Freeman (60 page)

Oh, God
.

She was.

He stopped breathing.

She
was
.

Dazedly, he spurred his horse forward at a walk. He wanted to gallop, wanted to shout, but he felt as if he were floating through a dream. The street receded, the world went away. There was only her, drawing closer now, and him, his heart filled with feelings he didn’t even have words to name.

He reined the horse a few feet short of her, climbed down, took the time to loop his reins over the railing.

“Sam?” she said.

“Tilda?” he said. “My God, is that you?”

He stood close to her, not daring to touch her for fear she might somehow prove to be a stray wisp of his mad imaginings. He did not trust that he was not really asleep in a field just outside of town, wrapped in yet another dream that would break his heart when he awoke.

But she was beautiful. Time and fears and stress and ache showed in her face, yes. It had been fifteen years. But she was beautiful, still.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked.

“My arm?” He glanced over, having completely forgotten, and was momentarily surprised to see the stump of a limb hanging from his left shoulder. “It was shot off,” he said.

“In the war?”

He shook his head. “I came through the war without a scratch,” he said. “This happened a couple months ago, while I was walking through Virginia, Tennessee, somewhere in there. Somebody shot me. They thought I was somebody else.”

“You were walking?”

He nodded. “I walked all the way from Philadelphia, Tilda. I came down here looking for you. And oh God, I’ve found you!”

Then he couldn’t stop himself. He took her in his embrace. And for all the hardship he’d had since being shot, for all the difficulty of learning to dress himself, open a bag, climb atop a horse with but a single limb, he had never felt the loss of his arm more painfully than he did right in that instant. Because he needed two arms to do justice to what he was feeling, two arms to pull this woman close, pull her into him, two arms for an embrace as enduring as his love.

Sam felt tears massing behind his eyes. Joy tears. Sorrow tears. Crazy, mixed-up tears.

Then he realized: she had stiffened at his embrace. Now she was pushing him gently, but firmly, away. Sam pulled back, mystified. She met his eyes.

“We’ve got to go,” she said. “Now.”

“I do not understand,” he said.

“Marse Jim will be looking for me. He’ll come after me.”

“He is not your master anymore. Have you not heard? The war is over.”

Her great beauty twisted itself into a smirk that derided him. “You think Marse Jim cares about any of that?”

“He must care!
The war is over
. There are no more slaves and no more masters.”

Now she shouted it. “You’re not listening to me! I said,
he doesn’t care
! As long as I’m living, I’m his property, I’m his slave. That’s how he sees it.”

“Then we shall make him care,” said Sam.

“No,” she said, in a voice that did not allow for contradiction. “You shall get killed. That’s what will happen. You’ll get us
both
killed.” She grabbed his hand in both of hers and her eyes were wild with pleading. “You don’t know him, Sam, but I do. We’ve got to get away.”

In his mind, Sam kept trying to work it like a math problem. But he couldn’t get the sums to line up. The war was over. Emancipation was the law of the land. How could this Jim McFarland, or
any
man, still think he had the right to hold someone in bondage? It was madness. It made no sense.

In his confusion, Sam cast about him for help. He found himself sharing a look with Abraham Jones, who had come up without Sam’s noticing. Jones’s face mirrored Sam’s own disbelief. Then the younger man shrugged.
And that, too, mirrored something in Sam: a recognition that ultimately, he had no choice.

“All right,” he said. “We shall go. We shall go right now.”

For the first time, she smiled. It was small and it was bruised, but it was hopeful, too, and relieved. All in all, thought Sam, her smile was one of the saddest and most beautiful things he had ever seen.

“Can you ride?” he asked.

She nodded. He braced her as best he could as she climbed into the saddle. When she was seated, he went to Abraham and offered his hand. “I want to thank you again,” he said. “Thank you for everything. Were it not for you…” He let the thought peter away, unable to speak the words.

Abraham shook his hand. “Take care of yourself, my friend,” he said, through his big smile. “Take care of
her
.”

“I will,” said Sam.

Abraham glanced up at Tilda. “I see why you were unwilling to give up on her,” he said, and mischief had entered his smile.

Sam shook his head. “No you don’t,” he said. “There is more. There is much more.”

He clapped Abraham on the shoulder, then went around and muscled himself up on the horse behind Tilda. Her face was tense, her eyes scanning the street. Well, soon enough they would be gone and she could put the fear behind her. He reached around and took the reins, turned the horse, and went down the street at a trot.

Abraham Lincoln Jones watched after them until they had disappeared and then for a few minutes more after that. Maybe he had been wrong about Sam Freeman. He had thought Sam too wrought up in a useless quest to ever be of much use to the race. But maybe there was no quest more important than to simply return to the embrace of love. And maybe, in his hopefulness and his stubborn perseverance, both of them now vindicated by the miracle Jones had just seen, Sam offered the race an example that would be invaluable in coming days.

At least, thought Jones with a private smile, that was how he would write the story. He pulled out his watch. If he hurried, he just had time to get it in the next paper.

For the next few hours, Jones worked at his desk, writing out the account of meeting Sam, helping him place his notice, secretly feeling that here was an impossible quest, then Tilda showing up in the offices of
The
Freedman’s Voice
, his own mad dash down the street, and finally, the touching conclusion, the moment when the star-crossed lovers were reunited after 15 long years.

