A glow emanated from the stable floor: not the flickering yellow of fire, but something softer, fainter, sulfurous. I crawled to the edge of the loft and peered over. My heart stopped.
My father’s spirit stood in the center of the stable. He still wore the crisp, new uniform he’d worn off to war. His body had a strange, luminous quality, as if tiny candles burned within him, and his flesh and clothing let the light filter through. He stared up at me in the loft, as if he had been waiting for me to show my face and look down. His eyes held the most profound sadness.
“Papa? Papa!”
He did not answer, did not show any sign of recognition. He turned, walked toward the closed stable door, and then passed through it.
The sight of his specter engendered no fear, though one might assume it would. Instead, all I felt was a deep longing to stay in his presence. I scrambled down the ladder and burst out the door after him. He was already a ways down the path from the stable, farther than his spirit could have walked in those seconds. I ran after him.
Fast as I ran, I gained no ground. He walked at the edge of the cotton field, and as I closed on him, he was suddenly a hundred yards deeper in the plantings. I closed again, and then he was off to the right, near the field’s edge. He never looked back, never checked on my progress. He entered a trail into the woods.
“Papa!”
I rushed after him blindly into the woods, hands ahead of me fending off branches and low-hanging moss. My pulse raced.
I caught sight of his opalescent figure ahead, beside an ancient oak. Lightning had struck the tree and split it near in two. As I closed on the oak, he stepped around to the other side. I rounded the trunk and jerked to a halt. He was gone, but I’d discovered something else.
A low fire burned in a small clearing. An old slave woman sat beside it on the stump of a long-dead oak. In the darkness behind her rose the barest outline of a haphazard shack fabricated of cast-off wood.
She looked up at me from the flames with surprise. Her face was long and deeply lined, her nose narrower and longer than most Negroes’. The sharpened white bones that pierced her earlobes flashed in the firelight. Strange symbols covered the red sash about her forehead. She rose with the slow deliberation of the old and pained.
“Who are you? How did you find this place?”
Normally, I would have balked at telling the truthful answer. But her dress and demeanor led me to trust that she would believe me. “I followed my father’s spirit.”
Understanding dawned upon her weathered face. “Yes. He could see what lies hidden from the rest.”
While her camp was in the woods, her shack and fire were hardly concealed. “Hidden?”
“Within the circle.”
She pointed to the ground behind me. A trail of rough salt crossed the path. It continued in a circle around the clearing, interrupted at four equidistant points by piles of bleached human bones, one with a skull atop it.
“With the spells of my Cherokee mother, I’ve blinded the living from all within the circle. Her bones stand guard for me.”
My skin crawled as I realized that the skull whose dark sockets stared at me from the right was the crazy old woman’s mother. A Cherokee mother explained this woman’s combination of Indian and Negro features. It also explained her more educated speech, as I’d been told that the Civilized Tribe had even a written language and mastery of English. But in Mississippi, half-black still meant all slave if that person fell into the wrong hands, as she certainly had.
“The slave hunters passed me by,” she said. “Their hounds never caught my scent.”
“Wait, are you Eleeza?”
“You’ve come from Beechwood? But from the look of you, you are no Powell.”
“I work in the stables, nearly a slave for the Powells.”
She cast me a scornful look. She slid up the sleeve of her blouse. Her ropy arm carried the scars of multiple lashings. “When you can show skin like this, tell me of your life as a slave.”
I grew red-faced with shame. Poor though my position was, it did not compare with the lives of those enslaved.
“You cast a spell on the roses there,” I said, to change the subject.
“Yes. Missus Powell had brought me into the main house to work. My age made me unfit for the fields, and she saw I had more education than the rest. For slaves, she treated us better than most.
“When news came of her son’s death, she was inconsolable. She never left the house, barely left her room. In a moment of weakness, as a mother, I felt compassion for her. With my mother’s magic, I made her favorite place, the rose garden, a weak spot in the veil between this world and the next. She could feel closer to her son’s spirit there.”
