The Eden Hunter (24 page)

He glanced around. A sentry was watching them from farther down the bank. “Easy,” he said.

She poked him in his leg. “Maybe
you
do not be afraid of
me
.”

“What you mean he teachin you?”

Again that laugh. “What I mean,
hombrito
, is that he runs a schoolhouse for us in that tent of his.”

“You tellin a riddle?”

“No riddle.”

He knelt down next to her. The grass was slick as pond lilies. “Tomorrow night I’m leavin,” he said. “You want you can come.”

She pulled slowly at her hair, letting it slide between her fingers. “Why would I do that?” she asked.

“If you don you gonna die. At best you gonna die.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I would never leave him.” She rolled over onto her knees and then lifted her nightgown. She was staring over her shoulder at him now. “
Esta noche
,
sí
” she said, “
pero mañana no
.”

He stood and walked away, leaving her half naked on the slope of the artillery bank saying, Last chance, last chance, last chance. She belonged to her general, he realized.

 

HE SPENT A second night in bed beside Beah. In the morning she was gone and when she returned it was to tell him that the mule-kicked soldier had passed. She waited for him to dress and then asked if he would help her attend to the body.

Together they filled a bucket at the well and went to the infirmary. The soldier was an older man he had not seen before. His face was swollen and his eyes were black. They pulled off his clothes and
Beah washed his skin. When she was finished they wrapped the body in a clean white sheet. Word had spread. Garçon appeared in the tent and said something in Spanish to the dead man. His name had been Roberto.

With Lower Creeks about, Garçon feared that any fresh grave dug beyond the walls of the fort would be desecrated, and so instead he ordered that Roberto and two cannonballs be sewn into a length of canvas and then sunk into the river.

Shooters took positions on the artillery bank as Xavier and three other soldiers carried the bundled corpse outside of the fort to the riverbank; two more soldiers trailed after them, dragging a canoe. Kau searched the gathered crowd and saw Juaneta. She was wearing that same green dress and watching him. He nodded to her, and she put her hands on her hips and rubbed them.

The corpse was placed inside the canoe, and then Xavier paddled the dead soldier Roberto out to the middle of the channel. As the current pulled the canoe south Kau saw a single arrow launch from high atop an upriver pine. It sailed well past Xavier and then entered the water without a splash. He turned to Beah but realized she had not seen it, that no one else had seen it. Xavier muscled the body out of the canoe, and when the river finally took Roberto the soldiers lining the artillery bank let fly with a salute volley.

And then Garçon came up beside him; he was holding Juaneta’s hand. The General asked Beah to leave them and once she was gone he pointed to Juaneta and spoke. “Listen very closely to me,” he said. “No.”

 

AT THE FIRST shadings of night he went to collect logs for his cook-fire so that he could eat and then begin preparing to leave. He was sorting through the woodpile when the gate of the fort opened and two Choctaws led a stooped negro inside. The man was barefoot and unarmed, his osnaburgs tattered and filthy. White hair. A cotton beard. Kau stood amid the scattered wood and stared, unbelieving.

Samuel.

He rushed over and saw that his old friend was wearing a pearl-gray top hat of dyed beaver felt. A white man’s hat. Samuel lifted his hands and pointed with two fingers. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery. “You,” he said.

They embraced and Kau held Samuel long enough to smell Yellowhammer on his skin and be reminded of Benjamin. He pulled away. The gate had been closed and Garçon was now standing with the two Choctaws and watching. “You know this man?” he asked.

“Samuel his name.”

“Who is he to you?”

“He’s my friend. My friend from back in Mississippi.”

“Amazing,” said Garçon.

Samuel spoke. “Adam,” he said. “So you do live.”

Garçon waved the Choctaws away, and as they slunk off Samuel turned to the General as if seeing him for the first time. He tugged at the sleeve of the British redcoat. “My,” he said. “And what you meant to be, son?”

