“You left your child,” Sam told him softly. “I killed mine.”
Ben had been staring into the fire. Now, slowly, he raised his eyes. “What did you say?”
Had it really been 15 years? Suddenly it seemed like last night, the details crisp as fall leaves. The boy, watching from corners as his parents argued over freedom. Tilda asking why Sam couldn’t leave well enough alone. They had a better life than colored had any right to expect, had plenty food to eat, a mistress who didn’t curse them or require inhuman amounts of work from them, who made sure her people were adequately fed and clothed, who didn’t believe in whipping and selling or separating families, who even taught her slaves to read and allowed them access to books.
Tilda, pleading. Talk to slaves from any other owner, she said, and they would tell you how rare that was. “We have everything here,” she said.
And himself, how smug he was. “Everything but freedom,” he replied. The boy, still watching silently from corners, looking so much like his mother, nodding sagely at that.
Sam answered Ben. “I said, I killed my boy,” he said.
“How?”
The boy, coming to him the damn fool night before he did the damn fool thing, declaring himself. Saying, “Papa, I want to be free, too.” Looking up at him with Tilda’s eyes
.
“I had the same plan you did,” Sam told Ben. “To run away, save some money and buy my family. But my son—Luke was his name—wanted to come with me. I should have told him no.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I did not. We argued about that, his mother and I.”
Tilda, eyes flashing. “Are you out your mind? He’s just a boy.”
“What she say?” asked Ben.
“She said he was too young.”
“What you say?”
The question brought a rueful smile. “I said, ‘No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he
is in enjoyment of his reason.’” He smiled again, this time at the confusion on Ben’s face. “A fellow named Diderot said that,” he explained. “He was French. Tilda and I…she was like me when it came to reading.”
“I see,” said Ben. “And readin’, I guess that explain why you talk like you do. ’Most white.”
“Our mistress had very…radical ideas. She allowed Tilda to learn to read. Tilda taught me. We quoted books to each other all the time.”
“And did this French man you quoted her, did he make her change her mind?”
Sam’s hand, flying to his cheek, cupping the sting
.
“She slapped me,” he said.
“But that ain’t stop you,” said Ben. He was feeding branches and twigs onto the fire.
Sam shook his head. “No. She begged me not to take him, but that also failed to persuade me. He was 14 and I felt that was old enough for him to know what he wanted to do, old enough to decide if he wanted to make a try for his freedom. She said…”
For a moment, he couldn’t go on. He paused, looking back 15 years into her desperate eyes. They were pleading with him to listen. Just, for once…
listen
. But he couldn’t do that. Not him.
Sam broke away from her eyes, forced himself back into the here and now, forced himself to finish the sentence. “She said I was going to get us both killed.” What followed came out of him in a whisper. “Sometimes, I wish I
had
gotten us both killed, instead of just him.”
The words fell into a silence broken only by the hiss of the damp wood—the rain had finally stopped—feeding the smoky fire. What was there to say? Hadn’t she said it all so long ago? Wasn’t the truth of it proven now, irrefutable now?
Of course, he hadn’t known that then. He had been wounded by her prediction, had drawn himself up and said righteously, “He’s dying every day, just being a slave. If I have to choose between dying slowly as that woman’s property or dying fast trying to be free, I’ll chose the last one every time.”
He had stared at her, daring her to respond, but she had not. For a long moment, they had only watched one another from either side of this gulf that had suddenly opened between them. After a time, she folded her arms over her heart and walked away.
And that had been that, effectively the last words that ever passed between them: her awful prediction, his smug reply. They were still not speaking to one another shortly after midnight that same evening when he gathered their son and slipped away with him, the two of them melting together into the impenetrable darkness of the moonless night. At the last moment, Sam glanced behind him to see her, just a shape, just a different shade of shadow in the blackness, standing in the doorway, arms still barricading her chest, watching them go.
“We ran away that night,” said Sam.
“You weren’t afraid the boy would slow you down?”
“Initially I was. As it turned out, I should have been worried I would slow him down. Luke could run for hours and never get tired. He wanted his freedom, you see. He desired it as deeply as I did, perhaps more.”
“How long before they come for you?”
“Two days.” Pause. “It was the best two days of my life.”
He remembered thinking that he had never really known his son before. How could he? When had he had the time? Sam working the fields all day, his son a houseboy waiting on Mistress and her seven children til all hours of the night. When had they had the time to be just father and son, fishing, talking, roughhousing with one another?
So it was hard not to smile some at the memory of those days alone with his boy. Running for their lives, mind you. Running to escape. But they had laughed as they had never laughed before, Luke imitating Mistress and all those children and their airs and pretensions with devastating accuracy. Late on the night of their second full day of freedom—the
last
night, as it turned out—they had even wrestled upon a carpet of fallen leaves to settle the question of which of them was the strongest. Sam had been surprised at the strength of his young son’s limbs. Just yesterday, the boy had been thigh high and clinging to his mother’s skirts. Now look at him, tall and straight and strong enough to make his father sweat a little, to make the veins pop out on his father’s arms, before finally giving up. And Sam looking down at him and smiling a private smile, knowing all at once it wouldn’t be long before he wouldn’t be able to pin the boy anymore.
