Freeman, page 17
Finally, Prudence shoved the gun barrel against Bo Wheaton’s cheek hard enough to break the skin. “Get out,” she said.
Another smile. He wiped at the tiny cut, glanced at the smidgen of blood he found. “Whatever you say,” he told her. He touched his hat and moved slowly away.
Bonnie didn’t breathe until the two men had cleared the door and Prudence allowed the gun to drop. Then Bonnie rushed to her friend and they embraced. Prudence was weeping, shuddering. “I need a bath,” she said. “I can still feel his hands upon me.”
“I know,” said Bonnie. “But you should not have done that.”
Prudence pulled back. “You think I was obliged to let him paw me? No. You know me better than that.”
She looked as if she was about to say more. Then her eyes caught sight of something over Bonnie’s shoulder. She motioned with her head and Bonnie turned.
A few feet away, Paul Cousins was standing in the doorway with his back to them, one hand ceaselessly massaging the other. His shoulders shuddered violently. Prudence’s eyes told her to go to him. She did.
Bonnie put a hand on his arm. She didn’t speak. After a moment, Paul looked down at her, his eyes moist and anguished. “Man raped my sister,” he said.
“What?”
“Back in slave time. I’m shoein’ his daddy’s hoss, he find her out back of the cabin working in the garden. He took her and he done his business with her. She weren’t but 14.”
“Paul, I am so sorry.”
“It ain’t easy, you know.”
“Beg pardon?”
“The other day when you said I must find it easy to smile at ’em while they say things and threaten us? It ain’t easy. Not by a fair sight.”
She was stricken. “Paul, forgive me. I never should have said that to you.”
He regarded her for a moment with fathomless eyes. Then he turned away. After a moment, she heard him say, “So, you really think you could teach me how to read?”
She has lost track of the miles.
Miles mean nothing anymore, anyway. Miles are just something somebody made up to measure distance, so that when so-and-so says he’s traveled thus and so many miles, everyone will all have the same idea of what is meant. But how can anybody have any idea of miles when you have walked so many of them, when your skirt tail is caked with mud and your feet are crusted with blood and you have cramps in your legs sometimes so bad they just give out and you fall onto your face and the few blessed moments of lying there makes it seem worth the heavy foot that comes prodding you and then kicks you in your behind while a voice above rages, “Get up! Get up, goddamn your sorry hide!”
And even though you don’t think you can, you get up anyway and you walk.
So yes, she has lost track of the miles.
She does know they are in a place called Arkansas. She gleaned this from Marse Jim’s conversation with the ferryman who took them across the Mississippi River, not, heaven knows, from anything he said to her. He does not speak an extraneous word to her, says nothing beyond “Get up!” or “Walk faster!” So thoroughly does he ignore her that sometimes she wonders if she is still there or if she has not become a figment of her own imagination.
He has taken to explaining to anyone who asks that he is a veteran of the late war, walking home with a faithful mammy who insisted on joining him in the field to make sure he had enough to eat. He says this with a catch in his voice and a gleam in his eyes that never fails to touch whoever is listening, says it so earnestly that she thinks he has come to believe it himself.
When he tells them this lie, people gaze upon her with raw adoration and gush fulsome praise for her faithfulness. She looks away and they always take this for modesty, which only makes them glorify her more. It surprises her that they believe such foolishness, but they do. They need to, she thinks. And Marse Jim seldom has to tell the story more than two times or three before finding some poor widow so moved by it that she will give them biscuits or sowbelly and a place to spend the night.
She has her chances to run from him. At night, him sprawling against a bale of hay in someone’s barn, legs drawn up crookedly, mouth gaped in a rasping snore, she could easily get up and slip out into the night. Maybe even get away. Instead, she squats there as if rooted, as if she were something growing up from the very soil, and watches him sleep. She wonders why.
Maybe it’s because she has nowhere she could go.
Maybe it’s because she knows he would find her.
