Freeman, page 24
But the short, stout woman who opened the door only squinted at him through her glasses. “Yes?” she said. She had fine, white hair drawn up in a bun.
Ben gave her that smile that threatened to split his face along its seams. “Mistress, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Ben.”
It took her a moment. “Ben?” she said. “My Ben?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “Once upon a time.”
“You rascal! You run off from us.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ben. “I did.”
“You know how much Albert paid for you? We trusted you, Ben. We treated you almost like family. And you up and run off? Why, Ben, that’s just like stealing!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ben, and no smile marked his face now. “I reckon you right. I stole. I stole myself.”
She sighed elaborately. “Well, I suppose it’s too long past to hold a grudge now. All the niggers left us after a while, when the war came. You were just the first.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now you’re back?” She was hopeful.
He shook his head. “No, ma’am. Just come to find Hannah.”
Her face brightened. “That’s right! You were sweet on Hannah. I remember that.”
“Yes, ma’am. More’n sweet, actually. We jumped the broom, had us a little baby girl together. I’se real anxious to see them.”
“Well, like I say, once the Yankees come through here, most of the niggers run off. There was a big fight in these parts just before Christmas. Oh, Ben, it was terrible. She left us right after that.”
Concern clouded his eyes. “Do you know where they run off to?”
She scratched her chin. “Not for certain. But I hear a bunch of the niggers settled in town. Maybe you could look there.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
To Sam’s surprise, he did not walk away. “Place in terrible shape, Mistress.”
“I know,” she said, her voice rueful. “But what can I do? All of you all left me and Albert died in the war.”
“You out here all by yourself?”
“I’m afraid I am. Don’t know what I’m going to do, either. That war was a terrible thing, Ben. I suppose you all think different. I know all the slaves say ‘Marse Linkum’ gave them their freedom. But look at the cost, Ben. So many of our boys and men dead, niggers all run away, our whole way of life destroyed.”
Ben said, “I make you a bargain, Mistress. If you don’t mind feedin’ a couple hungry men, we give you a day’s work. See what we can do to get this yard back in order for you.”
Sam was thunderstruck. “Ben!”
Ben lifted a hand. His eyes never left the old woman’s face, which was lit like the dawn sky. She clasped her hands together. “Ben, you’d do that for me? Oh, thank you, Ben. Thank you. It’s good to know the old feelings are not entirely gone.”
“Tools still in the same place?” asked Ben.
She pointed. “Right out in the little shed in back.”
He nodded. “We get to work then,” he said.
She nodded. “Thank you, Ben.”
As the door closed, Sam hissed at his friend. “Are you out of your mind?”
“You don’t have to help,” said Ben, leading the way to the tool shed. “I just felt sorry for her, is all. Poor old woman, out here by herself.”
“She is a poor old white woman who calls you a nigger and thinks you ought to be ashamed for ‘stealing’ your own self.”
“I know,” said Ben, “but she weren’t the worst of ’em. I seen plenty far worse.”
“What about your wife? What about your daughter? Have you forgotten about them?”
Ben paused, his hand on the tool house door, and gave Sam a look. “You know better than to ask me that,” he said. “Ain’t never forgot about them. Not for a minute. Like I say, she just a poor old lady out here by herself. I just feel bad for her, is all. I sleep better if I put in a little work.”
Sam shook his head. “This makes no sense. You were always the one haranguing me to move on. Now you want to stop and spend a day putting this old woman’s house in order?”
“Told you,” said Ben, “you ain’t got to help. I understand if you don’t. I really will.”
“That is foolishness,” said Sam. “Let her do her own work.” But even as he spoke, he laboriously undid the buttons on his shirt and hung it on the door.
They worked the rest of that day. The woman had a sack of crushed lime and sand left from before the war. Ben mixed it with water and spent the morning and early afternoon carrying stones up and down the ladder, rebuilding the chimney. Sam handled the scythe, trimming the wild grass down to finger length. Raking it was difficult with one hand, but he managed it, using long, even strokes to pull the grass into a pile. Late in the day as the grass burned, the two men repaired the split-rail fence.
