The Tinsmith (35 page)

He pulled harder now, found a rhythm to calm himself. And yet he still heard the taunts as he headed for the slough; they seemed to rise up out of the river and surround him.

The Englishman moaned from the gunwale where Dare had adjusted his body. For a moment, Dare froze, the air on his nape warm as the mulatto's breath. He knew his bullet had not struck the man; he knew he had aimed at the sky. So why did he feel the awful, descending chill of a haunting? What ghost had come for him out of the slime and salmon blood? He shook the chill off. On the horizon, a small moon hung faint and dirty, the dark pressing around it. Marbled pig's flesh. The overseer's cheek. Only the black smears on the moon were wrong; they belonged to another face. Dare drew a deep, ratcheting breath, then pulled to meet his image, the boy the overseer hadn't killed, the boy who escaped the rice fields and ran, starved and terrified, with only the stars and his hatred to guide him. But the man who had returned to Antietam could not keep what was behind from coming up with each lifting of the dark water.

September 1862, near Antietam Creek

The letters were gone. He had scraped them off his flesh with a dull blade not long after joining up with the great backwash of people following the Union army. But he could still feel them under the larger, messier scar he'd made, even without raising a hand to his cheek. Sometimes they burned even more than when he'd hidden in the master's house after the great battle and waited for Orlett to return. Those hours had been among his worst. Each small sound fired his blood; he was so close to the revenge that had kept him awake nights, so close to wiping out the doglike grin and Caleb's red back and the quick splashes beside the ferry. But as time passed and the overseer didn't return to the master's house, the pressure became too much. He had to act. He had to go out again and search. Sometimes it seemed that every moment of the overseer's continuing life subtracted a moment from his own. It was harder than the drive south or the long year toiling under the whip in the rice fields because then he knew he had obstacles to overcome. Now, this close, the delay felt like a failure that might prove permanent. Besides, he needed to contribute to the Union cause. Daney had been right about the war, and he was going to do all he could to make sure she'd be right about the freedom too. Waiting in the master's house to exact his private vengeance felt almost selfish. But he decided there was no reason that he couldn't do both. After all, just that morning he had removed the uniform from a dead soldier; so it was only right that he should continue the work of that soldier's army.

The war had surrounded the farm, washed up against it like a great bloody tide that, receding, had left a beach of rotting debris. Within a hundred yards of the house, the bodies lay thick, fallen almost in perfect rows. Beyond, for a half-mile north and south along the dusty turnpike, solitary figures and small groups of three and four men moved among the dead and wounded, slowly as wasps over rotted fruit. Farther to the north, banked against the woods like the ashes of a fire, the bulk of the army rested.

But he did not think in terms of armies and battles: the cries of the wounded circled his legs and threatened to pull him down, for they were cries that contained the same suffering he had witnessed in Daney and Caleb and their children. Except, in the case of these fallen soldiers, he could still do something.

So he walked the body-strewn battlefield, picking up the wounded, one after another, and taking them to the hospitals, the barns, and houses on the neighbouring Mumma and Roulette farms that had been converted for that purpose. His fear had gone. He did not feel like a fugitive slave anymore, he did not tense, waiting for the baying of a bloodhound or the shouts of a patrol. He had been through that terror. The battlefield was almost a relief, or it would have been if not for Orlett. But where was he? A black from another farm said that the overseer had not left when the battle threatened, that he was too greedy and too drunk to leave his property unprotected. So where was he?

John cradled the wounded white men and watched out for the overseer. From the bodies of the dead he took whatever food and drink he could find. When soldiers approached, he either lay low or sought to blend in. The soldiers, however, took little notice of him; most were searching the battlefield themselves or were limping away from the front lines.

Hours passed quickly. By nightfall, he had returned to the master's house, to the elaborately carved veranda running along every side of it and to the large dormered windows and turreted roof. Inside, the house seemed even emptier than before, the darkness having swallowed what shreds were left of the finest furnishings—a bunched bit of velvet drapery like a puddle of blood. If the overseer had sought to protect his property, he had failed. But then it occurred to John in a flash what the “property” referred to. He decided to search the shacks.

