Chapter One — The Road Walking Him
Freedom meant one thing to the living and something else entirely to the dead, and Elijah Cross walked eleven days through Mississippi before anybody bothered to explain the difference to him.
He was twenty-six that autumn and had been walking since March.
He walked the way a man walks when the walking is the whole of his employment — early, and steadily, and without any particular hurry, because hurrying costs more than it buys and there is no wage at the end of the day to spend it against. He had learned that in the first month. He had learned a good deal in the first month, most of it about his feet.
The Trace ran north out of the low country through pine and oak and second-growth scrub that had been fields inside living memory. In places the old road was cut down twelve feet below the level of the land on either side, worn there by a hundred and fifty years of hooves and wheels and men, so that a traveler walked in a green trench with the roots of trees standing out of the walls at the height of his head. In those stretches the light came down as though through a window high in a wall, and the sound of a bird overhead arrived flattened and strange.
Elijah did not care for those stretches and could not have said why.
He carried a bedroll, a tin cup, a razor, a good knife, a pen case with two nibs and a corked bottle of ink, and four dollars in Federal paper folded into a seam he had sewn himself and sewn badly. He had two shirts. He was wearing the better one because the other had gotten into a condition where wearing it made things worse.
He also carried, though he would not have listed it, the fact that nobody on earth was expecting him anywhere.
He had gotten his name in Vicksburg in the spring.
There had been a table set up under a canvas fly on a street where a building used to be, and a white man behind it with a tin box of forms and a bored young soldier keeping the line. Freedmen’s Bureau. The line ran forty deep at nine in the morning and was still forty deep at three in the afternoon, which told you something about the arithmetic of it.
Elijah had stood in that line for the better part of a day.
When he got to the table the man did not look up.
“Name.”
“Elijah.”
The pen moved. Then it stopped.
“Elijah what.”
And Elijah Cross had stood in the sun with his hat in his hands and said nothing for something like a minute.
It was a strange thing to be asked. He had been asked his name perhaps four hundred times in his life and had never once been asked the second half of it, because the second half of it had always been supplied by somebody else and had always been the same word, which was the name of the place.
The man looked up.
“Son, I got a line.”
“I know it.”
“Then give me something. It don’t have to be anything. Half these boys are taking Lincoln.” He said it without unkindness. He said it the way a man says a thing he has said two hundred times before dinner. “It’s a name. It just has to be yours.”
“Whose was it before?”
The man looked at him for a second.
“Nobody’s,” he said. “That’s the whole point of it. Now give me a word or step aside.”
Elijah gave him Freeman, and the man wrote it, and Elijah walked six blocks and came back and stood in the line again for two more hours and had it struck out.
The clerk was not pleased about the strike-out. There was a procedure for corrections and it involved a second form.
“You had it and you don’t want it.”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
Elijah had thought about it on the six blocks and on the two hours and had gotten it into one sentence, which he did not say out loud, because the sentence was: because it’s a description and not a name, and because a man who has to say what he is every time he says who he is has not got all the way loose of anything.
What he said was, “It ain’t mine.”
“And what is?”
“Cross.”
The clerk wrote Cross, and asked how it was spelled, and Elijah told him, and the clerk looked up at him one more time and then did not ask the thing he had been about to ask.
Elijah Cross walked out of Vicksburg the following morning.
It had been his mother’s, or it had been the thing people called her, which in 1853 amounted to the same transaction.
Ruth Cross. That was how she was spoken of in the quarters and at the well and by the cook and by everybody except the man who owned her and the man who drove her, and Elijah had never in his life understood where it came from. There had been no Mr. Cross. There had been no place called Cross. He had asked her twice as a boy and gotten a different answer both times, one of them plainly invented on the spot and the other one funny.
He had said it out loud to himself on the road that first afternoon, to hear whether it fit.
Elijah Cross.
It fit badly. It fit the way a dead man’s coat fits — the shoulders wrong, the sleeves long, and something in the lining of it that has kept the shape of somebody else.
He wore it anyway. That was what you did with a coat you had.