When it was done, Sam stepped away, dragging his forearm across his brow. It came away muddy with sweat and dirt. “You and your soft conscience,” he told Ben. But there was no rebuke in it. He was too tired for rebuke.
Ben grinned. “Yeah,” he said, “but admit it: you feel better than if you just left her out here to fend for herself.”
Sam didn’t answer and Ben nodded, taking it for assent. It wasn’t. Sam had done this work for Ben, because he knew it would make his friend feel better. But Sam could happily have left the old woman out here to rot and spared not a second thought. Why should he give her his labor or even his concern? What had white people ever given him? What had they ever done except take?
Mary Cuthbert had treated him decently, yes. The memory rode in to him on wings of conscience. She had read to him, written letters for him, employed him. But was that enough to make up for all that white people had taken? Did it make up for Luke lying dead in that bog? Did it make up for Josiah hanging in that tree? Did it make up for Sam, reduced to stealing a dead man’s shoes and finding even that difficult because he had only one arm to work with, white people having taken that, too? Did it make up for losing Tilda?
No, it didn’t.
Damn them.
No, it did not at all.
They slept that night on the porch. The woman gave them breakfast in the morning, biscuits and eggs. As they were preparing to leave, she asked Ben if he might consider staying on. “You could help me get the place in order,” she said. “I couldn’t pay you much, but…”
She left the words hanging there. Ben didn’t reach for them. He smiled and there was pity in it. “I got to find my family,” he said.
He nodded a farewell and they set out for town. The walk took them downhill through a pine forest where trees had been broken and felled in great swaths. Then, for a while, they followed a river curling in great, wide loops along the valley floor. Ben, ordinarily a voluble man, kept a dogged silence this morning. Sam imagined he himself would not feel much like speaking if he were about to see Tilda again. Too much to think about it. Too many things to fear. And what words existed for that? After all these miles and all these mountains, what was there to say?
It took them three hours. The town that rose before them was a grid of clapboard buildings and dirt streets that hunkered in the shadow of two heavily forested hills. Sam and Ben entered on the main street. The signs of fighting were everywhere. They passed the smashed remnant of a general store, then a barber shop. They circled a huge crater in the middle of the street. Workmen were hammering together the skeleton of a building rising on a vacant lot between the scorched remains of a feed store and a hotel. At the end of the block stood a blacksmith shop, where hammer meeting anvil formed a song of industry that felt somehow hopeful in the bright, hard light of the morning. The blacksmith was a strapping young Negro man. Ben approached him eagerly.
“Do you know a colored woman named Hannah?” he said. “Got a daughter named Leila, be about seven.” The man shook his head.
It took Ben three tries more before he found a woman who knew Hannah. Her eyes narrowed dubiously when Ben asked her—Sam figured he and Ben must look a sight—but she gave them directions: go to the end of West Street, turn right at the hog pens, left on Laramie and then a quick right in a little alley without a name. It was the house at the very end, just before the railroad tracks. Ben rushed out a word of thanks and took off at almost a sprint. Sam had to hurry to keep up.
“Oh, Lord,” said Ben, speaking to Sam, speaking to the morning. “Oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord. You believe this? I done found her. I done found her at last! Oh, thank you Jesus!”
At the mouth of the nameless alley, Ben paused so abruptly Sam almost plowed into him. As promised, there were three houses, tall clapboard structures with common walls. Two little dark-skinned girls with plaited hair sat on the steps of the last one playing hull gull. The first girl held out her fists. “Hull gull!” she sang out and her voice was sweet and thin.
“Hand full,” came the second girl’s voice and it, too, was falsetto music.
“How many?” asked the first girl, a challenge rising in her voice.