H
E WATCHED AS Samuel yawned and then scratched at his head with both hands. They were in the tent with Beah, and the old man was sitting on her camp bed while she doctored the cuts and sores and blisters on his feet. Several times Kau tried to ask Samuel questions but Beah always hushed him, telling him to leave her patient be. As she worked Samuel’s breaths became longer and then the sweat-stained top hat fell from his head.

Kau ate another square of the ashcake that Beah had found for them, but finally he could no longer stand the waiting. Beah left them to tend to a sick child, and once she was gone he shook Samuel awake but in a gentle way. “How is it you here?” he asked.

“What is this place, Adam?”

“Kau.”

“What?”

“Kau. Call me that now.”

“Thas your true name, ain’t it?”

“Yes.”

Samuel shrugged. “All right,” he said. “What is this place, Kau? Tell me.”

He explained to him about Garçon and the fort, about the Americans who would soon be coming. There was a tin mug of cold coffee on the small table beside the bed. Samuel asked him if he could have it, and Kau nodded. He drained the mug in a single swallow, then wiped his thick beard with his sleeve. “So listen,” he said.

 

IT HAD BEEN a Friday night when Kau left Yellowhammer with the boy, and since the innkeeper knew it was in the habit of the pair to spend long days together—catfishing and exploring and what all—it was not until Saturday supper came and went that he became concerned over the whereabouts of his son and the little slave. Samuel was on his knees and praying when the innkeeper at last called for him.

Samuel readied a pair of horses and the two men rode off together. At dusk they found Benjamin’s mare idling riderless beside the river, and even before they came upon the puddle of stinking blood, Samuel had begun to sense just what Kau had done.

After Samuel was whipped and Lawson’s body found—the trail of Kau lost—the soldiers returned to this place on the river. A grapple hook was dragged twenty times across a deep black-water hole, and on a last fortunate cast it hooked into a leg. The
sunken corpse of Benjamin—a fraction eaten by mud turtles, the chest infested with minnows—was pulled dripping onto the bank. The innkeeper collapsed onto his dead son, and Samuel cried for them both.

The innkeeper was a Jew. This was something he had never even told Benjamin—yet in his grief the man quit his drinking and became devout, found the god he had abandoned after his wife died in childbirth. Benjamin was laid carefully across a table inside the inn, and from notes that had been handwritten inside a beaten copy of some holy book the innkeeper tried to teach himself how to prepare the body in accordance with the laws of his people. There were faltering prayers in a language Samuel did not recognize, and the corpse was washed and dried as best they could manage. Samuel helped dress Benjamin in fresh white linen, and then a blue sash was tied around the boy’s waist. The innkeeper fastened and unfastened the strip of silk as he struggled to arrange the knot into some specific and special shape. When he was satisfied he pointed to the knot and looked up at Samuel. “This is the name of God,” he said.

It was here Samuel realized that his master had become crazed, and he wondered what would become of him—the slave of a madman.

The innkeeper went into his bedroom and began to search the same cedar chest that had held the ancient book. When he returned he was carrying a corked vial of khaki dirt that he said came from some sacred land. He sprinkled the dirt onto his son, and the body was at last buried at the base of a gentle green hill. Afterward the
innkeeper told Samuel that he would grieve as a Jew should. For a week he received the sympathies of visitors—the soldiers and Indians and traders who had known the boy—and then at midnight on the seventh day he went into his bedroom with the book.

At dawn and at dusk Samuel would bring the innkeeper a meal and empty his chamber pot. Travelers seeking lodging were turned away, and from time to time Samuel pressed his ear to the closed door and could hear his master chanting aloud. The innkeeper’s short hair went uncut; he grew a shabby beard. A month of this and then he emerged from his room. That same day a wagon merchant appeared with a top hat the innkeeper had requested many weeks before. “Vanity,” said the innkeeper. He paid the merchant, then gave the hat over to Samuel.

And next the innkeeper freed him, apologizing to the man he had owned for all of the sins that he had committed against him. Then he left. One morning Samuel awoke and the innkeeper was gone. The rumor along the federal road was that he had fallen in with a small band of Coushattas relocating west to Louisiana. It was said that in his month of solitude and grief the innkeeper had come to a conclusion about the Indians still living wild in the Americas, that he had decided they were the last descendants of some greater, lost tribe of the Old World—that therefore those migrating Coushattas were somehow related to his own ancestors. His mind was addled.

