A Different Flesh (20 page)

“Hurry it up, Jeremiah,” Stowe said. “They're getting way ahead there.”

“They know what they're doing,” the slave grunted, stung by the taunt. “Turn one loose in my kitchen and see what kind of mess you'd get.” To his surprise, Stowe laughed.

Jeremiah soon grew sore, stiff, and winded. He did not think he could have gone on without the half-grown sim that carried a bucket of water from one worker to the next. At first it would not stop for him, passing him by for members of its own kind. A growl from Stowe, though, fixed that in a hurry.

Reluctantly, Jeremiah came to see that the overseer did not use his charges with undue harshness. To have done so would have wrung less work from them, and work was what Stowe was after. He treated the sims—and Jeremiah—like so many other beasts of burden, with impersonal efficiency. The slave even wished for the malice Stowe had shown on the path that summer night. That, at least, would have been an acknowledgment of his humanity.

Before long, he found out what it meant to have such wishes granted. “Spread the hemp out better once you cut it,” Stowe snapped. Jeremiah jumped; he had not heard the overseer come up behind him. “Spread it out,” Stowe repeated. “It won't dry as well if you don't.”

“I'm doing as well as the sims are,” Jeremiah said, nodding toward the long, sharp, dark-green leaves lying to his right and left.

Stowe snorted. “I could wear out my whip arm and they'd still be slipshod. I expect better from you, and by Christ I'll get it.” His arm went back, then forward, fast as a striking snake. The whip cracked less than a foot from Jeremiah's ear. He flinched. He could not help it. “The next one you'll feel,” the overseer promised. He paused to let the message sink in, then moved on to keep the sims busy.

Jeremiah had a shirt of dark green silk. He mostly wore it for show, when his master was entertaining guests. He had never noticed it was the exact color of hemp leaves. Now he did, and told himself he would never put it on again.

The day seemed endless. Jeremiah did not dare look at his hands. He did know that, when he shifted them on the handle of the sickle, he saw red-brown stains on the gray, smooth wood.

Craack!
“God damn you, Jeremiah, I told you what I wanted!” Stowe shouted. The slave screamed at the hot touch of whip on his back. “Oh, stop your whining,” the overseer said. “I've not even marked you, past a bruise. You keep provoking me, though, and I'll give you stripes you'll wear the rest of your life.”

Several sims watched the byplay, taking advantage of Stowe's preoccupation to rest from their labor.
Work more, work better
, one signed at Jeremiah. Its wide, stupid grin was infuriatingly smug.

“Go to the devil,” Jeremiah muttered. For once, he hoped sims had souls, so they could spend eternity roasting in hellfire.

He thought the day would never end, but at last the sun set. “Enough!” Stowe shouted. This time Jeremiah had no trouble understanding the sims' whoops. He felt like adding some himself.

Stowe collected the tools, counting them as carefully as he had in the morning to make sure none was missing. His chilly gaze swung toward Jeremiah. “I'll see you tomorrow come sunrise. Now that you know what to do, I won't have to go easy on you anymore.” The whip twitched in his hand, ever so slightly.

“No, sir, Mr. Stowe, you surely won't,” Jeremiah said. The overseer nodded, for once satisfied.

Jeremiah had been afraid he would have to sleep in the sim barracks, but Stowe did not object when he went back to his room in the big house. Probably hadn't thought of it, the slave decided. He stopped at the kitchen for leftovers from the meal Jane Gillen had cooked. They were better than what the sims ate, but not much. His lip curled; he had forgotten more about cooking than Mrs. Gillen knew.

His hands felt as if they were on fire. He could not ignore them any more. There was a crock of lard in the kitchen. He rubbed it into both palms. The fat soothed the raw, broken skin.

Jeremiah went to his room. His back twinged again when he took off his shirt. Stowe knew exactly what he was doing with a lash, though; he had not drawn blood. But Jeremiah remembered the overseer's warning. His aching muscles contracted involuntarily, as if anticipating a blow that was sure to come.

Looking back, Jeremiah thought that unwilled, mortifying twinge was what made him do what he did next. “I don't care how white he is, he ain't gonna get the chance to whip me again,” he said out loud. He put his shirt back on, took out the pouch with his hard-saved sesters and denaires, opened the door, stepped into the hallway, shut the door behind him.

