Song of Slaves in the Desert (39 page)

“The boat went up the river to the creek and took me to the brickyard at the plantation, and there the niggers hid me for all this time, and even when I didn’t even know it turned out I was waiting for Liza and you to come for me.”

Shadows filled the spaces between the trees and we were up and moving, even as the trees themselves began to fade into the general dark.

“We are going to do that,” I said.

“Oh, I pray you, sir, please, because I do so want to get home. My Ma will be thinking long ago I was dead, and I feel that way, I’ve been so much put upon. But in my heart—”

I was listening to him and his pathetic tale, but I was staring at Liza, this woman who had brought my life to such a strange and unexpected turn.

She was staring back at me.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“I am glad you have run away with me, Nate,” she said.

“You do feel some affection for me then? You did not merely plan to seduce me and enlist me in this plan of yours?”

“I feel more than affection,” she said.

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” she said, watching as the boy curled up against the tree to take the last of the day’s rest.

Within a moment he was sleeping. “Nate?”

“Yes, Liza?”

“There is something more,” she said.

“And what is that something, Liza?” I said.

“I am carrying our child.”

All that second night I walked while carrying the thoughts about that child in my mind, and it both weighed me down and kept me buoyant, blotting my fears of possible interception and capture—who knew what slave hunters or horsemen waited on the fringes of the marsh? However, by the next morning I felt strange and awful, a living playground of chills and then after a while what felt to me like heat rising on a sun-bright day in autumn.

Frogs croaked, birds splashed into the swamp to fish for them. Snakes wound their way through the tree branches. In the distance birds called to each other, singing about fish and snakes.

“You must try to rest,” Liza said.

“How can I rest when you—?”

“Hush, you,” she said, taking me like a child in her arms. “You must sleep.”

“And you?”

“I’ll try,” she said. “Yet when I close my eyes I begin to hear sounds—”

“Splashing, as if horses are tramping through the swamp?”

“Yes.”

“Voices, that turn out to be swamp birds?”

“Yes, I heard them.”

“You sleep and I will keep watch,” I said. “And then you can keep watch and I will sleep.”

“Let’s turn that around, Nate,” Liza said. “You sleep first. Then me.”

“You must have your rest. You are…” I could scarcely think the word let alone say it.

She shook her head and laughed lightly in her throat.

“It is as strange to me as it is to you, Nate.”

I pushed my head against her breast.

“I never knew my mother beyond my seven or so years,” I said. “But she was a good mother, she was. I have the hope that you will be, too.”

“And yet I worry about this child,” she said. “I have talked to the other women about it. We, you and I, being cousins…”

“I have heard stories,” I said. “There is a danger. But not as great a danger as if we had not ever met.”

She pressed me in her arms and touched her lips to the top of my head, holding me as though I myself were her as yet unborn child.

“You are sweet to say that, Nate.”

“Your sweetness lingers on my lips as I say it.”

And as I spoke a sudden convulsion of coldness and heat overtook me, and I said, with teeth chattering, “I love you, Liza. I want never for us to part.”

“Hush, now,” she said, “we’ll save all that for when we’re free.”

“I was once a free man, but now I am your slave.”

“Tish,” she said, “tish, tish.”

“Sometimes the brute truth sounds harsh and brittle. But this truth is soft and sweet and full of music.”

“Yankee words,” she said. “Trying to knock me off my guard.”

“Words I say to the woman who will become my wife. Words I say to the woman who carries my child.”

Liza bowed her head as if in prayer. I would have spoken but another wave of chills passed over me again, and I did not know if I was sick with fatigue or if the thought of marriage gave me fright—or wild hopefulness!

“You will marry me, will you not?” I said.

“Hush, now,” she said, whispering a lullaby in my ear as I sank further into her arms, closing my eyes and attempting to keep myself awake with thoughts of the child within her womb. When next I opened my eyes Liza was asleep, slumped against the tree, her arms wrapped around herself in an even more gentle version of the posture in which she had held me. Charles slept, curled up at her feet.

The swamp too had settled into a delicious, yet ominous, stillness. Even the bright daylight, turned a shade of deep green by its reflection against so many green plants and trees, seemed to retract into itself, as though it were trying to become in broad daylight as close to dark of night as it could. But even as it grew darker, its odor became broader and stronger, so that even its fetid stink began to have a stench all of its own on top of its odiferous self.

