Freeman (58 page)

Honey has been rehearsing this moment. She keeps her face bored, her voice tensionless. “She went down to the water. Do some washing.”

“Early for that,” he says.

She shrugs. “Not so hot early,” she says.

For a moment, she fears he is going down to the water to check. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything, just takes his plate and walks away. She doesn’t dare even to sigh.

Hours pass. It is late in the day when he approaches her again. She is before the cookhouse, splitting logs for the fire.

“Where’s that other one?” he asks. “Ain’t seen her all day.”

Honey lowers the axe, dabs with her forearm at her sweaty brow. “Couldn’t say,” she says. “Ain’t seen her myself.”

She doesn’t even see him move. The next thing she knows, she is on the ground and the side of her face burns as if it has been dipped in fire. She touches it gingerly. His shadow falls upon her. The sound of argument and movement in the camp falls away to silence. There is nobody in the world but the two of them.

“You think I am a fool?” he growls. “Where is she? Where is my nigger?”

Somehow, she still has the axe. Her grip tightens on the handle. She means to bury the blade in his stomach. As she is thinking this, a pistol appears in his hands. He draws the hammer back. “Asked you a question,” he says.

She stares up at him. Spits blood. “You go to hell,” she says.

The pistol comes up. She closes her eyes. She hears a gunshot.

Honey opens her eyes, surprised that she can. Colonel Moody is holding a revolver, the smoking barrel pointed to the tops of the trees. His gray eyes are fathomless. “That’ll be
enough
, Captain,” he says.

“My nigger’s gone!” shouts Marse Jim. “My nigger’s gone and this one knows where she went.”

Moody turns those eyes on her now. “That true, Honey?”

Honey is surprised how frictionless and easy the lie feels. “No, sir. Done tol’ the cap’n already, I ain’t seed her all day. I’m just as surprised as he is that she gone.”

Marse Jim’s voice rises toward panic. “She’s lying! Can’t you see she’s lying?” The gun in his hand waggles crazily.

Moody is cool. “Maybe she is,” he says, “but you can’t shoot the truth out of her, now can you?”

There is a moment, as a mad despair backlights Jim McFarland’s shining, half-moon eyes, that she is certain he will try. “She’s the only thing of value I still own in this world,” he says, pleading.

“I understand,” says Moody. “But Honey is the only thing
I
still own. Would you deprive me of my property because you have been deprived of yours? Where is the honor in that, Captain?”

She can see the words taking effect. His back stiffens. The gun comes down. The light in his eyes fades to a dull determination. “I’ve got to find where she went,” he says.

“Maybe there’s some clue in the cookhouse,” says Moody amiably.

To Honey’s horror, Marse Jim shambles into the little cabin where she lives. She can hear him banging around pans, throwing ladles aside. Then there is a horrible moment of silence and she knows. She just knows.

Belatedly she remembers to climb to her feet. As she does, Marse Jim appears, holding the newspaper above his head like a captured flag. “She’s gone to Little Rock,” he says. “Some buck put a notice in a nigger paper. She’s gone off there to meet him.”

Honey feels sick. She curses herself for not burning the paper.

“Are you sure?” asks Moody.

“Damn certain I’m sure,” cries Marse Jim, holding the paper close to his eyes. “It’s got my name in it and everything. Says big as life, ‘She was the property of James McFarland.’ That’s me.”

“So it is,” says Moody. “Then your course is clear. You must go to Little Rock. Will you require assistance?”

“Against one runaway nigger?” Marse Jim’s laugh is a bitter explosion. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Godspeed, then,” says Moody.

Marse Jim turns and shambles off without another word. Moody holsters his pistol. He regards her for a moment. “I trust supper will not be unduly delayed because of this?” he asks.

In reply, she closes her eyes and conjures the image. The fear in Tilda’s eyes that very morning as they stood in lamplight by the door. And then, the resolve. God grant that resolve will be enough to keep her safe.

