The Loom (20 page)

“Oh yes, you need help.”

“I’ll be fine.” She hobbled forward and shrieked.

“I insist.” Jackson looped her arm around his, shifting her weight against his large frame. Lydia hopped against him into the carriage.

“Now tell me. What were you doing out here alone?”

“Leaving.” How much of the truth could she share?

“Leaving? Leaving what? Leaving whom?” He stared at her.

“My father died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. My condolences. Does Elizabeth know?”

“Yes. She knows.”

“Well, I’d imagine she would be glad to take you in. I’m certain you could stay with her.”

“I did. I was with her, but her father, her father tried to…” She dropped her head in shame. If only she had told John.

“I understand. Enough said.”

“I just left, walked away with nothing.” She held up the broken leather. “But this heel.” She forced a smile for all the broken she held on to.

Odessa wailed at Abram’s feet.

An early winter chill whipped through the hills of the Kelly plantation and in and out of the bodies of owners and slaves alike.

Days later, it settled deep in the chest of her love.

She couldn’t lose him. Not now. Lord Jesus, not ever.

She was supposed to go first. Fall in his arms and rise in the arms of Jesus. That was the way it was supposed to be, the way it had to be because he was the strong one. The rock. Her strength. She needed him. God knew she needed him. Had never made a step without him.

“Please, Lord.”

She draped herself over him, pressed her cheek against his chest, his hot, damp chest, rising and falling, higher, drawing his stomach tighter, lower until his ribs poked through the rags of thin cotton. She closed her eyes, listened to the rattling of sleep coming from blankets across from her, the wheezing of death beneath her. Ruth and Lou had stayed up until bloodshot eyes begged to close, but she had no choice. She had to fight. She kissed the scar in the middle of his palm, leaned in, pressed harder, whispered into his pores, spoke to him. Spoke through him. Her face lifted with his every breath, dropped with each exhale. Together they battled. His body, her prayers. One spirit fighting to live.

It wasn’t the first time.

Decades before when she, Abram, and Ruth were on the Whitfield plantation, it was she who needed saving.

“I got you just where I want you, girl.” Young master, their owner’s son, stepped toward her.

Odessa squirmed in the corner of the dim work shed where she had been waiting for Abram, her love. He had promised to meet her there each day for a week, but every evening she had waited in vain.

She tugged on the folds of her dingy dress, stretched it past her ankles, sweeping it against the floor, but it still wasn’t enough.

Lustful eyes looked past it, saw through it. She needed a real covering.

Lord, help me.

Master Tim made his way through all the slave girls, ones she had brought into the world with her own hands, and now he wanted women, even ones old enough to be his mother. She had prayed she’d never see the day but it had arrived, streaking in as a harsh ray of light across her enemy’s face. He was close enough for her to see him well. Every detail. Four beads of sweat, clinging to his upper lip, ran together when he grinned.

He stepped forward into the shadows.

Please, God.

“I’ve been waiting for this a long time. I’ve been watching you.”

Another step closer.

Jesus, You there?

“Now I’m a see if you been worth the wait.” His fingers trembled when he reached for her. She screamed for Abram and shrank away from his hands, from those nails. They were the shortest nails she’d ever seen, rimmed in dirt or blood, bit so deep the tips looked longer than normal. The ugliest hands she’d ever seen.

“Come here, girl.”

“Please, sir, please. Don’t do this. Please!”

“Where you going? You playing shy?” Laughter spilled from his pursed lips. “I like that.” Hot words seared her face.

His fingers clutched her thigh. She screamed.

“Please, no! God, no.” Help me, Father. She struggled to break free, to move his hand, but his hold was tighter, stronger than she could manage. She swung forward, her right hand tearing his face with her fingernails.

Two red lines stretched from his temple to his jawbone. His eyes narrowed. He threw her down against the wall. “You crazy

—” Please, Jesus, come for me.

“Leave her.” Ruth’s trembling voice turned their heads in her direction. She stood with a knife, holding the red handle like a pistol between both hands, her legs spread wide apart under the sway of her skirt. “Leave her alone.”

Master Tim leapt toward her friend and grabbed the blade from her hands. It was the moment, the tragedy Odessa would never forget, the horror she would never forgive that would change all of them, each as much as the other. Ruth’s dark brown eyes widened just before the blade sliced across them and they gaped with blood. Odessa screamed as she watched her friend collapse in the hay.

There was no sound, only the horror of a red stream trickling down a stricken face, a white shirt, a burlap skirt. The flow that would not stop, would never dry from her own eyes.

Master Tim stood staring at the injured woman at his feet. It was the last thing Odessa remembered before a scarred hand wrapped around her mouth, pulling her to her feet. Suddenly she was lifted and carried away. She slept for hours before she awoke safe on her cot, wrapped in wool.

“Sissy?”

“Child, what is it?” Her friend stirred and turned to face her, her eyes still slit from sleep.

“How did I get here?” She scrambled up and looked around. “I went to go meet Abram at the shed, but Master Tim…” Ruth.

The image of Ruth shook her. How had she been able to sleep?

“What did that boy do, Dessa?” Sissy rose wide awake. “He touch you?”

“No. That’s the thing. He was about to. He was in my face, Sissy, all over me, oh, it was awful.” She bit back the pain. “I thought for sure he was going to… Oh, Sissy, I knew this was it, there was no getting away this time. I was all alone, hunched up in a corner, when Ruth came. Ruth is dead.” She sobbed. “Ruth is dead, but I was saved. I was saved. Somebody, I didn’t see him, but somebody with a scar on the inside of his hand, right in the center of his palm, put his hand over my mouth and took me out of that place. I don’t remember nothing else, but I’m here and I’m saved.”

