’cause walking wouldn’t’ve got me to him fast enough.
“May.” He said my name when I got near, said it like it was a warning, and that’s when I knew there was something awful to know.
First thing I did was look him over. Can’t help habit. Awful, in my mind, is always borne by the body. I was looking for a new lashing scar, a cut, a burn, a bruise. A loss. He caught on to what I was after and shook his head. Not the body then. The head?
He took up my hand and pulled me over the whole way to the shed by the creek. We had to step out of the safe thick of the wood to cut through the clearing, and I felt like we were stark naked there, like anyone could see us and know what we were about. He stopped me at the door and pushed it open and so I looked in.
I couldn’t see rightly ’til my eyes could catch up, but it didn’t matter—my nose got to it first. There’s no mistaking the smell of dead things, not when you’ve known it as often as I have, like a oft-worn cologne. When I could see right I put it together fast. There were all the chickens, and they’d been slaughtered. Splayed-out innards and feathers made all red. Their heads were gone. Their clutch of eggs had all been smashed, the fertilized and unfertilized alike so’s that the dead headless hens lay in a mess with all the possible outcomes of their purpose. Blood and yolk and blood and chicks not yet chicks, pink and small and all dead too.
“Marse Charles’ll be sore,” I said first.
My man shook his head. There was something I was not getting at quick enough, but he wasn’t going to say it for me. That’s his way. He don’t ever press a thing. He lead you where you need to go then let you make up your own mind, horse to water.
“It’s a message,” I said, building up the thought as I spoke it. “Somebody got somethin’ to say and this is how they sayin’ it.”
“More’n that.”
“Yes, it’s a message and it’s punishment also.”
We’ve heard tell of the abolitionist folks, Northerners who ain’t just angry for their own sake, but on behalf of colored folk. If not heard them straight out then heard echoes of theirs, reverberating. But they’d spoken for themselves now, here, and spoken right out loud.
“More’n that too,” my man had to say. He was leading me away from the shed, but I still had my eye on it, and even when I couldn’t rightly see into it I still saw the no-sense slaughter behind the blink of my eye. That little meaningless massacre, them headless chickens, they had me shaken as much as any violence I’ve ever seen, and I seen just about every kind. Only what was the point of it?
“Tell me plain.” In the shade of the trees I touched his face. He leaned his long body up against a tree and looked at me in his way, considering.
“Them Northerner soldiers ain’t saints. They ain’t want nothin’ more than to be right. This their way of winnin’. They wanna make you hurt. Yo’ marse and li’l mistress and slavefolk too. They wanna make you go hungry.”
I laughed, looked up at the fecund green of the wood, yonder, persimmon and mulberry and Chickasaw plum in blossom. The eucalyptus hanging down and tickling at the top of my man’s head. He swat at it like it was a bother.
“We hardly livin’ on chicken offal alone out here,” I said. “Why you suddenly got so much hate for some Blues you ain’t even met?”
He shook loose my searching hand. Is it so wrong that I was wanting him right there? Not even a stone’s throw away from the awful stink of death and I was still wanting him, wanting him more because of it. The whole length of his body was warm and alive, so broad and strong he was making the tree trunk behind him seem weak. As I snaked my arms around him, my fingers touched the wretched