Cy in Chains (16 page)

“Naw—stay here and pray to God to free us.”

“Any black man who believes in God is a fool!” Cy was shocked to hear Arnold's words come out of his own mouth, but they were true.

“You really believe what you said?” Jess asked.

“Yeah! Way I figures it, they ain't no heaven, and hell is right here on earth.”

Jess looked pained. “It natural you so bitter. I know what Prescott done to you.”

Shame swept over him. “How?”

“Ain't important how.”

“Everybody in on it?” He hated the thought that others knew.

“Naw. And I ain't gonna tell. Nothin' like that oughtta happen to nobody. Prescott is one evil man. He gonna have a bad time come judgment day.”

“Maybe you don't care 'bout yourself, but what about all the others?” Cy insisted. “Mouse, Ring, Billy. Next time it could be any of 'em. We got to protect 'em. We
got
to do somethin'!”

“I told you. I
is
doin' somethin'. Lookin' after my boys. And prayin'.”

Wastin' your time
, Cy thought. “So you won't help me?”

“Help sentence all these boys to somethin' worse'n what they got here? Have 'em shot down in the woods? Tore up by dogs? No, sir. You best forget the whole idea.”

“I can't.”

“Then don't say nothin' more to me.”

So that was the end of it. Jess would sit back and wait for the next disaster to happen. This time it had been three whippings and—no, he refused to think about the other thing. Next time, someone would die.

You all alone
, he told himself.
Best face it. You don't need Jess. You don't need nobody
.

Then Cy realized Billy wasn't staring into the fire. The boy's eyes were fixed on him. How much had he heard? How much had he understood? Cy looked into Billy's eyes and wished he could read what he saw there. But everything in those depths was black—blacker than night in the icehouse.

W
HAT NOW
? C
Y WONDERED, LYING AWAKE
after the others had drifted into sleep. Trust in Jess's God? He wanted to laugh. That was like trusting in the wind. The only thing left to trust in was himself. If he wanted freedom, he'd have to find it on his own. When Mouse tried to snuggle next to him that night, Cy pushed him away.

Before he fell asleep, Cy promised himself that starting the next day, he'd be looking for his chance. And when it came, he'd take it and run with it as far as he could go. Until he found his way to freedom or they killed him for trying.

 

The weather turned bitter cold. Cain was forced to bring wood stoves into both bunkhouses and cut holes in the walls for the pipes to vent the smoke outside. He grumbled about the cost and the extra mess, and he made his men responsible for keeping wood on hand and the fires going. Stryker and Prescott just as quickly pushed that responsibility off onto the boys. The older, bigger boys made the younger ones do the hard work of lugging the wood into the buildings and the hot, dirty work of cleaning out the stoves. At least they could all sleep a little better, until the fires died out sometime in the night.

Most of the boys were huddled around the stove one night before bedtime when Cy persuaded West to tell fortunes again. West retrieved his pottery hoodoo bowl from its hiding place and filled it from the small barrel that held drinking water. He pricked his finger with a needle he said he'd found in the cookhouse and squeezed some drops of blood into the water.

“Why you askin' to know yo' fortune?” West asked Cy. “I already done it for you a while back. Man's fortune don't change. What's set out for him is gon' happen, sooner or later.”

“You saw freedom for all of us,” Cy replied. “Billy, me, Mouse. But ain't none of us free yet.”

“It didn't say
when
,” West replied.

Cy noticed Billy standing in the shadows behind Mouse. Bit by bit, he'd returned to the world. As his back healed up, so did his mind, and now, most of the time, he was all right. Never said a lot, cowered when the white men came around, and stuck to Jess like a sand burr to a pant leg.

“You can tell my fortune,” Billy said.

“Come on, then. Hold out your finger.” He poked Billy's finger, and the red blood dropped into the water. Then West closed his eyes and began humming. He peered into the water, holding the bowl close to his face to see better in the flickering light from the open door of the stove.

“What you see?” Billy asked.

“Same as before. You gon' get free. It ain't gon' be easy, though. I still sees water ahead o' you. And—I hear shots.”

