“It is a hypothesis many would find disturbing, sir.”
“And it works both ways.” Rat shuddered visibly. “When I think of some of . . . my experiences.”
“You find you have not always chosen your companions with an eye toward eternal conjoinment, sir?”
Rat didn’t reply directly. “What do you think of confession, Cummings?”
“It is widely reputed to be good for the soul, sir,” said Cummings, buttering the toast.
“How’s it done?”
“Sir?” said Cummings, a little startled. He was native of a time when the answer to such questions were taken with mother’s milk. “You mean where does one go?”
“A priest, I suppose?”
“Adherents of certain faiths discover absolution through an intermediary, sir. Yes. Others appeal directly to the Deity in the quietude of their hearts, I am given to understand.”
“Well, I’m not exactly on speaking terms,” said Rat, studying his soul. “So you’ll have to do.”
“Me, sir? I’m hardly—”
“Is there anyone else on the island?”
Cummings saw that he was trapped. “No, sir. No one sensate.”
“Then buckle your seat belt, Cummings, and secure it tightly. I’m about to unload.”
Cummings’ eyes flashed about the room, as if in search of escape. “I’m really not, I’m not . . .” For the first time he was at a loss for words. It was a novel and uncomfortable sensation.
“Sit, Cummings,” said Rat, slapping his palm on the stool that sat before the dresser. “Open both ears to their considerable extent.”
“Yes, sir.”
And so Harold Erasmus Jackson applied the Roto-Rooter of his conscience to the most private precincts of his heart. Darkened rooms whose doors he’d always kept securely bolted, even against the prying eye of his own memory, stood wide open. Nothing held back. Nothing hidden. At the conclusion, he felt better. Better than better. He felt purged. As if an ancient, ossified knot of incorporeal constipation had given way, releasing a tidal wave of vigorous, purifying luminescence to surge unimpeded through his spiritual plumbing, scouring and cleansing.
Cummings, on the other hand, had not fared so well. His had been a sheltered existence, despite his vicarious share in the lives of others, and Rat’s seven hours of undiluted purgation left him blinking uncontrollably. While the Resident’s karma might have shed fifty pounds, Cummings’ felt not merely as if he’d been standing behind the Refuse Wagon when it unloaded, but that he had, at the time, been wearing a costume with many deep pockets, and a hat with a wide brim, all of which were now stuffed with the steaming residue of Rat Badger’s crimes and misdemeanors.
Rat breathed deeply as Cummings folded him beneath a straw blanket. “I feel like a small, furry woodland creature,” he said with a smile, “newborn and crammed to the brim with joyful juices. Clean as the proverbial whistle. Where do you suppose that saying came from, Cummings? Whistles spend much of their professional lives in people’s mouths, don’t they? Not the cleanest of places. Dogs’ mouths, say scientists who are given grants to study such things, are cleaner.”
Cummings moved his mouth, but nothing came out.
“You look like a large, unhappy fish, Cummings. Anything wrong?”
“I . . . we . . . you . . . you have lived a full life, sir,” said Cummings, for whom Rat’s confession was still hot off the presses—the headlines, leading paragraphs, and sidebars burning shocking images in his brain.
“A bucket full of manure is still only a bucket full of manure,” Rat philosophized. “No more! I’ve changed. When next I gaze into the eyes of my soul, I expect capital improvements observable from a vehicle passing at considerable speed.” He searched the room for his reflection. “Speaking of my soul, Cummings, where did you put it?”
“Here, sir,” said Cummings, placing a tin oil lamp on the dirt floor by Rat’s head, its solitary wick waving a feeble flame like a flag of surrender. The walls it illuminated were of a shallow cave recently dug by hand in rich, red dirt.
The reflection in the lamp was blurred and indistinct, but Rat was able to tell that it was of a black man, somewhat past forty, that he was raggedly dressed, and that he was covered with grime and sweat. He had been running.
