Freeman (24 page)

And now Bonnie understood: Paul was shaming them. And threatening them. All without doing either.

Vernon pulled on Bo’s sleeve. “Come on, Bo,” he said, worried eyes darting toward Paul. “Pa’ll be lookin’ for us.”

Bo stared hard, his expression that of a man who knows he’s being fooled, but can’t figure out how. He released Prudence’s face and breast, shoving her away from him for good measure. She fell against the table. “Maybe you’re right,” he told his brother, eyes still fixed on Paul. “What I want with some stale Yankee widow anyway?”

His eyes roamed desks and tables and neat stacks of McGuffey primers and his lips curled. “Nigger school,” he said. And he harked and spat on the floor. “That’s what I think of your nigger—”

He stopped. The muzzle of the little derringer was pushing into his cheek. Prudence held it with both hands, her arms fully extended, her right index finger curled around the trigger. Bonnie scarcely recognized her face, a contortion of outrage and tears. “Don’t you ever put your hands on me again,” she said. Her voice sounded like a pot just as the last of the water boils out, an angry scorch of steam.

All at once, Bonnie couldn’t seem to get enough breath. “Miss Prudence, you put that away,” she said.

“You should listen to the nigger,” seconded Vernon.

Bo Wheaton’s palms came up and he looked cautiously left to the gun pressed into his cheek and the unnatural glare beyond. He smiled. “You gon’ shoot me with that toy, honey?”

“You think I won’t?” Her knuckles were white.

He appeared to consider this without much interest. “I think you might,” he said. “And you know what’ll happen then? My pa’ll go to the military governor and swear out a complaint. Yankees are the only law in these parts right now, sad to say. They’ll come take you away. Probably hang you. And what’ll happen to your school then? Who you think will teach your niggers then?” The oily voice was calm, an undisturbed pond in the solitude of first light.

Paul had gone silent as a post. Bonnie stepped forward, hands raised as if in a holdup. “Miss Prudence, I am asking you to consider what your father would want. What would he tell you to do?”

Prudence didn’t even look her way. “You touched me,” she said. “I am not some piece of meat you may paw with impunity. Do not
ever
touch me again.”

His eyes still tilted left. He smiled as if at some joke only he understood. “Ma’am,” he said, “I never will. ’Sides, that was just a distraction. Wasn’t the reason I dropped by at all. See, the real reason I come was to tell you: this school? Folks don’t like it. Some of us think it’d probably be a good thing all around if you all hightailed it on back to your own country ’fore somethin’ happens or somebody gets hurt. That’s all I really wanted to tell you. The rest was just…funnin’.”

She pushed the gun hard into his cheek. “Are you threatening me?”

“No, ma’am. Just statin’ fact is all.”

It hung there for fully half a minute, the five of them frozen in place like statuary just inside the warehouse door. Bonnie’s throat was painfully dry. She needed badly to relieve herself. She had never been more terrified.

Finally, Prudence shoved the gun barrel against Bo Wheaton’s cheek hard enough to break the skin. “Get out,” she said.

Another smile. He wiped at the tiny cut, glanced at the smidgen of blood he found. “Whatever you say,” he told her. He touched his hat and moved slowly away.

Bonnie didn’t breathe until the two men had cleared the door and Prudence allowed the gun to drop. Then Bonnie rushed to her friend and they embraced. Prudence was weeping, shuddering. “I need a bath,” she said. “I can still feel his hands upon me.”

“I know,” said Bonnie. “But you should not have done that.”

Prudence pulled back. “You think I was obliged to let him paw me? No. You know me better than that.”

She looked as if she was about to say more. Then her eyes caught sight of something over Bonnie’s shoulder. She motioned with her head and Bonnie turned.

A few feet away, Paul Cousins was standing in the doorway with his back to them, one hand ceaselessly massaging the other. His shoulders shuddered violently. Prudence’s eyes told her to go to him. She did.

Bonnie put a hand on his arm. She didn’t speak. After a moment, Paul looked down at her, his eyes moist and anguished. “Man raped my sister,” he said.

“What?”

“Back in slave time. I’m shoein’ his daddy’s hoss, he find her out back of the cabin working in the garden. He took her and he done his business with her. She weren’t but 14.”

“Paul, I am so sorry.”

“It
ain’t
easy, you know.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The other day when you said I must find it easy to smile at ’em while they say things and threaten us? It
ain’t
easy. Not by a fair sight.”

She was stricken. “Paul, forgive me. I never should have said that to you.”

He regarded her for a moment with fathomless eyes. Then he turned away. After a moment, she heard him say, “So, you really think you could teach me how to read?”

She has lost track of the miles.

Miles mean nothing anymore, anyway. Miles are just something somebody made up to measure distance, so that when so-and-so says he’s traveled thus and so many miles, everyone will all have the same idea of what is meant. But how can anybody have any idea of miles when you have walked so many of them, when your skirt tail is caked with mud and your feet are crusted with blood and you have cramps in your legs sometimes so bad they just give out and you fall onto your face and the few blessed moments of lying there makes it seem worth the heavy foot that comes prodding you and then kicks you in your behind while a voice above rages, “Get up! Get up, goddamn your sorry hide!”

And even though you don’t think you can, you get up anyway and you walk.

So yes, she has lost track of the miles.

She does know they are in a place called Arkansas. She gleaned this from Marse Jim’s conversation with the ferryman who took them across the Mississippi River, not, heaven knows, from anything he said to her. He does not speak an extraneous word to her, says nothing beyond “Get up!” or “Walk faster!” So thoroughly does he ignore her that sometimes she wonders if she is still there or if she has not become a figment of her own imagination.

