The Warriors (8 page)

Still sick, he’d blundered ahead—straight into a maze of little tributaries of the river, a place of rank water and steaming gloom produced by huge cypresses and live oaks.

He’d slopped across one shallow backwater and up the far bank, intending to lie down and rest only a few moments. That was all he remembered until now.

He grew alarmed by a weightlessness in two places where there should have been weight. The precious Enfield no longer pressed against his shoulder; his cartridge box was missing from his belt.

His face felt scorching, oily. He knew he had the fever again.

He dragged his left hand back. Fumbled at his waist.

The oilskin pouch was still there, thank God.

He heard a foot squish down in mud. Heard a man breathing. His teeth started to chatter as he opened his eyes.

Ten inches from his nose a small turtle lay upside down on the curve of its shell. The turtle had withdrawn its head and legs. He couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead. A short distance beyond the turtle he saw a man’s feet, calves, and the bottoms of tattered trousers. His panic worsened.

Thick, horny toenails were half hidden in rust-colored mud. But Jeremiah could see the skin well enough—

Black skin.

He heard a heavy, mellow voice, neither friendly nor hostile. “You ’wake, mister soldier?”

Jeremiah’s head jerked up. His temples throbbed from the sudden move. His lips compressed, he jammed his fists into the red clay bank where he’d slept. Doubled his knees. Eventually staggered to his feet, his uniform filthy, his face and hair caked with mud.

“Who are you? Where am I?”

The black man was superbly built, with a slender waist and a broad chest. A ragged shirt cut off at the shoulders exposed thick arms. He was about thirty, Jeremiah guessed. His skin was so dark it had a blue cast.

The man’s eyes were almost perfectly oval, with huge brown pupils. He stood in a placid, relaxed pose. Yet Jeremiah couldn’t escape an irrational feeling that the Negro was simmering with hostility.

“Which question you want me to answer first?”

Jeremiah saw a double image of the black’s curly head. He squeezed his eyelids shut and spread his feet, hoping to keep his balance.

“Tell me where I am.”

“This here’s a swamp down by the acreage we call the bottom.”

“Who calls it that?” The black’s lackadaisical air angered him. “Don’t you know how to be civil to a white man?”

“Why, ’course I do.” But Jeremiah thought he saw a corner of the man’s mouth twitch. “The bottom land belongs to Rosewood.”

“Rosewood.” he repeated. “Colonel Henry Rose’s place?”

The black licked his lips. Staring into those round brown pupils, Jeremiah thought,
My Lord, he hates me. Or he hates the uniform I’m wearing, anyway.
He was increasingly aware that he lacked any weapon except the sheathed knife in his boot. Without the Enfield he felt naked.

“Reckon there ain’t another Rosewood in the county.”

“It’s the place I’ve been hunting.” Fingers plucked at the pouch on his belt. “I’m carrying a message for the colonel’s wife.”

The black stared, as if he didn’t comprehend.

“Is this Wednesday?”

It took a while for the black man to decide to reply. “That’s right, Wednesday. Every Wednesday Miz Rose gives me an hour in the mornin’ to come catch coolers.” His glance flicked to the turtle. “Can’t abide ’em myself. But I sell ’em to Miz Rose for soup. She’s real kind, lettin’ us niggers make a little money of our own.” The last words carried a faintly caustic edge.

“Then you’re from the plantation. One of the slaves—”

A quick, adamant shake of the head. “No more.”

“Oh?”

The man smiled. “Year ago January, Linkum said I wasn’t property. Jubilee’s come, mister soldier.”

Yet he spoke the words joylessly, sounded angry. Jeremiah was growing increasingly angry with the man’s quiet arrogance. “If you think you’re free—”

“I
know
I’m free.”

“Then what the hell are you doing around here?”

A shrug. “Waitin’.”

“For what?”

“To see who wins. If you boys lose, I can go off anyplace I choose. But if you win, an’ I leave ahead of time, I could be in a peck of trouble. Don’t appear likely that you’re goin’ to win, though. Still—can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right?”

Smart bastard,
Jeremiah thought.
Smart, wily bastard. Getting out of this swamp alive may take some doing.

He scanned the area, saw nothing but narrow watercourses winding between mud banks and the great trees. Sunlit insects flitted over green-scummed water like flakes of living gold.

