“Exactly. The army erased all traces of what it did.”
“Why?”
“Well, naturally the officers knew it was incendiary, lynching thirteen black men. They wanted to make an example for other Negro soldiers, but they didn’t want to incite more rioting in Houston. So they carried out the execution in secret away from the city and only announced it afterwards. Even then, they said it had taken place at a nearby fort in accordance with strict military procedure.”
“What do you hope to find here today?”
I shake my head, step from the car. Grass scratches my ankles. I make sure the Taurus is okay in the high weeds, not too hot underneath, no danger of flame. Ariyeh follows me, a few tentative steps, then stops to swat mosquitoes. Her boredom has turned into annoyance. The field is soft in places, then hard, like leftover food not fully frozen. It smells leftover, too: smoky, green, slightly spoiled. The pines are dry in the late summer heat, green-going-to-yellow. Red and purple dabs of flowers. Shadows move across the limp stalks as a warm breeze blows the trees, silhouettes huddled in soil clumps, praying men, bones bent by grief.
I survey the field the way I imagine the commander did that day, sweeping my eyes across its borders against the bronze and azure light, and I feel myself slip — out of my skin, out of time. Green bugs pop from the dirt. A khaki-clad guard, gripping his rifle, turns his collar up against a sudden early-morning chill. The folding chairs creak. A whiff of sweat and shit. Coming home, Lord, coming home. I can even smell the ropes, several yards away, resinous, dusty, redolent of earth and passing time. They sound violent, like disease must sound inside the body, eating it away. The hangman adjusts the knots. A train whistle echoes to the north, clacking wheels, roaring wind, goods speeding through the woods, sustenance for communities of fortunate men, far away. Sweat rivers my ribs. I call, “Attention!” and ask my god to forgive me. As the prisoners shuffle up the scaffolding, I turn my head away, and there, shivering in the shadows at the fringe, a pathetic white figure in a rumpled blue dress, hands clasped, her gaze darting, ratchety, quick as a hummingbird. Her presence unsettles, even angers, me. She has no business here. The army does not conduct charity work. Best to send her home with various physics, herbs, broths, with sympathetic sighs and the narcotic advice of talk-cure men. A thump. A shout. One of the doomed has tripped on the gallows steps. I flick my eyes to glimpse him …
… to see if he is safe. Is it he who is down? Shaken, tugged, kicked by a guard. My eyes sting. I pull a kerchief from my dress pocket. What does it matter if Cletus twists an ankle? Within minutes his soul will be lost. He stands stiffly now at the platform’s edge, his long arms, capable of such tenderness and warmth, neatly by his side as if he were about to be decorated for valor. I have felt the soldier in him, a slight formality as though his commander were judging him, even in our intimacies: his kisses little forays into unsecured territory, cautious, efficient. For all he has risked to spend a few unbuttoned moments with me, he is still a deeply proper man, his bravery dutiful, expected. I am the rebel, careless in my prim trappings (perhaps a tad ungrateful, unappreciative of how easy life has been till now), aching to secede …
Until last night, when the city fragmented. Sudden spasms like a Roman candle. The noise awakened me over my parents’ murky snoring. Gunshots. Guttural voices. Immediately I knew there was trouble at the camp, perhaps because Cletus had been nervous for days, sensing unease among his comrades, simmering anger. I rose quietly, buttoned my dress. Cletus and I … did we have a regular meeting time? Each night? Three nights a week? In my mama’s garden? Why not in a safer spot? How was he able to escape from his bunk? Did he tell his commanding officer he wanted to rise before dawn to lend us a hand, before his own chores began at the camp? Was he granted permission to be charitable to this stumbling white family for whom his father once worked?
And tonight, what had happened to him? Mud-spattered, soaked, frightened, and wild. “Cletus?” I whispered. “For God’s sakes, what is it?” He trembled as though his ribs were a spinning turbine. He gripped my arms, tearing a sleeve. He was at war. The causes were unclear to me, the reasons for sacrifice ambiguous, but I felt the conviction in his clench. He hadn’t waited to be shipped to France. “Cletus?” “Forgive me,” he said. Then my buttons spilled into the furrows at our feet, bitter seeds among the sproutings of weeds, and I was enemy, hostage, land to be seized … in a lurch, my perspective leaps again; I smell olives, gin, stale automobile upholstery; Dwayne’s face hovers above me; “The dark part of you wants it” … Coming home, Lord, coming home. Another leap. Cletus wears the rope now like a horse’s harness. He holds his dignity. Or he doesn’t. The soldiers pull the triggers. “Cletus! For God’s sakes!”
Ariyeh folds her arms, scratches an ankle with her foot. An edgy sound, insisting on the moment. “So?” she says, imploring me to be done with this place.
I bow my head to clear it, walk to the fringe, where the field starts to curve like a toppled bowl. I struggle to focus. “This must be where they had the coffins waiting. And there, where the Mexicans stood. The hired men who’d actually do the burying.”
“What do you get from this?” Ariyeh asks, not unkindly. She slaps another mosquito. “Looking around? Speculating?”
A whisper in the trees. Birds. Wind. “More questions,” I admit. “I think the only resolution I can hope for is to accept I’ll know only so much. Maybe I know as much, already, as I ever will. But to be convinced of that, I need to see this. To see it’s nothing. Does that make sense?
“Of course. Yes.”
“Too many perspectives …”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I could settle on a single approach to the story …” A train — an actual one — goes speeding through the woods. “I’ve always blamed it on the women. Instability. A weakness of mind, even of soul. Mama and Grandma, neither black nor white, here nor there … and Great-Grandma, I can’t even pin her story down … but that’s not what I’m getting at. Sometimes I lose myself in other people. People from the past. It’s the weirdest thing, Ariyeh. It’s like my whole ego … I don’t know … just spills into others …”
“It’s a gift. A vision. The ability to see through the cracks.”
“I fear it means I’ve got no center.”
“No, really. Think of slaves,” Ariyeh says. “Living in shacks but gaining access to the big house, the masters’ bedrooms and kitchens. They had the whole perspective, in a way even their owners didn’t. Saw it all, top to bottom, inside and out. Maybe that’s the gift you have, T. I mean, I believe that stuff”
“If so, it’s a bitch to carry.”
“I know.”
“Sometimes I think I’m going nuts. Hearing voices, you know, like some crazy bag lady on the street.” I want to linger in the field, to breathe it inside me, but Ariyeh is getting more and more impatient. I smile at her. “Okay, what do you say? Dairy Queen? Time for an ice cream sundae?” I hear the false cheeriness in my voice, and I’m sure she’s aware of it too.
“Sure. I’ll buy.”
We move toward the car, listening to the insect buzz in the field. Back on the highway, signs for bail bondsmen, a semipro baseball team, an Arthur Murray dance studio. I’m disoriented; I grip the wheel until my fingers ache.
Ariyeh laughs, capping our uncomfortable quiet. “You ever take dance lessons?”
“No.” I feel the pull, still, of another world, another time. “I have enough trouble keeping my balance as it is.”