Orphan of Creation Read online

  These were the Creatures, the animals, that the latter-day slave traders would present to Gowrie and his friends as the equal of the Negro in all things—intelligence, ability, skill. I have said that the importation of animals to circumvent the slave import laws was a tacit admission that the Negro Slave was indeed human. How doubly d**ning then, how hypocritical and two-faced, for those same White men to expect us to live with and accept these Beasts as our equals, in huts next to our own, as if it was nothing more than housing a donkey alongside a horse. And how foolish. The Negro Slaves, needless to say, were, all of us, every man, woman and child, disgusted and horrified by these unnatural creatures, beasts in the form of men. I remember well the first time I saw them. I worked as a stableboy then, and it was as the cart brought their cage up from Gowrie Landing . . .

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  Barbara suddenly felt as if she were no longer simply reading this story. Some part of it gripped her soul, as if she were seeing it, living it. It had happened to her a thousand times as a child. She felt again the sensation of being drawn down into the tale, the words transforming themselves into sights, smells, sounds. As the words marched in front of her eyes, with the stern countenance of the writer staring down at her, with his very blood coursing through her veins, with the wild storm chasing itself madly around the darkened landscape outside, the images of those elder days flashed before her eyes. She knew how it must have been . . . .

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  Young Zeb looked on the beasts in outright terror. They seemed huge, monstrous, the denizens of a nightmare. They were perhaps no larger than a grownup, but their shrieking, screaming, maddened yelling, the wild way they flung themselves at the bars of their cage, the banging and clanging of all the bars and locks that set the cart to bouncing wildly about, all this made them seem far larger than they really were.

  The pair of horses drawing the cart were just as fearful, snorting and whinnying, pawing the ground in their fright, the well-muscled sinews rippling beneath their perfect chestnut hides. Zeb found himself staring at the horses instead of the beasts, for at least the horses seemed real, normal, of this world.

  But real or not, the horses too were terrified, and it was all the ostler could do to keep them from stampeding. The cart was backing and starting, threatening to pitch over on its side altogether. Finally, the drayman, adding to the chaos with a stream of shouted curses, brought his team to a full halt, and leapt gracefully down from the rig and stood at a respectful distance. At least the horses suffered themselves to stand still, wild-eyed, with their nostrils flared, their flanks twitching and flecked with foam. Zeb didn’t know where he got the courage to step in and hold the leads, but he did, and stood between the heads of the frightened horses, speaking soft soothing words to them as he watched the proceedings at the back end of the cart.

  Gowrie himself was there, a tall, rangy man with a small black goatee and a fierce enthusiasm of expression. He was standing by the rear of the cart, grinning wildly, looking over his new chattels with great pleasure. “Joe, Will, let’s get that cage open and welcome our new friends,” he said, holding out the key to the cage and gesturing to two of his slaves.

  “Massah Gowrie,” Will said in his soft plantation creole, “This ain’t no time to let them things out.” Will worked in the stables and barns, caring for the farm animals, and knew a lot about most live things. “Let ‘em set a bit, calm down a mite. They’s scared half to death from the ride, and someone sure to get hurt if they come out now—else they just go over the horizon in a flash.”

  “Will, I said to open the cage!” Gowrie growled. “You fixing to get whipped?”

  “No suh. But I’d druther be whipped than bitten and clawed. Them things is fierce right now!”

  “Joe—get up there and—” Gowrie began, but Joe just shook his head. “Damn you both, then!” Gowrie shouted, and leapt up on the cart bed. He set the key in the lock—and two hairy arms reached out for him. He suddenly found himself thrown to the ground, his clothing ripped and the flesh in his arm badly scratched. He was shocked, infuriated, swore incoherently. He got up, grabbed a whip from the drayman, and lashed it savagely against the bars of the cages, setting the beasts into new paroxysms of hysteria, panicking the horses anew. Zeb was almost thrown off his feet and trampled before the drayman came to his rescue and helped calm the animals.

