Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  “Don’ never do that. Not even in fun. Man don’ know whether it be loaded or not. If’n the pan flash, man might turn some pair of breeches brown.” He said it all with such solemnity that it took them a moment to realize that he had made a joke of it. While they laughed, Lolly leaned over to him and hit him on the arm.

  “Didn’ mean nothin, Cese.” He looked sheepish, as he always did when a joke went wrong or no one laughed with him.

  “No harm done, Lolly.” Any rancor Caesar might have felt was expelled by the man’s obvious competence. Joking or not, he had watched and learned.

  Next it was Old Ben’s turn; although he had fired the gun before, he wanted the practice. Caesar gave him a ball and enough powder to drive it; Ben had earned a real shot. He put powder in the pan, spun the musket in his hands and put powder in the barrel and pushed a ball down atop it, seated on a little patch of oiled muskrat hide. He had to push hard on the ramrod to seat the ball, and he looked carefully at Caesar’s mark on the ramrod to make sure the ball was fully seated. Then he took careful aim at the billet of wood across the clearing and fired. He didn’t hit the wood, but sandy soil flew in the sun close to his point of aim, if a little short. The others cheered his shooting.

  Caesar swayed a little as he recovered the musket. He coached Tom through the motions of loading, but he looked green and seemed to be struggling with his body to stay upright.

  “You sick, Caesar?” asked Ben directly.

  “Somethin’ I ate. I feel like somebody kicked me.”

  “You get out o’ the sun, then, an’ don’ be foolish.” Ben took control of the gun and its associated pouch and began to move the whole party back toward their camp. By the time they reached it, Tom and Lolly had to carry Caesar.

  She never closed her eyes, not when he was in her, not when he stroked her, not even when she crooned to him at the end of her passion. But those odd golden eyes looked at him with some intent, and he could lose himself in their light. When they were in the half-dark barn, those eyes seemed to have a slight glow, like the last of a sunset, and the first time he had loved her, he had put a hand in front of her eyes to see if they really cast some light. It was like that for him; she scared him a little.

  At first he had thought that tremor of fear came from his long abstinence. It had been a year or more since he had been in a woman—any woman at all—and his wife, a fine woman, had never had the fire this one had, or the shape. But as he came back for her again and again, against his own judgment, he began to be afraid that she had taken something of his soul, or had bound him. He even wondered if it was all the power of her eyes.

  The men at the camp knew he was with a woman. Jim had been quick to tell them about the first encounter and had probably watched the second. Caesar didn’t know; he lay on a pile of brush under a bower in the camp, and they had to carry him back and forth to empty himself. Virgil tried not to think that Caesar was probably dying. He lost himself in her eyes again and reached beneath her to slip his hands under her and raise her body into his strokes. She liked to be touched constantly when he was in her, and pouted if he paid her too little mind, but she never talked. In fact, he didn’t know anything about her, except that the slave-takers owned her.

  But just as he lost himself in the act again, that last thought burned through him, so that his whole body stiffened a little and she made a little grunting noise like a question. She was very good at reading him.

  She belonged to the two slave-takers. He knew their names, now: Bludner and Weymes. And he wondered why two white men owned the most beautiful black woman near the swamp and didn’t use her.

  It was his third time with her, and only now, at the brink of his own vast satisfaction, did he really wonder why she lay with him. It might have unmanned him completely—the icy hand of betrayal on his prick—but she opened her eyes wide, and her cunny gave a little pulse, as if grabbing him to her, and he was past his fear, and she seemed the only thing in the world. He pinched her nipples, hard, and held her face in his big hands, and they both spasmed together, beyond ecstasy for a moment. Then he didn’t know where she went; he went straight back to the fear of betrayal.

  He rolled off her, stroking her with his left hand to keep her passive while he looked out of the long crack between the barn’s boards. He could see down into the yard. The old slave couple were willing conspirators, warning them when anyone approached the barn, but Virgil had known from the first that the old woman didn’t fancy young Sally one bit. Perhaps her man wanted Sally, old as he was. That would be no odd thing. Or perhaps Sally didn’t talk to the old couple any more than she talked to him. She was odd, a sort of magical creature, too handsome for the dirt and tangle of real life. Even now, as he watched for the two white men with the long guns and assumed that she had betrayed him, he wanted her.

