Citizens Creek (12 page)

His thoughts broke in every direction, but he held himself firm. “I want to help you if I can,” Cow Tom repeated.

She stared at him, without commitment one way or the other, waiting passively for his next move.

“This blanket is for you,” he said.

He handed her the last of the blankets, and she draped it around her shoulders, clearly pleased with her new acquisition.

For two decades, of the countless times in his life since the age of seven he’d spent conjuring up possible images of this day, the thought never once crossed Cow Tom’s mind that if he could ever find his way back to his mother again, their first meeting would be like this.

Chapter 16

COW TOM GUIDED
her down to the shelter near the boiler room. She didn’t resist.

“This is Harry Island,” he said.

Harry shot Cow Tom a look of puzzlement. Cow Tom conveyed a silent plea in return. They had negotiated together long enough to pick up each other’s signals, and Harry played along. He talked to the woman about unimportant and nonthreatening topics, about whether she was hungry, and the chill in the fall air, and although she wasn’t chatty, she warmed to Harry, a little, more quickly than she had to Cow Tom.

“What name you go by?” asked Harry.

“Bella,” she said.

“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” said Harry.

He rummaged around in his belongings, pulled out his fiddle, and brought it to his chin. He drew back his bow, and made up a fast and catchy tune of trills and riffs, and in a deep voice sang a refrain for a chorus whose single word was Bella, liberally repeated.

Harry’s music attracted a small crowd on the ship, drawn to the tight space to listen, even one military man. They formed a jagged circle around his notes and his voice, and he entertained Creek and Negroes at large, but he kept his focus primarily on Bella. Cow Tom kept a close eye on his mother, who at first sat on the cold floor, both transfixed and timid. But after a time she clapped with the
others, and let the music take her. She seemed stronger, almost as if without worry, and Cow Tom seized the moment to lean closer.

“Reminds me of a fiddler used to play in Alabama when I was a boy,” he said. He didn’t call Old Turtle by name, trying to go slow, but they had listened together to those plaintive notes strung on the narcissus-scented night air, mother and son, on many a Saturday evening on the plantation after the day work was done.

She showed signs of agitation, tugging at her swirl-scarf, threatening to go inward, and Cow Tom backed away from his attempt to draw her out. He contented himself to sit alongside without further engagement, stealing a glance at her whenever he got the chance. Harry by then was in full swing, improvising from one tune to another without pause, encouraged to continue by the crowd’s enthusiasm. By the time Harry put down his fiddle and joined them, and the others drifted elsewhere on the ship, she relaxed a bit.

“Where they taking us?” she asked Harry.

“Most likely Alabama first,” said Harry. “Then New Orleans. But at the end, all go to Indian Territory.”

Bella grew quiet. She turned from them.

Cow Tom couldn’t decide what was best. Try to reassure her? Leave her to her own devices? Continue to let Harry take the lead?

“He’ll come for me there,” she said. “Alabama.”

“Who?” Cow Tom asked.

She shook her head, a quick, evasive gesture.

“You have people?” Harry finally asked, and Cow Tom tensed.

“My people are gone,” she said. “All long gone.”

Pain blossomed along Cow Tom’s right side, as if a wild animal used teeth and claws to get out. The pain always passed, eventually. He drew a deep breath, unable to look at his mother.

“My man got the fever, and died. So many of us starving, we came in by our own,” she went on. “For food. To stop them hunting us anymore.”

Before now, he had only considered his side of loss. His boyhood abandonment. His hurt. His confusion. For years, he’d qui
etly nursed what sometimes came as crippling anger, with no place to go, only exercised in private, if at all. In the far past, he sometimes focused the anger toward the big house on the Alabama plantation, breaking some petty rule now and again if he thought he couldn’t be caught. On occasion, a dark wave washed over him after remembering the horse’s gallop as it rounded the bend of the long road with his mother thrown across the front like a sack of grain before disappearing from view. The aftermath was always the worst, hours of brooding before he could right himself.

But his anger spilled to his mother as well. She hadn’t come back for him or sent word of her whereabouts, nothing to muffle the deafening speculation looping round and round in his head for days after, and weeks, and months, and then years. He’d wondered whether she was truly taken to Florida, wondered what Florida was compared to Alabama, if all slave life carried the same constancy, if being owned by a Seminole was different from being owned by white or Creek, whether she’d had another little boy to take his place after leaving him behind. He’d spent so much time on his own wounds he hadn’t given thought to what their separation had done to her. And now he knew. This wasn’t the woman he remembered, the stern but sometimes playful woman he’d preserved as young and vibrant in his mind.

Cow Tom’s stomach burned. Harry stepped into the silence.

“I only have my nana from the old place,” said Harry. “She’s old, and no good for travel. I hope she’s in a pick-up camp on the way.”

Bella absorbed this. “And you?” she asked Cow Tom. She didn’t call him by name. “Your people?”

Cow Tom forced his words beyond the bitterness threatening to block his tongue. “I have a wife, and two little girls,” he said, “supposed to be in a camp for families of Creeks sent to Florida. If they haven’t already moved west.” He felt he should add something more. “I fix to buy myself, and after, buy them too.”

She seemed interested then, leaning forward toward him, sharing a secret. “Seminoles act different than Creeks. In the Ever
glades, we lived free,” she said. “Worked hard, but not to serve.” She lost her moment of animation and leaned back in resignation. “But that’s gone.”

