Sweetsmoke (8 page)

    Well,
said Cassius. Maybe she's the lucky one. You remember to tell Savilla I thank
her.

    All
right tonight, said Abram. Cassius caught a whiff of Abram's breath and knew
that his tooth had to go.

    Abram
was a decent man and in the raw caverns of Cassius's mind, Abram's concern and
empathy were a balm. But it was a relief when he was gone.

    Cassius
lay on his pallet and listened as the quarter settled. Children's voices
drifted off as bathing ended and bedtime stories concluded. Low conversations
among men replaced them, as well as the activities of women, finishing candles,
washing clothes, or mending their only frocks or their husband's one pair of
trousers.

    Insects
and crickets voiced their songs as the air cooled. His mind drifted and touched
briefly on Mam Rosie. She had raised him, but Hoke had named him. Which act was
more important to his personality? he wondered. Hoke Howard was not his father;
his mother had been pregnant when Hoke bought her, although he had not bought
Cassius's father. He had sold her four years after Cassius was born, and
Cassius wondered if an incident had precipitated her sale. He thought not;
Hoke's fortunes had always been up and down, and the turnover in slaves and
horseflesh was considerable, new favorites purchased when he was
enthusiastically flush, sold off when things went sour. Cassius considered Hoke
Howard's name. If Cassius was named on a flight of whimsy, Hoke was named with
grave consideration. The third Hoke Howard bore a name of substance with extensive
roots. His great-grandfather Horace had built Sweetsmoke; his grandfather, the
first Hoke, had made it a monstrous success; his father, the second Hoke, had
further expanded it; and he now commanded it. If Cassius was a name from a
book, Hoke was a name with great expectations. What would it be like to bear
such a name? Cassius thought of the responsibility he had witnessed that
afternoon, and for a fleeting moment imagined Hoke Howard as trapped in his
destiny as Cassius was in his.

    Jenny
came to his cabin door. She opened it without knocking, but tonight lingered in
the doorway; normally she would have closed the door behind her and begun to
undress.

    You
want me with you tonight, Cassius? said Jenny.

    He looked
at her silhouette, her arm stretched out with her hand on the door. Behind her,
the grease fires were out, and a log shifted and sprayed embers in what
remained of a fire by the gully. An instant of flame hugged the log, then
dropped back into the glowing red ashes.

    Not
tonight, said Cassius.

    Her
silhouette nodded and backed out. He regretted turning her away, but did not
know how to be anything but alone this night. Jenny would have been smart enough
to provide nothing more than warmth and an easy presence, but he could not have
that now.

    Back
when it happened, Cassius had assumed that the love component of his life was
over for good. His wife and son were gone. In the aftermath of that, with a
raging and tormented mind, he saw women shy from him the way wild deer shy from
a company of soldiers. More than a year passed before Jenny happened by the
carpentry shed with something to be repaired. A few days later she visited
again. In time, her excuses became careless. He had thought Jenny offered
charity for old times' sake. Years before he had courted her, but it was a poor
match and she had ended it and he had borne that hurt for some time. Now she
came at night so the others would not know.

    Cassius
and Jenny did not meet often. They rarely had occasion to speak; he a
carpenter, she a field hand; and she only came when he nodded to her at some
point during the day, granting her permission. She would not always come at his
nod, but when she did, she would come furtively and lie beside him where he
pretended not to be waiting. He craved the physical element of their liaison,
but youthful passion was gone. She had once abandoned him—her punishment was to
be ravished, but not loved. Yet she was willing, while others acted as if he
were in smallpox quarantine. He better trusted the judgment of the wary women;
they saw him as he saw himself, a raging, bitter, coldhearted man. Jenny tried
to be near him, the way small children and animals tried to be near him, and
this to him was inexplicable.

