, all he had ever known: his mind refused to see that it was gone from him now.

"There ain't no choice for us, Mr. Hick. Couldn't you wait? Give us time? A few months? I'll bring us back. Please?"

Had his father heard him ask such questions of anyone, much less a black man, he would have been whipped; it had been his mother who had pressured him in secret to try.

"Cain't wait," came the black voice. "How I to do for myself? An old man, broke down like some worthless machine. What I s'pose to do? Chase the possum? The coon?" He looked at the boy for an answer and shifted uneasily on the pew. "Life turns, runs off from you sometimes. Cain't catch it, no-how, cain't pin it down. Now me, this thing a depression, you call it, they tell you to call it this thing that was so far off is up close now and just like with y'all that didn't look for it well, me too and now here it is. Y'all leaving leaves me in the depression, you see . . ." His mind drifted, and then almost in anger he said, "Now you got to git or your mama be in for you in a big way."

The old man's face, like some huge fruit or vegetable at the county fair, showed the boy nothing human. He knew why. He had seen it before in the faces of adults who had decided something, understood that something inevitable had arrived, and even in love or fondness they became cruel. "Go on!" the old man said.

The boy turned, took a step and then stopped in the dewy dust below the porch. He stood in a triangle of dusty sunlight. He felt the old man's stare. From behind him he heard, "Walter."

It was barely a whisper, barely a breath. But the boy turned again and leapt up onto the porch for the first time in his life. He hugged the old black neck and felt the old black hands on his back and smelled the old black odors of a body born in slavery that had slaved still in freedom and slaved even then to remain alive. It was the first time they had ever touched each other in love and it would be the last time and for the rest of his life the boy (and then the man and then the old man) would recall the moment every time he touched or smelled or even saw rough leather. The smell, the touch, even the sight of a saddle on a horse's back would always remind him that once, long ago, hugging the neck of his family's former handyman, he had wept.

He turned; he leapt from the porch. He ran out of the meager clearing and into the familiar trees of the ancient forest and up the hill and then down the hill, through the marsh and its bitter smell, until he came to the creek. On its bridge he stopped.

Goodbye, deer, he thought, and in his mind there appeared the deer he had once fed from his hand. Goodbye, coons, and possums, and copperheads. Goodbye, hawks. Goodbye, foxes. Goodbye, bears, he thought, for there were still bear in the East Texas woods at that time. "Goodbye, woods," he said.

The call of a mockingbird reminded the boy that he was late. He crossed the log bridge to the other side but stopped again, looked again, reached down and picked up a handful of the black forest dirt. He let the dirt warm in the palm of his hand and considered putting it into his pocket to carry as a reminder of this place, but it would only scatter and soil and it was then that he felt the stone pressing against the sole of his shoe. He turned the stone with the sole of his shoe, dug at it, picked it out of the dank black earth with his toe and bent down again. It was beautiful, the size of a robin's egg, the color of sulfur. It warmed in his hand. It fit into his pocket easily.

III

All that morning, ever since she had pulled herself from the bed at 4:30 to finish the packing and prepare for the day, Elvira McIntyre had been plagued by the feeling that something was living in her belly, gnawing on her insides. It wouldn't quit and every few minutes she caught herself rubbing, touching, holding with her palm the slight bulge around her navel.

I'm just anxious, she said to herself half a dozen times even before the sun had risen to show that everything the yard, the listing and paintless picket fence, the pitted street out front and the alley behind, her neighbors' houses across the street and beyond the alley, the woods that stretched away to the east Karankawa was still there. She had dreamed herself into a city that night. Was it Houston? She'd never been to Houston; she'd never been to any city larger than Marshall or little Huntsville with its several thousand citizens. That's where old Sam Houston was buried, some of whose blood ran in her veins. This she had been told by her mother, the proud woman from Marshall, the daughter of a judge, the wife of a lawyer who had made a deep mark with his Marshall Land & Surveying Co. They had lived in a huge yellow house with servants.

Didn't they have a duty, an obligation to succeed, for what would the people say who knew that some of the privileged blood of old Sam Houston ran in the veins of her children? No, it was more; they had a right to succeed and no setback such as the one they were now suffering would set them back permanently.

Still, it was an embarrassment and she had not stepped foot outside the house in nearly six months except on Sundays and Wednesday evenings. For what would they think, her neighbors, were she to stoop so low, to be overwhelmed to the point that she allowed herself, her husband, her children, to go without God?

"Well, I know good and well what they would think," she said out loud to the window that offered the view of the woods. She had been standing there, looking out, for some time. Then she remembered and said, "Where is that boy?"

The others had gone on in the loaded-down Ford pulling the loaded-down trailer. They had gone on to church Sunday school would have begun by now and she had stayed behind to wait for her youngest who had gone to feed that old slave.

If only he would die, now, this very morning, so that the secret pact could be fulfilled. It must be fulfilled, for she knew better than most the value of land. Land was esteem. Land was privilege. And how they had paid: she rising early each morning to prepare the old man's meals and then sending off her youngest, her brightest, the most loyal and wise of the four, to carry it to him through the cold threatening woods and then having to lie to the others as to his whereabouts each morning and evening. Just imagine what they would say.

And there was another reason why she had sent them all ahead that Sunday morning. Time, a few minutes: to say farewell. Three of her four children had been born in this house. During the good years when the railroad had prospered and Mr. McIntyre had prospered along with it there had been the prospect of a grand future. No great wealth, certainly, but at least enough for comfort and respectability. So that children seemed proper. To have children said to the world that they knew what lay ahead and were ready for it. Four children in eight years, raised in this house. She heard the voices, the laughter, remembered the plans she and Mr. McIntyre discussed in their bed at night. Each year they said: save, save hard this year, and next year we'll buy that house on Travis Street which Brother Hames is holding for us, renting now, but holding till we can get up the down payment, bless his heart. And they planned as well for their children.