Now it was October and he had been eleven days on the Trace out of Rodney and the walking had gone peculiar.
He noticed it first as a feeling and dismissed it, because he was a man who dismissed feelings on principle and had gotten as far as twenty-six years old largely on the strength of it.
Then he noticed it as arithmetic, which was harder to argue with.
He would come to a fork in the late afternoon and consider it honestly. He would look at both roads and think about water and about whether there was likely to be a settlement, and he would weigh it, and he would take the left.
And an hour on, the road would bend, and there would be a fence line running away east through the pines with the rails down in the third and fourth panels, and Elijah would stop walking.
Because he had seen that fence before. Not the fence — he had never been within forty miles of that fence in his life. He had seen it the way you see a face in a crowd that you know you do not know.
He would stand there in the road with his thumbs in his pack straps and understand that he had been aiming at this fence since Tuesday.
That happened four times in eleven days.
He tested it once.
On the ninth day he came to a place where the Trace ran up over a low ridge and a wagon track went off to the west toward a mill he could hear but not see, and every part of Elijah Cross that had opinions about supper wanted to go west.
He went east instead, on purpose, out of spite.
He walked east for two hours through country that got worse the whole way, and came to a creek with no crossing, and had to work a mile downstream to a place shallow enough, and came up out of the water on the far bank in the last of the light.
And there was the Trace.
He had crossed a creek to arrive at the road he had left.
Elijah sat down on the bank with his boots in his hands for a considerable time.
He was not a man who went in for signs. His mother had been. She had read the sky and she had read birds and she had once refused to let him go down to the landing on a Tuesday for a reason she never explained, and a boy had drowned at the landing on that Tuesday, and Elijah had spent fourteen years being careful not to draw a conclusion from it.
He was not a man who went in for signs.
He put his boots back on and walked north up the Trace in the dark, because it was where the road went.
That was the thing he could not get round, and he turned it over for the last two days and never got any further with it than this.
A man walks a road. That is the arrangement. The road lies there and does nothing at all and the man does all the work, and where he comes out at the end of it is his own business and his own doing and nobody else’s.
But there is another way to think about a road, which is that it was put there by somebody, and it goes where it was made to go, and every man who has ever walked it has ended up at the same place regardless of what he intended, and the road has never once had to do anything but lie still.
Elijah Cross had begun to suspect, in a way he could not have defended to a judge, that he was not walking this road.
That the road was walking him.
He came to the place on the eleventh evening.
There was no sign of it from the Trace. He nearly went by. It was a gap in the trees on the east side where a wagon track went off, grown over at the mouth with sumac and a young pine standing directly in the middle of where the ruts had been — which meant nothing had come out of there in five or six years — but packed hard underneath, the way a road stays packed for a generation after the last wagon.
Elijah stopped at the mouth of it.
The light was going. He had perhaps forty minutes. There was no water that he could hear and no smoke that he could smell and no good reason on this earth to leave a road he knew for a road he did not, in the dark, in October, in a county where a Black man walking alone was a question that somebody might decide to answer.
He stood there long enough for the light to change.
Then he turned in.
The track ran a half mile through second growth, and the second growth thinned, and then he was out in the open and stopped walking altogether.
Fields.
They had been enormous. He could see the shape of them even in that light, running away east and south further than he could make out, and they had gone to scrub and sumac and volunteer pine coming up in ragged uneven lines — but the furrows were still there under all of it. You could see them the way you see writing under a wash of ink. Somebody had put a plow through this ground ten thousand times and the ground had not forgotten it and was not going to inside of a hundred years.
Cotton. It had been cotton, and a great deal of it.
At the far end the big house had burned.
Three chimneys stood up out of the ground where it had been, black against the last of the sky, and there was nothing whatsoever between them. Not a wall, not a stub of one. The fire had been thorough and had had help.
Elijah looked at the chimneys for a while.
He had passed a dozen like it since March and had gone up to four of them, because a burned house sometimes has a smokehouse or a well that still works and nobody left to mind either.
He did not go toward the house.
