Freedom Stone (11 page)

Cal reached out his hand, felt a rough-hewn post and leaned against it. His eyes were starting to accustom themselves to the darkness and from around one row of stalls he saw the shadow of Cupit approaching. The older boy moved through the darkness with far greater speed and ease than Cal had earlier—not a surprise, since Cupit had been working as a stable boy for years and was well familiar with the lay of the place. It was Cupit who'd recommended meeting here tonight, knowing from experience that it was one of the spots the slave drivers and overseer patrolled least after dark. Cupit trotted up to Cal and spoke in a whisper.

“Did anyone see you come?” he asked.

“No,” Cal answered. “Slipped out of the cabin after the others was asleep.” Cal had a few ways of referring to George and Nelly. “The others” was one of them. “The growns” was another. He never described them as his parents.

“Did you cut through the field like I told you to?” Cupit said.

“Yes. Kept low, kept quiet. Didn't run into nobody. But I didn't see Benjy, neither.”

“He was supposed to be here first!”

“I know it,” Cal said.

“I don't like it,” Cupit answered.

Neither boy could have been completely sure that Benjy would be here on time tonight, but the fact that he wasn't was nonetheless a cause for worry. When Benjy was late, it was usually because he was in some kind of trouble. Benjy was the oldest of the three boys—seventeen or so by most people's reckoning. He'd been bought from a plantation in Louisiana just two years ago, and that was the third time his ownership papers had changed hands since he was born on a farm somewhere in Kentucky well before the war began. When slaves were bought and sold so much, their true ages often got lost. However old Benjy was, he was old enough not to need any adult slaves to look after him, and he generally bedded down in the cabin of whatever family was willing to take him in for a few weeks or months at a time. When none were, he'd sleep under the stars, in the toolshed or sometimes even with the horses.

The reason Benjy got sold so many times had to do with his temperament. He was a good-enough-natured boy when he wanted to be, which was most of the time. He worked well and he worked fast, and he always seemed happy to join other slaves in their chores when he was done with his own. It was Benjy, in fact, who'd done the most to help Cal get his wound bandaged the day he got kicked by Coal Mine. Even Cupit had hung back, too afraid of the overseer to move, until Benjy ordered him to lend a hand, lest Cal and Benjy not be there for him if he ever got hurt the same way.

But Benjy worked best when he wasn't being pushed. The less he was interfered with, the more he got done. Smart slave drivers learned to recognize which slaves had that trait and knew to stand aside and let them be. The problem was that smart was just what most of the slave drivers who'd had a whip-hand over Benjy had not been. Louis and Bull seemed the dimmest of all, and they never appeared quite as happy as when they were badgering Benjy about how he was working, telling him to do something one way, then the other, then deciding both were wrong and coming up with a third way. Eventually, Benjy would grow angry enough to talk out of turn or throw down his hoe and earn himself a field flogging for it—which Cal reckoned was the reason Bull and Louis bothered him in the first place. Many was the time he and Cupit tried to tell Benjy that if he really wanted to bother the slave drivers in return, the best way to do it was to hold his temper and deny them the chance to lash him. But Benjy never seemed to hear that, and it was generally believed that he'd been whipped more than any young slave who'd ever worked at Greenfog before.

“I knew he'd be trouble tonight,” Cal said to Cupit, looking around the stable. “We shouldn't never have allowed him to come.”

“It was all his plan,” Cupit said. “He's the one what gets to say who's a part of it.”

Before Cal could answer, there was a loud jiggling of the stable latch, followed by the sound of the door opening with a squeak and closing with a careless rattle. Cal and Cupit froze. The only people who'd be making such a racket would be the overseer—who didn't have to care who knew he was here—or Benjy, who ought to care but wouldn't bother if he was in a foul temper. Neither possibility pleased Cal.

“Anyone there?” a voice whispered. It was Benjy's.

“Over here!” Cupit whispered.

Benjy moved clumsily though the darkness, thumping and bumping things as he went, and finally joining the other two boys. He was out of breath as if he'd been running.