He could have gone back with no one the wiser, but from that moment on he was irrevocably a runaway in his own mind. Being one, he stopped in the kitchen again, to steal a carving knife. He had held that blade in his hand a hundred times with the Gillens or their children close by, and never thought of lifting it against them. “No more,” he whispered. “No more.”

And yet, as he left the dark and quiet house, he had trouble fighting the paralyzing tide of fear that rose inside him. He had his place here, his known duties and expectations. His master had let him earn the money he was carrying just so he could buy his freedom one day.

He turned back. His hand was on the doorknob when the pain that light touch brought returned him to his purpose. How was it really his place, he wondered, if Gillen could take it from him whenever he chose?

The question had no answer. He walked down the wooden steps and into the night.

Eleven days later, he came down the West Norfolk Road into Portsmouth. He was ragged and dirty and thin and tired; only on the last day had he dared actually travel the highway. Before that, fearing dogs and hunters on his track, he had gone by winding, back-country paths and through the woods.

Those held terrors of their own. Spearfangs had been hunted almost to extinction in Virginia years ago. Almost, however, was the operative word; Jeremiah had spent an uncomfortable night in a tree because of a thunderous coughing roar that erupted from the undergrowth a few hundred yards to his left.

He also had an encounter with a wild sim. It was hard to say which of the two got a worse fright from it. In the old days, Jeremiah had heard, sims would hunt down and eat any humans they could catch. But now, brought low by gunpowder and by man's greater native wit, the wild sims were only skulking pests in the land they had once roamed freely. And when this one saw the knife Jeremiah jerked out, it hooted and fled before it had a chance to hear his teeth chattering.

After those adventures and a couple of more like them, he wished he had taken his chances on hounds and trackers. With them, at least, he knew what to expect.

Portsmouth was the biggest town he had ever seen, ever imagined. By the bay, masts of merchantmen and naval vessels made a bare-branched forest against the sky. The gilded dome of the commonwealth capitol dominated the skyline. Jeremiah did not know that was what it was. He only knew it was grand and beautiful.

People of every sort swarmed through the streets, paying no attention to one more newly arrived, none-too-clean black man. Even the four sims bearing a rich trader's sedan chair looked down their broad, flat noses at him. And no wonder, he thought. Charles Gillen was a long way from poor, but he did not own a suit of clothes half so fine as the matched outfits of silk and satin the sims were wearing.

Jeremiah blessed the half-thought-out notion that had brought him to the city. Among these thousands, how could anyone hope to find one person in particular? His confidence took a jolt, though, when he passed a cabin whose sign declared: “JASON BROS: RUNAWAY SIMS AND NIGGERS CATCHED.” The picture below showed a sim treed by hounds with improbably sharp teeth and red mouths. Jeremiah shuddered and hurried on.

Before long, his grumbling stomach forced him to face another problem. On the road, he had raided fruit trees and stolen a couple of chickens, eking them out with fruits and berries. He did not think he could get away with that kind of provisioning for long in Portsmouth. Food was harder to get at and thieves more likely to be hunted down. He could eat for a while on the money he had with him, but he would have to find work if he did not want to deplete it. The twenty sesters he paid for a bad breakfast only reinforced the truth of that.

Here he would not have turned down the kind of hard manual labor that had made him run away in the first place. He would have been doing it for himself, of his own free will, and he reasoned that employers who wanted only strong backs would ask few questions.

But no such hauling or digging or carrying jobs were to be had: sims did them all, for no more wages than their keep. “You must be just off the farm, to think you can get that kind of job and get paid for it,” a straw boss said. Jeremiah's heart leaped into his mouth, but the man went on, “If you have a skilled trade, now, like carpenter or mason, I can use you. How about it?”

Jeremiah had used saw and chisel and plane often enough on the Gillen estate, but he said, “Sorry, sir, no,” and left in a hurry. The straw boss's chance reference to his real status, even if nothing was behind it, made him too nervous to stay.

