“Them’s the magic words, boy. There’s four of ’em. Gived by the Fish Man Angel hisself. For your reckoning someday.”
“I’m hungry,” the boy said.
Simmie chuckled. “How can you fuss ’bout food when I’m giving you the word of the King of Kings? We got a place to live. And food to eat. And good friends. Like Master Willie and Father Abe and his wife, and all the people about us, even old coachman, with his crazy old self. See, God favors the righteous. He favors us with words! The Bible. Words, boy! Not a pistol or knife or cannon lingering in the whole bunch! Just words, passed from one ear to the next! Oh, yes, I wish I was lettered. Them four words just lingers in my mind. They floats about me from day to day. Just four words they is. But powerful enough. Righteous, I’d say. Them four words got bones in ’em! They say, ‘Stop the train! We ain’t going no further! It’s over! Quit it! Har up that mule! Git off! Clip it! Ship out your troubles! Stop everything!’”
And here Simmie paused and dropped his voice to a near whisper: “Here . . . thenceforward . . . forever-more . . . free.”
He turned to the boy, who had placed his head on his father’s chest now, eyes drooping. “What you think?”
“Mmm.” The boy’s eyes blinked slowly. Sleep was coming.
Simmie piped on. “Course, them thoughts is just my guesses. To be honest, I can’t know exactly to the dot what them four words mean. But there’s good to each and every one of ’em. I reckon if I had to boil it down, I’d say they mean hating on somebody takes too much work.”
“Mmm,” the boy mumbled drowsily.
Simmie cradled the boy’s head in his chest and smiled at him, rubbing the boy’s smooth, brown, downturned face. Simmie murmured aloud, almost to himself now.
“Your ma died in bondage, she did, but with a knowing in her heart. That the Fish Man Angel’s four magic words is gonna shine on you someday.”
He sighed happily, then looked about, glancing at a tiny upper window of the barn where the first glimmers of dawn were appearing.
“There ain’t but a few hours left till light,” he said. “Father Abe do need these horses, and Angel Willie do need his pony cleaned up. Let’s finish up. We’ll do the horses first, then do Willie’s pony last. First we’ll fetch some fresh water.”
He looked down, but the boy was fast asleep. He shook him. But the boy would not awaken. The old man gently slid away from the child and lay him curled in a ball, asleep, on the straw of the barn floor, then stood and leaned over the sleeping child, his hands clasped and eyes closed, praying: “Lord, listen in on the Fish Man Angel, God Almighty, listen in. Hear them words in the name of Sweet Jesus: here . . . thenceforward . . . forever-more . . . free. Amen.” With that he unclasped his hands, stood erect, grabbed the bucket, and left the stable for the well, leaving the boy asleep on the floor.
Lincoln watched him leave, Simmie’s words turning over in his mind, clawing at his chest, a reflection of his own aching heart, churning in his mind . . . here . . . thenceforward . . . forever-more . . . free.
He rose too, stepped over the snoring child, and crept to the door of the stable. He peeked out to see that the way was clear, quickly thrust his stovepipe hat upon his head, and headed back to the White House, a tall, stooped figure, hurrying across the yard in the night.
• • •
EIGHT MONTHS LATER, on a freezing New Year’s morning in 1862, the president of the United States delivered, in twenty-two minutes from his Telegraph Office, the statement that changed the war and America for the rest of time.
There was no thunderous applause from the telegraph room when Lincoln was done. No standing ovation. No clapping on the back, no murmurs of approval; only a nodding of heads and a general flurry of excited activity in the office among the five telegraph operators who delivered the news to cities across America with somber and driven purpose.
Lincoln, in his usual fashion, had delivered a bomb that no one expected. He had changed the tenor of the war. The war between the states was done. It was now a war against slavery.
As was his habit, the president sat on a chair in the War Department while the operators worked to send his words across the wires, his boots resting on a desk. He waited, ruminating silently, to make sure the telegraphs had gone out to the most important cities in the largest states.
When he was certain they had gone, he rose and, accompanied by his staff and several generals, left for his carriage to head back to the White House. The telegraphers were sending them to smaller cities by the time he reached his coach. As he did, the president complained of thirst. An aide disappeared and returned with a glass. Sitting in the coach, Lincoln drank, then handed the glass to the man and thanked him. He opened his door to the crisp January air and spoke to the driver overhead.
