The Book of Lost Friends(47)

It’s on the way back to the barn I notice the space between the stalls and the end wall. Not much more than three foot, but it’s sealed up good, hid from the outside. Don’t recall seeing a door to it from the aisle. I can think up only one reason for a barn like that, with a room that’s made to be a secret place.

Back inside, I search round, find a hatchet hanging through a metal loop on the wall, but it ain’t there to be a hatchet. It’s there to keep a hasp shut, to hide it. A length of batten wood holds the other side upright. When I wiggle off the batten and lift out the hatchet, the piece of wall comes loose like the lid of a sideways crate.

The room’s what I thought. A hiding place like slave poachers used back before the freedom. Even in the shadow dark, I can see pegs hung with slave chains. Men like these would hunt down runaways in the swamp. Grab folks right off the road—free coloreds with papers, mulattos and Creoles, slaves doing their master’s bidding and carrying a pass. Men like these didn’t bother to question. Just throw a bag over the head of a man, woman, or child, tie them under a tarp in the back of a wagon, hide them in the swamp to sell to a trader marching some sad coffle to a auction sale far off. Men like these do their business the way Jep Loach done his.

The smell comes, then sifts up out of the dark of that room. Same as the trunks. Stomachs and bowels emptied, then the mess left to sour and rot. “You in here?” I whisper, but no answer comes. I listen hard. Do I hear breathin’?

I move by feel, find a half-warm body dumped ’cross the straw, and then another one. Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane ain’t dead, but they ain’t alive, either. They’re dressed in no more than their shimmies and drawers. Can’t be roused with whispering and shaking and slapping. I poke my head from the room, check the house again. The red tick dog sits in the barn door, watching me, but he just scrubs his half-bare tail back and forth over the dirt, remembering the meat. He won’t be no trouble.

Do the next thing, Hannie, I tell myself. Do the next thing and do it quick, before somebody comes.

I hunt up halters and leads and bridles and the best two of them old war saddles. The cinches and leathers hang rat chewed and weak, but they’ll hold, I hope. Got no choice. Only way I can keep them two girls on the horses is to have something to tie them to. Push them up there and hogtie them belly-down, just like the patrollers did to the runaway slaves back in the bad times.

Juneau Jane is a easy task, even though the gelding’s tall. She don’t weigh much and that horse is so glad to see her, he’s gentle as a toy rocky horse while I get her settled. Missy Lavinia, she’s a whole other task. She ain’t ladylike and airy. She’s solid. Weighs way more than a hundred-pound white oak basket full of cotton, that’s for definite. But I’m a strong woman, and my heart’s pumping so heavy from fear, I’m good as two strong women put together. I get her in the wagon bed, pull Old Ginger up next to it and go to pulling and pushing till Missy’s flopped over the saddle and I can tie her there. The stink on her drags dried meat and bile and cypress water right on up my throat, and I swallow back and swallow back and swallow back, check the house, check the house, check the house, thankful for the whiskey them men got from the boat and lots of it. They must be stone drunk asleep in there. I hope they don’t know a thing till tomorrow morning, elsewise we’ll all end up back in that poacher’s hold together.

I tie the old, dull hatchet on one of the saddles, and then the last matter I try to figure is the mule. Less chance of them men catching up to me if I got hooves under me and they don’t. If I try to take that mule with me, he’s likely to carry on and fuss with the horses and make noise, though. I can turn him loose, and if the luck’s on me, he’ll wander off in the woods looking for fodder. If the luck ain’t, he’ll linger near the home barn.

Opening the stall door, I say to that half-starved old soul, “Shush now. If you’re smart, you won’t ever come back here. These’re bad men. They done you in a terrible way.” The hide of that poor mule looks like the skin of the old folks who had come as marriage dowry from the Loach plantation. The Loaches used to brand the little ones when they turned a year old. Said it made them harder to steal. Branded the runaways, and any slave they bought, too.

This poor old mule’s been hot marked a dozen different times, including by both armies. He’s got to carry all that with him forever. “You’re a free mule now,” I tell him. “You go be free.”

He follows out of the barn when I lead the horses away, but I shoo him off, so he trails at a distance while we pick up our poke and wind out from that cabin and through the woods, working inland. The hound follows, too, and I let him. “Guess you’re free, too,” I tell him when we’re well enough away. “No bad men like that oughta have a dog, either.”

Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane’s heads flop loose against stirrups. I hope nobody’s dead or dying, but there’s no help for it. Not one thing I can do, except get us far from here, be careful, quiet, keep my ears peeled, keep off the wagon trail, stay clear of sump holes, or swamp cabins, or towns, or wagons, or folks. Hide from everybody till Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane can talk on their own. Ain’t no way of me explaining what looks like a colored boy, toting two white girls, half dressed and tied belly-down on horses.

I’ll be dead before I can even try.