    On
his worst days, small children, barely old enough to speak, would hover as if
sensing his need. He imagined himself unapproachable, and yet they came,
sometimes to sit by him, sometimes to take his hand. And he would grow calm.
Domestic animals, independent cats in particular, would approach. Blinded
within black storms, he would be jolted by a nudge against his shin, the shock
of a cold nose, the amazing strength of a tiny body running its length against him,
a layer of fur coating the sweat of his leg or neck or cheek.

    It
was strange to think of these things, at a time when he was ready to release
the demons of his memory.

    Cassius
dreamed of running. His muscles knotted and anxiety passed through his legs as
he slept fitfully on his pallet with his back on fire.

    He
woke suddenly. He tried to shake off the dream, but it encircled him. On that
day, he had been unaware of his back bleeding, but he had felt a deep cold and
searing heat all at once. Marriah was dead. The boy who had yet to be named was
gone. Cassius ran.

    The
patrollers chased him on their horses with their dogs. When his mind was right,
he knew ways to fool the dogs and evade the patrollers, but that took planning
and this was not planned, he had to outrun them with the only tools he
possessed: Stamina fueled by hatred and horror, the stamina to run forever and
never stop, not to eat, not to sleep, just to run until he had outrun all of
it.

    He
ran through the fields, past crops and hedgerows, he ran across dusty roads and
into woods, he ran through brambles and brush, he ran along the creek, he ran
without thinking.

    The
dogs were close, then far, then close again. He did not care. He anticipated
the moment the dogs would catch him and tear him apart, a chance to feel
again—would they go for his back, would the blood drive them mad, would it
happen quickly or would he have time to savor his own death?

    He
ran to the edge of town. A flash through his brain warned that if he were to
run through the streets, he would surely be caught. He ran through the streets.

    They
came on, dogs, and horses carrying men, and he ran between houses and past the
dry goods store and a boardinghouse and a tavern, and then his legs were
strange, as if no longer joined to his hips, running full-out in his mind while
his legs lagged, as if dragging a dead steer, as if he had plugged into dense
muck, thick legs sucking to pull free, the bottom of his feet shooting roots
that dug in and grabbed. Each step tore his feet out of the ground while the
world rushed and swirled around him.

    The
first dog was too fast, barking maniacally, dancing around him. Then came the
pack, a thunderous wave of sharp barking and hot breath chased by whistles,
horsemen ordering dogs back, horses blundering in, dust clouding and choking.

    A
woman's voice poked a pinhole of light into the scrabble of his mind, and he
pictured the sound coming between himself and the dogs horses men. Her voice
was a safe sound, a barrier, authority without fear. He quivered with
exhaustion as he willed himself to remain standing. Never before had his body
quit on him, never, he could press it to impossible limits and yet here in the
direst of moments, it trembled.

    Her
voice was close, the patroller's voices responded from far off. In a moment or
an hour, the horse hooves backed away and she was in front of him, her arms
under his armpits, and they moved, a miracle, but it was her legs doing the
work, his own being dead.

    He
did not know that Emoline Justice had saved him from being hobbled. He did not
know that she had confronted the patroller who had unsheathed his blade,
readying it for Cassius's Achilles tendon. He did not know that they were soon
joined by Hoke on horseback. He did not know that she told them she would take
Cassius into her home and that when he was recovered he would return to
Sweetsmoke and his duties.

    He
did not know that Hoke nodded in agreement at the same moment that the others
scoffed at her in that high-handed arrogance of the desperate poor who crave a
lower creature to abuse.

    Hoke
turned them back and created a simmering resentment. Hoke informed them that
Cassius was a valuable possession and he did not care to throw away property.
Neither county nor Commonwealth would reimburse him for the loss of a
carpenter, and he suggested that any patroller on their eight-dollar-a-week
salary who damaged his slave could repay Hoke for Cassius's fair value. But
Cassius knew Hoke Howard. Hoke was an emotional man who trusted his first
instincts. In a moment of high dudgeon, Hoke had been known to sacrifice his
own best interests for that heady savor of power and revenge. As he healed,
Cassius revisited Hoke's choice. That same man three days before had flayed him
with a bullwhip, carving stripe after stripe into his back. Planters reckoned
that each stripe lowered the price of a slave by five dollars, but at that
moment, Hoke was interested only in punishment. Cassius did not consider that
something decent might be coiled inside the planter. Emoline alone had seen
that.

