Rafe (11 page)

And what about the grim walls of the prisonlike stockade across the rear garden? What did they contain? And why? Criminal slaves? Could the situation have deteriorated so far?

Her mind was a welter of conflicting thoughts. She was angry at the attitude of the household servants yet felt pity for those unfortunates being herded to Lord knew what tasks. The conflicting emotions of her upbringing and her education raged within her and would not be still. “This will not be an easy homecoming,” she sighed aloud.

A tiny wisp of smoke curled up from the pecan grove across the road. Pa-Paw up and about, making his tea. She smiled warmly, fondly. The mystery could wait. There were enough mysteries to last a few days. More important was Pa-Paw. She stepped back into the room and stripped her gown from her body, tossing it lazily onto the bed. How soon, she thought, we slip back into the old ways. In Boston she was expected to care for her own bedclothes, expected to keep her garments and room clean and neat. She frowned at herself, turned and picked up the gown and hung it in the armoire, then quickly made up the bed. No reasonably healthy person needed a slave to make a bed.

The water in the basin was cold, directly from the spring. She sponged herself all over, washing the journey's grit from her body, feeling her skin tingle with each cleansing caress. “Cold water, clean and pure, is the best thing for a man—or a woman,” her father had told her. “That spring will run forever.”

The armoire was full of her old clothes, carefully kept against the damp. She reached into the stale camphor and cedar-perfumed air to pick an old and favorite sundress and stepped into it, wriggling it up around her hips and over her breasts, then giggling when it wouldn't fasten. She had grown. Crissa moved to the mirror and looked at herself with pleasure. Four years. And now no room for her in the old dress. A wide V ran down her front, barely concealing her nipples, and try as she might, there was no buttoning the garment past the bottom three. She sighed. It didn't matter. Her trunk would arrive soon. She wriggled out of the dress and hung it back in the armoire, shook out the dust and grit from the one she'd worn the day before and put it on. A brush through her hair a few times and a dab of concealing perfume and she was ready.

The house was still quiet. The aroma of frying ham and newly baked bread wafted up the stairs to her and reminded her stomach of the meager fare of the day before. She tiptoed along the upstairs hall, determined to avoid any and all contact with the Freedom household servants. Now wasn't the time, hungry though she was.

The front doors were already open and she flitted through them and into the morning sunlight. Standing there on the gallery, the front grounds and distant acreage displayed in the light of dawn, a momentary panic seized her. For four years she had lived in the browns and grays of a large northern city and now she was assailed by a solid wall of undifferentiated green. She forced herself to take a deep breath, forced herself to separate magnolia green from pecan green from grass green from pine green. So many subtleties and innuendoes of green. Could she decipher the similar undercurrents of mystery and tension in the house behind her? “This is my home,” she said aloud to herself. “It was once, and I will make it so again.”

Hair glistening golden-red in the morning sun, she ran lightly down the steps and across the drive. The magnolias swirled into focus as she neared them. The dark trunks were heavily scored. Massive limbs meant for climbing and building tree houses—she looked for a sign of the house she and Steve had built so many years ago, but it was gone—angled out to end in heavy, dark green waxen leaves. No one knew who had planted the trees. They were there when John Fitzman built the house. She paused a moment, remembering sitting high in their branches and listening to her mother anxiously calling, “Crissa! Crissa Elizabeth Fitzman, you come here this instant!”

Suddenly filled with a sense of urgency, she ran down the long lawn toward the road and the pecan grove beyond, stopping short as two ragged men on horseback rode around the bend and stopped. Both were heavily armed, both somewhat taken aback. One of the men doffed his cap, followed by the other. Scruffily bearded countenances split in broad grins; their eyes were dull and red. More like animals, she thought. They frightened her. She nodded briefly and lost no time in crossing in front of the horses and into the pecan grove, for once inside the trees she would be free of their disquieting gaze.

