1
THE CHILD GUSHED out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt. Slight, he was, and feeble as a promise. He felt in her palms a great wilderness—such a tender thing as he could never be parsed fully by the likes of her.
Had she more strength, she’d have limped to the river and drownt him. It’d be a gentler end than the one the fiend had in mind.
Vern leant against the trunk of a loblolly and pressed the child naked and limp to her chest. His trembling lips lay right where the heart-shaped charm of a locket would be if she’d ever had a locket. “So that’s how it’s gonna be, hm? Win me over with lip wibbles?” she asked, and though she was not one to capitulate to bids for love, this baby had a way about him that most did not. There was courage in his relentless neediness. He would not be reasoned out of his demands.
Vern reached for the towel next to her. With what gentleness she could muster, and it wasn’t enough to fill a thimble, she dragged rough terry over the baby’s mucky skin. “Well, well,” she said, cautiously impressed, “look at you.” Vern’s nystagmus and resultant low vision were especially troublesome in the waning light, but pulling her baby close lessened the impact of her partial blindness. She could see him full-on.
He was smaller than most newborns she’d had the occasion to handle and had inherited neither her albinism nor her husband Sherman’s yellow-bonedness. His skin was dark, dark-dark, and Vern found it hard to believe that the African ancestry that begat such a hue had ever once been disrupted by whiteness. The only person Vern knew that dark was Lucy.
Viscous cries gurgled up from the child’s throat but died quickly on the bed of Vern’s skin. Her flesh was his hovel, and he was coming to a quick peace with it. His bones were annals of lifetimes of knowledge. He understood that heat and the smell of milk were to be clung to or else.
It was a shame such instincts would not be enough to save him. As much as Vern had made a haven here these last few months, the woods were not safe. A stranger had declared war against her and hers, his threats increasingly pointed of late: a gutted deer with its dead fawn fetus curled beside; a skinned raccoon staked to a trunk, body clothed in an infant’s sleepsuit; and everywhere, everywhere, cottontails hung from trees, necks in nooses and feet clad in baby bootees. The fiend’s kills, always maternal in message, revealed a commitment to theme rarely seen outside a five-year-old’s birthday party.
Another girl might’ve heeded the warnings to leave the woods, but Vern preferred this obvious malevolence to the covert violence of life beyond the trees. To be warned of bad happenings afoot was a welcome luxury. People might’ve followed Vern off the compound when she’d fled if there’d been a fiend there discarding dead animals as auguries.
“Hush, now,” Vern said, then, thinking it was what a good mam would do, sang her babe a song her mam used to sing to her. “Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t weep.”
Even though it was a spiritual, it wasn’t a song about Jesus direct, which suited Vern because she hated music about the Christ. It was one of the few items on which she and her husband, Sherman, agreed. She nodded along to every sermon he gave about the ways the white man plundered the world under the direction of this so-called savior.
Whole continents reek of the suffering that man has caused. Can you smell it? he would ask. The congregation would shout, Amen, Reverend Sherman, we smell it! And then he’d ask, Don’t it stink? And they’d say, Yes, Reverend! It sure does. And he’d ask, But does it stink here, on the Blessed Acres of Cain, where we live lives removed from that white devil god of Abel and his followers? The people would cry out, No!
According to Mam, there was a time when Cainites were less ardent about Reverend Sherman’s teachings. His predecessor and father, Eamon Fields, was the congregation’s true beacon. An early settler of the compound, arriving in the first wave, Eamon rose quickly from secretary to accountant to deacon to reverend. He was a stern man, violent, but for Cainites who’d been traumatized by the disorder inherent to Black American life, puritanical strictness held a dazzling, charismatic appeal. Sherman was not so hard as his father before him, which disoriented the brothers and sisters of the compound. In the end, he won them over on the pulpit, entrancing all with his passionate sermons.
And do we dare abandon the compound and mingle our fate with those devilish outsiders? Sherman asked.
No, Reverend!
That’s right, my beautiful brothers and sisters, kings and queens, sons and daughters of Cain. We stay here, where there is bounty. Free from the white devil dogs who would tear us limb from limb. Their world is one of filth and contradiction, poison and lies! Rich folks in homes that could house fifty, one hundred, two hundred, while the poorest and sickest among them rot on the street! Would we allow that here?
No!
Sherman could make lies out of the truth—Vern had learned that much as his wife—but she full-believed her husband’s fiery sermons about the Nazarene. She’d witnessed the curious hold Jesus had on people from her trips off the compound. Every other billboard and bumper sticker preached his gospel. Christ-talk made up the few words Vern could read by sight because they were everywhere in large print.
JESUS.
HELL.
SALVATION.
JOHN 3:16.
He was on T-shirts, bracelets, anklets, mugs. And that damn cross everywhere. The whole world outside the Blessed Acres of Cain seemed an endless elegy to Christ and his dying, his bleeding, his suffering. How come white folks were always telling Black people to get over slavery because it was 150 or so years ago but they couldn’t get over their Christ who died 1,830 years before that?
Who cared if he rose up from the dead? Weeds did that, too. It wasn’t in Vern’s nature to trust a man with that much power. For how did he come to have it?
Her new babe would never have to hear a thing about him. Vern would sing only the God-spirituals. She didn’t believe in him, either, but at least there was an ineffability to him, a silence that could be filled with a person’s own projection of the divine. Not so with Christ, who was a person, a particular person.
Copyright © 2021 by Rivers Solomon
