Freeman (56 page)

He climbed down from the horse, covering his mouth. Fearing the worst, he went inside the barn to investigate the stench. It turned out to be a dead mule. The carcass had gone black. Rats had been at it.

Hand still clenched firmly to his mouth, Sam backed out of the barn and went back to his horse, which nickered with soft urgency. “I know, boy,” he said.

He didn’t begrudge the horse its unease. This was a haunted place.

A snarl of determination issued through clenched teeth as he one-armed his weight back into the saddle.

They picked their way through the pine woods back to the main trail and continued west. After a few minutes, they came across an old Negro man in a battered silk top hat resting by the side of the road. Sam asked if he knew Jim McFarland. The man said he reckoned he knew most everybody in the county; before the war, he had been a driver for his own master. Sam asked if he knew what had happened to McFarland. The man smiled a sunny smile through a scraggly beard and said he did not. He tipped the old top hat back from his brow and shaded his eyes as he regarded Sam.
“Why you lookin’ for that scalawag anyway? Ain’t nothin’ but trouble, that one. My old marse used to say so all the time.”

“It is not him I am concerned with,” said Sam. “I am looking for a woman who was once a slave on his place.”

“Well, way I hear it, he ain’t had but two, three of us’n left by the time he lit out,” said the man. “Used to have near ’bout fifty, but the rest, they up and left during the war. Tell you who you ought to talk to. You ought to talk to Nick.”

“Who is Nick?”

“Nick use’ to belong to Marse Gus Chambers. Stayed on Marse Gus’s place after the surrender. He told me him and Marse Gus stopped at Marse Jim’s place on the way home from the war. Said it was a powerful strange sight to see Marse Jim holdin’ on to them two, three slaves like don’t none of ’em know the war over. Nick and Marse Gus was probably the last ones seed Marse Jim ’fore he up and disappeared.”

Sam asked directions and the other man gave them. He said, “Thank you, Mr.—”

“Walker,” said the other man. “That’s what most folks calls me. They used to call me Driver on account of that was my job. Now it’s just Walker. ’Cause that’s what I does, since the surrender come. I walks.”

“I know the feeling,” said Sam.

He found Nick three hours later, mending a pasture fence with another Negro man. When Sam called out to him, he drew a forearm across his sweaty forehead. “What can I do for you, mister?” he asked. He was a tall, thin man and when he approached, Sam saw that he walked with a pronounced limp.

“I am hoping you can help me,” said Sam. “I am searching for a woman who used to be a slave on the McFarland place. I hear you stopped through there a few months back, before McFarland disappeared.”

“Yes, I reckon we did. Me and Marse Gus. Wasn’t but three colored on his place by then, though. Two women, one fella. Tell me about the one you lookin’ for.”

“She would be about 45,” said Sam. “I have not seen her in many years, but when I knew her she was…” A pause, remembering. Then he sighed. “Well,” he said, “she was about the most beautiful thing you ever saw. She had dark skin and long, thick hair.”

Nick smiled. “They was one there like that. The other one, she were pretty, too, but she were a young gal.”

Sam felt hope fluttering in his chest. He pushed it down. “Did you get the name of the older woman?”

Nick frowned. “I did,” he said, “but I’m durned if I can remember it.”

“Please try,” said Sam.

“Been tryin’ all the time we been talkin’,” said Nick. “It won’t come.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. Don’t nobody know ’
zactly
where they gone, but I expect I know what direction.”

“What direction would that be?”

Nick gave him a surprised look. “Why, think about it,” he said. “If they go south, what be the point? They already south. North or east and they gon’ run into more of them Yankees, and them the ones they tryin’ to get shed of.”

“West,” said Sam.

A nod, an easy smile. “That’s it. Way I hear, that’s where a lot of them rebs is goin’ that don’t want to give up the fight.”

Sam’s response was cut off when a white man sitting astride a horse in the middle of the pasture yelled out, “Nick, am I paying you to lollygag with every tramp who wanders through, or am I paying you to work?”

“Be right there, Marse Gus,” yelled Nick over his shoulder.

“You all wanted to be paid for your work,” groused the white man. “Well, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. That’s how it goes.”

“Yes, sir, Marse Gus.”

Rolling his eyes for Sam’s benefit, Nick turned to go. Sam itched with the frustration of it. It was so close to proof that Tilda was alive—or had been as of three short months ago—and was headed west with some stubborn rebel who refused to believe his cause was lost. But at the same time, it really wasn’t proof at all, was it? A vague description that could fit her, or a hundred other colored women: 45 years old and beautiful. Based on that, he might chase this McFarland down, find the woman he was traveling with, and then she might not be Tilda at all, might be some other poor woman entirely. And then where would he be?

The same place he was now, he supposed, sighing. It surely couldn’t make things it any worse. He clicked his tongue at the horse, ready to continue this fool’s journey.

Then Nick turned back. “One thing I do remember,” he said. “Something she told me.”

“Beg pardon?”

Nick grinned. “Well, like I say, she were a pretty thing and I was feeling flirtatious, but she weren’t interested. And I told her, I say, ‘Gal, I’m gon’
make
you love me.’ And when I said that, she said the durndest thing.”

Something hot stabbed Sam’s chest. He stopped breathing without realizing it. “She said, ‘Love is long suffering,’” he said.