Stepping into the grove was like entering another world, a world of shadows haphazardly split by piercing beams of slanted light. Later in the day the straight rows would become a uniformly dappled magic wonderland where fairies played while leprechauns slept, but mornings and evenings transformed the grove into something even more unearthly. The chilliness of the dew mingled with a splendid, hushed, all-pervading quiet. This was why she had so loved the grove, had been so drawn to it. She wandered amid the pathless, woody sanctuary and her mind cleared and sorted itself. Decisions needed to be made. If her mother had become weak, well, she certainly had not. Ezra must be confronted with the fact that Crissa intended to assert herself. She thought back on her father's will. Fitzman's Freedom had been left jointly to her and her mother. Patrick Fitzman held Crissa's half in trust for her, with provision for her assuming control upon reaching her majority. A reasonable enough will, to be sure, but where was Uncle Patrick? She realized how isolated she had been for the last four years, how little she really knew. But perhaps that was of little import. On the 22nd she would be twenty-one. On that day the mystery would come to an end, for she could legally demand answers.

Crissa turned, catching a glint of movement behind her among the trees. A grouse or pheasant, perhaps. The movement repeated itself, took shape. A diminutive, stoop-shouldered Negro stepped into a patch of sunlight spreading its gleaming light along the grassy earth. The Negro shambled toward her, his eyes squinting to catch a better look, shading them against the bright slant of morning sun. The right sleeve of his ragged linen shirt was tucked into the rope belted about his waist, the fabric pressed flat against his body.

“Who dere? Who comin' to see ol' Eph'em dis early in de mo'nin'?”

Crissa felt tears brim and spill down her cheeks. A little more aged perhaps, but he hadn't changed all that much. She gathered her skirts and ran across the glade, startling the old Negro as she embraced him. “Pa-paw … Pa-Paw Ephraim, it's me …,” she cried, hugging him, laughing and crying at the same time.

“Who me?” the old man asked, confused by what seemed a wood spirit who had burst into the grove to take him away.

“Crissa. It's Crissa Elizabeth, Pa-Paw. Oh, I couldn't have changed all that much.”

“Crissa? Ma' little Crissa? Oh, ma' lawd. Ah done up an' died an' gon' ta' hebbin. Dey to'd me you was comin' an' Ah hear al de ruckus las' night, but Ah toles ma'se'f doan yo' beliebs it lessen yo' see dat chile.” He peered inquisitively at her. “Now Ah knows. It's ma' little girl right 'nuff. Lawd, lawd, lawdie …” the old man exclaimed, his face beaming.

He stepped back to see her better. “Ma' lawd, Cap'n John's little girl turned into a lady, sho 'nuff. An' she come back to her ol' Pa-Paw, yassuh, come back. Gab'ril soun' dat trumpit, let de ju'gemen' day come. Dis ol' nigger's ready. Ma' little girl done come home.”

He led her from the clearing deeper into the grove to the simple shack he had constructed out of dry limbs, broken branches and the few boards he could round up. Crissa felt like a child again. She and Ephraim reminisced, invoking the pleasant memories of the past. The aged Negro freeman continued to live unmolested among his beloved woody children. Ezra had at one time suggested the old man be put to the fields but Micara had stood up for him. Another time he'd tried to make Ephraim skedaddle across the river, but once again Micara had insisted he be allowed to stay. The last incident was several years earlier, and to Ephraim's way of thinking, “Mastuh Clayton done prob'ly fo'got about ol' Eph'em, least ways Ah sho' hopes so.”

Ephraim brewed some cherry bark tea in a battered pot, pouring the steaming liquid into two even more decrepit, unmatched cups. Talk eventually centered around new Freedom as it was under Ezra's control. “Honey chile, t'ings ain't de same. Dat Ezra Clayton a mean, mean man. An' de way ob de mastuh is de way dose under gwine be. White mens wid guns an' a' prowlin' all ober, nebber gibin' a nigger no rest. An' mo' workers fo' de extra fields. Dey's sompin' queer in de woodpile. A meanness to de place dat neva' was befo'. Dem darkies workin' in de fields, lawd but dey suffa's. An' whippin'? Land o' goshen yo' nevah done seed de lak. An' worstes' a' all is de pit. T'ain't right. T'ain't right no ways …”

A cold, tight wave of fear washed over Crissa. Twice in so many days now she had heard someone speak of the pit. Animal baiting was common but she didn't hold with it at all, thought the sport nauseating, cruel and demeaning. She pressed Ephraim for more information but he doggedly refused to speak further.

“T'ain't fittin' fo' a chile lak yo' is. Jes' keep to yo'se'f lak me. Some things in de worl' ain't fittin' fo' a chile to heah o' see.”

And that was that. Ephraim changed the subject, morosely recounting how the grove no longer rang to the laughter of a dozen children playing. There was little time for playing at Freedom these days and the grove was shunned by the little ones, no doubt afraid to laugh even when given the chance.