He went north, along the edge of the field, toward the row.
He did not decide to.
That was the part he came back to afterward, more than any of it. He did not stand at the edge of that field and weigh a burned house against a line of cabins and choose. His feet turned him left and he went, and by the time it occurred to him to have an opinion he was two hundred yards along the field edge with the sumac catching at his trouser legs.
The quarters stood on the north side. Eleven cabins in a line, or what had been eleven; he counted the foundations. Most of them had fallen in on themselves and gone under the weeds, so that from a distance the row read as a long low ridge with two upright things in it.
Only the end one still had a roof.
Elijah stopped forty feet short and looked at it.
Nothing about it was remarkable. He had been in a hundred of these. He had slept in a dozen since March. One room, dirt floor, a hearth, a door hung on leather, a shelf if the man who built it had been minded to put a shelf in. He could have drawn the inside of it without going any closer and been right about nine things out of ten.
He stood in a dark field in Mississippi with his heart going like a man on the wrong side of a locked door.
“All right,” he said out loud, to nobody, in the tone of a man agreeing to something he has not been offered.
Then he walked up and pushed the door open and went in.
Chapter Two — The Cabin at the End of the Row
The inside was one room and it was exactly what he had known it would be, and that did not help at all.
Dirt floor, packed and swept — swept, which registered somewhere in the back of Elijah’s mind and did not come forward for another hour. A hearth on the north wall with a good deal of old ash in it and a length of iron set into the stone for hanging a pot. A plank bed frame against the far wall with the ropes rotted out of it and gone in three places, so the whole thing sagged inward like something waiting.
A shelf, high up, empty.
And a table.
The table was too good for the room. That was the second thing he noticed. Somebody had built the bed frame out of whatever came to hand and had built the table properly — mortised, pegged, planed on the top surface, the legs squared and matched. It had been made by a man who knew how and had been given time and had cared how it came out.
Elijah put his hand flat on it.
Water had come through the roof in three places. He could see the streaks down the wall and there was standing water in the corner nearest the door, an inch of it, with mosquito wigglers going in it even in October.
The table was dry. The floor under the table was dry.
And on the table, square in the middle of it, was a book.
Elijah looked at the book for a long time without moving.
It was leather-bound and it was the size of a family Bible and it was sitting in the middle of a table in a cabin that had been standing empty for four years in a state that gets fifty inches of rain, and it was dry.
Not preserved. Not wrapped, not oiled, not in a box. Dry the way a book is dry when you have taken it off a shelf in a house with a fire going.
He was aware that he had begun to breathe through his mouth.
“All right,” he said.
He put his pack down by the door, and then thought better of it and moved it out of the doorway, and then thought better of that and put it back, and became aware that he was arranging a pack because he was not doing something else.
He went out and got wood.
He built the fire carefully.
He was aware the entire time that he was being careful, and aware that a fire does not need to be that careful, and aware that he was doing the thing men do when they want the light and are pretending to want the warmth.
There was old wood in the second cabin along — a fallen rafter, cut down and split, and somebody’s rick of kindling under what was left of a lean-to, four years old and dry as paper. He took two armloads. He laid the fire in the hearth the way his mother had taught him at eight years old, which was the way she had done everything, which was with an entirely unreasonable amount of attention.
You lay it wrong, you’ll be laying it twice.
It caught first strike.
The room came up out of the dark and the walls were closer than he had thought and the shelf higher, and the light went yellow across the top of the table and across the cover of the book.
Elijah sat down on the edge of the bed frame and it took his weight, badly, with a sound.
He pulled the table around toward him by one leg.
Then he opened the cover.
The first page was a heading, done large, in a clerk’s hand, in ink that had gone the color of dried blood.
PROPERTY INVENTORY & INCREASE KEANE, A. — BELLE ROSE — MISS.
Under it, smaller, in the same hand:
Begun this 14th day of March, 1786.
Elijah’s mouth had gone dry.
He knew what he was looking at before he had read four lines of it.
He read four lines of it anyway.
