by Alan Cheuse
And then it occurred to me.
“Oh, Liza! It is Isaac! My uncle is his father! He is a cousin to me and half-brother to Jonathan!”
“Whatever Jonathan is to any of us. Now we must start moving. He will have probably already discovered we are gone, and it will be all Isaac can do to distract him from our trail.”
“Our trail? And just where are we going?”
“With this boy in tow? Where do you think? We are going away. Or I am. You, of course, are free to stay.”
Liza gave her horse a kick, and he set to moving, and so Promise moved, and all of us moved into the dark.
Chapter Seventy-six
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Moving into the Dark
We began our journey by heading back toward the main road. It was a risk, but the choice lay between abandoning the horses and making off through the woods on foot, or taking our chances on meeting trouble on the road and keeping our superior means of travel.
“They may be waiting for us at the house!” I called to Liza over the noise of our animals.
“If Jonathan has gone after us, he is already on his way to town,” Liza called back to me.
“How do you know?”
“Isaac will have told him we have gone that way, and he will be leading him there. Jonathan will remember that you went to town to visit the shipping office.”
“Should not Isaac be running as we are?”
“He will not run,” Liza said. “He is too proud.”
Oh, I said to myself, and I have no pride, and so I am running. But another voice came to me and said, Yes, you are running, running with this woman to love and freedom!
Suddenly we broke into the clearing and looked back and saw the house still all ablaze with lights. I pictured my aunt and Rebecca gathered about my uncle’s body in the upper room, or huddled together for succor in the parlor, their ears inclined toward the sound of our passage.
Oh, Uncle, I called out to him in my mind, I am stealing what was not yours to keep! And what is not mine to take!
Perhaps my uncle replied to me from the world of the dead, but our horses made too much noise for me to hear anything but the beating of their hooves against the hard dirt of the road.
Pounding away they were as we raced down the tunnel of trees to the main road—and headed northwest instead of southeast.
“Do you have a plan?” I called to Liza as we hurried along. She didn’t turn to look at me, but the slave boy did, his young face showing no emotion as we moved under the dark trees on a part of the road I had never traveled.
“Lord,” I said to all and no one, “I wish I had my pistol!”
She did not reply, but the boy turned his head and gave me a knowing nod.
What did he know? Who was he, he still almost a child, who had boarded that ship in New Jersey and traveled with the wickedest man I had ever met, and then escaped, hiding at the brickyard at The Oaks all these weeks, harbored, of course, by the other slaves?
If he had truly escaped.
Long minutes passed. Liza noticed the animals were beginning to tire, and so we slowed down a bit, but still moving forward along the dark road. It was late for country life, and no one was on the road, and if there were other people living out in the fields along the road they were sleeping or sitting up awake in the dark.
“Liza?”
“Hush, Nathaniel,” she called back to me. “We’ll have time later to talk.”
“I should have—”
“Hush!”
I had spoken too soon, because I saw, as she did, a light flickering up the road far ahead, a light that danced and waxed and waned I hoped against hope it was a phantom lamp, one of those will-o’-the-wisp tricks of the darkish air, product perhaps of swamp gases and the dampness of the hour. But as we approached the light became still, and hovered at just the height it would if it were a torch or lamp held by a man on horseback.
It was in fact two lights, each held by a man on horseback.
“Whoa!” called out one of them as we slowed down on our approach, as if he were talking to his own horse.
“Liza—”
“Hush!” she cautioned me.
“Well, well, well, good evening, Mister Yankeeman,” said the patroller Langerhans, holding up one of the torches. “Out kind of late, ain’t you?” He turned to smile to his two assistants, who nodded back at him, smiling.
“As are you,” I said.
“I’m on patrol,” said the slave-catcher. “And you?”
“Me?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, slurring his esses.
“I’m going about my uncle’s business,” I said.
“In the middle of the night? With a slave girl riding along? And what? Who is that darky sitting up behind her? Wouldn’t be the young nigger we come out to look around for not long ago, could it?”
“He is nobody to you,” Liza said.
“Liza, I’ll take care of this.”
Langerhans made a clucking noise in his mouth.
“Will you?”
“Stand aside,” I said.
Langerhans shook his head, which gave his already rather monstrous aspect in the wavering light of the torch an even more grotesque appearance.
“I can’t do that. I get paid to keep niggers from running off and if I don’t my children aren’t going to eat.”
“She has a pass,” I said.
“Really? And does that boy have a pass, too? Where’re y’all riding in the middle of the night?”
“She is going to visit family,” I said. “North of here.”
“That’s funny. All the family I ever hear about is living north, when all the family I ever know about has gone south.”
“I’ll show you the passes,” I said, reaching into the inside of my coat.
“Slow,” Langerhans said. “Show me slow.”
“Of course,” I said, preparing to pat my pocket as though I had lost the paper, a ghastly empty place swelling in my heart because of the absence of my pistol.
“Slow!” he said again.