Samuel spent only a few days living alone at Yellowhammer. Pioneers bound for Texas presented. He apologized and told them that the inn was now closed. An hour later the failing farmers kicked
in the door and told him that the inn was now theirs. He was left with nothing, nothing save his freedom papers and the clothes on his back, the hat on his head.

So as an old man Samuel started his life anew. He was a third-generation slave with no understanding of how to exist free and independent. He walked the federal road east, sought charity but received none. Twice he offered himself as property, but both times he was judged useless and denied. He was a man without any value—and as if to prove this point his freedom papers were finally taken from him by a soldier near Fort Mitchell and burned. A near four-score years as an owned man, and now at long last he had his liberty not as a reward or a gift but only because there were no white men left who wanted him as their own.

At the border to Georgia Samuel sat on the bank of the Chattahoochee, the top hat in his hands as he watched the ferry take livestock and horses and men back and forth across the river. He himself had no money to pay for the crossing, and so he prayed and he waited. After several hours of this a long black racer slithered out of the forest to then lie motionless in the sun. Samuel bashed the basking snake’s head with the edge of a flat rock, and later he saw two Indians dressed as white men paddle a canoe to the downstream shore. They made camp on the riverbank, and because he was very hungry and had no tinderbox, Samuel was fearless and went to them. He made gestures meant to ask if he might share their fire so as to cook his snake. The Indians were happy with drink, and though on most other nights they no doubt would have ignored him, on this night they were kind and made room.

Samuel soon recognized that these two Indians were Creeks, and though he knew their language well he did not let on—even as one of them spoke to the other of a strange thing he had seen on one of his furtive excursions downriver into Florida: a tiny sharp-toothed negro caught and kept chained in a chickenhouse. “They thought he was one of their angels,” said the Indian. “I have bought three runaways from that farmer, but this small one he would not sell.”

That night Samuel gnawed snake and watched from the forest as the Indians laughed and continued on with their drinking. Once they were asleep he returned, stole their canoe and began drifting south, following the river, searching for his friend.

 

SAMUEL WENT QUIET, and Kau looked up from his chair by the table. “I’d done more to stop you if I’d known,” said Samuel.

“Known what?”

“That he be leavin with you. Why do that? Why take him jus to kill him?”

“That ain’t it.”

“What ain’t?”

“I mean I ain’t sure I ever meant to cut him.”

Samuel shook his head. “At first I was only wantin to find you so I could ask you that. Maybe make some sense of what you done.”

“And now?”

“Now I think it don really matter.” Samuel pointed at the ceiling of the tent. “I believe now that all this was meant to happen, that this be God’s plan for you and me both.”

 

SAMUEL KEPT PUSHING south in the stolen canoe because with the boy dead and the innkeeper gone Kau was all he had for family left in the world. His friend had killed a child and for that he was damned, but still Samuel was determined to find him, help him, as in truth over time he had come to see a sort of blessing in the murder. Though he had loved Benjamin, he knew that the boy would one day be a man molded by his father—that most all that had been pure and perfect about him soon would fall away like velvet rubbed from buckhorn in the late summer woods. So yes, damned, for certain Kau was damned. But in killing the boy Kau had also saved the boy, kept him from becoming another evil man. Though Benjamin was the son of a Jew, Samuel was certain the boy would see heaven. He refused to believe that a Christian God would punish a child of any sort, and so in that Samuel rejoiced and was glad.

But with Kau it was different. Time and again Samuel had tried to school him on the Lord Jesus, but he could never reach him. Kau had rejected God at every advance, and so, for Samuel, that his friend was fated to forever burn in hell made his earthbound years that much more precious. If Kau was really being kept chained in a chickenhouse that could not be allowed to stand. He should have some comfort in this life, as later he would only know even worse suffering.