The sheriff looks around, shrugs as if to say “why not.”
“Ain’t a doctor-type among us, Sheriff. We should take him back into town. Least so’s his people can identify him.” The young man’s face softens. “Be a nice bit of closure for the family,” he finishes, softly.
Doesn’t occur to any of ’em that the boy ain’t got no more family, none that can be found, anyway.
I realize then how young all the deputies are, especially the local ones. They have hair on their faces, sure, and they have a man’s bearing about them, and they wear their guns the way men should, but many of them don’t have the spiritual wrinkles that come with manhood, those devotional foldings that show up as crow’s feet or gray hair or arthritis. Those that have it, I notice, seem like the war-hardened back home. The rest, it turns out, had managed to avoid that hardship and haven’t yet had the kindness beaten or shot or cut out of ’em. They have a bit more aching to do.
“Yeah, we’ll do that,” the sheriff says back. He faces his congregation. “The corpse of the deceased, after it was decided that present conditions did not allow for a full and thorough autopsy, was transported back to Galveston, where it was to be transported back to Ohio, reunited with the deceased’s family, and prepared for burial.” A pause. “You get all that?”
A moment’s scribbling, then a vigorous head-nod from the scribe, who fans the paper, then folds it and slips it into his jacket pocket.
Everyone is standing now, silent, unsure of what to do or how next to proceed.
“Y’all can roll him up now,” says the sheriff, saving us. And the gravediggers do just that while the big fella fills the hole back in with the shovel I’d made that Morgan boy use before I’d murdered him. The marshal jerks my length of rope, pulling me away, and we all walk back to the caravan while the nigger toils in silence.
I walk close to the marshal, but she doesn’t seem inclined toward speaking. Maybe she’s got no more cigarettes. Maybe seeing that extra shovel in the grave, that indication of a particular cruelty, has changed her mind about me.
Sunlight bleeds down the valley wall in strips.
I think maybe I’ll ask the woman for a cigarette anyway.
The nigger giant batters the rest of the delinquent earth into the ground with a thud-dull smack, and joins us.
A sideways glance at the marshal confirms my suspicion that she ain’t from no Lorain County.
[May 18th, 20—, 3:30 a.m.]
Anyway, that was the last thing I ever heard him say to me.
You see, Gladden sits between Black River and Lynch River. And the reason it looked like there were fewer and fewer people outside was that they were being evacuated. We were so busy dancin’ in the rain that we didn’t notice. The reactor I told you about, it got flooded and was leaking its shit into the soil and the water. And the river waters were starting to rise. We had no sandbags, they hadn’t even given us enough bottled water. It was either September 13 or 14. One of those days.
Because, the next day, Hurricane Faustine hit us.
That night, we felt the shock wave from the explosion. The power plant had flooded. Was supposed to have been decommissioned, but the state wanted to try out nuclear energy again, I guess. Core exploded. Just gone. Afterward, people were talking about graphite falling straight out of the sky. You pick it up, your hand melts. Anyway, stormwater came. Hurricane took the ash. Wind and flood brought it straight to us.
Washed us all away. It was hell. They left us in hell. No one came to save us. It was …
It was …
[Inaudible.]
Lot of us were too sick to get out and avoid the worst of it. We’d been fed poisoned food and water for months now. Eventually, clean-up arrived. People said, afterward, that they looked like ghosts. With their masks and their gowns. Some of them were dripping in whatever they got sprayed with to protect from the radiation. Those of us who didn’t get out in time, they got shot. Those bodies are under the concrete now. Whole place was paved over. Never saw Freddie’s boyfriend again. I don’t think he got out. Don’t know why I was so sure the old man did, but I was. Even though they got rid of all of it, I was sure. Anyway, they razed the whole state of South Carolina. And buried that prison underneath layer after layer after layer of concrete.
And that’s how it started. That’s how … all of this got started. The red dust storms, the radiation, the fallout, the war, the Exodusters. All of it.
THE dead body grows pustules in the heat and even a few wagons away, can be smelt by Cayenne and one of her deputies, with whom she rides back to Galveston. She wonders why she doesn’t yet feel completed. She tries to speed her thoughts already to the next job, but instead parallel presents and imaginary pasts capture her. Clipped with scissors and stitched together with thread, a variety of recollections that fracture her sight like a broken mirror. In this one, Jacob checks the buttons of his shirt, then the cuff links of his collar, then brushes some of his hair while he stares at his reflection in a fingerprint-smudged bathroom mirror. A job interview. In this one, Jacob sits on his bed in darkness, with the stillness of a mountain, while she kneels before him in their Vegas apartment and dabs at the cut above his eye with cotton and cleaning fluid. Already, a cemetery of copper cotton balls soaks in the bucket at her bare heels, toes peeking out from beneath the patterned wool of her nightgown. In this one, Cayenne shovels dirt onto her son’s grave after having cut him down from a streetlamp while his father watched. She is preparing it for anonymity. And in this one, she is unearthing the corpse untouched by maggots, carrion unsullied by pillagers and pestilential tenants. In this one, she sweeps the bedroom floor and her two children, unknowing of the apocalypse they’ve been born into, read quietly on their beds. In this one, Cayenne lies on the desert floor, foot still twisted in her stirrup, life leaking out of the gunshot wound in her chest. And in this one, mirroring the choreography of the previous, she is not frowning in confusion, nor is she weeping with regret, but rather smiling. Faintly. With the corners of her mouth. Hoping no one else sees it. Cain finally harmed beyond fixing, the mark of the beast no longer an infernal protection from the After. In this one, she is running with her second son, now half-grown, through a field of waist-high grass that bends in a breeze shepherded by fortune from the surrounding mountains. In this one, it is that boy leading her. In this one, this second son, her Lincoln, is a pace or two ahead, his hand rough and scabrous and firm against Cayenne’s: the origin of the heat sweating her palm.
