bloomed already. This is who you are. This is your condition and if you is planning to change it, you must do it as I did.”
“Don’t work no more,” I said. “Ain’t no tasking man capable of out-earning Natchez.”
“Then your life is your life. And may I say it is a good one. Your only charge is that dumb brother of yours. Go home, Hiram. Get yourself a wife. And make like you happy.”
I did not answer. He said it again, “Go home.”
* * *
—
And so that was Georgie’s command and I followed it. But what I believed, right then, was that Georgie had lied to me, that he was as they had claimed him to be—an officer of freedom, of some other life, of an Oregon for a colored man. He had not even denied it, and so the matter to me then became simple—I had to prove to him who and what I was, that I could not, at that late hour, be talked out of it, and I was certain I could do this, and so as I walked back to Maynard and the chaise, back past the square, I knew that Georgie would help me, I knew that he would get me out, because there was no future here and I saw this even in my short walk back through the refuse of the day. There was trash all out in the streets. A man of Quality, whom I recognized by his garment, lay passed out face-down in manure while his compatriots, stripped down to the shame of their shirtsleeves, laughed at him. I saw torn hats and the flowers that once adorned them. I saw azure scarves in the street. I saw men tossing dice along the side of the pub, and then out front two cocks being fitted for the fight. This was their civilization—a mask so thin that for the first time in my life, I wondered what I myself had ever aspired to in those days back down in the Street, with my trick of memory, designing to catch the eye of the Pharaoh of Lockless, and not for the first time I saw that I had set my sights much too low. Because we in the Warrens lived among them, we knew first-hand that they took the privy as all others, that they were young and stupid, and old and frail, and that their powers were all a fiction. They were no better than us, and in so many ways worse.
Maynard was outside the fancy house with his fancy girl, waiting, and next to them I saw Corrine’s man again. Hawkins. Maynard was laughing at some joke, while Hawkins regarded him with a muted loathing Maynard was too drunk to detect. When Maynard spotted me, he laughed even harder, started toward me, and stumbled to the ground, taking the girl along with him. I helped the girl up, while Hawkins quickly moved to help Maynard, whose breeches and waistcoat were now soiled with mud.
“Goddamn it, Hiram!” he cried. “You suppose to catch me!” Indeed. I had always caught him.
“The girl is my own tonight,” he yelled. “She’s mine, goddamn it! Like I told them, Hiram! Like I told them all! Like I told all the girls!”
Then he looked over to the loathing Hawkins. “Not a word of this to your mistress, boy. Not one word. You understand?”
“A word about what, sir?” Hawkins said.
After a moment of squinting, Maynard laughed again. “Yessir, we gonna get along well, me and you.”
“Like family should,” said Hawkins.
“Like family should!” Maynard yelled, climbing into the chaise. I helped the girl in and then we were off, headed out the way we’d come in. But then, and who knows why, a moment of clarity struck him, a shame that had defied him all his life, and he ordered me back, away from the town square, out toward Dumb Silk Road. And so we left Starfall in this fashion, left the world as we had known it, for as I rode out of town and the buildings gave way to trees, bursting in gold and orange, as I heard the crows in the distance, the horse clopping in front, and felt the wind in my face, I knew that I had seen every inch of the only world I’d know. I knew how my span of days would end. Someday my father would pass on from this earth and what remained would fall to Maynard, and