The Book of Lost Friends(53)

Finally, I follow the footprints up the slope.

The tracks turn and go down the road. Two people, still heading someplace afoot. Both got shoes on. The big tracks travel along straight, but the little ones wander to and fro, on the road and off it, showing there was no hurry at all. Don’t know why it’s a comfort, but it is. The footprints don’t go far before they turn off the road and start up some high ground to the other side. I stand and look, try to set my mind on whether I should follow or keep on straight. A swish of breeze blows from the dark sky ahead, and answers my question. A storm’s rising. We need shelter, a place we can lay up. That’s all there is to it.

Dog comes back. Didn’t catch the rabbit, but he’s got a squirrel he wants me to have.

“Good dog,” I tell him and gut the squirrel quick with the old hatchet, then tie it to one of the saddles. “We’ll have that later. You catch another one if you see it.”

He smiles in a dog way, and swings that ugly bare-skin tail of his, and starts off down the road along the foot tracks, and I follow.

The trail takes us up a little hill, then down again, ’cross a shallow creek where the horses stop to drink. After a while, more tracks come in from other directions. Horse tracks. Mule tracks. People tracks. The more that come together, the more they make a clear path, trod through the woods, down into the soil. People been walking in this way a long time. But always walking, or riding a horse or mule. Never a wagon.

Me and the gray and Ginger and the dog add our tracks to all that’s passed through before.

Rain catches us just after the trail gets better. Rain in kettlefuls and pails. It soaks through my clothes and runs rivers off my hat. Dog and the horses clamp their tails and arch their backs against it. I tip my head down, fighting the misery, and the only good thing is it washes the stink off of me and the saddles and the horses and Missy and Juneau Jane.

Now and again, I squint against the curtains of water, try to see, Is there anything around? But I can’t make out five foot ahead. The path turns to mush. My feet slide. The horses slip round. Old Ginger stumbles and flounders on her knees in front again. She’s so fretful about the rain, she gets right back on her feet.

We start up another rise, little rivers washing all around us. Water flows through my shoes, burns on the blisters there at first, then just turns my feet cold, so I can’t feel them at all. My body quakes till it feels like my bones might break in two.

Juneau Jane moans long and loud enough I hear it, even over the storm. Dog hears it, too, circles in behind her. Next thing, he’s back to lead the way, but I’m blinded enough that I trip over him and fall hands first in the mud.

He yelps, squirts out from under me, and skitters off running. It’s only when I’m climbing to my feet and pulling my hat out of the mud that I figure out why. There’s a place here. Little old place tucked in the trees, low roofed and built of cypress logs chinked with straw and tabby. The trail meets a half dozen other trails from other directions and leads us right to the front door of that little house.

Nobody answers when I step on the porch beside the dog, and call out, and pull the horses up close where they can shelter their heads at least.

Once I open the door, I know why, and what this house is. This the kind of place the slaves built with their own hands, way deep in the swamps and the woods, where their masters wouldn’t find it. Sundays, when the work gangs didn’t go to the fields, off they’d sneak to these hideaways, one by one, two by two. Meet up for preaching, and singing, and shouting, and praying, where they couldn’t be heard, where the owners and the overseers couldn’t stop them from crying out for freedom and how their deliverance was coming one day soon.

Here in the woods, a colored man was free to read from the Bible, if he could read, or listen to it if he couldn’t, not just be told that God gave you to your masters so that you could obey.

I thank the saints and get us out of the weather, quick as I can. Dog follows me back and forth ’cross the dirt floor, the two of us leaving trails of water and mud on the straw that’s been laid down. Can’t be helped, and I don’t suppose God or anybody would blame us.

Slabwood benches stand in quiet rows. Up front for the altar, the floor’s built up using four old doors that must’ve been on a Grand House back before the war. Three red velvet chairs sit behind the preacher’s stand. On the communion table, there’s a pretty crystal glass and four china plates, probably brung from a big house when the white folks went refugee because of the Yankees, leaving the place empty.

Behind the altar, a tall cut-glass window catches what there is of the daylight. It’s out of one of the doors on the floor. Oilcloth stretched on frames covers the rest of the windows. Newspapers been nailed to the walls at the back of the room. The chink must be gappy in that part.

It’s up there at the altar that I lay down Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, pull the velvet cushions off the chairs and put them under their heads. Juneau Jane shivers like a wretch, that wet shimmy stuck to her body with dirt and water and blood. Missy Lavinia is worse yet, and she still don’t moan or move. I lean close to her nose to see, Is she still breathin’?

Just the least stroke of air stirs on my cheek. It’s cold and feathery, and I got no good way to warm her up. Everything we have is soggy wet, so I strip us all down, hang the clothes to drip, and get a fire laid in the iron stove at the back of the room. It’s a fancy little one from a ladies’ parlor, with roses and vines and ivy leaves cast in the iron and a pretty skirt and bowed legs.