Freeman (44 page)

“Miss Prentiss,” he said.

“Yes, Perseus?”

“Why are you doing this?”

She sighed, checked the saddle, then turned to face him. “They are frightened, Perseus. We all are. Some fool Yankee woman in town smuggled in fifty rifles to arm the colored men. They mean to finish off what the Union didn’t, get revenge on white people for what happened in the time of slavery. Some of our men have been patrolling the roads, looking for them. It’s gone hard for the ones they catch, Perseus, I don’t mind telling you. Harder than it
went for you, I mean. There have been some terrible things done. Just terrible. I cannot allow that to happen to you—even though you ran off from me.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“You can thank me by climbing up on this horse and riding out of here.”

It was easier said than done. Between the arm he no longer had and the leg he could no longer use and the pain that spiked in his back every time he twisted or reached, climbing atop the horse posed a challenge not readily solved. Finally, Miss Prentiss had to retrieve an old milking stool from the cow stall at the far end of the building. He stood on that, the little woman braced him from below, he took hold of the pommel, and somehow, managed to lever himself up into place.

The exertion spilled fresh blood out of him.

“Perseus, you are hurt very badly. You need a doctor, but you dare not go into town.”

He was leaning into the horse’s neck, waiting for the barn to stand still. Oh, he hurt. He hurt like he had been rolled in broken glass and dipped in fire.

“I know,” he whispered and could barely hear his own voice.

“I regret I can’t do more to help you,” she said.

“You have done…plenty,” he said. It was harder to breathe. “Thank you.”

He pushed himself as near to upright as he could manage, gave her a shaky smile, and spurred the horse. Bucephalus moved forward at a trot. Every bounce of the horse’s flanks was a fresh punishment. He tried to ignore it. He held the reins in his teeth, pulled on them with his hand to guide the horse. Soon enough, he was out of Miss Prentiss’s lane and back on the main road. There was no sign of the six men, but Sam knew she was right. They would return. He should give up this foolish quest. He should run.

Instead, Sam turned the horse west toward the town where Tilda had been sold, toward Kendricks.

He never got there.

Tilda shook her head.

“You’re dying now, Sam. Are you happy?”

Tears stood in her eyes. He was moved.

“You could have escaped,” she said. “You could have
lived
. Now look at you. You’re cut to pieces, you’re all beat up. There is so much blood, Sam. Lord, look at all this blood.”

I had to reach you
. He tried to say.

I had to find you
. He tried to say.

She laughed a little as she wept. “You are such a fool, Sam. You are such a mad fool.”

He was vaguely aware of hands on him, dragging him off.

Tilda
. He tried to say. Tried to scream.

But it was no use. Tilda shook her head again, shook her head with all the pity in the world. He watched her. She grew smaller, slipping further and further away.

And then he was gone.

“You goin’ down there to punish yourself again.” From the door of her bedroom, Miss Ginny accused Prudence’s back. She held a single candle that painted the walls with shadows that quivered out of the deeper blackness.

Prudence didn’t speak. Her hand was on the handle of the back door, which she held slightly ajar. It was still dark out. Crickets serenaded the waning night. She had hoped to be gone without the old woman hearing.

“This ain’t doin’ no good,” said Miss Ginny.

“I know,” said Prudence.

“Ain’t no point in you going down there to sit in the dark and cry, child.”

But Prudence had already closed the door behind her.

Ten days after, it still did not feel real. Her soul still refused to believe.

So she rose every morning, as if that awful night had never happened, dressed herself in teacher’s clothes, and left Miss Ginny’s by the back door, walking along the alley so as not to be seen walking on the street. There was little real danger she would be attacked—too many Union soldiers patrolling the town—but still, she preferred the back way. She hid herself so the town would be spared the sight of her.

Miss Ginny was right, of course. There was no reason to go out. But she could not stop herself. She rose in the mornings and walked down the block as if there were still classes to teach and papers to grade—as if she didn’t know all that was over and done with, as if she didn’t know the old warehouse would never be a school again.

But she
knew
.

Walking down to the school—and how hard it was to stop using that word—was just what Miss Ginny had called it: an act of penance for all her sins of folly, arrogance and, yes, Lord,
imprudence
. So every day since it happened, she had walked the alley, come up the side of the building, unlocked the door, and entered upon a scene even
her
soul could not deny.

Shafts of sunlight tunneled the shadows, entering through the holes that bullets had punched in the walls. Glass still crunched under her feet, desks were still overturned, tables were still splintered, and papers still littered the floor from the brief struggle that had ensued when a few of the townspeople managed to force their way inside before the soldiers repulsed them. They had seized her. She still felt their hands upon her, still felt herself being carried away, her feet not touching the ground. And they had seized Bonnie. She still heard her sister scream.

Then Sergeant Russell lifted his rifle and shot and a white man fell dead with a bullet hole in his cheek and they melted off of her and she crawled back into the shelter of the school—
crawled!—
as soldiers swung the big doors closed, and she looked around for Bonnie.

And she looked around for Bonnie.

“Where is Bonnie?” she cried.

And Sergeant Russell lifted his shoulders. “We could not save her.”

“You must save her! You must go get her!”

“There are nine of us,” Russell told her. “There are hundreds of them.”

“You must save her!”

