The Lost Quilter (18 page)

“If you stay behind, they’ll punish you,” said Tavia.

Auntie Bess cackled. “What they gonna do, beat an old woman?”

“They done it before,” said Pearl.

“Even if they do, it be worth it to get you almost an extra day head start.”

“Come with us, Auntie Bess,” Titus urged. “Live the rest of your days a free woman.”

“Tell you what,” she said. “You get free, then you get yourself a good living and buy my freedom.”

Nothing they said would persuade her. All Titus could do was to promise to buy her freedom someday, leaving unspoken how unlikely it was that he could ever do so, how many years he would have to work to earn enough wages, how impossible it was to imagine him persuading Marse Chester to sell one of his slaves to one of his runaways.

Joanna stole one of the mistress’s old dresses, one left in the mending basket so long the mistress had forgotten it. One night she let out the hem, ripped out seams, and made it over to fit her belly. If anyone noticed that the fabric didn’t match, she hoped they would pity her as a newly impoverished, frugal widow. She was counting on the painted measles spots to keep people at a distance. As for her burn scar, she had no idea how to explain it away except as a symptom of the same disease.

Auntie Bess used up the last of the cornmeal baking biscuits for them to take on their journey. When they protested that she ought to keep some back for herself, she retorted, “Next week I’ll have the whole ration to myself.”

“After that, you’ll be lucky to get a ration at all,” said Titus, still confounded by Auntie Bess’s refusal to run. “You best eat your fill Sunday night, because Monday morning they’ll take everything you got left.”

“I’ll hide it in the woods in a basket,” she said airily, so Titus let her be.

They counted down the days and slept restlessly at night, full of eagerness and worry. The children sensed something was coming, but they were accustomed to uncertainty and did not
fuss. Some mornings Joanna awoke from nightmares of slave hunters and bellowing dogs, shaking from fear and tasting bile. Other days she fairly flew from the big house to the slave quarter, counting down the number of times she would swing the washhouse door shut, pass the chestnut trees, cross the dusty road between the cabins. Dread and excitement haunted her; anticipation spurred her to plan for an uncertain future: This time next month, they might be crossing the border into Pennsylvania. This time next year, they could be building a home in Canada, with rooms for them all, her older boy and her new baby taking his first steps, her husband and his kin.

This time next week, they could all be in the buck, bound down in a squat, backs split open and seeping blood. This time next week, they could be dead.

Friday came—their last Friday on Oak Grove, the women murmured to one another as they prepared to leave Tavia’s cabin for the day. Two more days to prepare; two more days to worry, to think of a million reasons to change their minds. Joanna rolled Mrs. Chester’s altered dress into her Birds in the Air quilt top and tucked her carefully hoarded pins, the needle case she had fashioned from a piece of worn linsey-woolsey, and her tin cornboiler into the bundle. Tomorrow she would leave the big house with the sewing shears and add them to her belongings. She figured she had earned them.

But as she was leaving the kitchen building after the noon meal, she spotted Titus striding up the road to the big house, his face contorted from the effort to conceal his fury. Instinctively her hand went to her belly to comfort her child, and when she caught Titus’s eye, she nodded and moved off behind a stand of live oaks so they could speak unobserved.

“What is it?” she asked as he took her hand and led her even farther into the thicket.

“Marse Chester change his plans,” he said, his jaw clenched so hard he could barely get the words out. “He’s sending me tomorrow to fetch Miss Evangeline. Not Sunday, tomorrow.”

“What?” Suddenly dizzy, Joanna reached for his strong arm and held fast. “Why? Why tomorrow? Does he know we mean to run?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, or we’d be feeling the lash right now.” Titus held her by the shoulders and locked his eyes on hers. “We can still run. We still got the coach, we still got this chance. We just got to figure out how to do it.”

Numbly, Joanna shook her head, trying to clear it. “How?” Titus could hide the children in the coach before sunrise, and maybe, maybe she could slip away from work since no one but Mrs. Chester knew from day to day whether she would be sorting cotton or sewing, but what about Tavia and Pearl? “Maybe Auntie Bess can tell Aaron that Tavia and Pearl sick.”