He wandered aimlessly through Portsmouth for a while, marveling at the number of buildings that would have dwarfed the Gillen house, till then the grandest he had known. One imposing marble structure near the capitol had an inscription over the columned entranceway. It was in large, clear letters, but even when he spelled it out twice it made no sense:
FIAT IUSTITIA ET RUANT COELI.
He shrugged and gave it up.

Not far away, down a winding side street, stood a dilapidated clapboard building with a sign nailed to the front door. The sign was hard to read because it needed painting, but the words, at least, made sense:
ALFRED
P.
DOUGLAS, ATTORNEY AT LAW.

Jeremiah was about to pass on by when he remembered Caleb Gillen's talk about lawyers and how important they were. Maybe an important man would have work for him. And if the important man got too nosy, well, important men tended to be fat, and he could probably outrun this one. He walked up and knocked on the door.

“It's open,” someone with a deep voice called from inside. He sounded important. Jeremiah turned the knob and walked in.

The man rummaging through the pile of books by his desk was fat, but that ended his resemblance to anything Jeremiah had imagined. He was about thirty, with a straggling mustache and a thick shock of greasy black hair. His breeches had a hole in the knee; one shoe had a hole in the sole. His shirt was no cleaner than Jeremiah's.

Whatever he was digging for, he must have decided he wasn't going to find it. He made a disgusted face, looked up at Jeremiah. “And what can I do for you today, sir?”

Jeremiah almost fled, as he had from the straw boss. No white man had ever called him sir, even in mockery. This did not sound like mockery. He took a chance, stayed. “I'm looking for work from you, sir.”

“I'm sorry; I don't need a clerk right now.” Douglas muttered something to himself that Jeremiah did not catch.

“I didn't mean that kind of work, sir.” Jeremiah tried to keep his mouth from falling open. The fellow thought he wanted to study law under him! “I meant cleaning, cooking, straightening up.” He looked around. “You'll excuse me for speaking so bold, sir, but this place could do with some straightening up.”

Douglas grunted. “You're right, sir; as I said just now”—that must have been the mutter—“what I need is someone to make sense of this mess. You'll not be able to do that, I promise, if you have no letters.”

“I can read, sir, some, and write a bit,” Jeremiah said, and then had the wit to add as an afterthought, “Mr. Douglas.”

Douglas grunted again. “You slave or free?”

Ice ran down Jeremiah's back. “Free,” he answered, and got ready to bolt if Douglas asked for papers to prove it.

All the lawyer said, though, was, “Good. I'd sooner line your pockets than your master's. What do I call you?”

“Jeremiah.” Realizing a second too late that if he was free he should also have a surname, he gave the first one that popped into his head. “Jeremiah, uh, Gillen.”

Douglas showed no sign of noticing the slip. He plopped his bulk into an overstuffed armchair. The springs groaned in protest. “All right, Mr. Gillen, I'll try you, damn me if I don't. Put that stack there into some kind of order and I'll take you on.”

The stack was the one the lawyer had been pawing through. Jeremiah knelt beside it. He almost gave up at once, for the books' titles were full of long, incomprehensible words: legal terms, he supposed. But before panic set in, he remembered the ABC Caleb Gillen had drilled into him, and the way Caleb's father kept the books in his library. If he arranged these alphabetically by author, he could not go far wrong.

“Here you are, sir,” he said a few minutes later. He held out a handful of coins. “And here are the, uh, ninety-one sesters mixed in with the books.”

Douglas stared, then burst into laughter. “Keep them, my friend, keep them. I'd say you've earned them, the more so as I'd long since forgotten they were there. It was honest of you to offer them back—but then who wouldn't be honest with a prospective employer watching?” That last so perfectly summed Jeremiah's thoughts when he found the money that he eyed Douglas with fresh respect.

The lawyer took more care inspecting the books than he had over the coins. He had to correct a mistake Jeremiah had made, and the black's heart sank for fear he would be turned down. But all Douglas said was, “Be more careful next time. Three denaires a week suit you?”

“Yes, sir!” The wage was a long way from kingly, but Jeremiah did not feel sure enough of himself to bargain. If he bought fresh food and did his own cooking, he thought he could scrape by.