Walk Through Darkness (5 page)

F
IVE
The two men sheltered in the nook between the overturned trunk of a fallen oak and the base of one still standing. As Oli unwrapped the cheese, William swallowed hard to keep down the saliva that flooded his mouth. It was a frightful-looking block, slimy with the day’s heat and dotted with fungal growth. But when Oli’s knife bit into it, the flesh of the cheese sliced open beautifully, white inside and so soft on his tongue that it melted almost instantly. With this came great mouthfuls of corn bread, smoked fish and fresh peas eaten raw and so crisp that they popped between the teeth. They drank from a large skin of watered-down beer. It had little to recommend it over creek water, but William drank it down all the same.

Oli enjoyed talking. As they ate he told a painful story of life on a Virginia plantation. He had been a sickly child, the only one of six to survive into his second year. He grew into a sickly man, never built for the hard labor to which he was put. His master had tried each year to sell him but was unsuccessful every time. Oli came to suspect that his master was planning some devious
venture with him. He had been approached by a slave trader who was willing to purchase Oli cheaply for resale into the deep southwest, into the fabled bottomlands of malaria and dysentery where owners hardly expected their chattels to live through a full summer. They get what work they can out of them, then write them off as little more than a footnote in a logbook on their deaths. Oli couldn’t abide that prospect. That was why he had hit the road north, his eyes set on that Canadian horizon.

The day faded into dusk. Deep within the woods as they were, their hideout was almost dark as full night. The branches above them obscured the sky and unhinged the clockwork that marked the passage of the hours. For the first time in days William forgot to measure the progress of the sun. On Oli’s prompting, they built up a tiny fire, which they contained in a small bowl and fed on twigs. William ventured down to the last creek they’d crossed and refilled the water skin. When he climbed back into their hiding place he found Oli grinning.

“You drink this?” he asked, holding up a bottle of an auburn liquid.

“Whiskey?”

“Yep. Been saving it up and this here seems as good a time as any. Go on and get a pull.”

As William took a few furtive sips, Oli began a long string of tales about rebellious slaves. He seemed to have a library of such stories stored in his head, embellished, no doubt, with his own embroidery. He told of three slaves who stole into their overseer’s cabin one night and bludgeoned him with clubs. They dragged him from his home, broke his neck, and spent the rest of the night arranging to disguise his death. One slave rode behind the dead man on his horse, scuffing the ground in a peculiar way, and then he tossed the man from the mount, loosened his saddle and tugged it over to its side. They then slapped the horse and sent it running. The officials ruled the white man’s death to be an accident, though most of the slaves who lived
thereabouts knew the real truth. In another tale two bondsmen absconded from their master’s plantation on horseback, sharing a single pony between them. One of them had the shoulders of a bull and a bullet-shaped head that glistened with sweat; the other one’s deformed torso measured only twelve inches from crotch to neck. The sight proved so odd to passersby that all let the couple ride on, more amused by the spectacle than inclined toward any action. There were slaves who stole away with chests of gold and those who ravished their mistresses and those who avenged old wrongs before parting. There were fabled gangs of Negroes who roamed the wild country of the uplands, stealing from white settlers and wreaking havoc wherever they passed. And there was Nat Turner and the swathe of terror he cut through Virginia, like an incarnation of every white man’s nightmare. It was a crazy time they were living in, Oli concluded, and he didn’t see any signs of sanity on the horizon.

Asked if he was really heading all the way to Canada, Oli’s eyes lifted and studied William for a moment. There was something in them that William couldn’t read, but he imagined them to be the mirror of his own thoughts. Such a place as the land of freedom was too far away from the place of their birth. How could they know that that country would accept them? That the ground would feel the same beneath their feet and the air the same in their lungs? And what of kin and friends and familiar places never to be seen again? In Oli’s answer William heard nothing to indicate that this other man hadn’t had the same thoughts.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t reckon there’s any way to be free but to be quit of this whole country. Ain’t no place in it a nigger’s safe. I know that for a biblical fact. Don’t much matter to me, not having much kin to speak of. But how bout yerself? You hurting? Leaving your kin, I mean.”

“Seems like that’s why we were put here—to hurt.”

“That’s a biblical fact, right there.”

William smirked. “A biblical one, huh?”

“Been my experience that that book’s a hard one to dispute.”

“We may be of two minds on that.”

“Ain’t no two minds about it …”

“I’d just as soon not talk it to death,” William said. His voice was edged just enough to quell Oli’s response. But, having spoken sharply, he lifted the bottle and scented it and nodded to his companion. “Think I’m starting to feel kindly toward this whiskey.”

The evening hours passed, and the two men became more fluid in their conversation. At first, William tried to speak sparingly, not caring to share too much of himself with a stranger. But as the night wore on the other man’s talkativeness proved infectious. The whiskey spread out through William’s body, loosening his tongue, lowering his guard. Oli didn’t seem like such a stranger after all, and it felt good to talk to someone after all his time alone. He spoke of his home in Annapolis, of the various chores he worked at, of Kent Island and of St. John Humboldt. He admitted that the scars he wore across his back were fresh wounds, administered by Humboldt just before he ran away.

“Came out after me in the fields,” he said. “This a couple days after I heard word that my woman had left Annapolis. Humboldt came out and asked why had my work slacked the last few days.”

“What’d you say?” Oli asked.

“Told him I didn’t know. Couldn’t recollect. Didn’t know what he was on bout.”

“Bet that didn’t sit with him.” The small man passed the bottle.