Honey’s body begins to shake. Tears sting the fresh bruise on her cheek. Her prayer is fervent and unspoken.

Run, Tilda
.

Run
.

Prudence’s fingers lingered against the coarse stone, tracing the deeply ingrained letters. For years into the unknowable future, for decades of wind and rain and wear, they would tell the story of a life in a few spare, painfully inadequate words.

Bonnie Cafferty
Beloved sister
b. 1839 d. 1865

The tombstone stood among a long line of similar stones marking the resting places of the other 11 victims of what was already being called the Buford Massacre. Charles Wheaton had kept his word regarding the condition she set as the price of selling her property. It struck her that Wheaton was, in his way, an honorable man. It almost made her sorry for what she was about to do. But only almost.

Prudence sat on a bench facing the tombstone. She had paid a man to clean up the ramshackle little cemetery behind the church and he had done a fastidious job, clearing walkways, pruning trees, building benches. The graveyard might almost have been a park.

But it was indeed a graveyard, and she sat there, comfortably alone among the dead, the sun warm and welcome on her neck. It was a beautiful day. The sky was cloudless and endless. An occasional breeze moved
playfully through the magnolia leaves above. Prudence withdrew her hand from the stone. She exhaled. It felt like the first time in years.

For two weeks now, she had spent every waking hour of every waking day going and doing. Up to Memphis to buy tickets from the steamship company and to negotiate with the Army and buy supplies. Down to the telegraph office, trading coded messages with her agent in Philadelphia.

In between, she had traveled the county, speaking to every colored woman or man who would give her an audience. She had addressed dozens at a time in their churches, had spoken to groups of three and four on back porches, in blacksmith shops, in fields.

Many of them tried to talk her out of it, told her it wouldn’t work. She promised them it would. Some walked away shaking their heads at her foolishness. Others nodded contemplatively as if thinking maybe it could work, at that.

Prudence didn’t know if it would work. She wondered secretly if the doubters were right, was gnawed by the fear that once again, she was asking colored people for their trust and once again, she would fail them. She kept her doubt hidden behind a determined face. Still, she wondered…

Prudence exhaled again. She regarded the stone for a moment. Birdsong drifted down from the magnolia branches.

“Hello, sister,” she said. Her voice seemed unnaturally loud in the stillness. She cleared her throat. “Hello, sister,” she said again, softer.

God, how she missed Bonnie. Doing this was hard enough. Doing it without Bonnie’s help and wise counsel was almost intolerable.

“I suppose I simply wanted to say that I am sorry, first and foremost, for dragging you down here,” she said. “Had I not done that, what happened to you would not have…would not have…it might have been I who…”

Her voice frayed and tore like rotted cloth. She stopped, took a breath, wiped at the tears. “Well,” she said, “what I was going to say”—and she forced more energy into her voice—“is that I am sorry for everything that happened. And I am sorry, too, that it has taken me so long to come visit you. I simply could not bear it before. And now that I am finally here, I am here to say farewell. I am leaving in a few days. I do not believe I will ever return. I hate this place, Bonnie, and I hate leaving you here.”

“But oh, sister…” Again, she had to pause, her voice trembling, going away from her. Prudence sniffled up tears. “Oh, sister,” she said again,
“know that no matter how far from this place I go, you will always travel with me in my heart.”

A silence intervened. Prudence watched through glistening eyes as a tiny bird lit on a branch above her. It bounced under the weight. After a moment, the bird flew away. Prudence spoke again. “So much has happened,” she said, “I barely know where to begin. I met a man—and lost him. It happened quite suddenly. Oh, Bonnie, you would have loved him. He was a colored man, if you can picture that of your sister. He was a good man, though. In fact, he was such a good man that he decided he could not be with me, decided he had to continue on with the mission that brought him here: to find his wife. He left me to go looking for her.”

