Micah laughed lightly and stroked her hair. The wonderful quiet contentedness of love settled upon their hearts. There was but one more thing burning on Emma’s heart to say.
“Please . . . don’t leave, Mister Duff,” she whispered. “Not now. I think my heart wud like ter break ef you did!”
“Emma . . . Emma,” Micah whispered, “when will you ever be able to stop calling me Mister Duff?”
“I’s try . . . Micah,” said Emma softly with an embarrassed smile.
Katie and I were out walking when we saw Micah and Emma coming toward us in the distance. As they drew closer we saw that they were walking hand in hand.
We looked at each other with our mouths hanging open, then we started running forward. Emma saw us and now left Micah and ran toward us. We met laughing and talking excitedly like three little girls!
“Emma, Emma,” exclaimed Katie, “what happened?”
“Dis good man,” said Emma, beaming as she glanced behind her, “he says he loves me, Miz Katie! How dat kin be, I don’ know. Almost like a miracle, ain’t it? I thought he had taken a fancy ter you, Mayme,” she said to me, “an’ now he says he loves me!”
“Oh, Emma, we’re so happy for you!” I exclaimed. And I truly was.
Katie’s smile was as big as Emma’s, and she now gave Emma a big hug. The next instant we were all three in each other’s arms laughing and crying all at once.
Emma stood back, giving us each a look and a smile that melted our hearts, a look of such love and gratitude like I’d never seen. Then she turned and ran back to Micah, who opened one arm wide to receive her. They continued toward us, his arm around her shoulder, Emma’s head contentedly leaning against him.
I turned and looked back toward the house. Jeremiah was standing there watching.
I gave a little wave and left Katie and went to join him. I walked straight to him, put my arms around him and rested my head against his chest. He reached around and held me close.
“Isn’t that wonderful to see, Jeremiah,” I said, “—Micah and Emma like that? Who would have imagined it?”
“I had a feelin’ ’bout it,” said Jeremiah, “though at first I wuz afraid he might take you away from me.”
“What!” I said, laughing and standing back to look in Jeremiah’s face to see if he was serious.
“Well, he’s a mighty handsome man.”
“No more than you, Jeremiah.”
“An’ you an’ he . . . that is, well . . . bein’ around Micah made me wonder ef I wuz good enuff fo you.”
“Jeremiah Patterson!” I said. “What kind of talk is that? You’re not just good enough for me, I love you—so let’s have no more talk like that.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
Again I embraced him and we were quiet for a minute.
“Did you really think that?” I asked more seriously.
“For a spell,” he said. “I couldn’t help comparin’ myself ter him.”
“I’m sorry, Jeremiah,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize you were feeling that way. I suppose I was caught up in . . . I don’t know, just enjoying getting to know Micah as a person and talking to him. I didn’t realize what it must have looked like to you. Katie even thought I was falling in love with him. But when she asked me if I was, I had to stop and think, and it made me realize that I wasn’t, and that you were still the one I loved. I didn’t think that maybe you were seeing the same thing Katie was. I am sorry.”
“Dat’s all right, Mayme. Everythin’s all right now.”
THE RIVER’S CLAIM
31
Summer was approaching and it started to get hot.
One particular day came and you could tell from the moment the sun came up that it would be a hot and muggy day. Micah had said nothing more about leaving Rosewood, and we were all glad of that.
By ten in the morning it was ninety degrees. At noon it was over a hundred. Not a breath of wind came from anywhere. What work there was to be done we got finished by lunchtime and no one felt inclined to go out in the hot sun after that if they didn’t have to. Everything would take care of itself until milking time came late in the afternoon. Only Uncle Ward had the energy to venture outdoors. He rode into town to make a withdrawal at the bank and pick up our mail.
Emma was still going out to the river a lot. She had been doing so ever since that day she would never forget. Usually she went alone—to pray or sing. It was obvious that her baptism, and now her growing love for Micah, had changed things so deep in her heart that she was still trying to grasp it. I think she went to the river every day or two—to sit as the river flowed slowly past her, to try to figure it all out, but also just to let it sink yet deeper into her heart.
“You want ter go dab dose feet er yers in da ribber, William?” said Emma to her four-year-old son as we sat around the table in the kitchen about noon.
“Dat I do, Mama!” replied the boy eagerly. “Kin we go now?”
“We’ll go right after lunch,” answered Emma.
Forty minutes later, the tall slender black girl and chubby little boy of tan complexion walked away from the house hand in hand. I went to the door and watched as they crossed two fields of green ripening stalks whose cotton we would all help pick later in the summer.
Back when Emma had first come here she hadn’t been much use to anyone and she knew it. Though she had been the oldest of we three girls who were thrown together by the war and had to figure out a way to survive alone, Emma had needed more taking care of than both Katie and me combined.
But she had grown and changed in the four years since she found her way here. And new and even more far-reaching kinds of changes were now stirring in Emma’s heart. A look of peace and self-assurance was gradually coming over her face. More often these days, rather than the most talkative, she was the quietest member of the Rosewood family around the kitchen table, sitting content to listen, watch, observe.