Solomon — m — 40 yrs — b. coast — field — sound — $900
Eliza — f — 23 yrs — Angola — house — sound — $1,100
Doris — f — 27 yrs — New Orleans — house — hand injury lft — $800
George — m — 30 yrs — Georgia — field — sound — $1,000
He put his hands flat on the table on either side of the book.
That helped for about four seconds and then it stopped helping, because he could feel his own pulse going against the wood, so he took them off and put them on his knees.
He had seen a ledger before.
He wanted to be clear about that afterward, when he told it, and he told it perhaps five times in forty years and never in front of more than two people.
He had seen one. He had seen the Belle Rose book itself, in fact, in the front room of the big house, in 1852, when he was eleven and had been sent up with a message and had waited eleven minutes in a doorway while a man he was not looking at wrote something down.
He had not been able to read it then.
That was the entire difference between the boy in that doorway and the man at this table, and there was a whole story in how the difference had happened, and it involved a woman named Delphine and a Sunday and a great deal of risk on somebody else’s part, and Elijah did not think about it that night.
What he thought, sitting at that table, was that he had spent fourteen years learning to read and had somehow never once considered that the thing would still be here.
He turned pages.
It went on. That was the first thing and it went on being the first thing for a long time. Column after column, page after page, in three hands and then four and then a fifth as one clerk gave way to another across eighty-one years — and the hands changed and the ink changed and the paper changed, from rag to something cheaper around the 1830s, and none of it changed at all.
Purchased. Born this place. Sold to Ferris, Adams Co. Deceased. Ran. Returned. Ran. Returned. Ran.
Sound. Sound. Unsound. Sound.
And the price at the end of the line like the last word of a sentence.
He read a run of eleven entries from 1804 without meaning to, and stopped, and understood that he had been reading them the way you read a column of figures — down the last column only, checking the numbers — and put his hand over his mouth for a moment.
He went back and read the eleven names.
Then he turned the page.
Later he worked out that it took him about forty minutes to get to her, and that he had gone through roughly sixty years of it to do so, and that he had been going faster at the end.
He did not go looking.
He wanted that understood. He said it every one of the five times he ever told it and it was the only part he ever said the same way twice.
I did not go looking.
He turned a page, and there it was, four lines down, in a rounder hand than the one before it.
Ruth — f — 38 yrs — b. this place — house — deceased Sept 1853 — —
The last column was empty.
They had not troubled to write anything in it. There was a dash where the figure went, put in by a clerk who was tidy, and nothing after it, because a dead woman is not worth a sum and the column was for value.
Elijah Cross sat in a cabin at the end of a row in a burned-out place in Mississippi and read his mother’s line four times.
The fourth time he read it out loud.
“Ruth Cross,” he said. “Female. Thirty-eight years. Deceased.”
The fire went out.
Not down. Not guttered, not smothered, not blown by a draft off the door.
Out — all at once and entire, the whole of it, the way a lamp goes when the flame is pinched between two wet fingers. There was a fire with six inches of flame on it and then there was black, and the black was total; Elijah put his hand up in front of his own face and could not find it.
And the cold came up out of the floor.
Through the dirt, through the soles of his boots, up through the bones of his feet and into his knees — not the cold of a night in October, which he had been sleeping in for three weeks and knew the shape of. Cellar cold. Well cold. The cold that comes off standing stone in a place the sun has never gotten into.
Elijah did not move.
He had a knife on his hip. He was aware of the knife the way you are aware of a word you cannot remember, and did not reach for it, and never afterward could say why not.
And from the far side of the table, four feet away, in the dark, a woman’s voice said:
“You read it wrong.”
Elijah Cross stopped breathing.
“You read it like it’s a price,” the voice said. “It ain’t a price. It’s a name and a place and a woman, and you read out the shape they put around her. Read it again.”
It was patient. That was the thing that got into him and stayed. It was not a moan and it was not a whisper and it did not come from everywhere at once. It was a woman four feet away in the dark, tired, being patient with somebody who had gotten a thing wrong twice.
He knew the voice.
