by Judith Pella
What kind of man was he?
It struck him like a crushing landslide, and as though rock and dirt were literally caving in on him, he felt choked and breathless.
“What were you saying before?” he rasped to his brother.
“I said a lot of things. Maybe some were out of line.” Perhaps holding the baby had softened Haden’s ire.
Benjamin forced himself to remember and speak the words. He lamented his confrontative nature and that it was now about to turn on him, but he couldn’t help himself. “You said . . . she . . . would have killed herself had she not left. What did you mean?”
“Forget it, Benjamin.”
“What—did—you—mean?” Each word was an effort, but he had to know.
“She planned to kill herself as soon as you returned from your circuit and were here to watch the children. She was waiting only for that and the birth of the baby.”
“You believed her?”
“I would not have taken her on a perilous journey in her condition if I hadn’t.”
“What else did she say to you?”
“Ben . . .”
“I have to know.”
“Too bad you didn’t have this desire to know while she lived. She was completely miserable, yet she received nothing but holy admonitions from you. Even then she was so afraid of standing in the way of your so-called call of God that she would rather take her own life than disappoint you.”
Benjamin nodded silently, unable to refute his brother’s words, though he desperately wanted to.
Instead he asked, “Did she love you?”
Haden quirked his head toward the baby. “This is proof of which one of us she loved.”
Of all the things Haden had said, that was the most difficult to believe. “I . . . killed her then,” was all Benjamin could say.
Haden said nothing but laid the baby in the cradle that Leah had used. He walked to the door and put his hand on the latch, saying not a word to refute Benjamin’s statement.
“Where are you going?” Benjamin asked.
“Away.”
“You can’t leave me like this!”
The ironic smile that slipped across Haden’s face was worse than a blow. “I feel sorry for you, Ben, but I feel no benevolence toward you. I loved Rebekah, and you killed her. I will never forgive you for that. Your contrition now comes much too late. There is no way we could dwell in peace under this roof.”
“But the children—”
“I hate the thought of leaving them in your cold, heartless care, but they are your children, not mine.”
“You never could take responsibility for anything—that’s why Rebekah married me and not you.” He had to lash out at his brother because he could take only so much self-flagellation.
“True.” Haden lifted the latch.
“You selfish, miserable reprobate!”
“good-bye, Benjamin.”
“Please!” Sheer desperation collided with Benjamin’s pride. “I need . . . I . . .” But pride won out.
“Even now you can’t admit your weaknesses. God help you, Ben!”
Haden swung the door open and slammed it shut behind him, leaving Benjamin gaping in his wake. Alone, confused, helpless, and afraid.
CHAPTER
29
COME BACK HERE, YOU TEASING TR OLLOP!”
He was big and ugly and dirty. Though thankfully in the dim light of night his looks were not as discernable as his odor. He smelled of horse and sweat and cheap whiskey. But that was not as appalling as the knife he gripped in his meaty paw.
Liz wrenched from his grasp just as he lifted the shiny blade—the only clean thing about him. Trembling, she scrambled across the bed, grabbing a pillow to use as a shield, but it was too late. Drops of blood stained the pillow—her blood. In numb disbelief she saw a slice across her shoulder and the red quickly soaking her chemise. Then she saw her terror actually pleased him. He was grinning, revealing two uneven rows of yellow, rotten teeth.
He lunged with the knife. Again, she didn’t move fast enough, but this time the blade only split the ticking of the pillow, spewing feathers everywhere. She tried to get around the bed to the door, but he guessed her thoughts. Clad only in long underwear, he launched himself from the bed and loomed large in her path.
“P-please! You don’t need to hurt me!” She’d had men get a bit rough before, but never like this. She saw murder in this one’s eyes. But she had done nothing to incur his wrath—in fact, he was not acting out of wrath at all. If he killed her, it would be out of sheer pleasure.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you, girl—not permanent-like.” He grinned again. “I’m just gonna make it interesting.”
