Chapter 13: Questions in the Middle of the Night

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13. Questions in the Middle of the Night

After the wonderful time I had had on the fourth page it seemed that I should have been blessed with wonderful warm dreams. But that is not what happened that night. Actually the dream started out fine, with me walking slowly along the meander of a muddy river. When I came to a the weeping branches of a willow tree I pushed them aside, convinced that I would find Phyla waiting for me, ready for an embrace and some more passionate kissing.

But instead, lying there at the base of the tree, it was the black man whom I had seen in the basement. His leg had been broken, a ragged bone pushing through the flesh. I remembered what I had seen in the basement, this same man disemboweled and dying in his own blood, vomit and piss. I wanted to run, but instead I was just frozen in place. It was as if I weren’t really there.

The sound of horses and dogs were coming from somewhere. Somehow I knew that he had meant for the river to disguise his scent, to allow him to escape. It hadn’t worked. The men were upon him.

As they pushed through the branches to his hiding place, the men pushed before them a black woman in a dirty brown dress. Her face was dirty and blood trickled from her lip on one side. The man’s sudden recognition and the pain on his face told me that this woman was someone precious to him. He began shaking his head, but lay there on the ground. There were seven or eight men now in the bower. One of them turned the woman, who had they had been marching before them while holding her arms behind her, and ripped it down to the ground, nearly pulling it down with her. Her coarse chemise followed and then she was completely nude in front of all of them. A man had a short rope, not long enough for a lynching. He used it to bind her wrists and then tied them to the tree.

Then the whip came out and they began they were busting her back open with lashes. She cried. Her husband, on the ground almost directly below her, flinched with each stroke, and when she began to bleed her blood splattered down onto him. He cried. After they had made pulverized the flesh of her back, they untied her and moved the rope so that her wrists were behind her once again, and then inflicted two lashes with the whip across her breasts, easily drawing blood from tender flesh.

One of the men stepped forward, holding up his hand to tell the one with the whip to stop. “We will finish them off in the cellar. The scene of the crime. We’ll let them remember for all eternity why they are going through this, and maybe he will give us the names of the others.”

Two big men heaved the slave with the broken leg between them and carried him out to a waiting horse, throwing him over its rump as if he were a sack of feed. Blood dripped from his leg down the horse’s flank. They shoved the woman before, walking her naked back up along the river bank.

Then the man who had been speaking before added, “And have Toby get their kids from out of the fields. They need to be there for this.” And he laughed.

It was so ugly that my dream-self simply collapsed.

I awoke to realize that I was sweating in my bed. The air was still and stale, musty, as if the basement’s fetid gas as climbed up through the rest of Holshue House while we all slept. I looked nervously at the unlocked door to my room – the doors had no locks. Any creature or human could be stalking me, ready to come through that door to inflict pain. The dead still dying living on and on in pain and sorrow. The darkness that had come for me on the night of the crash. But why?

Perhaps it hadn’t been wise to sleep naked, but after my time with Phyla I wanted skin, skin that I could touch and stoke. Without her there I had decided to enjoy the smoothness of my own skin, and even the stubbly hairiness of my unshaven legs. With a swipe I retrieved sweat from the softer hair of my armpit and brought it to my nose, struggling to remember everything sensuous about my time up on the fourth floor with Phyla. The scent was still relatively clean from having showered that morning. It was then that I remembered that in spite of all my prettiness I had been kissing her with my whole mouth, my whole being, with Johnny Marzetti and green beans on my breath. Not exactly appealing.

She was only a few feet away, on the other side of another unlocked door. But it was too soon to go climbing into her bed, and too risky. Once she had pointed out the camera watching the outside door I had realized that they were in all the hallway ceilings, always tracking our movements.

Now I just wanted the warmth of another person touching me, holding me while I finished shaking over my nightmare. Phyla was so close and yet so far away. Did I really know her well enough to seek that kind of comfort? All we had done was kiss in that little window of time that we had had together. And now I wish that we had talked more, that I had gotten her to tell me more about the name, Gesama, that she called me, that she had explained the feeling that we already knew each other. But then, I realized that I didn’t regret a single kiss, a single brush of skin on skin. It was all too precious.

But what if Phyla had just wanted an afternoon kissing session and nothing more, that it was all a tease? Perhaps she had made up the name, Gesama, foreign like her own, sensing some identity confusion of mine. Did she understand that I had been a spider? And what did I really feel? I had been so alone in so many ways since the crash, particularly since Allison had withdrawn so deeply into us. Alone, and facing very scary things.

I remembered the nightmare and being naked in bed with an unlocked door definitely felt not safe. I got out of bed only long enough to pull on my blue-flower cotton pajamas before crawling back under the covers. I wanted to cry for a world so unfair, for the possibility of a new relationship that probably wouldn’t be allowed to exist, for a mother who wasn’t there to hold me, for the tortured ghost-slaves who suffered in the basement. But actually I was crying for myself, locked up in this place with its creepy past, and with the fear of falling in love.

Submitted: October 18, 2023

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