But they weren’t listening to her. The dead white man’s body was impeding the path of the door. Two of the soldiers rolled it into the street outside, and now the doors were being closed and the lock secured and chairs being used as barricades.

She heard a scream arise from somewhere outside. Then hail—no,
bullets
—coming through the door. Russell cried, “Get down!” She was slow to obey. A soldier tackled her to the floor, covering her body with his own. She could smell tobacco and onions. She could hear him breathing. Another soldier yelled, “I am shot!”

When the hailstorm ceased, Russell ordered them all upstairs. Someone scooped her up and carried her. Two others helped the wounded soldier, whose backside was squirting blood. They cleared a table, lay him atop it on his stomach, and one of them began attending to the wound.

There were windows in the loft overlooking the street. A rock sailed through, and a spray of glass splashed the floor. She heard, quite clearly, Bonnie’s scream. It did not sound human.

“Please,” she said. She was talking to Russell, who stood at the window watching the scene below, his face ashen and still. “Please save her.”

He looked at her. “Mrs. Kent,” he said, “I am not certain we will be able to save ourselves.”

Through the shattered glass, they watched the crowd mill about aimlessly for a moment. Then, as if they all decided at once, they moved south, toward the colored section. If they could not have the school, they would have the town and every colored face in it.

Prudence searched the mob for Bonnie. She did not see her.

They spent the night in the loft, for the most part too terrified to speak. Prudence could see the glow of distant fires, hear shrieks of pain that seemed like nothing a human throat could ever produce.

She thought of the mob not as a collection of maddened people, but as a single entity, a beast that prowled the colored section of the town, visiting devastation on anyone luckless or foolish enough to confront it. Because the animal did not listen to reason, the animal was insensate to pleadings and lament. The animal existed only to rend and tear.

And she had created it and set it loose.

She should have listened. She knew that now, walking the alley to the building that once had housed her school. But she had not listened, had she?

Up until that awful night now ten days past, her life had repeatedly taught her one lesson: too much time spent listening only allowed voices of timidity and cowardice to turn you from doing what you knew needed to be done,
demanded
to be done. In her experience, listening was too often just an excuse for fearfulness and inaction. If she had listened, after all, she would never have spirited a family of runaways out of Boston in a wagon with a false bottom, never have spoken out for the cause of abolition, never have known Bonnie as her sister.

And yet…

If she had listened, her sister would still be alive.

And then that next morning came, a dazed, hung-over morning wreathed with tendrils of smoke, and she finally ventured out from shelter with the company of soldiers, leaving the wounded man behind, and it felt very much as if they were the last people in all of God’s creation. Noah
walking forth from the Ark could not have felt more lonely. Silence oppressed the town, clamped down on it as tightly as a lid to a jar so that she started a little when Russell ordered three of his men to go down to Socrates’s store, to break in, if need be, and send for help. His voice seemed unnaturally loud, an affront to the stillness.

As the soldiers ran to comply, Prudence asked Russell if she might check on Miss Ginny. He agreed with a curt nod and they moved up the street to the little house with the garden blooming in a riot of color out front.

Prudence knocked on the door. A taut voice answered her from the other side. “Get away from here, you devil. I got a gun and I’ll shoot you. Swear ’fore Jesus, I will.”

“Miss Ginny, it is Prudence.”

“Prudence?” The door opened just a sliver and the old woman peered out hesitantly. When she saw Prudence and the five Union soldiers standing behind her, she breathed a long sigh. “You all right,” she said, opening the door wider. “Thank you, Jesus.”

And then confusion creased her brow. “But where Bonnie?” she asked.

It was the hardest thing Prudence had ever said. “They took her last night.”

The old woman’s eyes filled. “She dead then.” Her voice wobbled like a child learning to walk. “God help her soul, but she dead.”

Prudence tried to reply, but her throat constricted, squeezing tight against the words. Nothing came out.

Miss Ginny grabbed her hand. “You need to get in here.”

“No,” Prudence managed to say. “I need to go and see for myself what has happened.”

“I would prefer it if you stay behind, Mrs. Kent,” said Russell. “The sights we are likely to see will not be fit viewing for a lady such as yourself.”

“No.” Winter snows lay thick upon that single word. “I need to see, sergeant, and I will. The only question is whether I shall be in the protection of Union soldiers when I do.”

He sighed. “Pity the man that marries you. You are a handful, you are.”

It was a grumble of defeat in which she once would have taken immense pride. But there was no pride left in her that morning. So she just waited for him to turn away and followed when he did. Together, Prudence and the soldiers wandered in silence through the remnants of mass madness.

The streets were littered with the detritus of other people’s lives. Prudence’s feet scuffed against other people’s papers, pieces of other people’s furniture, dolls belonging to other people’s children, ambrotype images of other people and their families staring up with solemn pride from fractured glass and broken frames. Houses were smashed and burned, the wood left blackened and deeply scored. In one house, flames still burned low, slowly dying for lack of fuel.

They found the bodies hanging in a single tree before the remains of someone’s home. There were twelve of them, tongues protruding, rope biting into their skin, necks elongated, heads turned to unnatural angles. No one spoke, or needed to. The only sound was the occasional creaking of a rope or angry buzzing of a fly. Prudence’s knees turned to water. Horror rushed up from her gut and she went to her knees to vomit in the dirt. One of the soldiers fell down beside her and did the same.