“What’s your name?”

“Price.”

“Which way’s the house?”

“Yonder,” Price told him, with such a faint inclination of his head that he might have meant any point on a whole quarter of the horizon.

“Your overseer anyplace close by?”

Price smiled. “Don’t think so. He went off to fight jus’ like the colonel. Ain’t come back. Any overseein’ to be done, Miz Catherine does it.”

“That’s the colonel’s wife—”

“’Pears you know a lot about the Rose family, mister soldier.”

“My name is Kent.
Corporal
Kent. You call me that, hear?”

Silence. The black’s eyes wandered down to the turtle, which appeared to be dead.

Even more sharply, Jeremiah said, “And lead me up to the house. I told you I have an important paper for your mistress. The colonel gave it to me before—”

Abruptly, he held back from breaking the news of Rose’s death. The colonel’s wife and daughter deserved to hear it first.

Price looked indifferent. God, what were those wicked Yanks in Washington City thinking about, granting freedom to men like this?

Of course Jeremiah knew very well what they were thinking about: the possibility that the blacks might rise up against their masters and aid the Northern war effort. Lincoln’s detested proclamation in the first month of 1863 hadn’t been so generous as to free every black man in the land, not by a damn sight. The President and that vicious pack of Republicans he served had only declared blacks were free in the rebelling states.

Lieutenant Colonel Rose had commented caustically on that limitation one time. “Old Abe has enough trouble on his hands without antagonizing the border states. Besides, I’ve read some of his speeches. He doesn’t believe nigras are the white man’s equal. He’d just as soon ship them all to Liberia and be shed of them. He’s freeing
our
nigras to make it hotter for us, that’s all. He’s no humanitarian, he’s a cheap politician who’ll use any available trick to beat us down.”

Jeremiah had accepted that as gospel; it jibed with all the anti-Northern talk he’d heard as a boy. Lincoln’s proclamation was merely one more example of how dishonorably the enemy was conducting the war. Let the North—and nigras like this one—praise Abe Lincoln as a high-minded emancipator; Jeremiah knew that wasn’t the truth at all.

With a move that rippled the muscles of his right forearm, Price reached up to flick sweat from his shiny blue cheek. He grinned, his eyes still mocking. “You don’ finish a lot of your sentences, mister soldier.”

Sentences?
That was a mighty fancy word for an ordinary field hand. The realization confirmed his feeling that this was a dangerous man. Price probably knew how to read and write—had no doubt learned in secret, in defiance of the law.

“That’s my business.”

The smile remained fixed. “Guess it is. You say you got a paper from the colonel ’fore somethin’ happened to him?”

“Before I left him. Also none of your affair. You take me to the house—right after you tell me something.” He swallowed hard, trying to stand steady. Price cocked his head, waiting.

“You tell me what happened to my musket.”

Price blinked twice, his expression deliberately blank. Jeremiah wanted to hit him.

“Musket?” Price turned his head right, then left. “Don’t see no musket anyplace round here—”

“I had my Enfield and my cartridge box with me when I passed out! They’re gone.”

“Can’t help that. I didn’t spy any such ’quipment when I come onto you lyin’ there. Guess somebody must have stole it during the night.”

“Who the hell would wander through a place like this during the night?”

“Oh, mebbe some of the other niggers from the neighborhood, mister—ah, Corporal,” Price corrected himself with an obviously forced politeness. “No, I surely can’t tell you what happened to that gun and that box. You didn’t have ’em when I found you, and since I was the only one awake right about then, guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

Jeremiah took a step forward, almost falling. “You stole them. You hid them someplace.
Didn’t you?”

Price’s gaze admitted it. But his face grew pious. “Now that’s a frightful thing to ’cuse a man of, Corporal. Me, a field buck, steal a white man’s weapon an’ hide it? Why, I could be whipped half to death for such a thing, if Miz Catherine was the kind who whipped her niggers. No, sir, I jus’ don’t know what become of those things you’re talkin’ ‘bout. You’ll just have to take my word.”

Price’s dazzling grin scorned him as a fool. Jeremiah concluded he might have been wrong about the cause of Price’s insolence. The man’s pigmentation might have nothing to do with it—

I wouldn’t trust this son of a bitch if he were as white as me.

