A Guardian of Slaves

by Naomi Finley

  “Not now.” Silas shook his head as if to dispel a buzzing fly. “Silence, I said.” His voice cracked with remote vulnerability.

  “Worthless,” Bowden repeated.

  “Don’t say that, Pa. I’m…not,” Silas cried. “No…not you! Get out of my head…witch.” He lifted his hands and covered the sides of his head.

  “He’s plumb crazy,” I whispered.

  “Witch?” Bowden’s voiced hitched with confusion.

  Silas never removed his hold on Bowden but continued to act eccentrically and speak in broken statements. “It’s all your fault. You and Pa brought the curse upon our family. You killed the Hendricks woman. We should’ve burned the witch alive instead of snapping her neck.”

  Mother! Fear curdled in my stomach with the realization. Ben grabbed my arm as I teetered.

  “I’ll kill him,” Ben whispered through clenched teeth.

  “Caesar, where are you,” Silas cried, sounding desperate. “You dumb nigger. Show yourself.”

  “He’s dead, I told you,” Bowden said as he twisted to remove himself from Silas’s hold.

  Silas’s head snapped back and then dropped forward as if coming out of a trance. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Check behind the barn. I painted it with his blood. We are even now, with the death of your prized mule. But rest assured, it was he who revealed to me your treasures under the floor before I ended him.”

  “I should’ve ended him when he wanted to squeal about the Hendricks woman, instead of taking his tongue.” Silas’s voice boomed. “You won’t be leaving here alive. I should’ve got rid of you from the start.”

  Had Caesar been there when my mother was murdered? Did he try to tell someone of what he’d witnessed? She’d died years ago. They’d have only been boys at the time. Had Silas’s pa killed my mother? But why? Silas spoke of another person, but who was he? The questions in my head consumed me, and I missed the movement from Bowden signaling for the men to move in.

  “Stay,” Ben ordered me before stepping from the woods.

  Mr. Sterling, rope in hand, and one of his men followed after Ben. Crouched low, they moved into position flanking Silas, using an outbuilding as their shield. I saw Mr. Sterling remove his pistol from his holster and nod at the men and Ben. They walked into the yard.

  “All right, Anderson. It is over,” Mr. Sterling said.

  Silas spun around in surprise at the approach of the men. “Ahh, so you didn’t come alone. I underestimated you, Armstrong.”

  “It appears you misjudged a lot,” Ben said. “To think you believed I’d sell out my niece for money.”

  “Better men have fallen for less.” Silas shrugged and locked his eyes on the woods where we stood. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  My heart thundered.

  “You murdered her!” Ben pounced on Silas and threw him to the ground and sent fist after fist at his face and torso. Finally, exhausted, Ben rocked back on his heels.

  Silas’s sadistic laugh bewildered me, but it was what happened next that buckled my knees. His voice changed to that of an Irishman with a heavy accent. “Yes! And she wiggled and twisted for life like your brother did beneath the carriage as the underbrush around it turned into an inferno.”

  Father…what was he saying? I leaned on a tree for support. What asylum had Silas escaped from?

  I moved from the trees and shook free of the hand of the man who reached for me. I heard his heavy treads behind me as I hurried closer.

  Bowden had risen to his feet and hovered over Silas.

  “I saw the fire and met Jones and his men as they brought him in.” Ben’s voice was hollow, as if he were recalling the night, and a daunting tone echoed in his next words. “It wasn’t an accident…nor was Bowden’s. You needed to be rid of them to get to Willow.”

  “You would’ve been next if you hadn’t convinced me of your willingness to help me take her fortune,” Silas said matter-of-factly. “Well done.”

  “And after you achieved her fortune, what then?” Bowden growled.

  “Kill her, and end the curse Olivia placed on my family once and for all!” he screamed. “No, don’t talk. We mustn’t tell them any more.” His voice altered from the Irishman to that of another. This one was more childlike and frightened.

  “The man’s insane!” Mr. Sterling swiped a hand over his face. “Get him up! You get the horses,” he told his man, and he took off toward the barn.