A sigh. “I tried to hate him for that, Bonnie. For a time, I believe I succeeded. But how could I, really? He gave me something I needed in a moment when I was at my lowest ebb. He gave me the caring touch of another human being. To tell you the truth, I feel I was blessed to hold him, if only for a few days.

“Besides,” she added, “he was the one who gave me the idea for how to respond to the Wheatons and their ilk. It is such a good plan, Bonnie. It is bold and impractical…all the things you say that I am. I can imagine you would have had your doubts, you would have been cautious about it. But I think in the end you would have given in and been delighted to do so. I think you would have thought it fitting.”

She laughed a little, still sniffling tears. From the front of the church, she heard the soft nickering of the horses. The driver she had hired was waiting for her in her new phaeton. A faint smell of pipe smoke drifted to her. Preacher Lee was in his church, poring over his Bible.

“And here is something I have not yet told you, sister, something Miss Ginny told me that I find so astonishing I have not even been able to make myself think about it. She says, if you can believe this, that I might be…colored or rather, part colored, I suppose.

“I know”—a melodic laugh—“is that not the most confounding thing you have ever heard? I do not know if I believe it. I do not know if I
want
to believe it. But at the same time, I cannot ignore the fact that it might be true. Ginny thinks my mother was not my real mother. Evidently Father sired a baby, a girl, with Ginny’s daughter, and she thinks I might be that child. She says Father and this woman kept company for a time. To learn such a thing about your father, Bonnie, is…is…”

She was unable to fashion the words. Restless, her hands massaged one another. At length, she said, “I admired him so much, as you know. I thought him the most outstanding man in the world because of the way he fought against slavery. I wanted so much to be like him, Bonnie. I wanted so much to make him proud. Now I find what a hypocrite he was and I feel…”

She pursed her lips, gazed to the sky, made herself breathe. “Betrayed,” she said finally. She chased it with a sigh. “I feel betrayed. I feel as if there is no longer anything in this world I can depend upon. It is a feeling I have had ever since we came here and learned that Cyrus Campbell was someone other than who I thought he was. And the feeling has only grown worse. I have lost my father—or at least, the man I thought my father was. I have lost you, I have lost Sam…”

Prudence wept without knowing. “I have lost myself,” she said. “It is as if everything I love, everything I depend upon, I lose. I feel as if I am falling and helpless to make it stop. I do not know who I am anymore, Bonnie. I do not even know who I am.”

The sound of her voice was pitiful in her own ears. Prudence had become the one thing she always scorned: weak. But she couldn’t help herself. She no longer knew how to be anything else.

She remembered once when she and Bonnie had been girls, walking together in the Common on the first warm day after a wet and miserable winter. She had stopped, kneeling to inspect the carcass of a dead baby bird, now being swarmed over by ants. Bonnie, disgusted, had walked on. So absorbed was Prudence in watching the ants dissect the poor dead bird, chunk by tiny chunk, that it was a moment before the boys’ voices reached her.

“Who said you could walk in our park, nigger?”

“What are you, lost? Get on back to your side of the Hill.”

There were three of them, white boys surrounding Bonnie, their hands curled into fists, their little faces twisted by their own meanness. A few adults stood by, watching in tolerant amusement. It made her angry. But what absolutely infuriated 11-year-old Prudence was Bonnie’s response. She was crying.

Prudence Cafferty, the terror of Louisburg Square, star hitter in a game called base ball, came to her feet running. She charged into the nearest boy, who never saw her coming. Even as he went down on his face, Prudence pivoted and decked the second boy with a roundhouse punch that would have done a dockworker proud. The boy she had tackled was coming to his
feet, wailing through a bloody mouth. She gave a two-handed shove that sent him sprawling over his prone friend. Then she wheeled around for the third boy. He already had his palms raised in a gesture of surrender, his eyes twin moons. The boy took a few steps back, then spun around and ran for all he was worth. His friends stumbled to their feet and took off after him. Only then did Prudence unfist her hands.