He had been twelve years old the last time he heard it and it had been telling him to get up under the house and be quiet and stay quiet no matter what he heard — and he had done it, and he had stayed quiet, and he had gone on staying quiet for fourteen years, and there was not one hour of the fourteen in which he had not been able to hear exactly how she said it.
His whole body had begun to shake and he could not stop it and did not try.
“Mama,” he said.
And the fire came back.
Chapter Three — Ruth
She was standing where the light was thinnest.
That was the first thing, and it stayed the first thing for the rest of his life: not that she was there, but where she had chosen to stand. At the end of the table, past the throw of the fire, in the place in that room where a person could be looked at without being examined.
She had always done that. She had done it in the yard and she had done it at the well and she had done it in the doorway of the big house kitchen for twenty years, and Elijah had never once noticed it while she was alive.
She was not made of smoke.
He had assumed she would be. Everybody assumed that; it was in every story anybody ever told on a porch — a thing like fog, a thing you could see the wall through, a shape that came apart at the edges.
Ruth Cross stood at the end of the table in a gray dress with her hair wrapped, and she was as solid as the table, and she was thirty-eight years old.
Exactly thirty-eight. Exactly as old as she had been. Exactly as old as she was going to be, which was a thing Elijah did not think through until much later and then could not stop thinking through.
The only wrong thing was the air.
The fire was going hard and the draft was coming in under the door and pulling at the flame, and it had the corner of the blanket on the bed frame going, and it had the ash lifting on the hearth.
It did not touch her dress. Not one thread of it. Not the hem, not the wrap on her head, not a hair.
Elijah stood up so fast the table went over an inch on the dirt.
“Mama.”
“Sit down before you fall down.”
“You’re—”
“Elijah.” Her voice did not rise at all. “Sit down.”
He sat down.
She looked at him.
He watched her do it, which was the strangest four seconds of a strange night. He watched his mother take in a grown man where a boy had been — the height of him, which he had gotten from somewhere and not from her; the hands; the beard he had been growing badly since June and had trimmed twice with a knife and no glass.
Her chin went.
“You got big,” Ruth said.
And her voice came apart in the middle of the word, and Elijah Cross put his face in his hands and cried in front of his mother for the first time since he was nine years old.
She let him.
She did not come around the table and she did not say anything and she did not tell him to stop, and every one of those was a kindness and he understood all three at the time.
When he could, he said, “How long.”
“Fourteen years, baby.”
“Here?”
“In this room.”
Elijah lifted his head.
“Mama. You’ve been in this room—”
“Some of it in the field.” She said it plainly, the way you would describe a season of work. “Some of it in the yard. I could get down to the well. I used to go stand by the well of an evening because you could hear the road from there.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Why?”
Ruth Cross looked at the book on the table.
Elijah followed her eyes and then wished he had not.
“Because I’m in there,” she said. “And what’s in there stays what the book says it is.”
He did not understand her.
He wanted that in the record too, when he told it, because people got that part wrong afterward — they told it as though he had understood at once, as though a man hears a sentence like that and it lands whole.
It did not land at all. It sat on the table between them like a tool he had never seen used.
“The war’s over,” he said.
“I know it.”
“It’s over, Mama. Two years. There was a proclamation and then there was an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, I’ve heard it read out loud twice—”
“By who?”
“A man in Vicksburg. And a preacher in Fayette.”
“And who was he reading it to?”
Elijah stopped.
Ruth waited. She had always waited. It had been the most maddening thing about her when he was fifteen and it was the most maddening thing about her now, and he found that he was grateful for it, because a thing that maddening cannot be counterfeited.
“To us,” he said. “To the living.”
“Yes.”
“And not—”
He heard where the sentence was going and did not want to arrive there.
“Say it,” Ruth said.
“Nobody read it to the dead.”
“No.”
“Mama, that don’t—” He put both hands on the table. “That ain’t how a law works. A law don’t have to be read to you. A law is a law whether you heard it or not, that’s the whole—” “That’s how a law works,” Ruth agreed. “This ain’t a law.”
