Porous.
… wasn’t as disturbing as what she didn’t see.
I’m porous. What?
Her soul was a cloth shot a hundred times through by bullet, or a sponge squeezed dry of water. Empty and porous. She’d felt this once before—yes, during the night of the Redger wedding—when she had woken up in her room and dreamt she’d been riddled with bullets.
The memory gaps, that’s what she was seeing: the holes left by her missing memories of the wedding and of the night by the rose bush. Oh, what had Christ stolen from her? She stepped closer to her reflection, staring in anguish. Her cheeks and the skin around her eyes had sunk into her head as dark impressions. Hollow, old-looking. Skin so thin, eyes so dark in the candlelight.
And as she watched, all color drained from her face. Her cheek bones grew sharper against the skin’s surface as the cushioning of fat and muscle disappeared. Her lips withdrew from each other and wrinkled up, exposing a grin of white and black teeth. Her eyes darkened and expanded, and then faded away until the eye sockets were empty holes.
A skull.
She groaned as the skeleton in the mirror collapsed into a pile of dust. Its hair and clothing boiled away as hissing black steam.
Alice turned her back and closed her eyes.
“It’s not real, not real,” she said aloud.
But she only half believed it.
Chapter 18
The next morning, Alice threw her hairbrush into the pantry fireplace and watched the flames consume it. The fire meant that Jonah was already up and tending the morning chores, and that was good because she hoped to catch him alone. After all, morning was the time for clear thinking and for sweeping away the previous day’s remnants.
She found him in the kitchen building, his back to her and hunched over the well as he cranked up the bucket rope. Another, larger fire roared in the fireplace behind him, burning the wood down into the coals he’d need for cooking.
“Jonah,” she said.
He yelped and whirled around, releasing the winch. The handle spun as the full bucket he’d been raising plummeted to the well’s bottom.
“What you want?”
He stumbled and sat down hard on the well’s stone edge and then sprang back up. He looked past her as if expecting Thorne to again barge in.
“It’s just me,” Alice said. “S-sorry I made you drop it.”
Some of the fear seemed to leave him. His face was drawn and tired. “It’s just water. Ain’t goin’ far.”
She felt a touch of apprehension at his comment—the image of water—but wasn’t sure why. Putting that out of her mind, she stepped closer. Her hands wrestled themselves.
“How’s the baby?”
“Child’s healthy. Happy. We’se thankful for de missus helpin’ us.”
“I’m glad. I, uh—” She clenched her hands at her stomach to keep them still. She recalled the Teferas’ worries about the blue flash. “I was concerned that what happened to me in the cabin might have affected someone else.”
“No, missus, that wasn’t yo’ fault.” He stepped forward, shaking his head, and Alice breathed a sigh of relief. “We should’ve been more careful wid the mojo.”
“That’s good. I mean, I’m glad you don’t blame me, because, well, you don’t know a lot about me or why I have these abilities.”
Jonah stood up straighter, starting to smile. “Not many know why the Lord makes things the way He does. Why do us shamans see when others can’t? No one knows.”
“Then can you see that I want to leave this place as much as you?”
Apparently not. Jonah looked surprised. But she held her breath and waited for his answer. Leftover rainwater from last night dripped off the trees and patted the tiny building. She thought she heard a footstep outside and glanced at the open door but no one appeared.
“Missus, I … I didn’t know. Thought you was happy wid the massa here.”
Alice smiled only because she’d long ago lost the ability to laugh. “Then you truly are blind in some respects. And Jonah, he’s a ‘mister’ now, not your ‘massa.’”
Jonah frowned.
“If you’re going to leave, please, take me with you.”
He stared at her for a long moment, until the frown smoothed into something she found both grandfatherly and solemn.
He surprised her by stepping forward and taking her hands in his. The last time they’d touched this way was three years ago, during a nearly identical conversation. His grip was still calloused and strong. Warm.
