Balm (13 page)

Horse had hidden the carving on its underside, knowing it was a dangerous thing for a Negro to own something of value. When upright, people would see a plain chair, worn, nicked. Only the preacher would know to turn it over and set an eye upon its preciousness.

He cleared his throat. “A few ears of corn would have sufficed.”

“Corn still in the fields,” Horse said.

“Tie it up.”

That afternoon, the preacher pronounced them husband and wife. The bride wiped her eyes with the dead mistress's handkerchief, her toothless grin like a child's, and Horse tucked a dandelion in her hair as they stood in the cool of a hackberry's shade. Herod did not speak, and it was not lost upon Horse that had she not tried that nighttime trick, he would have placed a flower in her hair, too.

Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

After the preacher pronounced them married, Horse and Annie walked hand in hand through the quarters, slaves calling out to them, shouting blessings and wishes for protection. In the cabin, a bowl of water and a freshly washed coverlet awaited. He held his bride, trying not to think of the next morning's work. In the coming Resurrection,
the trees would be greener, the sky bluer. A man of lesser faith might have thought this moment itself was heaven. But Horse, even with his un-Christian name, was thinking of an even better time. Lying with Annie led him to believe not in the existence of a heaven but in the possibility that he would get there.

I
N THE FIRST YEARS OF THEIR MARRIAGE
, H
ORSE
revealed his loyalty to Annie piece by piece, and she thrived beneath the attention. She was his holy woman, his Hagar, his Sarah. And he was her Horse. She opened up and talked more, even kissed him on the cheek when he was not expecting it. By the time news of an attack on Fort Sumter reached the farm, Horse had settled comfortably into married life.

A year later, it shocked them all when a bespectacled boy knocked on the door with the news that Mr. Harrison's son had died in a battle down in Tennessee. Months earlier, when they learned the younger Harrison had volunteered with a Kentucky regiment, they feared for him, but none anticipated what happened next. It was April 1862, and the word
Shiloh
passed between them. They looked for news, hoping for abolition but more concerned with who would inherit all of them should the old man die. Once Harrison learned he would not even have a body to bury, he sat in his chair staring out at the stand of maples
in his front yard. Nothing could rouse him. Every now and then the housemaid summoned Horse to the house for a repair and whispered what she had gleaned from the occasional newspaper that reached them. River transport was disrupted. So was cotton production. The war was affecting everything, and the demand for hemp would be considerably less that year.

The men were cutting timothy hay when Horse relayed the information.

“What do it mean for us?” Jess coughed and wiped the sweat from his face before straightening up to look at Horse.

“I don't rightly know,” Horse answered.

Off in the distance, Horse saw two hats astride horses. He shaded his eyes with his hands. The Harrison farm was not on the way to anywhere else, the trail ending at the house, so it was a rare sight to see passersby. He squinted. A slow, dark line snaked behind the horses. The other men were looking now, too. A muffled yell rang out, and though none of the husbands knew whose voice it was, each one of them sprang to life, certain he had heard his own name. Among them, Horse's feet beat through the grass, and he tried to say
Annie!
As he neared them, he saw the shadow of a white man raising his gun, but Horse could not stop running, even when he heard the shot, because there was the unmistakable figure of Annie crouching at the back of the coffle. Now the women were screaming, and it took a moment for Horse to understand that they were yelling for the men to stop. Horse slowed, glancing around at the husbands. They had halted, but their necks were strung tightly. Horse had to act or they would all get hurt. He searched his head for the words that would save them and opened his mouth, knowing, before he'd uttered a sound, how little he could salvage.

“Sir, we don't aim to cause no trouble. We just want to say a word to the women.”

The man spat. “Women? I don't see no women.”

Horse did not look beneath the hat's brim. “Just a word. That's all we ask.”

The hat aimed his pistol at each man, silently counting the three of them and, perhaps, counting his bullets and measuring his speed against six arms and six legs. He spoke from behind the gun: “Make it quick. I ain't no Christian, neither is you, and hell ain't no happy place.”

Horse approached Annie, but he could not look at her. She raised her hands to touch his face and he heard the tinkle of chains. He could see the back of the girl Herod who did not turn around to see this farewell between the only two parents she could remember. Horse wished he had something to give Annie, but he had nothing, not even a drop of water in his can. He heard her sniffle and knew she was crying. He and Annie had lived on the same farm for years, and he could not ever remember her shedding a tear.