Maybe it’s because she remembers. Wilson flying backward from the explosion, landing against the tree like a sack of flour. Lucretia, gazing at the blood-oozing hole in her stomach, then up at Tilda, right up at Tilda, spearing her with accusatory eyes.
“We’s free now,” she had said. Insisted.
“How are they going to free my niggers?” Marse Jim had said. “How are they going to take away from me something I paid good money for, something I bought fair and legal?”
And then he shot her, and she died.
“Little Jim liked cane.”
The voice jolts her in her reverie, brings her back to herself. She is sitting near him under an old oak tree at the edge of a sugarcane field. His voice is so unexpected that she glances around to see who he is talking to. When she sees no one else is there and that the words must have been meant for her, she grunts an acknowledgement, not knowing what else to do.
He barely notices, rubbing a stalk of cane contemplatively between thumb and forefinger. “Brought him through this way once, must have been about six years ago, on a trip to see some niggers this fellow had for sale. Stopped somewhere ’long in here for the night and the owner of the place, he give Little Jim a piece of cane to chaw on. He ain’t knowed what it was right away, but once he took him a chew, you never saw a boy so happy.”
He seems to be waiting for her to respond, but what is there to say? She shrugs. “He really liked it, did he?”
It sounds weak to her ears, but apparently, it is response enough, an invitation to speak aloud about his dead son, because he immediately turns to her. It takes a moment to realize the thing on his face is a smile. “Oh yeah,” he says. “It’s sweet, you know, sugarcane. Just got to peel the skin back and there you go. Little Jim, he worked on that thing all that day. Always promised him I was going to bring him back here for another taste, but then the war come and I never got to do it.”
His eyes are shining and she wonders again what it is she is supposed to say. And then, all at once she knows, and it is surprisingly easy to say because it is the truth. “I’m sorry they killed your boy. The Yankees had no call to do that.”
He turns away and she gets the sense it is because tears are falling and he doesn’t want her to see. “Damn right they didn’t,” he says, and his voice is harsh. “Damn right.”
It is a hot day. The tree shade is a welcome mercy, the wind breathes softly on her cheek. She can’t figure what it is that gets into her at that moment. She knows better, doesn’t she? And if she didn’t before, she surely does now. But she can’t stop herself. She isn’t even sure she wants to.
“My boy died, too,” she says.
There, she said it. Same thing she said walking down the hill from Little Jim’s grave, same thing that made him snort at her presumption, made Wilson and Lucretia give her that hard look as they trudged past. Same thing. But why should she not be allowed to say it? It’s true, isn’t it? Lord knows it is.
Still, she is braced for his cursing, even braced for him to hit her for her insolence. Instead, he looks at her. Looks at her for a long time. Finally he says, “What happened to him?”
She swallows. “Got shot. Same as yours.”
He nods, seeming to think this through. “Runaway?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says.
“Shouldn’t of run,” he says. “That’s bad business, niggers running.” He is silent for a long time, staring down the road they have just walked. Then he says, “But they ain’t had to shoot him, I expect. Some of them nigger chasers, you know, they just plain don’t think. All they want to do is bring the nigger back. Don’t occur to them that you got to bring him back alive. Otherwise, what’s the point? What’s the value of a dead nigger?”
She absorbs this torrent of words, more than he has spoken all together in the last five days, stoically. She wonders if some rough nugget of empathy is supposed to lie buried in them. Then she decides it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. “I miss him,” she says. “I miss my son.”
He gives her that look again. Then he looks away. “Miss mine, too,” he says. “Son shouldn’t die before the father. That’s just wrong.”
“Shouldn’t die before the mother, either,” she says, wondering where this boldness is coming from. Wondering where her sense of self-preservation has gone.
But he only nods. “Shouldn’t die before the mother,” he agrees.
The silence that follows feels almost companionable, except that she knows it isn’t. Even in the silence, he is still Marse Jim, and she is still just a nigger he owns. So they sit there another moment, together but not. And when he decides they have been sitting long enough, he stands without a word or even a backward glance, hoists the rifle to his shoulder, and starts walking. She follows.