I settled myself, listening intently for any signal or sign that we might have hunters on our trail.

Nothing.

And nothing.

And nothing.

Until I heard a faint clacking, as though some bird were peck-peck-pecking on a tall tree nearby.

(A-hah! I felt like such a fool when I realized it was the noise of my own teeth!)

All the rest of nature settled down as I quieted myself once more.

And caught my eye on a nub of dark plant floating in the pool of water mid-distant between our tree and the far clump of plants that made up an island, like a stepping stone, in the marsh. I studied this small mark upon the placid inlet, bore my eyes down on it.

With a flip of a lid that startled me back into the shivers, it opened an eye on me.

And then another.

It floated toward me, rising a little as it moved, so that soon I could see the knotted hair, the broad and spectral brow, the woman as brown as Liza, hair spiked like star-shine, her breasts ascendant as she rose out of the water.

Charles!
I cried out, but my throat went dry and so I could say nothing.

Liza!

As if I had called
her
name, whatever she or it might be, she floated, her breasts buoyant and rising, her glance falling directly on me.

What could I do but shield my eyes and cry out,
Run, Liza, run!

Forgive me, but I was afraid and fascinated all at once, hypnotized and mystified by this apparition of the swamp—for surely she was a hallucination, and I was losing my mind. Did I wake or sleep?

Nate!
I heard the woman calling to me.
Goodbye, Nate! I’m running!

I awoke to white light turning into golden light streaming in through the windows, and hovering over me, with as it seemed to my senses, a slight odor of smoke adhering to her, a dark figure, herself all dressed in white, and she turned, and I saw her face.

“Precious Sally,” I said.

“You back!” She raised her hands as if at a political rally or prayer meeting. “Thank the God Jehovah! He’s back!”

But of course if she was standing there I was back at The Oaks. I strained to speak, and my voice sounded to my own ears like a noise filtered through a long hollow log. “How did I get here?” Every joint of me ached and my head felt as though it were on fire.

Precious Sally leaned over me, dabbing at my forehead with a damp cloth.

“You arrived on that horse,” she said. “Somebody slung you over the horse like a dead animal. When I saw first you, you was out, like in a deep, deep sleep, I almost thought you was already dead.”

Gathering what little strength I had, I sat up quickly, but immediately fell back onto the bed.

“Where is Liza?”

Again Precious shook her head, and leaned close to me, so that I could drink deeply of her by-now-familiar breath.

“Gone,” she said. “You know she run off. You run off after her, didn’t you? Hoping to catch her, right? That’s what I told Mr. Jonathan. Isaac told him, too. Said he saw her take the horse and run, and then you come running, and you took off after her, you and that boy who just come up out of nowhere. The nights go by. And then you come back, tied onto the back of the horse. You’re shivering and burning. Shouting and seeing things. Please, Mister Nathaniel, I know you got touched by the Visitor, but you got to get out of bed now and makes things all right! There’s a lot of more trouble here at The Oaks. Master Jonathan took off after Liza, dragging Isaac with him. He had a gun, oh, gods, a big old gun. He supposed to be here to watch over the massa but now the men come from town and put him in his grave. I don’t know, what kind of son that is, goes chasing off into the swamp for a missing girl when he supposed to be watching over his father! It’s more than a day gone by. And the Visitor still here, it took our poor Jack while you was sleeping, and half a dozen men from the cabins, they gone. Now the missus is sick in her room. Miss Rebecca, she went to town with the burial men, hoping she wait out the Visitor there.”

I listened and listened to her catalog of doom, while my heart leaped out into the terrible forever, sick with regret because Liza was on the run without me. It made me even more sick than I was to think of that, but then how if she had not left me behind could she run far enough and fast enough to escape the patrols?

“Precious Sally,” I said, upright again and holding steadier than a moment before, “has my cousin read his father’s will?”

“The what, suh?” she said.

The what
,
I said to myself,
the what, indeed!

“I am going to try and evict myself from this bed,” I said. “Precious Sally, can you meanwhile go down to the barns and see if Isaac has returned?”

“Yes, massa Nate,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, and lay back, listening to her feet, the sound of her walking along the hall, then descending the stairs. How was it that I had found myself back here again after all our plans for running? Oh, yes, I arrived on the horse, tied there no doubt by young Charles from New Jersey. But where had he gone? Was he off and running again? Some moments passed—or was it minutes? Certainly not an hour went by while I lay there, my mind hoping all the best for the young boy and my soul hoping to rush along at the speed of a horse to catch Liza so that I might run with her even further. My legs, however, would not move.

