They didn’t even give each other the chance to fully disrobe. Isaiah’s pants were down around his knees; Samuel’s dangling from an ankle. Impatient, thrusting into each other in a haystack, the moonlight shining dimly on Isaiah’s ass and Samuel’s soles—they rocked.
By the time the one slid off the other, they were already tumbled off the haystack, deeper into the darkness, spread out on the ground. They were so spent that neither wanted to move, though both craved a thorough washing in the river. Silently, they decided to remain where they were, at least until after they had regained control of their breathing and the spasms subsided.
In the darkness, they could hear the animals shuffling, and they could also hear the muffled sounds of the people nearby in their shacks, singing or maybe crying. Both were viable possibilities. More clearly, they could hear laughter coming from the Big House.
Though there were a least two walls and not an insignificant amount of space between him and the laughter, Samuel looked in the direction of the house and tried to focus on the voices emanating from within. He thought he could recognize a few.
“Nothing never changes. New face, but same tongue,” he said.
“What?” Isaiah asked as he stopped staring at the roof and faced Samuel’s direction.
“Them.”
Isaiah inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly. He nodded. “So what we do? Bash the face? Split the tongue?”
Samuel laughed. “Face been bashed. Tongue already split. You’ve seen a snake before. Better to get far away as we can. Let them slither here on they own.”
“That’s the only choice, then: run?”
“If the face don’t heed, don’t even know it’s not heeding. If the tongue don’t yield. Yes.”
Samuel sighed. Maybe Isaiah was afraid of the dark, but he wasn’t. It was where he found shelter, where he blended, and where he thought the key to freedom surely rested. But still, he wondered what happened to people who wandered off into a wilderness that wasn’t their own. Some turned into trees, he reckoned. Some became the silt at the bottom of rivers. Some didn’t win the mountain lion’s race. Some just died. He lay there silently for a moment, listening to Isaiah’s breathing. Then he sat up.
“You coming?”
“Where?”
“To the river.”
Isaiah turned on his side but said nothing. He looked in the direction of Samuel’s voice and tried to differentiate his shape from the surrounding darkness. It was all one endless mass until Samuel moved and delineated the living from the dead. But what was that sound?
A scratching noise was coming from somewhere.
“You hear that?” Isaiah asked.
“Hear what?”
Isaiah was still. The scratching had stopped. He laid his head back down on the ground. Samuel moved again, as though preparing to stand.
“Wait,” Isaiah whispered.
Samuel sucked his teeth but returned to his position, lying next to Isaiah. Just as he got comfortable, the scratching noise returned. He didn’t hear it but Isaiah looked in the direction it was coming from, close to the horse pens. Something took shape there. It was first a tiny point, like a star, and then it spread until it was the night he was brought to the plantation.
Twenty of them, maybe more, piled into a wagon drawn by horses. All of them chained together at the ankles and at the wrists, which made movement labored and unified. Some of them wore iron helmets that covered their entire heads, turned their voices into echoes and their breathing into rattles. The oversized contraptions rested on their collarbones, leaving behind gashes that bled down to their navels and made them woozy. Everyone was naked.
They had traveled over bumpy, dusty trails for what, to Isaiah, seemed a lifetime—the sun burning their flesh in the day and mosquitoes tearing it up at night. Still, they were thankful for the torrential showers, when those without helmets could drink at their leisure rather than at the gunmen’s.
When they finally reached Empty—which was what, in the quiet places, people called the Halifax plantation, and for good reason—he couldn’t make out anything except a dim light coming from the Big House. And then they were pulled one by one from the wagon, each of them stumbling because none of them could feel their legs. For some, the weight of the helmet made it impossible to stand. Others had the burden of being held down by the corpse they were chained to. Isaiah, who was just a child, didn’t even know enough to consider the man who lifted him up and carried him even though his own legs were about to give.
“I got you, little one,” the man said. His voice labored and dry. “Your maw made me promise. And I gotta tell you your name.”
Then everything went black.
When Isaiah came to, it was morning and they were all still chained together: living and dead alike. They were lying on the ground near the cotton field. He was hungry and thirsty, and the first to sit up. That was when he saw them: a group of people holding pails marching up the path, headed right for them. Some were as young as he was. They came with water and food—well, at least as close to food as he was liable to get. Pig parts that were seasoned enough to cover up the acrid taste and alleviate gagging.
A boy with a ladle approached him. He moved the ladle toward Isaiah’s face. Isaiah parted his lips and closed his eyes. He gulped as warm, sweet water leaked from the corners of his mouth. When he was done, he looked up at the boy; the sun made him squint so that at first, he could only see the boy’s outline. The boy moved a little, blocking the sun. He looked down at Isaiah with big, skeptical eyes and a chin too proud for anyone to have under those conditions.
“You want some more?” the boy called Samuel asked him.
Isaiah was no longer thirsty but nodded anyway.
When the darkness returned to itself, Isaiah touched his own body to make sure he wasn’t a child anymore. He was himself, he was sure, but what had just come to him, from a pinpoint in the dark, proved that time could go missing whenever and wherever it pleased, and Isaiah couldn’t yet figure out a way to retrieve it.
Isaiah couldn’t be certain, but the remembrance that showed itself reminded him that he and Samuel were about the same age, sixteen or seventeen now, if every four seasons were properly counted. Nearly twenty years old now and so much had remained unspoken between them. To leave it in the silence was the only way it could be and not break a spirit in half. Working, eating, sleeping, playing. Fucking on purpose. For survival, everything that was learned had to be transmitted by circling the thing rather than uncovering it. Who, after all, was foolish enough to show wounds to folks who wanted to stick their mouth-sucked fingers into them?
The quiet was mutual, not so much agreed upon as inherited; safe, but containing the ability to cause great destruction. There, lying in the dark, Isaiah, exposed too closely to a living dream, heard it speak.