“Woulda got here sooner,” he said, “but I nearly run into Bull. He looked drunk as a hound and sounded like one too, the way he was bayin' at the sky. I had to keep 'specially low so he wouldn't see me.”

“You still didn't need to slam that door!” Cupit whispered fiercely. “We get caught here, there ain't no tellin' the trouble.”

Benjy waved him off. “Won't have to worry about none o' that soon enough. We'll be done with this place and done with bein' slaves too.”

Benjy smiled and looked at Cal and Cupit, expecting them to smile back. The other boys tried, but somehow couldn't manage. It was no secret why they were all here tonight, but until this moment, none of them had ever said it out loud in quite that way. The fact that Benjy did was both thrilling and terrifying.

For a long time, Benjy had been whispering to Cal and Cupit about what it would be like to run away from Greenfog. There were ways it could be done, he'd say, routes through the woods where the thickets were so heavy and the swamps so muddy that no man could track them and no hound could smell them. There were people along the way who would help runaways—free blacks and other slaves who knew the route north. There were even a few whites—ladies, mostly, who lived in the South but were partial to the Union and were happy when the war came if only so all the slaves could be set loose. Naturally, talk of escape was forbidden among slaves, and whole families would be broken up and sold off one by one as punishment if a single member so much as whispered about it.

But Benjy never seemed troubled by such things—or by most matters that caused other slaves worry. He had courage—dumb courage often enough, but courage all the same—and he knew how to talk a line. The way Benjy's voice quickened and his eyes brightened when he spoke of escaping—the way his words painted a picture of how easy it could be—made it hard to imagine why every slave didn't try it. Cal and Cupit knew the folly of the thing, but when Benjy was talking to them, they forgot all about it. Still, tonight, when it was more than just talk, Cal didn't feel so sure.

“You really reckon this is right?” he asked.

“Righter'n it's ever been,” Benjy answered.

“Fall's settin' in hard,” Cal said. “Frost weather's comin'.”

“It ain't here yet.”

“Rain's comin' too, though,” Cupit said. “That cold, cuttin' kind of rain.”

“That's just the kind the hounds don't like,” Benjy answered. “They can't track for nothin' when they's wet and chilled.”

Cupit nodded, guessing that had to be true, but not knowing for sure—which was often the way it was when Benjy was telling you something.

Benjy then turned his attention to Cal. He held the boy's eyes fast, and he let a second or two pass. “Besides,” he said at last, “there's Mr. Willis.”

Cal had half expected Benjy to say that, but the mention of the name made him feel sick all the same. It was the day after Coal Mine kicked Cal in the head that the boys' idle talk about running away had turned serious. Scary as the blow from the horse had been, the look on Lillie's mama's face had been worse. Mr. Willis had said he meant to kill Cal one day, but Mr. Willis said a lot of things when his temper was up, and often as not he forgot all about them. This time, though, Lillie's mama's face said something else. It said she heard something different in the overseer's voice—something deadly—and Cal, truth be told, heard it too. Now, in the darkness of the barn, Benjy looked into his eyes and seemed to know what the younger boy was thinking.

“You only thirteen, Cal,” he said. “You got a life ahead. Mr. Willis gonna end that life sure as we're talkin' here. And if he don't end it, he's gonna make you so miser'ble you'll wish he did. You know that. I know that.”

Cal said nothing, but he nodded.

“He's right, Little Cal,” Cupit added. “I seen Mr. Willis look like that only one time before, when he caught the fox what was killing the chickens after the Master made him pay for the lost birds. Proper way to kill a fox is with a pistol. Mr. Willis used a shovel—and he looked like he liked it.”

Cal found his voice and spoke up hoarsely. “What about you?” he said to Cupit. “You ain't the one he wants to kill, so why you wanna run?”

Cupit shrugged. “My papa's dead, my mama's sickly. Don't got no other family. Soon enough I'll be old enough for soldierin', and if this war keeps goin' bad for the whites, they'll surely get all their slaves to fight it for 'em. I'm scared o' runnin' away, but I'm scared more o' war. Both can get me free, but both can get me killed; I reckon I stand a better chance runnin'.”