  “Them slave-takers comin’ fo’ me?” he asked, suddenly.

  She turned her face a little away.

  “Sally,” he started, and then couldn’t think of what to say. A profession of love didn’t seem appropriate; he lacked the will to threaten her. He turned her head to face him, and stared into those deep golden eyes that seemed guileless. “Sally, I need to know. Wheah ah they?”

  “Don’ know.”

  “Is they comin’ fo’ me?”

  “They don’ wan’ you.” She turned on her side so that her heavy breasts rolled on to the straw, a movement that always caught his eye. She smiled when she saw how he watched her, even now.

  “They know I’m heah?”

  “They don’ wan’ you. They wan’ the otha’ man, the one killed all the white folk.”

  “They know wheah he is?”

  “They follow you, big man. An’ they wan’ follow you today, to be sho.”

  He stopped stroking her. Somehow, she had said too much—enough to let him know how well she knew the slave-takers, how much of their plans she understood, how little she cared about him. He didn’t really expect her to resist them; it was too hard for a slave woman to resist a man, and he knew it too well. But there were other ways to rebel, and she wasn’t following them. He thought now that he could guess why the old woman disliked her. He pulled his breeches on and his shirt; he had laid the shirt under them to keep her off the scratchy old straw, and it smelled of her. She just watched him, naked. The first woman he had ever known for whom nakedness seemed to mean nothing, as if she preferred it to clothes. His wife had been much shyer.

  “I won’ be back. You need to get clear of they two slave-takers, girl.”

  “I may. Fat lot you know about me.” She wasn’t sullen, just direct, and again he wondered at how little he knew her. He still had one of their two pistols, and he checked the prime, stuck it in the back of his waistband. Then he jumped, caught a beam and swung to the hard-packed floor of the barn, avoiding the creak of the roped wooden ladder that let on to the little loft. He didn’t know where they were or how they were watching him; for all he knew, she was signaling them even now. That didn’t seem so bad, if he could get one of them before they got him, but he suspected they knew he was armed. He suspected they knew all about him. The barn had only one door and he slipped through it and into the tall weeds in seconds, expecting a rifle ball in the back as he moved, but there was no shot, no movement, no call for a chase. He began to breathe a little easier, and then he realized that there was no sound of voices anywhere; that the farmer and his old male slave were still in the field, but no one else seemed to be around. He had expected to find the boy, Jim, who waited for him every time. He wanted, suddenly, to know, and he looked for Jim in the brush at the edge of the clearing. Failing that, he moved as cautiously as he could into the brush pile behind the little windowless cabin where the two old slaves lived. He slipped up on the little cabin from the big cabin’s blind spot and scratched the door with a stick.

  “Who theah?” called the old woman.

  “Virgil,” he answered softly, going through the door.

  “You best be off, b
oy.” She was cooking on her little mud hearth, making johnnycakes on a flat rock with some meat fat. They smelled delicious.

  “You seen my Jim?”

  “I seen more than Jim. Damn, all you young men is fools. They two men is followin’ yo’ Jim, and they’ll take him, an’ you too. All because you have to wet yo’ prick.”

  Virgil felt his face get hot; it was like being admonished by his mother or aunt. But he could think quickly when it mattered, and he knew that the camp was in danger if Jim was running for it with the two whites on his trail.

  “How long back did they start?”

  “Half an hour. They took guns, boy. You bettah run.”

  “I got a gun of my own, momma. You take care.”

  “It’s that Sally, ain’t it, boy? She sets you up and they takes you?”

  “She jus’ does what she has to, momma.” He couldn’t raise an anger for Sally; and the old woman really reminded him of his mother. Virgil found himself thinking about things he hadn’t troubled himself about since he came to the swamp. He shook his head as if to clear it of thoughts. He slipped out the door and back into the weeds, found Jim’s trail, and started to notice what he hadn’t seen before—clear sign of two big men in boots following the boy. He checked his prime again and set off at a run.

