Freedom Stone

by Jeffrey Kluger

  Cal said nothing, simply taking in all that Bett had said. Lillie was right that he was a smart boy, but smart boys could also be practical boys, not given to fanciful thoughts. Cal, however, had a feel for things that were so and things that weren’t so—which was one of the other things Lillie liked about him. She watched his eyes as Bett spoke and could see by looking at them that he knew what he was hearing now had the feel of truth.

  “That’s why you got that fire goin’?” he asked quietly. “To send Lillie back today?”

  “Yes,” Bett answered. “I expected she’d figure it out, but what she ain’t tellin’ you is that I said it’s dangerous. I reckon that’s why she brought you—busted foot and all. Reckon she thought I wouldn’t let her go ’less someone went with her.”

  Lillie nodded, and Bett looked hard at both of them.

  “Lillie, girl,” she said, “I’ll send you back if you want, but you was right—only if this here boy goes with you. And only if you both know why I said it’s a dangerous thing to do.” She drew a breath. “The truth is, for a long time, I didn’t even know it was possible to go backwards. I discovered it by accident one day when I fell asleep while a cake was in and didn’t wake up till it was baked black. When I looked outside, there was slaves comin’ to work in the fields what had already come there before I put the cake in. The overseer blew the startin’ horn like the day was just beginnin’ but he’d already blown it once before. It was only when I put out the fire in the oven that things caught up to where they was supposed to be.”

  “Then it worked,” Lillie said.

  Bett shook her head. “But you was right that before things can go backwards they have to come to a stop, and things that stop can get stuck.” She looked for a moment as if she didn’t want to say what she was about to say. “There was a barn cat what used to come ’round my cabin to catch mice for me—a good animal with a fine nature, and I liked him dear. I came outside after puttin’ out the oven that day and he was just standin’ there, froze solid as marble. The magic took hold o’ him and never let go.”

  “He was . . . dead?”

  “Not straight away, but he got there. It took that poor animal two days to cool down from cat temperature—and two days more for its cold eyes to stop shinin’. I expect that meant it was alive that whole time, knowin’ it was trapped inside that stone and just waitin’ to die. It ain’t nothin’ but luck that no people got caught the same way.”

  With that, Bett turned and stepped toward the small wooden trunk she kept at the foot of her little bed. She knelt down in front of it, opened it up, and pulled out something about the size of a large loaf of bread, wrapped in a soft cloth. Then she returned to the table and set it down. She carefully opened up the cloth to reveal the awful thing inside.

  Staring lifelessly at Lillie, Cal and Bett was a cat—a stone cat. It was the size of a proper cat and the colors of a proper cat, and it looked as if it would feel soft and warm and living like a proper cat. But neither Lillie nor Cal dared reach out to touch it. Even from where they sat, the thing gave off a cold, dead chill, one that actually made them shudder, as if the very air of the cabin had gone wintry. Worse than that was the terrible look in the cat’s lifeless eyes—a look of fear and misery and the need to cry out, if only the stone that imprisoned it would release its hold.

  Lillie covered her eyes in horror. “Put it away, put it away!” she said. Even Cal could look at the thing for only so long before he felt sick and lowered his eyes too.

  “This kind o’magic is like a log fire,” Bett said softly. “If you’re careful, you can keep it in place, but a spark can still pop free. Could be a cat what gets burnt this time, could be you, could be me. That’s what you got to know—and that’s why I showed you this poor thing.” Bett then swaddled the cat in the cloth, carried it back to its place in the trunk and returned.

  “One more thing, children,” she said, and this time she looked at Cal. “If you go, you ain’t just stayin’ on this plantation and goin’ back to before Lillie’s papa went to war. What’s done is done, and what’s dead is dead. If it was his lot to be took by a bullet on a battlefield, he can’t ever come here again—even with the stones helpin’ him. It’s you two what’s goin’ to the battlefield instead. You find him there, you talk to him and ask him what you got to ask him, and you get back here ’fore he dies—’less you want to be around to see such a thing.”

