She opens the door. The night is warm. A thoughtful moon has lit her path.
And there it is, freedom. One step away, two at the most. She could run down from this porch, run down that road. She could disappear and then…
And then…
And then.
Nothing. She cannot imagine, cannot see in her mind, what would happen next. Cannot
trust
what would happen next in the way you cannot trust jumping from a high bridge into cold, deep water. And she needs that, needs to be able to trust.
She tries not to need it. She commands her foot to take a step. For a moment, it actually hovers in midair over the threshold of Mrs. Lindley’s front door. Then it comes down, right where it was.
Tilda turns away from the door, closes it behind her. She is cursing herself, raging at herself, wondering when and how she became this weak, timid creature she now seems to be. She wasn’t like this always. What happened to her? What went out of her? Where has it gone?
She has her head down, but all at once, she is aware of being watched. Tilda raises her eyes and there is Mrs. Lindley, standing at the bottom of the stairwell. She carries a candle in a candleholder and by its light and that of the moon, her face is easily visible. Disgust and, Tilda thinks, disappointment mingle there.
She shakes her head and breathes a single word. “Niggers,” she says. And then she turns and climbs the stairs, leaving Tilda alone with Marse Jim and the moon.
Tilda bent down over him and her eyes brimmed. “Sam?” Her voice was soft as a new morning. “Sam, what have you done to yourself?”
He tried to answer, but dust was lodged in his throat. He coughed, made himself swallow. “I have not done anything to myself,” he said, finally. He spoke in a grainy whisper. “Someone did this to me. Someone shot me.”
“You should be more careful. What were you doing out there in the first place?”
“What do you
think
I was doing?” He coughed again. “I was looking for you.”
Her eyes grew even more tender. “Oh, Sam,” she said. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand. He
felt
this, her touch cool and dry against the side of his face. “Oh, Sam,” she repeated. “Is that what you’re doing? You poor man. You’re never going to find me, Sam. Go back home. You’re
never
going to find me.”
He became angry with her for saying it and that started him coughing again, a violent hawking that made his chest ache. “Do not say that,” he said. “I will find you. I
will
.”
She shook her head, and her brow creased as if disagreeing with him caused her pain. “No you won’t,” she said softly. “You were mad to think you would. You’ll never see me again.”
“Do not say that!” He was crying and didn’t care. “Tilda,” he said. He tried to reach out to her, but for some reason, he could not. He settled for repeating her name. “Tilda.”
She stood erect, gazing down on him. “And look what you’ve done to yourself,” she said with faint reproach.
“What do you mean? What have I done?”
In reply, she only nodded toward the left side of him. He looked. His arm was gone.
And he didn’t care. “Tilda,” he said, turning back to her. “Tilda.” But she was gone, too.
Sam awoke stretched out atop a long wooden table in a room that stank of food, urine, and unwashed men. No light entered. He had no idea when it was. Sam tried to rise and discovered that he couldn’t. It was as if body and mind had become disconnected somehow. The thought washed a wave of panic over him and he fought it down. Panic would accomplish nothing. He forced himself to assess himself and his surroundings. He found he could move his head, so he did that. First to the right, where a blackened pot hung suspended above the embers of a dead fire. Then straight above him, where heavy black timbers supported a roof.
A voice said, “Look like your friend is awake.”
The voice came from his left and Sam’s head came around, looking for its source. He tried to speak, but his mouth, too, seemed disconnected.
Just as Sam felt the panic rising in him again like bile, Ben’s face swam into view. Ben was smiling and Sam knew instinctively that it was false, for his benefit. Worry pinched the edges of Ben’s eyes. “Mornin’,” he said. “Had us worried about you.”
Where am I?
Sam heard the thought clearly in his mind. His throat produced only a raspy croak. “Easy now,” said Ben. “Don’t try to speak.”
“Where…?” Finally the croak resolved itself into a word.
“You was shot,” said Ben.
And now, another face came to hover above him. This face was dark like Ben’s, but younger; it had a moustache and was topped by a thick ruffle of curly black hair. “Can you talk?” the new face asked. “How you feeling?”
“This here Josiah,” said Ben. “He helped me get you here.”
The other man opened his mouth to say something to Sam, but didn’t. Instead, he told Ben: “I don’t think he listening no more.”
Sam wondered what he meant. Then the world shimmered and turned gray, and it was as if he were watching them through a rain-streaked window. Darkness fell.
Sam could not say how many hours more had passed when his eyes came open again. He lifted his head, grateful that he could. Ben, who was sitting in a chair next to the table, saw this and called out, “Josiah! He awake again.”
“Where am I?” asked Sam. He was pleased this time to hear himself speak the words out loud, albeit in a voice so raspy he barely recognized it as his own.
Ben smiled. “Ain’t rightly sure, tell you the truth. Might maybe still be in Virginia. Might be done crossed over into Tennessee.”
Sam heard the other man enter the room. “Y’all in Tennessee all right,” he said, standing opposite Ben, both of them looking down at Sam. “This here used to be slave quarters on the Jameson place. Him and his missus run away to the west in the war, took they slaves with ’em. Nobody seen ’em in a couple years. Whole place abandoned. You ought to be safe here for a while.”
“Safe from what?” asked Sam. His voice felt a little stronger.
“Well actually,” said Josiah, “not so much you as me. Ain’t nobody huntin’ you. It’s me they after.”
“Why are they after you?”
