Running Out of Night (2 page)

I might not have worked out in the fields, but I weren’t lazy. I were the one who cooked our food, kept up the cabin, done the washin, mended, and tended our garden and animals. I squared my chin and bit down on my tongue to keep it from waggin me into trouble again.

My brothers and Pa left the table without a word; the door left open behind them. They walked out onto the porch, and Delia and Bathsheba, Grandpa’s hounds, uncurled, shook, and loped after them. I heard a round of barkin and yippin, as though the hounds thought they was goin on a coon hunt.

I stood at the window and watched till they passed my tomater patch and turned the corner at the barn; then I pulled Mama’s quilt off my bed and took it outside. I shook it good, spread it out along the porch rail to air, and run my hand over its fineness. My mama had worked the straightest, tiniest stitches into her quilts, but my needlework on my old pieced Hannah doll, it looked like the jaggedy scar that runs up the side of my leg.

I went back indoors and sank down onto the three-legged stool. The long cherrywood table, cut and milled on Grandpa’s land and built by him, were strewn with food and grease. Grandpa, my mama’s father, had been the onliest piece of softness in the family, a big, curly-headed Irishman who called me Girl like all the others, but when we was alone, my name were always Sweet Girl. And when we was alone and I cried over the things Pa and my brothers done to me, well, Grandpa always told me that bad beginnins are a sign of a good endin. I hoped I didn’t have to wait too long for the good to come.

Grandpa teached me what I knowed about the stars—turned them from strangers to friends. He showed me how to plant by the moon and what wild herbs were for pickin and eatin, healin or hurtin. He learnt me how to shoot a gun till I were near as good as him. By my eighth birthday, I could hit a corncob stuck on top of the fence clear acrost the barnyard. He knowed all the animals and how to talk to them and care for them. He give that charm over to me to carry on. Two years ago, on the day he died, I felt like most of my world, leastwise the good parts of it, went into the grave with him.

I needed to pay Grandpa some respect. After I finished up the breakfast mess, I’d clean his table proper-like and work some of my beeswax into it to bring on a shine.

I picked up my sand bucket and lye, but afore I began scrubbin the floors, I set down and leant on my elbows. “Mama,” I said aloud, “I made it safe through this mornin
without gettin into trouble.” My stomach grumbled. I slid some of the leftovers off of Pa’s and my brothers’ plates and sopped up the juices and grease with a heavy piece of yesterday’s corn bread. “Thanks, Mama,” I said. “You remembered my birthday and made me a cake.” I closed my eyes, gnawed into the corn bread, and smiled. It tasted like angel food.

From outside, I heard somethin scuffle acrost the front porch. I jumped up and tucked the last of the dried-out bread into my pocket alongside some minty wintergreen leaves and the lucky buckeye Grandpa had always carried with him. Lord save me if Pa ever found me sittin down in the middle of the day. I blanked my face, smoothed my apron, and picked up a pile of dirty plates. The sound come again. I walked toward the door, then stopped midstride and listened. Catoctin Crick, so much a part of my life that I don’t usually hear its noisesomeness, filled the cabin with its rain-fed roar.

The floorboards thrummed under my bare feet as someone walked along the porch, then stopped near the Catalpa tree. I stood, plates askew, cocked my head like a hooty owl, listened. Then I shivered. My head prickled like it did this mornin when my brother Samuel sneezed at the table—a sure sign of death comin soon.

W
hen you see a buzzard fly over your house, you can be sure that company will soon arrive
.

T
he oak plank door shuddered, and then a dry
scritch, scritch, scritch
moved up and down, side to side, like twigs on a windowpane. I weren’t expectin no one, but a big black buzzard flew over me this mornin when I were bringin in the firewood, so I knowed company were comin.

Not but two days ago three starvin Indians out huntin deer was killt by a settler who claimed they was stealin food from his land. We all knowed that it wouldn’t be long afore some of our folks would be hurt, or killt, for what Blackburn had done to them Indians. Was they on my porch right now?

I set down the plates and crept toward the door. When I laid my ear against it, I heard a strange whimperin cry.

Someone or somethin were hurt out there, or lost, or sick, and I needed to gather up my courage and unlatch the door, but I couldn’t. I was plain scairt.

I reached for the hatchet by the fireplace, and with my other hand touched the latch to make sure the bolt were throwed shut, but I’d never closed it when Pa and my brothers left.

I pushed against the rough plankin to hold the door tight closed and tried to work the bolt into the thick block of wood to hold it. No matter how hard I wiggled it I couldn’t quite slip it into place. I leant against the planks and pressed my eye to the round knothole of daylight between the boards. A big golden eye stared back at me.

N
o matter how scarce the victuals, share, for you may be feeding angels unawares
.

I
yanked open the door, and a raggedy girl in a dirty gray bandanna turned to run away. I grabbed her skinny saplin arm, the color of dark clover honey, and held on.

“Whoa!” I said. “What you doin out here?” I wanted to look at my hand to see if any of her color had rubbed off on me, but I kept my hand tight on her and stared hard into her wide golden-brown eyes, near the same color as her skin.