“Three.” The second girl spoke with a smugness.
The first girl’s features fell like a rock. “How you know that?” she demanded, as she opened her hand. Three seeds were nestled inside her chubby palm. As the first girl claimed her prize, Ben edged forward.
“Beg your pardon,” he said, and to Sam, his voice sounded hollow as a cave.
The girls had not noticed the two men watching them. Now they turned wary eyes and did not respond.
“Is one of y’all named Leila?”
The two girls shared a look. After a moment, the first girl stood. “How you know my name?” she demanded.
Ben’s legs deserted him then. He staggered like a drunk, then crumbled in sections until he was on his knees. His mouth moved, it even croaked sounds, but he seemed unable to construct a sentence.
Sam stepped forward. “Leila, is your mother around?” he asked. The little girl nodded, her eyes never leaving Ben. Sam said, “Would you fetch her out here, please?”
The girl spun around and ran inside. The second girl stepped down off the stoop. “Why he cryin’?” she asked, pointing.
At that, Ben mashed impatiently at the tears on his cheeks. Sam reached down to touch his friend’s shoulder. “He is just happy,” he said. “He has been trying to find his way here for a very long time.”
The girl’s mouth drew up in skepticism. “He don’t look happy to me,” she said.
The door slammed open. A slender, pretty woman with arms folded protectively about her waist spoke Ben’s name in the way you would speak a ghost’s. He looked up, then clambered to his feet, unsteady as a toddler. “Hannah,” he said. “It’s me. I come home to you.”
She said something stricken, something that was not quite a word. And then she was in his arms, crying into his chest and the girls were watching with wide, scandalized eyes. “Oh, Ben,” she sobbed. “I thought you was dead. It’s been so long. I thought you was dead!”
He held her back from him so he could get a look. “Ain’t dead,” he said. “Ain’t nearly dead. And ain’t passed a day I didn’t think about you—you and my baby. Soon’s the war ended, I took off walkin’. I walked all this way here, Hannah, all the way from the North, just to see you. There were days I thought I’d never find you. But praise the Lord I did and we’s together now and I ain’t never gon’ leave you again.”
He leaned forward to close the distance between them with a kiss. She stopped him with a hand on his chest, and turned away from the questions that pooled in his eyes.
“Hannah? What’s wrong?”
“I thought you was dead, Ben.” It was an accusation now, and it made her voice tremble.
“But I ain’t dead.”
“I can see that,” she said. “Oh, Lord, I can.” She caught her tears in her hands, took a definitive step back from him. He reached for her. She flinched from his touch.
“I ain’t dead,” he said again.
She lifted her eyes. “You might as well be,” she said, the accusation sharper now, her eyes glittering like wet stones. “For seven years you might as well been dead. You can’t stay away for seven years, then come back and expect ever’ thing gon’ be just like you left it. Time move on, Ben. Time move on!”
“Hannah? What you mean?”
But that was when the door opened and a man appeared on the steps. He was tall, thick in the chest, had skin the color of crow’s feathers and wore overalls with no shirt. “Hannah, what’s going on out here? Who this?”
She looked back at him helplessly as a drowning woman looks at a far shore. Ben’s chin came up, a primal challenge. “I’m her husband, that’s who I am! Who the hell are you?”
The big man stepped down, his giant hands fisted. “The devil you say!”
Hannah pressed her hand into the other man’s large chest. He stopped advancing, but his eyes never left Ben’s. “Henry,” she pleaded, “it’s all right, sugar. It’s all right. He just don’t understand, is all. He just don’t know.”
“Understand what?” Ben screamed it with a rawness of pain.
Sam pulled at him with his one good hand. “Ben,” he said, “come with me.” His friend shoved him off with surprising violence.
“Understand what?” demanded Ben. His voice was gravelly and urgent and Sam realized he needed to hear her say it, needed it even though he knew—had to know—what was coming.
