It was cold and spitting snow, he could see its slow slant by the lantern light. They passed between the cribs of slavequarters, the trunks of enormous live oaks pale and transparent-looking in the rolling fog. They went toward a house built on an elevation and silhouetted black against the slightly paler sky so it looked depthless, a false front with rectangular knockouts through which dim yellow light flared.
A story-and-a-half log house with a dogtrot between two sections of rooms. He was led up a dark stairwell to an attic bedroom, ushered through the door. It was warm and comfortable in the room, the first time Mayfield had been warm in four days. An enormous fire crackled in the fireplace and fire logs were ricked in against a stone woodbox.
There was a brass bed in one corner of the room, on which a young girl lay partially covered with a blue sheet. Her long hair was the color of cornsilk. She seemed to be very young. She was watching Mayfield with wide blue eyes, a look congested with a mixture of fear and horror. Through the sheet he could see that she was grotesquely pregnant, and he divined at last the true reason for his presence, though not the methods that had ensured it. He set the bag down at the foot of the bed.
You men get out of here, he said, feeling better and more confident, at last in a situation he felt master of. A set of circumstances experience and training had made him familiar with.
The black man turned and went out and closed the door behind him. The white man said something. The malady that had affected him seemed to be dissipating. His face was not nearly as swollen, and Mayfield was able to understand a few words he told the black woman. Nonetheless the woman turned to him.
Old Marster say he ain’t trustin this gal to no nigger midwife. Says it’s a life for a life. He say tell you if she dies you die too.
The whiskered man said something else.
The heavyset black woman sat by the bedside, her face a gargoyle of sorrow, statuary carved with infinite care from black ebony. Mayfield turned the sheet back, and she fought him weakly so that he thought to himself, well, little lady, if you’d fought over the cover that hard nine months ago, me and you wouldn’t be doing it now. He uncurled the girl’s fingers from it, her eyes blank and then altering to a kind of bitter spitefulness. As if it was all his doing, as if she blamed him for planting the seed that he had been kidnapped and bounced blindfolded in a wagon a hard day’s ride to harvest. He watched her eyes, then abruptly a whine of pain assaulted her so that she clenched them tight, made a soft mewing sound like a cat. He shoved the gown up till it swaddled about her hips. Her water had broken and the bedclothes were stained a pale rose pink.
The man sat on the hearth, and with a hawkbilled knife he cut himself a childsized sliver of chewing tobacco and inserted it in his rosebud mouth, worried it about irritably as if it brought him small satisfaction.
When the birth happened, it happened without incident, almost anticlimactic, and Mayfield felt a curious sense of disappointment, as if he had been brought this far for nothing. It was a boy, beetred and squalling and wrinkled, a full head of sandy red hair.
Mayfield washed him with soap and water the old woman brought him, wrapped him in a clean muslin shift. The girl slept. The old woman sat holding the baby until the rawboned man got up from the hearth and strode toward her. She watched him with a growing apprehension.
He held his arms out for the baby, but something did not look right to Mayfield. He knew intuitively the scene was darkly parodic, not what it seemed. The man said something short and guttural, a curse or an invocation. She reached the child up to— what? Mayfield wondered. Grandfather? Father? Then he dropped the pan of water he was holding and screamed, for the man had turned and thrown the baby into the fire.
Mayfield’s scream was the inchoate, anguished scream of an animal, outraged, an appalled venting of sound bordering on madness. He crossed the room in two strides but the bearded man blocked his path. He seized the man by his face, his features going utterly vacuous with pain when Mayfield hit his cheeks, the eyes rolling upward and his breath wheezing with an audible hiss.
Mayfield had his thumbs locked in the soft depression of the man’s throat when the door opened behind them. The black man leapt upon Mayfield, fairly swinging on the thick arms to disengage them. The man with the muttonchop whiskers stumbled backward wildeyed, arms flailing, ceased when he remembered the knife.
He stepped forward, instinctively positioned his feet just as the gangling black’s arms encircled Mayfield’s chest. The hawkbilled knife flashed in an arc above them, hooked the point of Mayfield’s jaw, and ripped open his throat, forming there momentarily a grotesque second mouth that vanished abruptly in a gout of blood that spewed down his white shirtfront and over the black man’s arms, and when the black released him he dropped slack and resistless to the floor.
Tennessee, 1956-1965
The logistics of chance had always fascinated David Binder, the curious inevitability of coincidence prevailing over the odds. Jung called it synchronicity, and after Binder read Jung’s book he was wont to call it synchronicity too. He was fascinated as well by the little incidents in life that appear wearing masks, disguised as other incidents; years later their significance surfaces, and sometimes you remember, with a sense of déjà vu, the keystone event that triggered the sequence. More often you don’t.
If you had asked David Binder to name the events that led him to the Beale farm in southwestern Tennessee in the summer of 1982 he might have named any but these:
In 1956, when Binder was six years old, he came in from school and went into his living room and there was a strange woman in his father’s rocking chair. The woman was old, seventy-something perhaps, and it was obvious even to a six-year-old that something was amiss. Her clothing was oldfashioned, years out of date. She was a heavyset woman in a black bonnet that tied beneath her chin, a long dress of some thick dark fabric he wasn’t familiar with, and he noted dispassionately that her hightopped shoes buttoned instead of tied. All in all she looked like some old yellowed daguerreotype from the bottom of the picture box.
It was a moment curiously electric, and he was simultaneously aware of a myriad of conflicting images. The woman’s face, unaware of him, was highly colored, almost florid, and she had rheumy blue eyes. A wisp of irongray hair peeked from beneath the bonnet. He turned. Through the open window he could see his mother in the garden, the rhythmic swing of the hoe, hear its metallic chink against the earth. The old woman motionless in the motionless chair, and the hot July day itself suddenly frozen, as if time had paused a moment to catch its breath.
When he turned from the window she was gone.
Binder was already known as an imaginative child. Nobody believed for a moment that he had seen a woman in the living room. Nothing happened to call it to mind later: no telegram, no phone call in the night, no longdistant relative unexpectedly dead. It was random, insignificant, purposeless. In a few hours’ time his parents had forgotten it; within the week he had forgotten it himself.
It was nine years before the next incident. He’d had a bitter argument with his father, both of them shouting themselves into a rage for neither the first time nor the last. All the same there was something different about it. A shower of stones fell on the roof. He could hear them striking the shingles, rattling hollowly in the gutters, and he ran outside. Staring in disbelief, he could see them forming above the roof of the house, round white stones half the size of an egg. Binder picked one out of the grass and cupped his hand about it. It was warm to the touch.