“You may go about your duties, Cummings,” said Rat sleepily. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
But Cummings was already gone. The night wrapped itself around Rat like a warm, moist blanket. The air was so thick it stuck in the throat and nostrils. Rat felt the man’s heart thumping frantically in his chest. He tasted the fear on his dry tongue. His name was Kinde, and he couldn’t rest long. Soon the dogs would catch his scent on the forest trail. He’d have to run again, to the river that formed the imaginary boundary between the north and the south. Hell and the Promised Land, where finally he would be free of the . . .
Slaveholder
The fifteenth night
The dogs weren’t Kinde’s greatest fear. That was reserved for the runners—other slaves whose wives and children were held as ransom toward successful completion of the mission. Should a runner fail his appointed task, his family would be sold away from him. Its older members might even be killed. He had been a runner himself. Only fear drove the runaway, but the runner was motivated as much by love, the desperate need to protect his family. A man with little to call his own will give all he has to fulfill his responsibilities as husband and father.
Provoked by a witch’s brew of powerful emotions, runners were as ruthless as they were relentless. Most often they beat the runaway senseless, so there was no danger of his escaping as they dragged him back to the Dahgwa, the master. If the blows killed him, the master would have them whipped for their carelessness, deprive them of food for a few days, but overall the economy wouldn’t suffer. A dead runaway was a powerful example, worth his bone’s weight in gold.
A runaway was a curse on his fellow slaves.
Kinde had become a curse.
Five miles. No more than that to the river. Already he had come eight, maybe nine, miles through field and swamp. His legs were covered with leeches; these he burned away with the lamp. As soon as he heard the dogs barking in the distance, he would snuff the wick, but for now it was his only company, his physician, his talisman against the demons that roamed the night, feasting upon souls. He stared, wide-eyed, into the darkness of the strange land. He’d never been so far from the plantation. His heart still shook his chest, but his panting had given way to deep, regular breathing.
If only his legs would stop shaking. A knot had formed in his right thigh. He stretched out his leg and massaged it vigorously. He could feel it seizing up.
Five miles.
There were alligators in the surrounding swamp. Poisonous snakes. Scorpions. A devil’s menagerie of deadly creatures between him and the river. Between him and freedom.
He was exhausted. His eyelids, heavy as stones, scratched his eyeballs with cinders of sleep. His head rolled back against the wall, dislodging a small cascade of dirt that tumbled down his back, cool and soft-footed.
Why had he run? It had been decided on the spur of the moment. The overseer was working another field, the driver dozing in his tree, little fearing an escape. Everyone knew the consequences.
Consequences. What consequences were there for Kinde? Starvation had taken his wife and children long ago in the summer of the locusts. There was no one to threaten him with. The other slaves? Most of them were from tribes he didn’t know. They were newly arrived and didn’t even speak the master’s language. He barely understood them himself. They meant nothing to him.
Yet it had been they who had awakened the whispers of freedom. He had overheard them as they talked of it on their cots, their words ravenous with hunger to recapture this strange beast, this wild delicacy whose taste lingered on their tongues. Thought of it possessed them, drove them to madness. In the darkness, they conspired against the master; in the bravery of their imaginings
risking everything for the sake of bending this uncertain god to their will. In the sunlight, though, they were docile, their eyes upon the ground, their backs bent to their work.
Kinde had never been free, had never conceived of freedom. His mother had been born to the household of the master’s father. He had been born to the master. He had worked the same fields and forest for forty years as his father had, and would do so until he died, either of old age or at the master’s pleasure. Meantime, if the master fed him, this was good. If a day or two passed when there was no food, this, too, was as the master pleased. That was the order of things. It had always been that way.
But the word wouldn’t let him go. It was alive. Freedom. It burrowed into his brain, waking him with forbidden whispers in the middle of the night; calling to him from the distance on those rare occasions during the day when he raised his eyes from his work long enough to consider the horizon; in his moments of leisure, sitting by the fire with his pipe, it painted strange fancies and horrors in the fallow places of his mind.