  Bowden and Ben pulled Silas to his feet as I stepped into the circle. Silas’s head flopped side to side, and he grinned at them like someone who’d floated away from the present time. They turned him around, and Mr. Sterling bound his hands behind his back.

  The man returned with the horses, and Bowden and Ben lifted Silas up onto the horse. He appeared harmless in his current crazed state of mind.

  “Mount up. We’ll see to it he meets his fate tonight.” Mr. Sterling swung up on his horse and turned sad eyes on me. “I’m sorry you had to hear this. Your mother’s disappearance has always troubled me. Now we know. And your father…he was my friend.”

  Ben’s arm slipped around my shoulder, and I slumped into him, burying my face into the curve of his shoulder, and wept.

  “I’ll ride with them. You’d best take her home,” Bowden said. “She’s dealt with enough for one day.”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  After the tramp of horses’ hooves faded, Ben pulled me from his side and lifted my chin so I’d look at him. His face reflected the pain and horror of Silas’s revelation.

  “His pa? Where is he now?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow I’ll go to town and place an advertisement in every paper offering a reward for anyone with information on the Anderson men.”

  THE NEWS OF SILAS’S ESCAPE from the posse rippled fear through the country folk and tensions were high. Ben doubled the guards at the gates and the entrances to the house and quadrupled the bounty on the fugitive’s head. Citizens placed advertisements in newspapers across the country for his capture. Vigilantes and bounty hunters spread from one border of South Carolina to the other in search of him. Far and wide the news traveled, and the sheriff of Charleston and those of nearby towns made it a priority to discover were Silas the drifter had come from.

  People fabricated stories, and the Guardian became Silas Anderson, the serial killer who’d roamed the outskirts of Charleston stealing slaves and murdering them to satisfy his appetite for blood.

  The lynching mob hung Collins for his involvement in the deaths related to the robberies. Caesar would’ve suffered the same fate if Mr. Sterling and his men hadn’t backed Bowden up on his insistence that Caesar had been as much a victim as we were in all of the crimes. And without a voice or the ability to read and write, he’d done the only thing he could to warn us all. Bowden went as far as to deem Caesar a hero, but the other men had scoffed at the title. Caesar had been listed for auction, and when I informed Caroline Smith of the cruelty done to him at the hands of Silas she arranged to have her source attend the auction and purchase him. Together Caroline and the source secured safe passage for him to the city of Hamilton in the Province of Canada.

  In early January, Mr. Sterling showed up with information that’d shed some light on the unanswered questions on Silas Anderson.

  “Name’s Reuben McCoy. From Jamestown, Virginia.” He leaned over the neck of his horse and held out a wanted poster to Ben.

  I moved in to take a look. The shaded sketch of a bearded man with shoulder-length hair looked dissimilar to the man we’d come to know as Silas.

  “He wasn’t from Kentucky,” I said.

  “No. He was born to a Martha and Horace McCoy. The family owned a small plantation in Virginia and had two sons. Horace was a local drunk and frequented the saloons and eventually was banned from all establishments for starting brawls and reported abuse to the whores. The man moved his wife and two sons to James Island.

  “Folks said the family kept to themselves
. Their homestead was isolated and off the beaten path. A trapper who roamed those parts of the woods said the mother up and vanished one day. Town says the husband never reported her missing. Horace and his eldest son were seen in town but the younger boy, Reuben…folks never would’ve known he existed if it weren’t for their wagon rolling into town the day they’d arrived.

  “Horace continued his past behavior and was a regular at the saloons in town and was rumored to have mentioned on occasion a curse on his family. Was said to have stated ‘The witch is the reason for the money drying up and my land being nothing but powder.’ No one knows who he spoke of, but he believed her to be the reason for his turn of bad luck.”

  “Any idea where he is now?” Ben asked.

  I noticed dark circles from sleepless nights had settled under Mr. Sterling’s eyes. “In a grave. It seems the McCoy homestead burned to the ground a few years back and the remains of a man were found inside.”

  “Only one?” His revelations did nothing to soothe my concerns that Silas…Reuben…lay in wait for the opportunity to come back and finish what he’d started. I rubbed my arms to quell my shivering.

