Walk Through Darkness (10 page)

But William couldn’t feel the same way. As much as he loved his mother, he could not share in her adoration of this man. He had no image of him, no drawing or engraving. They had never spent those idyllic evenings fishing together. He was a man composed of nothing save Nan’s words. And on this her words were not enough. They lived in a world divided by race. Of course, he knew of many violations across the color lines, but these were crimes of lustful owners upon the owned. That was very different to the tale of love between the races that his mother claimed. There was nothing in it that he could twin with the world around him.

William tried to roll to his other side, but was trapped by his chains and couldn’t complete the motion. He shook his head to clear it. Yes, he wanted the memory of that house, but he wanted nothing to do with the man who had built it. He lay there thankful that the man had died seven months after completing that house, starved to death by his own frozen jaw.

Throughout the morning of the third day a haze hung in the shallow valleys. Only the insects seemed undeterred by the humidity Their calls rose with a staccato brilliance unparalleled by the visible landscape. They seemed not to belong to this land. Yet they were as integral a part of the countryside as the dust-fine
dirt and the tilled fields and their distant workers. They marched through a town of slack-jawed inhabitants who watched the slaves pass from the shade of porches and storefronts. At the far edge of the town a white man sat in a wagon with an old Negro in the bed behind him. The Negro watched the group passing with somber eyes. Before they progressed he spoke words of encouragement and a reminder that the Lord awaits them all and will judge them all in their season and that patience and faith are the things He looks for foremost. The white man turned on hearing this, brought the butt end of his whip down on the speaking man’s head and commenced to beat him senseless. The coffle marched on.

Around midmorning they climbed the bare back of a ridge-line and entered a woodland of crab apple and sugar maple. A few minutes into the shade the Frenchman, who walked ahead of the group by some fifty yards, stopped and stared at something at his feet. He lifted his rifle high, held it a moment, then slammed the butt end of it down on the ground. When the tobacco-chewer reached him, he reined in his horse, leaned over its shoulder, and peered down. The two exchanged some words. The first of the slaves bunched up behind them and slowed. The leader ribbed his horse forward a few steps, leaving William with a perfect view of all that was to follow.

“What is it?” the leader called, but the others were not to have time to answer.

The little man bound to Saxon twisted his wrists and shed the cuffs from both his hands. He reached for the chain attached to his neck and ripped it from his collar with one yank. From where William stood, it seemed he had rendered the iron of his cuffs suddenly molten, with no more strength than soft clay. It made no sense, such a simple action but one so profound in its effect. The links dropped into a swinging arch, free on one end. They were soon snapped taut by Saxon’s wrists, to which they were still fast. The giant held his arms stiff-limbed before him
and swung them up just as the tobacco-chewer turned. The links wrapped around the white man’s head and yanked him from the saddle. He hit the ground hard on his shoulder but didn’t come free of the stirrup. He dangled there with a leg entrapped and the horse in a frenzy. The white man’s head snapped and jerked with blows from the horse’s hooves. His hands slapped at the stirrup but could make no sense of it. An instant later he was hiding his face. The next his arms hung limp around him. The little one used the Frenchman’s moment of confusion against him. He was behind him in a second, even with his feet still bound, and he took him out at knee level, laying him flat on his back. William couldn’t see just what he was doing to him—crouched down as he was, staring wide-mouthed, full of terror and euphoria both—but he seemed to have the white man gripped about the neck. Another slave, the one who ate dirt, hobbled over to the two, pulling a portion of the line with him, and prepared to jump on the Frenchman’s lower body.

The leader pulled his rifle from its scabbard and lifted it to sight, an action that inspired motion in all the slaves. They pressed themselves against the ground, squirming and pulling each other in chaotic directions and therefore moving nowhere. The leader’s first shot tore into the dirt-eater’s shoulder, taking with it the workings of the shoulder joint and leaving his arm dangling limp from what flesh remained. The boy stood stunned, staring at his injury, until another shot took him in the chest and ended all such contemplation. The white man was shouting out to all, white and black both, commanding order and action and calm. He might have prevailed even then, but Saxon swung his chains up into motion again. He was a good twenty yards from the horseman, but he moved with startling speed. He dragged those connected to his neck chain in his wake. The teen just behind him fought against him for a few futile seconds. Then he moved forward crouched just behind the big man, his eyes flashing with fear.

The leader backed his horse and tried to stay calm. He balanced his spent rifle on the horn of his saddle and reached for his revolver. He had trouble getting it free. All the time his mount backed and shied and Saxon came on steadily. The white man got his revolver free, but as he brought it up to aim his horse reared up and his shot went wide. The horse found this more disturbing yet. It twirled. The man’s head became entangled within the low branches of a tree. As he fought to free himself he misfired again. The horse balked, yanking the man to the side of the saddle. So he was when Saxon reached him: arms fighting with the tree, legs frantic in their grip on the horse, he losing at both efforts. The black man swung up his chains and caught the man’s torso. The horse bolted, snapping the man’s forearm between two branches before he gave up the saddle. He hung for a few frantic seconds in the air, then fell. Saxon was instantly on top of him.

The little man rose to his feet and pulled the Frenchman up with him, the latter barely able to stand. Saxon stepped toward him as if to steady him, but instead brought his two fists down hard across his face and smashed the bridge of his nose. The man dropped to his knees, shouting for mercy in the name of God. This only fueled the black man’s rage. Saxon turned, snatched up the tobacco-chewer’s rifle and dropped to his knees. He placed the weapon at the base of the Frenchman’s throat, stared into the white man’s face for a few seconds, then pulled the trigger. A spray of dark moisture sprang from the top of his head, followed by larger bits of solid matter. They all surged up in silhouette, caught before the background of the green summer afternoon. The Frenchman collapsed. Saxon threw down the firearm and began rifling through his clothes and pockets. Finally, he pulled a knife out of a sheath tied to the man’s ankle. He measured its weight in his hand. He tested the edge, then leaned close and tilted the point of the knife into his flesh.