“Guns?”

“Reckon so. You gonna have to be brave. Braver than you ever been. Do that, and you be free.”

Billy stared at West. “You ain't messin' with me?”

West shook his head. “I never do when it come to this. This is serious.”

“You see my daddy there?”

West gazed into the bloody water again. “Don't see no black man. I sees—”

West put the bowl down on the ground so hard that some water spilled.

“What is it?” Cy demanded. “What you see?” A creepy feeling had been coming over him ever since West had begun. He was starting to regret asking for this. Now he felt sure West had seen something he didn't want to share.

“Nothin',” West answered. “I didn't see nothin'.”

“You did! You just don't want to tell it.”

But West couldn't be persuaded to change his mind. “Who next?” he asked.

Mouse volunteered. West told him the same thing: he'd be free. Mouse allowed that he knew it, had always known it, and one day he was going back to the Okefenokee and find Tiberius, the old man who had taught him all about wild critters and their ways.

“My turn,” Cy said. West took his blood and held the bowl close to his face.

“What you see?' Cy asked.

West stared at him. “Freedom. First one kind, then another.”

“What that mean?”

“Don't know. But that what I heard. The voice say, ‘First one kind, then another.'”

“Nothin' else?”

West shook his head.

Cy felt annoyed. He didn't like West's riddles. They could mean anything or nothing. Maybe he was just making everything up.

“You ever look for yourself?” Billy asked.

“I done told you once, no!” West's voice was shrill.

“Why you so bothered?” Cy wanted to know.

“I ain't!”

“I bet you
have
looked for yourself before,” Mouse said. “Ain't that so?”

West dumped the water into the dirt and threw the bowl against the wall, where it broke into pieces. Boys warming themselves at the stove looked up.

“Why you so mad?” Cy asked. “Is Mouse right?”

“What if he is? Ain't no concern o' yours.”

“If that how you want it,” Cy agreed.

“You can tell us what you seen for yourself,” Billy told West, drawing up close to him. “Somethin' bad?”

West pulled himself together. “Naw. Nothin' like that.”

“Then why you break yo' bowl?”

“I dunno. Guess I's just tired o' messin' with it. Nothin' to it, anyway.”

 

Christmas came and went. Cy wouldn't have known, but West noticed that Pook had some new clothes and a little wooden horse that rolled on wheels. He asked Rosalee about it, and she let it slip that it was Christmas. As she dished up breakfast that morning, her eyes had a dreamy expression and she seemed only half awake. Christmas also explained why Cain and Stryker didn't show up for breakfast that day, and why Prescott was badly hung over and in an evil mood. They'd celebrated way too much the night before.

Cy had never enjoyed much of a Christmas growing up. The Williams family had never earned enough extra for store-bought gifts. But his mama had always tried to make something nice for him, even if it was only a new shirt made of cheap cotton cloth. And Pete Williams always found a way to get hold of penny candy. Christmas dinner had been special—a chicken, maybe, or fried catfish if luck was on the side of the fishermen.

In Cain's camp, Christmas meant nothing except that the boys didn't have to work palmetto. A free day, but the weather was cold and rainy, so everyone stayed inside, trying to keep close to the wood stoves that offered the only relief from the chilly, damp air.

That night, Mouse developed a cough and a fever. Jess reported to Cain that he was sick, but Cain brushed it off as nothing more than a cold. What did anyone expect, given the weather?

The days went by, and Mouse didn't get better. Instead, a lot of the other boys caught the same thing. Coughing, sneezing, fever. Some days, the sickest boys couldn't go to work, and Stryker or Prescott had to stay in camp to keep an eye on them. Cy almost wished he would come down sick, too, and spend his days lying in bed instead of cutting his hands to pieces on the biting teeth of the palmetto plants.

One night, about two weeks after Mouse first took ill, he woke up the boys near him with his coughing. The coughing got worse and worse until it turned into a regular fit. His entire body shook with it.

