The Soldier's Lady (2 page)

So as she and William made their way to the river on this hot June day, Emma was not thinking of swimming or playing in the water with her son to cool off from the heat. She was going to the river to remember.

She had been doing this so often these last several weeks, since that day she would never forget. Usually she came alone—to pray or sing quietly and let her heart absorb the memory of what she had felt as she had come up out of the water, face and hair dripping, face aglow with new life.

Praise Jesus!
were her only words. She had not shouted them as in a camp meeting revival. Rising out of the river's waters, she had uttered them quietly, reverently, scarcely above a whisper. For the first time in the depths of her being she knew what those two eternal words meant. And her smiling heart had been quietly repeating them over and over since then . . .
Praise Jesus . . . Praise Jesus.

Emma Tolan had begun to change before that day. But
her baptism sent that change so deep into her heart that she was still trying to grasp it. So she came here every few days—to sit as the river flowed slowly past her, to ponder what God had meant when He made her, and to reflect on what He might want to make of her now that she knew how much He loved her.

She could not know—how could she have known?—that she was being watched.

In this season of peace and happiness in her life, Emma was not thinking of the past, nor of the secrets she possessed, whose danger even she herself did not fully recognize. She was thinking of the wonderful now and the bright future.

But there was someone who
was
thinking of a dark past—of a time in her life she had finally almost forgotten. He had not forgotten. He had sent the watchers to watch, and to await an opportunity to bury the memory of that past forever, not in the triumphant waters of baptism, but in the dark waters of death.

Emma sat down at the river's edge and eased her bare brown feet into the shallow water as William ran straight into it.

“You be careful, William!” she said. “You stay near me, you hear. I don't want ter be havin' ter haul you outta dat water yonder cuz I can't swim so good.”

Whether William was listening was doubtful. But he was in no danger yet, for the site where Emma had been baptized was far on the opposite bank, and the sandy bottom sloped away toward it gradually. He ran and splashed within four feet of the shore, to no more depth than halfway up his fat little calves, laughing and shrieking happily
without a care in the world, until he was wet from head to foot. Emma watched with a smile on her face. It wasn't easy to pray with a rambunctious youngster making such a racket. But she was content to be there.

She had just begun to get sleepy under the blazing sun and had lain down on her back, when sudden footsteps sounded behind her from some unknown hiding place in the brush bordering the river. Startled but suspecting nothing amiss, Emma sat up and turned toward the sound. Three white men were running toward her, two bearing big brown burlap bags.

Before she could cry out, they were upon her. One of the men seized her and yanked her to her feet. It didn't take long for her to find her voice. She cried out in pain as the second man pulled her arms behind her. The third had kept going straight for William, threw the open end of one sack over his head, and scooped the boy out of the shallow water and off his feet.

“Mama!” William howled in fright. But the next instant he was bundled up so tightly and thrown over the man's shoulder that all he could make were muffled noises of terror.

Emma's pre-baptismal voice could now be heard a half-mile away, if not more. She screamed at the top of her lungs, struggling and kicking frantically to keep the second bag off her own head.

“You let him go . . . William . . . git yo han's off me . . . help—somebody . . . Miz Katie, help! Mayme!”

“Shut up, you fool!” yelled one of the men, trying desperately to calm her down. But even two of them were hardly a match for an enraged, frightened human mother-bear.
She writhed and struggled and kicked with every ounce of survival instinct she possessed. As one tried to take hold of her shoulders and force her to be still, Emma's teeth clamped down onto his wrist like the vise of a steel trap.

He cried out in pain, swearing violently, glanced down to see blood flowing from his arm, then whacked Emma across the side of the head with the back of his hand. But it only made her scream the louder.

“Help!” she shrieked in a mad frenzy. “Git away from me . . . William, Mama's here . . . help! Miz Katie . . . dey's got William. Help!”

Two hands took hold of her head from behind, and the next instant Emma's voice was silenced by a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. She felt herself lifted off the ground, kicking and wildly swinging her arms about and writhing to free herself. The three men now made clumsily for their waiting horses and then struggled to mount with their unwieldy human cargo.

The river was not so far from the house that Emma's screams were not plainly heard. The frantic cries quickly brought everyone running from several directions at once.

“Is that Emma?” called Katie in alarm, hurrying out onto the porch and glancing all about to see what was going on.

“She went to the river,” said Mayme, running around from the side of the house.

“Where's Emma and William?” yelled Templeton Daniels, Katie's uncle and Mayme's father, as he ran toward them from the barn where he'd gone to prepare for milking.

“At the river,” Mayme answered.

“William must have fallen in,” he said. “Let's go!”

They all sprinted away from the house in the direction of the river.

Someone else had also heard Emma's cries for help. He had come to Rosewood as a stranger a few months earlier. At Emma's first scream he had burst out of the cabin where he had been bunking, a cabin that had been part of Rosewood's slave village before the war. He was now flying across the ground in the direction of the sounds.