William wanted to look away. There was a wild beating of hooves behind him. He knew without looking that they came from the boy’s horse, riding not into the action but away at breakneck speed. He tried to make his eyes move, to turn his body, to twist his neck. But his whole being betrayed him. He watched as Saxon sliced the man’s flesh in-line with his jaw, behind the ears and up along the edges of his scalp. He stared as Saxon tossed away the blade, wormed his fingers beneath the edges of the cut and ripped the man’s face from his skull. He stood and lifted the flap of flesh on the palm of his hand, like an offering to God. His forearms dripped with the mingled blood of his victim’s face and of his own wrists. Then he spoke for the first time.

“Next time they come for me I tell them Saxon not a nigger,” he said. “I say, ‘Look, look my white man’s face.’” He held the Frenchman’s face against his own for a second. When he pulled it away his eyes touched on William. His mouth cracked open and he laughed, creating an image William would sleep with that night and many more nights to follow.

With the white men dead, the other slaves searched among their corpses and came up with the keys to unlock themselves. Freed of his chains, Saxon leapt into the saddle of the leader’s horse. The mount spun beneath him, wheeled and bucked for a moment, then fell still and accepted him. The little man likewise mounted up. Together they bounded down the lane beneath the low canopy of trees. William followed them with his eyes until the path turned and they disappeared. He stared after them at the space into which they vanished, experiencing a quick progression of emotion: fear, awe and disbelief, wonder and a physical revulsion that twisted his insides into knots. While he stood transfixed the rest of the slaves made fast their escape. He caught movement from the corner of his eye, heard the sounds of bodies crashing through the woods. Within a few moments they all had vanished. He stood alone on the pathway. His chains hung
from his wrists. The empty sockets that had once contained Lemuel bumped against his shins.

It took him some time to find motion. In the end the same creatures that had first caused the men to pause spurred him on. He spotted their movements, faint and tiny though they were. He stepped forward through the slashes of blood on the ground, until he realized what he was looking at. Snakes. The Frenchman’s rifle butt had smashed the head of a pregnant garter snake, killing her and pinning her flattened skull to the packed soil. But life had not ended with her death. She had been fat and ripe for birth, and her children squirmed out of her still warm body. One after the other: four and then seven and then more than he could count. With their tiny, dead eyes, they were perfect miniatures of the mother. Their motions seemed otherworldly and unnatural, crawling as they were out of a corpse, tongues tasting the air, hungry already. William turned from them and found himself on his knees, heaving up bile from low in his stomach.

After freeing himself, William covered several miles before he reached the shores of the lower Bay. It was well into the night, a still evening, close around him. He followed the ragged shoreline to the northwest. Eventually, the woods gave way to geometric shapes of thicker darkness and ground worn smooth by traffic. He crept into the town, keeping to the darker regions, moving the heavy soles of his boots with all the care he could muster. He heard voices off to the left, where the main body of the settlement seemed to be. He moved away from them, careful to slide from shadow to shadow along the shore, never even opening himself to the starlight. In this way he crept along the edge of town and out to the far reaches of the docks.

He still had no clear thought when he stepped onto the planking of the pier. It was lined along most of its edge with cargo. He looked for some sign as to whether it was newly unloaded or was waiting to go out, but he couldn’t tell. He sunk
between two crates and took his weight off his legs. Once settled, he looked out across the river at the dancing lights cast from the far shore. He could just make out the shape of the houses over there, dwarfed as they were by the thick jumble of trees just behind them. The water was calm; the night sounds muted. The tide lapped at the pylons of the pier. A fish jumped, its body caught in a sliver of silver, a splash of white, then tiny rings echoing across the surface. Strange how tranquil the world could be, the same world that had created the day’s bloody scenes. Images that had been kept at bay through motion came back to him. The eyes of the maddened horse, the way the beast’s teeth snapped and its hooves smashed crescents into the skull of the man trapped beneath it. The black hole of Saxon’s laughing mouth. The Frenchman’s brain shot through, with a fan of crimson hung like a sheet upon the summer light. The same man’s face upheld and eyeless upon Saxon’s palm. The serpents. William closed his eyes and pressed against them with his fingertips as if he could blot out the images with pain.

When he looked up again a shape stood out that he had not noticed before. There was a ship docked at the end of the pier, a medium-size brig, with the short, stout build that marked her as a cargo vessel. There was no light about her, no sign of crew or watchman. He thought this over. He had reached the northern point of the land, and he had no heart for swimming any more. He was sure his legs would pull him straight to the bottom. But if he could climb aboard that ship and find a place to hide … There would have to be hidden depths to it, crates and boards and black spaces into which he could twist himself and not be found.

The decision was made. He crept aboard and stole his way far down into the belly of her. He wedged himself in against the backbone of the ship, tight between a moist wooden beam and the corrugated side of some crate. It was a most uncomfortable bedding, and yet he was asleep almost as soon as he closed his
eyes. It wasn’t until he felt the ship move early the next morning that he wondered where the vessel might be taking him. But by then it was too late, and he had to ride it out. Yes, the boat was moving, but if he rode it out, he thought, if he slept through it, perhaps somehow he would awake to a world less ruled by chaos.