Hannah faced him. “Ben,” she said, “this Henry. He my husband now.”
The nakedness of his confusion was painful to see. Ben looked like a man who has suddenly learned that snow falls out of the sun. “How he gon’ be your husband?” he asked. “I’m your husband.”
“Ben, when you run off, you said you’d come back and get me in a year, two at the most. Ben, it’s been seven years.”
“But the war come. You can’t blame me for the war!”
“Ben, ain’t nobody blamin’ you. And I hope you know, you can’t blame me, neither. Can’t nobody blame nobody for nothin’. It was never our choice to be slaves, and it was never our choice to be separated for so long. All we wanted was to be free to love each other and raise our babies. But seem like what we wanted ain’t mattered a whole lot. So we got to make the best of it. That’s all we can do.”
“What?” Ben laughed his disbelief. He turned to Sam, as if for confirmation this odd new equation made absolutely no sense.
Snow falling from the sun.
“What?”
But he was talking to the back of Hannah’s head. “Henry,” she said, “this the man I told you about. Me and him was owned by Marse Albert and Miss Sue. We was together, before.”
Henry nodded. The anger in his eyes had melted down to a dull pity. His fisted hands had fallen open.
She turned to the little girls, standing transfixed by the confrontation between the adults. “Leila,” she said, and her head nodded toward Ben, “this here is your real father.”
The little girl’s eyes raked over Ben and she spoke with a scorn accessible only to children. “Nuh uh,” she said. “Daddy’s my daddy.” And to emphasize it, she hugged the man named Henry around one of his massive legs. He made a half-hearted effort to push her off, knowing what the sight of it would do to the stranger in front of his home.
Ben didn’t even see them. Snow tumbling out of the noon sun. And rain leaping up out of the ground. And horses conversing like men. And…oh, God, the entire world turned upside down, all his expectations, all his hopes, spilling out on the ground like water from a broken jar.
Ben’s head went down. His shoulders rounded. They waited for him. It took a moment. They waited. Even the little girl. Finally, Ben lifted his head like a weight and spoke in a voice rusty with pain. “You was the only thing kept me alive,” he told her. “Runnin’ through bullets, lyin’ in that hospital cot spittin’ up blood, walkin’ all those miles, crossin’ rivers and mountains and valleys and woods, you and her was the only thing kept me alive. ’Cause I knowed I was comin’ back here to you. Y’all kept me goin’. I thank you for that, at least.”
He turned from her. She touched him and he looked back. “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He smiled without smiling. “Me, too,” he said. “I won’t trouble you all no more.” Turning to go.
She touched him again, he looked back again. “You still got a daughter here,” she said. An invitation.
He looked past her to the little girl, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, clinging to another man’s leg as to driftwood in a flood, clinging to him as though her own father was a threat, as though her father who loved her more than he loved water and air, who had just walked across half a country on the mere hope of seeing her, would hurt her. “That ain’t what she say,” he said. And he walked away.
She called his name. He didn’t stop. She looked at Sam. Her eyes implored him but toward what, he could not say. He lifted his shoulders—what do you want me to do?—and followed his friend.
They didn’t speak. They walked without aim, walking itself being the entire point, putting distance between themselves and the nameless little alley where Ben’s life had broken to pieces. After a few minutes, they reached the river. Ben sat on a grassy bluff overlooking the water. Sam sat next to him.
“So,” said Ben, and his voice was quiet, “you got a quote for me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ain’t you gon’ tell me what some dead white man got to say ’bout this?”
Sam faked a smile. “You will be happy to know that I have lost a great deal of my faith in the ability of dead white men to explain what happens to us in this life.”
“Hallelujah,” said Ben. “Thank you, Jesus.”
Sam looked at him. “So what are you going to do?”
A sigh. “Don’t rightly know,” said Ben. “Maybe walk on with you. See if you have better luck when you find your wife. Lord know ain’t nothin’ for me here.”
