As if in answer to the unvoiced question, the tavern door swings open and Marse comes through, swaying like a tree in a storm. “There they go,” he says, staring after the departing federals. His voice is thick and mushy like porridge. “There they go, the rascals who killed my boy.”
His voice rises on the last words and for a crazy moment, she is afraid he is about to raise his rifle and shoot one of the federals in the back. Instead, he watches after them with his filmy eyes until they are gone. Then he shakes his head and steps down from the porch without a word. Tilda follows.
The rain has turned the street to mud. Tilda thinks it will be impossible for Marse to trail them now. She is wrong. Even though he totters like a
baby on new legs, he still does not hesitate. They walk for hours. The rain stops. She builds a fire. He goes out with his rifle, hunting dinner. Running doesn’t even cross her mind. At length he returns, a rabbit’s bloody carcass hanging by the ears from his fist. He hands it to her without a word, followed by a knife, settles himself against a tree, and closes his eyes.
She takes up the knife and goes to work skinning the hare. After a moment, Marse Jim begins to snore. The sound draws her and she pauses in her work to look. His chest rises and falls with a steady rhythm and she marvels that he can hand her a knife and then fall asleep, as if it has never even crossed his mind that she might bury the blade in that heaving chest all the way to its hilt. Then she realizes: the thought has not crossed her mind either, has it? Not a flicker of temptation, not an instant of inducement. Nothing. And he knew this about her, didn’t he? Knew it before she did. This is why he could give her a knife, then go to sleep.
She returns to her work, hands working with a brisk, mindless efficiency, lopping off the head, cutting sinew, separating fur from flesh. She is angry with herself, embarrassed by herself. When did she become so old? So old and riven with fear? She knows she has not always been this way, but she cannot recall when she was something other, cannot even remember what it must have been like.
Marse wakes to the sizzle of fat dropping into the flames. When the food is done, she hands him the makeshift spit. Without a word, he pries off a large piece of meat. She eats what remains. They sleep that night on the dirt.
The next morning, they come upon Wilson and Lucretia. They are sleeping in a clearing, curled together against the cold. Marse Jim raises his rifle. Tilda follows. Her throat is stiff like parchment. Her stomach is a rock. Wilson and Lucretia begin to stir at the sound of Marse Jim’s approach, slowly at first, then all at once as realization arrives like a thunderclap.
Wilson taps Lucretia’s shoulder. “Marse Jim,” he says, and there is gravity in his voice, none of the false cheer he usually uses to put white people at their ease.
“Think you can run out on me?” Marse Jim growls from behind the rifle.
Wilson says, “Marse, we is free now.” He is coming to his feet as he speaks. He never gets there. The rifle barks and the blast hurls him against a tree. He does not move.
Tilda does not realize she is screaming until the white man slaps her. “Shut up, goddamn you!”
He has thrown the rifle down, pulled a pistol from his belt and trains it now on Lucretia. She is shrieking, crouched over the bloody dead thing that was her Wilson less than a minute ago.
“Marse, don’t!” cries Tilda.
He does not acknowledge her. They stand frozen in that blood-stained tableau for a long moment, until finally Lucretia turns on Marse Jim. The hatred glares from her eyes with a force that is almost physical. “You ain’t had to do that,” she says. Her voice is scalding.
“Think you can run out on me?” he repeats.
She stands with deliberate slowness. “We’s
free
now,” she says. “You heard it same as we did.”
“Yankee lies.”
“How you talk? Wasn’t no Yankee told you that. Was a reb, one of your own kind.”
“Yankee
lies
,” he insists. “How are they goin’ to free
my
niggers? How are they goin’ to take from me something I paid good money for, something I bought fair and legal? I
own
you.”
“Don’t nobody own nobody no more. That’s the law now.”
‘You think I won’t kill you, just because you’re a woman?”
“You can kill me,” she says, and her voice is level, “but you can’t kill the truth. We is
free
now.”
His mouth works soundlessly. Then he shoots her. She looks down at the red hole blossoming in her stomach, then back up at him. She seems surprised. Her gaze falls on Tilda and there’s something else there. To Tilda’s horror, it is accusation. And then, close on that, pity. Lucretia’s legs give way and she crumples. Her eyes are still on Tilda. And then, they are on nothing.
“You didn’t have to shoot them,” Tilda hears herself say.
He brings the gun around. “Are you next?” he says. “Are you plannin’ to run out on me, too?”
It takes her a moment. Finally she says, “I’m just saying you didn’t have to shoot them, that’s all.” She resists an urge to squeeze her eyes shut against the coming muzzle flash.
It doesn’t come. He stares at her a long time. A very long time. Then he lowers the gun. “We’re goin’,” he says. He stoops to recover the rifle.
“We’re not going to bury them?” She is appalled that they will go to eternity with no one to speak words on their behalf.
“We’re goin’,” he repeats.
Still she does not move. “There was too much work on that place for four people,” she says. “How are we supposed to manage it with two?”
“We’re not goin’ back there,” he says, walking away from her.
“What?”
“We’re goin’ west,” he says. “Someplace new. I will not live in a country dominated by the Yankee race.” He is already halfway across the clearing.
She stands there for a long moment after he has disappeared, wrestling with the implications of what he has said. She is so tired. She feels as if the ground has risen up, taken her by the ankles, and will not let go. What a wonderful thing it would be to stop fighting it, just to stand here and never move again.
