Freeman (31 page)

“Don’t blame you,” he says. “Long day. Another long day tomorrow.” And he grunts and lies down opposite her, pulls the hat low over his eyes, and crosses his hands upon his chest.

Her thoughts are running laps. All his awkward advances, his lumbering attempts at conversation, point in a direction she cannot get her mind to follow. She feels the same confusion she felt the day they spoke about their sons.
She is a thing he owns
. No more than that, no more than a table, a hog, a chair. But you don’t ask a chair if it is tired. You don’t warn a table that tomorrow will be a long day. So perhaps—and her mind drags toward this with the stubbornness of a mule that has decided it is done plowing for the day—perhaps he has begun to see her as something other than a thing. Not a person, certainly. That would be too much. But yes, something other than a thing.

In the fading light, she can see the rise and fall of his chest. But if she truly has become something other than a thing, perhaps that is her chance to ask him the question that has bedeviled her all the long weeks of their wayfaring, the great mystery of this entire enterprise. She clears her throat to warn him the question is coming, piles her courage up as high as she can make it, then stands atop it and opens her mouth.

“Marse?”

He grunts.

“Marse, can I ask you a question?”

He grunts again and she takes this for assent.

“Marse, where are we going?”

He lifts the hat now, raises his head to get a look at her, as though her aspect might have changed somehow in the few seconds since last he saw her. As though she might have become something wholly new. She doesn’t know what he sees when he gazes across at her, but he answers. “Going someplace a white man can be treated like a white man,” he says, “and don’t have to kowtow to Yankee domination. That’s where I’m goin’. I have no desire to live under the thumb of them what killed my boy.”

She considers his words, decides to push her luck. “Yes, Marse,” she says. “But where is that?”

For the second time in as many minutes, she is shocked by him. He laughs. It sounds like pebbles rattling together in an old pipe. She hears anger in the sound. And sorrow, too. “Can’t say I rightly know,” he says. “California. Mexico, maybe.”

“We are going to walk that whole way?”

“I expect we will,” he says. “Get there or die in the tryin’. You think that’s mad, I expect.”

She knows better than to answer. He knows she knows and chuckles again. “Got no other choice,” he says. “You don’t understand that, I suppose, but it’s truth. Man’s got a right to live free, otherwise he can’t be a man at all. That’s something your Yankee government just don’t believe, so I can’t believe in it.”

Man’s got a right to live free
.

It marks itself in her mind—her slave’s mind—indelibly as ink.
Man’s got a right. To live free
.

What about a colored man? Does that go for him, too? What about a woman? A colored woman? Does it go for her? She knows the answer, of course, but for a crazed, vertiginous moment, she stands on the precipice of asking anyway. Just to hear it spoken. Just to know what he might say.

But she knows she has already pushed her luck beyond the rim of common sense. She was foolish to push it that far. She would be doubly foolish to push it further. So she lies in silence and after a moment, his breathing turns to a loud rasping that makes the whiskers around his mouth shiver.

She watches him until all the light is gone, then gets up and climbs down from the loft. The world is the color of pitch and she is careful on the ladder, fearful of stumbling and breaking her neck. When she feels the floor beneath her she dismounts and walks slowly through the dark, hands stretched out before her, navigating from memory. Somewhere in the darkness, she can hear the farmer’s horse, nickering softly. After a moment, she reaches the doorway and passes through it. She finds herself in a grassy field—she can feel it scratching at her ankles—beneath a canopy of stars.

She sits in the grass, drawing her legs up, like a child. She wraps her arms around them, then uses her knees as a platform for her chin. She makes herself as small as she knows how and watches as infinity wheels slowly above her. Does it see her, scarred and weary little black thing sitting in the tall grass of some farmer’s field somewhere in Arkansas? And if infinity sees her, does it care?

She falls asleep looking up.

It is four days later that Marse Jim finds what he is looking for. That place he was looking for, that place a white man can live in freedom, turns out to be not California or Mexico, but a forest in Arkansas. They are walking through a tangle of trees, following a footpath that has a disconcerting habit of narrowing and disappearing in the underbrush, and Marse Jim is in a foul mood as a result, cursing up a fury and casting worried glances
overhead in search of the sun so he can navigate. But the sun hides its face as often as not and she knows he fears them lost.

Then a boy’s voice says, “You best stop right there, or I’ll shoot.”

He surprises them. He is standing in the gnarled, moss-covered limbs of an old live oak that bends toward the ground like an old woman stooped by time. He has a rifle trained on them.

Marse Jim is unimpressed. “Is that a fact?” he says.

“That is, indeed, sir.” He is probably not yet 18, has something that aspires to be a moustache overtop a few chin hairs sprouting from skin as virginal and white as fresh fallen snow. He watches them from beneath a rebel’s kepi.

“And just who is it that’s givin’ these orders?” Marse Jim asks.

The boy’s voice is thin and reedy, but his response is crisp. “Private Virgil Goodman, sir, Monticello Artillery, Howell’s Battery.” She has the impression that a salute would ordinarily follow this.

Marse Jim grins, amused by the boy. “Well, Private,” he says, “I am Captain James McFarland, Company H, Second Mississippi Infantry Regiment, and you ain’t got no need for that Spencer you got trained on us. We’re on the same side. I seen the elephant too, same as you.”

It is the boy’s turn to be unimpressed. He hops down from the low branch, his eyes never leaving them, motions with the barrel of the rifle. “I expect that’ll be up to Colonel Moody to judge. Y’all want to walk straight through there. But first, I’ll be needing your firearms, sir.”

Marse Jim complies, handing over his rifle and the pistol in his belt, then lifts his hands and shakes his head, still amused, and walks where the boy has pointed. She follows him, the boy follows her. Occasionally, he pokes her in the back with the rifle to make her walk faster.