  Lillie nodded and both she and Bett faced Cal. He said nothing, considering all that Bett had said. Then, he looked toward Lillie. “I reckon I ain’t no barn cat,” he said with a smile. “And I reckon I wouldn’t mind seein’ what a little magic feels like. If Lillie’s gonna go, Miss Bett, you’d best send me along with her.”

  Lillie burst into a grin. Without thinking, she grabbed Cal in a hug around his neck and kissed him hard on the cheek. Cal squirmed away and wiped off his face as if he’d been bit by something nasty—but he looked at Lillie in a way that said something else entirely.

  “All right, children,” Bett said with her own small grin. “You both go.”

  Wordlessly, Bett now stepped to her work counter and beckoned them to follow. With the practiced eye gained from a lifetime at the oven, she measured out the ingredients she’d need for a large and heavy dough, then pushed them to Cal and Lillie to prepare. She stood back while Lillie mixed and stirred, watching to make sure the girl remembered what she’d taught her, and clucking if she missed a step or got careless with one. When the dough was mixed, Cal and Lillie took turns kneading it. Sometimes Lillie’s hands were in the bowl, sometimes Cal’s, sometimes they both reached in at once. Their doughy fingers would collide and tangle, and Lillie would feel a small tingle go through her each time. Finally, the work was done and Bett turned to Lillie.

  “Spit,” she instructed, and Lillie spat in the dough. “Spit,” she repeated to Cal, and he did the same. She gave the dough a last knead and slid the baking tray into the oven. Then she waved Lillie and Cal back to the table to sit.

  “What comes next,” she said, “is what’s gonna be hardest for you children because what you got to do is nothing at all, ’cept close your eyes, stay quiet and think hard ’bout where you want to go and what you got to do.” Lillie began to ask a question but Bett silenced her with a look. “Just do what I say, and the bakin’ will carry you.”

  Cal and Lillie closed their eyes and at first noticed nothing at all. Lillie was able to steady her body, but her mind was racing, alive with the thoughts of what was to come. She shifted once, then again, the chair giving off a loud creak each time.

  “Be still, girl,” Bett said to her quietly. “Be still. Let it come get you.”

  Slowly, Lillie was able to let her body go slack, finding it all at once easier than she thought it would be and pleasanter too. Then, just as Bett promised, the baking seemed to be trying to gather her up. She could feel the warmth of the cook fire filling the cabin and swirling around her. She could hear the pop of a log and the crackle of the flame and they filled her head as if they were the only sounds there were to be heard. The smell of the baking soon followed, and it seemed a richer, sweeter smell than any Lillie had known before. The fragrance and the warmth and the sounds of the logs now thickened and grew, swirling together and crowding the cabin and pushing out anything else. Lillie felt her head grow light and her body grow buoyant, and she felt as if she were beginning to come unmoored and float straight up, even though she could still feel the hard wood of the chair beneath her. Her thoughts themselves soon began to melt away. The only things she knew for certain were that Cal was beside her, that he was surely feeling the same things she was feeling and that somewhere far away—but less far every second—her papa was waiting for them.

  She was aware then of just one more thing: the touch of Bett’s hand atop her own, patting it gently. “Travel safe, little Ibo,” the old woman said. “And come home free.”

  A moment later, Bett stood in her cabin, alone.

  Chapter Twenty
-six

  THE FIRST THING Lillie noticed before the darkness began to part was the smell of gunpowder. She still couldn’t see anything, and she still couldn’t hear anything, but the smoky, stony scent of the powder seemed to be everywhere. Gunpowder was always a smell Lillie reckoned ought to be unpleasant, given the nasty work it was usually put to, but it was one she liked all the same. Right now, there was plenty of it in the air for her to enjoy.

  Then slowly, beneath the heavy air of powder, Lillie began to notice other things too. There was a damp smell; a warm, moldy smell; and there was the sharp, acrid tang of men who hadn’t bathed in a long, long time. The men smelled of more than old sweat, though; they also smelled of fresh fear. It was a scent Lillie had learned to recognize long ago. It had come off her the night she had run to Orchard Hill. It had come off every slave at Greenfog ever threatened with the whip. Now it seemed to be rising up from everywhere.

