Freeman (63 page)

After all these years of hating himself for what had happened, all these years wrestling with guilt and shame and now, to hear those words…

It was not your fault
.

…he couldn’t…he didn’t…

You were right. Slavery was wrong
.

His mouth fell open, his thoughts fell silent. And all at once, his legs went wobbly and loose until they gave way, no longer capable of supporting his weight. Sam Freeman felt something go out of him then, felt something lift off of him, and without meaning to, he sank to his knees next to Tilda.

Kneeling in the spot where their son had died, Sam held his wife, she held him, and together they cried for a long time.

Three hours later, their shadows dragging behind them, Sam and Tilda walked side by side down a dusty road, Sam leading the horse. They didn’t speak much, but this silence was not hard and somber like what had sat
between them since Little Rock. This was a silence shared, not imposed, a silence made of contemplation.

Sam felt so many feelings at once he couldn’t even name them all. But they coalesced into a rough-hewn hope, a sense that maybe the future, which had always seemed so bleak and endless to him, might actually hold something else entirely, might even hold some hard-earned measure of happiness. They had done the thing that frightened him most, and they had emerged holding one another, giving one another strength.

It made him think, for the first time in a very long time, that anything was possible, anything could happen.

Anything at all.

“Nigger!”

It shattered his reverie like glass. A hateful word, a guttural voice.

Sam was still turning when the pistol barked and he felt something punch him hard in the ribs.

Tilda screamed, the horse bolted, and he heard himself thinking distractedly that the animal would never have made a good cavalry mount. Too easily spooked. Then, the ground came up to catch him. He found himself looking up at a slovenly white man in a slouch hat who stepped out now from where he had been waiting for them among the trees at the side of the road. This, then, was Jim McFarland. Sam realized bitterly that for all Tilda had told him about this man,
warned
him about this man, he had not truly listened. He had still managed to walk blithely into ambush.

He ordered himself up, ordered himself to his feet, but his body was not listening to orders anymore. It wouldn’t move. He could only lie there watching as the man came forward. Tilda was kneeling at Sam’s side now, pulling at him, tugging at him. Her mind was gone. She was screaming something that was no longer words. McFarland glanced at her with a terrible contempt. Then he swung the back of his closed fist at her head and she flew away.

Get up!
Sam ordered. But still his body refused to obey. His wife was about to be taken from him by this animal.

Raped. And beaten. Over and over again
.

There was not a blessed thing he could do about it. Sam had never known a sense of failure so utter and complete, not even when his son was killed.

McFarland stood over him, sighted down the pistol. “Nigger,” he said again, in that awful, scraping voice of his. “You think you can take my property and get away with it?”

Sam’s hand sought the bag tied to his belt. His fingers fumbled about looking for it, kept closing on emptiness. He sighed, felt death rattling in his chest as he did. It had been a long shot at best, a long shot bordering on wishful stupidity, the idea that he could open the bag, seize the little gun, and fire it before McFarland pulled the trigger. But he couldn’t even feel the bag, and didn’t that speak volumes about the uselessness of his entire goddamned existence?

Sam’s fingers stopped fumbling for the missing bag. He met McFarland’s burning gaze with open eyes and a strange calm and waited for the gunshot.

It came.

It was not what he expected, not an echoing blast that followed him down into oblivion. No, it was a flat pop, not unlike the breaking of a child’s balloon. And now there was a tiny red hole in
McFarland’s
face, just below his left eye. His hand came up to inspect the wound. He looked about him in dazed confusion. Then his eyes went blank, rolling back til only the whites were visible. He swayed and then, like a tree, toppled onto the dirt so hard he bounced. He lay still and did not move.

Sam craned his head, saw Tilda moving forward now, the little derringer gripped in her right hand, smoke drifting from its tip. And he realized: She hadn’t been tugging at him; she had been tugging at the bag on his belt and screaming in feigned hysteria to cover it up. Tilda moved past him now, went to inspect McFarland. Sam saw her foot prod his ample belly and get no response. When she knew her tormenter was dead, Tilda flung the little gun away from her like something filthy and came to kneel next to Sam. Her face filled his vision.

“We must get you to a doctor,” she said.

“No use,” he said, and his voice rasped out of him like a rusted hinge. “Not going to make it. Hurt too bad.”

Her face hardened. “Do not say that. You will not die on me, Sam Freeman. You get up right now, do you hear what I’m saying? You get up!”

And she grabbed his arm and pulled him to a sitting position, ignoring his gasp. Sam’s shirt was matted to him by blood. The bullet had entered beneath his only arm. Working feverishly, she pulled off his shirt. She
took her teeth to the cloth where it wasn’t soaked with blood and shredded a long piece. She looped this around his chest and tied it so tightly he gasped again. Sam watched all this activity with a detachment bordering on amusement.

When she felt she had controlled the bleeding as best she could, she came around to the front of him. “Now, you are going to stand up, Sam, and you are going to get on that horse.” And the amusement went out of him.

“I cannot,” he said.

“Yes, you can!” The very force of it made him flinch. He gulped and did not respond. “You will get up,” she told him, “and you will get on that horse, and we will go into that town and get you a doctor. Do you hear me, Sam Freeman?”

He nodded because he was scared not to.

