Thrust: A Novel

That we could have been born from her, but small cracks began to appear in the story, just as in the materials of her body and our labor. Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there — our labor had put them there — and we had thoughts about it.

We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden. We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don’t speak. A fear slid through some of our necks — that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers — but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings.

Once, when we were working on the head and the face at ground level, I saw a suffragist from a protest march spit on the face of her as we worked. Why should a female face represent freedom when women cannot yet vote, she asked. She shook as she yelled, as her question streaked down the hard copper cheek.

I thought about that streak for a very long time.

After everyone was gone for the night, I took a rag to the copper there, crying briefly as I wiped it away. The suffragist was right. I saw her meaning. But I had been among those who’d worked to make that statue’s face, worked so that it could hold both the gravitas and the tenderness of an idea that I believed could be beautiful. In some future — not ours, but some day to come. A face that might become something we were not yet. A freedom obscured in the shackles hidden beneath her feet, rising up her body and arm all the way to the torch, the sky, the endless heavens. I had an unusual dream in the form of her face. My face had its own markings.

Our labor had a rhythm and shape and song that were larger and reached farther than our differences. Maybe the song of us helped us feel part of some whole that did and did not exist. The song of us helped to get the work done, helped our bodies not to give out or give in. The song of we the body met the air and the water around us differently from how any one person might; we the body were part of everything and nothing at the same time.

In those days, for the first time in my weary life, I had people I loved. Endora and David, John Joseph — all of us from someplace else, all of us collected by her body.

Maybe because we were building her body, we felt our own bodies differently, and that welded some of our hearts together. Me with my patchwork-skin story. Endora’s barren gut and foul, funny mouth. The opalescent mosaic of scars on David’s back. The way John Joseph always talked with his hands, as if he were reaching for some meaning beyond words. The way his words would then return to his ancestors.

Or maybe our labor made us love one another. That happens to workers sometimes, when you labor near other bodies. Maybe we were looking so hard for something in this emerging place that we turned inside out a little. I don’t know.

I only know that we built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She carried us in her.

Or we thought she did.

Some nights, after we worked together on her body, John Joseph, Endora, David, and I would drink late at night and talk about what it would have been like if the woman we built had really represented emancipation. If the broken chains had stayed aloft, in her left hand, for everyone everywhere to see.

The original story. Instead of the story that came.

And John Joseph’s hands would come alive and he’d say, You could have been president. I’d tell him, You could have been secretary of the interior, and Endora, she could have been vice president! And Endora would say, Are you kidding? I’m the president. You lot would just muck everything up. David would stare at the fire and smile. Of all of us, David believed in fantasies the least. He was the heart of us. Then we’d all pause and take a drink. We laughed our asses off. It made such sense. It fit the stories of our labor, our bodies. The stories we told ourselves were part of the stories that created the weight of her. But sense wasn’t what was coming.