“Gather yo’ things. Anything you’ll need. One change of clothes, matches, a little bread. A knife. Steal his pistol an’ bullets. Wait ’til night, then throw ’em through my cabin window. Give us a day to steal food and tools, ’fore Mister Thorne gets back. We’ll air de tumblin’ boxes quilt when it’s time to go. Then you wait for us that night at the stable.” He smiled, almost. “I think de missus knows what the quilt looks like.”
Alice struggled to contain the swelling feeling in her chest, her mind barely keeping up with these instructions. At first she wondered about all the proposed secrecy, then frowned at her own naiveté. Emancipation or no, Thorne would never permit his cooks to leave, and especially not with his wife.
“What if Thorne follows us?”
Jonah shook his head, smiling fully now. “No worries. You be on the gospel train, Miz Alice. It goes by night ’til we’re out of Georgia and follows the drinkin’ gourd.”
At that moment, someone outside the door gasped and ran off.
“Oh no!” Alice said.
They dashed out, looked left and right, and saw Mariann Redger disappear into the basement chapel.
“Damnation,” Jonah said.
Alice held him back with a hand although it was unnecessary. “No. She heard what she heard, and she’ll do what she’ll do.”
Jonah touched Alice’s elbow and motioned her back into the kitchen building. His face was tight and sweaty with fright. “We can’t wait now. No good.”
“Jonah …” She wanted to tell him they shouldn’t bother with her, that it was too risky now.
“Tonight, we gone tonight. Get yo’ things an’ wait for us—not by the stable. On the bridle trail yonder, by the North Road.”
They stared at each other in shocked silence—shock that everything had changed so quickly.
Alice startled him—and herself—by kissing his cheek before running out.
✽ ✽ ✽
The day passed in an agony of worry—worry about who Mariann would tell—and the agony made worse by the need to wait for nightfall. She had no idea when Thorne would return from his trip. Had he said two days or three?
Why couldn’t they leave that morning or afternoon? she wondered, but reminded herself that Jonah knew best in these matters. He’d been smuggling people off the plantation for years, and if he said leave at night, then it was leave at night. The end of slavery made no difference. Thorne would stop at nothing to hunt them down, and—she realized with a gulp—Thorne could easily tell the authorities that the Teferas had kidnapped her. Why, they might have to travel like this indefinitely.
It took no time at all to gather the items Jonah had listed into an old tow sack, but she’d only traveled crosscountry once,when Thorne brought her here from South Carolina, and doubted she had enough supplies. After some consideration, she transferred them into the trunk she had packed for their abortive trip three years ago.
“There,” she said and clamped the lid down on the bulging mass of skirts and blouses. She would find some way to drag it to the rendezvous point and would simply present it when the Teferas came to fetch her. What would they say, “No”?
But doubt crept in as the hours passed, and in the end she settled on the tow sack with the one change of clothes, matches, bread, and knife. She searched high and low for Thorne’s pistol but was forced to conclude he’d taken it with him.
Too much time, too little to do. She glanced at the standing clock so often
that the hour hand appeared to move backward. She even went so far as to search for Mariann Redger—to convince her that she hadn’t really heard what she had—but like the firearm, Mariann was nowhere to be found.
Eventually, she sought out the Teferas and came upon them in the kitchen, cooking the evening meal for her and the Redgers—and presumably something for the road.
But Eliza, breastfeeding the baby in the corner, shooed her away. “It’s best we ain’t seen together.”
Reluctantly, Alice returned to her room to wait.
Dinner was a bowl of spiced vegetable stew and a hard roll, but she hardly touched it. Eliza didn’t bring it to her personally as she usually did but left it in the pantry and called her down before running out the back door. Alice ate alone, as she had for the last eight years, but was lonely for the first time in nearly as long.
When finished, she stood at the dining room window and watched night spread its promise of departure. The rose bush was a black stain at the edge of the grove. She judged that it was dark enough to go when she could no longer see it.