He reached the river twenty or thirty seconds ahead of the others. He was just in time to see three horses disappearing around a bend of the river, two lumpy burlap bags slung over two of their saddles. A hasty look around what he knew to be Emma's favorite spot showed signs of a scuffle. Seconds later he was sprinting back for the house. He intercepted the others about a third of the way but did not slow.

“Somebody's taken Emma and William!” he yelled as he ran by. “They're on horseback!”

He reached the barn just as Templeton's brother, Ward, was returning from town. Though his horse was hot and tired, it was already saddled, and every second might be the difference between life and death. Ward Daniels' feet had no more hit the ground than he saw the figure dashing toward him, felt the reins grabbed from his hands, and in less than five seconds watched his horse disappearing at full gallop toward the river. He stared after it in bewilderment until his brother and two nieces ran back into the yard a minute later and explained what was happening.

The rider lashed and kicked at his mount, making an
angle he hoped would intercept the three horses he had seen earlier. He had no idea where they were going, unless it was toward Greens Ford, a narrow section of river which, in summer, was shallow enough to cross easily and cut a mile off the distance to town by avoiding the bridge downstream.

He reached Greens Ford and slowed. There was no sign of them.

Frantically he tried to still Ward's jittery horse enough to listen. A hint of dust still swirled in the air where the ground had been stirred up beyond the ford but on the same side of the river. He kicked the horse's sides and bolted toward it. If they had not crossed the ford, where were they going? Why were they following the river?

Suddenly a chill seized him as the image of the burlap sacks filled his mind. The rapids . . . and the treacherously deep pool bordered by a cliff on one side and high boulders on the other!

He lashed the horse to yet greater speed, then swung up the bank hoping to cut across another wide bend of the river toward the spot.

Three minutes later he dismounted and ran down a steep rocky slope so fast he barely managed to keep his feet beneath him.

He heard them now. They were at the place he feared!

He slowed enough to keep from sending the stones underfoot tumbling down the slope ahead of him, thinking desperately. What could he hope to do against three white men, probably with guns!

He began to slow and crept closer.

Suddenly a scream sounded.

“William . . . somebody help us!” shrieked a girl's voice.

He knew that voice! Whatever was to become of him, nothing would stop him now! He sprinted toward the sound.

“Dey's got William . . . help!” came another terrified scream.

“What the—” a man exclaimed. “How did she get that thing loose?”

“Just shut her up!” shouted another.

“It doesn't matter now. Let's do what we came to do!”

One more wild scream pierced the air, then a great splash. It was followed by another.

“That ought to take care of them . . . let's get out of here!”

Seconds later three horses galloped away as a frantic black man ran in desperation out onto an overhanging ledge of rock some twenty feet above a deep black pool of the river. It was easy enough to see two widening circles rippling across the surface of the water.

He ripped off his boots, stepped back, then took two running strides forward and flew into the air.

B
UFFALO
S
OLDIER

2

T
o tell you the whole story of what happened and why, I'll have to back up a bit.

It wasn't because of the stranger that such sudden and unexpected danger had come to Rosewood. It had started long before and would have come anyway. But the fact that he was there sure changed how it would turn out.

I remember that first day I saw him a few months back. After all that had happened around Rosewood, the plantation where I lived with my cousin Katie, the sight of one more new face shouldn't have surprised anyone. People had been coming and going around the place for years, ever since I'd first appeared at Katie's doorstep after my own family had been killed. Katie was white, I was half white and half black. Her uncle Templeton Daniels was my father. My mother, a slave, was no longer alive.

If Rosewood had become a refuge for strays and waifs and runaways, it hadn't been by intent. It just
kind of happened that way. And so, on that day when Henry Patterson, our friend and Jeremiah's father, came riding up with the bedraggled-looking black man, like I say, it wasn't exactly a surprise.

But even beneath the dirt, the bloodstained jacket, and the look of obvious pain on his face from whatever injury he'd had, something about this particular stranger looked different. And when his gaze first caught my eyes, a tingle went through me and I knew instantly that a young man had come into our lives who just might change things in ways we could not foresee.

The stranger who'd come with Henry had ridden slowly into Greens Crossing a couple days before.

He was a Negro, tall, well built but thin, whether from natural build or lack of food it was hard to say. He appeared to be in his early or maybe middle twenties and looked weak and tired. Although the war had been over four years, he still wore the coat of the Union army. But it was so badly torn and so dirty, you could hardly tell it had actually once been blue. Some of the stains on it looked like dried blood.

To say that he looked weary as he rode would hardly be enough. The poor fellow looked as if he'd ridden a thousand miles without sleep or food and was about to fall out of the saddle onto the street. The horse was plodding along so slow he seemed as tired as his rider. It was clear it had been a long time since either of them had had anything to
eat. Some of the bloodstains on his coat were darker, older stains, but others appeared more recent. From the look of his face and how he was slumped over as he rode, he might still have been nursing a wound somewhere in his chest or shoulder.