The Third Mrs. Galway

by Deirdre Sinnott

Augustin’s eyes opened. “Never.” He raised himself on his elbows, but fell back down again. “Maggie is too important to this house.”

  Without warning, sleep seemed to have gotten the better of him. Helen stewed. His organization would be of no help. “Imari” and “Joe” weren’t criminals, at least she didn’t think so. But they had lied. Well, what else could one expect from runaways? With the slave notice in her hand, she went out the side door into the backyard to confront them.

  The shed door swung open, ushering in a blast of cool air. Imari and Joe froze in their places. Helen swept in.

  “So, Suzy and Joey, I know who you really are now.” Helen held up a lantern. She stood over the two prone figures gripping a crumpled piece of paper. “According to this, you are runaway slaves from Virginia. And you’re dangerous.” She shoved the paper toward the woman, who did not raise her hand to take it.

  “I am … I can …” Imari began.

  Joe, sitting up now, kept his eyes low.

  “You cannot deny what is printed right here.” Helen drew the paper back and read: “Escaped from the Barnwell Plantation, Virginia … a Yellow Wench, 30 years old, bright, named Suzy. With her is a Negro Boy of 10 years named Joey. She is 8 months with child … Suzy is of light complexion, freckled, well-spoken … and DANGEROUS. The boy is of dark complexion, bushy red hair, skinny limbed.” She paused, lowered the paper, and glared at them. “Originally ran with a Mulatto Man called Elymas, aged 30, since recaptured.” Staring down on Imari, she continued, “It says there’s a $150 reward for you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “That say Elymas been captured? Let me see.”

  Helen seemed taken aback and handed her the notice.

  Imari studied the paper, trying to focus on it, wiping away some tears. There it was. Captured. She could no longer deny his fate.

  “He ain’t gonna catch up, is he?” asked Joe with bitterness.

  “No,” she said. Letting go of the idea was impossible. He had to catch up. Why live if he couldn’t be with them? “He gone.” No longer able to restrain herself, she sobbed.

  Helen, her hand on her chest, kneeled down. “I’m sorry.” Silence filled the shed. “If you go back with this Mr. Hickox, you’ll be reunited with your husband, won’t you?”

  Imari began to tremble. “Missus, sorry, but you don’t understand the way things is. We ain’t never gonna see him again.”

  “Why is that? Won’t he be returned to his master?”

  Imari swallowed hard. “Sometimes if you run and get caught in the neighborhood, you might get a whipping and maybe Master, he keep you. Elymas is a blacksmith, so he important to the farm. But he got caught way up in New Jersey, I think. He got a taste a freedom, at least that’s how Master will look at it.”

  “He’s a blacksmith? So was my father. I didn’t think you people—”

  “That we smart enough?”

  “That’s not, um, no. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m sorry, missus,” Imari said. “There ain’t no reason for you to know how it go where we come from.”

  “My teacher, Miss Manahan, said that the master is like a very stern father.”

  “Father,” said Imari, shaking her head. “Let me tell you, Elymas be a real father. He cared so much for his boy here and this one in here,” she rubbed her pregnant belly, “that he run right at Hickox so we could get away. And what he gonna get for that? He gonna get sold to the soul drivers.”

  “Soul drivers?”

  “They buy the slaves nobody wants. Runaways, troublemakers, people Master can’t afford to feed. They go from plantation to plantation riding tall on they horses. We seen them come down the road with fifty, maybe a hundred slaves, all chained together in one long row. Men, yes. And women and children too. Just like me and Joe here. Chained up and walking clear to the cotton and sugar fields down south. Master told me they walking all the way to New Orleans to be sold on the block.”

  “But that’s just cruel,” said Helen, color rising to her cheeks.

  “Missus, that what we running from.”

  “That’s not what I’ve been told.”

  “You gotta know the truth. I ain’t never showed this to nobody.” Imari pulled aside her shawl and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. There on her arm, standing out so tall it cast its own shadow, was a long scar that slashed across her skin. “That be from a whip.”

  “I feel sick,” said Helen. “Does it still hurt?” She leaned in to look again.

