The Healing (24 page)

“Some of these burns look awful bad,” Aunt Sylvie called out from the bedside. “I reckon you best go fetch Polly.”

Grateful for an errand that would get her away from Silas’s questioning, Granada turned toward the door. But Silas grabbed her arm, holding her tight.

“Sylvie, let’s not go mixing that woman up in the family’s affairs,” he said. “Master won’t abide a slave woman doctoring on his wife. You know how he is.”

“Look at her, Silas!” Sylvie cried. “Eyes swelling shut and her face turning red as an Indian. And her hair, my Lord!” she cried. “Stubble and scalp. We got to do something! Master Ben will kill me.”

Silas released Granada to take his wife by the shoulders. “You can keep lard on her face as good as Polly Shine,” he said firmly, looking hard into her eyes. “And
you
know which flour barrel you hid the laudanum in. Nothing she can do, you can’t do better.”

Aunt Sylvie nodded, but with little conviction. Granada wasn’t so sure, either. She had seen Polly heal all kinds of wounds, including the burns of those clearing the forests. But Silas kept offering his arguments, sounding calm and reasonable and very wise.

“Besides,” he continued, “by tomorrow, that prideful woman will have it spread across the countryside how
she
saved Master Ben’s wife. Everybody, slave and master, will know how far Mistress Amanda has
fallen. How do you think the master will like his business gossiped about that way?”

Aunt Sylvie shook her head. “No, I … I reckon not.”

“For all we know,” he said, looking now at Granada, “that old woman put a hex on the mistress. You ever think of that?”

Granada had wondered the same thing.

Silas put his arm around Sylvie’s shoulder and pulled her close. He said in her ear, “Now don’t you worry. I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

Silas had it all worked out. He told Aunt Sylvie to meet Master Ben at the stables upon his return—before he had a chance to see his wife. “Don’t beat the devil around the bush, Sylvie. Tell him everything that happened, straight-out. And don’t let him talk to anyone else,” Silas said. “Then you tell him something else.”

Silas glanced over at Granada, as if surprised she was still there. He studied her for a moment. “Maybe I ought not be talking in front of the girl,” he said. “You going to carry this back to Polly?”

Granada shook her head. Polly wouldn’t want to hear anything about the mistress, anyway.

Then Silas asked another question, one she had not expected. “You still wanting back in the house with the mistress?”

“You can get me back in?” Granada asked tentatively.

“Depends,” he said. “To get you back where you belong, we need to get rid of Polly first. You ready to go against Polly? You ready to tell me what she’s been up to?”

She studied his expression hard, to see the truth in it, wanting to believe. He smiled an all-knowing old man’s smile at her. Granada nodded.

“Then tell me something now. Show me I can trust you.”

Granada’s heart pounded in her ears.

“Well,” Granada stammered. “She’s always speaking bad about Master Ben. Says one day soon, ain’t going to be no more masters. No more slaves. Says one day, we’ll all go to a place she calls Freedomland.”

It didn’t sound like much, but when she finished speaking her face burned hot.

Old Silas seemed satisfied. “Good. From now on you tell me everything she does. Slip off to my cabin when she’s looking the other way. I’ll get you back in with the mistress where you belong.”

Silas had turned back to his wife. “Sylvie, tell the master Old Silas himself saw how bad off the mistress was. Tell him it nearly broke my heart. Then tell him how I got down on my knees asking the Lord’s mercy for him and his mistress. Tell him just like that. You understand?” he asked. “Tell him I’m in my cabin, all broke up over it.”

“I do like you say, Old Silas.”

“And one more thing. Most important of all. Make sure he knows Little Lord was in the room. That the mistress tried to kill his only child.”

“But I don’t think she—” Sylvie caught herself and then nodded.

“Good. Don’t let anybody get to him before me. If you do like I say, then everything will be all right.”

He smiled at Sylvie now and winked. “It’s as plain as my big toe, Sylvie. Remember?” he said, chuckling. “Master Ben’s pain’s about to overtake his pride. He’s got no one else to turn to. He’ll be needing me now.”

An hour later found Granada sitting outside Mistress Amanda’s window on the gallery, one eye watching the levee road and the other on the mistress, drugged and resting uneasily in her bed. Aunt Sylvie sat at the bedside. Her lips were in constant motion, rehearsing what Old Silas had told her to say.

When the dust cloud rose on the horizon, Granada signaled Aunt Sylvie, who shot out of her chair and made haste for the stables.

Granada watched as Sylvie walked hesitantly up to the master while Chester led the stallion to the barn. Master Ben stood stone-still, letting her speak without interruption. When she had finished, he didn’t open his mouth.

He finally took several heavy steps over to the stable gate. From
there he looked up at the house, staring in Granada’s direction. Little Lord had stepped out onto the gallery. The boy and the father were watching each other, neither making a motion or even a gesture of recognition.

The master nodded to himself, and then walked through the stable gate, passed under the sprawling limbs of the oak, his shoulders slumped, and before even going to see his wife, he headed straight to Silas’s cabin. He stayed there for well over two hours.

Granada didn’t understand everything that had transpired, especially the complexities of Silas’s plan, but she could see with her own eyes the results. As Polly and Granada stood watching on the hospital porch, the master helped his unsteady wife into the carriage.

Granada heard a child’s scream and looked up at the top of the stairs. There Little Lord struggled to free himself from Lizzie’s grasp, trying to get to his mother. But even when he bit into Lizzie’s arm, she would not release the boy.

Lizzie was gazing unflinchingly at the carriage with her one good eye, and then she grinned. It was the same gratified smirk she wore the day of the fire.

Granada’s heart sank. All she had wanted was to be back with Little Lord and the mistress. That was the bargain she thought she had struck. But somehow it all got turned upside down. Everybody got what they wanted but her. Lizzie, Polly, Silas—they got rid of the mistress. And it was Granada who helped them do it.