  Finally, Lillie noticed one other smell that closed her in and choked her throat and swept the air clean of all the other smells as if they hadn’t been there at all. It was the terrible smell of flesh—horse flesh and human flesh. And it was flesh that was burning.

  With that, Lillie became filled with fear, and suddenly her trip through the darkness was not the gentle, dreamy spin it had been. Now it was more like a plunge. She flailed her arms and kicked her legs and desperately grabbed about in the blackness for anything solid to clutch and hold. But there was nothing solid—just more darkness and more fear and the growing roasting animal smell. Then, fleetingly, her fingers brushed something. It was soft and it was warm and it felt familiar. She reached for it again and felt it again and grabbed on to it tight and immediately realized that she was holding fast not to something but to someone. That someone was surely Cal and when she realized that, she held tighter still, as if just by doing so she could stop her plunge. But holding Cal didn’t help at all. The harder she held him, the faster she fell, and then she felt him holding her back—with the same urgency, the same fear. And still they fell. Now Lillie was sure they were both going to die—something that was probably all right since the poisonous air and the dizzying plunge were becoming too terrible, and if she and Cal did strike the ground and their short lives did end, at least those other things would end too.

  And then, all at once, Lillie was standing. The fall had stopped, the spinning had stopped, and though the fearful smells were still everywhere, her own fear had mostly stopped too. She slowly opened her eyes and blinked around, squinting against a sudden flood of sun. The first thing she could make out clearly—the only thing she could make out clearly—was Cal’s face, pressed close to hers. She pulled back from their tangled embrace and looked at him full. His eyes were still shut tight and while he was well and truly there in front of her, he seemed to be somewhere else too. For him, the fall through the darkness had not yet ended.

  “Cal!” she said sharply. “Cal! Open your eyes!”

  Cal seemed to hear her and tried to say something, but all that came out was the kind of jumble of words people mumble in deep sleep—the kind that make no sense at all.

  “Cal!” Lillie said louder. “Cal, you got to wake up!”

  Cal now jumped as if he’d been struck and his eyes flew open. He drew in a few startled breaths and Lillie gripped him tighter to prevent him from swinging his arms about if he still couldn’t see her. Then he, like Lillie, began gazing blindly around himself—and he too seemed only to focus when his gaze came to rest on the face in front of his.

  “Lillie,” he said hoarsely, “Lillie, we ain’t dead.”

  “No,” Lillie said. “No, we ain’t.”

  “I thought we was gonna be for sure. I thought we already was.”

  “So did I,” she said. “I don’t reckon we are, though—leastways not yet.”

  Lillie and Cal slowly loosed the hold they had on one another, stood back and only then began to look fully around. When they did, Lillie covered her mouth in both fear and wonder.

  The children were standing in the middle of a vast, muddy, flaming battlefield. Everywhere they looked there was violence being done. Everywhere they looked, trees were burning and men were dying and great sprays of explosive fire were tearing up the earth. And yet all of it was completely silent and completely still. A terrible fight was unfolding before them, but it was a fight held fast in a frozen moment—as real as Bett’s poor barn cat had once been, and yet as dead and stony-looking as that cat was now.

  “We’re in the war,” Cal whispered in wonder. “The magic worked and we’re in the war.”

  Lillie nodded mutely. Surely Cal was right; surely this was the war. But all the same, this couldn’t be the war. War was supposed to be whooping men and charging horses. It was supposed to be fought on green fields under clear skies with flags and drums and bugles everywhere. The soldiers of the North were supposed to be wearing uniforms of midnight blue with gold buttons and bright swords. The soldiers of the South were supposed to be dressed in the cool gray of clean iron, with squared-off caps perched on their heads and shiny black boots on their feet.

  But here the sky was a sodden gray and the ground was a sea of mud. There were soldiers everywhere, but most were capless, some were bootless, all were filthy and many were dead. Their uniforms might once have been blue or gray, but there was no telling them apart now, since they were all the same grimy shade of mud and earth. The landscape was an endless spread of blood and death and smoke and stink—a scene more of plague than of war.

  “What is this place?” Lillie said in horror. She took a wary step forward and her foot sank almost to her ankle in mud. She pulled it out with a loud, wet noise, nearly losing her shoe to the ooze as she did. She took another few steps and Cal followed her, treading carefully with his bandaged foot. Both of them stared around in silence as they walked.

