Freeman, page 42
For the first time, she smiled. It was small and it was bruised, but it was hopeful, too, and relieved. All in all, thought Sam, her smile was one of the saddest and most beautiful things he had ever seen.
“Can you ride?” he asked.
She nodded. He braced her as best he could as she climbed into the saddle. When she was seated, he went to Abraham and offered his hand. “I want to thank you again,” he said. “Thank you for everything. Were it not for you…” He let the thought peter away, unable to speak the words.
Abraham shook his hand. “Take care of yourself, my friend,” he said, through his big smile. “Take care of her.”
“I will,” said Sam.
Abraham glanced up at Tilda. “I see why you were unwilling to give up on her,” he said, and mischief had entered his smile.
Sam shook his head. “No you don’t,” he said. “There is more. There is much more.”
He clapped Abraham on the shoulder, then went around and muscled himself up on the horse behind Tilda. Her face was tense, her eyes scanning the street. Well, soon enough they would be gone and she could put the fear behind her. He reached around and took the reins, turned the horse, and went down the street at a trot.
Abraham Lincoln Jones watched after them until they had disappeared and then for a few minutes more after that. Maybe he had been wrong about Sam Freeman. He had thought Sam too wrought up in a useless quest to ever be of much use to the race. But maybe there was no quest more important than to simply return to the embrace of love. And maybe, in his hopefulness and his stubborn perseverance, both of them now vindicated by the miracle Jones had just seen, Sam offered the race an example that would be invaluable in coming days.
At least, thought Jones with a private smile, that was how he would write the story. He pulled out his watch. If he hurried, he just had time to get it in the next paper.
For the next few hours, Jones worked at his desk, writing out the account of meeting Sam, helping him place his notice, secretly feeling that here was an impossible quest, then Tilda showing up in the offices of The Freedman’s Voice, his own mad dash down the street, and finally, the touching conclusion, the moment when the star-crossed lovers were reunited after 15 long years.
He would have to punch that part of the narrative up a bit, he thought, his pen flying across paper. Was it simply his imagination, or hadn’t the woman Tilda seemed more filled with fear of this “Marse Jim” character than with joy of seeing Sam again?
No matter. In the narrative, her happiness at being unexpectedly returned to her one true love would leap off the page. He would see to it.
It was after six and the streets outside had cleared away to emptiness by the time he was done writing and typesetting. The headline told the tale:
Former Bondman Finds His Truelove (With the Help of The Voice).
It made him smile to think of how the story would give hope to so many people. He couldn’t wait until it was in the paper. He was eager for their reactions.
Jones was reaching for his composing stick when he heard the door open. He came around the printing press, wearing the ink-smeared apron he always wore when putting the paper together, and found himself facing a smelly, unshaven white man who regarded him with naked malice from beneath the brow of his slouch hat.
The white man had a rifle cradled in one arm and with his free hand, he held up a copy of The Freedman’s Voice. “You the one publishes this rag?” His voice was like rocks in a barrel.
Jones made himself smile. “I am A.L. Jones,” he said, “just as it says on the window. And who might you be, sir?” But he already knew, instinctively, who this white man was, and his eyes grazed the pistol he kept under the counter. From where he stood, Jim McFarland couldn’t see it. Jones wondered if he could reach it without arousing suspicion.
“I am Captain James McFarland,” said the white man. “You took something that belongs to me, and I’ll have it back.”
Jones freshened the smile. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir,” he said, coming forward as naturally as he could manage.
“That’s far enough,” said McFarland. He gestured with the rifle, not even bothering to move it from the crook of his arm, where it nestled in gleaming dark malice.
“I was just going to ask if you were sure you had the right place,” said Jones, eyes darting toward the pistol.
“Don’t toy with me, nigger. I got the right place, all right.”
Still smiling, Jones said, “Well, then, perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me what it is I am supposed to have taken from you.”
“Nigger wench. Goes by the name Tilda. Some buck looking for her put a notice in your paper. Next thing I know, she’s disappeared.”
Jones scratched his chin. “Tilda? I’m sorry, sir, name doesn’t ring a bell.”
Jim McFarland’s voice was thunder from a cloudless sky, a blast that startles all the more for having come out of nowhere. “I told you don’t toy with me!” he roared. “Think I’m a fool, nigger? Now you got one chance to keep your head on them shoulders of yours: tell me where they went. Tell me everything you know.”
Jones swallowed, then found his smile again. “Well, sir,” he said, “perhaps if you be kind enough to show me the notice.” Desperate. Playing for time. The pistol under the counter just a step or two away.
McFarland gave him a look of dark suspicion, then slammed the paper down. Jones was grateful for that, because it gave him an excuse to come forward to the counter. His left hand finally closed on the reassuring shape of the pistol grip even as he studied the notice with feigned concentration.
“Oh, yes sir,” he said. “I remember this. A Mr. Sam Freeman placed this ad a week ago. Said he was lookin’ for this woman, Tilda. He waited around town for ’most a week, come in here every day to check if I heard any answer, which I haven’t. He came for the last time yesterday, say he wasn’t going to tarry ’round here any longer. Said he’s going back home.”