She looks around her. Wilson lies with his head against a tree, his chest a bloody mess, one leg drawn up in a grotesque posture of repose. Lucretia’s head lies at his feet, her eyes still staring down infinity. Tilda kneels and gently, gently, lowers Lucretia’s lids. Her hands linger there a moment, soft against the cooling skin. Then she stands and follows her owner.
It rained a lot.
It was a mean, cold rain that sent fingers of ice trickling down your back, into your shoes, that turned the roads into swamps. You had to make sure your shoes were tightly laced or the mud would suck them right off your feet, like meat right off a bone. The calendar said spring had arrived, but winter clung hard to the land. As did the war.
They began to see it as they inched south. The cratered farm fields, the black trees, the fields still so littered with Minié balls they crunched beneath your feet, the decomposing hand sticking up from a shallow grave as if the occupant were trying to claw himself free, eager to join one last doomed charge against one last sunken road. They saw it, too, in the mean, miserable eyes—white people’s eyes—that sometimes marked their passage, eyes that had taken in defeat and humiliation and hunger and did not yet know what to do with them. These things were still too new, too raw.
Resentment of those things leaked out of a white man who watched Sam and Ben go by from atop his roof, then went back to hammering wood across a hole left by shell shot. Out of a white woman with a plow who watched them pass, then went back to following a rangy mule across an unkempt and overgrown field. Out of a white boy who stood by the road, barefoot and dirty, in clothes that were little more than tatters, his eyes following them down.
A man approached them once, an imperious white man on a horse, with a Spencer carbine hanging from his saddle. His beard reached to the middle
of his chest, his teeth were the color of bark. “Who you niggers belong to?” he demanded.
“We belong to no one,” said Sam.
Ben got in front of him, blazing a path with that smile. Sam was coming to hate that smile. “What he mean to say is, us used to belong to the Pattersons down in Mi’sippi. Yankees come an’ got us. We tryin’ to make our way back there now. Get back to our white folks. Only true home us know.”
“I’ve some work needs to be done on my place,” said the man. “Hauling and patching and like that. Couple weeks worth. Pay you a dollar a day. You can sleep in the barn, take your meals on the back porch.”
A bow. “We thank you kindly for the offer, suh, but us is pow’ful eager to get back to Mi’sippi. See the Pattersons.”
The white man gave them a hard look. Ben smiled into it. Finally, the white man’s mouth twisted and he spurred the horse so abruptly Sam had to jump aside. “Free niggers,” the man muttered as he rode away.
At night, they found somewhere just off the road and made camp, eating whatever they could catch in the woods or beg from somebody’s back door. They rubbed and wrapped their feet, which had become hard where they were not blistered, the toenails turning black and peeling off, a hard ache hammering from inside the very bones.
And as they sat there they talked, mostly about how it would be, the things they would do, the lives they would build themselves, in this brave new time when nobody owned anybody anymore. It would be better, Sam said. Yes, white people would need some time to get used to the new order of things, but soon enough they would accept it. What choice did they have? Federal troops would be there to enforce federal authority. So while white people might not like it, they would soon enough get used to it, soon enough begin making work contracts with the people they had owned until just a few weeks ago. A black man would have a chance to put some money in his pockets, advance as far as his strength and ingenuity would carry him, sell his services to the highest bidder, move around as the mood struck him, maybe save and buy a piece of land all his own.
It would be good, he said. Ben would see.
“You still plannin’ on bein’ a Negro in this here new world?” Ben asked him one night.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, long as you’s a Negro you best get over this idea white folks gon’ ever treat you like a man.”
“They will give you the treatment you require of them,” said Sam. “Carry yourself as a man and they shall have no choice but to treat you as one.”
“You must done met some different white folks from the ones I been dealin’ with all my life,” said Ben. He chased it with a laugh.
The laugh irked Sam. He did not like being mocked. Then he thought of Billy Horn, and of the white man who snapped at him the night was Lincoln was shot, and of the boy soldier on the bridge. He said nothing.
Ben annoyed him sometimes, but on balance, Sam was grateful for the company. Sam Freeman was not the most voluble or social of men. Still, it was unthinkable to him that he might have spent these long hours trekking across unfamiliar woods and meadows and mountains and valleys with only his own company to entertain him, only his own thoughts to hear. Having Ben along made the journey easier.
Ben had run away from a plantation near Nashville seven years before. He said he had done it for his baby girl. Born and raised a slave, he had thought he’d made—
peace
wasn’t the right word, he said, but it was about as close as he could come—peace with his lot in life, with waking in the dark and returning in the dark and, in the hours between, being treated like a beast of burden. He had been, he said, sold like a horse, whipped like a horse, and worked like a horse. And he had accepted it, had taught himself to think as a slave must if he is to survive: expect nothing, want nothing, hope for nothing.
Then Leila was born and he made the mistake of holding her, of watching her stretch, tiny little hands balled into tiny little fists, then yawn and fall asleep, content, in her father’s arms. And his reserve broke, cracked open like river ice in the spring thaw. Because he could not abide the thought of her ever learning to expect, want, hope for, and get nothing.
He ran away a year later. He planned to find work in the North, save his money, and buy freedom for his daughter and her mother. Then the war came.
“If I only knew,” he told Sam. They were sitting at the fire, having eaten an evening meal of salted meat from Sam’s old haversack. “If I only knew. I would never have left them. I would have stayed there. I would have waited. We could have been together all along and then freed together. If I only knew.”
Sam recognized in the other man a guilt all too familiar to him, because he saw it reflected whenever he caught his own image in some pane of glass. It was a guilt that isolated you, made you alone. But Ben was not alone, was he?