  “It don’t hurt here,” said Imari, indicating the scar. “It hurt here.” She pointed to her head. “And you never know when the whip gonna come your way. Bad things happen, missus. All the time. You think you ain’t never gonna be surprised by it again, but then, thwack, and you feel the bite, or your child does, or your momma. Missus, if you tell Hickox that we here—all that, whipping and soul drivers, that gonna happen to us too.” Drawing both arms around her stomach, she looked straight into Helen’s face. “You the only friend this baby got in the world.”

  “Me? How can that be?”

  “You stand between this baby and death.”

  Helen’s mouth opened as if to protest.

  “And if this baby lives, you the only one that can keep him from being sold on the block.”

  Helen rocked back, the animation draining from her body.

  Imari continued, “This baby like a piece a meat to them slave-catching dogs. They mouths dripping wet thinking about them pieces a gold—just like Judas. Forget about me, missus, think a this here helpless baby.”

  Helen brought her hands to her face. “I can’t …” she said through tears.

  “There ain’t no ‘I can’t,’” said Imari.

  “How dare you speak to me like that?” Helen said, wiping her face. “I don’t even know why I should be responsible.”

  Imari closed her eyes, lids stretching, inside corners trembling. Huge tears fell down her face and landed on her cheeks, dripping onto her shawl. “Oh Lord,” she cried, looking to the ceiling, hands up in appeal. “This my punishment, Lord? I prayed. I done my best, but I lost my man and now we stuck here. And now you don’t send me no help? Why hate me, Lord?” She sobbed, her thin shoulders heaving. She brought her palms together and again looked up toward the heavens. “Please, God, please. Have mercy. Hate me, okay. But don’t hate my baby.”

  Helen shivered as if she were being dragged under the freezing waters of the Ballou.

  Imari continued to weep and Helen embraced her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Helen moaned. “I’m a stupid girl. God doesn’t hate you.” She paused. “I don’t hate you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN THE WHITE LADY LEFT THEM ALONE, Joe threw the quilt off and was on his feet, pacing among the clutter. “What we supposed to do now?” he asked in an angry whisper. “If Poppa said go, we oughta go.”

  Imari sighed deeply. “No. I can’t move. Elymas might …”

  “He ain’t coming,” Joe hissed. His mother held her head in her hands. He cleared his throat. “We oughta go right now to the man we was supposed to meet.”

  “I can’t.”

  Joe kneeled beside her. “I’ll help you.”

  “You gonna help? All right, go get me a real big carriage and make sure it got a fine Negro in livery hanging off the back.”

  Joe got to his feet and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Listen, boy. I can’t move. This baby need me to be still. So we gotta wait. Then we move. You got that?”

  “Let me go now and look for him,” the boy said eagerly.

  “You ain’t getting outta my sight. You all I got left. Besides, it be night and Hickox be out there waiting. Swoop down on you like a chicken hawk. Tomorrow be good enough.”

  Joe threw himself down, pulling the quilt over himself and his mother. In the dark, his mind went to his father. At first, after they got separated, he had expected him to appear. Upon waking he would sit up looking around, knowing that Poppa wo
uld be right there, close enough to touch. It was only after they moved across the water to New York City that he secretly lost hope. He must have been killed, Joe decided. Otherwise he would have found them. Joe didn’t dare suggest that to his mother. Every day she said he would “catch up,” even as they traveled farther and farther toward wherever it was they were going. When he remembered that Poppa wasn’t with them it felt like he had an animal inside chewing on his guts, sometimes his chest, sometimes his stomach, sometimes his very bowels.

  He yawned and blinked and thought back to the plantation’s blacksmith shop, where his father sweat from dawn till dusk supplying the plantation with nails and other forged iron, making and repairing farm and garden tools, patching cooking pots, and furnishing horses with shoes he crafted special for each animal. Whenever Joe had the opportunity, he watched his father, often receiving lectures on the art and craft of ironwork.

  “Here come Mr. De Vries,” Joe warned one morning when he spotted the overseer striding toward them. Elymas stopped hammering a barrel strap and pumped the bellows, which reddened the coal fire and sharply raised the temperature of the shop. Elymas winked at him and picked up a rag to wipe the sweat and soot off his neck.

