Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twelve

I did not mean to seem cynical about belief. Age has brought me little if any wisdom. I knew more at twenty-one than at forty. Why is that? Because at age forty I was dumb enough to believe I knew anything at all. The only lesson I’ve learned in life is that the human personality does not change, and our propensity for destroying the earth and our fellow man is stronger and more wanton than it has ever been, and if the incineration of our cities and civilians and the increased lethality of our weapons during the last one hundred years has not taught us that, nothing will.

I cannot envision eternity or infinity. I cannot understand the concept of endlessness. Nor do I understand how a primeval swamp can produce life-forms that can plan their own evolution and become sentient and functioning creatures with eyes and neurological systems and the ability to survive on a planet that had not cooled and whose skies were streaked with smoke from volcanoes as numerous as anthills. And for those reasons I try not to discount or reject possibilities of any kind, including the possibility that unseen entities exist just the other side of our fingertips.

The great inventions and geographical discoveries have often come about because of the inventor’s or the explorer’s blunder. The same applies to my life. The greatest events or changes in it were not planned and have occurred in an unpredictable and illogical fashion. That’s a humbling thought. I would like to claim power and personal direction over my life. But a day does not go by that I do not experience a reminder of an event that left me at the mercy of strangers. The trigger can be one of many: the sound of rushing water, the press of bodies inside an elevator, a piece of food sticking in my windpipe. In seconds I’m back to a wintry day in 1935, three months after exiting my mother’s womb and about to be baptized by immersion in the San Antonio River, not far from the Alamo.

Model T cars were parked on the mudbank, and people had put on their best clothes and, in spite of the weather, had brought picnic baskets and pitchers of lemonade to celebrate the occasion. As would be expected in that time period, all of them were white, uneducated, and very poor; better and more respectfully said, they were people who cut their own hair and sewed clothes for their children from colorfully stamped Purina feed sacks and thought corn pone with maple syrup was a treat. They also thought a baptism was a big event, one that took the congregation away from the endless privation that seemed to characterize their lives.

It should have been a grand day, except the preacher was drunk and stepped in a deep hole and dropped me in the current.

In seconds I was whisked away. The wool blanket I was wrapped in turned to lead. Thirty yards downstream, a fat Black woman who had no name except Aint Minnie was washing clothes in the cattails. Her only family was her thirteen-year-old daughter, who was as big as her mother and known as Snowball.

Aint Minnie turned her washtub upside down and dumped the clothes in the water and waded into the current, using the tub as a buoy, her dress floating above her hips. In the meantime I had gone under. I was not told that. I know it because I still have nightmares filled with enclosure, graves, tunnels, entrapment in a sewer pipe, a cold liquid darkness that seeps into the bone. I try to flee the blanket, but my arms are pinched against my sides. In the dream I know I’m about to die, and I know that no power on earth can save me.

Aint Minnie clutched my blanket, then my diaper, and lifted me from the water and placed me in the washtub and pushed me ahead of her into the cattails. Snowball grabbed one side of the washtub, and she and her mother slogged in men’s work boots through mud that was up to their calves until they were on high ground. My grandfather was the first person to reach us. He was a Texas Ranger and owned a sizable ranch, although the drought had burned up his cotton and blown away a third of his topsoil. He picked me up and wrapped me inside his coat.

“Aint Minnie, you and Snowball got a home at my ranch the rest of y’all’s lives,” he said. “I swear that before the throne of God.”

Grandfather kept his word and then some. When he died, Aint Minnie and Snowball were in his will. Aint Minnie lived to be ninety-seven years old, and Snowball became a professor at Texas Southern University in Houston. For years members of my family called me “Aint Minnie’s little boy.” And that’s why I try never to reject the perceptions of others or the stories they might tell about their lives, no matter how improbable the account might be, and that includes Ruby Spotted Horse’s stories about monsters and rogues who are imprisoned under the earth.