“Sarah, we need you here. You’ve become indispensable to—to all of us.”
“. . . It’s decided, Israel. I’m sorry. I’m going home to Charleston.”
He sighed. “At least tell me you’ll come back to us after things are settled there.”
The window was sheened with the glare of the room, but I stepped close to it and bent my head to the pane. I could see the bright helix of fireflies still out there. “. . . I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”
Handful
The night before I went to the City Arsenal to steal a bullet mold, me and Goodis crept up to the empty room over the carriage house—the same one where me and mauma used to sleep—and I let him do what he’d been wanting to do with me for years, and I guess what I’d been wanting to do with him. I was twenty-nine years old now, and I told myself, if I get caught tomorrow, the Guard will kill me, and if they don’t, the Work House will, so before I leave the earth, I might as well know what the fuss is about.
The room was empty except for a straw mattress Sabe had laid on the floor for Minta and him, but the place still had the same old fragrance of horse shit. I looked down at the grungy mattress, while Goodis spread a clean blanket cross it, smoothing out every little wrinkle just-so, and seeing the care he took with it, I felt tenderness to him pour through me. He wasn’t old, but most of his hair was gone. The lid over his wandering eye drooped, while the other lid stayed up, so he always looked like he was half asleep, but he had a big, easy smile and he kept it on while he helped me out from my dress.
When I was stretched out on the blanket, he gazed at the pouch round my neck, stuffed fat with scraps of the spirit tree.
“I don’t take that off,” I said.
He gave it a pinch, feeling the hard lumps of bark and acorns. “These your jewels?”
“Yeah. Those are my gemstones.”
Pushing the pouch to the side, he held my breasts in his hands and said, “These ain’t big as two hazelnuts, but that’s how I like ’em, small and brown like this.” He kissed my mouth and shoulders and rubbed his face against the hazelnuts. Then he kissed my bad foot, his lip following the snarled path of scars. I wasn’t one to cry, but tears leaked from the sides of my eyes and ran behind my ears.
I never spoke a word the whole time, even when he pushed inside me. I felt like a mortar at first and he was the pestle. It was like pounding rice, but gentle and kind, breaking open the tough hulls. Once he laughed, saying, “This what you thought it’d be?” and I couldn’t answer. I smiled with the tears seeping out.
The next morning, I was sore from loving. At breakfast, Goodis said, “It’s a fine day. What you think, Handful?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Tomorrow gon be fine, too.”
“Might be,” I said.
After the meal, I found Nina and asked her could I have a pass for the market—Sabe wasn’t in a granting mood. I told her, “Aunt-Sister says molasses with a little whiskey would do your mauma a world of good, might calm her down, but we don’t have any.”
She wrote the pass and when she handed it to me, she said, “Any time you need . . . molasses or anything like that, you come to me. All right?”
That’s how I knew we had an understanding. Course, if she knew what I was about to do, she never would’ve signed her name on that paper.
I walked to the Arsenal with my rabbit cane, carrying a basket of rags, cleaning spirits, a feather duster, and a long broom over my shoulder. Gullah Jack had been watching the place for a good while now. He said on the first Monday of the month, they opened it up for inspection and maintenance, counting weapons, cleaning muskets, and what-not. A free black girl named Hilde came those days to sweep it out, dust, oil the gun racks, and clean the privy out back. Gullah Jack had given her a coin not to show up today.