“Y-you can have your m-money back.” Her trembling lips made her speech nearly incoherent.
“Ha! Maurry don’t give refunds for nothing! Anyways, I don’t want my money back.”
He snatched her arm, holding her so tightly it cut off the circulation. Then he ruthlessly shoved her back onto the bed. She silently prayed he would thrust his knife straight into her heart. Why should she go on living like this? But instead of despair, sudden rage welled up in her. It had always been there, of course, lurking within her on some level, but she had been successful in keeping it under control. Now it simply overwhelmed her.
That was no surprise. The last few days had been utterly dreadful, sapping her of the strength that had aided her in the past. Hannah was sicker than ever, and Liz had been up with her constantly in the night. She’d had next to no sleep in two days. It might have been different if she had been able to spend that time rocking her sick daughter. But no, she still had to perform all her duties. The other girls, even Mae, were tiring of helping her. They had been harping a lot lately about giving Hannah to one of the town women—leaving her on a doorstep, if necessary.
Liz had been teetering on a precipice, and this mean, lumbering oaf was merely pushing her over.
“You really want to use that knife?” She gripped his hand and forced the knife down so that the tip rested just under her right breast. “Go ahead! I want to see blood, too! Real blood, not just a measly trickle from a little scratch.”
“You’re plumb crazy!” The oaf changed his tune as quickly as she had changed hers.
“You’re all talk then!” she dared. “Come on, you lily-livered, addle-brained coward!”
“I ain’t gonna hang for killing no whore!”
“Then I’ll hang!”
She twisted his arm so quickly he had no time to react. His fingers spread apart, and the knife slipped easily into Liz’s hand. She turned it quickly while her attacker gaped. He could have stopped her at any time, but he was too shocked to do anything. In an instant it was too late for him to make a move, for the tip of the blade now rested just below his rib cage—the soft, fleshy part, which even she could penetrate with a good jab.
“It won’t kill you,” she taunted, “but it’ll hurt awful bad.”
He licked his lips. “Easy now, sweetheart.”
“Sweetheart, is it? A minute ago, you were ready to slit my throat.”
“I was only playing.”
“I want to kill you.” She could hardly recognize her own voice, its cold, deadly tones. Her hand ached as it gripped the knife—yes, it ached to kill.
Slowly he eased away. When he saw she was not going to follow through on her threat, he scrambled even more quickly until he was off the bed. Gathering up his clothes, he backed toward the door.
“Maurry said you was a genteel plantation nigger. You ain’t nothing but a—”
He didn’t finish. Liz sent the knife flying, and it plunged into the door, inches from his greasy head. His retreat was quick and silent after that. He didn’t even pause to retrieve his knife.
Liz fell back against the remaining pillow on the bed, her limbs shaking, her heart pounding. Fear and fury slammed against her sensibilities until tears oozed from her eyes. Yet it was neither the man’s attack nor the blood drawn that made t
he tears erupt. As she lay there in her chemise, the tangled blankets of the bed still strong with the man’s fetid odor, she felt as never before the reality of what she was. For the first time in a year, she truly felt like a whore—hard, dirty, but most of all, completely competent at this hideous job. The ribald battle with her customer proved she was no more a victim. She could have killed him. Maybe next time she would not hesitate. Maybe she would even kill Maurry. For an instant as she held the knife to the man’s chest, she had felt strong.
Yet the tears still flowing from her eyes blatantly contradicted that.
Maybe there was hope. Maybe this incident only proved that she had more fight in her than she thought. If only it were true. One thing was certain, she might not be completely lost in this appalling life, but she was very close to being so. If the last two days had put her on the edge, she knew now exactly where she was. On one side the life of a real human being—a person, a woman of worth—was to be had. Over the edge on the other side plunged the existence of a whore. The rest of the girls were already there, even Mae, because she, too, had accepted the life Maurry forced on them all. Some of them had even convinced themselves that this life wasn’t so bad. They had food and clothes and shelter, all in exchange for their virtue. They no longer thought it was an unfair exchange.
