Freeman (21 page)

Up the stairs came a colored woman dressed in rags—a head wrap and a thin old dress covered with patches, all of them in different colors, as though stitched together by a magpie. Her hopeful smile revealed teeth that were discolored and few. Her eyes, shiny with rheum, lit on Sam. She approached him without hesitation and for an instant, he wondered absurdly if he knew her. But there was no recognition in those eyes. Just something eager and heartrending.

She spoke without preamble. “I’se looking for my daughter,” she said, in a voice rough like burlap. She took Sam’s hands in her own and lifted them. Hers were bony and cool. The nails were jagged.

“I beg your pardon?” said Sam.

“I’se looking for my little girl,” she said. “Is you seen her?”

Sam was confused. “Ma’am, how would I know if I have seen her or not? I do not know your daughter.”

She shook her head, smiling her wet smile to assure him. “Oh, you’d know her if you saw her,” she promised. “She was such a pretty little thing, prettiest baby you ever did see, I expect.”

Sam felt something cold flow through him, as though his blood had become ice water. He was aware of Ben, staring. “Baby?” he said.

She was still smiling, but now some irreducible mourning crept in from the edges of her gaze. “Marse sold her from me, pert’ near 20 years ago, I reckon.”

“Do you know who he sold her to? Do you know where she is?”

The woman shook her head vigorously. Then she grinned. “But I’se bound to find her. Yes, sir, I is.”

It struck Sam that the war had left the slaves a nation of mad women and men, rootless, homeless, wandering about, looking for wives, looking for children, trying to get back that which could never be retrieved, put back what once was, and never mind that you knew (though you would never admit it even to yourself) that this was not possible. You tried anyway and sometimes, as now with this wretched woman, the trying left you broken. A loathing climbed through him like rising water for white men and all their cruelty and arrogance. Look what it had done. To him, to her, to this line of negritude stretching to the end of the bench, the end of this broken country.

He was surprised to feel tears forming in his eyes. The woman watched him quizzically. There was something delicate and birdlike in the way she cocked her head to regard him from different angles with her merry eyes. Sam coughed to steady his voice. He spoke gently. “I shall look for your baby girl,” he said. “If I see her, I will tell you.”

Her face brightened. “You promise me?”

Sam gave the bony fingers a soft squeeze. “I do promise,” he said.

She nodded. Then she was standing in front of Ben and lifting his hand. “I’se looking for my little girl,” she began.

“I heard,” said Ben. “I’ll let you know if I see her.”

And on she went to the next person in the line. “Poor old woman,” said Ben when she was out of earshot. “Feel sorry for her. I surely do.”

“Are we so different?” asked Sam. This earned him a sharp look. He shrugged. “You and I are out here just as she is, searching for what we will probably never find.”

“Speak for yourself. I got enough sense to know my daughter ain’t no baby no more. Got to be near ’bout seven, eight year old by now. And I know where she is, too, or where I left her, anyway. She in Tennessee with her mama.”

“Yes,” said Sam, “but what I mean is, even if you find her, even if I find Tilda, it is not going to be as we remember it. Time does not stand still. They have changed, we have changed. You cannot return to what used to be.”

“You sayin’ you ready to give up then? Go on back up North and forget all about it?” The question was a challenge.

“No,” said Sam, “of course not.”

“Then hush up about it. Don’t nobody need to hear that kind of thing.” His words were hard, but his voice was not. His voice was imploring, the voice of a man who desperately does not want to hear his fears spoken aloud.

Sam said, “Perhaps you are right.” He went back to massaging his foot.

Moments later, the door opened and the young colored man came out, his expression grim with satisfaction. Sam had time to glance at Ben. Then the young soldier said, “Next,” and they stood together and walked into what had once been the office of the mayor.

The provost was an Army colonel, a big man with a drooping moustache and the black stump of a dead cigar in his teeth. He sat writing at a table in the middle of a vast room illuminated by light from a pair of tall windows. At the sound of their entrance, he flicked them with a glance, then went back to his writing. “And what is it I can do for you boys?” he asked. His words were light, but his voice was leaden with tedium.

Sam and Ben exchanged another glance. Then Sam said, “We saw a killing.”

This brought his head up, narrowed his gray eyes. “You saw what?” he asked around the dead cigar.

“We saw a killing,” said Sam.

“Who is it you’re saying was killed?” He produced a fresh sheet of paper and began writing.

“He called himself Brother. His name was Eli.”

“White? Colored?”

“He was colored. The man who shot him was white. We saw them, but they did not see us.”

An eyebrow lifted. “Them?”

“It seemed to be some sort of rebel posse. There were six men in all.”

“When did all this happen?”

“It happened five days ago.”

The colonel stopped writing. “Five days? And you are just reporting it now?”

“It happened in Forsyth,” said Sam. “It took us that long to get here, as we are traveling on foot.”

The pen went down. “There’s nothing in Forsyth. Town was blown to cinders.”

“There are a woman and two children. They are the dead man’s family.”

“I suppose what I mean to be saying is, I’ve enough trouble right here without sending men on a daylong ride to investigate something that happened five days ago. That is six days, all told. You think we will find any of them still there? The woman? The posse?” He snorted. “Even the dead man is gone by now.”

“So you shall do nothing?”

“There’s nothing I
can
do.”

Sam felt himself getting hot. “It does not concern you that there is a rebel militia operating up in those mountains and that it is killing people?”

