Freeman (61 page)

But the blast that filled the small space came from Jim McFarland’s rifle instead.

The bullet ripped through Jones like fire. Felt like it had taken his shoulder off. His legs turned in a corkscrew motion, twisting around one another, and he went down to the floor, which was littered with scrap paper and stray pieces of type. He found himself at eye level with the spittoon he never used. There was blood everywhere. Jones thought he might vomit. His heart thumped heavily in his ears.

Then he heard McFarland’s measured steps, coming around the counter.
All Jones could see of him was his boots, gray with age, brown with muck. Jones’s left hand sought his right shoulder, the pistol dropped somewhere and forgotten. The hand touched something spongy and wet, embedded with sharp edges that he supposed were bone. If he lived, he thought, he would surely lose the arm.

But he didn’t think he would live.

“Almost had me goin’, boy,” said McFarland, kneeling into Jones’s field of vision. “Guess I forgot what natural liars niggers can be.”

Jones’s leg kicked, a spasm. “So he went back to Buford, eh?” said McFarland. “Well, that works out just fine for me, I suppose. Been thinkin’ about goin’ back home anyway. Be able to kill two birds with one stone.”

Jones’s leg spasmed again, and this time didn’t stop. Lying on the floor, he danced a macabre jig to music only his leg could hear. He tried to speak, but the sounds he made were nothing like language. Blood bubbled, coppery and hot, on his lips.

McFarland stood. He prodded Jones’s wrecked shoulder with the toe of his boot. “Could have spared yourself all this,” he said. “Should have told me where they went.”

He stepped out of Jones’s view. Jones heard his feet scraping across the floor, doing what, he could not guess. For a moment there was silence, but for the knocking of his own leg as it bounced madly against the floor.

Then, in a distracted voice to himself, Jim McFarland spoke the last words Abraham Lincoln Jones would ever hear. “Need to get me a horse,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

They were an hour out of Little Rock. This was the first time she had spoken to him unprompted since they left Abraham Lincoln Jones standing in front of his newspaper office. The realization that he had no answer took Sam by surprise.

For three months, he had been driven forward, whipped by a single imperative:
find her
. Thinking beyond that had never even occurred to him. Now here she was, real and in the flesh and
there
, asking the obvious question. He gave the first answer that entered his head, hoping it sounded like something he had planned all along.

“We are going North to Philadelphia,” he said. “I was recently employed at a library there and perhaps I can get my situation back. That is,” he added cautiously, “if you are of a mind to travel that far.”

“Philadelphia would be fine,” she said. “Marse Jim hates the North. He will never come looking for me there.”

“What does it matter if he does?” asked Sam. “I keep telling you: the North won the war. He has no legal authority over you.”

She snickered. “Legal authority,” she said. And then, she said nothing more.

Sam’s first thought was to ask what she meant. He chose silence instead. It seemed wiser. No, it seemed
safer
.

Silence had ridden hard between them all the way out of Little Rock. It occurred to him that he was riding with a stranger. Once, he had known
her so intimately. Once, the contours of her face, her breasts, her mind, had been as familiar to him as the breath in his lungs. Now she had become this…
foreigner
, as distant and unknowable as the moon.

For this, he had walked a thousand miles, lost his arm, been beaten and stabbed? Sam pursed his lips to keep the questions inside.

They ambled east in the silence. Another hour passed. Sam lost himself in wondering where they would stop for the night. If they were fortunate, they would find an abandoned barn, or perhaps even a colored family that didn’t mind taking in strangers. If they were not fortunate, they would be obliged to sleep in a clearing or a field somewhere.

“Would you be willing to take me to the place where Luke died?”

The sound of her voice surprised him. She had turned in the saddle and was looking up at him. Her eyes were disconcerting.

“Likely, it will be difficult to find,” he said. The mention of their dead son unsettled him. He wondered, guiltily, if this was the moment she would cry and accuse him of getting their boy killed. He braced for it, but it didn’t come. All she said was, “Would you be willing to try? I would like to see it.”

He heard himself say yes. And he realized, somewhat to his surprise, that he wanted to see it, too.

They stopped for the night an hour later. For a dollar drawn from the dwindling supply of coins Prudence had given him, a colored widow in a little town without a name allowed them to use one of her two rooms, moving her two children into the other room for the night. She fed them a dinner of poke salad and beans.

In the room, Tilda went straight to the bed and stretched out on her back, eyes closed. Sam didn’t even consider joining her. He used the haversack as a pillow and laid himself on the rough boards of the floor. After a moment, he heard Tilda snoring lightly. He lay awake, wondering if this were not all a mistake.

Love never fails
.

He reminded himself of this. But still, he wondered.

Morning came. The woman fixed them corn cakes and eggs. Before Sam and Tilda set off, she stuffed a few extra corn cakes in Sam’s haversack for lunch. They set out at an easy pace. Sam was worried about tiring the horse, which now had to bear the weight of two.

Another long, silent time passed. Finally Sam had had enough. He said, “I do not recall you being so quiet.”

“Fifteen years is a long time,” she said.

He waited for her. When she didn’t say anything more he said, “And what does that mean?”

“It means what it says,” she said. “Fifteen years is a long time. Many things change.”

Many things change
.

