I stood and walked to the window. The day was clear and I could see, from the back side of Lockless, clear to the hills, hazy in the distance. I turned away from the window and saw my father coming back to the room. Behind him was Roscoe, who’d brought me up all those years ago from the Street. And across his aged, creased face there was a look of gravity and concern, and I remembered that there had been people who knew me and loved me, elders, who delighted in my song and games. Roscoe laid a set of clothes on Maynard’s dresser—my clothes. Then he stripped the bedding, wrapped it into a bundle under his arm, and walked out. My father sat again on the footstool.
“We have sought his body in the river, but the water…” he said, his voice trailing off. He was trembling now.
“When I think of my boy at the bottom of that river…” he said. “And I cannot but think of anything else, do you hear me, Hiram? When I think of him engaged to that bottom…Forgive me. I can but imagine what you saw out there. But I must confess, for none other is fit to hear it: Maynard was all I had of his mother. When his eyes went gleeful, I saw hers. When he was forgetful, I saw her habit. When he was compassionate, as he was always, I saw her.”
He was crying now. “And now he is gone, and I am twice departed.”
Roscoe returned, this time with a washcloth, a small basin of water, and a larger empty one, and set it all on the dresser.
“Well, so it is, son,” my father said. “Some arrangement shall be made. The memory of him does not die, wherever his body might make its rest. What you must know, what you surely know, is that Maynard loved you, and I do not doubt he gave his very life so that you might get out of that river.”
When my father left, I took the washcloth and water and cleaned myself, but my hands shook while I juggled the madness of his last words. Maynard loved you. This notion—that Maynard loved anyone, that Maynard would give his life for anyone, much less me—was astounding me. But then as I dressed, and turned it over, I came to an understanding—my father believed this insanity. He had to. Maynard was him, was his wife, and this glorified portrait somehow lived right along with the admonition my father had always communicated to me—that Maynard must be watched, that he was not to be trusted with his own life. Walking down the back stairs, I knew that my father’s statement could only be reconciled through the peculiar religion of Virginia—Virginia, where it was held that a whole race would submit to chains; Virginia, where this same race held the math that molded iron and carved marble to exact proportion and were still called beasts; Virginia, where a man would profess his love for you one moment and sell you off the next. Oh, the curses my mind constructed for my fool of a father, for this country where men dress sin in pageantry and pomp, in cotillions and crinolines, where they hide its exercise, in the down there, in a basement of the mind, in these slave-stairs, which I now I descended, into the Warrens, into this secret city, which powered an empire so great that none dare speak its true name.
—
When I got back to the Warrens, I found Thena standing just outside her door, in the dim light, talking to Sophia. Thena looked at me hard. I smiled at her. She walked over to me, shaking her head. Then she put her hand on my cheek and locked eyes. She didn’t smile, only regarded me from my head to feet, and I had the feeling that she was making sure every part of me was in its place.
“Well,” she said. “Don’t look like you fell in no river.”
She was not a warm woman, Thena, this other mother of mine. There was a general belief that if she wasn’t cursing you or shooing you off, she might, at least, have a good feeling for you. I generally returned this good feeling with my own muted affection. And there was no offense in that. We had our own language to affirm what we were to each other.
But that day, without thought, I spoke a different language. I wrapped my arms around Thena and pulled her close, and held her tight as though venting all my joy at being alive, and held her tight like she were flotsam and I were back in the Goose.
After a few seconds, she pulled back, looked me up and down again. Then she turned and walked off.
Sophia watched her go, then when Thena had turned a corner, she looked at me and laughed.
“That ol’ gal know she love you,” she said.
I nodded.
“I mean it. She don’t much talk to me. But after you went under, she kept asking questions, side-like, trying to get what word on you she could.”
“She come see me?”
“Not once—and that’s how I know she love you. I’d ask her and she’d get all flustered and I knew what it was—she couldn’t see you like that. It’s hard, Hiram. It was hard even on me, and I don’t like you, much less love you.”
At that she slapped my shoulder and we laughed quietly together, but my heart tumbled in my chest.
“So how are you?” Sophia asked.
“Been better,” I said. “But glad to be getting back to where I belong.”
“Which is to say not looking up from the Goose,” said Sophia.
“That is about the fact of it,” I said.
There was a silence between us for a few moments that began to feel uncertain and then rude. So I invited Sophia into my quarters. She accepted. I pulled out a chair for her, and when seated, she reached into her apron and produced a ball of yarn and needles and started knitting one of her inscrutable things. I sat on my bed, our knees now almost touching.
“Glad to see you shaping up,” she said.
“Yes, I am coming together,” I said. “Ain’t waste no time getting me out Maynard’s room, did they?”
“It’s better that way, ain’t it?” she said. “Can’t say I’d want to be in some dead man’s bed.”
“It is better that way,” I said.
By instinct, I reached into my pocket for my coin, but the coin was not there. Likely it was now lost, and the fact of this saddened me. It had been my charm, my token of the Street, even if my great plans had come to nothing.
“How’d they find me?” I asked.
“Corrine’s man,” Sophia said, still knitting. “You know him? Hawkins?”
“Hawkins?” I said. “Where?”
“On the shore,” Sophia said. “This side of the Goose. Face-down in the muck. No idea how you made it out of there, cold as that water be. Got somebody watching over you.”
“Maybe,” I said. But I was not thinking of how I got out. I was thinking of Hawkins—how I’d seen him twice on race-day and then how he’d been the one to find me.
“Hawkins, huh?” I repeated.
“Yep,” she said. “Corrine and him and her girl, Amy, been here most days since. Sure would be nice to thank him.”
“Sure would,” I said. “Guessing I will.”
She rose to leave and I felt now the soft pain that came to me whenever she did.
—
After Sophia left, I sat on the edge of my bed contemplating the shape of events. Something did not fit. Sophia had said that Hawkins found me on the riverbank. But I had the most distinct memory of falling down in the fallows. I remembered seeing the monument there, the stone left to mark the first works of the progenitor, Archibald Walker. But the fallows were two miles from the river, and I had no memory of walking the distance between the two. Perhaps I had imagined it all, in the throes of near-death, conjured up this last vision of my ancestry—my dancing mother, the monument of the progenitor—as some farewell to this world.