Freeman (43 page)

“Yes, ma’am, you were.”

“Then how could you do that to me?”

And what could he do but shrug and repeat it? “I wanted to be
free
, Miss Prentiss.”

She made a scornful sound. “Well, you are free, all right. All of you are free. But if you are not careful, you will get yourself killed, I expect. It’s only God’s own mercy that you got here safely. But you can’t stay, Perseus. You have to turn around and go back where you came from.”

He shook his head. “I cannot do that, Miss. I need to find Tilda.”

“She is not here anymore, Perseus. I had to sell her right before the war began. I sold a lot of them, in fact. I had some…reversals. And then, when the Union came near, the others ran off.” The admissions made her voice small.

“I have to
find
her!” The force of his own words surprised him. It surprised her, too. Her eyes rounded and she took in a short, sharp breath. “I love her,” he said. The confession made him feel helpless.

Louisa Prentiss laughed at him. It was an airy, musical sound. “Love,” she said. “That there is a mighty big word, Perseus.”

He could feel the anger trying to squirm its way into his voice. He wrestled it down as best he could. “I know what love is, Miss Prentiss. I love Tilda. I always have.”

“Go back where you came from, Perseus. Find another woman there. I am certain there are lots of pretty colored girls who would be happy to be courted by a buck like you, even with one wing. It’s dangerous in these parts. You are going to get yourself killed insisting on one woman in particular.”

“I must take that risk,” said Sam. “That one woman in particular is the only woman I want. Can you please tell me where you sold her to?”

Exasperation snagged on her lips. “I do not recall you being this stubborn,” she said. Then she sighed. “It was a man named McFarland. James McFarland. He had a big place in Kendricks. But the way I hear it, he abandoned it two months ago and took his last slaves with him.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No one does,” she said.

“
Someone
does,” he assured her, turning to leave.

“You cannot just walk yourself down there, Perseus. Have you not you heard a word I’ve said? It’s
dangerous
right now.”

He did not hear her, in fact. He heard only his own racing thoughts. Kendricks wasn’t even fifty miles away. He could be there in two days. He might see Tilda in
two days
. “Thank you,” he said, and to his surprise, his voice shook. “Thank you.” He stepped away from her. And stopped.

There were six of them coming down Miss Prentiss’s lane single file on horseback, lean white men in tattered cavalry gear, their faces overgrown with beards, their iron eyes fixed on him. The one in the lead brought his horse to a stop just a few feet away and climbed down. The animal nickered softly as the man looped the reins around a magnolia branch. He tipped a cap back from his brow as he stepped forward. “Louisa, I see you got one of them.”

“One of what?” said Sam. He felt himself smiling again. Nobody even looked his way. The other men were dismounting.

“No, Zachariah,” said Miss Prentiss, in an odd, fluty voice, “he is not one of them. He’s one of my people from a long time ago. He come back to see me, is all.”

“Is that so? Well, you can’t be too careful, Louisa. Some of ’em can be pure deceitful.” His gaze came around to Sam. “What about it, boy? What you know about that army of niggers?”

He wanted to draw himself up then, wanted to reach for some long and daunting word, pronounced in icy correctness, that would make this white man shrink from him in confusion, make him realize that Sam Freeman was a free Negro man, dignified and unafraid. To his horror, Sam felt the opposite happening, felt his smile stretching itself across his face, unfurling itself like a flag of impotence and fear. “Suh, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no army of niggers.”

How easily the old language had come back to him. Thanks to Louisa Prentiss, Sam Freeman was an educated man, a reader of books, a student of history and literature who prided himself upon his command of words, on the way he could use them to lash white men with the whip of their own ignorance. Yet how easily he had slipped into the broken grammar of the merest field hand. How easily he had said “niggers.” It had happened without even conscious thought, and in that moment, Sam hated himself. He knew he’d had no choice, knew he had done the only smart thing, but that simply made it worse.

Not that it mattered. The one Miss Prentiss called Zachariah stepped directly in front of Sam. He had depthless gray eyes. His breath was warm and smelled of stew meat. “Is that so?” he said. “Well, boy, I’m afraid I don’t believe you.”

Sam lowered his eyes. This, too, felt appallingly natural. “It’s the truth, suh,” he heard himself say.

A rushing river thundered in his temples. The men had closed around him, a wall of beards and cold stares, and he could no longer see Miss Prentiss. Her voice came from somewhere far away.

“Leave him alone!” she commanded. “I told you, he just came back to see me, that’s all.”

“To rob you and cut your throat, more likely,” said one of the men.

“No suh,” said Sam, shaking his head emphatically. “No,
suh
.”

“Zach, what are we wastin’ time for with this one-armed nigger? You know how to make him talk. Tie him to that tree yonder and give him a few licks. That’ll loosen his tongue.”

“But I ain’t
done
nothin’!” cried Sam. Indignation spiked in his voice and he knew instantly it was a mistake.

“Yeah, boys, I think you’re right,” said Zachariah, regarding him closely. “This one needs to be taken down a peg.” He grabbed Sam by the stump of his missing arm. Sam wrenched away. Then three of them had hold of him, pulling in opposite directions as if to rip him like paper. He struggled to pull himself free. One of them hit him, a fist to the jaw that swung his head hard to the left.

“That’s showin’ him!” someone yelled. “Hit him again.”

Far away, Miss Prentiss cried out. And then he lost track, because all at once, the blows were coming too fast and hard. They hit him in the
stomach. They smashed him in the eye. He felt his shirt torn away. Blood filled his mouth.

