Wild, Beautiful, and Free(12)
“All anyone have to hear is a few words, and they’ll know you got some education. Madame lying something desperate. Ain’t no overseer worth his salt gonna let an owner pay good money for a troublemaker. Got to tell ’em you dumb, and if you say a damn thing, I’ll cut out your tongue and make it true. You hear me? You smart enough to hear that?”
He turned around, and though it was dark, his eyes cut through, daring me to say yes. But I nodded and covered my mouth with my hands. He snapped the reins, and this man took me away from Catalpa Valley. Away from my home. He wouldn’t kill me. He was willing to make me suffer, but he wouldn’t kill me. I was worth something to him alive. I didn’t have to fear for my life, but everything else I wasn’t sure about, like my tongue. I figured I had to do two things: find a way to remember not to talk, not even to myself, and learn where I was going so I could get back to Catalpa Valley as soon as I could.
I reached for the stone that Dorinda had given to me. Her words and thoughts had a power I didn’t understand, but if she believed it would bring me back home, then I believed it too. It just had to be true. If I didn’t, I probably would have wailed myself sick, and Amesbury would have beaten me into a rag doll.
As it was, my head was clear enough to think of Papa’s maps. I pictured them in my mind as best I could. I listened carefully to the bumps in the road and for familiar sounds to keep me oriented. The bridge at Belle Neuve made the cart bounce in the way Papa’s carriage had always done. And I felt the careful curve the horses took, like the way Papa did when he was riding around the swampy, damp patch of ground that sat two miles west of the cotton fields at the edge of Catalpa Valley. There was a gate five miles after the cotton field. Amesbury got out to open and close it. Tears sprang to my eyes when we didn’t turn around but drove through the gate. At that point we were beyond Papa’s land. Since I hadn’t gone much beyond the boundaries of Catalpa Valley, I was lost. I burrowed my head into a corner of the cart, covered my mouth with my hand, and wept. After a while I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and I cried myself to sleep.
I couldn’t have slept long. When I woke, it was still dark, but I could smell water. Not fragrant like rainwater on grass—this was water full of mud and decay. I figured it was the Mississippi. We must be going north. The river was on the left side of the cart, and I could see dim fires that must have been from boats on the water. Knowing we were near the river settled me. Papa had shown me how the wide old river cut up and down in the South, leading straight down to Louisiana. If Amesbury kept us close to the river, I’d be able to find my way back to Catalpa Valley.
He stopped by a glade on the side of the road and built a fire. He pulled out a bedroll for himself and set about making himself supper. He only let me out of the cart long enough to relieve myself in the woods with him watching over me. Then he gave me a cup of water and tied me up again. I waited until he was asleep to eat the food Dorinda had given me. My head and neck were still sore from his blows.
While I ate, I thought of Madame and of all the ways I might have her punished. My anger felt like a wild animal in my heart, and I wanted her to suffer. But at the end of these ruminations, I’d still find myself lying on the hard boards of Amesbury’s cart with no sense of where I was going or what my life was about to be. It seemed I needed to be thinking about what I had to do and not waste my energy on Madame. I was old enough to know that being angry wasn’t easy. Dorinda used to say that cursing someone wasn’t a matter of spittin’ out words. You had to stay focused on the curse, nursing the words and the hurt, and after a while you wouldn’t even know that some part of you was still working the curse, because it got so deep inside you. I didn’t like that. If a thing was inside you like that, it had to be eating you up. Just stood to reason. I didn’t care enough about Madame, even in hate, to let her have that much of me. I didn’t know what to do with the hate, though. I couldn’t resolve it, so I put it aside. I figured I’d get back to it when I got back to Catalpa Valley. I’d find a way to avenge myself against her, and that would be that—at least that was my thinking.
The problem in front of me right then was how I was going to live wherever Amesbury was taking me without talking. Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much once he went away? But since I didn’t know our destination, that was a calculation I couldn’t make, not with any certainty. All I could do was pay attention and take whatever chances came my way.
It rained once as we made our way. It was that kind of rain that feels heavy, like a cloud has been wrung out like a sponge. I felt the saddest I’d ever felt since Papa had died, because the rain made it feel like the world was weeping all around me. My dress stuck to my skin and made me cold and sunk, pulled down into darkness. I crouched into a ball in a corner of the cart closest to being underneath Amesbury’s seat and fell asleep.
Wherever we had arrived, we got there in the dark. Someone pulled me from the cart and put a fire to my face. I couldn’t see who held the torches, but I felt myself being handled. My head was jerked around, my limbs pulled. The hands tried to force open my mouth, but I was awake enough to know to keep my jaws clenched shut and not make a sound. I heard men’s voices murmuring, and they kept murmuring when I was taken away to a place that was a circular yard of dirt. Buildings that seemed like stables lined the edges. I heard a man’s muffled scream. I knew it was muffled because the sound was so deep and wretched that it should have been much louder—higher and louder. I guessed he must have had something forcibly covering his mouth.