The Book of Lost Friends(29)
My leg twitches all on its own. The jingling harness buckles and chains go quiet, and I feel Moses looking my way. Heavy steps grind the stones in the alley, come closer one at a time, careful. A pistol slides from its holster. The hammer draws back.
I swallow my breath, press into the wood staves. This how I die? I think to myself. After all these years of toil, I don’t grow more than eighteen years old. Don’t have a husband. No babies. Just dead by the hand of a bad man and dumped off in the river.
Moses is right on me now, trying to see in the shadows. Hide me, I beg that old hogshead and the dark. Hide me good.
“Mmm-hmmm…” He makes the sound deep in his throat. His smells—tobacco, gun sulfur, wet wood, and sausage grease—dance up my nose.
Why’s he waiting? Why don’t he shoot? Should I bust out, try to get past him?
Old Ginger nickers and paws, nervous, like she knows this is trouble. Like she feels it the way animals do. She snorts and squeals, and dances over the shafts to take a kick at the gray. The man, Moses, must’ve stood them too close together. He don’t know them two horses ain’t familiar. Old boss mare like Ginger, she’ll put a young rowdy gelding in his place, first chance she gets.
“Har!” Moses moves away to settle the horses. I weigh out my chances on running or keeping hid.
He stays with the stock, and I hold still. Seems like hours I wait for him to calm the horses, then check up and down the alley, knocking over stacks of crates and kicking up trash piles. Finally, he fires off a shot, but he’s far down from me. I wrap my arms over my head and wonder if that bullet’s coming my way, but it don’t. No more follow after it.
A window slides up just over my head, and the Lieutenant hollers at Moses to get done with the job he’s at; there’s cargo to load yet. He wants Moses to see to it, personal. Especially the horses. Get them on the boat and get rid of the boy.
“Yas’ir.”
The horses’ iron shoes ring against the stones and echo on the walls when he leads them off.
I wait till the sounds fade before I creep from my spot and hurry to the calèche to feel around for Missy Lavinia’s brown lace reticule. Without it, we ain’t got money or food to get us back home. Once it’s in my hand, I run like the devil’s on my hind heels. Thing is, he might be.
I don’t stop till I’m away from that building and down toward the water, where there’s men and boys swarming a night-call boat like ants on a mound. Pushing Missy Lavinia’s reticule down the front of my britches, I move off from the river landing to where farm wagons and freighter wagons sit parked in a camp lot, waiting for boats that’ll come in tomorrow. Tents billow and sigh in the river breeze and wagon curtains and mosquito nets hang stretched to tree branches, sheltering bed pallets underneath.
I slip through the camps quiet as the breeze, the voice of the river covering the little sounds of my passing. Water’s up high from spring rains, the old Mississippi making a ear-filling noise like the drummers on their homemade drums did back before the freedom. When the harvest was in—corn was always last of all—the masters had big corn-shuckin’ celebration parties, with platters of ham, sausage, fried chicken, bowls of gravy and peas, Irish potatoes, and barrels of corn liquor, all anybody wanted. Shuck corn and eat and drink and shuck more corn. Play the fiddle and banjo. Sing “Oh! Susanna” and “Swanee River.” Have us a frolic, finally free of our labor till it all started up again.
After the white folks had long took their leave of the party and gone up to the Grand House, the fiddlers put away their fiddles and took out the drums, and the people danced in the old way, their bodies slick in the lantern light, swaying and stomping and feeling the rhythms. The old ones, weary in their chairs after the hard season of cane cutting and feeding the steam mill in the sugarhouse, threw back their heads in their chairs and sang songs in the tongues they learned from their mamas and grandmamas. The songs of long-gone places.
Tonight, the river’s like they were then, wild and looking for a way free, crashing and pushing at the walls built up by men to keep it trapped.
I find a wagon with nobody near and climb up into a safe place between piles of oilcloth, a space just big enough for me to fit into. Gathering my knees to my chest, I wrap my arms tight, and try to make sense of things in my mind. Off through the wagons and tents, stevedores and roustabouts come and go from the buildings along the row, rolling barrels and wheeling loaded-down handcarts. They move in a rush under the gas lamps, loading the boat so it can take to the water by morning light. That the Genesee Star the Lieutenant man spoke of to Moses?
Moses comes and goes from the buildings to the boat, answers my question. He points, gives orders, pushes the workers along. He’s a strong, brash man like the slave drivers of the old days. The driver was always the sort that’d use the cat-o’-nine-tails on his own kind to earn hisself good food and a better house. Type who’d kill his own color and bury them out in the field and plow and plant over their graves next season.
I scoot farther back in the canvas when Moses turns toward the camp, even though I know he can’t see me here.
How’d Missy get herself tied up with men like these? I need to find the why of it, and so I open her lace bag to see what’s there. Inside is a kerchief that smells like it’s got corn pone wrapped inside. Missy don’t go too many places without food. My stomach squeezes while I finger through the rest of what she was carrying. A coin pouch with six Liberty dollars, Missy’s ivory hair combs, and, at the very bottom, something rolled up in one of Old Mister’s black silk cravats. The thing inside is hard and heavy and jingles a little when I unwrap it. A shudder goes through me as a little pearl-handle two-shot pistol and a pair of loose rimfire cartridges drops in my palm. I dump the pistol back in the cloth and sit looking at it on my knee.