Emma’s soul was coming awake.
Emma sat down at the river’s edge and eased her bare brown feet into the shallow water as William ran straight into it.
“You be careful, William!” she said. “You stay near me, you hear. I don’t want ter be havin’ ter haul you outta dat water yonder cuz I can’t swim so good.”
Whether William was listening was doubtful. But he was in no danger yet, for the site where Emma had been baptized was out in the middle and the sandy bottom sloped away toward it gradually. He ran and splashed about within four feet of the shore, to no more depth than halfway up his fat little calves, laughing and shrieking without a care in the world, until he was wet from head to foot. Emma watched with a smile on her face.
In this season of peace and happiness in her life, Emma was not thinking of the past, nor of dangerous secrets she possessed whose danger even she herself did not fully recognize. She was thinking of the wonderful now and the bright future. She was thinking of Micah Duff.
Emma had just begun to get sleepy under the blazing sun and had lain down on her back, when sudden footsteps sounded behind her from some unknown hiding place in the brush bordering the river. Startled but suspecting nothing, Emma sat up and turned toward the sound. Three white men ran toward her, two bearing big brown burlap bags.
Before she could cry out, one of the men yanked her to her feet. Emma cried out in pain as the second man pulled her arms behind her. The third went for William, threw the open end of one sack over his head, and scooped the boy out of the shallow water.
“Mama!” William howled. But the next instant he was bundled up, then clunked on the head and thrown over the man’s shoulder.
Terror unlike she had ever known clenched at Emma’s heart. She screamed at the top of her lungs, struggling and kicking frantically.
“You let him go . . . William . . . git yo han’s off me . . . help—somebody . . . Miz Katie, help! Mayme!”
“Shut up, you fool!” yelled one of the men. But even two of them were hardly a match for her. Emma writhed and kicke
d with every ounce of survival instinct she possessed. As one tried to take hold of her shoulders and force her to be still, Emma’s teeth clamped down onto his wrist like the vise of a steel trap.
He cried out in pain and swore violently as blood flowed from his arm. He whacked Emma across the side of the head with the back of his hand. But it only made her scream louder.
“Help!” she shrieked in a mad frenzy. “Git away from me . . . William, Mama’s here . . . help! Miz Katie . . . dey’s got William. Help!”
Two hands took hold of her head from behind, and the next instant a handkerchief was stuffed into her mouth, muffling her cries. She was lifted off the ground, kicking and wildly swinging her arms about. The three men now made clumsily for their waiting horses and struggled to mount with the two unwieldy bags.
The river was not so far from the house that we couldn’t plainly hear Emma’s screams. The frantic cries quickly brought us all running from several directions at once.
“Is that Emma?” called Katie in alarm, hurrying out onto the porch and glancing all about to see what was going on.
“She went to the river,” I said, running around from the side of the house.
“Where’s Emma and William?” yelled my papa as he ran toward them from the barn where he’d gone to prepare for milking.
“At the river,” I answered, my heart pounding in fear.
“William must have fallen in,” he said. “Let’s go!”
We all sprinted away from the house in the direction of the river.
Micah Duff had also heard Emma’s cries for help. At Emma’s first scream he had burst out of the cabin that Papa and Uncle Ward had fixed up for him. He now flew across the ground in the direction of the sounds.
He reached the river twenty or thirty seconds ahead of the rest of us. He was just in time to see three horses disappearing around a bend in the river, two lumpy burlap bags slung over two of their saddles. He looked about hastily and saw signs of a scuffle. Seconds later he was sprinting back for the house. He intercepted us about a third of the way there.
“Somebody’s taken Emma and William!” he yelled as he ran straight past us for the house. “They’re on horseback!”
Dread filled me. We had tried to keep Emma hidden and protected for so long. Had her worst fears finally come to pass? I swallowed hard as Micah continued on as fast as he could run. Just as he reached the barn, Uncle Ward rode in from town. Though his horse was hot and tired, it was already saddled. Micah grabbed the reins from his hands, and in less than five seconds was disappearing at full gallop toward the river. Uncle Ward stared after Micah in bewilderment until we all ran back into the yard a minute later and quickly explained.
Micah lashed and kicked at his horse, making an angle he hoped would intercept the three horses he had seen earlier. He had no idea where they were going, unless it was toward Greens Ford, a narrow section of river that was shallow enough to cross easily and cut a mile off the distance to town by avoiding the bridge downstream.
He reached Greens Ford but there was no sign of them.
Frantically he tried to still Uncle Ward’s jittery horse enough to listen. A hint of dust still swirled in the air where the ground had been stirred up beyond the ford but on the same side of the river. He bolted toward it. If they had not crossed the ford, where were they going? Why were they following the river?
Suddenly a chill seized him. The rapids . . . and the treacherously deep pool bordered by a cliff on one side and high boulders on the other!
He lashed the horse to yet greater speed, then swung up the bank.
Three minutes later he dismounted and ran down a steep rocky slope. He heard them now. They were at the place he feared!
Thinking desperately, he crept closer.
Suddenly a scream sounded.