“Who’s to claim you once off the boat?” Harry asked. “The man from Tampa Bay?”

“He’s only an agent, holding the paper, sent to bring me back,” said Bella. “He works for a man in Alabama.” She leaned her back against the wall. “Better dead than back there,” she said, her voice small.

Once again, they settled into uncomfortable silence. Once again, Cow Tom tasted the cruel sting of helplessness. He left them both and went above deck, to see if there was any good he could do there.

The boat made steady progress on the open sea, but never ventured far from land. Cow Tom threw himself into action, walking the length of the ship, checking the status of the newly arrived. Anything to blunt the dread and confusion he couldn’t control. In his mind, there was only uncertainty on all sides, about Amy, about his daughters, about his mother, about a new home. He cleared his mind as best as he was able, and went to free more blankets. But this time, he identified four families, all women with small children, and only then, without promises, did he go back to petition the military man he started to think of as Schoolboy, Lieutenant Sloan, a formal-lessoned man from the North.

They made another trip together to the padlocked room, where Schoolboy allocated not only four additional blankets but also small runs of cloth, several metal needles, and a spool of coarse thread. By the time Cow Tom took the goods to the families, the first wave of boiled hominy was out from the galley belowdecks. The crew ate first, and then Creeks, by order of the Indian agent, and then Negroes last. Some possessed wooden bowls and took their meal in that, but most shaped the corn mixture into their open palms and ate where they stood, or carried portions to others. Before nightfall, everyone was
fed, with hominy left for morning. Cow Tom’s biggest fear of hunger-fueled unrest didn’t come to pass. No outcome would be worse than to unleash a lockdown mentality among the military men.

Bone weary and ready to let go of the day, Cow Tom returned belowdecks. His mother lay asleep, curled into herself in a semi-private corner fashioned from a slight rearrangement of firewood cords. The new army-issue blanket was pulled to her chin despite the damp heat, and her inky black hair splayed around her head like a buffalo’s mane. Harry was still awake, on the other side of the wood line that now separated their sleeping area from Bella’s. He’d liberated more whiskey from the boiler room, and gotten a head start, brightening when he saw Cow Tom and motioning him over.

“Who is she?” Harry whispered.

Cow Tom shrugged, loath to loosen the tangle of his secret hurt and hope. “She matters to me.”

Harry didn’t press further, pulling a long draft from the flask before dropping immediately to sleep. Even the bickering firemen were quiet in the boiler room. Cow Tom was the last awake, sure his mind would get the best of him. He hadn’t time in the packed day to figure out much of anything, including how to handle Bella. But next he knew, the firemen were yelling, blaming each other for letting the fires burn too low, rushing in and then out again to carry more wood to the boiler room.

Morning.

The night wasn’t long enough. Cow Tom dreamed of Amy, a too-familiar and unsettling recurrence, the dream in which he returned home to find his wife disappeared, without a trace, leaving him in an empty cabin surrounded by a pack of wolves. It always took him a moment to shake off the aftereffects of that dream, and the impossibility of Amy gone. He squeezed his eyes tight, reorienting himself to the realities of the world and not the trickster images echoing in his head.

“Morning.”

Bella was at the ready, up for some time by the looks of it. Her flour-sack dress hung overlarge on her small frame, but she secured her swirl-scarf around her head in a tight back knot that made her look more in charge of herself than yesterday. She’d found a straw broom somewhere, and held it suspended in front of her with both hands, as if a dance partner.

Harry snored softly.

“Morning, Bella,” he said. “Passable sleep?”

He would have liked to hear his own name come from her mouth, to measure the sound and tone today against what he remembered. When he was Tom. When she was Ma’dear. But she hadn’t once called him in his name since she’d come on the boat.

She came closer, her voice barely a whisper, whether out of deference for the sleeping Harry or a natural reticence, he couldn’t tell. “I brought back
sofki
,” she said.

He was wide-awake now. She was trying to look after him, gone early to the galley. He hadn’t bothered to take off anything but his cotton jacket last night, balled under his head as a pillow while he slept, and he stood, clothed, and stretched his cramped muscles, at her level now.

“Three portions,” she said, the pride obvious.

Cow Tom fought the suddenness of his disappointment. She was looking after Harry too, not just him.

“Thank you, Bella,” he said. She had taken the bark from one of the smallest and flattest logs in their alcove and used it as a tray to bring back three large mounds. Cow Tom helped himself to one, stuffing the food in with his fingers until gone. “No one gave you trouble?”

She laughed, a bit smug. “In the galley this morning, in the waiting line, I said I was with you and Harry Island,” she said. “There was no trouble.” She paused. “The woman serving, Ilza, she sends her regards.”

Chapter 17

BELLA WORRIED OVER
their small corner of the boat, caretaker to the two young men who came to an older woman’s rescue. She tidied up their quarters with a presumption that surprised Cow Tom, shaking out and airing blankets and oft-worn bits of their clothing in sore need of washing, humming the while.

As if come to unspoken agreement, Cow Tom knew he daren’t broach the endearment of Ma’dear with Bella again. He only left the overheated alcove when he had to. Between himself and Harry, one or the other of them was in constant demand, whether as liaison with the Negroes or between the Creeks and the military. He’d been called to service half a dozen times before midday.