She stares at the back of him as she has now for more days than she can remember, his balding head hunched down, his potato-shaped body pushed slightly forward, like a man walking uphill against a wind. And she wonders what this is that just happened between them, what it means that they just talked about their sons.
It is confusing. Because she is just a thing he owns. She knows this. She has always known this. But do you speak to the things you own about your son? Do you meet with them on the common ground of loss?
You do not. So maybe she is—maybe he knows she is—something more. She wants to ask him about it, but she doesn’t know the words to do so. And even if she did, it would be useless. He would just stare at her and shake his head if she were lucky. Slap her so hard her ears would sing if she were not.
They walk for two hours through cane fields, Marse Jim dragging the rifle by the barrel. Abruptly he stops, one hand on his chest as if he is taking a pledge. She pauses, not quite abreast of him. Stands there and waits.
“Gon’ stop here for the night,” he says, without turning around.
She looks. “Here” is a cabin, on the edge of a row separating two cane fields. The door is open and it looks abandoned, perhaps by some slave who has run to seize his freedom. Tilda is confused. “Here?” she says. The sun is still high. Usually, they never stop until it sits low on the horizon and their shadows stretch long behind them.
He thunders at her. “Yes, damn you. Can’t you hear?” Then he winces as if thundering has caused him pain. She can hear him breathing, the air creaking in and out of him in labored sighs. He nods toward the cabin, speaks in a tired voice. “Go look inside,” he says.
She does. No one is inside except a mouse that bolts between her feet and off the step in a flying leap the moment she pokes her head in the door. She sees a cot with a thin, raggedy mattress, corn shucks peeking through the holes. There are shelves, but they are empty. A hook where no shirt or dress hangs. A table with nothing on it. All of it coated with the dust. The room is filled with absence.
“Nobody here,” she calls, “for a long time.”
He nods grimly, walks toward her. Halfway across, he seems to stagger a bit. “Marse?” she says. He glares at her and she swallows her question. He brushes past her and into the muggy darkness of the room.
He lowers himself carefully onto the cot and the corn shucks make a dry, crisping sound beneath his weight. She settles onto the floor. Through the open door, she can see the sun standing high above the cane. They had another two or three hours of light at the very least. But here they are, already bedding down for the night inside a cabin some slave once called home. And apparently, they will not eat tonight, either. Indeed, food seems to be the furthest thing from his mind as he reclines with a weighty grunt, the rifle on the bed between him and the wall, one forearm thrown over his face. He closes his eyes.
She stares, boldly. Something is wrong with him, she decides. But she doesn’t know what.
Suddenly his eyes are on her and he has grabbed her forearm in a grip that radiates pain down to her fingertips. She didn’t even see him move. “Don’t get no ideas,” he growls. “You try to get away, I’ll kill you.” He doesn’t say it in the overheated way one speaks a threat. He says it in the way one explains a certainty, a simple mathematical calculation. Two plus two is four; try to get away, I’ll kill you.
She starts, because it’s as if he has read her thoughts, read her recognition of his vulnerability, and leapt ahead of her to the obvious conclusion. And she cannot shake her head vigorously enough. “No, Marse Jim. Wouldn’t do that, Marse Jim. Ain’t got to worry none, Marse Jim.”
He looks at her for a long moment before he releases his grip. She flexes fingers she cannot feel. He leans back and closes his eyes. After a few moments, he is snoring loudly, breath leaving him in a whistle. She sits awake for long hours, stomach gnawing hungrily at itself, watching through the door as darkness rises from the rim of the world to catch the falling sun.
In the morning, he is worse. His mouth droops open as if he lacks the strength to keep it closed, and perspiration stands in little bubbles on his brow. He sits up on the edge of the bed, weaving as if the floor were dancing beneath him. She pulls herself into a sitting position, back aching from a night on the hard wood.