“Hey, Mouse, take it easy! Lemme help you,” Jess offered. He tried to slap Mouse on the back, but Mouse pushed him away. He doubled over, head between his knees, coughing as if his lungs would burst.

“He bad off,” Jess declared. “Y'all make some racket, get Stryker or Prescott in here.”

The boys, all awake now, obliged by shouting and clanking their leg irons as loudly as they could. The fit kept its grip on Mouse's tiny body as he coughed, choked, gasped for breath. Finally, it stopped. Mouse tried to suck in a big gulp of air, and he made an awful, high-pitched whistling sound when he did. Then he vomited all over himself.

“Aw, shit,” West cried from his place on Mouse's other side.

Mouse started to cry.

“Mouse!” Jess said. “Take it easy. It gonna be all right. Somebody be in here in a minute, take care o' you.”

And who would that be?
Cy wondered. Jess just couldn't stop himself from trying to make things better.

“I's sick,” Mouse whimpered. “Bad sick. Help me, Jess.”

“Keep up that ruckus,” Jess told everyone. “We
got
to get somebody in here.”

Then another fit took Mouse. Runny snot poured out of his nose, slid over his mouth, and ran down his chin. When the attack stopped, the whistling noise came again. Mouse fell backwards, worn out from the fit.

But it came on him yet again.

At last, Stryker appeared at the door. “What's goin' on in here? What y'all think you're doing, making all this fuss? Shut up and go back to sleep.”

“Please, sir,” Jess implored. “Mouse is real sick, and he done puked all over hisself.”

“I can smell it,” Stryker said.

Just at the moment, another attack seized the boy. Stryker came in close and held his lantern overhead. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed. “This is all we need.”

“What is it, Mr. Stryker?” Jess asked.

“Hoopin' cough.”

“What that?”

“Don't ask a stupid question. It's just what you see. You get it, your lungs fill up with that slime, you try and cough it up so you don't strangle to death, and then you make that noise when you try and catch your breath back.”

“Mouse got it bad.”

“You think I can't see that? Christ, what do we do now?”

“Give him some medicine,” Billy suggested.

“Did I ask for your advice?” Stryker snarled. “There
ain't
no medicine for it! You got to let it take its course. And now
all
y'all are gonna get it.”

A pang of fear shot through Cy. He looked at Mouse, covered in puke, and tried not to imagine himself in the same trouble.

“How come we all gon' get it?” Jess asked.

“'Cause that's the way it works! It's
contagious
, if you dummies know what that means. Once one of you comes down with it, y'all will, too. Just a matter of time. It ain't gonna be pretty, I promise you that. Shit! This is really gonna fry Cain's eggs. That's what he gets,” Stryker said to himself.

Another fit began, and Stryker moved away. “I'll be back,” he said.

He returned with Cain, Prescott, and Rosalee, who was moving slowly and seemed to be half asleep. Mouse started coughing again, and everyone waited until the fit passed, ending with the awful sound of his gasping for air.

“Told you,” Stryker said to Cain.

“You sure it's hoopin' cough? I ain't ever seen it before.”

“Then you're lucky. Trust me. That's what it is.”

“So what do we do?”

“Nothing
to
do but let it be.”

“How long will it take?”

“Long time. Couple weeks once it gets to this stage. Maybe more. And it's gonna seem like a year before it's all over.”

Cain looked weary. “A doctor couldn't help?”   

“From what I know, most likely not. And if we tell him the truth about what we got on our hands, he might not even come out and have a look. This stuff is mighty catchin'.”

“No way to stop it from spreading?” Cain asked.

“Quarantine. You got to separate the sick boys from the healthy ones, and pray that every single one of 'em don't come down with it.”

“Separate 'em?”

Stryker sighed, then went on, like he was trying to explain something to a child. “We got to keep these boys away from the other gang, starting tomorrow. Nobody in that other bunk has it yet, far as I know. But the minute anyone from over there starts actin' sick, we move him here. The sick and the healthy—they got to eat separate, shit separate—everything.”

“Damn it!” Cain exclaimed. “I reckon they can't work when they got it.” He sounded disappointed.