“You can keep digging holes until your hands fall off, Mother,” she said.
“I will,” I said.
“I know you will.”
“I’ll never stop.”
“No, you won’t.”
“First my fingers will fall off, then my hands, then my wrists, then my elbows, then the rest of my arms.”
“And you will still keep digging.”
“Yes.”
For her part, Cleome got quieter as her time passed. Her small face grew wider and her eyes larger, and her hair fell with fresh oils that caught the sunlight.
I would tell Linus Lancaster about all this at our breakfasts together. I would eat pork and mush and look at his dead forehead and talk at him about how the angel he had carried on his shoulder sat on Zinnia’s shoulder now and about how quiet Cleome was and how there was a sweetness somewhere sipping at that quiet and how far she had gotten along.
Sometimes I picked up my talking at the end of the day when I was lying on the dirt floor of the shed. It wasn’t unusual that my lips were too cracked to move nice enough for real talk, so I would just run it in my head. Linus Lancaster, you are dead and I am lying out here with a shackle on my ankle, and Cleome is grown bigger and bigger, and Zinnia is fixing to strike me down so I won’t come up again. The rats are in there at you, and then they’ll come out and look to me, and everything they ever sang in those old songs about the hard places a body can come to are true.
But the cold dark is a fretful place to pose a colloquy, even if it is just in your head. So mostly I just lay there. Waiting for my breakfast. Looking out for the rats. Without any more dainties about outings and candy and Chinamen in barrels and daisies and such. My arms still digging into the black and rock of the earth, even though it had been hours since they had in the actuality stopped. Counting, as my arms still dug, as I waited for them to fall off, on the pig sticker or any one of its evil cousins to come for me and swallow me up.
6
WHEN LUCIOUS WILSON’S WOMAN had me out of the cold frame behind the outhouse and into the light, she did not lift the heavy stick she had taken up at me and she did not ask me any question about how I had come to be there. She was an old woman and had an eye to see through things, and she saw through my skin where it had healed or it hadn’t to the wounds I had lately had, and through those to the wounds I had offered unto others, and through those to that four-square kingdom in Kentucky and the woods that surrounded it and the thundering tunnel of my days that led up to my father’s house in Indiana where I had started out from. She looked at me and she blinked her crop-colored eyes and dropped her heavy stick and told me wherever I’d been, I couldn’t live in Lucious Wilson’s cold frame and I’d better come on.
Lucious Wilson didn’t have that old woman’s eye, but he had that old woman, and after she had nodded, he told me there was a place for me in his employ if I knew how to work and wanted it, and I told him I did. He did not ask me where I had come from. I expect that after she had gotten me bathed and settled the old woman had told him. Whether or not her seeing extended to the naming part of things, she told me that first night they would need to know what to call me. I thought of my old teacher and told her that my name was Sue.
“Well, Sue, you aren’t sleeping in a cold frame tonight or any night after if that’s the way you want it,” she said.
“That’s the way I want it,” I said.
The next weekend they had me over to a revival outside of town where there was a line-up for dunking, and that old woman had me take my place. The minister spoke and dunked and spoke again. It was a pretty place, and they had set up garlands on the bushes. The spot they were in was next to a short bridge and the little ones had their legs dangling off it. Lucious Wilson went in the front of us. He had on a fine suit and waded right out into the water and let the minister speak his words and dunk him down. There were some of his other folk in the line, men and women, then there was me. I had on some Sunday clothes they’d given me. There were good folks on the banks, all dripping and weeping and wiping at the air above their faces with their hands.
“Go on now, Sue,” the old woman said.
I went. I stepped into the water and the water, which the minister had been telling could be robe and belt both to any who wanted it, walked away to either side of me. I stepped on the bottom and as I stepped, the water walked even away out of the mud and my borrowed shoes kept dry. The minister spoke his words about salvation and the blood of the good lamb and leaned me back and pushed me down, but the water had walked away, and when I came up I was dry. I know the minister knew this because when he spoke his words again about the robe and the belt, he whispered them up against my ear and never when he was finished with his whispering said amen, and I know the old woman knew because when I got back out onto the bank, she said the best thing to do about it would be to sit on the grass by the garlanded bushes with the others and, dry or wet, commend myself to Him who was lurking everywhere. To Him who sat in the shadows and the dark parts with us. To Him who would in the end harrow every evil and offer even those of us the water didn’t want, and whom the water wasn’t helping, a jewel from his glittering crown.
That’s not what Alcofibras came back to tell me. All those weeks after Linus Lancaster had been pushed down onto the table, Alcofibras didn’t walk through the wall of my enshackled night to sit cross-legged and ringed by rats before me and commune about robes and jewels and crowns. After he had sat, shrunk and whip-broken, lit by the glow of his own burning eyes, wrapped in a red shawl, he hadn’t stood himself up to speak about the coming of the Lord. I know that, even though all he said to me by way of greeting in that bowl of blackness was, “Evenin’, Miss Ginny.” No one, not even me with one of my eyes shut to bruising, would have mistaken what followed for anything to do with the lamb.
Alcofibras flung back that shawl and showed out his whip-cut shoulders and lifted up his gangle legs and twisted his arms, and the light from his eyes lit up every bit of him. His knees went up either side higher than his head, and the pink soles of his feet slapped back down on the ground. There wasn’t any music to it beside those pink soles slapping the cold ground. Presently his hands commenced to hit together. When they had come back away from each other, he would hold them out at me like he was saying Stop. Then he bowed and showed his back and shoulders then threw up his eyes at me. Then he bowed again and pulled his shawl over his head and shuffled around until his naked back was before me, then he raised up and leaned this way around, and as I looked an eye the size of a saucer opened up in the middle of his shoulders then closed, and he turned and pulled his shawl back down and smiled at me and recommenced lifting his legs and slapping his soles and hitting his hands and holding them out like he was saying Stop.
Then he stood still and looked at me, and looked at me and looked at me, and mouths grew up over his arms and legs and each one of them opened and all of them wailed at once, then went closed and quiet. Alcofibras then came up closer to me, his knees climbing to either side of him and his hands hitting together, and he leaned in close and when he did, ears came out of his forehead and his cheeks and his neck and his chest, until they were on every part of him and even the ears had grown ears and the ears were shaking, and I found myself sobbing because all they had to listen to was my poor breath and my poor heart, and all his mouth had had to wail to and all that eye had had to look upon was my poor self, shackled in the dark, a sorry thing of the earth, when outside there was so much, when out beyond my four-square kingdom, out along the midnight flanks of the republic, out atop the great wide oceans there was so much, and I called out to Alcofibras, who after a hundred, a thousand years was sitting quiet again with the shawl wrapped around his shoulders and his own dead eyes and ears and mouth, “What have you shown me?”