“Why did you run away if life in the main house wasn’t bad?”
“After I enchanted the roses, it got bad. Master Powell flew into a rage when she told him what I’d done. Said he’d ‘brook no witchcraft’, as he called it. He had me shackled and arranged to send me to New Orleans to be sold, as a symbol to the rest of the slaves of what following witchcraft would bring them all.”
“How did you escape?”
She laughed. Her few remaining teeth were like kernels of blackened corn. “A hex bag is stronger than iron bindings, and let me slip from the Powells’ chains in the night.”
“Head north,” I said. “The Union soldiers are close. Lincoln has freed all slaves.”
“I am too old for such a journey. My Cherokee half is part of this land. And my African half still has family in Beechwood.”
“They come see you here?”
“No one sees me here. The risk is too great. They would talk about it, especially my grandson, or someone would follow them out here. My grandson’s father has promised to look out for him. It just feels better to be close to them.”
Just like it felt better to have my father’s pocket watch in my bag.
“Ramses is a twisted man,” she said. “He’d not be above torturing one of them if he thought they could give up an escaped slave.”
“I fear he’s worse than that. Slaves have been disappearing, disappearing after he takes them from their quarters at night.”
“Are they sold?”
“No one knows. They just vanish.”
“If they were sold,” she said, “Master Powell would advertise it, strike some fear into the rest.”
“There is fear enough from not knowing. There is no mention of the boys again. I would not put it past Ramses to kill them just for sport.”
“This is a bad sign. Perhaps the spirit of your father brought you here to tell me about this.” She looked across her shoulder at the eastern sky. “You must go back while you still have darkness to hide you.”
She was right. I had no idea what time I had woken up, or how long I’d been awake. Being seen by the slaves around their homes might be as bad as being seen by the Powells around theirs. In addition, slave hunters regularly patrolled the woods. How would I explain my presence? The rest of the world wouldn’t duplicate Eleeza’s blind acceptance of the tale of my father’s ghost.
Eleeza turned and disappeared into the shadows of her shack. The fire instantly shrank to embers, as if turned down like the wick of a lantern. There would be no answers for the many questions I still entertained. I backed away from her camp, careful to step over and not through the circle of salt in the sand.
Chapter Eleven
My trek back through the woods was much more deliberate then my headlong flight in. During my advance, the force of my father had drawn me forward, but on this return trip, fear of discovery shoved me from behind. Each snap of a branch or rustle of a leaf conjured visions of slave hunters prowling the woods or runaways ready to kill to stay secreted.
At the forest’s edge, I found myself at a different spot from where I’d entered. I was beside the slave quarters, not in the midst of the cotton fields. The most direct route to the stable was though the warren of log cabins. Exhaustion and fear overrode what little caution youth
kindled, and I made a dash for the lee of the nearest cabin.
No sooner had I ducked into the shadow than I heard the door of that cabin burst open. Lantern light lit the window frame above my head. My heart slammed to a gallop and I tried to make myself small. I closed my eyes, as if not seeing meant I could not be seen.
“William!” growled Ramses. “Get the hell up, boy.”
The whimpering sobs of a woman responded. “Master Powell done promised William would be treated different.”
“You see Master Powell in the doorway or you see me?” Ramses said.
“Leave him be, please,” she begged. “Take me instead.”
Ramses laughed. “Woman, you ain’t got what this boy’s gonna deliver. Not by a furlong.” The tip of his whip snapped against the wall by my head so loudly that I flinched at the impact. “Let loose that boy before I split you to the bone.”
The woman cried.
“It’s gonna be fine, Mama,” a teenage boy’s voice said. The reassuring words crackled with fear. “I’ll be back right quick. Right, Massuh Ramses?”
The whip cracked again.
“Just get out,” Ramses said. “I ain’t sayin’ it again.”
Something scuffed and shuffled inside the cabin.