There is no hint of a trail here. They make their way through an old forest, detouring around trees and climbing over roots half as tall as a man. The ground is spongy with generations of dead leaves. The air is clammy and close. The sun does not penetrate.

Marse Jim says, “You’ve got a company of men back there, I expect?”

The boy says, “You’ll see soon enough.”

Marse Jim says, “Swear, you’re the most close-mouthed pup I ever did see.”

The boy doesn’t respond.

She hears a dog barking a few moments before they emerge into a clearing. In the middle sits a large, rudely constructed cabin, ringed about by the stumps of trees. About 15 men are there. Some are sitting beneath trees, cleaning their weapons. One is perched on a railing on the porch, reading a letter. A few are chatting quietly together. They all seem older than the boy, most of them tall and rangy with heavy beards and a leanness in the eyes that suggests a long time between meals. Those lean eyes come up and all conversation stills as Goodman’s captives precede him into the clearing.

“What you got there, Virgil?” asks a man with a yodel in his voice. He hooks a pair of spectacles over his ears and adjusts them so he can see better.

“Found these two skulking around over by Pike’s Farm,” yells Virgil.

The man laughs. “They hardly look like Yankee spies, Virge.”

“Boy always was a caution,” says another man, coming up behind.

Marse Jim chuckles indulgently, lowers his hands without being told to. “Ah, leave the boy alone,” he says. “Better he be too careful than not careful enough.”

“My sentiments exactly.” The man who has come out on the porch has a mop of yellow hair, as thick and lustrous as any woman’s. His uniform is crisp as a morning in fall, with the exception of a neatly sewn patch on one knee. His belt buckle is a gleaming oval of brass with the inscription CSA. He holds himself as erect as if he were marching at the head of a grand parade, not standing on a porch among a ragtag group of men, half of them in their undershirts.

He extends a hand to Marse Jim. “I am Colonel Jackson Moody, sir, at your service. And you are?”

Instead of accepting the handshake, Marse Jim salutes. This seems to amuse some of the men, who grin and poke one another. But if Marse Jim notices or cares, Tilda cannot see it. His eyes are moist and earnest. “Captain James McFarland, sir, late of the Mississippi Infantry Regiment.” And only now does he pump Moody’s hand.

“Captain, what brings you into these woods?”

Marse Jim swallows. “Man come by my place, told me the war was over. I could barely believe it. He said we’s been whupped by the Yankees and need to accept that. Sir, I told him I
can’t
accept that. So we been walkin’ ever since, me and her.” A nod toward Tilda. “She’s my last slave. Only nigger ain’t run off from me. She asked me just the other day”—and here, he hunches his shoulders and makes his voice slow, his words mushy and
indistinct and Tilda realizes with a shock that this is his imitation of her—“‘Marse, where us goin’? Where you got us walkin’ to?’”

The men around them laugh in appreciation of the mimicry. All at once, Marse Jim yanks himself out of his slouch, makes his posture as vertical as a pole. He is not her anymore, cringing and quivering slave woman, but himself, noble and courageous white man. “I told her I
refuse
to live under Yankee domination,” he says and here, he lifts his chin in defiance. “I told her, by God, we will walk and keep walking til we find someplace where white men are still willing to fight back against tyranny.”

He stares. Moody stares. The men all stare. And Tilda realizes that something has happened here, something she doesn’t understand and cannot name. But she knows with a deep and sudden foreboding that it is powerful to them, that it puts a glitter in their eyes and sets their Adam’s apples to bobbing.

After a moment, Moody puts a hand on Marse Jim’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Captain. You’ve found that place.”

Marse Jim nods. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Why don’t you join me? I was just sitting down to a meal. Virgil, you come, too, since you’re the one who found the captain. Judkins will take your place on watch.” He leads them inside.

She doesn’t know what she is supposed to do, so she follows them up to the porch and into the big cabin. Inside is one vast room. Bedrolls line the walls and there is a long, roughly constructed table at one end with benches on either side. Moody motions and all three men sit down. Tilda stands behind Marse Jim.

This annoys him. “Don’t just hover there like a moth!” he snarls, flicking at her as though she were, indeed, a flying pest. “Get away! Go sit yourself down somewhere!” As she moves away to the other side of the room, she hears him say, “Damn niggers. Stupid as the day is long.” There is laughter and general assent. She sits on the floor, far away enough to be unobtrusive, close enough to hear every word.

Moody says, “So, you walked here from Mississippi, Captain? That’s impressive. ’Course, you’re not the only one. Most of these boys have been with me through the whole war, but we’ve got a few that just sort of wandered in, like. Grissom out there is from Texas. Delacroix came up from Louisiana. But they’re all like you—all refuse to live their lives under Yankee domination.”

“So what do you propose to do about it?” asks Marse Jim.

Moody gives him a level look. “We propose to fight, of course.”

Marse Jim’s eyes look as if someone has lit a lantern inside his skull. He is giddy as a boy. “Colonel, that’s all I’ve wanted to hear, that there are still white men in this country who refuse to knuckle under.”

“Well, sir, you have found them. Moody’s Raiders—the men chose the name, not I. We’ve already been fighting, in fact, and we have managed to bloody the Yanks’ noses a few times. You ever hear the term, ‘guerrilla warfare?’ It means sabotage, hit and run strikes and the like. We don’t have the manpower for a frontal assault, yet.”

The boy chimes in eagerly. “We blowed up a bridge at Beaver Creek. Caused the Yanks no end of consternation. And we raided their armory. Got a whole passel of weapons and ammunition. Going to shoot them down with their own guns next time.”