The Good Lord Bird

I didn’t right know what to say to him at that moment, so I nodded at the open cell door. “You could escape easily, couldn’t you, Captain? There’s plenty talk ’bout rousing up new men from all parts and taking you back out. Couldn’t you bust out and we could stir up another army and do it like the old days, like Kansas?”

The Old Man, stern as always, shook his head. “Why would I do that? I am the luckiest man in the world.”

“It don’t seem that way.”

“There is an eternity behind and an eternity before, Onion. That little speck at the center, however long, is life. And that is but comparatively a minute,” he said. “I has done what the Lord has asked me to do in the little time I had. That was my purpose. To hive the colored.”

I couldn’t stand it. He was a failure. He didn’t hive nobody. He didn’t free nobody, and that spun my guts a bit to see him in that state, for I did love the Old Man, but he was dying cockeyed, and I didn’t want that. So I said, “The slaves never hived, Captain. That was my fault.”

I started to tell him ’bout the Rail Man, but he put up his hand.

“Hiving takes a while. Sometimes bees don’t hive for years.”

“You saying they will?”

“I’m saying God’s mercy will spread its light on the world. Just like He spread His mercy to you. It done my heart good to see you accept God in that engine house, Onion. That alone, that one life freed toward our King of Peace, is worth a thousand bullets and all the pain in the world. I won’t live to see the change God wants. But I hope you do. Some of it anyway. By God, I feels a prayer hatching, Onion.” And he stood up and grabbed my hands and prayed for a good half hour, holding my hands in his wrinkled paws, his head down, powwowing with his Maker ’bout this and that, thanking Him for making me true to myself, and all sorts of other business, praying for his jailer and hoping the jailer gets paid and don’t get robbed and nobody breaks outta jail on his watch, and throwing in a good word for them that jailed him and killed his boys. I let him go on.

After ’bout a half hour he was done, and sat back down on his bed, tired. It was getting light outside. I could see just a peek of dawn was through the window. It was time for me to go.

“But, Captain, you never asked me why I ... went ’bout as I did.”

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath ’em all, and his gray eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren’t no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was—from the very first.

“Whatever you is, Onion,” he said, “be it full. God is no respecter of persons. I loves you, Onion. Look in on my family from time to time.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a Good Lord Bird feather. “The Good Lord Bird don’t run in a flock. He flies alone. You know why? He’s searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that’s taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till that thing gets tired and falls down. And the dirt from it raises the other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes ’em strong. Gives ’em life. And the circle goes ’round.”

He gived me that feather, and set back on his cot, and gone back to his writing, writing another letter, I expect.

I opened the cell door, closed it quietly, and walked out the jailhouse. I never saw him again.

* * *