“Where’s that? Home?”
“Philadelphy,” said Jones.
McFarland pondered this. Jones wondered if there was a way to pull back the hammer of the pistol without the white man hearing. Maybe he could shoot him without the raising the gun, shoot him right through the counter. The pistol was slimy in his grip.
McFarland said, “You’re lying.”
“What do you mean, sir?” He gave the white man the roundest eyes he could.
“I mean, no buck comes all the way down here, goes through all that time and trouble looking for a woman, and stays for only six days. No, he’s here. He’s either in Little Rock or someplace close, but he sure ain’t gone to Philadelphy. Not yet. She means too much to him.”
“Well, sir, I can’t say as I’d know. All I do is take the money and put the notice in the paper.” Still smiling.
“What about the woman? She come in here?”
“No, sir. Haven’t seen a woman in here all day. Sure would like to, though. Make the day go faster.” He hoped his smile suggested lascivious thoughts. A certain kind of white man, he had found, liked it when colored men spoke sex to them. He was reasonably sure this foul-smelling reb was one of them.
But Jim McFarland barely seemed to hear him. To Jones’s horror, he was picking idly through the items strewn across his desk. One of them was the tablet on which he had written out the new story for tomorrow’s front page. He could still see the lead in his head: “Two star-crossed lovers, both former slaves, were reunited yesterday in Little Rock and your own Freedman’s Voice played a critical role.” And further down, it told how Sam had spent three months walking in the South looking for Tilda, how he had sojourned recently in a town called Buford, in Mississippi.
His lungs stopped sucking down air. He saw McFarland snatch up the tablet. He saw the white man’s lips moving, reading the story. Then he saw the piggish eyes abruptly narrow. McFarland’s head was coming up, the rifle was rising, his mouth was already curled around whatever cruel triumph he was about to yell.
Hurry.
Jones’s hand fumbled for the pistol and he brought it up, cocking the hammer as it came. He managed to clear the desk, managed to sight the center mass of the man before him. He had time to see McFarland’s eyes go wide. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
But the blast that filled the small space came from Jim McFarland’s rifle instead.
The bullet ripped through Jones like fire. Felt like it had taken his shoulder off. His legs turned in a corkscrew motion, twisting around one another, and he went down to the floor, which was littered with scrap paper and stray pieces of type. He found himself at eye level with the spittoon he never used. There was blood everywhere. Jones thought he might vomit. His heart thumped heavily in his ears.
Then he heard McFarland’s measured steps, coming around the counter. All Jones could see of him was his boots, gray with age, brown with muck. Jones’s left hand sought his right shoulder, the pistol dropped somewhere and forgotten. The hand touched something spongy and wet, embedded with sharp edges that he supposed were bone. If he lived, he thought, he would surely lose the arm.
But he didn’t think he would live.
“Almost had me goin’, boy,” said McFarland, kneeling into Jones’s field of vision. “Guess I forgot what natural liars niggers can be.”
Jones’s leg kicked, a spasm. “So he went back to Buford, eh?” said McFarland. “Well, that works out just fine for me, I suppose. Been thinkin’ about goin’ back home anyway. Be able to kill two birds with one stone.”
Jones’s leg spasmed again, and this time didn’t stop. Lying on the floor, he danced a macabre jig to music only his leg could hear. He tried to speak, but the sounds he made were nothing like language. Blood bubbled, coppery and hot, on his lips.
McFarland stood. He prodded Jones’s wrecked shoulder with the toe of his boot. “Could have spared yourself all this,” he said. “Should have told me where they went.”
He stepped out of Jones’s view. Jones heard his feet scraping across the floor, doing what, he could not guess. For a moment there was silence, but for the knocking of his own leg as it bounced madly against the floor.
Then, in a distracted voice to himself, Jim McFarland spoke the last words Abraham Lincoln Jones would ever hear. “Need to get me a horse,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
They were an hour out of Little Rock. This was the first time she had spoken to him unprompted since they left Abraham Lincoln Jones standing in front of his newspaper office. The realization that he had no answer took Sam by surprise.
For three months, he had been driven forward, whipped by a single imperative: find her. Thinking beyond that had never even occurred to him. Now here she was, real and in the flesh and there, asking the obvious question. He gave the first answer that entered his head, hoping it sounded like something he had planned all along.
“We are going North to Philadelphia,” he said. “I was recently employed at a library there and perhaps I can get my situation back. That is,” he added cautiously, “if you are of a mind to travel that far.”
“Philadelphia would be fine,” she said. “Marse Jim hates the North. He will never come looking for me there.”
“What does it matter if he does?” asked Sam. “I keep telling you: the North won the war. He has no legal authority over you.”
She snickered. “Legal authority,” she said. And then, she said nothing more.
Sam’s first thought was to ask what she meant. He chose silence instead. It seemed wiser. No, it seemed safer.
Silence had ridden hard between them all the way out of Little Rock. It occurred to him that he was riding with a stranger. Once, he had known her so intimately. Once, the contours of her face, her breasts, her mind, had been as familiar to him as the breath in his lungs. Now she had become this…foreigner, as distant and unknowable as the moon.