Nick’s grin fell. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly what she said. How you know that? She said it was from the Bible.”

“It is,” said Sam.

Memory
.

Sitting on the stoop in front of his cabin on a Saturday night. Tilda, looking up at him, laughter in her eyes. Him, vaguely annoyed that she is amused, vaguely hurt that she has refused, yet again, to jump the broom with him. How many times has he asked her? How many times has she told him no?

“Gal, how many times you gon’ turn me down? I feel like I’se fit to bust.”

A smile that knows. “‘Love is long suffering,’” she says
.

“What? What that mean?”

“That’s in the Bible,” she says
.

“Where? Show me.”

So she gets a Bible and reads to him. When she is done, he can only look at her and marvel. “Ain’t never seen no nigger could read.”

“Negro,” she says. “And you can learn. I can show you.”

“How?”

“Come here,” she says
.

And he scoots closer so that she can open the Bible across both their laps. She points to the unfamiliar symbols on the page and explains how they join together to make sounds. He can barely pay attention. He is uncomfortably aware of the closeness of her, the warmth of her bare arm brushing his, the smell of sweat in her hair
.

It is their first reading lesson. The first of many
.

“It’s in the book of First Corinthians,” he told Nick. “Chapter 13.” And then he closed his eyes and read the words off a page in his mind.

“‘Love is long suffering; it aboundeth in kindness. Love is not envious. Love is not insolent: it is not puffed up. It doth not behave itself unbecomingly. It is not self interested. It is not easily provoked. It placeth not the evil to account. It rejoiceth not in iniquity, but shareth in the joys of truth. It beareth all things. It believeth all things. It hopeth all things. It endureth all things patiently.’”

When he opened his eyes, he was almost surprised to find Nick still there, looking at him. The words had taken him elsewhere.

“That’s in the Bible?” asked Nick.

Sam smiled. “She read it to me one day when
I
was feeling flirtatious,” he said.

The white man cried out again. “Nick, didn’t you hear me, goddamn your black hide?”

“I
said
I be right there!” shouted Nick, half turning. The sharpness in his voice surprised Sam. From the look on his face, it surprised Nick, too. The white man looked especially shocked. He blanched and swallowed, but did not speak.

“I expect you will have some grief from that,” said Sam.

“He get over it,” said Nick. “But you right: I better get back to work ’fore he lose his mind.” He regarded Sam closely. “Good luck findin’ her, you hear?”

“Thank you,” said Sam. And he spurred the horse into a trot.

His thoughts moved even faster. She was
alive
. Somewhere to the west of him, she was alive.

Love endureth all things patiently
. It perseveres.

He had forgotten that, hadn’t he? Forgotten her voice reading that to him in the gathering twilight of a warm evening in spring. Forgotten the wonder of sitting next to her, listening. Forgotten the awe of jumping the broom with her. Hand in hand before an old straw broom someone held low, eyes upon them, Miss Prentiss watching from the back porch in tolerant amusement, their legs tensing and then springing them high, together, still hand in hand, across that old wooden stick into the land of matrimony. He had forgotten how he had leapt with her and felt as if he might never come down.

The horse raced past unseen trees.

Sam made camp that night in a field off the main road not far from the river. He ate for the first time all day—biscuits and cold chicken from the
haversack Miss Ginny had fixed. He worked open the sack Prudence had given him and ran his hands through the coins. At the bottom, he found the derringer and pulled it out. A tiny thing. Unless fired at close range, it was more apt to make a man mad than really hurt him. Or miss him altogether.

Of course, it had been a weapon just like it that killed Lincoln, so obviously the little gun could be deadly. Sam slipped it back into the bag. He slept that night without dreams.

When the morning light woke him, he saddled his horse and rode down to the riverbank. He traveled along it for half an hour before finding what he sought: a ferryman. Sam paid passage and the man took him and his horse across the wide, solemn Mississippi into the state of Arkansas.

He rode at a leisurely pace, not really seeing the sugarcane fields as he passed them by. Instead, he found himself trying to envision the ending of this quest. For weeks now, for
months
, he had pictured it as tragedy and disaster—Tilda with a new man, Tilda rejecting him, Tilda dead. For the first time, he allowed himself to imagine it as something else: Tilda joyous. Tilda rejoicing and praising God for reuniting them. Tilda as amazed to see him as he would be to see her, her arms thrown around him, her tears wetting his neck.

Was that possible? Did he even dare allow himself to hope?

He rode for two days, covering 150 miles. The trail grew cold. He asked at the back doors of farmhouses, stopped mule drivers and fence post diggers. None recalled seeing a white man and three Negroes making their way west.

There was a moment when he thought he might have uncovered a sign of them. A Negro blacksmith in a little town called Beckman told him a white woman named Mrs. Lindley had taken in a white man some weeks past. The blacksmith believed the white man was traveling with at least one Negro woman.

Sam followed the blacksmith’s directions and soon found himself standing at the back door of a Mrs. Agnes Lindley, who told him she had indeed taken in a white man, a Captain McFarland, C.S.A., who had fallen ill with pneumonia. But she could not remember his first name. He had been traveling with a colored woman, but she couldn’t remember that name at all. And there had not been three Negroes. The woman had been the only one.

Some other McFarland, thought Sam bitterly. It was not them. It was not
her
.