“Did you wish those men dead?”
“Don’t know if I wished it or not. Might’ve. Even if I did wishing didn’t make it so.” He caught sight of the ermine again, slipping across the rocks, half-serpentine, a smaller rodent clamped in its jaws. “But I ain’t shed no tears for them, and there ain’t a thing bout what I saw that shames me.”
Redford nodded curtly and looked away. His eyes sought out the weasel and watched it out of sight. He rose and said it was well past time for him to head back and that he should get going, but having said it he just stood taking in the view. William stood profiled next to him and the two men beheld the scene in silence. The sun had dipped below the trees behind them and cast the horizon to the east in shadow, dimming the world and doing nothing for that smoldering city’s prospects. A lone tree near the crest of a nearby hill predicted the change of season ahead of the others. It had a blaze of red and orange running up one side, a flame set in rustling motion by a rising breath of air, slower in its consumption than fire but no less a harbinger of change.
“I told you before that you could trust me,” Redford said, “and I’m telling you again now. You may think I’m a man of words alone and perhaps I am as yet, but like you I’ve taken my place in the world I was born into. I know you didn’t kill those men. I guess I always knew it. Coming up here … I think I was hoping you had. I’d have shaken your hand and thanked you. There are many ways to do God’s work. I don’t doubt that some of them are bloody. I don’t doubt it at all.”
Back at the carriage house, before he took his leave, Redford instructed William exactly how to proceed. Two days from now, just after dark, he should make his way back to the city. As William swore that he remembered the way, Redford said he would meet him at his apartment. Redford planned to already have the other fugitives loaded on the ship. He and William would spend the night in his apartment, meet Dover early in the morning, and then join the others on the ship. God willing, they’d then be off to true freedom. He left telling William to prepare himself. The waiting was over and things were going to happen fast and furious from here on out.
The next morning William awoke and could not remember having dreamed. This was strange for he always dreamed and usually vividly. He sat through the day watching the sun’s slow progression. Never had that orb seemed such a stationary object. He watched it, sometimes staring into it so long it lingered in his vision afterward, imposed on everything he saw, a glaring spot both brilliant and black. But even this scrutiny couldn’t shame the sun to move any faster and the day was an ordeal of waiting.
That night he slept short and lightly waking in the deep hours when dusk was long gone and dawn nowhere in sight. He tried to recollect his dreams but he again realized he had none. That short sleep had been as barren as a desert at night and it was just that that had caused him to wake. It left him uneasy a feeling that grew as the day progressed. One final day in stillness, and then everything would be decided. One last day and yet it seemed unending.
Early in the afternoon of the next day a flock of black birds descended upon the field. William watched them, finding in their motions something primitive. Their calls seemed to him like those of humans, cursed and deprived of proper speech. Midday he rose and ran out into the field, waving his arms furiously. The birds rose up before him, wings beating the air, hovering above him loud and unrepentant. They moved on, but left in their wake a silence worse than their cacophony had been. He stood there some time in the field, exposed but unable to retreat too quickly.
He knew something was wrong.
EIGHT Morrison stood in the lee of a warehouse for some time. He could hear Humboldt’s men. They had gathered just around the corner in preparation for the evening’s work. Their voices came to him in clipped breaths of clarity, mundane words spoken with mirth, jokes that gave little indication to the deeds they were planning. He could see them in his mind as clearly as if he were standing amongst them. He stood roiling with hatred like none he had felt before. He hated them for the deformities that marked them, for the tone of their voices and for the cold, thin souls within them. Why was he here? Why had the episodes of his life so ordered themselves that this moment was necessary? He didn’t ask these questions in words as such, but he felt them through every inch of his body. A hunger for flight burned in his chest, but he couldn’t give in to it. He had fled before and been brought back. He could not flee again.
He glanced at the hound. She stood near at hand, occasionally looking up at the man and then away, waiting, scenting the air and thus noting the passage of things the man had no inkling of. Though Morrison wished her by his side at that moment, he was thankful that she would not witness the things to come. He realized as he stood there that he feared the canine’s judgment more than he did any living person’s. He reached out, ran his palm across the coarse hairs of the hound’s coat and pulled her tight against his thigh.
Come, he said. Let’s get on with it.
A few of the men glanced up at his approach, but most of them barely noticed. Morrison saw first to the hound, tying a length of rope around her neck and securing her to a pylon. He glanced around to verify that the planter was not amongst them, then he turned his eyes down toward his gun. He listened as the others talked and so confirmed what he had already heard rumored. They had rounded up a total of five Negroes so far. Through a variety of means Humboldt had acquired the proper permissions to take them into slavery. He called them fugitives but in truth he could only verify that with two of them. The other three had probably never been outside of Philadelphia, but they were a bad sort for whom no white man would vouch. The authorities were willing enough to part with them. Some of their other men were away to gather up a sixth fugitive at that very moment. This would’ve been a good catch in its own right, but the true loot was still to come.
