She called me by a vision that burned right through the smokes of autumn. The haze of Indian summer was appropriate backing for the curtain of gloom that had drawn itself over the village of Kosciuszko in Kosciuszko County, Illinois. For a hamlet of three hundred people, only half of whom were black, to lose three young black males within the same year was bad enough, but at least two of the three deaths were tied together by the strangest of circumstance. Their hearts had been removed. More than the deaths, the missing hearts raised the hair on the back of my neck.
Back in January, I hadn’t thought too much about it when Bobby Joe Jason was killed in his parachute in Vietnam and the Viet Cong cut out his heart. “Them comnists is godless. My boy was doin The Lord’s work,” sobbed Bobby Joe’s father at the funeral.
Bobby Joe’s two brothers didn’t look so sure. In our little village, we’re all soldiers of The Lord, but neither Jason brother stood up to vow revenge on those godless commies.
In April, Riley Mann got killed by the KKK down in Mississippi. Three other freedom riders, two white boys and a white girl, were in the car when it was ambushed. Riley was in the backseat with the white girl. Maybe that’s why the Klan shot up the car and killed them all, but Riley was the only one whose heart they cut out. They never found Riley’s heart just like they never found Bobby Joe’s. Of course nobody expected Bobby Joe’s heart to be found, and two missing hearts did not make a pattern. Still the feeling of dread that settled over me cut deeper than just the morbid fascination of a seventeen year old. I couldn’t shake it.
In farm country, a lazy day in July is a luxury to be savored, and the news that Elroy and Ruby Ellis’ baby had disappeared ruined one of the rare Sunday baseball games between us village boys. The whole village—well, the black half anyway—went out searching. We didn’t find anything. Personally, I was relieved. Like everyone else, I was already disturbed by the deaths of two young men. Now a newborn had disappeared. For me, the loss of the Ellis baby spoiled the rest of that summer of ’66. What if we had found a baby and no heart? That would have been a pattern.
Making matters worse, I had nobody to share my anxiety with. No one else seemed much concerned with the business of two stolen hearts. I tried talking to my brother, Oz. Oz is short for Ozell. We were born only ten months apart, which is not all that rare in our neck of the woods. Because of our birthdays and the rules for starting school, we should have been in the same grade even though we weren’t twins. In our male dominated society, having two boys starting school together would have given Daddy some bragging rights. But Momma headed his bragging rights off at the pass by starting me in school a year early. Even though we weren’t inseparable, Oz and I talked twice a day, every day, because on our farm, we did the milking.
For the first time in my life, my brother didn’t take me seriously. “It’s just coincidence, Rail. You’re overreacting, that’s all. We got enough weirdos running around here without you getting weird.”
I could tell from his voice that he found my unease amusing. He was blowing me off. The problem was that although I sort of had faith in my intuition, he was right. I had no logical grounds for such feelings. Whenever I got caught up in a mental battle between logic and faith, I always went with logic. So I threw in the towel. I didn’t try talking about missing hearts with him again. His cavalier dismissal of my concerns hurt my feelings.
The end of summer couldn’t come soon enough. My mental pallor didn’t lift and Kosciuszko didn’t even start getting back to normal until summer ended and we went back to school. I liked school because for at least five days a week, it saved me from the drudgery of field work.
When you’re the children of poor farmers, summer in Southernmost Illinois could be a rough time. Daylight was for making money, either by working in Daddy’s fields or riding the work buses to serve as day labor for other farmers. We started our daily chores at first light and didn’t finish until after last light. Except for going to church on Sunday, there was no time off. For my brother and me, our only refuge was the barn.
I should also say that Kosciuszko is pronounced Kuss-Ko. In the southernmost part of Southern Illinois, where everybody speaks with a drawl, there’s no such thing as a four-syllable word and even a three-syllable word is too precious to be wasted on some Polish guy.
My name is Lorenzo Henry. I probably would have been called Renzo or Rennie, except that Momma said when I was born, the midwife, Miss Ezili, had cried out, “Oooo! What a pretty baby. He blacker than a cross tie and long and skinny like a rail. I ain’t never seed such a long and skinny baby. Thas how come he come out so easy.”
So my nickname became Rail, and that’s what I put on my papers at school: Rail Henry.
They could have called me Orangutan Henry. I wouldn’t have complained because I considered myself a man of the forest. Our little farm turned its back on the channel of the Cache River less than half a mile away. The Cache usually burst out of its banks at least twice yearly, and during high water, we could fish at the bottom of the hill on which our barn sat. All that alluvial mud and brackish water fertilized a dense stand of hardwood forest that ran for miles on both sides of the muddy stream. Never having been to the Amazon Rain Forest, I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but I was pretty certain that our local weeds, vines, and great trees could match any thing I was likely to find in a South American jungle. I called the area along the banks of the Cache my rain forest. I was happiest when I was alone there.