  Off to their right, a huge fountain of mud and flame was roaring up from the ground, caught in mid-climb just instants after being hit from an exploding shell like the ones the Yankees were firing at Charleston. Soldiers on all sides of the blast were being knocked back or blown into the air—themselves stopped cold between the living world they all inhabited and the dead one some of them were surely about to join. Barely ten yards away, a fat oak tree, struck by another shell, had been snapped in two like a chicken bone. It was pitching forward and plunging to the ground, poised over a cluster of muddy soldiers who had taken shelter under it and would now be pinned beneath it. Elsewhere, fire raged from the remains of a supply wagon, which had been blown onto its side and lay in blazing ruins, its bags of provisions and other equipment spilled in the mud. The horse that had pulled it had also toppled over and was itself being consumed by the flames. The closer Lillie and Cal drew to it, the more sharply they could smell the animal’s sizzling bulk. Cal stepped ahead of Lillie and held out his hand to the frozen fire.

  “No, Cal!” Lillie cried out, but she cried it too late. Cal thrust his hand into the flame.

  “It don’t feel like nothin’,” he said. “Like it ain’t there at all.”

  Huddling closer together, the children walked deeper and deeper into the battlefield as the wreckage and death they’d already passed closed behind them and more of the same kept opening up. Lillie looked overhead and saw another shell—shaped like a bullet but big around as a tree stump—trapped in flight, heading for unlucky soldiers in an unlucky spot an untold distance away. Clouds of bullets as thick as gnat swarms hung in the air too, and judging by their pointed ends, they were headed in every direction at once. All over the field, men were being claimed by the gunfire—some freshly shot, clutching their wounds and falling to earth with their faces twisted in terrible agony, others still untouched but about to be shot, standing square in the path of a bullet that had not yet found its mark. Those same bullets, however, could do the children no harm. When Lillie approached a swarm of them that was too big to sidestep, she simply brushed them aside as easily as she’d brush a cobweb, and the bullets dropped to the gr
ound and stuck in the mud with a wet plop.

  “Like the slowbees,” she said to Cal. “Just like the slowbees.”

  “This can’t be where we’re s’posed to be,” Cal said. “There must be somethin’ went wrong with the charm. We stay here, we gonna die with the rest.”

  “We ain’t gonna die,” Lillie answered. “We ain’t supposed to die. The charm don’t make that kind o’ mistake.”

  Lillie could not know if what she was saying was true, but neither she nor Cal could know it wasn’t. The only thing she knew for sure was what she felt in her belly—and what she felt in her belly was that this was exactly the place she was meant to be.

  “C’mon,” she said and pulled on Cal’s sleeve, “or I’ll leave you where you stand.”

  Lillie trudged on a few steps more, Cal limping behind her without protest, until suddenly, she stopped where she was—as still as one of the soldiers. Her eyes opened wide, her body tensed, and a single word came exploding out of her.

  “Papa!” she cried, from every part of herself all at once. “Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa!”

  And her papa, indeed, was there.

  In a deep shell hole not far from where they were, the man who’d died early last spring stood. It was her papa’s face; it was her papa’s shape. He was splattered everywhere with blood, but judging by the way he held himself and the fierce look in his eyes, he was not injured. What he seemed to be covered with was other men’s blood—and that made sense. Papa had joined the army as a battlefield nurse.

  Lillie’s heart boomed in her chest so hard and so fast she felt set to swoon. “Papa, Papa, Papa!” she cried again.

  “It is!” Cal said. “It’s your papa! It is!”

  Lillie began racing through the mud now with Cal limping after her, both of them lurching and stumbling as fast as they could and gasping with the effort of it. At last, they reached the lip of the shell hole and tumbled into it and Lillie spun and fell and came to rest near her papa’s feet. She looked up into Papa’s face and drank in the sight of him. He had a stubbly beard he hadn’t had before and his forehead bore deep, new lines. There were dustings of gray throughout his hair that Lillie had also never seen. But it was her papa all the same, as sure as if he’d never left.