Freeman (45 page)

These people were not simply dead. They were ruined. They were desecrated. Burned. Gouged. Skinned.

There was Paul, head on his chest, face smashed in on itself, covered with a crust of blood.

There was Rufus, peppery old Rufus, deep wounds marring the smooth black crown of his scalp, creamy white bone showing through at the shoulder.

There was a man she didn’t know. Or maybe she had once; there was no way to tell. His body was only a husk, a hollow-eyed black thing so badly charred she feared the merest touch would turn it to ash.

Lord, there was poor little Bug, the big eyes distended now in the horror of his own grotesque death.

And there was Bonnie, the only woman, her hands empty and limp, her dress torn, her skin gray, her face bloody, her tongue between her lips, her eyes mercifully closed.

Oh, sister. Oh, Miss Bonnie
.

Prudence took Bonnie’s hand. It was cold and rough with scars, the fingernails broken. She brought the hand against her forehead, closed her eyes and wept as she had not even wept when the news came that her husband had been killed at Gettysburg.

How many thousands of nights had they lain awake in the same bed, one having snuck into the other’s room? How many hundreds of childish confidences had they shared? How many dozens of arguments had they
had? How many smiles and pouts and walks in the square and summer evenings on the front stoop watching the sky turn to gold and then to black as fireflies winked at them from the gathering shadows?

How many? Too many for it all to come down to this, a brutal death in a godforsaken Mississippi town.

“Cut them down,” said Sergeant Russell. “Someone find a Bible and give them a decent burial.”

He put an arm around her shoulder. “Come,” he said, and his gruff voice was oddly gentle. “That’s enough.”

A soldier had clambered into the tree and was using his knife on the rope that held Bonnie. Another braced her from below. The man in the tree sawed through the rope and Bonnie’s body folded itself over the shoulder of the soldier below. Prudence allowed herself to be led away.

She did not know what to do. For the first time in her entire life, she had no idea, no plan, no sure and certain sense of what came next. It was as if she no longer knew herself, as if she no longer
was
herself, as if something essential to who she was had died that same awful night.

Maybe just surety and certainty themselves. Maybe it was as simple as that.

The soft nickering of the horse drew her up out of herself, pulled her out of that morning and back into this one, ten days later. She glanced up and saw it by the light of the swiftly paling moon, a horse’s muzzle poking out from behind the building. It was a big roan and its one visible eye watched her with an almost human intelligence. When she paused warily, the horse whinnied again, as if urging her closer.

Prudence came forward slowly, until she was standing in front of the animal. She placed the flat of her palm on its forehead. “Where did you come from?” she whispered. And then she saw the dead man.

He was colored, lying with his face in the dirt, clothing torn, face bruised, and blood everywhere
—
even, now that she looked, smeared on the horse’s flanks. She knelt gingerly, seeking his face. She would be surprised if she knew it. Most of the colored men in town—most of the colored
people
in town—were still hiding in the woods and fields where they had fled the night the rampage began. This man was probably from someplace out in the country. She wondered if he was another victim of white people who had lost their minds. She had been told that the rumor of a marauding colored army had now spread far from town.

Prudence touched his face and something that could not happen did. The dead man moved. It was just a flicker of his eye—as if something unwelcome troubled his dreams—and for a moment, she tried to convince herself she hadn’t seen it. But there was still warmth in his skin, and his chest—she could see this even in the meager light of the newborn day—rose and fell in a frail rhythm. The dead man was alive.

She flew down the alley and back through Miss Ginny’s door, crying out her name. The old woman came out of her bedroom, eyes wide and shiny. “Land sakes, child. What’s wrong?”

“There is a man out there. He has been injured! We must help him!”

Moments later, Prudence rushed back down the alley, Miss Ginny as close behind her as age and infirmity would permit. The horse was still where she had left it, as was the man. Prudence was almost surprised. She had half expected to come back and find nothing at all, proof she had hallucinated the whole thing. Miss Ginny came up behind her. She looked closely. “You sure he alive?” she said.

Prudence nodded. “Yes, I am certain of it,” she said. “He has been dreadfully injured, though.”

“Yes, he has.” She pointed. “You see that?”

Prudence came closer and saw what she hadn’t before. The stranger was missing an arm. “My God,” she said, “what happened to him?”

“Time for that later,” said Miss Ginny. “Got to get him off the street. Whoever done this to him might be lookin’ to finish it off.”

Prudence hadn’t thought of that. “How can we do that?” she asked. She could look at him and know there was no way she could lift him, much less carry him back down the alley.

“Got to drag him,” Miss Ginny said. “Use the horse. Take him into the warehouse.”

Warehouse
. Even distracted as she was by dilemma, some part of Prudence caught the word and it pricked her like a needle.
Warehouse, not school
. She shook her head, impatient with her own thoughts. “Dragging him could worsen his injuries,” she said.

Miss Ginny pursed her lips. “Can’t get too much worse than it already is,” she replied.

Prudence found a rope inside the warehouse. She tied one end to the pommel on the horse’s saddle, the other to the man’s shoes. Then Miss Ginny led the horse, slowly as possible, gently as possible, while Prudence
supported the man’s head, and they dragged him inside. Prudence had the sense they were hauling not a man, but a thing—a sack of flour or beans. At one point, Prudence paused and knelt to check him, convinced the ordeal meant to save his life had taken it instead.