The love between a boy and the wild woods is as real as anything dreamed up by that Freud fellow. And without all the guilt. It is as complex a relationship as having a girlfriend, except that mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers don’t break your heart. At seventeen, I had already suffered magnificently through many broken hearts. Of course, none of those backwoods sirens had known of my amorous affection. I was too shy for that. Every time I fixed my sights on a succulent plum, she was picked and her love plundered by a rougher suitor, someone less encumbered than I by the anticipatory phase of pleasure. I knew I was already pretty slow off the mark when it came to romantic conquest, and my lack of courage was becoming worrisome. Other boys my age were teasing me about not getting any. Fortunately, I had my rain forest.
Except, of course, farm work is never ending. My father and the other fathers raising large families on small farms used their children as free labor. In my neck of the woods, a seventeen year old can pretty much manage a farm, leaving the old man to get some well- deserved—in the old man’s mind anyway— rest. Daddy wanted his farmer.
I was a reasonable sort of fellow. Most of the time, I really didn’t mind getting worked into the ground. But when the days shortened and autumn deepened, the Indian summer of 1966 outdid itself. A sharp early frost killed off the biting insects and started the leaves a turning. Unseasonable warm weather followed the frost. The absence of high winds normal from late October through November left the leaves on the trees into early December. My Southern Illinois rain forest was putting on a show. Walking in the woods was like walking inside a rainbow, with the colors biased towards flaming golds and burnt reds. I had to be a part of it every day. Naturally I waged orangutan warfare.
For years it had been my job to find and drive back home any of our stock that broke out of our fences. Most of our farm animals seemed pretty happy with their lot, but there was one milk cow, Bossy, who would exploit any weakness in the fence to make a break for freedom. I think she liked being in the forest as much as I did. So just for the rest of that Indian summer, which looked like it might stretch right on into the next year, Bossy and I came to a little unspoken arrangement. I didn’t fix the fences too well, and she didn’t make herself too hard to find when she broke out. Every day the cow went to the same meadow in the forest. I could fetch her at my leisure. Until it was time to go home and do the milking, I could enjoy an after school romp in the sunburst beneath the canopy of leaves.
On the day of my vision, I was enjoying a two-pronged victory over the forces of workaholic good. I was walking home from school alone because I had stayed for a student council meeting. I wasn’t a student council type or anything like that. It’s just that Daddy wouldn’t let me play baseball. The daily practice took up too much time.
Student council meetings are weekly and appallingly boring, but each one bought me a little extra time out of the harness. I still got to fetch Bossy back after school. My only problem was that after mid-November, the days shorten quickly. I had to get home pronto or Momma would send someone else after the cow. I was swish-swishing my feet faster than usual through the leaves littering our lane, which ribbonned its way from the school bus stop on the gravel road, through the slough, between fields and pasture, and up the knoll to our house. But my brisk pace didn’t stop my eyes from drinking in the color from the thick stand of trees that grew in the protection of the slough’s boggy ground. That stretch of land was too flood prone for crops or orchards. The farmer who owned it had given it over to the trees, wild animals and the occasional foraging hog.
The top of the knoll is the perfect height for looking out over the fields and enjoying the colors of the fall foliage. If the forests of Southern Illinois were putting on a show in general, the trees of the slough were going for the greatest show on Earth. Spectacular as they were, the autumn blue of the sky and the deep reds, burnt oranges, and shimmering golds dripping off the trees were just a preview of what I would be in if I could just make it home before the sun set too low in the sky for the sunlight to filter through the leaves. I hurried, my feet pointed forward and my eyes looking to the side and upward and drinking in perfectly fermented Indian summer wine. Despite all that had happened, the year was ending on a good note.
The vision lasted perhaps two or three seconds at most. Like a geyser, the silhouette of a girl gushed upward from the tree tops of the slough and filled the sky. The colors of autumn streaked her hair, which streamed out all entwined with leaves and vines behind her as she arced out over the fields. Her face formed, first copper in silhouette, and then golden as she turned and looked right at me. The warmth of her gaze, even though it lasted for no more than a second, pierced my thick blacker-than-a-crosstie skin and singed my boyish heart. Then she was gone, diving with her hair fanning out behind her wider than the forty acres that we farmed, into the forest on the other side of the fields: the Cache side of the forest.
I ran now, not to get home and ask if anyone else had seen, because I already knew the vision was for me alone. The girl had not faded away like in a daydream. Instead she had plunged from view or perhaps just landed, taking the color and the light of the day with her like one swipe of a dingy cloth across a clean window. From where she had risen, the leaves were brown and not red or gold. In her flight path, the turquoise of the sky had gone darker. It seemed to me that daylight was running out of the cup faster than it had before. I should have felt a chill, but already I was stupefied by love.
She was gone, but I had seen enough. I knew where to find her. In fact, I knew her. We went to the same high school. She took a different bus home than I did because she lived on the other side of the Cache. At school she smiled at me when we passed in the hallways. I had just left her a few minutes earlier when the student council meeting ended. At seventeen, perhaps I should have had enough sense to be afraid, but I am certainly not to blame for what happened. Say what you will about me—
I come when I am called.