“We got a long day, Simmie. Might as well get at it.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Simmie, resplendent in coachman’s outfit, top hat, and white gloves, said. He grabbed the traces to har up the horses.
“Wait,” Lincoln said, glancing around. “Where’s the boy?”
“He went to fetch you some water, sir.”
The president seemed irritated. “But I have had it,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Wait a moment, then,” Lincoln said. He closed the door of the coach against the cold air and waited inside, his aides milling about outside the coach in the freezing weather until after a few long moments a black boy, Simmie’s son, appeared from around the side of the building running at full sprint, holding a bucket and a ladle. He tapped at the door of the coach.
Lincoln opened the door. Standing outside the coach, the boy offered up the ladle. Lincoln motioned with his hand that he was not thirsty, and motioned for the boy to toss the water. As the boy turned to do so, even in the chill winter day, Lincoln noticed the sweat on the boy’s head.
“Wait. You thirsty?” Lincoln asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Drink then. Hurry now.”
The boy quickly slipped the ladle in the water and sipped. Then, as an afterthought, Lincoln took the ladle and in plain sight of his generals, aides, and several pedestrians who stood on the wooden sidewalk, the president of the United States and commander in chief of the Union Army dipped the ladle in the bucket and brought it to his lips, where he drank deeply. He handed the ladle back to the boy, who dumped the water from the bucket and then hopped aboard the driver’s seat next to his father.
The president stuck his head out the window.
“How about it, Simmie.”
Simmie raised his reins. The carriage pulled away.
As the coach charged forward, the telegraph operators continued banging away, sending the words of the Emancipation Proclamation to cities all across the land, the words of the Fish Man Angel: “. . . here, thenceforward, and forever-more . . . free.”
MR. P & THE WIND
Chapter 1
The 24th Hour
I am a lion. I live in a zoo. But I was once a free lion, and never forgot it.
Many years ago, before I was captured and brung here, I knowed a lion who ate a Man. His name was Box. I don’t know how Box come to that name, for lions got their own names for their own purpose, and that name was a puzzlement to me. Box is a Human name, you see, and it stands to reason maybe a Human gived him that name. However it happened, or whether Box got a reason for telling it or not telling it, it ain’t my business to know, for most lions know that Man-things often ain’t got no purpose, and no creature of the jungle is gonna sniff around something that ain’t purposeful, especially something big as a name, for lions got their own names that’s particular to ’em. Like Monkey Tricked Him, or His Wife Don’t Visit, or Feet Smell Funny, or Don’t Trust Her ’Cause She’s a Son, or Orange Head, and all like that. For example, Humans call me Hal. But my real name is Get Along, Go Along. No Animal in his right head would dare
call me Hal unless they want me lunching on their guts. But Box come to his name some kind of way. That was his first mistake, I think, to call himself by a Man-name when he had his own mother-called name.
I never knew Box’s real name, by the way. Never stupid enough to ask neither, for Box was what you call a plain old drylongso lion. He was a hard lion, set in his ways. He didn’t take no shit off nobody.
Now because Box was hard-set in his ways, he couldn’t adjust to nothing. He didn’t like fancy things. No springboks, rhinos, ostrich, monkey, and all that kind of shit for him. Just straight-out blood and guts. Zebra. Snake. Whatever he could get. He was what you call old country. He didn’t slaughter a lot, but what he did slaughter he did eat. Most of what he ate was bigger creatures so the smaller, scarcer ones could grow big for better eating later. He didn’t waste nothing, including time. So when he seen me walking ’round one day when I was but a little cub and said, “Set here a minute. I got to tell you something,” I set down to listen. For Box wasn’t nobody to ignore.
Now I heard many a story told to me when I was a cub running free back yonder in the plains of Africa, and a bunch of them stories was lies, for Animals ain’t no different than Man that way. The story starts out one way and five days later it grows tree branches and leaves and before you know it, it’s the size of a mountain with caves and rocks and you can’t see the top or bottom of the thing while standing on it.
But Box told me this story hisself, and Box wasn’t the type to lie.