He has taken to explaining to anyone who asks that he is a veteran of the late war, walking home with a faithful mammy who insisted on joining him in the field to make sure he had enough to eat. He says this with a catch in
his voice and a gleam in his eyes that never fails to touch whoever is listening, says it so earnestly that she thinks he has come to believe it himself.

When he tells them this lie, people gaze upon her with raw adoration and gush fulsome praise for her faithfulness. She looks away and they always take this for modesty, which only makes them glorify her more. It surprises her that they believe such foolishness, but they do. They
need
to, she thinks. And Marse Jim seldom has to tell the story more than two times or three before finding some poor widow so moved by it that she will give them biscuits or sowbelly and a place to spend the night.

She has her chances to run from him. At night, him sprawling against a bale of hay in someone’s barn, legs drawn up crookedly, mouth gaped in a rasping snore, she could easily get up and slip out into the night. Maybe even get away. Instead, she squats there as if rooted, as if she were something growing up from the very soil, and watches him sleep. She wonders why.

Maybe it’s because she has nowhere she could go.

Maybe it’s because she knows he would find her.

Maybe it’s because she remembers. Wilson flying backward from the explosion, landing against the tree like a sack of flour. Lucretia, gazing at the blood-oozing hole in her stomach, then up at Tilda, right up at Tilda, spearing her with accusatory eyes.

“We’s free now,” she had said. Insisted
.

“How are they going to free my niggers?” Marse Jim had said. “How are they going to take away from me something I paid good money for, something I bought fair and legal?”

And then he shot her, and she died.

“Little Jim liked cane.”

The voice jolts her in her reverie, brings her back to herself. She is sitting near him under an old oak tree at the edge of a sugarcane field. His voice is so unexpected that she glances around to see who he is talking to. When she sees no one else is there and that the words must have been meant for her, she grunts an acknowledgement, not knowing what else to do.

He barely notices, rubbing a stalk of cane contemplatively between thumb and forefinger. “Brought him through this way once, must have been about six years ago, on a trip to see some niggers this fellow had for sale. Stopped somewhere ’long in here for the night and the owner of the place, he give Little Jim a piece of cane to chaw on. He ain’t knowed what it was right away, but once he took him a chew, you never saw a boy so happy.”

He seems to be waiting for her to respond, but what is there to say? She shrugs. “He really liked it, did he?”

It sounds weak to her ears, but apparently, it is response enough, an invitation to speak aloud about his dead son, because he immediately turns to her. It takes a moment to realize the thing on his face is a smile. “Oh yeah,” he says. “It’s sweet, you know, sugarcane. Just got to peel the skin back and there you go. Little Jim, he worked on that thing all that day. Always promised him I was going to bring him back here for another taste, but then the war come and I never got to do it.”

His eyes are shining and she wonders again what it is she is supposed to say. And then, all at once she knows, and it is surprisingly easy to say because it is the truth. “I’m sorry they killed your boy. The Yankees had no call to do that.”

He turns away and she gets the sense it is because tears are falling and he doesn’t want her to see. “Damn right they didn’t,” he says, and his voice is harsh. “Damn right.”

It is a hot day. The tree shade is a welcome mercy, the wind breathes softly on her cheek. She can’t figure what it is that gets into her at that moment. She knows better, doesn’t she? And if she didn’t before, she surely does now. But she can’t stop herself. She isn’t even sure she wants to.

“My boy died, too,” she says.

There, she said it. Same thing she said walking down the hill from Little Jim’s grave, same thing that made him snort at her presumption, made Wilson and Lucretia give her that hard look as they trudged past. Same thing. But why should she not be allowed to say it? It’s true, isn’t it? Lord knows it is.

Still, she is braced for his cursing, even braced for him to hit her for her insolence. Instead, he looks at her. Looks at her for a long time. Finally he says, “What happened to him?”

She swallows. “Got shot. Same as yours.”

He nods, seeming to think this through. “Runaway?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“Shouldn’t of run,” he says. “That’s bad business, niggers running.” He is silent for a long time, staring down the road they have just walked. Then he says, “But they ain’t had to shoot him, I expect. Some of them nigger chasers, you know, they just plain don’t think. All they want to do is bring the nigger back. Don’t occur to them that you got to bring him back alive. Otherwise, what’s the point? What’s the value of a dead nigger?”

She absorbs this torrent of words, more than he has spoken all together in the last five days, stoically. She wonders if some rough nugget of empathy is supposed to lie buried in them. Then she decides it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. “I miss him,” she says. “I miss my son.”

He gives her that look again. Then he looks away. “Miss mine, too,” he says. “Son shouldn’t die before the father. That’s just wrong.”

“Shouldn’t die before the mother, either,” she says, wondering where this boldness is coming from. Wondering where her sense of self-preservation has gone.

But he only nods. “Shouldn’t die before the mother,” he agrees.

The silence that follows feels almost companionable, except that she knows it isn’t. Even in the silence, he is still Marse Jim, and she is still just a nigger he owns. So they sit there another moment, together but not. And when he decides they have been sitting long enough, he stands without a word or even a backward glance, hoists the rifle to his shoulder, and starts walking. She follows.

She stares at the back of him as she has now for more days than she can remember, his balding head hunched down, his potato-shaped body pushed slightly forward, like a man walking uphill against a wind. And she wonders what this is that just happened between them, what it means that they just talked about their sons.