In the wavering light of the torch I saw a movement at Liza’s side.
Langerhans saw it too, and made a joke.
“Oh, my,” he said to his men, “do you see what I see? This nigger girl’s holding a pistol just big enough to take off a toe or the tip of a nose.”
The men laughed as Langerhans turned in his saddle.
“But she don’t even have it cocked. Might be loaded, though I doubt that, but it ain’t cocked. If you’re lucky enough to know it’s even loaded, how you going to fire a weapon it ain’t cocked, I ask you that?”
“Liza,” I said, meaning for her to lower the weapon.
Instead she moved her free hand across it and we all heard the sound.
“Lordy,” Langerhans said again, as though he were announcing a show, “looked what she done! She done cocked that weapon! Oh, oh, oh, ain’t she smart? I mean, smart for a nigger bitch!”
“Liza,” I said again, speaking but feeling unable to breathe.
“Liza,” Langerhans said, mocking my voice. “He wants you to put that gun down now. Even if it ain’t loaded.”
Liza in silence kept that weapon level and pointed directly at Langerhans.
“Liza, you hear him?”
Langerhans sounded a bit impatient now.
“Liza,” he said again.
“Liza,” I said.
“Come on, you bitch—” Langerhans reached toward her.
Came a loud blast and flash of light, a man screamed, the horses jumped about, I grabbed Promise’s reins. At that moment my heart felt as though it might break through my rib-cage and fly away like a terrified bird.
“Ride!” Liza called to me.
And we rode.
A second loud bang, and a flash spurred our horses even faster.
I heard a voice, a moan. It was mine, but it also echoed along behind us in the dark.
***
After about half
an hour we slowed, then stopped, looked down the road and saw nothing, no light, nothing—and when the horses settled a bit, stopped their nickering and whinnying, we breathed in the dark, wondering, hoping, worrying, wondering.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“No,” she said. “But I’m not bleeding.”
The slave boy spoke up from behind me on the horse.
“I ain’t breathing.”
“You are if you’re speaking.”
“Then I’m breathing,” he said.
“Hurry now,” Liza said, giving her horse a start.
I rode up next to her, making up the way through the woods.
“How long have you been keeping my pistol?” I asked her.
“Long enough,” Liza said.
And we started off again, two runaway slaves and a Yankee, each of us now a murderer. I carried heavy regrets, oh, yes, I carried regrets, and a mixed burden of hope and despair. Liza and I were running, and I would not see the harvest.
Chapter Seventy-seven
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Darkness of the Dark
Darkness of the dark, black pitch tar-hole dead of night starless moonless abyss of nothingness nothing…The dark had a scent to it, the thick green stink of fecund plant, root and stem, bole and leaf, and the rot of still waters, and the spoor of invisible animals that swam or crawled in the pitch-black around us.
And the dark had a sound, which, when now and then when we stopped to get our bearings—or, I should say, Liza stopped us, and she figured our path a little further—and the horses quieted down, we could hear as a constant whirring of insects and an occasional chirp or squawk of bird or sigh of hunting animal, or the splash of some creature fishing in the swamp.
But it was not until we had ridden for what seemed like many hours in the pitch of night that I could distinguish darkness upon darkness and make out certain shapes and figures—trees, mainly, and more trees—against what had been a dark so empty that it took on heft and girth, and I could hear sounds buried under other sounds, and it seemed almost that I could hold my breath and appreciate the purring of ticks under the wings of sleeping birds and the liquid whispers of mother fish as they herded their fry beneath the placid liquid dark of the ditches and eddies of the swamp.
Now I could see Liza riding ahead of us and despite the first light I felt a terrible inward rush of emptiness and false bearings.
“Wait!” I called to her.
She slowed her horse and my Promise nearly collided with it.
“What is it, Nate?” she said.
“What is it? I still cannot rid my thoughts of this. You killed a man. And I am a party to it.”
“You would have done it, if I had not.”
I reached for the reins of her horse, but it skittered away.
“If you had not stolen my pistol, perhaps.”
Liza laughed a laugh all too gay given the circumstances, as though we might be waltzing about the lawn of the big house to the music made by violins.
“How can you laugh at such a time as this? When you have killed a man and we are running?”
“When we have killed a man,” she said. “You just agreed to that.”
A terrible thought occurred to me.
“What else did you take? Did you steal money from my dying uncle?”
“I took nothing that was not mine,” Liza said.
And by the early light of our new dawn together I saw her reach into the sack she had carried with her as we had made our escape from the house—in which she had kept, among other things, the pistol she had taken from my room—and extract one of the silver candlesticks, inscribed so long ago in an eastern country, and hold it up to show me, grinning a girlish grin that never would have allowed you to believe, if you had not been there when it happened, that she had shot and killed a man only hours before.
Now it was daylight, and we edged the horses into the narrow trail into the swamp, needing to find a place to hide for the long day to come.