I lay there in that bed, even more helpless than before, despising myself for collapsing under the weight of the illness—that Visitor, as the slaves called it—unable to help Liza. I must have dreamed, because I recall a fleeting image of Liza, and of that same female creature, brown-skinned, with bountiful breasts, whom I had seen rising out of the swamp.

***

A commotion arose outside my window, horses whinnied, and wheels spat up stones along the drive. A strong odor of smoke and burning drifted in the window and into, as I imagined, all the halls and rooms of the house.

“Precious Sally?”

I cried out, finding the strength in my belly if not in my lungs.

Shouts down below. Heavy footsteps in the hall. Suddenly as though from a blast of wind in a sudden storm, the door burst open and in came my cousin Jonathan in torn coat and filthy trousers, swept along by the odor of smoke and burning.

“Well, hello, Cousin. I hear you are not feeling so well. While you were ailing things have moved along. I have been led off on a wild goose chase and that bitch is on the run! And there is this!” he said, holding up a sheaf of smoldering paper.

“What are you doing?” I said to him in challenge.

“What am I doing?” He waved the paper in front of me, bringing it almost within my reach, and so I could smell the stink of the whiskey upon him even stronger than the odor of the fire. “I am making the future. I will not be bound by the past. My late father, now, turns out to have been a man quite haunted by the days gone by, the days when he was a thin gentleman with a thick lust for love among the cabins.” He barked out a monstrous laugh. “Like father, like son, do we say? Except that the son did not know this important fact about the father! The son believed that he was the sole heir of this already God-forsaken enterprise! But the father, the father was skulking about the cabins, making other heirs!”

Again, he waved the paper in front of me, as though he were an attorney arguing a case of law and I was the jury.

I felt all of a sudden absolutely ice-cold lucid and hauled myself upright on the bed.

“And you? You hypocrite! You dare to judge him?”

Jonathan laughed a wild and reckless
caw-caw-caw
ing of a laugh.

“Who will judge him if not me? Cousin, are you Jews in New York mere pale imitations of the Gentiles? Do you sit around and say to yourselves, ‘Well, sirs, man cannot judge. Only God can judge?’ Here, in this deep place of rice and water, of ocean and woods, oh, yes, here, we make our own judgments about ourselves and others. At least do we Jews!”

I swung my feet around and steadied them on the floor next to the bed.

“At least do you who call yourselves Jews,” I said, amazed that I could find my balance. “Slaveholders that you are, you are much more like Pharaohs!”

“Ah, and you, pure heart, have not dabbled with a slave? Not you, no. Who is the hypocrite here? Who wanted to make a purchase of a certain young female!”

“Do not speak of her as though she were an animal, Cousin.”

“You used her as such, did you not?”

I took a step toward him, intending to slap his face, but my knees buckled and I fell back toward the bed.

“You have used her in much worse fashion.”

Ignoring my accusation, he countered with another. “She is a murderer, you know. I have seen the evidence.”

“It was my pistol,” I said.

“Are you saying that you shot Langerhans? I never would have thought you had it in you, Cousin.”

“You have done so much worse,” I said.

“Have I?”

“Bastard!” I reached for him and my breath came up short and the room began to spin.

I tried to regain my balance even as my cousin went about the business of completing the burning of the will.

“I will not let you get away with this,” I said, “I know what that paper contains.”

“Oh, and will you take me to court? On whose behalf?”

“On Isaac’s,” I said. “On the part of your half-brother.”

He opened his hand and the remaining shreds of charred paper drifted to the floor.

“Half no more,” he said.

“What do you say?”

“A sad and unfortunate accident,” he said.

Now I pushed myself from the bed again and stumbled toward him, fists raised.

Deftly, he stepped aside and I went stumbling to the door, where I held myself in tenuous balance.

“What do you say?” I repeated hoarsely, turning myself around.

“Do you want to know the truth, Cousin?”

“Tell me what you did,” I said.

“What I did?”

“Tell me what happened.”

I could scarcely catch a breath, but I hovered there at the doorway, waiting for him to speak while the stink of smoke drifted in through the windows and, in fainter fashion, crept up the stairwell and sneaked into the hall, that insidious odor of the worst things to come.