  Up in the barn, Sally wiped herself with a bit of tow she kept to hand and then wiped her body with straw before she pulled her shift on, and then pulled her petticoats over her head and then over her breasts. She never liked taking a man in her clothes; it was so much nicer being naked. She wriggled a bit to settle the petticoat, and then pulled her strings taut and tied them off, and began to look for her pockets and her apron. The men who owned her didn’t care if she did a lick of work beyond what they kept her for, but she didn’t like to be called useless by a wise old woman like Old Sukey. She went down to the garden where Virgil had found her and got her hoe, humming a little in her throat.

  Virgil ran and ran, slowing from time to time to listen to the swamp, or just to get his breath. After the third stop his breath was ragged and uneven, and he felt winded. He was in good shape, but the uneven diet told, and running in the swamp was as fatiguing to the mind—which had to make judgments every second—as it was to the body. He checked his priming again, tapped the powder back to the bottom of the pan, and moved off no faster than a quick walk. It was the best he could do.

  Caesar squatted over his log, emptying himself into the pool of filth he had created over the last few days. It stank so badly that the other men went somewhere else. They were afraid of him, now—afraid of his fever and the death they all thought they saw on him. Sometimes, in the evening like this, he was pretty lucid; he could look around and see that he was not being chased through endless swamp by some nameless horror that had pursued him for days since the fever hit him. In the evening, the horror abated and he knew himself and the camp, although he was so weak he couldn’t raise his hands for water. And he seemed to want water all the time.

  But the dream was still apparently with him tonight because he could hear Jim shouting something from the trail at the edge of the camp and then there was a shot. It wasn’t their fowler; it was a sharper bang, almost like a crack of lightning, and adrenaline put a little energy in his body, although it had taken the whole force of his will to drag his near-naked body from his pallet to this log.

  Someone was screaming, and there was a second shot that cut off the scream like a knife cutting off the last squeals of a hog. Caesar threw himself forward and pulled his breeches up, trying in vain to button them and feeling filthy for not having wiped himself, but the unmistakable sound of a third shot, this one from the fowler, drove him on. He tried to crawl forward, but the effort was too much for him, at least for a moment, and he lay, still and defeated, and listened to the renewed screams from the camp.

  He wasn’t sure if it was the dream or not, but for a moment a tall, ferret-faced white man was towering over him, pointing a little pistol at his belly, and he felt very alone. Then the man spoke, and it was all very clear and slow but not, terrifyingly, a dream.

  “He’s skinny as a polecat, Mr. Bludner. Thin. Got the swamp fevuh. He’s dead already.”

  “Leave him. We’ll get him when we round up the othuhs.” And the narrow face was gone.

  Slave-takers. If he wasn’t in the dream, he needed to get away. If they knew he had killed Gordon, he couldn’t allow himself to be taken. He began to crawl toward the water, only a few feet beyond the trail. It was deep here—full of things, but deep. He pulled himself along and kicked with his legs, sweating away every bit of water his bowels had left him, and he heard the sharp crack of the rifles again, not far away in the bush, and then he was sliding into the water.

  He had some distant notion of hiding. Indeed, he had little expectation of anything after he reached the water. But it was so cold that it seemed to wake him up and charge him with energy, and he swam out into the deepest part, where they bathed, and then across toward the green scum where the big fish and the biggest frogs lived on the far side.

  Virgil heard the shots and knew he was too late, but he didn’t slow himself, bursting into the edge of the camp only a few moments after the first flurry of fire. He couldn’t tell, as Caesar could, the different pieces by their different sounds, but he was unsurprised to find Lolly lying dead in a vast pool of blood, his gut shot and a small hole in the middle of his face, right at the top of his nose. The back of his head was all over the inside of their little wigwam. His eyes were wide open. It might have made Virgil sick, but he was too angry, and he blamed himself. He ran on. Old Ben lay in the clearing, the old fowler fallen beside

  him. He was mewling like a kitten, making pitiful noises every time he exhaled. Both hands clutched at his belly, which was caked in mud and blood and something worse, something gray that was leaking out of him. He didn’t scream. He just lay and made that dreadful noise. Virgil paused and looked at him, and then reached down and stripped the little pouch and horn for the fowler over the old man’s head. Old Ben didn’t resist, but he didn’t seem to know what was happening, either, and he let out a mournful sound when Virgil rolled him back on his side. Virgil tried to be gentle, but he knew he was hurting the old man by the time he got the powder horn. It had to be done.