Marse Jim glares at her as if trying to remember who she is. Abruptly, he rises to his feet. It is an effort, she can see that. And once there he holds his head for a long moment, occasionally wincing and cursing with the pain. After a few moments of this, he walks out on wobbly legs. A minute later, she can hear his piss hitting the ground behind the shed. Then he appears in the doorway, motions with his head. And they are off walking again.
It is difficult for her to keep behind him. His determined gait has become a leaden shuffle, inching him doggedly across the Arkansas countryside, and she keeps catching up, despite her best efforts to trail. For two hours they walk like this, their progress painful and slow. Then, just as the cane fields deliver them to the edge of a tiny settlement, his strength fails him altogether and he slips down to the ground.
“Marse Jim!” she cries.
There is no answer from the disheveled heap lying in the center of the road. She edges toward him, feeling panic rising in her chest. “Marse Jim?” Still only silence. She is standing over him now. His cheek, what she can see of it through the coarse black bristles of his beard, is flushed and damp. His eyes are closed. Tilda reaches a hesitant hand out and shakes his shoulder, gently at first, then vigorously. He does not respond. She doesn’t know what to do. The panic in her chest has risen so high she can feel herself about to drown.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he dead?”
The woman who asks is white, standing at the front gate of a neat clapboard house, drying her hands on an apron.
Tilda hunches her shoulders. “I don’t know, Miss. We walkin’ along and he just fell over. Been sick for two days now.”
The woman comes over to take a look. “He’s poorly, all right,” she says. “Let’s get him in the parlor.”
They each take an arm. It is not easy. They are only women and Marse Jim is a great vast bulk of a man. But eventually, they wrestle him out of the street and up onto the porch and, finally, onto a high-backed couch in a genteel parlor with paintings on the wall and a piano in the corner by the window. Soon, he is resting as comfortably as they can manage and the two of them stand near the couch, facing one another.
The woman says her name is Mrs. Lindley. She asks how it is that they have come to be in the lane before her house. Automatically, Tilda tells the story of how she and Marse Jim are on their way home from the war, Tilda having gone with him to make sure he was cared for in camp. “Where are you from?” asks the woman.
Tilda answers without thinking. “Mississippi,” she says.
The woman’s brow wrinkles. “But you were walking west,” she says. “Mississippi is the other way. East.”
Tilda manages an awkward smile. “Marse must have gotten confused,” she says. She can see by the look in the white woman’s eyes that Mrs. Lindley doesn’t quite believe her. She allows the moment to breathe, then lifts her chin in the direction of the unconscious form on the couch. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”
The woman nods. “We used to treat soldiers here, before the war was lost. I’ve seen this many times. Your master has pneumonia.”
Tilda is perplexed. “Pneumonia? What is that?”
“It’s a sickness in his lungs. He will probably get better, though I’ve seen some die. I’ll have to give him some brandy and quinine. It may be necessary to employ scarified cupping.”
Tilda’s confusion must show on her face. “Bleeding,” the woman says. “To improve the blood flow, let the sickness out of him.”
“You’ve done this?”
“I’ve helped doctors do it,” she says. A moment passes during which the only sound in the parlor is the air laboring in and out of Marse Jim’s lungs. Then Mrs. Lindley says, “Is it true, the two of you are going back to Mississippi?”
She is, Tilda decides, probably in her middle thirties, hair a nondescript color going over to gray, pulled back now into a bun. There is frank intelligence in the eyes that wait on Tilda’s reply. They are blue and clear as water.
“No,” says Tilda. “That’s just what Marse Jim has been telling everybody.”
Mrs. Lindley’s mouth tightens with satisfaction. “That’s what I thought,” she says. “So where are you going, then?”
“I don’t know,” says Tilda. “He has not told me. We left Mississippi after two runaways. We found them, he killed them, and we have been walking ever since.”
“Killed them?” Her hands hang clasped before her.
Tilda nods. “Shot them down,” she says.