  De Vries stepped in. “Damn,” he said, “how do you darkies take this kinda heat?”

  “Don’t know, Mr. De Vries,” said Elymas.

  “I reckon it’s in your blood, ain’t it?”

  “If you says so, Mr. De Vries.”

  “I need me a collar all chained up and ready by tonight,” said the overseer.

  “That a mighty big job, Mr. De Vries,” said Elymas, a look of alarm on his face.

  “It ain’t for you, if that’s your concern.” De Vries strolled casually over to some pieces of chain that hung on the shop’s wall and brushed his hand across them. The jangle of the metal filled the room.

  “No sir. Thanks,” said Elymas. “But—”

  De Vries swung a yard of chain, slamming it down on the worktable, scattering tools and nails. Elymas leaped back, almost stumbling into the fire. Joe screamed.

  “You want a taste to get you moving?” De Vries said softly.

  “No sir. Sorry, sir,” said Elymas, his eyes flashing toward Joe. “I gonna get ’em to you when they done. I be real fast.”

  De Vries strode out. Elymas threw a rod of charcoal iron at the fire so hard that red fragments flew out of the hearth and scattered to the dirt floor.

  “Pick them up,” Elymas said, shoving a pair of tongs toward Joe. “Fast now or the shop gonna burn up.”

  In bare feet, Joe slowly moved about, grasping small bits of burning coal and depositing them back into the hearth. Elymas extracted the red-hot iron and began to hammer. Each deafening blow vibrated in Joe’s head. As the iron collar began to take shape, Elymas’s rage seemed to grow. He produced two half circles that could be joined by two locks, but he looked unsatisfied.

  He filed and pounded the inner surface of the collar, checking it often with his gloved hand. Finally, he plunged the collar halves into the water barrel to cool them.

  “Get over here, boy,” he said. “Run your finger along the inside, there.”

  Joe passed his hand over the still-warm edge and inside face of the collar.

  “You don’t feel no bump?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “They ain’t no tiny hook that gonna cut nobody, right?”

  “They clean,” said Joe.

  Elymas handed him the collar halves and a length of chain. “Run them to Mr. De Vries. Don’t say nothing but yes sir or no sir.”

  Joe nodded.

  “Repeat it,” said Elymas.

  “Yes sir and no sir,” said Joe.

  “No sass now. No nothing.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You meet me back at the cabin. We got work to do.”

  At the cabin, Joe found Elymas staring into a small outdoor cook fire.

  “I ain’t never making no more chains.” He took a branch of pine that Joe had stacked that morning and brought it to the fire so he could set the end to blaze. The dry part of the bark quickly sparked into a white-hot flame. He held it over his head. “Show me where you find this here wood.”

  Joe led him to a wind-felled tree. There they selected a few long logs and carried them to the edge of the Potomac.

  “We gotta store ’em up so they don’t look like nothing but what the river wash down,” Elymas told Joe. “Don’t tie nothing together till we ready.”

  Joe asked, “Ready for what?” But Poppa would not say.

  As he lay in the shed now, he closed his eyes remembering the river and how more than once Elymas had warned him to stay away from the water. Despite that, he knew the terrain and where the shore quickly became a sheer wall of rock near the great gorge. He knew the rapids where the current swept around an elbow of land.

  That summer, during an almost unendurable hot spell, he had secretly eased his way into the river, inch by inch. At first he shivered in the cold, but he forged ahead one small step at a time. When he was up to his chest, his feet struggled to maintain contact with the rocky bottom. Finally, he held his breath, pinched his nose shut, and submerged himself completely. He opened his eyes and saw fish and eels and floating vegetation. His mind filled with questions, but there was no one he could ask.

  The secluded power he felt in the water was intoxicating. He could barely even look at the river without stripping off his shirt and pants and diving in. He taught himself how to swim and grew stronger, challenging his new power in the current. In an effort to stay near the bottom, he held a heavy stone. With his free hand he scattered schools of fish and snatched up terrified crawdads, watching as their tiny claws pinched uselessly. He imagined himself a river-god, like the type that his elderly friend Quack described in his stories about Africa. Late at night as he lay on his pallet, he practiced holding his breath.

