A Perilous Proposal (15 page)

“It did. It showed you've got guts, Jake. There's men doing brave things all around us every day. But any fool can go out and get his head blown off, or fight and show how
tough he is. Sometimes the men who talk the most about being tough are the biggest fools of all. Any fool can act brave if all he wants is to prove he's tougher than someone else. Don't get me wrong—I was proud of what you did the other day. Putting yourself in danger for someone else took real courage. All I'm saying is that by itself, that kind of courage can't make a man of you.”

“So what kin make a man er me, Duff?”

“That you've got to find out for yourself, Jake. And I'm thinking it's just about time you did.”

“Wha'chu mean by dat?”

“I'm just wondering if it's not about time you took a look inside yourself about that anger that's eating away there.”

“Dere you go agin—you gwine start preachin' at me agin!”

“You just tell me to shut up if you want, Jake, and I won't say another word. You asked what I meant by courage, so I figured I'd try to tell you.”

Jake looked away but said nothing.

“So what do you want, Jake?” said Micah. “You want me to shut up? Or are you brave enough to hear what I've got to say?”

Jake shrugged and muttered something Micah didn't hear.

“I didn't catch what you said, Jake.”

“Aw, go on an' say whateber you want . . . dat's what I said.”

Again they rode on for a while in silence.

“All I'm saying, Jake,” said Micah after a while, “is nothing more than I've had to do myself—look inside and own up to things that were wrong there, to look at my crooked places and get them straightened around. That's the thing that I say takes a kind of courage that most men don't learn soon enough in life. Some never learn it at all. That's where the real fearsome kinds of things are—inside us. Most men go through life trying to prove that they're men in all the wrong
ways. They try to prove that they can take care of themselves and that they don't need anybody else. That's what the man I was telling you about helped me see. But I decided I didn't want to be that kind of man. I decided I wanted to be a
real
man, the kind of man with courage to face what's inside, to face those places in me that no one else had ever seen.”

Micah glanced at Jake, but he was just looking ahead.

“That's not an easy thing to do, Jake,” Micah continued. “Growing into a man with that kind of courage is a hard thing. But it's the only way to be a whole man. Otherwise, you'll only be half a man. As many brave things as you might do, you'll still only be half a man. That's why I've been trying to get you to take an honest look at the anger that's inside you, Jake—because I want you to be a whole man.”

Micah paused again. Jake was still staring at the saddle horn in front of him, showing nothing by his expression of what he thought.

“Who knows where anger comes from, Jake,” Micah went on. “But lots of men have it deep down inside them. Most folks have got some kind of anger inside them toward either their ma or their pa. Kind of a mystery, it's always seemed to me, that the folks that gave them life are the ones folks get angriest at. But that anger toward your pa will kill you, Jake, if you don't someday summon the courage to face it. All of us have got to learn to forgive. It takes courage. It takes humility to forgive. But no one can be a whole man without being able to do both.”

Micah stopped. He had said what he had to say. Now it was Jake's turn. Micah Duff knew that Jake's future was now in his own hands.

A
WAY

20

T
HAT NIGHT JAKE LAY AWAKE LONG AFTER EVERYONE
 else was asleep. He couldn't have admitted it to him, but Micah's words had hit him hard.

He didn't like them.

And as he lay fussing and fuming and turning them over and back in his mind, the slow anger in his heart grew.

He was a man, he said to himself. He was sixteen. But Micah was treating him like a boy, always preaching at him and lecturing him about everything that was wrong with him. All that nonsense about courage and looking inside yourself.

He didn't need it!

What business was it of Micah Duff's anyway? His insides were his own business, nobody else's.

He'd had enough of it!

But try as he might, he couldn't stop the many words that Micah had spoken during their three years together.

“
Anger's not a pretty thing. It makes people miserable inside
. . . .”

The longer he lay awake the more agitated he became. Agitated and angry.

“
When we fall in with how God means us to be, that's when our grain grows straight and true
. . . .”

He couldn't stop the plaguing voice.

“
When are you going to let the light all the way inside your heart, Jake
? . . .”

Finally he couldn't stand it another minute. He got up out of his bedroll. There was enough of a moon to see by and he walked a little way off from the camp. He paced back and forth on the other side of the roped-off horse corral that he and Micah had strung up that afternoon. But still the words hounded him.

“
You're full of anger. . . . You're trying to run from it, trying to hide from the light. But you can't escape it
. . . .”

He was in a sweat now and pacing more rapidly, trying desperately to escape the one thing no one can ever escape—his own thoughts.

He continued to get more and more stirred up. Suddenly burst out from inside him—though in the blackness of night the words exploded silently in his own mind:

Heck wiff you, Micah Duff. . . ! I don't need none ob yo blamed preachin' no mo! I don't need you neither. I don't need nobody! I kin take care ob mysel'. I don't need you meddlin' wiff me, carryin' on all 'bout darkness an' courage an' da like. I don't need it, Duff!