For this, he had walked a thousand miles, lost his arm, been beaten and stabbed? Sam pursed his lips to keep the questions inside.
They ambled east in the silence. Another hour passed. Sam lost himself in wondering where they would stop for the night. If they were fortunate, they would find an abandoned barn, or perhaps even a colored family that didn’t mind taking in strangers. If they were not fortunate, they would be obliged to sleep in a clearing or a field somewhere.
“Would you be willing to take me to the place where Luke died?”
The sound of her voice surprised him. She had turned in the saddle and was looking up at him. Her eyes were disconcerting.
“Likely, it will be difficult to find,” he said. The mention of their dead son unsettled him. He wondered, guiltily, if this was the moment she would cry and accuse him of getting their boy killed. He braced for it, but it didn’t come. All she said was, “Would you be willing to try? I would like to see it.”
He heard himself say yes. And he realized, somewhat to his surprise, that he wanted to see it, too.
They stopped for the night an hour later. For a dollar drawn from the dwindling supply of coins Prudence had given him, a colored widow in a little town without a name allowed them to use one of her two rooms, moving her two children into the other room for the night. She fed them a dinner of poke salad and beans.
In the room, Tilda went straight to the bed and stretched out on her back, eyes closed. Sam didn’t even consider joining her. He used the haversack as a pillow and laid himself on the rough boards of the floor. After a moment, he heard Tilda snoring lightly. He lay awake, wondering if this were not all a mistake.
Love never fails.
He reminded himself of this. But still, he wondered.
Morning came. The woman fixed them corn cakes and eggs. Before Sam and Tilda set off, she stuffed a few extra corn cakes in Sam’s haversack for lunch. They set out at an easy pace. Sam was worried about tiring the horse, which now had to bear the weight of two.
Another long, silent time passed. Finally Sam had had enough. He said, “I do not recall you being so quiet.”
“Fifteen years is a long time,” she said.
He waited for her. When she didn’t say anything more he said, “And what does that mean?”
“It means what it says,” she said. “Fifteen years is a long time. Many things change.”
Many things change.
Three words and suddenly, it was if his heart had fallen out of his chest. From the first day he set out upon this quest, he had cautioned himself not to hope, even a little, that they could restore what had once existed between them, had told himself he was looking for her only because he owed her that much. But he realized now that he must have been hoping without even knowing he was doing it, because her words made him dizzy with pain. He wondered if he was about to become Ben standing in that alley, trying to laugh the truth away even as the hope that had sustained him for so many hard miles spilled like water around him.
It crushed him to think maybe now the same thing was happening to him. It crushed him to think maybe she did not love him anymore.
Sam swallowed. “‘Many things change,’” he repeated, and his voice sounded log hollow in his own ears. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
He persisted. He couldn’t help himself. “I just wish to know to what you are referring. I believe I have the right to—”
That was as far as he got. She spun around, her face close to his in the confines of the saddle, her eyes hateful, her features razored. “I have been raped and I have been beaten!” she cried. “Do you hear me? Raped and beaten over and over again! I am sorry if I am not very amusing company for you, Sam Prentiss or Sam Freeman or whatever it is you call yourself now. But I am afraid I don’t feel very sociable these days! Do you understand? Is that all right with you?”
Sam’s mouth opened to release a stunned silence. It must have satisfied her, because she turned back, her hands pinned beneath her arms, her head hunched down as if against a stark, cold wind. She looked as if she wanted to curl up inside herself, crawl into the shadows, and die. A silence intervened. Then she spoke again.
“And if you were thinking we might lie together, if that is why you came after me”—her voice was stripped like bark from a tree down to some grim and plain essence of itself—“you can forget it. If that was your intention, Sam, we can part company here and I will walk. I swear I will.”
“That was not my intention,” he said. And it wasn’t. He spoke these words absently. The truth is, he barely heard her. He’d barely heard anything—not words, not cawing of crows, not clopping of horse’s hooves—since she’d spoken those stunning, poisonous words that should not have surprised him but somehow did anyway.
Raped and beaten. Over and over again.
And why not? Why should this be a shock? Miss Prentiss had never allowed that sort of thing on her place, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Of course it happened. Only the fact that they had been spoiled by a mistress who believed in treating even colored people like people had ever allowed him to forget that. But then, Tilda had been sold to this James McFarland person and her luck had changed and she had lost the luxury of forgetting. Apparently, this McFarland had practiced every form of cruelty and mistreatment they had previously been fortunate enough to escape. And Tilda had suffered that without him. Suffered it alone.
He gazed down at her shoulders, wanted to touch them, but did not. She seemed…shrunken. Her chin was on her chest and she still held herself tightly as if afraid she might otherwise unravel, the shreds and tangles of her unspooling all over this delta land east of Little Rock.
“I am sorry,” he heard himself say.
If she heard, she gave no indication. Seen from behind, she might have been carved from stone. Sam fell silent. And in silence, they passed the remains of the day. They rode past mangled train tracks and blooming fields. They forded streams whose cold, clear water grazed the horse’s belly. It was just before twilight when they reached the broad brown back of the Mississippi and paid a ferryman to take them across. They made camp in a clearing that night.