Humboldt strode in all motion and vigor. Awareness of his arrival passed through the men like a wave of electricity. He said he had come to prepare them with a frank statement of facts and they were these. The niggers may fight, he said, but they won’t be armed. They’ll be down in the hold of the ship. It’ll be a nasty business prying them loose and getting them up top. There’ll be some women among them, but don’t trust them for a second cause they’ll cut your prick off just as soon as look at. There’ll be no crew to deal with. Just the captain, and we’ve settled up already. Took a little persuasion, but the captain got right sensible when I put the point to him.
Before they departed the boy from Virginia jogged in with news that they’d grabbed the Negro girl as directed. Morrison moved closer and heard the boy say that it had gone smooth as cream. They’d jumped her right there in front of her lady’s big house and carried her off. They did it quiet like. Nobody’d even know she had been nabbed. He asked Humboldt if he should take her to the ship but the man said no, not yet. He should pen her for now and send the others to join up with him. The more guns the merrier, he figured.
Morrison watched the Virginian go off again, confirming his destination from the direction he turned, part of him a dart stuck in the boy’s back.
See what I mean, boys? Humboldt turned to the gang of men. The good Lord himself’s on our side. This next business’ll be a walk on. Just keep your heads on and we’ll be done in time for supper.
All told they were a group of eleven. As they moved out, Morrison fell in toward the rear of the line, lagging behind a half-step, eyes hard and slanted on the men before him. It was a misty evening. Bands of low-hung cloud crept in from the water, the light gray and otherworldly. It brought to mind a story he had heard in his youth, a biblical one he believed, a story in which death floated through the streets killing all those without the proper markings to identify them to God. He had never been a religious man. He wasn’t even sure that his recollection of the story was correct. It was a child’s remembrance, a child’s fear and that was the problem. He felt like a child faced with a world beyond his control. He was not at all sure about the role he might
play in the events to come. The players were moving toward each other with a rapidity that was a surprise to him even though he had watched it brew. He was waiting to see the way forward but he did not yet see it. Something would come to him, he thought. His internal gears whirled unhinged, spinning through ideas, waiting to catch. Something had damn sure better come to him.
The fog was thick across the docks but moved rapidly, the scenes behind fading in and out as if they were the incorporeal substance instead of the mist. They moved down alleys between warehouses, trod through puddles and around stacks of crates and reams of timber, past an enormous mound of something that looked and smelled like rotting coffee. The men chatted as they walked, nervous talk, spaced more and more frequently by uneasy gaps. Eventually, Humboldt ordered the men to silence with a raised hand. They walked on, each motion seeming louder now than normal: their boots across the stones, the wrinkle of fabric, the clink of iron against iron, a throat cleared of phlegm. All was white for a few moments, but with the next break in the low clouds came a view of the ship, clear and solid before them, masts thrusting toward the sky like the great trees they had once been, sailcloth bunched in folds, damp and heavy just to look at.
For Morrison the impact of seeing it could not have been greater if the mist had cleared upon a mountain. It was just there. There was motion on the deck, silent, but fast, a single person had seen them and sprung back from the near side of the ship. Humboldt leapt forward, caution gone in an instant. In a moment he was down the pier, the next he was climbing the gangplank, and then he was astride the ship.
The other men were fast on his heels, and Morrison close behind them. He was one of the last men to mount the deck, but once there he felt an urgency he had not a moment before. He pushed past a few men, ducked under the mainsail and leapt up onto a thick coil of rope. From that vantage he saw that Humboldt had a black man pressed against the railing of the ship. Their faces were close together. Morrison couldn’t see the white man’s face, but the base of his neck quivered with anger. His arms moved as he spoke, his shoulders rolling in their joints as if they might pop loose. Morrison swung his rifle up into a two-handed grip, his finger on the trigger’s crescent.
This the one, then? Humboldt asked, motioning for the man beside him to grab hold of the Negro. This the one?
Another man, the Irish Captain, answered that it was. He stood behind Humboldt, his eyes skittering over the scene, his voice weak and distant.
Though he didn’t lift his rifle to sight, Morrison let it swing in Humboldt’s direction. He felt and heard the other men around him, but he couldn’t think of them. He set his features immobile and knew that they would not see him at that moment. Their collective attention was all on Humboldt, all eyes except his. It was the Negro man he studied. He had a face of malleable features, full around the jowls even though he was not overheavy. His spectacles perched low on his nose and canted to one side. Behind them the man’s eyes peered out with a singular intelligence, a knowing resignation that was sad to the core but not defeated. Morrison tried to find anything familiar in the man’s features but for the life of him he wasn’t sure if he did or not.
And are they all here? We get the whole load? Humboldt asked. He had to repeat the question several times before the captain answered.
Almost. There’s one that didn’t show.
This news captured the whole of the planter’s attention. He spun on the captain. You’re not gonna tell me that one is my nigger, are you?
I… I don’t know. Who’s your …
William. For Christ Almighty’s sake! Tell me we got him.
But the Irishman could not do that. They didn’t have him.