She went upstairs and donned her most rugged pair of shoes, wincing at the ankle sprain from yesterday. She was no longer limping but felt they’d have to slow their travel pace that night if very much walking were required. Around her shoulders, she slipped on her gray “working shaw,” as she thought of it, the sturdier but less-sightly article she wore when doing kitchen work or tromping through the fields.
Then, swinging the tow sack over her shoulder like a man, she slipped out of the pantry’s back door. She left in the opposite direction of the Redger house—not down the main entry road like a fool, but via the path to the west field, and then looped southeast along the bridle trail. When she reached the plantation’s main entry road and with North Road visible off to her right, she hunkered down in the wooded darkness to wait.
✽ ✽ ✽
An hour passed, and Alice wondered if she’d misunderstood the instructions on where and when to meet. But sitting still and silent for so long did afford the time to relax, to stop breathing so hard and jumping at every insect’s buzz.
With calmness came a greater awareness of her environment: the perfume of new flowers and tree bark, the embrace of early spring humidity, and the crunch of decaying leaves where she sat. And when the full moon emerged from behind the clouds and turned the entry road into a gray ribbon, the angel’s wings awakened and told her something else:
She was being watched.
Alice crouched lower in the brush. She bit her knuckles and peered into the shadows. The hanging branches now resembled hands with fingers as long as men. Where were Jonah and Eliza?
The sense of someone watching grew stronger. But the watcher wasn’t human, she realized. Even confined to their mental cage, the angel’s wings could tell, just as one might distinguish thunder from cannonfire. And yet, she sensed the watcher was intelligent.
Oh, no.
She couldn’t let her escape be thwarted again. The last time, Thorne had returned from the War at the very moment they were rolling down the road. What now? She groaned as she realized there was only one way to find out.
Closing her eyes and breathing deeply, Alice threw open the doors of the mental cage. The angel’s wings flew free.
Because the act of releasing the wings was inherently unpredictable, she wasn’t surprised when they seemed to disappear and her point of view remained within herself. Instead, her head ballooned—painlessly, silently, invisibly—expanding beyond her body like a cloud, engulfing the woods and bringing each thing it touched into her awareness. She felt every spider web, the texture of every scale of tree bark, and the air circulating through the branches. She felt every vein in every leaf and the flow of the green blood within them. She saw the night through a hundred thousand insect eyes.
On the entry road, she heard faint echoes of Mariann Redger’s thoughts, where the woman had galloped by hours ago on her husband’s horse: Have to find Thorne, have to tell him they’re leaving.
So that’s where she had gone. Alice clenched her teeth. This confirmed her suspicion that Mariann was part of the conspiracy against her.
She finally found the watcher, but not in a physical sense. She was only sure that it was out there. She didn’t know precisely where it was in relation to her. Was it near the road or far back in the woods? And she still wasn’t sure what it was. Not human, but not inhuman, either.
Filled with water.
And sharp! Too late to pull herself back. Its water was an icicle, sharper than a dagger. It punctured her balloon-like astral head, injecting:
Thorne, Jesus—an image of Thorne’s crucifix necklace—a laughing face forming at the top of the widow Libby Hughes’s altar cross—cold and repellant and somehow—
Familiar. As if it were made of her own urine.
She screamed and frantically tried to suck her awareness back into herself, away from this presence. For all she knew, it was Christ Himself.
While she was able to pull away from it, the effort exhausted her. She couldn’t call the angel’s wings back into her head. Nor could she reawaken within her body. She was aware of herself lying face-down in the brush, covered in sweat and shaking. Her awareness and the angel’s wings fluttered around her like a dog fretting over its fallen master.
What she thought was distant thunder resolved into hoofbeats approaching along the North Road. Two, three—no, four horses. She watched them with the wings. The riders each wore hoods and Confederate grays, and three of them were painted head to toe in a different color—one red, one white, and one black—while the fourth rider remained unpainted in his grays. The red rider led them with a torch and growled like an animal. She recognized him as Thorne.
They turned up the plantation’s entry road and thundered by her. The angel’s wings invisibly flapped after them, carrying Alice’s perspective along.