“Breathe a word of this, woman,” Ramses said, “and you’ll be on the block in New Orleans to the lowest bidder.”
The door creaked open and slammed shut. I crawled around in the dirt to the front of the cabin. Ramses stood at the boy’s back, lashing his victim’s hands together. Ramses’s metal nose glowed in the low moonlight, and without his hat, the leather straps around his head looked like bindings that kept him from exploding from rage. The boy looked to be about my age, perhaps a shade older, but the poor condition of the slaves made it hard to judge. Ramses frog-marched him up the path toward the main house, a strange dance of shoving the boy and dragging his club foot that made them look like the shadow of some wounded, four legged animal.
From within the cabin came the muffled wail of the bereaved mother, no doubt screamed full force into her bedding. Her sorrow cut me to the bone. As soon as Ramses was a safe distance up the path, I scrambled across the road and between the other cabins. I ran straight for the stable.
My quicker speed and more direct route allowed me to beat Ramses back to the big house. From the inside of the stable, I watched him shove the boy to the rear of the main house. He pulled open the door to a buried root cellar between the main house and the cookhouse. He shoved the boy in. He followed him down and pulled the door shut behind him.
With the earth to hide his cries, there was no telling what tortures the boy might be enduring, but my imagination certainly attempted to fill in the gaps.
It dawned upon me that this was my second failure to take action as a man. First I’d let a woman be beaten, then left her in agony to save myself. Now I had witnessed a kidnapping and the possible prelude to murder, and hidden myself in the shadows in response. I was no match for Ramses, but between the other boy and I, we might have had a chance. I feared this cowardice in the face of evil could be my lot in life.
In the main house, a light came on in one of the ground floor rooms. I made out a shadowy mass of long hair moving beyond the thin curtains and recognized Lucinda. A piano started to play.
The Powells were so unaware of what evil unfolded in the earth beneath the plantation that Lucinda could play sweet music while a boy met some grisly fate.
But still, the burden of taking action was more than I thought I could bear. I crawled up into my loft, thankful that I had made it back undetected and terrified for the boy now trapped underground. I can say for certain that I slept not a wink that night, consumed with thoughts of the witch in the woods and the doomed boy beneath the root cellar doors.
Chapter Twelve
The break of dawn came and I rejoiced. The sun burned away the shadows of the night, and I rushed to begin my day, to busy myself with chores and to purge my mind of the previous night’s horrors.
But Victor was my first chore. The horse eyed me from the moment my feet touched the stable floor with a look far too knowing for such an animal. He could not be aware of what I’d seen, yet he seemingly smiled at me, the same look one friend would give another who now shared a great, dark secret, like a welcome to a twisted fraternity. We both knew the full depths of Ramses’s depravity.
As with the previous morning, he allowed himself to be saddled and prepared, lest his master be kept waiting. When I finished and lashed his reins to a post, he looked down at me and snorted, as if to say, “Good day, brother.”
Ramses arrived, musket upon one shoulder, club foot scraping a deeper gouge in the earth today. Was he tired from his torturous exertions the night before? Had William given him a good fight before dying? I certainly prayed so.
With each step closer he took, a great new anxiety welled up within me. Perhaps he’d seen me last night, but with his hands full of kidnapped slave, he’d said nothing. Now, alone, he’d whip me into a permanent silence. I stood frozen in fear by Victor’s side. The overseer entered the stable, his weathered face contorted into a snarl. He tapped his coiled whip against his thigh. Two black eyes bored into me like sharpened awls.
“You gonna bring me my horse, boy, or do I need to whip you into action this morning?”
I jumped and unlashed Victor’s reins. I led the horse to Ramses’s side. He slipped the musket into its custom holster and held the whip in one hand. He mounted the horse, and as soon as he was seated, brought the whip’s hard handle down across my face. The force spun my head to the side and opened a red-hot gash in my cheek. I shrank away.
