Blue-Tail Fly

A Singular Dispersion over Franklin, Tennessee

49 A Singular Dispersion over Franklin, Tennessee Over my head I see freedom in the air, There must be a God somewhere. Folk song One officer in Tennessee breakfasts over maps, coffee, and wagers. His plate kept piled by a one-named slave, quiet as a grass snake. She has been convinced the cannibals are on their way south. She has seen signs of disaster: bulls mating out of season, bloody cream in the churn, a congregation of buzzards in the tall stick-needles. She prepares meals as best she can given the conditions. Her kerchief is unstarched but straight to honor the Rebel endeavor. She manages an extra glaze on the ham. Surely you do not believe they will free you? Why want freedom? Who bought you that good frock? Who keeps your children? Without being asked, she positions the bacon, spoons the gravy, grits, and pone. Replaces the soiled pewter. Cuts new tomatoes. Talcs her forehead in the kitchen. Maintains a freshness difficult in the clime. Her apron is blue. Blue is the color of clean. Her mother taught her this. It is all she remembers of her. A dry, blue head-wrapping. The dining room is cool away from the hot kitchen with its walls of pitching brick. 50 No one goes in but her and she does the work of six. Her duty. Her part. Her master reminds her in war we all must serve. Just that morning, he patted her thigh over the butcher’s block as he said her name. She has come to pine for the sound of him calling her by that one name. He says ___________ with a lilt as if calling a favored horse that wins all of its races. It has come to be the voice of her dead mother, of her lost father. It is the unsold lover. The sound that does not abandon. An officer moves his hands over the maps. She follows them expecting an order. She goes back to griddle more cakes. They flap up and over the way Master’s young’uns jump up and down on the beds as she watches their hair move over the shoulders like creek water over stones. He calls her again, insistent and still famished, wanting coffee to wash it all down while he and the other officers plan and make decisions. She reaches over his arm to pour. When bricks with the force of an army thrust him into her bosom. Her kerchief embeds in the ceiling. His scream locks in the moment. The explosions, neither the first nor the last, will leave the others to die, but alone, without this shattering warmth. Each man becoming a singular dispersion of limb and whatever he was eating. ...