    The
first two days spent in Emoline's home, Cassius did not know where he was. His
mind was convulsive with fulminating rage, ashriek with images of Marriah and
her baby, images that burned inside until he was empty of everything, and yet
the fire still would not quit.

    Pain
gripped and ripped him, pain more intense than his shredded back. His
helplessness was his horror, as he could not save the ones he loved. He could
do precisely nothing. She was gone, the baby was out there somewhere, and there
was no way to find him. By now, the boy was three days away and might well have
been sold more than once. How could he force Hoke to name the slave trader and
his destination? And were he to escape Sweetsmoke, he had never traveled more
than thirty miles from the plantation. He did not know what existed out there.
He could not read, and to him, a map was nothing more than a jumble of shapes
and lines. He had done every possible thing in his power and it was not enough,
it would never be enough. He had bargained, offered himself as proxy to accept
the punishment intended for his wife, he had fought, he had run, and still he
had ended up here. He had not even been able to defend himself. He was alive
and not crippled only because an old freed woman had come to his defense. The
wail that rose from his pith blinded him, engorging and splitting open the
whole of his skin: Who will love him, who will love the little boy?

    Emoline
Justice nursed him from the outside. She showed him a different side of her
aggressive, opinionated nature. She worked her magic with salves, using
extracts from leaves and bark and seemingly every other potion in her
possession to soothe and heal him until his back responded. He wondered later
if she had borrowed the intensity of her uncompromising persona and transposed
it into healing, and he thought some of that persona had inadvertently rubbed
in and taken root under his skin.

    Emoline
had grown up at Sweetsmoke, a house servant and nanny to the children of Hoke
Howard's parents. Hoke's mother, Grace, had been particular about the language
spoken by her servants, and Emoline was her star pupil. Emoline then served as
tutor to the children, one of whom was Hoke, a mere five years younger. After
Emoline and Hoke's son was born, she "married" a man in the quarters
who gave her two daughters. Marriages among slaves were not considered legal or
binding in the eyes of the law, but Emoline treated her marriage as sacrosanct.
Hoke's resultant jealousy caught him by surprise. Then Hoke's father died with
Hoke still in his young twenties, and shortly thereafter his bereaved mother
followed, leaving him the callow master of Sweetsmoke. He attempted to rise to
the challenge of his father's expectations, and in a moment of magnanimous
sentimentality he would come to regret, Hoke allowed Emoline to buy her
freedom. She chose the last name Justice for herself and shared it with her
son, Richard, whom she was able to buy a number of years later, when Hoke
floundered in one of his depressed financial periods. The man in the quarters
she had married now married another, a marriage Hoke had encouraged if not
arranged. Emoline, however, remained true to her vows. She called herself a schoolteacher,
even as she made more on the side as a conjurer, and it was conjurer money that
bought freedom for her son.

    Throughout
the first week of Cassius's healing, she read aloud. After a number of days he
became aware that he was listening, and her words added up to a story. She read
about a man named Ulysses, a warrior struggling to return home. As Cassius's
interest grew, his rage became intermittent and she began to turn the open book
and show him the words. Initially he saw small black shapes arranged in rows on
white paper, and as they meant nothing to him, they were little more than
magical markings. Yet they somehow conjured up fantastic imagery. In the years
that followed, Cassius remembered few specifics from the book, only that it was
another salve to his pain. He did remember that Ulysses had been away from home
a long time, that when he returned he found more troubles, and Ulysses defeated
those troubles in a great paroxysm of violence.