It frightened him, this freedom. To have no surety of the day? To have to trust to one’s own thoughts? To rely on one’s own wits for a roof overhead? To have to put food in the mouths of your wife and children, and clothes on their backs! The notion congealed the blood in his veins. Even in so light a thing as his thoughts, the burden was suffocating. The responsibility crushing. Yet, the master lived with these things everyday, not for himself and his family only, but for all his slaves.
Kinde prayed for his master.
In time the new slaves were new no more. They stopped talking of regaining their freedom. Each day left them too tired and feeble to lift their heads and sniff the weakening perfume of dreams. Instead, they began to remember it aloud, to relive the time when time was their own; each day a treasure in their own purse, shiny and golden, to spend as they wished. Before their captivity, back in the villages of their distant countries, they would hunt when they wanted to. Or fish. Or forage the forest. Or dance and sing. Or retell the stories of the old ones, and in retelling polish them to deeper sheen with the lusty cloth of their imagination, revealing new dimensions in oft-told tales. And they would feast! By the time Kinde realized that it was in eavesdropping on these memories that the danger lay, it was too late. Freedom had taken shape. Whatever it was, it had ignited coals in the tinder of his heart where they smoldered and when, one day, they burst into flame, his feet would catch fire that no amount of reason could contain. He would run.
But where? Where did this freedom live? How far away? How could he be sure to run to it, and not away from it?
At night he listened carefully to the slaves and learned from their conversation—not as hushed and conspiratorial as it once was—that freedom lay beyond the border, where the north becomes the south. Just beyond the river, twelve miles away.
Twelve miles! Kinde had heard the cattlemen speak of a fence that wound through the forest at the edge of the plantation, but he’d never dreamed of going there. That, to him, was the end of the world. Twelve miles beyond! Twelve miles of swamps and hardship . . . to freedom.
When the day came, Kinde was surprised to find that the plan had already been made, somewhere deep in his subconscious, that in dwelling upon freedom so long he had unwittingly resolved to have it.
It was purely by chance that he looked up to see the driver nodding off in the tree. Purely by chance that the overseer was absent. Purely by chance that every other head was bowed toward the work. Purely by chance that he was so near the trees.
Without a thought, he dropped his scythe and, before it settled on the ground, had concealed himself in the forest. He hid himself behind a grandfatherly oak and looked back toward the field. No one had noticed he’d gone. The driver still nodded in the tree. The other slaves picked away at the earth; one of them started singing, and the others joined in. Vultures lolled and rose over distant trees. Crickets crowded the air with bawdy songs, and the sun threw dollops of transparent light through the cool, broad leaves of the trees.
Kinde tried to swallow his heart. He was not yet missed. It was not too late. He could go back, to the safety of the known. To the field and to his work. To his evening meal. To his pipe and the comfort of his fireside gods. To the confidence and familiar cruelty of his slavery. He studied the forest before him. The solace of his gods wouldn’t find him there. Even the master’s god, which ruled over all others on the plantation, would be daunted by a place so deep and undiscovered.
In the court of his mind, the members of his consciousness assembled—his spirit, his heart, his will, and that unnamed and unpredictable ingredient that flies in the face of them all—and fought out his fate. But all debate was overridden by his feet, which took flight and followed themselves deeper and deeper into the forest. Farther away from the known. With every step a degree closer to the perilous regions of Freedom.
Thus far freedom was a nervous companion, leaping at every sound, forcing his eyes to the end of their stalks at every trick of the light, presenting a host of horrible possibilities to his anxious imagination.
The horrors were real enough. He’d pulled the half-eaten corpses of slaves from the water himself. He was no stranger to the scorpion’s sting. Or to the mosquitoes who delivered disease with their sting, slower, but no less deadly.
The lamp went out of its own accord. Kinde fell asleep.
