he stood, walked over, and sat on the edge of the bed. He reached out and gripped my shoulder tight. My eyes wandered down to my own body and I saw someone had dressed me in a long nightgown, which I recognized as Maynard’s. I looked back up to my father and saw a kind of realization crawling over his face, and we were, in that moment, in a kind of secret communication that can only exist between a parent and child, no matter how monstrous the relation. I saw his small eyes, red with grief, squinting, as though straining to comprehend a message, straining to understand how it came to be that all that remained of him was here before him, was a slave. And when this realization was complete, he pulled back, buried his head in his hands, stood, weeping loudly, and walked out.
I stood and walked to the window. The day was clear and I could see, from the back side of Lockless, clear to the hills, hazy in the distance. I turned away from the window and saw my father coming back to the room. Behind him was Roscoe, who’d brought me up all those years ago from the Street. And across his aged, creased face there was a look of gravity and concern, and I remembered that there had been people who knew me and loved me, elders, who delighted in my song and games. Roscoe laid a set of clothes on Maynard’s dresser—my clothes. Then he stripped the bedding, wrapped it into a bundle under his arm, and walked out. My father sat again on the footstool.
“We have sought his body in the river, but the water…” he said, his voice trailing off. He was trembling now.
“When I think of my boy at the bottom of that river…” he said. “And I cannot but think of anything else, do you hear me, Hiram? When I think of him engaged to that bottom…Forgive me. I can but imagine what you saw out there. But I must confess, for none other is fit to hear it: Maynard was all I had of his mother. When his eyes went gleeful, I saw hers. When he was forgetful, I saw her habit. When he was compassionate, as he was always, I saw her.”
He was crying now. “And now he is gone, and I am twice departed.”
Roscoe returned, this time with a washcloth, a small basin of water, and a larger empty one, and set it all on the dresser.
“Well, so it is, son,” my father said. “Some arrangement shall be made. The memory of him does not die, wherever his body might make its rest. What you must know, what you surely know, is that Maynard loved you, and I do not doubt he gave his very life so that you might get out of that river.”
When my father left, I took the washcloth and water and cleaned myself, but my hands shook while I juggled the madness of his last words. Maynard loved you. This notion—that Maynard loved anyone, that Maynard would give his life for anyone, much less me—was astounding me. But then as I dressed, and turned it over, I came to an understanding—my father believed this insanity. He had to. Maynard was him, was his wife, and this glorified portrait somehow lived right along with the admonition my father had always communicated to me—that Maynard must be watched, that he was not to be trusted with his own life. Walking down the back stairs, I knew that my father’s statement could only be reconciled through the peculiar religion of Virginia—Virginia, where it was held that a whole race would submit to chains; Virginia, where this same race held the math that molded iron and carved marble to exact proportion and were still called beasts; Virginia, where a man would profess his love for you one moment and sell you off the next. Oh, the curses my mind constructed for my fool of a father, for this country where men dress sin in pageantry and pomp, in cotillions and crinolines, where they hide its exercise, in the down there, in a basement of the mind, in these slave-stairs, which I now I descended, into the Warrens, into this secret city, which powered an empire so great that none dare speak its true name.
* * *
—
When I got back to the Warrens, I found Thena standing just outside her door, in the dim light,