This is what Box told me.
He was coming through the jungle one day and a hunter surprised him. Got the drop on him. Box walked right past him. Never smelled him or sensed him. Nothing. The man jumped out of a bush from behind Box holding a spear with dead lion scent all over it. He had Box dead to rights. He had old Box cold. Wasn’t nothing Box could do.
Box knew his big head was gonna hang from the wall of the Man’s lair for the rest of time while the Man apologized to Box and all his relatives for taking his life and so forth, for that’s how the old-time hunters did it. They put you to the Big Sleep and thanked your relatives afterwards by praying and so forth so your souls can live together for the rest of time, while he uses your claws as plates for his smoking sticks and so forth.
There wasn’t nothing Box could do, so he said to hisself, “It is a good day to die,” and turned on the Man and waited to sleep.
But this Man knew too much. Instead of throwing his spear when Box turned on him, the Man spoke to Box in Thought Speak. Know what he said? He said this:
“I know it ain’t your 24th hour.”
Well, that threw old Box. I don’t know what threw old Box more. Man talking in Thought Speak, which is how Animals speak, or Man speaking about the 24th hour. Both had never happened to Box before. But Man spouting off about the 24th hour put the thing in a different light.
See, a lion won’t eat but one hour a day. The other 23 hours we mostly sleep or look for fun or pussy. That’s our game. Lions is Higher Orders, which is what all Animals call ourself. It’s mostly a pleasure trip being a Higher Order, except one or two rules you got to stick to. For this group of Higher Orders, lions that is, the 24th hour rule is our line in the sand. See, we’re harmless 23 whole hours a day. You can do whatever you want ’round the King of the Jungle for them 23 hours: throw a dance, write your auntie letters, take your clothes off and dance naked, don’t mean nothing to us. But that 24th hour, that lone hour we is eating, you don’t want to be around us then. You might wanna go play cards or visit your aunt Thelma across the woods or do whatever it is smelly humans do during that time.
Box, old-fashioned soul that he was, was just floored by that whole business. He just plain didn’t know what to do. First, hearing Man throw Thought Speak around like that. Then him going on about the 24th hour. Box got chicken-hearted. So he said, “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” the Man said in clear Thought Speak. “I know this ain’t your 24th hour. You know how I know? I been tracking you, Box. You still in your 23 hours of wandering around, sleeping, looking for water, and fun, and pussy, all that. So I won’t kill you, for I don’t want your head now. I want your head in the 24th hour, when you are hunting, for I’m a great chief myself. And I’m looking for something mighty like me. So I’m going to let you live. I am even going to suggest a few things for you to do in your free 23 hours. For I have traveled many places and I knows many things. And I can help you.” Then he patted Box on the shoulder and turned away.
That’s when Box jumped him.
He knocked the Man down. Grabbed the Man’s spear with his mouth and stuck the tooth end down into the earth so the stick stood up like a pole. Then he snatched him up in his mouth and whipped the Man across the stick, back and forth. Beating the Man with his own stick. Beating the stick with the Man. And when he was done, he threw him down and tore him up, ripped him up, ran a paw across the Man’s face, and killed him dead. Then he ate him, or a good part of him, and slept a good two days without waking up.
Many a day I’ve thought about Box, while setting in this cage, pacing back and forth, night and day, year in and year out, thinking about it. That hunter did no harm to old Box. The Man had him cold and didn’t kill him. He even offered to school Box on how to live good in his free time. Still, old Box killed him.
You know why?
He was insulted, see. If Man had walked off and said nothing, Box would’ve walked on into the jungle and gone about his business. But Man had to turn around and tell a Higher Order, a grown lion, what was in his head. Box didn’t want that Man defining him and telling him who he was and what all his plans was and what Box was supposed to do with his free 23 hours and how Man knew everything Box was supposed to do in his 23 hours. That was Box’s 23 hours to do with as he pleased. And just so long as Man wasn’t fooling around in that magic 24th hour, that one hour where nothing in the world is safe from a lion who’s got to eat, then he was all right. But he threw himself in Box’s business them other 23 hours, telling Box what he could be doing with his time and how he was supposed to be sleeping and so forth. He was counting Box’s 24th hour like it was his own. Well, Box didn’t like that. He figured if the Man was so big in his britches to count up to his 24th hour, he might want to tell him how to count his free 23 hours, and tell him what to do in his 22nd hour, and the 21st, and so forth. So Box cleaned him up, beat him with his own stick, and sent him to the Big Nap, because he knew it wouldn’t be long before that Man told him what to do with his one eating hour, and every other single hour.
