How long we wandered as I tried to retrieve our lost path I don’t know. Clouds hung low and the wood was thick. Once I fell into a gully and tore my dress on a thorn slick. Cleome caught her hair on an oak branch. An owl came swooping by. Near sunrise it took me to run. I don’t know why it came upon me that we must. We ran and crossed a road and had just gotten over it safely to the other side when a cart came along. Cleome breathed loud beside me and had been struck by a cough. I told her to cover her mouth and lie low, and she smiled her little smile at me and did her best. I don’t know why I had felt we needed to run, what had frightened me. There were two white men sitting at the front of the cart, one of them looking sharp and holding a rifle. In the back of the cart sat another man with a rifle and beside him a white man wrapped in chains. Just as they were passing Cleome coughed loud, and all four of them turned their heads. It was only one of them who found my eyes in the grasses, the one dressed in chains. I did not move and I did not blink, and the man saw me and I saw him. It was Bennett Marsden, friend to our dead owner. His lips curled a little and his eyebrow went up, then he looked away and the cart rolled on.
I took us farther into the wood away from the road, and we waited the long day under an ash tree, Cleome coughing and smiling and speaking about her rocks. She said she was glad we had run through the dark woods, that the rocks had fallen away from her faster as we had. With the light I could figure where we were and where we needed to be and felt calmed by this knowledge. We had long had the habit of telling little stories to each other, sometimes about our lost brother Alcofibras, and the strange chance of seeing Bennett Marsden, who had known us all in the old days before Paradise, all wrapped up in chains made me think of him. So I told the story of how Alcofibras had one day, when he had been let to wander a little, come upon a fish that had tried to swallow a snake and was now floating dead with it still caught in its jaws. Alcofibras had gone down into the pond and pulled the snake out of the fish’s mouth, and the snake had woken and looked Alcofibras in the eye then had slithered off. “That’s us, slithering off now,” I told Cleome.
“Taken out of the fish’s mouth,” she said.
“Still alive.”
“Still alive, yes, but slithering off where? That’s what I’m trying to figure. And to what?”
We returned the cart and horses to their owner in Louisville then took the train to Indianapolis. Eunice Fairbanks’s daughter lives there with her husband in a nice little home and when we called at her door she invited us to stay with her. I was as pleased as Prosper was to accept the invitation. Lilly Fairbanks had been a student at the same time as Prosper in the classroom where I worked as a teacher’s assistant in Chicago for thirty years. She was as sweet and sharp as ever, and before we knew it we had our feet up and lemonade in our hands.
“Well now, Miss Zinnia, what brings you and Prosper to Indianapolis?” she said, taking a seat near us.
“I hardly know,” I said.
That evening before we slept, I told Prosper that I was worn out and would need to recuperate for a few days before continuing on our way. He said he understood and wondered what I thought about him taking a trip ahead up into Clinton County for us. He wouldn’t do any talking beyond asking directions, beyond finding our path, if it could be found. That way, when I was ready, we could head straight for Mr. Lucious Wilson’s door. It was something he could do and do easily for me, he said. He is a very good boy, is my Prosper. He is my dearest heart on this earth. There isn’t anyone else I would have let share my errand, and I told him so.
“What is your errand, Aunt Zinnia?”
I shrugged, and he shrugged and smiled, and I promised I would tell him — as I now am telling you, you and the one other who I now think needs to read this — soon enough.
While he was gone the next whole day and a half, I lay on the bed Lilly Fairbanks had let me have the use of and looked the past in its eye. It peered in at me through the window and down at me from the ceiling, and more than once it crawled right up and sat down hard on my chest. They say once you’ve had the shackle on you it never comes off. I know one of our flock on the South Side can’t look at his legs without seeing chains. I could feel it as I lay there — around my neck, around my ankle, around my arm. There is being whipped and then there is being whipped when you are tied to an oak tree in the noonday sun. Who can you tell that to? Who has the ears to hear it? I save it for my prayers. There are a good number of us now in the County Home. Our church takes food to them each month.
I never cry, but I cried a little as I lay on Lilly Fairbanks’s clean sheets with the past sitting on my chest, its black eyes peering down at me. I suppose I thought I would like to just leave it behind and go home to my own room in Prosper’s house in Chicago. Maybe Ginestra Lancaster was dead now. Maybe it was too late. I could return to my church and Prosper could go back to his work and the past could go back to mostly ignoring me. But there I was and there it was. I neither blinked nor turned away from it. Where could I have looked?
As we sat waiting for nightfall, Cleome calmed herself down out of a coughing fit then said it was her turn to tell me a story. She said she could not remember if Alcofibras or some other had first told it to her. Or, in truth, if anyone had told it to her at all. It was long ago, at the beginning of everything, and in those early days all the people were just skulls. They had no arms, no legs, no bodies, no skin, no eyes. They were skulls with little candle flames burning inside of them, and to get around they had to hop. They were always angry, these skulls, and they were jealous of the animals that walked the earth with their paws and green eyes and long teeth and handsome fur. Whenever they could they would kill an animal and steal its fur and take its eyes and walk through the world clothed in something besides bone and with something to see with that wasn’t candle flame.
One day the lord of fire, who ruled over that world, went out for a walk and saw a group of these skulls stalk and kill and skin a beautiful lion. He watched them fight over the skin and the eyes and the legs and the claws. They fought so hard that everything was torn to bits and all that was left was a bloody mess. He was saddened by this sight and walked on. A little farther along he saw a group of skulls stalk and kill and skin a beautiful deer. He watched them fight over the skin and the eyes and the legs and the hooves. He was saddened by this sight and shook his head and walked on. All of that day and all of that night he watched skulls stalk and kill and destroy, and what they didn’t destroy they paraded around in. Sometime during the middle of that night, he came upon a group of the skulls huddled quietly together in a pile, their little candle flames gently lighting the night. He was so struck by the difference between these skulls and the ones he had seen before that he asked them why they, too, weren’t fighting over a carcass, why they were sitting so quietly with their candles burning so bright. “Shhh,” they said to him, “There’s an elephant coming. We mean to have its tusks.”