Citizens Creek (14 page)

Cow Tom couldn’t calm his belly’s jitters. He might be only an hour away from Amy and his daughters. One final hour. But he also flashed on Bella, whether someone would claim her in Mobile and pack her off to some remote locale, whether her fate was to disappear into the bowels of Alabama, or into the Seminole-designated part of Indian Territory, or some other place he couldn’t guess.

He made the rounds, spreading the word, but those on board already sensed the change in the wind, and didn’t need telling they would soon dock. Everyone crowded the deck.

Cow Tom went back to the alcove, where Bella sat cross-legged on the floor. He’d given her one of the metal needles, and she mended a hole in his sock, drawing together coarse material, dipping the needle in and out until the gaps disappeared. She began to hum, soothing and sweet. As he lingered, she began an old lullaby, a song he remembered, the voice resonating deep in his marrow, and it poured into him like tonic. He needed no proof she was who he knew she was, that he hadn’t made her up out of some need to satisfy a boyhood invention, that her voice was indeed beautiful and the memory not false, and yet this song confirmed again everything for him.

She looked up. Her face brightened when she saw him, although her cheeks sank inward within her gaunt face, a markedly unhealthy effect. She’d taken off her scarf, and her coarse hair lay sweat-flattened against her head. Yet she looked at peace, the beginnings of a smile playing at her lips.

“You’ve let your things go to ruin,” she said.

“But now you’re here,” Cow Tom replied.

He watched Bella’s face close to him, her small smile evaporating. She dropped her head and slipped her full concentration into the loop of her stitches.

“We must prepare to go ashore soon,” Cow Tom said. “We’re almost at Mobile Point.”

With a resigned shrug, Bella put aside her mending and gath
ered her few things, including the blanket he’d given her, and followed him to the deck.

The inlet was wide, but a large ship headed out of the bay, and the
Paragon
gave it berth, maneuvering around, finally pulling alongside the dock where two stern military men kept vigil. As they drew closer to shore, neat stacks laid out on the flat of the wharf came into view. Cow Tom assumed them supplies, until he made out details.

They were bodies, dozens of them, placed with care in rows, head to toe, as if a checkerboard for a colossus.

They made no move to disembark. Only Schoolboy left the boat, and they all watched his lone figure descend down the gangplank. He talked to the military men for barely a few minutes, and returned directly back aboard. The
Paragon
lingered in Mobile Point for less than an hour, and only that to allow two men to go ashore to procure wood for the boilers, before the steamboat set out again for open sea.

Chapter 19

NERVOUS SPECULATION FAST
became all-out panic, from crew to military to Creek to black. Tangles of voices in a myriad of languages carried hysteria but little information, and by the time Cow Tom elbowed his way to the wheelhouse, Schoolboy was under siege, his face tight and closed to the assault of questioning. He spotted Cow Tom and waved him to his side.

“Calm them,” he demanded. “Dysentery and fever. Tell them the living are carried to Mississippi, where we go straightaway.”

Cow Tom obeyed, repeating the message time and again around the ship, as then did all the linguisters to their own constituents, but his thoughts were of Amy, whether she had transported to Mississippi or lay on the Mobile Point wharf. He tried to reassure, but his voice had gone shrill, and he couldn’t find the correct words in any language.

He left the rest to others, and set off to confront Bella. By all that was holy he would tell her about Amy, and his daughters, of his life with Chief Yargee, of his distress. Whether she responded or no, he meant to make her listen, to see him for who he was, to force the connection. He found her humming as she performed her fruitless sweep of the filthy floor. She cut him off before he could begin.

“Harry told me,” she said, and smiled, as if all was right with the world. “No Alabama.”

Harry’s name came easy to her, but not once since meeting had she uttered his.

His resolve vanished. Cow Tom turned on his heel and rushed out of the alcove, almost tripped by a split of firewood on the floor. He kicked at the log, unmindful of the alarm on Bella’s face. At the base of the narrow stairway leading to the deck, a hollow-cheeked young man bullied an older woman for her blanket, trying to pry it from her hands.

“Leave her be,” Cow Tom said.

“Who you think you are?” the man challenged.

Without a word, Cow Tom punched him square in the face, not once but several times, until the blood ran. He only came to himself when he felt the pain in his hand. The stunned man loosed his hold and backed away. The woman gave him a strange look, equal parts bafflement and gratitude, and settled her blanket more snugly around her. Cow Tom left them both and climbed topside. He claimed a place near the wheelhouse, where he spent the night in the cold and in his own silence, refusing anyone else’s problems.

Toward morning, a land-based lighthouse appeared in the distance, marking the point where the channel to Pass Christian began. The tapered brick structure rose out of the surf like a watchful parent. Buoys marked the outer turns in the muddy water, and the captain and crew went hard at it, guiding the
Paragon
in toward the Mississippi mainland.

His mind more stable, Cow Tom roused Harry and Bella, but didn’t encourage talk. Once again, they gathered their small bundles, as they had at Mobile Point, and flanked Bella at the railing, prepared to dock at Pass Christian. They waited, and this time, once ropes were secured and the plank attached to the wharf, they, along with the others, disembarked and followed the military men who met the boat.

As relieved as Cow Tom was to leave the
Paragon
and walk firm ground, his patience was scraped bare. The soldiers told them their
families were at a place called Henderson Point, and they trekked inland, coming at last to an enormous clearing, with tents and bark huts in every direction. There were thousands of Indians in a series of squalid, abutting villages. Cow Tom scanned for any familiar face in the vast landscape but saw none. Returned Creek warriors, informed to meet again tomorrow for the formalities of mustering out, began to canvas the encampment, looking for their own. The military corralled the Seminole slaves together, more careful now they were off the boat.