As she watched the carriage retreat into the distance, trailing a cloud of dust, Granada remembered Polly’s words from the dream: “The cord been cut betwixt you and her!”

Polly had been right. A thread had been broken, the one that linked Granada to the mistress and to the only place where the girl had ever felt she belonged.

G
ranada fought to stay awake, determined to have no more dreams.

Before blowing out the lantern, Polly had instructed once more, as she had each of the previous three nights since the mistress had gone away, “The remembering has begun. Don’t be scared of your dreaming. Go where it wants to take you.”

“I don’t want to dream no more,” Granada whimpered. “Make them go away.”

She was accustomed to dreams that were vague and fuzzy, vanishing like morning dew after she woke. But the remembering dreams were like the one she had the morning of the fire. They seared themselves into her memory like a hot iron and instead of fading away with daylight, grew in strength and vividness, until the dream felt so real she knew one of two things had to be true: that the events in the dream had already happened or that they were about to happen.

Polly said there really was no difference. “When you stand in the river, downstream or upstream, it’s all the same water.”

For three nights now Granada had dreamed of floods bringing great snakes that devoured the master’s house and everyone in it. She dreamed of getting lost in dark, endless tunnels that had no exit. She dreamed of the mistress falling into a bottomless well, her shouts
growing fainter. Each morning Granada’s own screaming woke her. And each morning Polly was sitting by the bed, asking what it was the girl had seen.

Polly assured her the dreams were a gift of sight, but how did she know that envisioning bad things didn’t
make
them come true? Maybe the mistress would still be here if she hadn’t dreamed about her.

“I didn’t ask for no gift,” Granada had argued. “I don’t want it.”

Polly’s amber eyes flashed. “You don’t
want
it?” she snapped. “Wanting ain’t got nothing to do with it. The sight ain’t no gift to
you
. It’s
your
gift to the people.”

Despite Polly’s scolding, Granada battled against sleep in every way she could imagine. She pinched her arm, and threw her legs off the side of the bed, and softly sang the words to a silly song Chester had taught her. She counted the croaks of a rainfrog hiding nearby. But she couldn’t win. Tonight, as all the other nights, sleep eventually took the girl, and as Polly had predicted, the strange dreaming returned.

I’m naked, standing before a dense growth of trees, thick with interlacing limbs and woody vines. A narrow, cave-like opening offers the only way in. As I step toward it I hear terrible voices, moaning, and sobbing, the grinding of teeth, the raspy whispering of mysterious words
.

Polly comes up behind me and tries to push me forward, but I kick and scream. Something reaches out and prickles my cheek, like the legs of a giant spider
.

I swat at my face, trying to rid myself of the hideous creature
.

She woke herself up. Blood was surging in her ears. Her body was coated with a thin film of sweat and the darkness seemed to quiver before her eyes.

But this time waking did not stop the sounds. Again she heard a voice, but now it spoke her name and she felt the spidery legs once more on her face. She grabbed at it. In her fist was a switch from the althea bush that grew by her window.

“Granada,” she heard the voice say, “wake up.”

She glanced up and saw a face like a pale moon gazing down on her. “Little Lord!” she gasped. “What you doing?”

The boy shushed her. “I’m going to find Momma,” he said. “You got to go with me!”

At the mention of the mistress, Granada was at once up on her knees in her cot, face-to-face with the boy in the window. “You know where she is?” So far no one seemed to have any idea where the master had taken her.

“I heard Daddy say he was going to keep her in Port Gayoso until they could catch a steamboat to New Orleans,” Little Lord whispered. “If we hurry, you and me can catch her.”

The boy’s rascally grin reminded Granada of her homesickness for him. He hadn’t been down to see her in months. “Why you want me to come?”

“There ain’t nobody else.”

Granada could hear the panic rising in his voice.

“Daniel Webster run off after Momma last night and Lizzie said she’s glad Momma’s gone and hopes a gator gets Daniel Webster!”

“Lizzie’s probably looking for you right this minute.”

“She’s drunk on Daddy’s brandy,” he said. “She told me, ‘First your momma, and now the monkey. You the only one left!’ That’s when she passed out. I think she’s going to kill me if I stay.”

Granada nodded and looked over in the dark to where Polly lay snoring in her bed. “I got me the same problem.”

“Aunt Sylvie said Polly put a spell on Momma and made her start that fire.”

Granada again nodded. “She say she don’t do hoodoo. I reckon that makes her a witch and a liar both.”

He leaned in closer and in a whisper so low she could barely hear him, he asked, “You learned enough yet to take a spell off somebody?”

Granada figured on the question for a moment. If she said no, would he still want her to go with him? “I been studying her close,”
she said. “I seen her doing some things I might can copy.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“You’re smart. You’re the quickest person I ever seen at learning. I bet you can make Momma well in a minute. Look,” he said lifting his leather game pouch, “I took some stuff for us to eat.”

“How we going to get there? It’ll be first light before long. Somebody bound to see us on the road.” The thought of the fierce slave-catching hounds popped into her head. But surely Mr. Bridger wouldn’t sic those flesh-ripping animals on the master’s boy, would he?

“We’ll take my canoe down the creek.”

“No!” she gasped, remembering her dreams. Snakes lived in that creek. “We can’t, Little Lord.”

“Sure we can. Barnabas taught me. I’ll show you how. It’ll be easy. The water’s still high enough to take us right up into town.”

“We’ll get bit for sure!” she said. “Mocs swimming in the water and coppers crawling on the banks. Rattlers up under every log and leaf. Snakes everywhere. They even dangling from the trees.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mother’s derringer. “I’ll protect us,” he said in a way that sounded uncharacteristically manlike.