Liz swiped the back of her hand across her wet eyes. “I won’t do it,” she whispered. Then more firmly, “I won’t do it! I won’t go over that edge. Not me, or Hannah either!”
Liz knew the only way to avoid plummeting over that threatening edge was to escape. That was not a new revelation. She’d thought about it constantly for the last year. Yes, it had been a whole year since this terrible ordeal had begun. She could not face another year like it, yet none of the obstacles to her leaving had changed. If anything, leaving was even more difficult now that Hannah’s condition seemed to grow worse each day.
The irony was that Liz had stayed, hoping her daughter would get better, but that obviously wasn’t happening. Perhaps in trying to protect Hannah, she had in fact only made her worse.
“Hannah, I’m beginning to think we have to take the risk.” She stared down at the child nestled on her lap one afternoon as she sat on her bed enjoying a rare moment of privacy.
The poor child was a little more than a year old, yet she looked more like a baby of eight months, and a small baby at that. And she still wasn’t walking. She might have a sixteenth of Negro blood in her, but she was as sallow-faced as any of the blond, blue-eyed grandchildren of the Hearnes.
From that moment, the idea of escape grew more urgent in Liz’s mind. Somehow she had to find a way around the barriers that kept her a prisoner of Maurry. In the quiet of her mind, she followed a path she had begun taking more and more often these days.
“Jesus, help me to find a way out of this place. I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t know where to go once I make the break.”
The answer to the second question came quickly. She had been holding her borrowed New Testament, and all at once the leather cover practically throbbed in her hands.
Rebekah Sinclair. Of course.
Rebekah would help Liz. She would be kind to her, accept her, perhaps even protect her from pursuers. The reverend might feel differently, but Liz knew wives had ways to get around their husband’s objections. Though Liz was practically a stranger, she knew Rebekah would not turn her away.
The problem of getting there was harder to solve. She knew the Sinclairs lived near Cooksburg, about forty miles north of San Felipe. The location of the Thomson place would add about ten miles to that distance, a two- or three-day hard ride on horseback. On foot, it might take several days beyond that to make the journey. At least she had feet. Supplies would be harder to come by. But she addressed that problem by pilfering scraps of food and secreting them away in her room.
The most daunting obstacle, of course, was the matter of pursuit. A woman on foot and carrying a child would be easy to overtake. And she dare not steal a horse because, though a runaway slave only risked being beaten, horse thieves were hanged in Texas.
She would just have to outsmart Maurry. For one thing, she doubted he would guess she’d go north into the wild frontier. It was suicide for a woman alone to do, especially a woman who knew little of surviving in the wilds. Smiling grimly to herself, she wondered if Maurry would guess just how insane she was. At any rate, he knew nothing about the Sinclairs, so it should not occur to him that she would head that way. No, he would first assume she’d go south to one of the ports—Matagora or Galveston. Though she had no money for passage, he’d figure she’d have no qualms about selling her favors for a few dollars.
For the next two days, Liz began to discreetly prepare for her flight. She found an old leather saddlebag that Lyle Thomson had discarded and would never miss. She also took Lyle’s mackintosh. He wouldn’t miss it until it rained, and by then they would know of her escape. Her plan was to wait for rain, in hope that it would cover her tracks. She had heard from some of the men that a good storm front was moving in.
“It’s gonna be a drencher,” one of the men had predicted. “You better see that Maurry shores up his place ’cause that creek he’s near is liable to flood.”
Liz dared not hope for such a disaster to befall her master. Her only stroke of luck was that the creek lay south of the Thomson place, and she would not have to cross it. The possibility of having to confront other swollen waterways was too daunting to even consider.
She avoided thinking of the many pitfalls in her plan. They were countless, she knew. In reality, she doubted she would survive. But that really was no longer an issue.