“Then what is it?”
She put her hand out over the book, palm down, four inches above the cover.
It cast no shadow. The fire was behind her and to the left and there was no shadow on the page at all, and Elijah’s stomach turned over.
“It’s a contract,” Ruth said.
She let him sit with it a while.
Then she said, “You know what the difference is?”
“No.”
“A law is what a country says. A contract is what two people put their hand to.” Her hand stayed where it was. “A country can change its mind, baby. A country changed its mind in 1863. But a contract goes on saying exactly what it said the day it was written down, and it don’t need one living soul to believe in it, and it don’t care what anybody’s changed their mind about, and it will still be saying it in a hundred years if the paper holds.”
“There wasn’t no contract. Nobody signed nothing. You never—”
“No,” Ruth said. “I never.”
Her hand came down and rested on the cover, and it made a sound. Elijah heard it. A palm on leather.
“That’s what makes it what it is,” she said. “It ain’t an agreement. It’s a ruling. Somebody wrote down what I was, and there wasn’t nobody in the room to write down anything different, and that was the end of the argument for eighty-one years.”
“They kept books everywhere,” Elijah said slowly.
“Every place.”
“Why?”
“Money, first. Taxes, and the bank, and to know what they had when they went to sell it or borrow against it. Same as a man keeps a book on his hogs.” She said that without any particular heat, which somehow made it worse. “That’s how it started. That’s all it was for a long while.”
“And then?”
“And then somewhere it got to be more than that, and I’ve had fourteen years to think about when and I still don’t know.” Ruth looked at the pages. “But you notice something, Elijah. Every one of these places had a driver, and a driver got paid in whiskey and a cabin. And every one of these places had a clerk. And a clerk got paid in money.”
Elijah looked at the columns.
“They paid better for the writing than the whipping,” Ruth said.
“Because the writing lasts.”
“Because the writing lasts.”
He got up and walked to the door because he could not sit any longer.
The night was ordinary out there. That was almost the worst of it. There was a field with sumac coming up in it and a sky with too many stars and something small going through the weeds about thirty feet out, and none of it had any opinion whatsoever about what was happening in the room behind him.
He stood in the doorway with his back to her.
“How many,” he said.
“Read the last page and count back.”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
“I know it ain’t.”
Elijah turned around.
“How many are in there with you?”
And Ruth Cross said, “All of them.”
He came back to the table.
“All of who?”
“Everybody that died on this place, or died owned by this place, since the fourteenth of March, seventeen and eighty-six.” She said the date the way you say a thing you have read four thousand times. “Some of them was carried here already dead, from other places,
because the account followed the body. There’s a man in there from Baltimore. He never saw this county alive.”
“That’s — Mama, that’s eighty-one years.”
“Eighty-one years.”
“That’s hundreds of people.”
“Four hundred and twelve,” Ruth said.
Elijah sat down.
He said nothing for a long time and Ruth let him have it, and the fire worked at a knot in one of the rafter pieces and popped twice.
“Where are they?” he said finally.
“Here.”
He looked around the room.
“Not in here,” Ruth said. “On the place. In the fields, mostly. Some in the trace out back where the old quarters was before this row. Some down at the well.” She almost smiled and it did not get all the way there. “There’s about forty in what used to be the kitchen garden, and I could never work out why, and then one day I did. It’s the only ground on this place that anybody ever chose to be in.”
“Can you—”
“We can see each other. We don’t talk much.” She said it flatly. “Fourteen years, baby. Some of them’s been here since before the Revolution. There ain’t a lot left to say to a man who’s been standing in the same field since 1794.”
Elijah put his face in his hands again, briefly, and took it away.
“Can they leave?”
“To the fence line.”
“And past it?”
Ruth Cross looked at her son.
“I have tried it every night God sends,” she said, “for fourteen years. I have gone at it walking and I have gone at it running and one time I went at it at a dead sprint from clear back at the gin because I had got it in my head that it was a matter of speed.”
“And?”
“And I have counted the trying,” Ruth said. “It’s five thousand and eleven.”