“The R—,” he whispers.
I do my best to laugh. “Him?” I say. “Didn’t you and Dodds stuff his body down the—”
“We did. I stabbed him through the neck and watched the blood run out till he was dead.” He says this as though I were arguing with him. He shuts his eyes. “Then Dodds and I dug him under.”
“In that case, he can’t be traveling anywhere.”
Virgil hushes.
“Can he, Virgil?” I say, taking the paper from his hands and crumpling it.
“Someone in the house is helping him,” he says. “Parson, of course.” He looks at me. “Parson and another.”
“It’s Dodds that buries the bodies,” I say. “Not Parson.”
“Parson tells him where.” The old self-pity creeps into his voice. “But you think I’m the murderer, don’t you. I’d forgotten.”
“I know you didn’t kill Harvey.”
His brow goes up. “How so, Miss Gilchrist? Did your new amour tell you?”
At first I think he means the R— and the breath catches in my throat. Then I see he only means the boy. I laugh dully. “My new amour’s not one for talking,” I reply.
“Ah,” he says. He stares down at the floor. “I see.”
“What do you mean to do about Parson?”
He brightens. He’s been waiting for me to ask. “I brought down all the bottles with your name on them,” he says. “From Parson’s coop.” He brings four cut-glass vials out of his pocket. “This one here has a lock of your hair in brine.” He holds another up to the light, that I can see its yellowishness. “This is yours, too.” He blushes.
“You’re not the only one raiding my chamber-pot at night, I see.”
“These last two have your new friend’s name on them,” he says, paying my joke no mind. He smiles pitifully. “Or is he your old friend by now?”
I sit down next to him. I run my hand lightly through his hair. “You must mean Oliver Delamare, the gentleman who lifts my skirts,” I say.
He does not recoil at this but keeps himself quite still, letting my answer run the length of him. He bows his head that I might stroke it better.
“Until today I thought you wanted him because he was beautiful,” he murmurs. “Or to cause me pain. Now I know better.”
“What do you know?” I ask. My hand hovers at his neck. His nape is soft and pink, with blotches of red under the hair-line.
He holds up a bottle marked “Delamare.” The milky liquor looks so odd inside the glass I can’t imagine what it might be.
“Did Parson come to you with this?” he says. “Did he give it to you empty?”
“Yes,” I say.
He’s above me now, cradling the bottle in his palm. “When was that? After you’d taken your boy to bed the first time, or before?” His hand closes on the bottle. “Did you ask our good Parson what he wanted it for, Clem? Or could it be that you knew already?”
“I know all manner of things,” I hiss. “I know more than you know with that fat white eye of yours. I know what Parson does upstairs and I know who’s going to be next and I know how little meat-and-bones a man is made of. I learn from listening, Mr. Ball. I’m a right good listener. And what I’ve heard through these walls would turn your blood to vinegar.”
“Tell me,” he says.
I get to my feet before him. The R— has explained that he must stay the night.
“I’d thought of this house as our penance,” I say. “Worse than any other thing that could befall. I thought of us each as separate, each in a different cell, together in this house only to make each other suffer.” I smile at him. “I was such a fool!”
I’m close to him now. I pull my arms out of my shift. “I’ve been listening, Aggie. Listening and thinking. I’m much better educated than I was before.”
“It’s true. We aren’t separate,” he says. His eyes fall to my belly. The bruise at his temple goes livid. “Not you, not me—”
“We weren’t brought together as a punishment,” I say. I shrug the shift from my shoulders. “The punishment happened by-the-bye. We weren’t brought together for our own sakes at all—: do you see? We’ve been so selfish, Aggie, and so vain!”
Now the shift hangs from my hips like a bustle. The cloth is damp and patterned with the sweat of long-forgotten hours. Even this past hour, when the boy was beside me. Sunk away and gone.
“You’ve discovered it too,” I whisper. “You went up and looked through Asa’s little window. You saw how small we are. Didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he says. His voice goes tight. “I saw.”
I close my mouth. It’s done. I look up into his face and wait for him to have me. This time it will not destroy me, not make me into another, not split me into halves. The R—’s breath is full and warm inside of me and it will not subside. My body has no more substance than a cloud.
“We’re pieces of pig-iron, Virgil. That’s all we are. But each of us has a purpose and a shape.” I guide his hand downwards. “If you put us together properly, we make a revolver.”
“God, Clem!” he says and brings himself against me. His hand is still closed tightly around the bottle. His mouth opens and his lips push against my own with all the slowness I remember. I feel through his britches that he is ready and I open them at the buckle and bring out his prick and smell the readiness on it. I take it in my left hand at the root and slide my palm upwards. “Clem Clem Clem,” he gasps and sinks white-faced to the bed. The memory of it is crashing over me now like a breaker at sea but it finds no spot on my smooth and weightless body to catch hold of. Still I feel that I am ready too and Virgil pulls aside the bustle and feels it on me and pulls me down. The smell of the boy is still in me and run through my skirts and stockings but. In another breath I am astride of him and his hope is up my belly looking to turn me outsides-in, looking for its twin where I’ve long sheltered it but it finds nothing—! Nothing there at all.
That twin is withered away and vanished. There is nothing in my belly but the R—.
“Oh!” says my mouth.
“Clem!” Virgil says, bucking under me. But Clem is a word.
His eyes fly open, then snap shut. His hand turns and unclenches like a flower.
“We are building a revolver, Virgil,” I breathe into his ear.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes!”
My right hand closes on the bottle.
“Oliver D. Lamar.”
23 May 1863
Geburah Plantation
There are errors or (let us call them as the world calls them) sins of arroganceand pride that even I, wasting hourly as I am, will make no mention of in this accounting. Let that be the measure of how far into the well of hubris I have fallen: to give voice to the preening circus nigger I’ve become would plant me squarely in my grave. That will be my legacy to the world, and I won’t recount it here. Here I will testify, as best I can in this language that has come to own me as a yeoman owns a sow, how I came to trade my existence for a cinder.
I dreamt of grand estates, and made my lodging in an outhouse. I dreamt of virtue, of genteel acts, and indentured myself to treachery. I dreamt of love and poetry, and gave my body to a hussy. First she took it grudgingly, then she took it slyly. She took it from me and she bottled it — a commodity like any other.
The progress of the “grippe” that has claimed me is so ambitious that I’m unable to rise unassisted from my bed, and this less than six hours after I was stricken. A system of welts, in pattern not unlike a skirt of lace, has risen from my ankles to my ribs — where these welts arise, I am a paralytic. That my sex has thus far been spared strikes me as poetic. No better emblem to a history of my follies could have been contrived.