Three words and suddenly, it was if his heart had fallen out of his chest. From the first day he set out upon this quest, he had cautioned himself not to hope, even a little, that they could restore what had once existed between them, had told himself he was looking for her only because he owed her that much. But he realized now that he must have been hoping without even knowing he was doing it, because her words made him dizzy with pain. He wondered if he was about to become Ben standing in that alley, trying to laugh the truth away even as the hope that had sustained him for so many hard miles spilled like water around him.

It crushed him to think maybe now the same thing was happening to him. It crushed him to think maybe she did not love him anymore.

Sam swallowed. “‘Many things change,’” he repeated, and his voice sounded log hollow in his own ears. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”

He persisted. He couldn’t help himself. “I just wish to know to what you are referring. I believe I have the right to—”

That was as far as he got. She spun around, her face close to his in the confines of the saddle, her eyes hateful, her features razored. “I have been
raped
and I have been
beaten
!” she cried. “Do you hear me? Raped and beaten over and
over
again! I am
sorry
if I am not very amusing company for you, Sam Prentiss or Sam Freeman or whatever it is you call yourself now. But I am afraid I don’t feel very sociable these days! Do you understand? Is that all right with you?”

Sam’s mouth opened to release a stunned silence. It must have satisfied her, because she turned back, her hands pinned beneath her arms, her head hunched down as if against a stark, cold wind. She looked as if she wanted to curl up inside herself, crawl into the shadows, and die. A silence intervened. Then she spoke again.

“And if you were thinking we might lie together, if that is why you came after me”—her voice was stripped like bark from a tree down to some grim
and plain essence of itself—“you can forget it. If that was your intention, Sam, we can part company here and I will walk. I swear I will.”

“That was not my intention,” he said. And it wasn’t. He spoke these words absently. The truth is, he barely heard her. He’d barely heard anything—not words, not cawing of crows, not clopping of horse’s hooves—since she’d spoken those stunning, poisonous words that should not have surprised him but somehow did anyway.

Raped and beaten. Over and over again
.

And why not? Why should this be a shock? Miss Prentiss had never allowed that sort of thing on her place, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Of
course
it happened. Only the fact that they had been spoiled by a mistress who believed in treating even colored people like people had ever allowed him to forget that. But then, Tilda had been sold to this James McFarland person and her luck had changed and she had lost the luxury of forgetting. Apparently, this McFarland had practiced every form of cruelty and mistreatment they had previously been fortunate enough to escape. And Tilda had suffered that without him. Suffered it alone.

He gazed down at her shoulders, wanted to touch them, but did not. She seemed…shrunken. Her chin was on her chest and she still held herself tightly as if afraid she might otherwise unravel, the shreds and tangles of her unspooling all over this delta land east of Little Rock.

“I am sorry,” he heard himself say.

If she heard, she gave no indication. Seen from behind, she might have been carved from stone. Sam fell silent. And in silence, they passed the remains of the day. They rode past mangled train tracks and blooming fields. They forded streams whose cold, clear water grazed the horse’s belly. It was just before twilight when they reached the broad brown back of the Mississippi and paid a ferryman to take them across. They made camp in a clearing that night.

Sam fashioned four poles from sapling limbs and set them out in the river. When he checked the lines an hour later, he’d caught three catfish. Sam gutted them and cooked them over a fire while Tilda watched. When they were done eating, Sam handed Tilda his bedroll, which he had purchased in Little Rock. He gave it without a sound and she accepted it the same way. Sam lay on his back in the summer grass, folded his arm across his chest, and slept.

He awoke in the morning to find her watching him. Her eyes were intent, as if she were struggling with a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out. When she saw him looking at her, she yanked her eyes away and busied herself scraping a mud spot on her dress.

“We should reach the spot today,” Sam told her. Her eyes questioned him. “The spot where Luke died,” he amended.

A hard look he couldn’t read settled upon her face. He produced the last of the dried meat he had bought in Little Rock and they had it for breakfast.

When they were done eating, Sam began saddling Bucephalus. As he worked, his thoughts turned themselves toward practical matters. What kind of shape was Tilda in? Could she take a long, hard journey across country on horseback? Especially living hand to mouth, as such a journey would require?

He could, he supposed, go to Buford—it wasn’t far—and ask Prudence for help. She would not have left for Boston yet, and she probably wouldn’t turn them away.

But Prudence had already done so much. He already owed her more than he could ever repay. Could he really go now and ask her to help him and the woman for whom he had abandoned her? He played that conversation over in his head a half dozen times. He could not find a way to make it work.

So they were on their own then. Fine. He would figure something out. Sweating from the exertion of cinching the girth with his one hand, he stood, his hand absently stroking the horse’s neck. Lost in thought, he didn’t hear Tilda behind him, didn’t know she was there until she placed her hand atop his. Startled, he turned, and nearly tumbled over into the brown eyes that looked up at him.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I had no cause to speak to you that way. Yesterday, I mean.”

“It is all right,” he said. “I understand.”

“Do you?” she took her hand away. “How can you? I am not sure I understand myself.”

“I just meant that I took no offense. You have the right to be”—pause, reaching for a word that made sense, finding none—“vexed.”

Her eyebrow lifted and he thought she almost smiled. “Vexed? Is that what I am?”

“Angry,” he said. “Hurt, furious, sad…” A sigh. “You tell me, Tilda. I do not know.”