  A grimace twisted Mr. Sterling’s face. “A neighbor said that after the land proved to be unyielding, the brother took off to find work. But he was never seen in those parts again. Horace had sold off their slaves to keep food in their bellies. The most bizarre thing is the alias Reuben was using. It belonged to a Negro planter not far from their homestead. The Negro and his wife were found dead. Their deaths were grotesque and appeared to be done by wild animals. Yet the Negroes’ bodies were desecrated and their valuables, along with their few slaves, gone.”

  My stomach went hollow and I said in a shaky voice, “How he escaped you all is beyond me.”

  Mr. Sterling averted his eyes. “Should’ve used chains instead of rope. Crazy one moment and a mastermind the next. We will get him, and I, for one, won’t rest until he’s caught. He’s moved to the top of the list of most wanted men across the country.”

  “Yet he still wanders free and is a threat to our family and others. His family murdered my brother’s wife, and he’s responsible for Charles’s death. He made his intentions clear with coming after Willow.” Ben pulled me into the curve of his arm.

  “What he did to your family has taken on a whole other aspect that has folks around here riled up. Your family’s well respected, and until he pays for what he’s done to you all, folks won’t rest. Even as we speak, the story grows. I’ve never been one for idle gossip, but this time it may work to your advantage.” Sterling laid kind eyes on me. “I know she loved you. Never made any sense why she’d leave. After what we’ve come to know of the sort of man Reuben is, I doubt we’ll ever have her body to lay to rest properly.”

  “Thank you for caring, Mr. Sterling. You’ve been a valued friend to my family and we won’t forget your kindness,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it. Only wish there was more I could do,” he said before he rode off.

  In fact, my mother’s body had been secretly laid to rest by my father in the family cemetery in a grave marked Katherine Shaw. When father had found her, he’d buried her and used her middle name to mark the grave. The slave woman he’d found hanging with her, he’d buried in the slave cemetery with her given name, Ellie.

  “Do you think Reuben McCoy will ever be brought to justice?” I said to Ben as he led me back inside the house.

  “You put enough money on a man’s head, and someone will deliver him to you.” His fingers gripped my shoulder.

  Many nights I didn’t sleep, for fear of waking up and finding Reuben standing over me. Nights when I did sleep, my dreams were filled with images of Reuben and two faceless men who stood back laughing as my mother clawed at the rope around her neck. Then her face would turn to mine and I’d sit straight up in bed with my heart battering my chest wall. And the next night it’d happen again.

  Inside, I mounted the first step to head upstairs to my bedchamber and turned to face Ben. Since the night Reuben had revealed he’d murdered my mother and father, he’d become consumed with finding the ones responsible. I’d often find him lost in thought, and his smiles were staged for my benefit.

  “Maybe it’s time I take that trip to England,” I said.

  He kissed my forehead before wandering down the hall to the study, where he’d spend the rest of the afternoon and late into the evening. “Maybe,” his reply echoed after him.

  Bowden

  THE THURSDAY BEFORE MY DEPARTURE, I rode toward Livingston. Tuesday I’d catch a train to Texas to meet the bank about a property I’d been considering since my visit this past summer. In my desperation to be rid of my plantation and forget Willow, I’d sold the place for significantly less than the property was worth. The new owner, Mr. Barlow, had said he and his wife would be keeping a small staff, and they’d acquire their own when they arrived in South Carolina. Mr. Barlow had gone on to inform me that though slavery was abolished in England in 1833, he’d never shown favor to the barbaric trade.

  The man had sent my plan cruising down the Cooper River on a one-way ticket by leaving me with fifty-three slaves. I’d made the decision to sell all the slaves and keep only my trusted servants. The dream of starting a new life in Texas had become my focus until Gray’s death. A muscle twitched in my jaw at the memory of his butchered body lying on the bed. Only a deranged lunatic could perform such brutality on another man, and Reuben McCoy had proven to be such a man. The fact he remained at large and could turn up at any moment to exact his warped vendetta against Willow and her family plagued me.

  In the dead of night last night, I’d had an epiphany. What was I doing? I couldn’t leave without trying one last time to hook the fool woman into marrying me.