The battle sounds had ceased. Only the occasional crack of a picket's rifle echoed over the stillness. Across the fields he could see the flickering lights of the hospitals. The wounded would be many, and he had to fight off the urge to help. It wasn't that he cared so much for the soldiers; it was because they were Daney's army, his army too. Their survival and eventual triumph were the black man's. That was why so many blacks had attached themselves to the federal troops and why he was able to blend in with the contrabands through most of Maryland. It was also why he could slip away for his own purposes and assume the guise of a soldier. In the chaos of battle, he knew he had his chance. But he also knew that chance wouldn't last long.

The shacks were empty, stripped of their meagre tin utensils and homemade wooden furniture. He stood in Caleb's and felt the strange acceleration of time—how quickly the world had changed. The air around him even seemed cleared, as if a whirlwind had passed through. Yet the longer he stood there, the more the shack refilled with its recent miseries. As soon as he remembered Orlett's grin again and heard the unbuckling of his belt and heard his grunts and Jancey's cries, John hurried on.

Back at the master's house, he realized that he had not made a thorough search of it from top to bottom. The instant he started down the cellar stairs, he heard the low thumping. It was very faint, and he might have ignored it if he had not known the house so well. Behind a false wall, down a short flight of stone steps, he found a thick oak door chained and padlocked. A hectic search of the cellar uncovered nothing that would help, so he left the house at a run and entered the barn. There he found an axe and hurried back to the cellar.

He put all of his hatred for the overseer into his axe swings. But the last year and a half had taken its toll. Overworked and underfed, almost starved on his run from the rice plantation, he had only begun to regain his strength once he'd joined up with the federal troops. Now his arms weakened as the axe splintered the wood. With each pause, he listened to hear if his actions had brought others to the house.

But it remained silent as the axe finally struck the decisive blow. John stooped through the jagged opening into a putrid, dirt-walled room with a low ceiling. The air stank of sweat and excrement. He heard breathing. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he made out the bodies sprawled on the dirt, their hands chained; some wore iron collars.

“Is you from de North?” a voice said weakly. Another croaked for water.

John noticed there seemed to be about a dozen bodies, all men. He quickly assured them that he was a friend as he tipped his canteen into several mouths. At the fifth mouth, he drew back, shocked by the loose-skinned, almost toothless old face. John dropped the canteen, spilling the water. It was Caleb.

He reached for the canteen as he spoke the old man's name.

“Who is dat knows me?”

He moved closer, on his knees.

“It's John.”

“John?”

Caleb's eyes moved slowly, like flies in blood.

“Yes, it's John. I've come back.”

Slowly the thin arms lifted their chains, then dropped them again.

John placed the canteen to the split lips and tilted it. The water trickled down the grizzled chin. Caleb's Adam's apple worked rapidly. He mouthed her name and John could not speak. The others groaned for water. He crawled away with the canteen.

“I'll have to fill it at the cistern,” he said. “I'll be back directly.”

Outside he leaned against the house, panting. Caleb was alive. The overseer's brutality opened inside John like a raw wound. He saw the grinning face clearly as a harvest moon, felt the searing iron on his cheek. The taste of blood filled his mouth.

Back in the dirt room, he lied, as he knew he must. He told Caleb that Daney and his children were sold to a plantation in Alabama, that they were all together. The old man closed his eyes and said nothing. There was no point in lying to a clever man like Caleb, but John could not bring himself to speak the truth. Not yet. He asked about the overseer. Caleb said he was worse than ever, crazed with spirits. That he'd taken over the farm when the master had died—over two years ago, a few months after the trader had taken them away—and had sold most of the other blacks, replacing them with blacks from the Deep South who could hardly speak a word of English. When the federal army entered Maryland, the overseer left Cray, the mulatto, and several other vicious white men in charge, and disappeared for long stretches. Some said he was a spy for the Confederates. Some said he was a soul driver himself, that he made his living that way because he sure didn't work the farm.