Ben hooked his forearm. “Come on now, Sam. We done took up enough of the colonel’s time.” His face was split wide by that idiot grin, that grin of deference and obsequious entreaties and shuffling feet. Sam was learning to hate that grin. He wrenched his arm away.

The colonel made a scornful sound. “Six men a militia? I do not think so.”

“It is not my purpose to debate terminology with you, sir,” said Sam stiffly. “You are a Union soldier, are you not? If you are, it seems to me you have a duty here. Would you apostasize from the cause to which you once swore fealty?”

Sam heard Ben behind him, struggling with the word. “Apostasize?” he pronounced uncertainly.

But to Sam’s surprise, the soldier simply smirked at him in response. “It means to betray an allegiance,” he explained. “Your friend here is accusing me of being untrue to the Union cause. He further wishes to make it understood that he is an educated Negro.” The colonel’s mouth twisted as he added, “That is the most troublesome sort of Negro in my experience.”

Sam said, “My point is simply—”

The colonel ignored him, swinging his gaze pointedly toward Ben. “Where are you boys headed?” he asked.

“He goin’ to Mississippi,” said Ben. “I’m goin’ to Tennessee.”

“Family?”

Ben nodded. The smile was gone. “He lookin’ for his wife. I’m tryin’ to find mine, too, and my little girl.”

The colonel removed the cold cigar from his mouth, looked at it for a moment. “Starting to get a lot of that,” he said. “Boys like you, walking long miles, trying to find family, knowing they probably won’t. It’s sad, really. Don’t know how you do it.” A silence intervened. Then he looked up and his gaze encompassed both of them. “Look, I know you think you are doing the right thing in reporting what you saw.”

Ben said, “It
was
bad, sir. Shot the man down like he were no more than a hog.”

“I do not doubt that it was bad. Just as I am aware there are still a lot of rebs out there that don’t know—or don’t care, more likely—that the surrender was signed and the war is over. We’ll get them all eventually, including the ones you say shot down the man in Forsyth. Of that I am confident. But in the meantime, I were you, I would be careful out there.”

“Is that it?” demanded Sam. Ben had his arm again.

The colonel’s expression was mild. “Boy, what I do is, I sit at this desk day in and day out and I play Solomon. This one has been cheated out of wages by a master who promised to pay him and then refused. That one says the free man sassed him and he don’t take kindly to sass from niggers. It is my job to sort it all out, to keep the peace between a bunch of no-account white men who resent the very air I breathe and a bunch of slaves—
former
slaves—still trying to figure out what it means to be free. I must keep them from each other’s throats. And then here you come, wanting me to drop everything and go scouring the mountains for some posse of rebels who killed a man
five days ago
and a hundred miles away.” A hardness had crept into his voice. “Yes,” he said, “that is, indeed, it.”

Ben tugged on Sam’s arm. There was a moment, Sam staring into the white colonel’s eyes. Finally, he allowed himself to be pulled away. He didn’t want to, but what else was left to do? What was left to say? “You boys be careful,” said the colonel as Ben pulled the door open. He had his head down and was writing again.

The line of negritude was looking up at them on their exit, staring as if answers might be written on their faces. The soldier said, “Next.” Ben trotted down the stairs. Sam followed him. They left the building, emerging onto a portico ringed by white columns chipped and scarred
from small-arms fire. Official notices were tacked there—curfews, wanted posters, proclamations. The sky hung low, the clouds pressing their swollen black bellies against a landscape of wooden shacks and hog pens, a livery stable, a tavern, a bank. A flash of white light blasted the world, gone before it was there. Then the sky let forth a guttural roar and it began to rain, a sudden torrent of water rushing down. Like it had been waiting for them. Like God had held His fire until He had them in His sights.

“Shit,” said Ben. “Goddamn it to hell.” He pulled up his collar, hunched his bald scalp, and stepped down into the deluge. Sam followed him and they trudged down the middle of a street suddenly slick with mud and horseshit. They had already lost five hours waiting in the hallway outside the mayor’s office in order to go inside and accomplish nothing. There was no thought of lying under a wagon to wait out the storm. No thought of anything but walking.

Sam found himself grateful for the rain. The mud was cool and easy beneath his bare feet.

They would walk until the light failed, then do as they had done many times before: find some old man or widowed woman willing to trade a meal of pinto beans or sowbelly and a night in a stable or shed for a few hours spent chopping wood or mending a fence. Often, that would be their only meal of the day. Sam had always been a sturdy man, not fat, but solid. Now he could feel his pants growing too big for him.

They walked in the rain, forks of fire arcing down from the clouds, thunder vibrating the earth. After a few moments, the last of the town was behind them and they were walking a dirt path under an awning of trees. It was a little less wet in here. The rain whispered to the spring leaves far above. They walked in silence for an hour.

Finally, Ben spoke. “Lost a lot of time back there,” he said.

“Do not start,” said Sam.

“Just sayin’.”

“Say something else.”

“And you,” said Ben with a cutting laugh, “tryin’ to use all your highfalutin’ words to show that man you’s special so he won’t treat you like he treat the rest of the niggers. Guess he showed you.”

“I refuse to allow people to treat me as a ‘nigger’ because I am not a nigger,” said Sam. “Perhaps you are, but I am not.”

Ben stopped. “What the hell that s’posed to mean?”

Sam stopped. Thought for a moment, then opened his face into a strained grin, bucked his eyes as if he were trying to see all creation at once. “Yassuh, Marse,” he said. “How us feelin’ today, Marse? No need to worry ’bout ol’ Shine, boss.”