  Along with other children, he was assigned to the garbage gang. But he tried to rise before the morning work horn just so he could spend time savoring the water’s buoyant, cooling embrace before the stinking work began.

  In the shed, he dreamed that he was sitting at the edge of the river in the darkness. Stars sparkled on the surface. Leaves shifted off to his right and he thought that his father had arrived. He tried to ask, That you? but his mouth seemed full of mud. He noticed the warmth of a nearby body and reached out, expecting to feel the coarse linen of his father’s shirt, but instead grabbed a thick, fibrous pelt. Something stuck its muzzle into his ear. The click of a wet mouth thundered in his head and he felt hot breath across his neck. The animal rose up and squeezed him between massive forearms. It was the bear. Joe’s legs would not move. His throat closed. His elbows shoved at the massive body as it pressed against him. There was no escape.

  Suddenly awake, he frantically turned his head left and right before realizing he was in the shed. He tried to blink away the dream. Even here—so far from the plantation—he had escaped nothing.

  Careful to be silent, he slipped out from under the quilt. His momma stirred, but did not wake. Streaks of bluish light came through the slats of the wall. He eased up the iron door latch and pushed out into the night. The cool breeze blowing off the creek embraced him. Body heat had mostly dried his clothing, with only a few folds still damp. Solid and bright, the moon hung over the western horizon. He looked up at the sky to orient himself by the Big Dipper and once again saw the long white mark in the Dipper’s cup. Someone told his mother that it was something called a comet, but to him it looked like a tear in the heavens. He watched to see if the white streak would grow, allowing long-dead ghosts a chance to pour back into the realm of the living.

  Before their journey, he had no idea how big the world was. He could not understand why his father and mother had ever started. They’d left warm hay mattresses and traded them for the cold dirt of shed floors and damp culverts. What sense did that make?

  Another whisper of wind blew off the water. Joe shivered. He w
as pretty certain that they must have been moving farther and farther away from the sun. Perhaps that tear in the sky meant that Canada existed behind the curtain of stars and they were finally getting close. He shoved his hands into his armpits, warming the tips of his fingers. There could be no harm just looking around for the place where the Frankfort man said their contact was supposed to be. I’ll get back before Momma wakes up, he thought. He stayed in the shadows and slipped out of the yard, walking to the corner of two wide streets. After checking to see that nobody was about, he crossed to the western side of the wide road so that the shadows of the trees hid his progress. The only way to return was to know your steps, so he studied the house he had just left. Secure that he would recognize it later, he kept the moon on his left and moved down the street.

  He passed a building that smelled of yeasty spoiled beer. On Christmas day, Master Arnold had barrels of beer brought out to the slave cabins and Elymas and the other men had rushed over with bowls. His father smelled of beer when he hoisted Joe on his shoulders and danced around a blazing bonfire. They were told that every day until the New Year more barrels would appear. Almost everyone drank themselves silly and had stinging headaches the next morning. Quack, who was so old he seldom left the fire he tended, hissed that it was “Master’s way a breaking us. We glad to work after eight mornings a beer sickness.”

  Thereafter, Elymas had only taken a cup or two. “Just enough to get me happy,” he said. Joe had been happy too, because on his father’s shoulders he towered over the other children.

  The farther he got away from the shed, the less he stayed to the shadows. Most houses were dark, but one window glowed. He crouched low and watched a shadow darken the glass. He skittered across the yard on his hands and toes, keeping his head up and his ears open. Just below the window he kneeled. He held the wooden frame and pulled himself up slowly until he was able to see inside. A thin, sharp-eyed, gray-haired white man in a comfortably old brocade robe strode about the room. He paused in front of a cheerful fire. Joe took in the entire messy array of things. The room was so full that it seemed like nobody could actually live in it. Every bit of furniture was taller, larger, and had more fabric than any he’d seen before. Pictures hung on the walls. Dried flowers sat undisturbed under a bell-shaped piece of glass.