She saw Obie Redger, naked and contorted, standing at his bedroom window and staring at the coming riders. He giggled and slapped the side of his head. Behind him, feces caked his bedsheets. It’s black, it’s all black. His spirit stank with imminent death.
The riders halted in front of Jonah and Eliza’s cabin, their mounts lathered with sweat.
Thorne drew the pistol that Alice had been looking for that day and fired into the sky. Inside the cabin, the Teferas stopped in the process of packing three tow sacks full of food and cooking implements.
“Oh Lordy,” Eliza said, and went to peek through the window’s corner.
Run! Run! Alice tried to shout. She felt her physical body moan and roll onto its back. They’ll kill you! Run!
Thorne dug in his heels into his mount, making it clomp closer to the cabin. “We are the Four Horsemen, the appointed protectors of Christ’s sovereign realm of the South. Come out!”
Eliza and Jonah looked at each other, and Alice could hear their minds searching in vain through plans and options. Jonah looked sadly at the bottle trees under the windows. The Knowing wasn’t much good against guns.
“Come forth! Now! Or we come in.”
Indicating for Eliza and the baby to hide in the corner, Jonah opened the door and stepped out. He closed it behind him and leaned on it. Inside, tears ran down Eliza’s cheeks as she soothed the baby, who thankfully remained quiet.
Thorne tossed his spent pistol to the gray rider, who tossed him back a loaded one. He trained it on Jonah’s nose. “Anyone else in there?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re lying, but it doesn’t matter. Eat the bullet willingly, and I’ll leave them be.”
Alice saw fear and comprehension spreading over Jonah’s face. No. Thorne can’t be serious. He’s too dependent on Jonah.
“I hereby pronounce sentence for your multiple crimes and trespasses against your employer.”
Astride the angel’s wings, Alice dove at Thorne’s head and tried to inflict pain. But she bounced off, too weak.
“For conspiring to elope with the mistress
and for consorting with her despite specific prohibitions against the same behavior …”
No no no no! Alice screamed into the ether.
Birds and insects for a surrounding square acre took flight at once, flapping and buzzing against the night sky.
“For planning to commit adultery and desert your present family, a crime all the more horrible as you have recently fathered an infant child …”
The torch flame danced, making the horses stamp nervously. Thorne’s three companions looked left and right, feeling Alice’s presence and expecting ambush.
“And above all for the crime of disloyalty, I sentence you to death.”
Alice hurled herself against Thorne’s body but succeeded only in making his arm twitch down an inch, so that when the bullet left the barrel it plowed through Jonah’s shoulder instead of his head. As Jonah collapsed, the bullet continued through the cabin door and sent shards of wood onto the floor at Eliza’s feet. She screamed her husband’s name.
“Shit.” Thorne threw the gun to the dirt. “I hate it when things don’t go clean.”
He dismounted and went to the moaning man, drawing his sword.
Two women’s screams clearly rang through the air when Thorne Norwick beheaded Jonah Tefera. The first came from Eliza inside the cabin. The other, a disembodied cry, raised the hackles of the other horsemen. In a precognitive flash, before she too lost awareness, Alice knew these men would continue hearing her rage on some level for hours afterward. The white and black riders would feel deep chills that night as they went to bed, even after they took hot baths to wash off the paint. And the gray rider, who hadn’t needed any paint, would drink himself into a stupor and vow to quit the Klan the next day.
Thorne, however, deaf and perceptionless, merely nodded at his handiwork and cleaned his sword on Jonah’s pant leg.
Chapter 19
Sometime after the horsemen rode off, Alice regained consciousness and walked back to the compound in a daze, still carrying her tow sack over her shoulder. She stared dumbly at Jonah’s headless body in front of the cabin door and at the scarlet stain in the mud. Inside, the infant wailed as if it were starving to death. She looked from the body to the head lying against the cabin wall, her own head thrumming with shock. Then she stepped over everything and went inside.
Cursed by Christ Page 20