When Jake came to himself, he was standing over Micah Duff's bedroll, listening to the quiet rhythmic breathing of his sleeping companion. For two or three minutes he stood, just staring down at the indistinct form in the darkness.

Then slowly he returned to where he had himself been sleeping. He stooped down and picked up the few things he could call his own. Finally he rolled up a single blanket of the Union Army he hoped they wouldn't mind if he took, and again left the camp.

This time he did not turn back.

H
AUNTED BY A
M
OTHER
'
S
W
ORDS

21

T
HOUGH THERE WAS ENOUGH OF A MOON TO SEE BY
, Jake knew that he had to choose his steps with care. He was pretty sure the Confederate Army they had engaged two days before had retreated toward the east. He did his best to follow what he thought was a northerly course, though he wasn't altogether sure which way that was.

He managed to avoid any encampments or farms or stray dogs. He changed his direction so many times, by the time he collapsed in sleepy exhaustion several hours later, he had no idea whether he had been walking north or south or east or west.

When he woke the sun was high in the sky. Whichever way he had been going, he was miles away and could not have hoped to find Captain Taylor's Illinois company now had he tried.

For the first time since his flight from the Winegaard plantation, Jake Patterson was again alone.

Though there had been a lot of talk lately that the war might not last much longer, he knew that traveling in the South still meant danger. Even though he might be free as a result of President Lincoln's proclamation, he knew that there
was danger everywhere for a black like him.

For the first time in years, his mother's words from the past began to return to him as he went.

“
You fin' yer papa, Jake . . . you fin' Carolina . . . I know dat sumday you'll see dat freedom me an' yer papa prayed ter see. So w'en you's free, you fin' him . . . you fin' him . . . you fin' Carolina, Jake
.”

After all that Micah Duff had said to him, he had no interest in finding his father. Yet he was alone in the world again. He had nothing else to cling to but his mother's words.

With a vague mingling of many conflicting emotions, he made his way like before. He found food and gradually encountered other blacks on the move like himself. And as he did, he began asking, “Which way ter Carolina?”

Not consciously even forming the idea in his brain that he had set upon a journey to search for his father,
Find Carolina
became the underlying impulse guiding his movements. He could not have said why. Drawn to the memory of his mother, and racked by the gnawing torment of guilt that he was responsible for her death, images of her face and the sound of her voice haunted the long nights of his sojourning loneliness. For reasons he could not himself define, he could do nothing else but obey her dying wish. The two words of his mother became the vague notion of his calling and present destiny. He had failed her in life. He could not fail her in death. He little realized in what ways his own life and future would be marked by footsteps that now set themselves to carry out her final charge from mother to son.

He had no idea where he was. But in time he learned that he had left his Union regiment near Fort Donelson in northwestern Tennessee and that Carolina lay east. And he knew enough from listening to Micah Duff talk about the sunrise to know that every morning the sun pointed him afresh in the direction he was compelled to follow. He was now walking
toward the sunrise every day—though not exactly spiritually yet. As he went he did not realize how close he had returned to where he had been before. After traveling with the company throughout Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi, he was again near the very spot where Micah Duff had first rescued him and where he had spent his first days with Captain Taylor's small detachment.

Slowly he began to vaguely recognize some of the terrain from his earlier travels. He had also come into a region of great troop activity and movement. Every day required more and more care to keep from being seen. He did not know about General Sherman's destruction of Atlanta and march to the sea. Neither did he know that he was in the very path where Southern General Hood was now invading southern Tennessee with a huge army, hoping to cut Sherman's northwest supply lines.

The first inkling he had of his danger was waking one morning to a distant rumble. Jake sat up and listened. He could not be sure, but it sounded like horses—hundreds of horses . . . maybe thousands.

Hurriedly he jumped to his feet and grabbed up his things. It was close! The sounds came from everywhere around him.

Without thinking, he glanced about and had scarcely had time to scramble up into a nearby oak when one of the flanks of Hood's army emerged through the woods. Within minutes, Jake was staring down upon a passing sea of grey uniforms. Had they been looking for a place to camp, or had they paused for any reason, he would surely have been seen. But they were on the march. It was obvious they were tired and worn. No one was looking up into the trees for frightened Negro runaways hiding among the birds.

In terror Jake watched for an hour. At last the tramp of
dust and marching feet and horses' hooves retreated into the distance toward the north.

Still he waited. After twenty minutes of silence about him, at last he let himself down to the ground, glanced up at the sky, then continued east toward the rising sun.

U
NSOUGHT
T
RAGEDY

22