  “To the devil with all of you!” Gowrie thundered ineffectually, flinging down the whip. “Leave them there caged up on the cart overnight, then, and see how they like it!” He stormed off, leaving the ostler to chase after him, protesting about having his cart standing idle all night.

  Will, Joe, and Zeb chocked up the cart and gingerly got the horses out of harness and into the stable to be fed and watered.

  The beasts they left to themselves, and the air that night was filled with an endless, terrifying hooting and calling.

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  The lightning flickered again, and Barbara came back to herself with a start. She had a vivid imagination, and had always managed to scare herself gleefully half to death by reading ghost stories. She read on, trying to keep her imagination in check if she could.

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  Gowrie had had a slave hut newly fitted with stout bars and a locking door, though none of the other Negro huts had a door of any kind—an irony that was hard to miss. The night in the open seemed to soothe the beasts somewhat, and Gowrie managed to get them out of their cage and into their new quarters without much incident.

  In the days that followed Gowrie started to work teaching them their duties. New shipments of the creatures arrived, every other day or so over the space of a fortnight, a pair at a time. Gowrie worked them all as hard he could, but in spite of all his efforts, all his coaxing and cajoling and threatening and whippings, he still could get but little work out of them, and that only after such endless training that it would have been less bother to do the job himself.

  And, after all that effort, the creatures did not last long. Three were dead in a month, of influenza.

  Gowrie House Plantation had (and still has, for that matter) a small plot of ground that served as a graveyard for the Slaves. Of course, not a grave there had a proper headstone, but the survivors would fashion a wooden cross out of picket fence staves and place it over their loved one’s grave, and perhaps add a smooth, round, whitewashed stone. The place was most carefully tended and maintained, and if any one thing on Earth could be said to belong to Gowrie’s Slaves, it was that graveyard, held as joint and common property by all of us, the final resting place of those who had finally died under the lash.

  And it was here that Colonel Ambrose Gowrie proposed to inter those three dumb beasts, laying them beside the honored and ancient bones of our grandparents and the remains of children lost in infancy. If Mississippi had ever been close to a slave revolt, it was on that day. . . .

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  Almost unwillingly, Barbara let the story steal over her again. She could see the Colonel in the midst of his predicament—the fear in his heart, the anger of the mob around him.

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  Ambrose Gowrie himself stood with the reins in his hands, the cart stopped dead right where the main plantation road intersected the path to the slaves’ burying ground. None of the white overseers had been willing to do the job, and even his own sons felt it was foolhardy to try this thing. Behind him, on the bed of the wagon, lay the three wooden boxes, packing crates renamed as coffins for their final service. Black men and women, his own slaves, surrounded the flat-bed wagon, a straining, silent, surly, dangerous mob. Gowrie thought of the lash, the bullet, and realized with a sudden, sick feeling in his gut that such things would be worse than useless.

  The sky was steel, a flat sheet of sullen grey that murmured with the rumblings of a nascent storm. The wind tossed the cotton plants about and lashed at the trees surrounding the plantation house, and a loose shutter on an upstairs window banged angrily.

  Behind him, silent in their boxes, lay the causes of all his troubles
. His slaves had hardly ever offered a bit of difficulty, but they had been close to open revolt from the first moment those accursed creatures had arrived. This now-dead trio of beasts had done nothing for him but cost him money, effort, and pride.

  Gowrie did not dare to so much as glance back at his cargo as he thought about the dead creatures. He could not risk looking away from this roiling mob. He felt a trickle of sweat slide down his face, and suddenly realized his armpits and back were soaked with the perspiration of fear, his hands clammy in the reins of the cart.

  With a conscious effort, he drew himself up and shouted, almost screamed at the crowd. “The corpses must be buried! Make way and let me into the graveyard, damn you! Make way or you’ll live to regret it!”

