Freeman (51 page)

A sigh. “You asked yesterday if I knew how it felt to be empty, to have your very soul hollowed out.”

“‘More than you know.’ That’s what you said.”

She nodded. “More than you know,” she said. She started to weep again.

Sam’s hand went to her shoulder. He didn’t tell it to, it just went. He was acutely conscious of the wrongness of what his hand had done, but he couldn’t pull it back. “I am sorry,” he said. “For you, for me, for all of us.”

After a moment, she looked at him. “We should go,” she said.

He nodded. He let her get a few steps ahead, then fell in behind her.

She said, “I was not taught to think that way, you know.”

“What way?”

“Just now, when I was in distress and you put your hand on my shoulder, just to comfort me as anyone would do. I could tell it made you anxious, your terrible brown hand touching my precious white skin. It was the same the first day I helped you walk.” Her laughter was bitter as smoke. “That is not how my father taught us, and sometimes I forget the rest of the world sees things quite differently.”

“Especially here,” said Sam.

“Especially here,” she agreed. “Here, it is as if the war never ended. Yes, the fighting stopped, but only because it had to. But nothing was settled. That is the thing I have found most astonishing in my sojourn here. These people are so haughty and prideful one gets confused sometimes about who actually surrendered to whom. I simply do not understand them.”

“And you are white,” said Sam.

There was a pause. “And I am white,” she finally agreed. Another silence.

“Yes, you are,” said Sam, “but you are not like these people.”

“Perhaps I am,” she said. “Perhaps they are what I would be had I been raised in a place where I was taught to view my skin as proof that I was a higher order of human being. Oh, do not mistake my meaning; there are some in Boston who do feel that way. There are many, I suppose. But there were also those like my father, who came to believe that such beliefs were ignorant and low, and would not tolerate them in his presence.”

“Your father sounds like an exceptional man,” said Sam.

“He was an imperfect man,” she said. “I told you what he once was. But
yes, once he understood the error of his ways, he embraced equality with a fierceness. And on that point he was absolutely unbending.”

“It must have made for a difficult childhood.”

The question seemed to surprise her. She stopped and turned, a tiny vertical consternation line creasing her brow. “What do you mean?”

He paused in his hobbling gait. “All the other children,” he said. “They must have thought you some kind of oddity.”

She turned back, walking again. “My father taught us to endure.”

Sam didn’t move. “Is that what you are doing here in Buford? Enduring?”

She stopped again, turned again. “I suppose you could say that. Why?”

“It seems a lonely existence,” he said, “just enduring. You have no business among these white people. You are not like them. I am glad you accepted that man’s offer, though I know it was difficult for you. But I would hate to think of you staying here among them.”

“Do you hate white people, Sam? It is perfectly all right to say so if you do. Sometimes, I hate them myself.”

Sam came forward, his bad leg scraping awkwardly on the baked dirt. “I do sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes, I hate them with a passion. Then I meet someone like you, who has treated me so kindly, or I remember Mary Cuthbert who nursed me to health in Philadelphia when I became ill in camp and the Army sent me there to die, and I am reminded all over again how foolish that is. It is simply that I get…
frustrated
. I once believed that if I learned to speak as well as they do, better than they do, if I carried myself with scrupulous dignity, they would see the folly of looking at my skin and presuming from that to treat me like dirt. I have since come to understand how naïve I was. But I am naïve no longer. They have beaten and shot and stabbed all the naïveté out of me.”

Prudence nodded, slowly. “I understand,” she said. “Look around you. I thought that with my family’s fortune, and my own stubbornness, my absolute refusal to give in to them, I could change things for the Negroes, at least in this tiny corner of Dixie. What you see before you is the only change I managed to make.”

A mangy orange dog loped out of the front door of a burned-out house. It stopped in the middle of the mud street and watched them for a moment. Then it put its head down and went on its way.

“So I feel much as you feel, Sam,” she said. “I, too, have had much taken
from me. They took my illusions. They took my sister. And what is worse, I have no one to blame but myself.”

It was a moment before Sam spoke. “So,” he finally said, “we are passengers in the same boat. What can we do now? Where do we go from here?”

Something helpless stole into her eyes just then, something vulnerable and small. “Well,” she said, “that is the heart of the matter, is it not? I have been asking myself that same question for a month and I still have no idea.”

She looked at him with her defenseless eyes. It was a sight too painful for seeing. He found something over her shoulder to stare at instead. After a beat, she said, too brightly, “Come on, then, let us get you off your feet. You can rest for a while and then return to saddling your horse.” She moved to the right side of him and reached for his arm, draping it across her shoulder. He knew she was waiting for him to flinch. He did not. So she braced him as they made their way slowly down the dirt street, as the blackened houses and the gnarled oak slipped further behind.

He knew someone might see this, might see them walking together this way, might think them a couple instead of a crippled Negro man being helped by a thoughtful white woman. Someone might take offense. Someone might raise the alarm.

He tried to care. But something had gone out of him. Whatever it was that allowed him to worry and fear, whatever it was that allowed him to give a damn, had seeped out of him like sweat, leaving him listless and hollow.