“My God…”

“You think, you think Jesus came?”

“Who else, Dessa? Who else?”

Odessa stared at the tears in Sissy’s eyes and thought of the shed blood that saved her.

But Ruth wasn’t dead. Yet and still, something had died in Odessa. An innocence, a trust, a peace cut out of her. The knife had sliced through her mind, made all her reasoning separate parts of a whole. Her words came out slowly as she linked her thoughts like the pieces of a puzzle, but when she couldn’t, she cried. She had cried every day since.

The next afternoon, Odessa waited for Abram at the shed and he showed up. When he extended his hand, she gasped, nearly fainted. Her heart beat double when she saw it.

“Where you get that scar?” It was the first thing she asked him.

“Ain’t nothing,” he said for hours until late that night when they were alone. “Last week me and Sammy decided we was gonna do something. Not just sit around and let them hurt our own. We’re willing to risk our lives if we have to. We’re going to save our women. That boy has to be stopped. Anyway, we used that hot poker to prove we were tough, that we could take whatever came our way. I got mine in the hand. Sammy’s is in his right foot.”

“It’s just the two of you? Saving folk?”

“Just the girls, from that no-good—” He bit back the words. “Yeah, the two of us. We were the only two fools crazy enough to believe we could do something. The only ones crazy enough to burn ourselves.” He chuckled.

A year later, Sammy stopped him, slit his throat like the man had sliced Ruth’s eyes, but the price was high. Master Whitfield beat him until he was unrecognizable and hung his body out by the slave cabins and dared anyone to take him down. He stayed up there until the stench filled every log house on slave’s row, until you could taste death in every bite, in every drink consumed on the land. His body stayed there until the slices of skin that were left peeled away under the boiling sun and his flesh was pecked by the wild at night.

None of it was good for Odessa’s mind. None of it was good for any of them, but while the others continued walking around the swinging corpse, choosing to move through the day like it was normal to see a dead man, a friend, somebody’s son twirling by a rope around his neck, Odessa couldn’t. She sat and cried.

“Old Man Whitfield’s an evil man and that bad seed passed right on through to his boys,” Abram said. “At least one’s gone. All we have to deal with now is Jackson, and he’s a young one who don’t seem to have a thing for dark skin. Don’t want none of us in his sight mostly. Suits me just fine.”

“I can’t believe ya’ll was so brave.”

He shrugged.

“How many girls you rescue, Abram?”

His head dropped before it shook.

“Abram?”

“I don’t talk about that, Dessa. I don’t ever talk about that. When they killed Sammy, I let it all go. He was the brave one. He was the one who died.”

And yet Abram was the one honored. The healer. So many years ago.

Odessa stared at the man lying before her. Ruth and Lou returned to her side.

“Lord, I’m so scared You gonna take my husband from me. Then what I’m gonna do, Lord? What I’m gonna do?”

“Odessa,” Ruth interrupted, “you gonna pray or you gonna worry? Can’t do both, child.”

“Leave Dessa alone. You all right, baby. Just talk to Him the way you want to. He knows your heart.”

Abram stirred.

“See there.”

Ruth reached down and touched the limbs in front of her. “That you, Dessa? She’s on his foot, Lou. Wouldn’t you wake up if all that was on you?” Odessa threw a tattered patch at Ruth. The women chuckled.

“You all right, love?”

He coughed, struggled up, and fell back.

“Stop trying to be strong. Rest now, you hear?”

He nodded, wiggling to his side. By midnight, he lay helpless in a pool of sweat. All heads bowed in prayer. Odessa wept.

“Abram, you got to make it. For me.”

Ruth and Odessa took turns wiping his forehead, keeping him dry. Tremors quaked through the broken vessel.

“Come on, get up, Abram! Get up.” Odessa gripped a chunk of his flesh and squeezed, twisting his skin purple under Ruth’s watchful hand.

“Stop that, Dessa, you hurting him.” The blind woman slapped her fingers away. “That’s a terrible way to die.”

The room fell silent.

“I’m sorry. Dessa, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. You know I always say too much.”

“I ain’t gonna make it without you.” She slumped over her husband’s body. “You kept me here in this world,” she mumbled, every word muffled against his ribs. “Without you, I would’ve been gone. Would’ve gone to Jesus a long time ago.”

Lou and Ruth swayed with her, calming her with gentle hands and a thick melodic hum. A death hymn, slow and dark. She was losing him and they all knew it. Each moment, he slipped further from her and this life, this world. It would be just the women left in The Room.

The ladies dozed in a layered pile until a wind whistled through the cracks of the walls. Shifting tumbled the stack awake.

Abram lay cold and still.

“My baby’s gone,” Odessa cried, gripping the hands of her sisters. They sobbed over the motionless body.

When Abram’s eyes flashed open, they screamed.

“Abram? Abram! You ain’t dead!”

He blinked, coughed, hard and long, and sat up on his forearms. “Wouldn’t you wake up with all that on you?”

Odessa put her hand on his forehead. “Fever’s gone.”

Lou leaned against the wall and pulled to her feet. She bounced in place, her hands pressed together, head down one moment, both hands and head raised the next. She shuffled herself breathless to her own rhythm.