  The crowd did not move. Fearful and uncertain, he sat down in the driver’s seat and swallowed hard. From the rear came quiet mutterings, the briefest flickerings of movement. The press of bodies inched forward slowly, quietly, until the closest of the myriad solemn faces were only a foot or two from his own. Gowrie suddenly found himself making calculations of how far he could get if he ran.

  But he had to do this thing, get those bodies below ground before they began to rot . . . and yet that was impossible. He might drive the cart into the graveyard, but how could he possibly dig the graves and move the heavy crate-coffins into the earth by himself, with this mob about him? He realized with a wrenching knot in his stomach that they weren’t afraid of him. What were they capable of if they weren’t afraid?

  The rear of the cart suddenly bucked and swayed, and Gowrie let out a wild yelp. They were overturning the cart! They were going to tear him—

  He looked behind to see a number of the burliest black men pulling the packing crates off the cart. Shovels and picks appeared from somewhere. The earth sprouted holes by the crossroads. Shallow graves suddenly gaped open.

  Gowrie sat in the cart, powerless, speechless. Will came up to him, and that little stable boy Zeb trailed behind. “Them dead will rot and smell same’s any other, Massah Gowrie,” Will said solemnly, “and they mus’ be buried—but not in our place. Not in our place.”

  Gowrie watched in silent, fearful awe as his slaves openly, willfully, jointly disobeyed him. Even if their revolt was in the form of a compromise, burying the corpses near their graveyard, and even though all his slaves quietly returned to their tasks the moment the last shovel of dirt was atop the graves, he had witnessed the beginnings of something—the primordial act of peaceful, determined defiance.

  He had seen how fragile his control was. And he saw the changes coming, saw that his world would never be quite the same again. This moment would be at the back of his mind every time he gave an order.

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  So the first of the creatures died and were buried. The rest soon followed. Some number more were lain to rest in that small crossroads. A few escaped and terrified the vicinity until they collapsed from illness, privation, or the gun. The remainder died, in secret and quiet, at the Negro’s hand, the bodies never to be found. They were animals, we were not, and we did not suffer lightly being equated with them.

  Colonel Gowrie was much affected as well, and from that time on, he would never willingly speak of the creatures that had cost him so much. As the town’s leading citizen—and the owner of most of it—he also saw to it that few others spoke of them again. The Negroes who traveled to town on errands reported to the rest of us that what should have been the grandest story and scandal of the day was scarce ever mentioned.

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  Barbara closed the book and sat there for a long moment. Even then, no one had known. Today, the secret of those unmarked graves was as dead as the corpses within them. The secrets of that story had waited a long time for her. She rose and looked out through the flickering lightning toward the slaves’ old burial ground. The creatures, the gorillas, were still waiting out there, bones moldering in the ground, proof of a brief, peculiar, and never chronicled sub-chapter in American history.

  She looked to the sky, and saw a star or two flicker to life on the horizon as the storm clouds retreated. Tomorrow would be clear.

  Those bones would not have much longer to wait.

  Interlude

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  They locked her in at night with her kind, in the strongest, best-built hut in the village. She lived with the others in squalor and filth inside the well-made walls and solid roof. It kept the night out, kept them out of the night.

  She wanted to be free. That much was in her, a solid sure thing, a part of her. Endless times she had tried to escape; endless times they had stopped her. The hut was made as well as it was, thanks to her.

  Perhaps she should have been no more aware of her bondage than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. Bondage was her element, the old and only heritage of her line, back through the mists of all half-remembered times. She and her kind had never known anything else. But fish can sense the water—the currents, the smells, the temperature. And she sensed and resented her enslavement, knew it to be wrong, even if she could not understand it. She had no idea but away, no plan but now, no real awareness that time had a past, a present, a future, that today and tomorrow were different. She had only slowly developed the craftiness that taught her to wait until she was unwatched before she tried to run, that made her bide her time, that forced her to scheme and be secret in her efforts to be away.