Morrison lowered his rifle and let it dangle, glancing about him. There was little time to observe the other men, however. Humboldt urged them all to action. Morrison went with the others, propelled into the ship by the men all around him. They emerged a few moments later with the fugitives, bruised and battered, trembling and again in chains. This all fed Humboldt’s anger further, for the one he most sought was not among them. He raged at the Irishman, at the bound Negroes and even at the men that drove them. But in the end he turned his attentions back to the bespectacled Negro. He asked him if he had ever been lashed like a common slave? He held the whip before his face and poked him with the butt of its handle. That’s what he would get if he didn’t open his mouth and say something useful. Why was William not here? Where was he? Where in this godforsaken Northern pisshole? Humboldt’s face pressed close to the man’s, cocked to the side so that he received the man’s answer directly into his ear.
Sir, the man said, I’ll answer none of your questions. I’ll simply speak to you in language you’ll understand: fuck you and the sick bitch that squeezed you out.
Morrison was near enough to hear this. He was meant to be checking the manacles on the Negroes, but he didn’t do so. He paused, watching the exchange. He noted the calm in the man’s voice, his polite tone, the way the words twisted from the man’s tongue. He wouldn’t have thought such words would come from a man with such a face, but he seemed to pleasure in them.
Humboldt didn’t take the statement lightly. He beat the black man with the full force of his body. The whip was little use from up close, but he used the knob of the grip to batter the man’s face. When the Negro fell to his knees, Humboldt kicked him and kicked him and stepped back and drove the heel of his foot into his nose. He yanked him upright and spit the same questions in his face again. But still the black man stared straight ahead and chewed his thoughts and let the blood dribble from his lips like it didn’t even belong to him. He met the man’s gaze only when he imposed his eyes upon his direction of vision. He stared at him, past him, through him, as if each view was equally mundane.
Turn around, Humboldt said.
You can’t hurt me, the black man said.
Turn around and we’ll see. The black man didn’t move so the planter spun him by the shoulder and pressed him up against the railing. You sure you don’t have anything to tell us? he asked, his mouth close to the other man’s ear.
Morrison took a step toward Humboldt. His finger twitched. He swung his rifle up into a two-handed grip, a reflex for no conscious thought spurred the action. He didn’t know this man. He was just a black man. A stranger, not the one he was looking for.
Nothing you’d want to hear, the black man said, speaking through swollen lips. But tell me, who betrayed us?
God, when he saw you born a nigger. You gonna regret you didn’t answered me rightly.
Morrison heard the tone of Humboldt’s voice and knew what it meant. The man had already decided. That’s where they were different. Humboldt had already decided; he, Morrison, had not. His finger was hot on the trigger of his rifle. His other hand clamped across the stock. It need only be a small motion, from where he stood he could aim one blast into the planter’s kidneys. But then what? What with all these men around? He would be giving up his cause for a man he didn’t know. Even if Humboldt’s side exploded in blood it would change nothing of what had already been decided.
The black man spoke as if unaware of the shotgun barrel pressed against the center of his spine. He spoke looking out across the water, watching the progress of the mist. All I regret is that I wasn’t more vigilant in my duties, he said. May they forgive me. May they know my intent was true. But you, you can give up your search this evening, for those other two are beyond you. They’re all beyond you, and your cause is lost. You are beyond redemption and already damned …
It’s not two I’m looking for, Humboldt said. My men already fetched the bitch. Nothing’s beyond me. You’d know that if you knew me. But the hell with it, I got things to do.
The black man’s lips opened with a question, but his words were clipped by the blast of shot that sprayed through his back, splaying out around his spine and exiting his chest in a blast of viscera. Morrison, from his profile, saw recognition on the man’s face, his own parts blown into the air before
him and he still of a mind to see and understand this. He tried to spin. His jaw worked the air and one hand rose with a finger upraised as if he would pause and make one last point. But his body gave way beneath him. His legs buckled and he tumbled. The deck smacked hard against his head, crushing his spectacles, a lens of which popped from the rims and skittered across the deck. As soon as his weight settled against the boards the man went still, slack and staring, eyes suddenly filmed and empty.
Humboldt spat over his corpse and into the water beyond the railing. He turned and, without comment on the dead man, gave orders pertaining to the slaves huddled on the deck and to the one still at large. He stepped into action, swearing that he was not yet quit of this night’s work, swearing that he was not yet to be beat by any nigger. He turned his attention to the captain, for there were still things he could tell him about where the dead man had lived and where this missing one might be.
Morrison wished his eyes to rise from the dead man’s face. He didn’t want to look into it and yet could not easily look away. It took an enormous effort to tilt his head and push his chin up toward the sky and close his eyes. Shame washed over him, not just shame at this moment, at the fact that he had watched this man die while knowing he did not deserve such a death. The shame went further back than that. There before him was an image to be twinned with his brother’s tale of the Negro from years ago, dead and pressed into the mud. In thinking of that man he thought of his brother, of how Lewis had cried for the man’s death, how he had wept for all those earlier dead, the ones beloved to them but now gone forever. At the time he had pitied his brother his heart, but now he knew better. A caring heart is not soft.
Twenty minutes later Morrison disembarked the ship at the end of the line of chained Negroes. He walked behind them a little ways but did not follow them all the way to the other ship, into which they were to be secured. Instead, he chose his moment and slipped into an alley and away. He had someone else to attend to. Shame is of no use unless one is prepared to learn from it.
Walk Through Darkness Page 21