She looped his arm over her shoulder, braced her own arm around his waist, and lifted. He had no leverage with which to push. He could only lean his weight on her and let her lift him.

It was impossible. It could not be done.

She bared her teeth, snarling with the effort. He felt himself rising.

Pain blinded him. He felt blood seeping from his wound, saw it soaking through her dress where her side was pressed to his. They were glued together by blood. She didn’t even notice.

Impossible. Could not be done.

But then he had his feet beneath him and he was still rising, the world reeling about him like children dancing around a pole. He clung to her, and she led him, his steps weak and faltering, to McFarland’s horse. She lifted his foot, placed it in the stirrup, lowered her shoulder to his backside and pushed, and
pushed,
and he took the pommel and pulled as best he could and somehow he was doing it, his leg coming up and over until he was seated in the dead man’s saddle. Exhausted. Sam collapsed against the pony’s neck.

Tilda was gone for a moment. When she came back, she was astride Bucephalus. She leaned over, took the reins of McFarland’s pony. “You hold on tight,” she told Sam.

He nodded, unable to speak. Tilda urged the roan into a walk, McFarland’s horse following obediently behind. She glanced briefly down at the body of her former owner, then turned her gaze to the road ahead.

“Free at last,” she whispered.

And Sam, his eyes closed in a world white with pain, heard this and smiled.

Ahead of them, the town of Buford rose out of the cotton fields. Tilda glanced back. Sam was unconscious, drooling into the horse’s neck. She had to shake him hard to bring him back to her. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, to know her, to remember.

“We’re here,” she said.

He lifted his head, pain corrugating his brow, surveyed the street, then pointed to a big, dark building on a corner. “There is an alley behind that warehouse,” he whispered. A pause, wincing, gathering his breath. “There will be a little house on your right. Look for a flower garden.”

She was uncertain, but she nodded anyway, jabbed her mount lightly with the spurs. They moved forward under the cold white gaze of the moon.

Tilda found the alley. She found the house. She pulled Sam’s horse up alongside her own. “There is a doctor here, Sam?” she asked.

“There are…friends,” he gasped.

“You have no need of friends. You have need of a doctor.”

“I do not know the doctor in this town. They will.”

She was still uncertain, but she slid down from the horse, climbed the three steps to the back door of the little clapboard house, and knocked hard. There was a scuffle of movement from inside. The door opened and a white woman was there.

“I am sorry,” said Tilda, stepping back in surprise, “we must have the wrong house.”

“What house are you looking for?” the white woman asked.

“I do not know. Sam, he…that is, my husband, he said…”

“Sam?” Something Tilda did not quite understand lit the white woman’s eyes. There was recognition, and something more.

“You know Sam?” she asked.

“You must be Tilda,” said the white woman,

“Yes,” said Tilda, wondering how this woman knew her name.

“He did it,” announced the white woman, beaming. Her eyes were emerald. “He found you.”

“Yes,” said Tilda.

“Where is he?”

And Tilda realized that for just a moment, she had forgotten the urgency of her mission, lost it in her confusion over who this white woman was and how she knew things she couldn’t know. “He is there,” she said, pointing. “He has been shot.”

The green eyes rounded. “What? Why did you not say so?” And she brushed past Tilda without waiting for an answer, calling over her shoulder to someone still inside the house. “Ginny! It’s Sam, he is hurt!”

Now a wizened little colored woman appeared at the door. She appraised Tilda with a smile. “He found you,” she said.

“Yes,” said Tilda. Who were these people?

“Good,” she said.

The white woman, her voice soaked with tears, was taking command. “Help me get him inside!”

She went to help. From the right side of the horse, the older woman pushed Sam’s leg up and over until it cleared the horse’s head. Tilda and the white woman caught the weight of him and lowered him, gently as they could.

“I am sorry,” Sam kept mumbling, not quite conscious. “I am sorry.” Tilda wasn’t sure which of them he was speaking to.

They got Sam’s legs under him as best they could. Tilda took his right arm over her shoulders, while the white woman braced herself under the nub of his left. They had to turn single file to go up the three stairs and through the narrow doorway into the house.

“Take him to my room,” the white woman said. “It is through that hallway, the second door on the left.”

Sam’s feet scraped the floor, his head lolling forward. Occasionally, he moaned.

The room she led them into was filled by a four-poster bed with a faded print cover. At the foot of the bed, a steamer trunk sat open and full of clothes. Apparently, the woman was packing to go somewhere.

They backed Sam up against the bed. Tilda pushed him gently back while the woman lifted his legs. Sam landed in the bed with a groan. His skin was a dead gray. The makeshift tourniquet around his side was soaked with blood.

“What happened to him?” asked the white woman.

Tilda ignored her. “He needs a doctor,” she said. “Is there a doctor in this town?”

The old woman spoke from the hallway behind them, as there was not space enough in the tiny room for all of them. “They’s a doctor down the street,” she said. “He don’t mind treatin’ colored, neither.”

“The two of you go get him,” the white woman said. She addressed herself to the old lady and added, “At this point, seeing me might just inflame matters.”

The old woman nodded. “Yeah, you probably right about that. Don’t want him to let Sam die just ’cause it’s you askin’ for help.”