The girl, who looked to be about my age, glanced over my shoulder and peered into the kitchen. She acted like the fox I freed from one of Pa’s leg traps last spring.

“Don’t be scairt of me,” I said. “Are you needin of somethin?”

“I’m hungry,” she said, twistin at a piece of her torn skirt. “Cain’t you spare me some pinders or cush?”

I looked past her and into the yard, where the chickens scratched at the bare ground. I couldn’t let no one see me with her or they’d accuse me of bein a Negra-lovin John Browner.

“Where you from?” I asked. I weren’t used to talkin to anyone her color out here. I tried to once when I was to the Janneys’ mill in Waterford, but Pa gave me the back of his hand and told me that I weren’t no better than “them.”

“My family is out pickin for one of your neighbors down the road. I’m lost. I watched you workin this mornin and hoped you’d help me.”

“Which family?” I asked, and wondered why she thought I’d help her. “Which family?” I asked again. We’re all poorer than ashes in these parts, and I didn’t know a one who could hire out their work.

“I cain’t mind their names,” she said as she studied at the ground, “but they live to the big white house with them tall posts. They traded for us to work in their fields.”

I might not have got away from our farm much, but I couldn’t remember ever seein such a house around here. I knowed that over Waterford way, where all the strange Quaker folk lived, the people my pa called slave lovers had houses bigger than ours, stone and brick where ours was
split logs, but there wasn’t any big white houses with posts on their porches.

The girl never looked at me. She just stood there and rubbed her dirty bare foot back and forth along the silvery floorboards of the porch.

What did I have that I could share with her? She looked to be even hungrier than me. I remembered the dried-out piece of corn bread in my pocket. My stomach complained again, but I pulled the corn bread out and offered it to her.

She grabbed the bread and stuffed the whole piece into her wide mouth.

“You’re welcome,” I said smart-like, and then in a nicer way, “Don’t break your teeth. Sorry it’s so hard, but it’s about all I got here. Pa keeps a close watchin on our stores.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the last of the scrapple stuck fast to the sides of the skillet. Pa would beat me if he knowed I shared anythin with anyone, especially someone her color, but I couldn’t let her go away without feedin her somethin more.

“C’mon in,” I said, steppin outside to scoop up Mama’s quilt. It flapped and lifted in the light wind like a bird’s wing. “But if you hear my pa and brothers comin, you’ll have to hightail it out that side door by the fireplace. You don’t want to tangle with them.”

She stepped through the doorway and looked around the room as though she wanted to memorize every crock, bench, and pan. I wished that I’d cleaned up a bit afore
she come, but I couldn’t hardly think of her as invited company.

“Not much here,” I said, “but start to scrapin the skillet, and I’ll try to find you somethin else.” I spread Mama’s quilt back onto my narrow bed, then patted the bench next to the table. The girl slid onto it and began to chip away at the burnt scrapple with a knife. Somehow she worked that knife around the skillet and watched every door and window. She reminded me of the white-faced owl in our barn. That big old moon-eyed bird seemed to spin its head nearly all the way round while it kept watch on me feedin the animals.

I could see that the girl were used to lookin out for herself, but she didn’t know what bad trouble we’d be in if Pa or one of my brothers come home and found her here. I’ve always kept an ear cocked for their sounds, but now I strained even more for both our sakes. She needed to be out the side door and runnin into the woods afore they got close to the cabin or the dogs got wind of her.

“What’s your name?” I asked, but afore she could answer, a sharp yippin cut through the quiet and the knife slipped from her hand and clanged to the floor. The girl stepped over the bench and headed for the side door, then stopped and turned back toward me. She reached out, grabbed my sleeve, then dropped it like it were an ember right out of the cookstove. She ran one way and then the other, the way a bobwhite does when a hawk passes over it.

Yip, yip, yip, whoooof, whooof, whooooo.
The mixed
sounds of dogs runnin a hot trail come from somewhere behind the cabin.

“I cain’t go out there,” she sobbed. “They’s too close. Them dogs smell me.” Her eyes shone with tears. She laid wide her hands. They looked like pink flowers openin to the sun.

Out on the front porch steps, I heard the
clomp, clomp, clomp
of boots. Then the familiar
thump, thump, thump
as Pa knocked mud off his boots afore comin inside.

Dogs on one side of the cabin, Pa on the porch. We was treed like coons. I bent over the bench by our kitchen table and whispered to her, “Help me move this so’s you can hide.”

We slid the bench backward. I stuck my fingers into two small holes in the floor and lifted the cellar trapdoor. Cold air and the smells of damp earth, potatoes, apples, and smoked meat filled the kitchen.

“Hurry, and don’t make no sound or we both be done for,” I warned.

The girl stepped through the hole, backed down the steps, and disappeared into the darkness. I slid the trapdoor back over the openin and threw a handful of sand acrost the floor to hide our scuffle marks. Afore I had time to move the bench into place, Pa crossed the porch and pushed through the door.