“But where's he now?” John said. “And why are there no women here?”

“Dey somewhere near. Dey his living and his pleasure too, him and Cray together. Dey no more dan two devils. Cray? Oh, he's jes as bad. I don't think he b'lieves he's coloured at all. He b'lieves he goin to git de overseer's place once he done drink hisself into de grave.”

“But where are they? Where are they?”

Caleb sighed and dropped his head to his chest.

“What you gwan to do? Dey ain't no point in it now.”

“I'm going to see that they don't hurt anyone again.”

“But dey two devils, you hear? Dey evil and dey know how to stay alive.”

“I've come here to kill him,” John said, “and I can kill the other too. Why else would I come? He said you were dead. I believed you were dead.”

“Den Daney and de chillen thought so?”

“Yes.”

Caleb's tears filled his deep wrinkles. For several minutes he did not speak. At last he raised his bleary eyes and fixed them on John. A flicker of triumph touched his face.

“Jancey knows different. I got word to her.”

“Jancey!” John's heart banged against his ribs. He couldn't speak.

Caleb smiled. “De overseer didn't catch her. She's clear away. In Canada.”

With a sickening sensation, John understood that Caleb's mind had been damaged along with his body. The old man needed to keep one of his daughters alive in order to keep himself alive. That he chose Jancey only increased John's own pain.

“She knows de truth about dat hog too,” Caleb said, reading his thoughts. “I figure she always did know. Inside. Probably her mother did too.”

He slumped against the dirt wall, ran his thick tongue over his cracked lips.

The mention of Daney struck John like cold water. He remembered where he was, and when. The overseer's face crossed over Jancey's just as if he'd come up from behind and wrapped his arms around her. John knew he couldn't waste any more time.

“Orlett and Cray. Where are they, Caleb?”

But the old man just sighed and shook his head. Fortunately, one of the other blacks explained. Orlett and Cray did some kind of work for the Union army. There was money to be made from the war, he had heard Orlett say. Maybe they sold horses. They owned plenty of them, had been buying them up for months. Generally they returned to the house at nightfall, but on account of the battle, it was hard to know when they'd come back this time.

Carefully, and with much effort, John struck the irons with a mallet and chisel he'd brought from the barn and told the men he'd take them straight away to a Union camp. If they were too weak to walk, he'd carry them. He wanted to get them safely away before the overseer and the mulatto returned. Did they have any idea where the women were kept?

“Dey somewhere in de house,” Caleb said. “We could hear de screaming sometimes. Jes days ago. De overseer, he like us to know what he doin with dem.”

John told them to stay put until he came back. Then he ran upstairs. But a search of the other rooms revealed nothing. Finally he remembered the attic. Climbing the stairs to it, he did not think anyone was there, for the air was not so foul and there was no sound. But when he pulled his head through the hole in the floor, he saw the bodies, gagged and handcuffed with rope. The overseer must have kept the space clean because . . . he didn't want to think of it. He spoke gently to the women, told them he was a friend who had brought freedom, that he would lead them away from this place. Urging them to be quiet, John undid the gags. Light fell in thin shafts through the ceiling cracks, and he saw that the six women were mostly young and very black. They just stared at the air as he undid their ropes, trying his best to be gentle even though he could feel the overseer's foul warm breath on his neck. Whenever one of the thin cotton shifts slid away to reveal a breast or stomach, he paused. Once, he discreetly pulled the shift back up. The smell of the women's bodies stirred him despite the situation, and he was ashamed. The women began to speak to each other in a foreign tongue and he urged them again to be quiet. Hurriedly he prepared to lead them downstairs, not knowing exactly what he should do with them or the men in the cellar. The Union army would not welcome any new contrabands now, not so soon after a horrific battle. And besides, he already knew that the slaveholders of Maryland were to be respected, given that the state remained neutral. Perhaps he could find the home of a free black on the other side of the village. Caleb would know what was best.