“Boy, yesterday I gave you grace for your slowness, but you keep movin’ like molasses, you’ll see more than this whip’s handle. Get me?”
I clutched the searing side of my face. Warm blood seeped through my fingers. The pain brought tears to my eyes. I remembered what happened to those who cried out in pain. I nodded without looking up.
“Might as well have a damn gyp in here.” He sighed. He spun Victor on his hind legs and left the stable at a canter.
I fingered the wound upon my face. While it bled, it was not deep, little more than a scratch. But the impact would leave a bruise, and I could already sense the swelling. Eleeza would be satisfied. I had finally tasted the whip.
At the bell’s toll, I made my way to breakfast, starved from my long night’s actions. Whether William’s mother followed Ramses’s order of silence or not, word of her son’s kidnapping somehow spread. The cookhouse was rife with rumors as I picked up my morning porridge.
William’s disappearance was big news. But another development was bigger still. His mother was dead, found hanged from a rafter in her cabin.
I nearly dropped my bowl as I overheard that news. She’d most certainly been alive when I’d departed, and Ramses would not have dragged his crippled foot all the way back there to kill a woman he’d certainly terrified into silence. She could have only died at her own hand. And who could blame her?
However, the rumor mill ground out the rest of the story with a most strange twist. Ramses wasn’t mentioned as William’s kidnapper. The consensus was that the boy had absconded, that his escaped grandmother had come back to show him the way to freedom through the Underground Railroad after his mother’s suicide. The women took this as proof that Eleeza was alive and free.
No bit of news could have distressed me more. As if this wicked tale did not have enough twists and turns, now Ramses’s latest victim was the grandson of the witch in the woods.
I returned to care for the pathetic horses. After they were fed, watered and brushed, I turned my energy to the two vacant stalls and the marbleized masses within each. With pitchfork and shovel, I hacked at the floor of a stall until I hit bare earth. Shovelful by shovelful I excavated as if uncovering an Egyptian ruin. So hard was the detritus I did not even take it to the garden as fertilizer, and just dumped it far beyond the stable.
As I
worked closer to the center, my shovel struck something with a sharper, hollow sound to it. With great effort I worked the spade underneath it. Despite my exertions, it would not dislodge. I slipped a small log under the shovel’s handle and pressed my weight against it like a lever. The mass stirred a bit, and I bounced upon it once, twice and then a third time.
At this last attempt, the item broke free. The shovel collapsed to the ground and I with it. The excavated item flew into the air and landed inches in front of my eyes.
A horse’s skull stared me in the face, eye sockets blackened with stinking mold, insects crawling upon patches of desiccated remains. I screamed and threw the skull across the stall. I scrambled away and pulled myself to my feet. Inside the stall, a gouge in the detritus yawned where the missing head had lain. The tips of white bones poked from the edges.
A horse had died here and reposed unburied until right now. How long ago had that been? How much straw had been shoveled upon the rotting carcass? What beasts had skulked into the stable in the night to feast upon its remains? The concept made my skin crawl.
I looked away only to see the adjacent stall, with its duplicate mound of undetermined origin. My stomach churned at the realization that another corpse no doubt lay there, awaiting my exhumation.
Outside the sad nags whinnied. No wonder their spirits were as broken as their bodies. To stand and eat and sleep alongside the carcasses of their fellows would be too much to bear. In defense of their sensibilities, though I may have given them too much credit, as I continued my work through the day, I took the wheelbarrows full of corpse out the opposite door and dumped them out of the horses’ sight.
My mind was never far from thoughts of the previous night, and this revelation brought one question back again. What did Ramses do with the bodies of those he killed? I imagined the root cellar as a crypt filled with his victims’ corpses, bodies stacked for display or perhaps stood up against the walls. I could barely stand the gruesome idea of it, the rank stench the cellar had to exude.
After dinner, these morbid thoughts compelled me to inspect the root cellar entrance, though the voice of self-preservation spoke to the contrary.
Blood Red Roses Page 5