“I thought God didn't make mens like you no more,” she said.

Horse looked at the ground. Annie's voice was low, but it rose through his ears like a message coming from the grave. He knew his face was streaked with dirt and sweat, and he could smell himself. He faced her open heart feeling soiled. He had asked for a word, and now he had none to share. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, her feet had disappeared. He lifted his chin and saw her skirt thin until it vanished.

“You give me a piece of myself back.”

“My scalp.” It was all he could say as he lifted his eyes, watching her disappear right in front of him. Nothing was left but her head, her dark eyes. She reached into the back of her hair and pulled something out—the comb he had made her.

“My scalp,” he said as she pressed it into his hand.

Later, Horse would remember how he'd stood in the dust left behind
by the coffle, thinking:
So this how it feel.
There had been too little time with her, and it baffled him how he let her and Herod live on the farm as long as they had without him seeing that she was the one who would bring him back to life.

He should have said more. What he'd wanted to say was,
Joy, woman. That's what you give me
.
You my joy.
Instead of
My scalp
.

Maybe he was the dumb horse Mister thought he was.

The next day, Horse cut his finger badly with a knife. At night, the three husbands spoke quietly about their chances of escape. Harrison brought in men with guns who took turns on night patrol around the property. Horse held on to a faint hope that the women would remain close by, their skills with hemp rope keeping them from being sold down the river. The husbands begged the housemaid to find out where the women had been sold. To them, her reading skill was akin to magical powers, but her searches turned up nothing. She had no way of finding out the information every husband on the place was after.

By fall of that year, Mr. Harrison was bedridden, and the men had ceased working. The hemp was not yet hackled and the fibers full of hurd when the first two of them ran off. The rest of them, save Horse and the housemaid, marched off the farm in clear daylight. While the woman continued to empty the old man's bedpan and cook up the meat that remained in the smokehouse, Horse slept alone in the loft he'd shared with Annie, hopeful that his wife would return.

He stayed on for two more years, until one morning the housemaid delivered his breakfast with the news that the old man had passed in his sleep. She wanted to go to the camp where some of the men had gone to enlist, up near Nicholasville, and she begged Horse to travel with her as her husband so she could seek refuge. They were promising free papers if he joined the army. Besides, she did not think they would survive the winter. There was no food left. Horse looked at her, noting that somewhere along the way she had lost her beauty. Her eyes
sank into her face, and the skin peeled from her cheeks. He did not want to leave, but she needed his help and he had already failed a coffle of women. He marked the moment: first, he would bury the old man; second, he would take the woman to this camp. He had not cared for Harrison at all, but being righteous was a step toward becoming a man.

T
HEY KEPT CLOSE TO THE ROADS
, staying just out of sight until they reached the cantilevered bridge over the river. Beneath them, the river swelled into white peaks, then dove forward in a relentless march south. He took her hand as they crossed a bridge. They came upon a village of white tents, neatly arranged in eight rows of four. At the head, a band of men sat around a fire. Horse approached, but one of them waved his arm and pointed in another direction. Horse took the shivering woman's hand.
Come on
. Positioned at the foot of a river, the land drew up into steep, stone gorges. On one end, the river palisades protected the camp; on the other a stretch of forest ended at Hickman Creek. In front of a gable-roofed building, a group of colored men drilled in a neat military step. Horse stopped to watch, openmouthed. A white officer barked an order, and the men turned, their feet perfectly aligned.

My land
, he whispered.

Horse sent the woman off to look for his wife while he waited for a turn to enter headquarters. A lit stove in the corner warmed the room, but Horse rubbed his hands together anyway. At the sound, the white officer looked up from where he was sitting at a table. Horse froze.

“Name?”

“Horse, sir.”

The officer put down his pencil.

The soldier standing behind him spoke. “Sir, this is not the first one. We have been asking some of them to think of suitable names.”

“Horse? You got another name you go by?”

“Ain't never been called nothing else, sir.”

“Well, is there something you'd like to be called? You are enlisting as a soldier in the federal army. We cannot call you Horse. That would be . . . unpatriotic.” He paused. “Do you understand me?”

The officer behind him snickered.

Horse hesitated. He believed his wife, Annie, and her daughter, Herod, might be somewhere out in that sea of huts and shanties. If he changed his name and people called him anything but Horse, Annie would never be able to find him. He hesitated.