“Then we's settled on it,” Benjy said. “We go next week. There's gonna be a Saturday slave dance at Bingham Woods. Greenfog slaves is invited.” He smiled at the other two boys. “Three of 'em ain't coming back.”

Cal swallowed hard. In a fortnight he'd be free. It didn't seem possible—but when Benjy was saying it, it somehow did.

Chapter Twelve

IT HAD BEEN A long time since there had been a slave party at Greenfog, but Lillie and the others remembered it well. Slave parties came as often as once a month on plantations with generous masters and as rarely as never on plantations with miserly ones. Whenever they did come, they were grand affairs. The mamas and the older girls would be released from work early so that they could prepare the cornbread and spoon bread and greens and beans that would be served up in portions so generous even the hungriest slaves couldn't finish them. The Master would provide a hog or a bunch of chickens for a big roasting that would begin hours before the dancing and feasting. Some masters would even donate a jug or two of whiskey, which would be passed around during the evening to any slave who was of age—and many who weren't—while the overseer kept a close eye on them all to make sure no one got too loosened by the liquor to remember that at the end of the night they were all still slaves. Usually the slaves from another plantation would be invited to attend and both masters would share the expense.

With the hard times across the South, such an expense was becoming something that masters could afford only rarely. The Master of Greenfog—whose fortunes seemed to be falling even faster than the other masters'—hadn't allowed his slaves a party since just a week before Lillie's papa left, and she thought about that night all the time. The morning of the party, the other slaves decided to give Papa a farewell gift and agreed that he would be the one to roast the hog—a job all the men liked to do and many of them would even argue about or wrestle over. Papa let Lillie and Plato help him with the roasting, giving them each a big wooden ladle and showing them how to spoon the sticky barbecue sauce onto the pig as it turned on the spit. When the job was done, he called them over so that they could be the first to taste the spicy-smoky-sugary flavor of the still-sizzling flesh. Lillie guessed she was about as happy that night as she'd ever been, and later, in their cabin, she told her papa so.

“I wish every day was a slave party day,” she said.

“No you don't,” Papa answered, with a frown that surprised her.

“But they's the most fun we ever have,” Lillie said.

“That's why I don't like 'em. A slave thinkin' 'bout a party is a slave forgettin' she's a slave,” Papa said. “The masters don't give us nothin' they don't reckon they have to, child. Parties is one way they keep you where you is and stop you from wantin' to be somewhere else.”

Lillie never did look at a slave party the same way after that—but she never quit feeling the thrill of them either. She learned about the Bingham Woods party the day after she returned from Bluffton, and even with thoughts of her visit there crowding her mind, her heart jumped at the news. At the last party, Cal had seemed close to asking her to dance, and Lillie reasoned that now that he had grown up a bit, he might find the spine to do it. Later that day, she ran across Cal near the slave cabins, talking to the boys Benjy and Cupit.

“Heard 'bout the dance?” she asked. She called it a dance rather than a party, reckoning that might put ideas in his head.

“Heard about it, yeah,” he mumbled.

“You ain't gonna go?” she asked.

“Don't know,” he said. “Maybe.” Then, oddly, he looked toward Benjy. “Yeah, I guess we is,” he answered finally.

“We's goin',” Benjy said quickly, and gave her a big smile. “We's all goin'. I expect we'll see you there too.”

“I expect,” Lillie said. She looked at Cal—who wouldn't meet her gaze—then she walked away shaking her head. Just like boys, she thought. Nice as you please till they get around one another and start thinking they've got to act tough.

After that, the business of the slave dance went mostly out of Lillie's head, allowing the more serious business of her bargain with Henry to flood back. Henry himself might not have believed that any letter Lillie mailed to Mississippi could make it through Southern roads that were being torn up by the war, but she was still determined to try. The job of actually writing the letter, at least, would not be all that difficult a business.