CHAPTER
30
THE STORM BROKE FOUR DAYS after Liz had first conceived her plan. No matter what became of it, she knew it must have been blessed a little by God because the storm began on Sunday, the only day Maurry did not require his girls to work. Thus, not having to entertain customers Sunday night, she would be free to leave long before dawn.
Sometimes the girls did not sleep so well on their free nights because they were accustomed to different hours. It was no different this night. Liz could hear stirrings in all the little cubicles well past midnight. Maurry and Lyle were taken up with their usual occupation of playing cards and drinking with a group of men in the main cabin. The noise of the drunken men seemed to go on forever.
Finally, around two or three in the morning, the restless throng quieted down. Some probably left despite the storm, preferring to pass the night in their own cabins. But if this was like other similar gatherings, most of the men had probably simply passed out on the cabin floor. They would sleep soundly and well into the morning.
“Well, Hannah, it’s time.” Liz gently brushed aside a strand of Hannah’s hair from her pale face.
She filled the saddlebag with all her pilfered supplies—food, water bottle, the medicinal herbs for Hannah, and a kitchen knife, the only weapon she could get her hands on. Too bad that oaf who had attacked her came back the next day for his knife. Finally Liz lovingly tucked Rebekah Sinclair’s New Testament inside. Then she snugly wrapped Hannah in a blanket from the bed. Tearing another blanket in half, she made a kind of sling in which she could place Hannah, then tie around her own body. It would help take off some of the weight, slight as it was, from Liz’s arms.
For herself, Liz wore her warmest and most modest outfit, a yellow silk skirt with a heavy ruffle around the bottom and a white muslin blouse. Maurry didn’t allow them practical clothes in an attempt, Liz thought, to keep them under his thumb. The yellow was bright, and the green of woods and trees would not blend with it, but it was better than the reds and purples of her other dresses. Slipping a coat over the outfit would help hide it a little.
She rejected the idea of bringing another blanket. The rain would only make it a wet and heavy burden. The clothes on her back would have to do. Placing the saddlebag by a strap around her shoulder, she completed the ensemble with the poncholike mackintosh, wh
ich was large enough to cover both her and Hannah.
At last she was ready.
She crept from her room. All was silent except for the pounding of the rain upon the roof of the cabin. In the common room that was exclusively for the girl’s use, the embers of the banked fire in the hearth emanated a delicious warmth, which made going out into the cold, wet night an unpleasant thought. A fleeting notion of abandoning her crazed plan assailed Liz.
Why not accept her life as it was? Warmth, food, shelter. Who was she to think she should have more? She was no plantation belle, only a Negro slave wench.
“Stop it!” she hissed to herself.
She’d made her decision. She had considered the risks. Part of her knew she and Hannah were likely to die in this escape attempt. She was not going to debate the matter further.
She took a determined step, then suddenly froze—but this time not from indecision but rather because she saw the rocker in the sitting room by the hearth move. Someone was awake.
“Storms always keep me awake.” Mae’s voice was quiet, almost soothing. “You, too, Liz?”
“I . . . I . . .”
In the dark, Liz saw Mae look up. Bundled as she was, there would be no way to hide what she was about to do. But contradicting the fierce pounding of her heart, a calm stole over Liz. She could not accept that all was lost so soon.
“I guess it can be a little scary—the rain, you know.” Liz spoke as if they were having a casual conversation, though in soft tones.
“Don’t be scared.” In the glow of the embers, Liz could see a faint smile play upon Mae’s lips. “I think the rain will be your friend.”
“I hope so.”
Mae rose from the rocker, the old wood creaking slightly. The sound made Liz tense.
“I guess I can sleep a bit now,” Mae said. “You gonna sit for a spell?”
“Maybe so. . . .”
Mae quietly approached Liz, her eyes carefully taking in the mackintosh-wrapped pair. She knew exactly what was happening. She reached up and gently patted Liz’s cheek.