When he woke it was the dead of night and, much too close, he could hear the dogs barking. Startled, he leapt to his feet, knocking the tin lamp from its narrow shelf. It fell to the floor and rattled among some loose stones. Kinde held his breath, but in vain. The runners had heard the clatter and were yelling in the distance.
Kinde threw himself into the night, which embraced him with fiendish delight, tearing at him with thorns and nettles, sucking at his feet with muddy lips, bringing him to a near-standstill, but it was too late now to turn back. The barks of the dogs and the calls of the runners were closing in. He ran on.
His one hope was that the swamp would become deep enough so he could swim a bit, even a few strokes, which would be enough to put the dogs off his scent. But the hope was not realized. Within minutes the swamp became a bog, slurping at his ankles. It seemed to pull him down, but it wasn’t deep enough.
Still, he trudged on.
Less than an hour ’til dawn. He could hear the mighty river not a mile away. At first he thought he had eluded his pursuers all night, then, from the baying of the dogs, he realized they had simply taken the high ground along the northern shore. He would have taken it, too, had he known it existed. And he would have been captured.
Perhaps his gods were watching out for him after all. Perhaps they were hiding him from the all-seeing eye of the master’s god. If so, they would have to work doubly hard once he broke into the clear on the far side of the swamp and made his dash to the river. Even now the trees had thinned and it was more darkness than foliage that concealed him from the dogs and the runners. Soon even that would be gone. He must get to the river first.
A few low hills bordered the swamp and, scrambling to the top of one of these, he caught his first glimpse of the river. It was far wider than he had imagined. The only thing he’d heard called a river was a small stream that ran through a shallow valley to the west of the slaves’ huts, where they bathed, and washed their clothes, and dipped their cooking and drinking water. It was friendly and cool and inviting. Nothing like this broad, silver serpent meandering through the land, splitting the world in two! No matter how loudly freedom called from the opposite shore, he could never swim that river.
He was trapped in the north.
Off to the right, the dogs and the runners had circumnavigated the swamp and were making their way toward him along the river’s edge. Kinde, bloodied, bruised, and covered with eel grass and slime, sank to his knees in the mud. He had kept them at it all night. They would not be gentle with him.
“Why did you do such a foolish thing, Kinde?” said the master. “You shame
your ancestors. You shame the gods who made you what you are!”
Kinde, who would have dropped to his knees before his master if the runners hadn’t forced him to them, despised himself. Tears ran down his mud-caked face. He believed the master was right, that it was his place to be a slave, and that in attempting to free himself, he had dishonored his gods. “I don’t know, master,” he cried. “I listened to voices.”
“Voices? What voices? What if my other slaves hear them, and run away? What then?”
Kinde bowed his face into the dirt. “Kill me, master.”
“I will do what I must,” said the master. “You see what you have brought upon yourself by running away? Did you imagine you could live as your betters? You are too base a creature for freedom, Kinde. It would destroy you. That is what I have protected you from all these years! And this is how you repay me?”
Kinde thought of his brief freedom, and how painful it had been. “I am not deserving of your mercy, master.”
“No,” said the master. “You aren’t. Nor shall you have it. It can’t be allowed. You must see that. I must protect my other slaves. I can’t think only of your welfare. You disgrace me, Kinde, and all of the kindness I have shown you.”
And so Kinde was buried up to his neck in the center of the compound, and his head was covered with honey for the ants.
It was the way slaves had always been dealt with in the village, for a thousand years.
The last thing Rat saw through Kinde’s eyes as, in the extremes of his agony, he looked up at the master, was a tall, sinewy man, his flesh as black as oil, on whose head was a circlet of gold. The eyes of the master—the village chieftain—were familiar, as was the shape of his face, the slight bulge at the crown of the nose, the curve of the chin. They were family traits, all inherited by Harold Erasmus Jackson . . . last living descendent of a slaveholder.
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