A grimness came into Josiah’s affable eyes then. “Told your friend here earlier, while we’s waitin’ for you to wake up. I slaved over on the next place, Marse Edward’s place. And his old mean wife tryin’ to keep my daughter, even though slave times is over. They don’t mean to give her back to me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just that. Durin’ the war, I run away with the Union when them soldier boys come through here and I fought with them. When I come home after surrender, first thing I done was go to Miss Polly—she Marse Edward’s wife, the one who had my daughter. Woman was always crazy for Lizzie Sue for some reason. Never had no girls of her own, only them six devil boys. Kept my Lizzie Sue in that big house of hers like a pet for years. Hardly never let her even come to see us—me and Nettie, that’s my wife.
“So the day I come home from the war, I rides up to the house and I knocks on her door, nice as you please. Miss Polly opens it and I tells her I’se come for Lizzie Sue. I says, ‘Time for her to be with her mama and me now. We’s free now, Miss Polly. Her belong to us.’ And you know that woman wouldn’t give me my child? First she try sweet-talkin’, beg me to let
her keep her ‘little nigger.’ That’s what she call her. Say, ‘I take care of her like she my own, educate her and everything.’”
Josiah imitated the white woman’s voice as a thin, grating whine. “She tell one of them sons of hers, ‘Go fetch my little nigger one of them blue-back Websters so I can teach her to read.’”
“But you told her no,” said Ben. It was a statement, not a question. His jaw was clenched and Sam knew he was thinking of his own child.
“’Course I did,” said the other man. “And that’s when them sons of hers—like I say she had six, but the war left her with three—they come to the door with they guns and run me off. We been shootin’ at each other ever since. I got one of them—Matthew, that’s her youngest. He tried to bushwhack me when I come back to the house a second time. Took a shot at me, but he missed. I shot back and I ain’t missed. Killed him dead. So they really means to get me now. And I means to get my daughter.”
“Don’t blame you,” said Ben. “Ain’t nobody with no sense could blame you.”
“Yes,” said the other man, “but it done got bigger than I ever thought. Mos’ part of a week now, we been fightin’. That’s how you got shot,” he told Sam. “They seen you poke your head out them woods, thought you was me. You might have bled to death, ’cept I heard the shot and went lookin’, found your friend draggin’ you back through the trees. Got you back here and sent word to Mose—that’s a colored man I know used to help a reb surgeon during the war. He come out here and fixed you up best he could. I’se purely sorry you got hurt so bad ’cause of me. Nothin’ I can do about it, but I’se sure sorry.”
“My arm,” said Sam, abruptly remembering Tilda. He looked over and it was true. His left arm ended at the elbow, the stump of it wrapped in white cloth spotted with blood. The sight was plainly impossible. It could not be and yet, there it was.
Half his arm,
gone
.
“Mose said they was no way to save it,” said Josiah. “Said them Minié balls, when they hit a bone, they just tear it up something fierce. Said only thing you could do is just cut it off.”
“But I can still
feel
it,” said Sam. Indeed, close his eyes and it might still be there. It prickled like he had laid on it for hours, crimping the blood flow. Occasionally, a sharp pain even stabbed through it. But how could that be, if it wasn’t even there? Sam wondered if he was going mad.
No, not “going.” He wondered if he had already made the trip.
“They say that happen sometime,” said Josiah. “Cut off a part of the body and it’s like your brain don’t know it’s gone yet. Mose said that’ll go away. Just take a while.”
Sam felt nausea bubbling in his throat. He felt tears sliding soundlessly down his cheeks. “Came through the whole war without a scratch,” he managed to say. “And now look at me.”
Ben put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s gon’ be all right,” he said.
Sam flinched from the sympathy. “Don’t,” he said. And then: “Help me up.”
So Ben extended a hand and Sam took it and drew himself upright. The room moved, circling around him as if trying to get a better view, and he gripped the table and willed it to stop. Josiah saw. “That’s gon’ pass in a minute,” he said. “Mose also said tell you get some shoes for them feet. Said that infection in your right one look to be clearin’ up, but you get infected again, you might could lose it, too.”
Sam glanced down. His foot was swollen and torn, shiny with smears of some kind of liniment. “Tell your friend I have no choice,” he said. “I lost my shoes a long way back. I have not been able to find a replacement and like you, there is someone I am looking for, someone I am determined to get back.”
Josiah grinned. “Ben told me you talk like you ’most white. I ain’t believed him, but I see he weren’t lyin’. Hell, you sound mo’ white than most of this white trash ’round here, tell you truth.”
“He read a lot,” said Ben. “Know everything in them books.” The admiring note he heard in Ben’s voice took Sam by surprise.
“Well,” said Josiah, “I wish you luck with findin’ who you’s lookin’ for.” He slipped a forage cap on his head, the brim pulled low over suddenly intense and purposeful eyes. He slung an Enfield rifle over his shoulder, its strap crisscrossing the strap of a bag filled with powder and shot. A soldier returning to war.
“Where are you going?” asked Sam. He knew it was a stupid question the instant it left his mouth.
Josiah pushed a pistol into his waistband. “Where you think I’m going?” he said. “Been here with you two days. Now that you’s awake, I need to get back out there and settle this. Take my daughter home.”
“They are going to kill you,” said Sam.
He nodded. “Good chance of that,” he said, and it was as if he were acknowledging a good chance of rain. “But I don’t see where I got no choice. What kind of free man I’m gon’ be if let ’em take my daughter away and don’t do nothin’ ’bout it?”
“You could contact a provost marshal and have the authorities go in and get your daughter for you.”
Josiah didn’t bother to hide his disdain. “You think they gon’ let me go after I done killed Miss Polly’s youngest boy? Don’t talk like a fool.” He chased it with a smile to soften the blow, but Sam knew he was right. The man’s only chance was to somehow spirit his daughter away from that house and then run somewhere they could not find him. And that was no chance at all. Josiah moved to the door.