He was empty.

So, although he tried to care, he could not. What could they say to him that they hadn’t said? What could they do that they hadn’t done? What could they take that was not already gone?

With his arm draped across her shoulder, her arm looped around his waist, they walked at his slow and painful pace down the street. At the far end of the block, Main Street crossed like the top bar of a T. On the opposite side of Main stood a cotton field, flowering white. Soon, crews of Negroes would stoop and bend there, twisting the fiber out of the hard bolls under the late-summer sun.

They turned at the corner. The warehouse was down on the left. From behind them, a wagon pulled by two rangy mules slowly overtook them. The driver was a dark-skinned colored man with a heavy beard. He looked at them from under the brim of his hat, nodded with a face that gave away nothing. The wagon clattered off into the distance.

“So now we are discovered,” said Prudence. “A white woman helping a crippled colored man. Oh, the horror.”

He didn’t answer. A rivulet of sweat trickled down the center of his back. It was early yet, but already he could tell it would be another day of infernal heat. They crossed in the wake of the wagon, walked alongside the field, the cotton plants whispering together in the breeze.

They entered the warehouse moments later. It was pungent with the smell of the horse. She braced him as he made his way over to the cot, his bad leg scraping behind him like some remnant of another life. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I am a little tired, is all.”

“That is my fault. I should not have made you walk such a long way.”

“No,” he said, “I needed to see.”

At the bed, he had to turn slowly to position himself. She clung to his stump as he did, counterbalanced his weight with her own as he lowered himself gingerly down to the canvas. There was a moment, her face close above his, her eyes watching his.

And she kissed him.

Almost before their lips touched, he pulled back, sick with horror. He fumbled for words, but his mind was empty. He simply could not believe what she had done.

Nor could she. You could see that. The green eyes were perfect ovals, pools of shock in a face where every muscle seemed to have failed simultaneously, her features hanging slack as a flag on a windless day.

A moment came. A moment went.

Then she came forward and now she was kissing him again, pressing her lips to his with a need that obliterated his mind, that drove him slowly back upon the canvas. He was sick with horror, yet scalded by need. He fumbled again for words, for resistance, for reason. Instead, his one arm came up, encircling her, pulling her closer. He kissed her until she pulled back from him. For a moment, she simply watched him, saying nothing. Her face was flushed. Her hair had come loose.

“Prudence,” he said.

And she kissed him again.

What came next was awkward, as how could it be anything else between an injured man with one arm trying to unbutton his scavenged pants and
shirt while lying on an army cot beneath a woman shrugging out of a dress and a whalebone corset? It took a while, took enough time, he thought, for them to come to their senses, change their minds if they’d wanted to. He half-thought she would. He half-wished she would.

Then he was naked and she was naked above him, sweat gleaming on her skin in the near-darkness of the old warehouse. And he stopped thinking. He put his hand on her

terrible brown hand touching precious white skin

and drew her to him.

He wanted to be on top of her, to take her as a man should take a woman. But he knew it would be awkward trying to brace himself with the one arm, knew he had no choice but to lie there beneath her. And though he barely dared admit it even to himself, there was something deliciously wicked in that, some crossing of uncrossable lines, some inversion of the natural order. Why not? With all the lines they were crossing now, all the inversions of the natural order they were committing, what did one more matter?

He felt absent from his body and yet, at the same time, furiously at one with it. He felt…loosed, felt like a balloon, the string released from an errant child’s hand, floating above the trees, floating into the sky.

She pushed herself against him with a hard urgency and he thrust back with an answering fierceness. His bad leg and residual injuries howled their protest. She was weeping. He wept without knowing.

After, she lay atop him, her breasts mashed into his belly, her moist cheek turned against his chest. His hand was buried in her October-colored hair.

They should get up from there. Someone might come to the door. Someone might peek through one of the bullet holes in the wall. Someone might see. But he did not say this and he did not move. Could not. The moment was its own universe, and it held them fast, safe in mutual embrace, sweating and breathing together, her ear pressed to the drumming of his heart.

But reality would not long be denied.

“What have we done?” he said.

“Shush,” she said.

“What have we done?” he repeated.

“I do not know,” she admitted.

“I should know better,” he told her. “You should, too. They will kill us if they find out. They will kill both of us.”

She lifted her head and turned her eyes upon him. “And how will they find out?” she asked. “Will you tell them?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I am only saying that—”

“Stop,” she said.

“I am only saying it is a dangerous thing we have done. Foolish, too.”

“Do you regret that we did it?” she asked.

He thought about it. He tried to locate regret somewhere within him, scanning for it as a sailor scans the sky for a navigational star. But he could not find it. He didn’t answer her. Which was, he knew, an answer in itself.

“I will not apologize,” she said. She turned her cheek to his chest again. “I will
not
. You said it yourself: they have already taken so much from us. Will we allow them to take this, too?”

“But what does this mean? What happens next?”

It took her a long time to answer. “I do not know,” she finally said, her breath stirring the hairs on his chest.