The six children of Adam and Joan were beautiful, and when the family arrived at church in their town, the only place where the eight of them visited together, it seemed acceptable to the congregation that the building where God lived should house such splendor once a week. The Pinchards sat in a row up front. Their Negroes sat with the others of their tribe at the very back of the church, as there wasn’t a balcony.
Sunday nights were a reprieve in the life of Samuel and his siblings, for the other six days a week, that light would be followed by the demon-filled darkness. In the room that he shared with his brothers and sisters, his rest was never deep, for he waited for his father’s candle to appear in the doorway, and for Adam to pull the covers off one of the three beds and select the child he would take away and remain with that night. Each night the candle appeared, Samuel would suck in his breath and hold it. He would pray, and two or three times a week, his prayer was answered, for Adam’s hand would reach across Samuel to his twin brother, and Samuel would be saved. Or Adam would not approach Samuel’s bed at all, and he would pull the covers off one of the other two beds. And rarely, there were nights when the door to the children’s room would not open, and Samuel wondered, was his father at rest, or had God answered his prayers and killed the man?
Yet there were the nights when Samuel was chosen and led through the kitchen and outside to the barn, where a blanket lay on the alfalfa hay. A Negro man slept in the barn and Adam did not bother to tell him to leave as Samuel was hurt in the darkness. Often, he hoped that the Negro would save him, that the Negro would strike Adam on the head with a horse’s whip or the shovel used to clean out the stalls of the horses and the mule, and then Samuel would be free. He did not ponder what would happen to the Negro upon his father’s death, as surely the Negro did. He did not care that perhaps this Negro would be sold to cover the taxes of his father’s thirty-five acres. Samuel only wanted not to lie facedown on a blanket in a barn.
Once, on a night that Samuel was chosen, and Adam’s hand steered him through the kitchen, Samuel began to scream for his mother. He cried Joan’s name, he begged her to make it stop, he surely howled as long and loud as an animal soon to be transformed to meat, and Joan appeared at the door that opened from her bedroom to the kitchen. Her face was utterly perfect, lit by the candle she held. Samuel reached his hand toward that light. He cried her name—Mother—and Joan stepped back and shut the door.
That next morning, after Samuel had slept away his pain and wretchedness, he felt Joan’s hand on his shoulder, tender and sincere. She told him she had cooked griddle cakes for his breakfast, with cane syrup and butter to go along. Joan’s odor drifted above him, an aroma as only a child knows, the perfume that would invade his memories and make him weep, long after this time. And he hated his mother. And he loved his mother. And he wished that he would no longer be weak and a little boy. And Samuel made promises of what his strength would accomplish, once he became a tall and powerful man.
The Monster Roams the Countryside
When Samuel was sixteen, his father died, carried away by a fever. Adam lay in bed, shaking with the heat that emptied his bowels and shaved meat from his bones. Throughout he held his Bible close to his chest. He was a righteous Christian to the end, as was Joan, who read to her husband from the biblical book for the prophet for whom Samuel had been named: “And she said, Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the Lord. For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him: Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. And he worshipped the Lord there.”
The week after his father was buried in the small backyard, Samuel took a horse from the barn and rode away into the night. He cared nothing about his brothers and sisters, not even the twin with whom he had shared a womb. He had planned his escape and had packed a leather satchel with clothes, hiding it in the corner of the barn under hay. It was the same corner where his father had assaulted him. Samuel hadn’t slept the day of his leaving and tipped into the kitchen that served as a parlor as well. He took a loaf of bread that was covered with cloth, and a small dish of butter. He uncorked a jug, sniffed, and was happy it was water. As he walked past the room where he knew his mother lay in the same bed where his father had died, Samuel did not knock or call a greeting. He continued out the door to the barn. When Samuel took the horse, he did not care if the Negro who lived in the barn would be punished for his theft. He did not care about his siblings. He did not care about the land. Care was a flaw that burdened the weak. He meant to be strong now: brutality was his traveling companion.