There were several white men milling about, watching the new arrivals. Cow Tom wasn’t sure if they were slavers or no, but he didn’t like the hungry way they eyed the gathering Negroes, as if waiting. One of them approached Schoolboy, gesturing with his hands in explanation of something, waving a paper as the slaver had in Tampa Bay.

Now or never.

Cow Tom broke off from the pack as the Creeks had, gently leading Bella by the arm, wading through the nearest thicket of tents, and Harry stayed close behind. Cow Tom caught Schoolboy’s eye, just a glance, but the soldier made no motion toward Bella, or acknowledgment at all, and kept talking to the white man, changing the position of his body a step to the left, enough so that when the man moved in response, he now had his back to Cow Tom and Bella. Cow Tom tucked his head and struck out.

They wound their way past filthy, dazed children and dispirited adults, most idle, all thin, lying on blankets by smoky campfires. Except for women cooking, there was little industry; no guns to hunt, no corn to plant, no livestock to tend. Henderson Point was a random re-sorting of Alabama Creek towns, squashed together, reconstituted on lesser land and devoid of supplies. He needed to find Upper Creek. He needed to find Chief Yargee.

They asked at tent after tent, following lackluster but conflicting directions of where the Upper Creek families from the Alabama River might be housed, without success. This search was no good,
there was no method to it, and now they were under no one’s gaze who might protect him, not Schoolboy, not Chief Yargee. And should Cow Tom fail, Bella had no chance.

When they came to a muddy crossing, more trickle than stream, Harry Island recognized an old man from his town, Negro, sitting in front of a crude shelter of blankets.

“Pompey?” asked Harry.

The man nodded. “Harry?” Pompey’s eyes were watery, as if burned by the sunlight. “Another brave just come through. All the Florida men back?”

“Brought us by steamboat,” said Harry.

“River’s high enough, then,” Pompey said. “Mayhaps they let us off here now.”

“You know Chief Yargee?” Cow Tom asked him. “Upper Creek? Alabama?”

The old man shook his head. “But bunches of Negroes back that way.”

He pointed off between a copse of trees, as good a place to look as any, and confident Harry had found his place, Cow Tom prepared to say his good-byes and continue his own search. As reluctant as he was to leave Harry behind, time was critical. There was no telling when or where slavers might appear.

“Good luck,” Harry said. He headed toward his master’s tepee, and Bella followed close behind him.

Cow Tom caught her by the arm to pull her away.

She balked. “No.”

He came closer and whispered in her ear. “If you don’t want to set loose slave catchers, you must stay quiet with me.”

Seminole and black alike from before the age of speech knew the importance of silence for survival. After years of pursuit in Florida, Bella was no exception. She went immediately docile, and Cow Tom led her away without further trouble.

They walked from camp to camp, but none of them was Yargee’s. Cow Tom wondered how long he could keep his own fear at
bay, and Bella from spooking. Already he had soaked through his shirt, despite the cold.

That’s when he saw her, from the rear, the round of her back so familiar, squatting at the cooking fire, her hair done up in cloth, two small children playing in the dirt nearby.

Amy.

Chapter 20

AMY WORE A
dirty, rough-weave cotton garment, hardly fit to call a dress, grayed to almost black, though it may once have been some other color. She turned in profile, and her cheeks were drawn and hollow, her feet bare, with winter already upon them.

“Amy?”

She found the focus of his face slowly, taking a while to register, as if it might be a trick. Her face showed a total tracking, first possibility, then fear of misidentification, then recognition and wonder. She seemed almost to levitate from her position by the fire, on her feet now.

The woman he left more than a year before hobbled toward him. She had a strip of bloody cloth wrapped around one foot, and winced each time she put weight on it, and he hurried to meet her, so intent was she on coming to him.

“Is it you, then?” she asked. “Is it you?”

When he got to her side, she leaned heavily on him. “We waited on you,” she said, and the trust in her voice pierced him.

Cow Tom was loath to take in the horror of this place, and willed it to background. Notwithstanding the fetid air that clung to the camp like fleas to a mangy dog, he took his first deep breath in over a year, something wrong righted. He’d seen all this before, the cramped camps, the filth, the idleness, the hunger, the sickness, and yet Amy in the midst worsened the impact tenfold. Cow Tom
pressed a piece of jerky he’d liberated from the ship into Amy’s hand, another excuse to touch her.

“We saw bodies at Mobile Point,” said Cow Tom. “I thought you . . .” He couldn’t make himself finish.

“We are well enough,” said Amy. “Compared to others. Though death and misery follow close wherever we go.”

She took his hat from his head, to get a better look, following the curve of his face with her fingers as if there were only the two of them on this earth. She flinched.

“What’s happened to your ear?” she asked, alarmed, touching the nubbed rim for the first time of many.

“Osceola,” he said, but the name meant nothing to her.

Amy called to the two small girls, ragged and dirty. They came immediately to her side, the older holding the hand of the younger. Each clutched a different part of Amy’s dress, hiding behind the skirt, peeking out. His daughters were bigger than he remembered, raw-boned and caked in mud. Malinda. Maggie. His heart broke and mended itself, seeing them thus. Alive.

“Girls, your father’s come.”

They seemed almost afraid, but Amy pushed them forward, and he touched each on the head, amazed by the wiry force of each. With one hand, Amy waved a circle in the air, encompassing all of them, and spit on the ground.

Cow Tom eased Amy to sitting, as the girls behind stared. Only after did Amy notice the frail woman standing at Cow Tom’s elbow.

“This is Bella,” Cow Tom said. “She came on the
Paragon
too.” Cow Tom dug out another plug of jerky. “Bella, take this over yonder and split it with my girls.”

Bella brightened, and took them off a small distance, within sight, but not hearing. Bella’s manner with the girls pleased him, and Cow Tom squatted next to Amy.