“But Horse is my name, sir.”

The men glanced at one another.

“How about George? That's a fine American name. Or how about your master's name? Most of the slaves are taking their masters' names.”

Horse thought of the soldier's suggestion. Whenever any of them were away from the farm, they knew they belonged to the Harrison Hemp farm. Surely that would leave enough of a clue for Annie to find. Still, the thought of taking his master's name saddened him. Already, he could sense the inescapable reach of the old man's arm, a hand on his back that would follow him into his new life.

“I reckon Hemp Harrison'll do,” he said, twisting the clues just enough to make the name his own.

“Hemp? Why don't we just call him cotton?”

Another snicker.

“Hemp ain't much better than Horse,” the officer seated at the table said, but he wrote the name anyway.

He was ordered to live in the colored soldiers' barracks, while the woman was sent down to the tents with the other women and children. In exchange for his service, he would receive his certificate of freedom. As he walked to the barracks, he hopped over a puddle, the reality of freedom almost too much to believe. He stood outside the building,
watching as colored men joked with one another. Laughing! This place was no place at all. It was some cruel trick, like the first touch of crazy when the stomach had been empty too long. He could not describe what he felt. He tossed the images he witnessed back and forth in his mind like pinecones as he sought to put a feeling to it—it was not a word, but a melody. It was like . . . a push of air beneath a wing, a twitch of muscle in the breast.

He began to think of all he would do once he found Annie. Build her a house. Plant her a garden. Suddenly, his feet stuck to the ground as he realized that without Annie, freedom meant nothing. Nothing at all.

Rather than enter the barracks, he made his way down to where the women camped. A girl directed him to a shanty where two old women stood throwing wood onto a fire. They took his hands from him, rubbed them until they were warm. Their dry touch soothed him and he never wanted them to let go. What's your name, baby? God bless you, they said. They told him they knew nothing of Annie and Herod, but he should feel free to take a look around. He walked slowly back up the hill, still mulling over the word
free
.

In the day, he drilled. In the evening, he checked for new arrivals. When nothing came of his search, he joined the men sitting around the stove in the mess hall. Their talk shifted between high and low. They spoke of the sickness raging through the camp, one man recounting the day's death tally. When they spoke of the children, a few cried openly. The families of the enlisted men had not been granted freedom, but they came to the camp anyway. To the dismay of the white officers, thousands of women and children had arrived seeking shelter, and just months before, hundreds of families had been forced off the grounds in freezing temperatures. Many of them had died, and Horse knew that even this long-awaited freedom was not enough to ease their pain.

The men were still eager to march, however, boasting of the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry trained at Camp Nelson that had gone off to fight at the Battle of Saltville in Virginia. Even Horse could not help but share in their patriotism. The sight of men who had been enslaved their entire lives dressed in uniform made him draw up his chest.

He continued to ask around for Annie, fearing that they would call upon him to fight before he found her. The flow of families in and out of the camp dwindled, and he no longer anticipated the new arrivals. He met a man who had passed through the Harrison farm and reported that the quarters were deserted. Horse was glad to know Annie had not returned there, but he did not know where else to look. Still, he made up his mind to leave and go look for her.

After saying farewell to the housemaid, he moved north through the palisades, alone, carrying only a canteen, a tin spoon, and his leather roll of carving tools in his sack. His supply dwindled. He downed birds and possum with rocks, using his drawknife to slice them open. He walked nearly fourteen hours a day, staying close to the river, tracing its snaky outline through the state, and when the sun reached its highest notch in the sky, he whispered his thanks that it was not the middle of winter or summer, the spring temperatures mild enough for foot travel.

At the end of the week, it began to rain and did not stop for three days. He looked for shelter as he wrapped his shirt around his head, tying it into a knot at his neck. Once the rain let up, he carried on. A sticky humidity soaked him all over again. He hung his clothes from a tree to dry and squatted naked on a rocky riverbank, warming his backside in the sun. He stumbled as he dipped a toe into the water's cool. He stepped back onto dry land and put a palm against his brow. North of him, he thought he saw the chimney of a cabin. He followed the sight until he found it. Deserted. He rummaged inside the house, finding nothing of value save a dull little knife to add to his pack. Out
back, he discovered a footpath, and he took it, making sure to keep the river in his view, climbing the hillier parts until he was walking along a cliff so steep that he dared not look below.