I asked Box later, “What did Man sound like?” for I had never spoken to Man.
“You can’t handle it,” he said.
“What do he taste like?” I asked, for I had never tasted Man neither.
He said, “Tastes like chicken.”
• • •
I REMEMBER HOW I got caught. I was crouched in high grass tracking a reebok that had wandered a bit off her pack. I was trying to figure another angle to take her before the wind threw my scent at her, because those creatures can smell a fart at three hundred yards and will run like the wind. I was crouched on all fours, ready to spring—then I heard a pop and I come here.
It wasn’t bad getting caught, compared to how some around here got nabbed. My buddy She Scratch Backwards—the black jaguar who lives across the hall from me—she says they ran her down for four days in a rainstorm in Brazil before they got her. Shot her eight times in the ass, she claims. “I coulda got away but for that last one,” she says. But you can’t trust Scratch too much. She likes to preen and lie and carry on, licking and scratching herself all the time in wrong places while she’s telling whoppers and so forth. They shot her four times, is what I say. I’m a lion. I know what the hell I’m talking about.
One of the problems of being here, besides the obvious one, is that the pecking order of nature’s ways is all screwed up. You got pigeons here tell
ing monkeys what to do. You got giraffes making deals with tigers. You got eels, fish, turkeys, ducks, all manner of Foreigners living one to the next, and each one willing to turn in their neighbor for a crumb of bread. Nobody got purpose here. Higher Orders without purpose are like Man: They get dangerous, often to themselves, which makes living here a task, for when you’re taken out of your element, your mind slips. Sitting around bullshitting ain’t no problem for Man, who can ignore his own heart and treat his own with all kinds of trickerations and cruelty to twist the truth so he can get what he wants, shutting off parts of his mind to let evil run things. But no Animal can do that, for Animals is Higher Orders, and we talk in Thought Speak, which don’t allow but so much wiggle room when it come to truth and consequence.
And that’s right, we do talk. Oh, I know you all got scientists and machines and people studying it and folks climbing into tanks with whales and sobbing tears on horses’ necks and all, whispering and carrying on, fooling theyselves with bullshit about speaking to us. We don’t pay that shit no mind. We talk through the mind.
When we’re free, that is.
Caged up, though, that’s a different wheel. Your mind ain’t right. Hell, I had a Man who come into my cage for fifteen years to leave rotten meat and take my nature things away and I learned nothing from him. And he learned nothing from me. We gave each other nothing. The only thing he gave me was his fear. And I gave him my ambivalence. When he left this cage forever he cried, but I felt nothing. He used to waste hours trying to color my Thought Shapes with his own, but I didn’t understand him, for he was without purpose, and no Animal can understand something that ain’t purposeful. I confess my thoughts were polluted by his thoughts a little. I even walked like him a little, and sometimes I came to the door when he arrived, for I grew accustomed to him. But I always kept a small part of me for myself. Doing that kept me free inside, allowing me to remember things like Box, and what Box said about Man, and hearing what all the other Thought Shapes the Animals ’round here sometimes make about their keepers, for stilted as it was, we still talked. There’s no such thing as silence in the zoo. That’s the worst part of being here. It ain’t the cage or the food. It’s the noise. You got owls hollering about seeing their reflections in the looking glass. You got chimpanzees screaming ’bout rooms full of dead pelicans, and free rats screaming bloody murder and making threats because they’re running free. You got mothers calling children’s names that disappeared twenty moons ago. Everybody’s looking for an angle and willing to kill their neighbor over a piece of old meat, trying to get out, to get in, to move on, to move over, their minds wound up tight, so the general Thought Speak is roaring loud and you can’t read it clear like when you do in the wild. The upshot is your mind don’t think right the moment you step into the zoo because the noise of sorrow is unbearable. So you just close it off. That’s the way it was for me, and for every creature in here.