Afterward, they had talked as they lay on their backs and watched the stars make their nightly pinwheel across the heavens.
“Where are we going to, Papa?”
“North.”
“Where in the North, Papa?”
“The Ohio River. You cross that into Ohio.”
“Ohio is in the North?”
“Yes. It’s free there.”
“How long will it take us?”
“Long time. We have a long way to go.”
“But we’ll be free there?”
“Yes.”
He was increasingly confident about that. Sam had forged traveling passes to help him get past any skeptical whites who stopped him and demanded to know what he was about. He had started out on a Friday night and it wouldn’t be until Monday that Mistress could place an advertisement in the paper or have handbills printed up. And it was whispered that there were white people who would help you, who would hide you in their homes, transport you in their wagons. There was said to be such a man in the next county north. Sam just had to find him, that’s all. It was the great unknown of this entire gamble, but if Sam could solve it, he thought they had a reasonable chance of getting away.
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do when you’re free?”
Sam had felt himself smiling in the dark. “Find work,” he said, “and save some money.”
“You’re going to get Mama?”
“Yes,” he said. “Mind you, it’s going to take a while, take a long time. But I’ll save some money and we’ll go back for your mother.”
“Why didn’t she want to come with us?”
The question made Sam’s chest tighten. “She was scared,” he said. “She thought we might get caught.”
“She likes it there.”
It took him by surprise. “No,” he said, “that is not it. She just…it’s just…sometimes, it is easier to stay with something you know, even if you don’t like it. It can be frightening to change.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“Are you scared?”
He considered this a moment. “A little,” he finally said, “but I’m excited, too.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you brought me.”
This struck some deep chord in him. “I am, too,” he said. “Now, go to sleep.” And they both did.
“The dogs woke us up the next morning,” he told Ben, and it seemed he could still hear them baying in the distance, still feel the freezing sweat that coated his skin in the early chill. They never had a chance. By the time he shook Luke awake and came to his feet, they were surrounded by white men.
There were six of them and they looked enough alike—dark hair, long noses, close-set eyes—that Sam knew right away they were related. A family of slave catchers. Four of them were on horseback and the other two held the leashes on a brace of bloodhounds, the dogs straining forward, barking excitedly. Three of the men on horseback held pistols trained on Sam and Luke. The oldest of the group, the one Sam took for the father, had his pistol holstered and sat his horse as casually as if he were bored.
Luke said, “Papa…” His eyes were wide and panic edged his voice.
“You had a good run, Perseus,” the older man told Sam. “Time to go back.”
“No!” The defiance in Luke’s shout took Sam by surprise. “No!” he cried again, “we’re not going back!”
Sam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Luke, hush,” he said. “We haven’t any choice.”
The man said, “You should listen to your daddy, boy. He knows what’s best.”
Luke turned to him then, and Sam knew the boy was waiting for him to give the word, tell him what they would do, tell him they would not just give in. His son’s eyes right then broke Sam’s heart forever. They searched him and did not see what they were looking for. They searched him and found him wanting. The failure melted them, urgency puddling into disillusionment.
The boy didn’t understand. You don’t resist when there are six men with guns and horses and you have nothing in your hands but the flesh that covers them. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is submit. Sam wanted to
say this to his son, wanted to say
something
to his son. He hesitated, looking for words. And then the chance was gone.
Luke ran.
It was a forever moment, one that stretched from then til now til always, one Sam still saw in dreams. The boy, arms and legs churning toward the trees, the dogs barking and pulling at their leashes, the gun coming up, Sam crying his son’s name, turning to go after him. In dreams, sometimes, he made it. In dreams, sometimes, he got there in time, brought Luke down before anything could happen. In dreams, sometimes, he saved his son’s life.
But in memory, there was a shot that caught Luke in midstride. One instant his arms and legs working in coordination, carrying him away. Then a bang that echoed, that made birds on the high branches take wing, and each of Luke’s arms and legs was on its own, out of sync, flying in different directions from the center mass of him.
Sam was running before his son hit the ground.
Oh Lord, no. Oh Lord, no
.
Oh, Lord
.
But there it was, right between the boy’s shoulder blades, a tiny, ragged red hole. Sam turned his son. The life was already draining from the boy’s eyes like sand. “Luke, I’m right here.”
The eyes found him. Luke said, “Papa…” Then the eyes lost their focus and Sam was looking down on a dead thing that one breath ago had been his son.
It would not register. His mind would not take it in. He kept working it like it was a math problem and he couldn’t get the sums to line up properly. Sam shook his son, gently at first, then insistently, then desperately, crying out his name. Behind him, the slave catchers cursed at their brother.
“Goddamn it, Zach, how many times we have to tell you to think before you act?”