  Tonight, she would try the door again. It was a heavy wooden thing, made of vertical logs set close together with only the slightest of gaps between, hung on stout leather hinges and held shut with a series of thick leather straps firmly tied off from the outside. In the pitch blackness of the cell, she groped for the door, found it, and started chewing at the leather straps.

  Part of her knew it wasn’t going to work, that dawn would come long before she finished, that the overseers would see what she had done and beat her again. She didn’t care. She closed her eyes and worked her massive teeth over the salty leather.

  Away. Now.

  Chapter Three

  Dr. Michael Marchando staggered into the on-call room and flopped down on a bunk. He was exhausted. The Emergency Room had been a madhouse his whole shift long, an endless parade of car-wreck victims and gunshot wounds, seasoned with the usual Thanksgiving catastrophes—allergic reactions to unusual holiday dishes, burns from cooking fires, turkey bones lodged in the throat, excruciating indigestion and cramps brought on by massive overeating, and an upswing in drunk-driver injuries.

  He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Here he was up in Washington, while Barb was down with that damn family of hers in Mississippi. This was the first Thanksgiving since Barbara and he had split up. He thought back, remembering the holidays they had had together, and wondered what she was doing. Right now, she was probably sound asleep, just about to wake up after a happy day with her family and a peaceful night of rest. Mike had bolted down his turkey early in the day, and left his mother’s place to rush to the hospital and get up to his armpits in the sick and injured. It wasn’t fair.

  He thought ahead to Monday. Barbara had agreed to meet him for dinner. He smiled humorlessly. He had managed to get a date with his own wife. They still spent the occasional night together, whenever Michael could pressure her into it, whenever he could escape from the hospital. It wasn’t any kind of a life. The more he thought about it, the more he saw how unfair it was.

  He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. It wasn’t fair at all.

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  Barbara woke, not with the sort of disorientation she usually experienced when she found herself in a strange bed, but instead with a preternaturally precise knowledge of where she was. Without opening her eyes, she knew exactly how the covers were wrinkled, precisely how far down the window shades were drawn, just how far the sunlight had made its way into the room, just how many children’s voices she could hear outside.

  She opened her eyes. The near-antique clock on the nightstand read 6:25. Good. Plenty of
time left in the day. She had set the alarm for 6:30, and now she reached out to switch it off, pleased that she awakened before it went off. Nice to have a sense of minor accomplishment without even getting out of bed. But today was full of big plans. She wanted to get started on disinterring those one-hundred-thirty-odd-year-old gorilla bones. Today was Friday. She had the weekend to work with before it was time for the long ride back to the airport and the endless flight from Mississippi to Washington. There was little time, and she would need all of it.

  Barbara threw back the covers, swung her feet out of bed, sat up, and looked out the window at the new, fresh-scrubbed morning. She heard laughter, looked down, and saw the children, four or five toddlers, tiny nieces and nephews and first-cousins-once-removed, wandering about on still-unsteady legs in the magically dew-brushed lush green of the lawn.

  It was barely light yet, and the sunlight swept in a low, golden fan across the clean, bright day, all of it lovely. Barbara suddenly realized there was a lump in her throat, and she looked back to the tiny children, laughing gleefully because they were alive.

  Barbara had no children, and never would. The doctors hadn’t quite come out and said that, but they had came as close as they could. Michael and she had tried everything before the collapse of their marriage. Probably, trying too hard had contributed to that collapse. Mike had not liked the thermometers or the precise timing that eliminated spontaneity, and, later, had liked even less the idea of storing his seed in the sperm bank for tries at artificial insemination. His sperm was still there, on ice, another relic of the ruined marriage no one quite knew what to do with.

  But children. She watched the children play outside, discovering the marvelous world. Suddenly, the old sorrow washed over her, and it was suddenly one of those times, one of those brief moments, when she felt a sense of grief and loss for a person who had never been brought into existence. It made her world emptier.