“He dead?” asked Miss Ginny, and Prudence almost thought she detected a note of hope. But she shook her head no. “Stubborn man,” Miss Ginny said. And now the note in the old woman’s voice was of admiration.

It took them a few minutes, but finally they had him in the old warehouse. Prudence ran down to Miss Ginny’s house for some linens and they made him a pallet on the floor. Then they knelt beside him and got to work.

From a cabinet in the loft, Prudence retrieved medical supplies left over from the days when the old warehouse had served as a military hospital. They cut his clothes away, gently dabbed the blood and grime from his skin, and dressed his wounds. The worst of them was a gash in his lower back.

Miss Ginny made a small fire in the potbellied stove from pieces of paper and splinters of desk, heated a knife blade, and then pressed it to the skin. There was a hissing sizzle that made Prudence wince. But Miss Ginny’s hands worked with a deft dexterity that magnetized Prudence’s eyes. “You have doctored wounded men before,” she said as the older woman lifted the blade to survey her work.

Miss Ginny glanced at her. “Too many times,” she said. “In the war.”

She applied the hot metal to bare skin again. The man barely flinched and Prudence found herself wondering, and hating herself for the thought, if all this effort would not prove itself wasted. He had been through so much—you could see the map of his sufferings in the bruises and scars that covered him to the very bottom of his feet. How much could a man take and still live? Or want to?

After a moment Miss Ginny said, “I’m finished. How is he?”

Prudence lay her ear against the stranger’s broad back. After a moment she said, “He is still breathing.”

“Too stubborn to stop,” said Miss Ginny. She beckoned to Prudence. “Come here, gal, and help me up.”

Prudence stood, then braced Miss Ginny as the older woman came to her feet, grunting with the effort.

Prudence nodded toward the figure on the pallet. “Do you think he will live?”

“That’s betwixt him an’ God,” Miss Ginny said. “I expect they arguin’ over that right now.”

“I hope he does live,” said Prudence, still looking down. “There has been enough dying here.”

“Lord know that’s true,” said Miss Ginny, one hand massaging an ache in her right flank. “I’m going down to the house, rest a bit. You stayin’ here?”

“Yes,” said Prudence.

“Expected you would,” said Miss Ginny. “Tie the horse up yonder,” she added, pointing to a corner of the room. “Get him some water. I get some oats for him later.”

“I will,” said Prudence.

But she didn’t move, not at first. For a long moment after Miss Ginny was gone, she simply stood there watching the half-dead man. Something familiar tugged at her and it took a while before she knew it for what it was. For the ten days since the rampage, she had wandered about without it, and for a woman whose life had so long been marked by moving forward, always forward, toward definable goals, the absence was disconcerting.
Purpose
. She felt it again. It was a small purpose, perhaps, in the grand sweep of things, but it was purpose nevertheless—and she held to it with a fierceness and a firmness.

Purpose.

She would keep this stubborn man alive.

The day sat on the verge of twilight, but you could not tell by the heat. It still shimmered in angry waves off the dirt road, glanced painfully off window glass and the belt buckles of passersby. On a chair in front of the warehouse sat Prudence, her blouse wet and gray, sweat drooling off her brow. She fanned herself miserably with an ornamental fan her father had once brought home from Philadelphia.

Inside the warehouse, she knew, the temperature was even worse and she felt guilty for sitting out front while the half-dead man lay insensate on a scavenged cot inside. But she had spent the last half hour trying to ensure his comfort. She had changed his dressings, then raised him into a sitting position and spooned water and soup broth into him.

It felt like doing chores. It felt like watering a plant. It had been three days now. He had not died, but he had not improved. She had begun to believe he never would. If anything, he was getting worse. His skin was damp and hot to the touch and though it was hard to be certain in this diabolical heat, she believed he had a fever.

Something else to fear. Her life had become full of such things.

The streets were quiet this afternoon but for the occasional colored man or woman straggling past. It was only a few days since colored people had begun returning to the town, and they still walked through as if crossing a high and rickety bridge.

They never looked her way, much less spoke to her. They pretended she didn’t exist, she whose grand plans had led them to ruin. And she couldn’t
blame them for pretending. There were days she wished she didn’t exist, days she wished the soldiers had not saved her and she had instead been carried out the door to join her sister in the arms of oblivion. Even better, she wished her father had been like other fathers, able to keep at a distance the inhumanity of what was being done to colored people in Dixie, able to regard it as something terrible happening to someone else somewhere far away and leave it at that, not teach his children that they had an obligation to advocate for those who could not do it for themselves.

Look where that had gotten her. Look what it had done. These colored people hated her and there was nothing she could say in response. They had every right.

She was surprised, then, when she saw a man and a girl approaching from across the street. Prudence’s fan paused in its steady, useless motion. She knew the girl—dark skin with lively eyes, hair jutting from her scalp in pigtails. She remembered the way her hand leapt into the air every time Prudence or Bonnie posed the class a question. Adelaide.

Prudence stood. She was so unused to being approached, or even noticed, she didn’t quite know what to say. She was thankful the man spoke first. “She wanted to see you,” he said, shrugging an apology. “Wouldn’t let nobody rest until I brought her over here.”

“Wanted to make sure you was all right,” the girl said.

Prudence’s lower lip snagged on her teeth. She had to pause, concentrate on breathing, to make sure she didn’t break and cry. It had been weeks since anyone except Miss Ginny had shown her anything like simple human concern. Not that she deserved it, not that she had a right to expect it.