***
Slavery is so simple, freedom so complicated. Here I was huddled in a damp hole beneath a towering swamp tree while the light of green day showed me my sleeping companions, Liza, her coffee-colored face unscarred by care, and the runaway boy, his features puckered into something resembling a dark wrinkled fruit.
If I could have seen myself in a glass, what would I have viewed? Shirt open, coat torn at the sleeves, hair askew, face smudged with leaves and mud, so that with darker skin I might have been mistaken for a runaway slave myself. We had been moving so quickly since we left The Oaks that it was only now that we found ourselves at rest that I began to question what I had done.
The shooting.
Running away.
Betraying my family.
Was that not what I had done?
I leaned over and reached for her hand.
She sat up, nearly fully awake.
“What? Are they here?”
“Liza,” I said, “I wish to speak with you.”
“They are not here?”
“We are alone,” I said. “Except for the boy.”
“Why wake me then? I am worn down, Nate.”
“We’ll have all day,” I said. “I understand, we must not move by day.”
“You’re learning.”
“I am learning,” I said. “But I have not learned everything I want to know.”
She shook her head, rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, and leaned back against the tree.
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Do you know what you are asking?”
“No, no, I do not. I have only my suspicions.”
“And what do you suspect?”
And just as I was saying what I said next I understood that until I began to say it I had not understood it all!
“You came to my bed so that I would help you run away.”
Chapter Seventy-eight
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Dark Tales by Light of Day
Coming to your bed,” Liza said, “was not my idea at first.”
Her words hit me in the chest like a fist.
“Whose idea was it?”
I reached over and took her hand, and took some deep breaths. The atmosphere of the swamp oozed damp and stink, a difficult place in which to breathe.
“Jonathan sent me to you.”
“What precisely do you mean by that?”
“He ordered me to visit you.”
“He did this? And you obeyed? Why on earth—?”
“Nathaniel, I belonged to him. He could do anything he wanted to do with me.”
“And he sent you to me?”
“Yes,” she broke in, “and if I could feel shame ever again I might feel it about this.”
“My head is a-whirl,” I said. “Is there more? Tell me everything.”
“Oh, it is quite sordid. Too sordid for a New York gentleman to contemplate, I’m afraid.”
“I want to know,” I said, already feeling as though someone had just torn away a swathe of skin from a blistering wound on my heart. “I love you, Liza. I offered to buy you. Is that not proof of how I felt?”
Liza laughed sardonically.
“If that is proof of love, folks all over the South would be feeling it every day. I buy you, I love you. I sell you, I hate you. As a matter of fact, Nate, slaves don’t find much affection in being either bought or sold.”
“No, I suppose not.” I spoke formally, but my heart, with its wound, now felt like a large rock in my chest, weighing me down, pulling me toward the ground.
Liza could see this on my face.
“Let’s try to sleep,” she said.
“You told me you would explain everything,” I said.
She kept her silence for a moment.
I glanced over at the sleeping boy.
“Tell me everything.”
Without taking much of a breath, she said, “I decided to seduce you so tha
t you would help me run away.”
“Please,” I said. “And so you would not prostitute yourself on your father’s orders. But you would do it on your own?”
“Please don’t speak about it like that.”
“You did not have to give yourself to me,” I said. “I was, I am, in love with you. I would have done without the…the bait.”
“It is not as if I didn’t, and don’t still, feel strongly for you,” she said. “What I did—was come up to the edge, and then cross over.”
“Ah, yes, the edge,” I said. “But had you never thought of running away with Isaac?”
“I thought of it, but he would never run.”
“Why not?”
“Not until he took his revenge. Do you forget that your uncle raped his mother and destroyed his father’s life?”
I took a few long breaths, but did not, could not, respond.
“So…it was me or no one?”
“Yes.”
“If you had made your predicament known I would have helped you without…”
“Seduction?”
“Yes, without that.”
“You might have,” Liza said. “It did not seem absolutely certain to me that you would have. You almost surely would not have run with me if it had not happened. I knew that if the patrollers had met me and I was alone on the road I never would have gotten past them.”
“Liza,” I said, “ I offered to buy you. Is that not that proof of how I felt?”
“Yes, but you forgot you were never going to own me. Jonathan would not allow his father to sell me to you. The older his father became, the more power the son took on. I was his daughter. He would have killed me, I have told you, before he ever let me go.”
The woods nearby, the swamp, had come alive with the sunrise, with sounds and calls alerting us to the nature of the world. Everything was bird and animal and insect, tree and water, rushing and stagnant, this was the place we lived in, and made our ways as best we could.
“My cousin is a vile, disgusting, deceitful and dishonorable man,” I said. “He deserves to be horse-whipped, or worse.”
“And yet he is my father,” Liza said.
“And my relative, yes. A man who only days ago made clear his desire to become my business partner in a family enterprise.”
Now Liza inched further away from me, but kept her lips closed as the boy from Jersey awoke and looked around.