Titus shook his head bleakly. “Aaron always checks to make sure no one’s shamming. If they wait in the cabin until Aaron come by, someone might see them going from the quarter to the stable.”

And if Aaron didn’t believe they were sick and sent them out to work anyway, they couldn’t simply drop their bags and walk off the cotton fields when the time came for Titus to depart in the coach.

“Maybe—” Joanna took a deep, shaky breath. “Maybe when they take their full bags to get weighed, instead of going back to the fields—”

“Aaron can see everything from the farthest edge of the fields
to the scales,” Titus broke in. “If they out of sight for more than five minutes, he’ll know they run off.”

Joanna knew he was right—and that she was watched almost as constantly as Tavia and Pearl. The buckra might not notice her absence as quickly, but before the day was out, everyone would realize that Joanna had disappeared. If the fugitives managed any head start at all, it would be a matter of hours or minutes, not days. A man on horseback with a rifle could overtake them before they reached Charleston, before they could collect the forged passes, their only measure of protection from patrollers and slave hunters.

If Joanna disappeared while Titus was out with the wagon, Marse Chester would know exactly where to search. He would punish them severely, sell them away from each other—or sell their child and keep Joanna and Titus, the better to punish them for the rest of their lives.

But Titus might never get another chance like this one.

“You got to go alone,” she told him.

“Joanna—”

“You got to. We can’t come with you, but you can still get away.”

“What would Tavia say if she hear you talking like this?” Titus placed a hand on her belly, and she laid her hands on his. “She wants freedom for her children as much as we want it for ours.”

“Tavia would say I’m right and you know it.” Titus shook his head, but she hurried on before he could argue, before he could persuade her that it had to be all of them or none. “Your friend can write a pass saying you been sent to fetch someone back to your master, someone in his family—make it his old mother, who can’t travel alone. Patrollers’ll believe that before they believe a
coach full of slaves and one white lady with measles and a burned face. Soon as I talk, or if they see my hair, they’d know I’m not white anyway.”

Anguished, Titus embraced her. “No. I can’t do it. I can’t leave you and Tavia and the children. Not when you about to have my child.”

Joanna fought back tears, tears she could not explain away when she returned to the big house, tears that would arouse the mistress’s suspicions. “You got to go.” She pressed her hand to his cheek, to the dear face she loved to look upon. “After you get to Philadelphia, you make your way west to the Elm Creek Valley. You find Gerda Bergstrom at Elm Creek Farm, and you find my son. Keep him safe until you can buy my freedom.”

She buried her face in his shoulder and felt him nod, his tears hot on her skin.

Saturday morning. Tavia looked so frightened, Pearl so bitterly disappointed, that Joanna implored them to keep their faces turned away from Aaron or he would know something was wrong. They had said their good-byes the night before, after supper, knowing it would be too difficult on the day of their parting. Titus had told his young niece and nephew only that he was going to Charleston to fetch Miss Evangeline, hoping that the children would not be punished too severely if, when questioned later, they knew nothing of his escape. As if they had sensed that their uncle would be gone much longer than he claimed, they had held on to him when he tried to go, begging him to stay until they fell asleep. He agreed, and sat on the edge of their bed stroking their backs until their eyes closed. Then he kissed them, embraced each of the women in turn, and gave Joanna one last, lingering
kiss before he gathered up the food set aside for the journey and ducked out of the cabin.

The next morning the sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky, but Joanna was insensible to anything but grief and fear. If Titus could not get the forged pass or if it wasn’t convincing, he could be shot on sight as a runaway and Joanna would never know what had become of him. Even if he made it to freedom—
when
he made it to freedom—he might not be able to send word to them. She would wonder for the rest of her life if the father of her child were living or dead.

She was sewing beneath the oak trees when she heard the coach rumble out of the carriage house, her husband high upon the driver’s seat, reins in his hands. He turned around once to look back, and she knew, although he gave no sign that he had seen her, that as long as he lived he would remember how she had looked as he had driven away, resting her sewing upon her ample belly and watching him go.

Then he turned back around, and she could only sit and watch his tall, straight back as he disappeared down the road behind a curtain of moss-draped oaks.

Suddenly hatred surged through her. What was one day to Marse Chester? One day to spoil their plans, to ruin all their hopes, to separate her from the only man she had ever loved. Titus was her only happiness, and now he was gone.