Price leaned down to scoop up the dead cooter. He sounded almost obsequious. “Care to hang onto my arm, Corporal?”

“No, thank you.”

“You sure lookin’ poorly. It’s ’bout a mile to the house—”

“I’ll manage!”

The black watched him, the smile gone. Jeremiah felt increasingly threatened.
He’s taken the Enfield and hidden it where he can go back and find it. Use it.

“This way, then.”

Jeremiah staggered after him, wondering whether Lieutenant Colonel Rose’s widow knew exactly what sort of treacherous rascal she was harboring. As if things weren’t bad enough with those sixty thousand bluebellies somewhere to the northwest and no male overseer on the place, the two women he was going to meet were threatened by a mean, devious nigra who now had a gun.

Jeremiah’s head pounded. He was shivering uncontrollably. The path out of the swamp seemed an endless maze.

He forced himself to keep up. Price might be older, but Jeremiah realized he couldn’t let the black man think he was stronger or smarter—even though Price had already outfoxed him by purloining the musket and ammunition.

Price cast a quick glance backward. Jeremiah looked him straight in the eye. The black pretended to study a wild turkey roosting in a live oak, but Jeremiah thought he heard the man snicker.

Got to watch out for that one,
he thought.

Walk behind him all the time.

Behind
him. Never ahead.

P
RICE AND JEREMIAH APPROACHED
Rosewood from a gently sloping cotton field that had been harvested earlier in the autumn. Though he was dizzy and hot—particularly now that he and the black man were into the full glare of the sunlight—he felt a peculiar sense of happiness at the sight of the plantation. To him it was very nearly a second home, so often and so lovingly had the slender, courtly Henry Rose described it.

Rosewood’s land, accumulated by the colonel’s father and grandfather, totaled about a thousand acres. Something like sixty-five slaves had worked the property, three-quarters of which the colonel had put into cotton, the remainder going into corn.

Originally Rosewood had been a rice plantation. But in the past two decades cotton had proved a far superior cash crop, even though the product of Rose’s fields never commanded the premium prices of the cotton grown in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The plantation had a prosperous if oddly deserted look this Wednesday morning. Directly ahead stood two large, immaculate barns. Beyond them Jeremiah glimpsed the end of the white-painted three-story manse that faced a dirt highway on his left. A half-mile road led from the highway to the house between rows of live oaks Rose’s grandfather had planted. Festoons of tillandsia hung from the branches, providing extra shade all the way to the white-painted fencing, the gate, and the bell with a rope pull.

As he and Price approached, more of the house came into view. He saw the front piazza, shaded by lattices twined with cypress vines. Square pillars reached up to a second-floor gallery running the entire length of the house. Starting near a well at the back of the building and running away from it at a right angle stood two long rows of slave cottages. The paint on the cottages had peeled in a few places, but otherwise they looked well kept. Directly behind the last two was a small picket-fenced burial ground.

Black men, women, and children idled in the dirt lane dividing the rows of tiny houses. An elderly slave tending a garden patch turned to stare at the gray-clad stranger and Price as they rounded the barn and passed three large hog pens: Magnolias had been planted near the perimeter of the pens. Rose had told Jeremiah he’d done that so the smell of the blooming trees would partially mask the stench of pig manure. This morning the stench was overpowering.

Past the manse Jeremiah saw the large gin house and two equally big corn cribs. Several blacks hailed Price from the cabin street. He acknowledged the greetings with little more than a curt nod. His arrogance told Jeremiah the man was someone special among his own kind.

A crowd had gathered near the stone well at the head of the lane, plainly curious about Price’s companion. But Price’s erect posture and steady stride seemed to preclude interference.

“Reckon we might find Miz Catherine in the office,” the big man remarked as they walked onto the rear piazza. The cooling shade made Jeremiah feel better. But not much.

Price tossed the dead turtle onto the ground beyond the piazza. A naked tot darted toward it from the well. One swift glance from Price sent a young woman dashing out to pick up her child before he could touch the prize. She had a frightened look on her face.

Jeremiah leaned a sweaty palm against the side of the house, struggling to catch his breath. He felt close to passing out again. “Give me a minute—”