  He picked up the fowler and moved along the trail where, apparently, Ben had fallen while the others ran. The whites must be right on them, although the forest was somehow quieter. He moved to the edge of the camp and took shelter in the shadow of a giant tree, and elected to wait. He had learned this while hunting with Caesar: when you don’t know exactly what your quarry is doing, be silent and wait.

  Something moved in the deepest part of the river, but he didn’t pay it much mind. Twice he heard voices, softly, but the day was fading fast and nothing seemed to get any closer to him, and then, suddenly, they were both in the clearing, and Virgil realized that it was much darker than he had thought.

  “That thin boy crawled away.”

  “No mattuh, Weymes. We kilt the old man with the gun. We’ll claim his bounty an’ the younguh one, too. We got the one I caught.” He laughed. “If’n they was all this easy, this would be a good an’ godly way to live, Weymes. Wheah’d you leave the one you tied?”

  “Up the trail. Come on, Mr. Bludner. If you don’ min’ the swamp in the dark, I do.”

  “I don’ think of you as a delicate flowuh, Brother Weymes.” The taller of the two men bent over Old Ben and cut his throat, then cut the whole top of the skin of his head away. The shorter man did the same to Lolly. Ben’s little moans had stopped some time since, and Virgil told himself that the poor man had been dead before his throat was cut, but the image of the act stayed with Virgil for the rest of his life.

  Virgil thought of shooting at them, there and then, but they had the boy, Jim, and only they knew where he was. Virgil waited some more and followed the two white men when they started back. It was several miles, and they set a fast pace, clearly u
nconcerned with pursuit. Their contempt for any opposition from the black men burned Virgil like fire. He knew he was responsible for Ben’s death and Lolly’s, and he flamed with desire for revenge, expiation and freedom from the knowledge that he had killed his friends—perhaps killed them all.

  He padded down the trail and thought about death.

  He might have run right on them and died, he was so lost inside his own guilt. Then the sounds of the swamp changed, a subtle change, more of a lack than a presence, but Virgil felt it and he stopped, disoriented, and listened to the silence. A crow cawed away in front of him. Something had spooked the crow and everything else.

  Ahead of him, Jim began to cry out in pain. Virgil was determined not to lose the boy, and he pressed on, no slower but with his attention focused on the task at hand. He saw a flicker of white among the trees, and then another. One of the men was in a shirt and the pale linen gave him away. They were stopped by a tree on the trail.

  They were cutting the boy down from the tree.

  He was almost on them; the boy was there, and his heart rose.

  Virgil didn’t hesitate, or plan. He ran down the trail—better trampled today than ever before—until he came to the little space where it crossed two tiny streams in a dozen feet. The two whites and the boy were just beyond the streams, where the boy had been tied tightly to a swamp oak. His returning circulation caused him to flop on the ground with more force than he could have used in full control of his limbs, and for a moment he was free of his captors, though too far gone to help himself. He rolled and spasmed, the agony of the returning blood more powerful than any desire to run.

  When Virgil was just a few feet from the taller man, whom Virgil had marked as the more dangerous, the man looked up and bellowed a warning. He tried to lever himself up from the crouch he was in and move back off the trail, but fell backwards, helpless and off balance. Virgil snapped his pistol in the big man’s face, and the prime flashed, but the barrel didn’t fire. Virgil kicked the man as hard as he could and whirled, dropping the pistol and looking for the little man, who was pointing a rifle at him a few feet away in the soft moonlight and smiling. The smile died as the man realized that his rifle was uncocked—that he had made a fool’s mistake and not reloaded after the last shot. Virgil’s fowler was loaded with shot, and the shot flew a little high in Virgil’s inexperienced hands, ripping into the man’s face and hands. He screamed, but he was not new to pain, and even as he fell he reached in his hunting pouch for a pistol. Virgil, his mind suddenly clear of doubt and his actions written out for him like morning orders, held the fowler, picked up the pistol he had dropped, plucked the crippled boy off the trail and ran into the dark. A shot barked at them, and then another, but Virgil clutched his precious burdens and ran.