“William . . . somebody help us!” shrieked a girl’s voice. “Dey’s got William . . . help!”
Micah sprinted down the precarious slope toward the river.
“What the—” a man exclaimed. “How did she get that thing loose?”
“Just shut her up!” shouted another.
“It doesn’t matter now. Let’s do what we came to do!”
One more wild scream pierced the air, then a great splash. It was followed by another.
“That ought to take care of them . . . let’s get out of here!”
Seconds later three horses galloped away as Micah ran frantically out onto an overhanging ledge of rock some twenty feet above a deep black pool of the river. He saw two widening circles rippling across the surface of the water.
He ripped off his boots, stepped back, then took two running strides forward and flew into the air. With a mighty splash he hit the water and dove deep into the river’s depths. But he could only see a few feet in the murky flow and could find nothing before he was forced back to the surface for air. He shot up, breathing desperately, sucked in what air he could in a second or two, then dove again. Up and down two or three times he went, struggling for breath, swimming in a frenzy, diving as deep into the river’s depths as possible and feeling about wildly with his hands and feet.
Again he burst above the surface, drew in a great gasping breath, and dove again, this time straight for the bottom.
Suddenly his fingers brushed past something! He kicked wildly to get himself deeper. There it was again.
It was burlap!
He grabbed at it and took hold, but the weight was too heavy to lift. His lungs nearly bursting, he flew again to the surface, gulped his lungs full of air, then dove straight down to the same spot.
With both hands he took hold of the bag and pulled with all his might, struggling desperately with its weight up to the surface. He felt the struggle of life inside the bag. It was a body—Emma’s body—and still alive!
With all the effort he could summon, he swam toward the river’s edge and lugged the bag out of the water and onto the few treacherous rocks of the thin shoreline. The moment his own footing was secure he ripped and yanked at the neck of the bag. A moment later Emma’s head burst through it, gasping for air and spitting out water. She threw her arms around Micah, babbling and crying and kissing him, hardly realizing what she was doing. Then suddenly she remembered.
“William . . . where’s my William?” she cried in terrified panic.
But already Micah had left Emma and was back into the river. Again he dove straight into its depth, unable to hear behind him Emma’s sobbing and frantic shouts.
Papa and Uncle Ward had jumped on a couple of horses bareback, taking time only to pull bridles over their heads. Papa leaned down to take my hand and pulled me up behind him onto the horse’s back. Uncle Ward did the same with Katie, and off we flew in the direction Micah had disappeared. It was all I could do to keep from falling off as I hung on desperately around Papa’s waist.
It wasn’t hard to follow the sounds—first from Micah’s galloping horse, then as we drew closer from Emma’s frantic and terrified cries.
We reached the river, hurriedly dismounted, and ran down the steep and treacherous slope as carefully as we could. Ahead of us we heard the splashing and thrashing of water in the midst of Emma’s wails.
We reached the edge of the cliff where Micah’s boots lay. What we saw did not look good.
Micah was diving again and again into the river, disappearing for thirty or forty seconds at a time, then flying up past the surface, gasping for two or three breaths, then disappearing from sight again.
Uncle Ward quickly threw off his boots. “You never did learn to swim, did you?” he said to Papa.
Papa shook his head.
“I learned in California,” replied Uncle Ward. “The hard way.”
“Then I’ll ride back and get a length of rope!” said Papa. “We’re going to need it to get them up out of there.”
Even as Papa began making his way back up the incline to the horses, the splash of Uncle Ward hitting the water sounded behind him.
Suddenly it seemed to g
et real quiet. Emma’s sobs at the water’s edge had softened to a quiet whimpering. Katie and I stood and watched in silence. Even though it was the hottest day of the year so far, a chill swept through me.
Micah and Uncle Ward were under the water so long that everything stilled around us. It got so quiet we began to hear the birds in the nearby trees. Then suddenly Micah burst again to the surface with a cry and gasp for air, then swam frantically toward Emma. Behind him he was hauling another burlap bag.
“William!” shrieked Emma, “William . . . you found my William!”
By now Uncle Ward had also resurfaced and swam after him. Exhausted from the effort, Micah struggled onto the rocky edge of the river and fumbled desperately to open the bag. Its weight, it was now clear, was not merely from William but from several large rocks that had been added to it.
Gently he lifted William’s limp form out of the sack. Emma’s hands and lips were desperate to grab and fondle and kiss her son, but somehow she knew she must leave him in Micah’s care awhile longer. Micah was probing the tiny mouth with his finger. He laid William on his stomach across his legs and whacked on his back two or three times. Still there was no movement. He turned William over and now bent down and placed his own mouth over William’s and blew into it. He continued to do so for several minutes.
All of us held our breaths, not realizing how much time had gone by until Papa appeared with the rope.
Finally Micah slumped back and handed William’s body to Emma. She clutched him to her breast, weeping frantically and rocking slowly back and forth.
Micah glanced up to where we stood and slowly shook his head.
Katie drew in a sharp breath of shock and disbelief.
“Oh, God . . . please, God—no!” she said under her breath.
My eyes stung. The next moment Katie and I were sobbing in each other’s arms.
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