He would have to punch that part of the narrative up a bit, he thought, his pen flying across paper. Was it simply his imagination, or hadn’t the woman Tilda seemed more filled with fear of this “Marse Jim” character than with joy of seeing Sam again?

No matter. In the narrative, her happiness at being unexpectedly returned to her one true love would leap off the page. He would see to it.

It was after six and the streets outside had cleared away to emptiness by the time he was done writing and typesetting. The headline told the tale:

It made him smile to think of how the story would give hope to so many people. He couldn’t wait until it was in the paper. He was eager for their reactions.

Jones was reaching for his composing stick when he heard the door open. He came around the printing press, wearing the ink-smeared apron he always wore when putting the paper together, and found himself facing a smelly, unshaven white man who regarded him with naked malice from beneath the brow of his slouch hat.

The white man had a rifle cradled in one arm and with his free hand, he held up a copy of
The Freedman’s Voice
. “You the one publishes this rag?” His voice was like rocks in a barrel.

Jones made himself smile. “I am A.L. Jones,” he said, “just as it says on the window. And who might you be, sir?” But he already knew, instinctively, who this white man was, and his eyes grazed the pistol he kept under the counter. From where he stood, Jim McFarland couldn’t see it. Jones wondered if he could reach it without arousing suspicion.

“I am Captain James McFarland,” said the white man. “You took something that belongs to me, and I’ll have it back.”

Jones freshened the smile. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir,” he said, coming forward as naturally as he could manage.

“That’s far enough,” said McFarland. He gestured with the rifle, not even bothering to move it from the crook of his arm, where it nestled in gleaming dark malice.

“I was just going to ask if you were sure you had the right place,” said Jones, eyes darting toward the pistol.

“Don’t toy with me, nigger. I got the right place, all right.”

Still smiling, Jones said, “Well, then, perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me what it is I am supposed to have taken from you.”

“Nigger wench. Goes by the name Tilda. Some buck looking for her put a notice in your paper. Next thing I know, she’s disappeared.”

Jones scratched his chin. “Tilda? I’m sorry, sir, name doesn’t ring a bell.”

Jim McFarland’s voice was thunder from a cloudless sky, a blast that startles all the more for having come out of nowhere. “I told you don’t
toy
with me!” he roared. “Think I’m a fool, nigger? Now you got one chance to keep your head on them shoulders of yours: tell me where they went. Tell me everything you know.”

Jones swallowed, then found his smile again. “Well, sir,” he said, “perhaps if you be kind enough to show me the notice.” Desperate. Playing for time. The pistol under the counter just a step or two away.

McFarland gave him a look of dark suspicion, then slammed the paper down. Jones was grateful for that, because it gave him an excuse to come forward to the counter. His left hand finally closed on the reassuring shape of the pistol grip even as he studied the notice with feigned concentration.

“Oh, yes sir,” he said. “I remember this. A Mr. Sam Freeman placed this ad a week ago. Said he was lookin’ for this woman, Tilda. He waited around town for ’most a week, come in here every day to check if I heard any answer, which I haven’t. He came for the last time yesterday, say he wasn’t going to tarry ’round here any longer. Said he’s going back home.”

“Where’s that? Home?”

“Philadelphy,” said Jones.

McFarland pondered this. Jones wondered if there was a way to pull back the hammer of the pistol without the white man hearing. Maybe he could shoot him without the raising the gun, shoot him right through the counter. The pistol was slimy in his grip.

McFarland said, “You’re lying.”

“What do you mean, sir?” He gave the white man the roundest eyes he could.

“I mean, no buck comes all the way down here, goes through all that time and trouble looking for a woman, and stays for only six days. No, he’s
here. He’s either in Little Rock or someplace close, but he sure ain’t gone to Philadelphy. Not yet. She means too much to him.”

“Well, sir, I can’t say as I’d know. All I do is take the money and put the notice in the paper.” Still smiling.

“What about the woman? She come in here?”

“No, sir. Haven’t seen a woman in here all day. Sure would like to, though. Make the day go faster.” He hoped his smile suggested lascivious thoughts. A certain kind of white man, he had found, liked it when colored men spoke sex to them. He was reasonably sure this foul-smelling reb was one of them.

But Jim McFarland barely seemed to hear him. To Jones’s horror, he was picking idly through the items strewn across his desk. One of them was the tablet on which he had written out the new story for tomorrow’s front page. He could still see the lead in his head: “Two star-crossed lovers, both former slaves, were reunited yesterday in Little Rock and your own
Freedman’s Voice
played a critical role.” And further down, it told how Sam had spent three months walking in the South looking for Tilda, how he had sojourned recently in a town called Buford, in Mississippi.

His lungs stopped sucking down air. He saw McFarland snatch up the tablet. He saw the white man’s lips moving, reading the story. Then he saw the piggish eyes abruptly narrow. McFarland’s head was coming up, the rifle was rising, his mouth was already curled around whatever cruel triumph he was about to yell.

Hurry
.

Jones’s hand fumbled for the pistol and he brought it up, cocking the hammer as it came. He managed to clear the desk, managed to sight the center mass of the man before him. He had time to see McFarland’s eyes go wide. All he had to do was pull the trigger.