William took hold of it and lifted it straight to his mouth. He closed his eyes at the sting of the stuff, although already it wasn’t so sharp as it had been at first. He confirmed that his denial had not sat well with Humboldt. “Ain’t nothing I could’ve said would’ve pleased him. He wasn’t looking for no answers. Said he
already knew what the problem was. I had myself a case of nigger love. That’s what he said, ‘Nigger love.’”

“Hit it right on, didn’t he?” Oli asked.

William cut him with his eyes, a warning but not a firm one. He handed the bottle back to him. Oli asked what happened next, but William shrugged it off. No surprise. The overseer had pushed him to his knees and rained blows of rawhide across his back. “He beat me,” William said. “Whatchu expect him to do?”

“And he done all that damage? Made you bleed and all?”

“Well … He ain’t the only one beat on me. I was there on my knees, this big white man above me, tearing my hide, cursing at me, talking bout the slave girls he’d had, bout the things he did to them. It put a rage in me. Not just the beating, but the way he was talking. I put out my hand and grabbed a hold of that whip. I knew just then that he was an evil son-a-bitch, and that I could’ve snatched the whip from his hand. Could’ve turned it on him and beat him down. Could’ve bitten off his nose and spat it back into his face. Could’ve done anything, I was so full of hating him.”

“You do that?” Oli asked. “Bite him I mean?”

“Naw. Just held the whip twined round my arm. Just held it ready. Just waited to see what he would do, and to see what I’d do. But he didn’t do nothing. Just had me get up and walk back to the plantation.”

“He didn’t beat you no more after that?” Oli asked.

“Naw.”

“Didn’t? What’d you spook him? Put the fear of nigger in him?”

“I said
he
didn’t beat me. But he got him this other boy a big slave named John, to beat me. Worked me over good. Near killed me, that beating. But when I woke up I had me a plan, and I done followed it ever since. So these here scars ain’t nothing I’m troubled about. They just the reminder of the day I got the sense beat into me and became my own man.”

He held up his hand and motioned for the bottle. When he had drunk from it again, he went on to tell of his swim across the Bay, a feat which prompted Oli to call him the swimmingest Negro he had ever heard tell of. He told of his fatigue and of the rain and of the cold. It was easy enough to share these things, but he gave only a few scant details about Dover. When he fell silent and Oli rambled on, William recalled her face and the parts of her body he knew so well. It was unbelievable that he had once held her beside him and spoken to her of the casual events of life, that he had run his fingers over her features and placed his lips against her skin. It seemed stranger still that she had invested him with some similar affection, that she had touched him and whispered in his ear and invoked him to do things to her in lovemaking that he wouldn’t have conceived of otherwise. He tried to find solace in these moments, but he only grew more uncomfortable. Perhaps things had never been as he imagined. With the alcohol slipping between the cracks in his recollections, he began to see a darker significance to all of his memories of Dover.

He recalled the first time he had ever seen her. In the August fury. He was kneeling between two rosebushes, shears in both hands, working the gardens on the edge of the Masons’ estate. The tool was too large for the close and dangerous work, and he had to crane at awkward angles to make the appropriate cuts, all the time avoiding the plants’ thorns. He was concentrating on the work, imagining perfections to the plants’ forms and trying to make them real. A woman’s voice roused him from these thoughts. She sang a tune just quietly enough so that he couldn’t pick up the words. He recognized the melody, though he couldn’t place it. It was beautiful, this voice, and unfamiliar. He stood up, but in so doing placed his back against the thorns. He cried out and lurched forward, knicking his chest. He slashed out with his arms and cut tiny cat scratches in them as well. By the time he freed himself and turned toward the woman she had
stopped to stare at him. He was robbed of speech. They shared a long moment, but in the end she turned and continued on her way without having said a word to him. They never broke that silence. And try as he might, he couldn’t find any more grace or dignity in the moment. Their first meeting was painful, embarrassing. Dover had robbed him of something. She had impaled him. She had walked away with a piece of him, and he had still not recovered from the loss.

He hardly noticed when Oli handed him another bottle, a smaller one this time and more finely constructed. He took it in hand and listened as Oli told another story. He would never remember bringing that bottle to his lips. He was too full of other memories, too confused at the way the world shimmied before his eyes and too focused on the strange waves of euphoric nausea that rolled through him. He had to concentrate to single out the true Oli from the two or three phantoms that shifted in and out of sight. Though he stared hard at him, he wouldn’t recall anything different in Oli’s eyes. It was only when he felt himself losing consciousness that he realized he had consumed that second bottle on his own, while Oli drank only from the water skin.

William awoke knowing that he had been hearing the voices for some time. He had sensed movement around him. His body had been pulled this way and that, rolled and dragged and handled. But for all the motion he was only vaguely involved. The sensations were muted, distant. It hadn’t occurred to him to respond to this world until a splash of moisture on his face jolted him awake. He opened his eyes on a skewed and unfocused scene. His hands were aching and numb all at once. He tried to bring them up to his face, but his arms were yanked to a halt by chains. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t find the balance to do even that. His head was full of rocks that ground against the side of his skull at the slightest provocation, the pain of it blotting his thoughts.

The pale face of a white man came into view, lean in the jaw but heavily browed. His skin was red and peeling from the summer sun. Old pox scars were evenly spaced over his cheeks and down his neck, and he bore a dimple in his cheek that must’ve been an old puncture wound.

“You gone and slept in your own sick,” the man said. “I hate to see a grown man like that.”

Pieces of the previous day flew back to William: the other black man, the weak one who told stories, the scent of cheese, the banquet spread before him, two men atop a single pony a mirage of three faces mingling and merging, whiskey and laughter and … And they’d been found. Slave catchers had tracked them down and come upon them while they slept. The understanding flooded upon him in its entirety. They had been caught, he and the other one, the frail one, the runt with the crooked spine …