The Book of Lost Friends(31)

I stay still as the dead, waiting for him to settle, before I throw my old shirt on the branch and run off half-naked, carrying his. I hunker down in a stubble field just off from the camps to get dressed. A dog barks in the woods, and then another with it. Then a third. They sing the long, wavering song of a hunt. I hark to the days when the overseers and the patrollers rode the night with their tracking hounds, chasing after the runners that tried to hide in the swamps or head north. Sometimes, the runaways got caught quick. Sometimes, they’d stay out there for months. A few never came back, and we hoped they’d made their way to the free states we’d all heard of.

Mostly, the runners got hungry, or sick with fever, or lonesome for their people, and they wandered home on their own. What happened then depended on their marse or missus. But if a runner got caught in the field, the patrollers would let their dogs chew flesh from bone before dragging whatever was left back to the home plantation. Then everybody, the field hands and the house girls and all the little children on that place, would be stood out to see the poor, tore-up soul and watch the lashing that was to come.

Old Gossett never kept a runner. Always said if a slave wasn’t grateful to be fed good and not worked on Sunday except during sugar season, and kept in clothes and shoes, and not sold off from their family, he wasn’t worth having. Nearly all of the Gossett help had been raised on the place, but the slaves that’d come from the Loach family as wedding gifts to Old Missus, they had different stories to tell. Their bodies spoke in scars, and the nubs of cutoff fingers and toes, and twisted arms and legs healed crooked after being broke. Was from them and others on plantations near Goswood Grove that we learned how other folks had it. Our worst worry day by day was to watch out for Old Missus’s bad temper. A life could be meaner than that, and many were.

I don’t want them dogs in the woods to get after me, and since I can’t tell what they’re chasing tonight, I figure I better hide up closer to town, maybe try to find myself a ride out on a wagon come morning. I could pay for it with the money in Missy’s reticule, but I don’t dare.

I ponder that, squatting there in the stubble while I button up the shirt placket. Tucking the hem over Missy’s reticule in my britches waist, I cinch John’s leather belt tight to hold it. Makes me shaped like a fat-bellied boy, which is good. Fat boy in a white shirt and a gray hat. The more different I look from before, the better. Now I just need to find a likely wagon and hide before morning, when that man sees the clothes he left to dry been traded out instead.

The dogs work closer and closer up the woods, so I cross the camp yard again, move near the river landing and listen at the men talking. I watch for just the right kind of wagon—one where the driver’s alone and the horses hadn’t been rubbed down and picketed, which means they’re headed for home at daybreak.

Light warms the sky by the time I find what I need. A old colored man guides his mules to the front of the line. The load in his wagon is covered over and tied down tight. Driver’s so crippled, he can’t hardly get down off the seat, and I hear him say he’s from a place upriver. When the workers untie the ropes, underneath the canvas is a fancy piano like the one Old Missus had before the war. It sings lopsided notes as the men take it down, and the driver limps after it up the boardwalk to the boat, bossing every step.

I start on my way toward that wagon, listening as voices mix with the noise of ropes whining and chains jangling and pulleys squealing. Mules and cows and horses kick and fret while the men make ready to load livestock. Right after that will come passengers, last of all.

Don’t run, I tell myself, though every inch of muscle and bone inside me wants to. Move like you hadn’t got a worry at all. Like you’re just here working the docks with all the rest. Easy-like.

I pass by a stack of empty crates, grab two and heft them on my shoulders, keeping my head down between. The hat slips low, so’s all I can see is the strip of ground in front of my feet. I hear Moses’s deep voice someplace nearby hollering out orders.

A pair of stovepipe boots stop in my path. I pull up short, squeezing the crates hard against my head. Don’t look up.

The boots half turn my way. I tooth my bottom lip, bite hard.

“These’uns get took straight where you been told,” the man says. I catch my breath that it ain’t Moses’s voice and he don’t seem to be talking to me, then I check and see it’s a big white man, telling a couple stevedores where to haul some trunks. “Best be quick at it, or you’ll get you a ride on that boat. Wind up in Texas.”

Past the man, farther on toward the river, is Moses. He stands ramrod-straight under a hanging lantern, one tall boot braced on the boardwalk and one in the mud. His palm rests over the pistol holstered to his thigh while he points and yells and tells workers where to put the goods. Every minute or two, he steps up on the boardwalk and takes a wide look around, like he’s watching for something. I hope it ain’t me.

I move back as the two big trunks get pushed by, strapped on handcarts. A wheel slips off the cypress planks that’ve been laid over the mud, and the lift handle snaps in two, sending a trunk and the worker sidewards. Something thumps inside the box, hollow like a melon. A whimper comes, low, soft.

The big white man steps forward, holds the trunk from falling on its side. “Best take care,” he says while the stevedore gets to his feet. “Bruise up Boss’s new dogs, he’d be mighty displeased. Watch them wheels.” He puts a knee and shoulder under the trunk to help get it upright on the planks again. Just as he does, something shiny gold falls through a crack along the trunk slats. It snakes down silent and lands in the mud next to the man’s foot. I know what it is, even before the workers and the man move on, and I set down one of my crates and scoop up what’s been left on the ground.