THE desert is littered with dead things.
This is what it’s gotta be like. Slate-cleaning for those of us comin’ after me. Settling here, making this place anew. I don’t look at us, doin’ what we did, as janitors. No, it’s more cosmic than that. We was a flood. Space ain’t a home. The Colony ain’t a home. It’s a waystation. A place to catch your breath. We know that truth to be self-evident. Powers the heart of every Marauder. Somebody’s gotta keep this place warm for when the returnees get back.
Truth is, this place never stopped being ours.
I content myself with dreams as we ride back. Thinking perhaps that in some other future, we make it back to Galveston and a bunch of the Morgan family is waiting for us and they see me and the sheriff and the marshal and the deputies rush to my aid to beat back the rioters and preserve my life for just a few more days. Thinking that as the company holds back the vengeful relatives and the Specials sympathizers who’ve taken up the Morgan family’s cause, I catch sight one last time of that woman, Margaret, and see everything in those eyes I’d been wanting to see for the past half decade. Thinking that she might have at her side a little boy, who looks a bit like the marshal but smaller. And as they take the body into the hospital and the doctor waits with the gravediggers who are just there to fill space because no one knows where else to put them, one of the niggers spots the little boy in the doorway, a cousin maybe, peeking surreptitiously through the crack in the door at the boy only a little older than him on a slab of wood. The large nigger is sitting down, fatigued in his entire body, but the smaller one has a coin in his hand, probably a week’s wages in Whiteland, and closes it in his fist, then opens it again for the child to see his empty, lined palm. Then he pulls the shining thing from behind the kid’s ear with an expression of mock-wonderment, and maybe it nudges a smile onto the boy’s smudged face.
With the creosote bush and the mesquite and the blackbrush, I wonder how often it’s rained since I was last here. Whether this flora ever saw any hint of relief in the clouds.
THE train stops and for an instant, neither the marshal nor Lingerfelt moves, captured as they are in the inertia of the journey. They regard each other. Between them passes some unseen communion, some silent remarking of the day’s passing, and it is then that the door to their compartment opens and one of the marshal’s deputies enters to let them know they’ve arrived at Oberlin. The rest of the troop enters and, together, they escort the prisoner out and into a rusted town car that spirits him into the night.
Tim sidles up beside Cayenne at the hilltop as they watch the transport head toward the prison; the music of chains clanking grows softer with each passing second, until it’s nothing. And Tim rolls a cigarette. Cayenne wonders why she is waiting, what she is waiting for, knowing, as she waits, that she’ll find no ram caught in the bushes and that the prisoner will hang and the future will unfold as it will. She wants to hate him the way Jacob would’ve hated him.
Guilt wraps its arms around her chest like her husband used to do. She can’t help but feel she had something to do with that little boy’s murder. She fights back visions of her two boys, the one dead, the other abandoned. But each time she sees a Black boy’s lifeless body she also sees her own Jacob hanging from a tree, strung up by whites maddened by the end of their world, and she sees her second boy, a baby, cradled in her arms and she sees herself walking away, from the memory of the one and the reality of the other. She’s grown so comfortable in the body of this heart-hardened woman, and she hopes, as she does with every mission, that some sense of completion awaits her. She’s waiting for the day she can say to herself, “Both my sons are dead, and here are their bodies.” Someday. Not today.
“You’re lookin’ a little sideways, marshal. Prisoner give you a hard time?”
Cayenne wishes she could find a way to quiet the ache thrumming in her chest. “Nah, Tim. Just tired.” She straightens. It doesn’t feel like revenge. Maybe it still is. It doesn’t feel like reparation, but maybe it still is. She says nothing more to Tim and watches them take that white man away in chains.
A man shuffles past with a long-handled hammer leaning against his shoulder. He shoulders into her, and the head falls off, thuds into the ground. She stoops to pick it up, and that’s when she sees the man has stopped.
“You dropped—”
The Preacher
How two deaths in New Haven, Connecticut, illuminate the intergenerational plight of the Exodusters