Someone kicked him in the knee. It buckled with a popping sound and he went to the ground. He tried to stand, but a foot in the chest pushed him into the earth. Then all their feet came down hard, stomping him like a snake. They kicked his head. They kicked his face. Pieces of tooth lodged in his throat, choking him. They kicked his stomach and agony corkscrewed through him. They stomped his ribs like a board and he felt the bone give under their heavy boots. They kicked his back. They kicked his legs. Someone yanked out a great fistful of his hair. They stomped his groin. He curled himself tight around his own suffering. Hurt fell down on him like rain. Voices flew up from all around.

“Ain’t so sassy now, nigger, are you?”

“You gon’ tell us where that nigger army is, nigger?”

“Don’t kill him yet!”

“No, let’s string him up like the others!”

Someone grabbed him by the stump of his arm, tried to draw him upright, but it was as if his legs were gone like his arm. He couldn’t stand. “Get up, nigger!” someone cried.

And Sam, who had called himself Freeman, knew with a sudden chilling certainty that he would die here, just two days from his goal, a fitting fate for a foolish man on a foolish quest that had been doomed from that day he stood above the Schuylkill River and bid Philadelphia farewell. As if in answer to that realization, someone pushed a knife into him just then, the blade going into the lower right side of his back, easy as a baby’s sigh. Standing half-erect, all their hands upon him, he arched himself against the pain and knew that he was finished. He gave himself over to death. Welcomed it.

And then a blast of rifle fire filled the world.

It was a moment before he realized he was no longer being hit, that he was lying on his back in the dirt. The men had melted off him like snow from the grass. From somewhere above, a man’s voice said, “Now, why don’t you put that down before somebody gets hurt?”

Sam managed to pry his eyes open. Through sweat, tears and blood, he saw Louisa Prentiss open the breech and shove a second shell into place.

“Louisa,” Zachariah was saying in the tone of voice you’d use to reason with a stubborn child, “you don’t want to shoot us over some nigger. Now put the gun down!”

“No,” she said, and there was leather in her voice. “You’ve done enough. I told you already: he doesn’t know anything about it. I will not stand here and watch you beat this boy to death. Now I’ll thank you to get off my property, Zachariah Monroe, or the next one goes through you.”

He was incredulous. “You’d shoot me?” he demanded in a breathless voice. “You’d shoot a white man over some nigger?”

She appeared to consider this for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t want to do it, Zachariah. It would pain me to no end. But look what you’ve become, all of you. Not soldiers. Not defenders. Just a mob of cowards, about to beat this boy to death for no good reason.”

“I never thought I’d see the day,” one of the white men said. His voice was a scandalized whisper.

“Neither did I,” she said. She motioned with the rifle. “Now
get
.”

There was a moment. Then one of the other men reached into the dirt for his hat. He smacked it twice against his thigh. “Ah, hell,” he said, slapping it back on his head, “let’s go, boys. She loves niggers so much, let’s leave her to it.” He mounted his horse.

Zachariah didn’t move. He stared at the little woman holding the gun. His lip curled and Sam wanted to yell out for her to stand back from him before he slapped the rifle aside. But Sam could not produce a sound.

It didn’t matter. Zachariah didn’t try to take the gun. He stared long and hard at Louisa Prentiss, as if to make his contempt plain. Then, with exaggerated leisure, he went to his horse and mounted it. “Come on, boys,” he said, “let’s go. It smells like nigger around here.”

The barrel of the rifle tracked them all the way down the lane. Only when she was sure they were gone did Miss Prentiss allow the weapon to fall. Her hands trembled as thought caught in a January breeze. She took a deep breath and for an instant, Sam thought she had forgotten him. Then she turned. “They will return,” she said. “You must go.”

“I don’t know if I can walk,” he said. His voice was like gravel.

“Then you can take one of the horses in the stable. Ride out of here as fast as you can.”

“Miss Prentiss, I do not even know if I can stand.” He had his hand to the wound in his back. It was oily with blood.

“You haven’t any choice,” she said. “You
must
ride.”

He winced at the thought. If the beating and stabbing didn’t kill him,
bouncing his wounded body on a horse surely would. But she was right, wasn’t she? No choice at all.

“Give me your hand, Perseus.” Her hand was stretched out before him. He hesitated
(had they ever so much as touched before?)
then reached for it. Their hands clasped, their grip slippery with his blood. She braced him. It was difficult—he had just the one arm and now, for all intents and purposes, just one leg—but after a moment, he struggled upright. The world reeled around him and he gripped the trunk of a magnolia tree to make sure he didn’t fall. His back was burning. Blood drenched the seat of his pants. He could not straighten himself and stood slightly bent at the waist.

“Come, we must hurry.”

He tried. The knee that had been kicked would not bear any weight, his infected foot was still filled with pain, so his gait was an ungainly cross between a hop and a skip. She walked briskly ahead of him toward the stables behind the house. He followed as best he could, his entire body a nest of cuts and bruises and pain. He considered again how he had managed to get through a year of the war without a scratch. The thought was good for a small, humorless laugh.

In his awkward gait, Sam reached the barn minutes after Miss Prentiss did. She was saddling a big roan when he got there. She glanced at him, then went back to work, buckling the straps. “This is Bucephalus,” she said. “He is the fastest I have. He will get you out of here.”

Sam grimaced as he walked toward the horse. The animal looked worn and thin. “You did love your Greek,” he said.

Her smile was tight as she finished the straps. “Greece was where civilization began,” she said. “Of course, if we are not careful, Mississippi is where it will end.” She looked at him, looked quickly away.