  “The worse she can say is no.” I patted the neck of my horse as I rode into Livingston.

  Coming to a stop in front of the main house, I dismounted, and James, the slave I’d heard Willow affectionately refer to as Jimmy, rushed into the yard to take my horse.

  He bowed his head. “Morning, Mr. Armstrong, sir.”

  “Are Mr. Hendricks and Willow around?”

  “Miss Willow has gone to see Missus Tucker, but Masa Hendricks is inside, I do believe.”

  “I see.” I removed my hat and tucked it in the crook of my arm before turning to look up at the house, swallowing back the nerves that had been playing in my gut all morning. “I’ll show myself in.” My feet remained planted.

  “You all right, sir?”

  “Yes. It’s just…” I twisted to look at the man. “I’ve come to seek Mr. Hendricks’s approval on marrying his niece.”

  A yelp came from James and he shot a fist at the skies. A wide grin lifted the tips of his ears. “Now dat’s de most sense I’ve heard in a long time. De Missus loves you a whole lot.”

  “And I, her. But she isn’t an easy woman.”

  “Aww, she’s easy ’nuf, but dere ain’t no changing what she thinks in dat purty head of hers.”

  “That was a realization I’ve come to terms with. A journey of discovery I had to make on my own…” I kicked at a stone with the tip of my boot.

  “Sometimes in life, et’s de hard lessons dat affect us de most and make us look at things differently.”

  “Unfortunately, so,” I said, eyeing the man. “I can see why she respects your opinion.”

  He reddened and ducked his head. “Miss Willow is a lot to handle, but she’s a fine woman.”

  “A woman worth nabbing, do you agree?”

  An odd but pleasant chuckle came from him. “Dat she be, Mr. Armstrong, dat she be.”

  I left him and mounted the front steps to the house, and Mary Grace came out to greet me. The months of hardship and grief hollowed her eyes and jutted her cheekbones. My pulse sped up, and for lack of better words, I said, “I’ve come to speak with Mr. Hendricks.”

  “I’ll…I’ll get him,” her voice quavered, and she turned to go inside.

  “Wait.”
>
  She froze.

  “How are the children?”

  Her body stiffened. “They are fine, sir.”

  “I wish…I miss him too,” I managed to say. “I…I’d do anything to have him back. I should’ve taken him away from here myself.”

  She turned slowly and raised tear-filled eyes to me. “What happened to him isn’t your fault. Gray spoke highly of you, and you did right by him.”

  “Not good enough. He was a man beyond men, and he’ll be remembered as such.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll let Mr. Hendricks know you’re here.”

  I nodded, and she disappeared inside. Turning away, I choked back the tears collecting in my throat and walked the length of the veranda to wait.

  “Afternoon; what can I do for you?” Mr. Hendricks’s gaunt appearance took me by surprise.

  “I’ve come to ask you a question.”

  “Let’s talk in the library,” he said and without waiting for a reply, turned and walked back into the house. I followed him.

  In the library, he closed the door behind us, moved about the room, and came to stand in front of the fireplace, resting his arm on the marble mantel.

  My eyes roved over the endless assortment of books on the floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves, then to the paintings, one of Willow and her father and the other of her mother. I studied her mother with reverence and thought of the tragic way her life had ended, and the pain of learning the gory details Reuben had shared with Mr. Hendricks and Willow.

  “I loved her, you know.” Mr. Hendricks’s voice broke through my pondering, and I craned my neck to look at him. “She was the love of my life.” His eyes softened as he thought of her. “She was a remarkable woman and one I’ve spent a lifetime trying to force from my mind.”

  Shortly after her father’s death, a grief-stricken Willow had told me of her parentage, and I’d held her in my arms and sworn to never tell another.

  “I know you are set on placing roots in Texas, but I’d hate to see you and Willow make the same mistakes we did. She’ll never leave this place. When we found out Olivia was pregnant with Willow, I tried to get her to marry me and go someplace where no one knew us. But this place became ingrained into who Olivia was, and she wouldn’t leave her father or the folks in the quarters.”