It was late morning when Crissa took her leave, promising to return whenever she could and assuring the old man she would see to it no one came to harm him or take him away from his beloved grove.

Crissa left the stand of pecans south of the main house. The morning air was still and close, humming with insects. A line of low cedars ran from east to west along the edge of the sculpted and aesthetically pleasing side lawn and led to the partially concealed pointed tops of the walled compound she had seen earlier. Determined to explore farther she traversed the side lawn and approached the compound from the east, skirted another line of protective cedars and found herself at the south wall. She stopped and stared in fascination at the iron-tipped trees, noted the bare trunks, even more formidable from close at hand. This was a nearly impregnable fort and she wondered what it could hold. Moving closer she cautiously peered between the six-inch spacing between the smooth wood surfaces. Her countenance was one of utter perplexity.

Near her two black youths wrestled each other within the diameter of a chalked circle. When one was pushed or shoved over the line a nearby guard flicked the tip of his whip to drive the wrestler back into the circle. She shifted her position and was able to see more of the compound. Several Negroes were lined up before a steaming iron pot, cups and plates in hand. Another black was ladling heaping portions of red beans and rice. Across the yard a cluster of black men squatted or lay prone upon the earth. A heavily bearded, barrel-gutted guard spoke in a gravelly voice similar to the snarling rasp of a cougar. The blacks rose to their feet and scrambled for plates and cups stacked before them. Those who had been wrestling quit and left the circle to join those already in line.

The bearded guard shouted, “Dingo, you bring me that pitchfork over yonder.” One of the Negroes who had been wrestling changed direction and headed for a shack, returning with the indicated tool. Crissa tensed, felt a similar uneasiness from the slaves in the compound.

“Here, Mistuh Butkis,” the slave called Dingo said, handing the farm implement to the guard.

Butkis turned the prongs to point toward Dingo. “Now you new bucks watch real close. Dingo, which end you gonna have ta' look out fer when a nigger come at you with one a' these?”

“Sheeit, Mistuh Butkis. Gotta watch de pokin' end.”

The cluster of young Negroes joined in with Dingo's laughter. Butkis glanced over at them as if to join their laughter, then shifted his weight and spun the implement, sending the wooden shaft slicing through the air to rap with a loud pop against Dingo's head. The Negro dropped like an empty sack. It was Butkis's turn to laugh, his head tilted back, mouth wide open.

“Hey!”

Crissa spun around, her hand raised on reflex to her mouth, stifling a scream.

Milo stared at her wide-eyed, more than a little surprised himself. “Oh,” he stammered. “S'cuse me, miss. Uh … uh … womenfolk ain't … uh … allowed over ta' here.…”

Crissa rapidly recovered her composure and assumed her most haughty air, staring at the lone guard until he lowered his gaze. “I am Crissa Fitzman. This is the Fitzman plantation and I'll thank you to refrain from telling me what I may and may not do.”

Milo, thoroughly cowed, nodded his head and muttered, “Yes'm.”

Crissa, head erect, primly stalked away, leaving him behind, too stunned to follow her immediately. She rounded the corner and saw the gate in the middle of the west wall, headed for it. Alongside the open gate limbs of a tree had been nailed to the spike-tipped trunks to form a crude ladder to a four foot long platform. There was room enough for a single guard on the platform. He stared inquisitively as the strange woman suddenly came around the corner and headed for him, followed by Milo. His eyes widened as she passed below him. Enjoying the expanse of breast visible from his perch, he shifted the ancient blunderbuss scattergun and leaned over the edge to get a better view. “My Gawd!” he marvelled. “Wait 'til ol' Boo hears about this. He'll shit for sure. Ah got Decater and Milo beat all hollow.”

Butkis stopped in the middle of a sentence, realizing the attention of the Negroes was obviously not with him, had strayed to someone or thing behind him. He turned in the direction they were staring. A woman stood centered in the open gateway, her fair blond fragility an incongruous contrast to the rough surroundings. The compound fell silent. Totally still. Dark faces, shiny, glistening and staring. “Shut that goddamn gate,” Butkis roared. A nearby guard quickly swung the gate closed. Though not as tall as the stockade walls it was sufficiently high enough to block the view of Crissa's appealing figure as well as obstruct her view of the interior of the compound.