Shaking with rage, she flung her sewing aside and pressed her hands to her face. The baby stirred and kicked within her. After a moment, Joanna lowered her hands and pressed them to her abdomen, answering the baby’s silent call, pressing gently upon the little feet that explored his little world. If only he could drift there forever, and never know discomfort, never know loneliness or grief or pain.

The Bergstroms would help Titus raise the money to buy their freedom. If the Bergstroms were not dead or in prison for helping her, they would help her husband.

The thought was a fragile thread holding her last hopes together, and if she tugged upon it, all would unravel.

Sunday passed, dull and heavy. When the time came for heads of households to draw the weekly ration, Joanna lined up behind Tavia and asked for Titus’s share. “Don’t you live with Tavia?” asked Aaron, eyeing her skeptically.

“Only because Miss Evangeline don’t want me to sleep in the barn.” She had stayed with Titus in his corner of the hayloft for the first few weeks of their marriage—after their second ceremony, the one the Chesters knew about—until Miss Evangeline complained that she smelled like horses. Then it was back to Tavia’s cabin and stolen moments alone beside the riverbank.

She met Aaron’s gaze boldly, ignoring the whip coiled on his belt. She would be feeling its sting soon enough. They all would. “I’m head of household while Titus gone to Charleston to fetch Miss Evangeline. He could get his ration himself when he gets back, but you always say if we miss the drawing, we got to wait until next week. He can’t go without food until then.”

“All right. Take it.” Aaron set out Titus’s portion on the ground, and Joanna quickly scooped up everything and carried it back to the cabin before he changed his mind. She knew he would not have bent the rules for anyone but Titus, the most trusted slave on Oak Grove after himself. Titus’s betrayal would enrage the Chesters the way the escape of a mere field hand never could. Her throat constricted whenever she imagined what Marse Chester would do to Titus if he were captured. And if they didn’t
catch him, those left behind might starve to death, no matter how much Marse Chester needed them to bring in the cotton. She would have to hoard every scrap of food she could in preparation for the coming famine.

In the meantime, only Joanna, Tavia, Pearl, and Auntie Bess knew what awaited them. They could not warn the others without exposing Titus’s escape, and if Aaron overheard even whispered rumors, slave hunters would be sent in pursuit as soon as Marse Chester could summon them. Joanna envisioned Isaac and Peter dragging Titus, bound and bleeding, behind their horses; she pictured the Georgia traders hauling him from the barracoon to the auction block. Dizzy and sick, unable to drive the horrible pictures from her mind, she ran off to the riverbank and wept, pressing her hand to her mouth to strangle her sobs. Hunger and exhaustion eventually drove her back to Tavia’s cabin, where the other women put their arms around her and held her. In the center of their intertwined arms was Joanna’s child, all that remained to her of the man she loved.

A storm struck the next day, driving rain and thunderclaps that shook the big house and turned day into night. Bored, Elliot Chester, the eldest son, terrified his two younger siblings with tales of a giant sea monster roaring and thrashing in the ocean to the east, furious at the humble planters who disturbed its rest by casting ships upon the waves above his watery kingdom. Joanna jumped at each flash of lightning, praying that Titus was far north of the storm and that the impassable roads would delay a messenger sent from Miss Evangeline’s aunt.

The storm subsided by nightfall and the next day dawned warm and sunny. While listing Joanna’s duties for the day, the mistress wondered aloud what could be keeping Miss Evangeline. “Her father should have gone to fetch her,” she said, piling
boys’ trousers into Joanna’s mending basket. “Likely she wanted to linger another day to enjoy the shops and parties, and if her aunt agreed, what could Titus do without an express command from his master?” Suddenly she paused and peered into Joanna’s face. “You needn’t be troubled. We don’t blame Titus. Evangeline ought to know better.”

Joanna composed herself and nodded. Until Aunt Lucretia sent word that Titus had never arrived, the Chesters would invent one excuse after another for the delay. Each day took her husband farther and farther from their reach. She prayed for the horses to be swift and strong, speeding him northward. She prayed that the Bergstroms would offer him work and a place to stay so that he could earn enough to buy his family’s freedom. They raised horses; they could use a man like Titus.