The Sport of Kings (47 page)

Scipio has lost the will to quiet her, unable to take his eyes from her stricken face.

“I runs through de yard with my poor Callie and I can't make no sense a nothing and I screams and I don't know what, but finally I understands my baby dead and I gots to bury my baby, but my William, oh Lord, my William, something done shaked loose in dat little soul. He snatch my Callie away from me and hold her like he got a nubbin for milkin and he singing to her, and den he cryin and he make like he playin and talkin to her, and de Marster, he come sneak up on him, but William see him and stop and screech like he done lost ever wit, ‘Go away you ugly nigger! God hate you, nigger!' He callin de Marster nigger, he so distracted, and de Marster, he start to cryin too. Den he smack my boy so hard he fall and de Marster bring me my dead Callie. Den William, he runnin and skippin bout like a dog gone ill and de Marster tell me, ‘You ain't nothin but bad luck, Abby. Dis here baby dead and now your son, he gone plum crazy. I done lost one thousand dollar dis day.' And den he done gone off and leaved me to bury my baby gal. I buried her with dese hands. But I ain't seed where William runned off and I never seed my William anymore. I gone lookin in de woods for him dat evening, and I heared him talkin nosense but he runned away from me, and two days later one a de other niggers come on him in de deep part a de creek where he drownded. Dey all suspicioned de Marster drownded him, but I disbelieve dat. I disbelieve dat! God, I pray my son done put hisself away like a good boy and ain't let dat dirty white trash hold him down one instant! I heared once God don't favor de man dat put hisself away, but I disbelieve dat. You hear me? I disbelieve dat! God got righteous mercy if dey six year old!”

She weeps openly and loudly and Scipio scoots over through the dry, rustling leaves, reaching around her, but not to embrace her, only to clamp one dry hand over her mouth. “Hush,” he says. “Hush your mouth. Don't make no sound now.”

She sobs against his hand, staring up into the blank sky at something beyond his eyes. With an utterly lost feeling, he looks around them at the butternut trees, at the stones, the dumb soil, all the while holding her, rocking her. He keeps that hand on her mouth, feeling a deep burn in his soul, and finally, when he senses that her tears are only coming harder and won't ever abate, he says, very quietly, “Hush now, hush. Let me tell you something what'll make you feel better. I got a story for you. This a story about a young buck named Scipio. Miss Abby, you know who that is?”

Her chest still heaving, Abby shakes her head against his hand, her brows drawn in wretched sorrow. “That's me, you understand? My mother, she named me Scipio. Now, when Scipio was just a young buck, he was mighty good friends with Master's son, named Richmond. Richmond and Scipio was running all over the place, through the fields, up the road, and all in the great house. Being friends with Richmond, Scipio didn't never get whipped, cause he never made no trouble, and he got some education on the sly. Nobody learned him to read, but he listened to the white folks talk and he learned plenty that way. He figured enough to know that the black folk was property in Kentucky but free in Ohio, and that got him to thinking. Got him to thinking hard. Now, Scipio's mother was the cook for the great house and Scipio, he was brung up to do the carpentry. The years passed until Richmond was near bout a man, sixteen or so, and four years older than Scipio. Richmond begun watching Scipio's mother and then one day he tried to interfere with her. Now, Scipio's mother wouldn't tolerate that kind of treatment from a pup and she slapped him away. But Richmond thought he had got the right to Scipio's mother! Richmond was so mad then, he put a wedding gift fire poker in the quarter Scipio shared with his mother. All the great house was searching for that fire poker and when they found it in the cabin, they raised revolution. They intended to whip Scipio's mother. So what you think Scipio done?”

Abby blinks and tugs his hand from her mouth. “What you done?” she whispers. He grins angrily, feeling strangely loose from his old self, almost disembodied; he has never told this story to a soul. His life has always depended upon it.

“Why, I hollered, ‘I done it!' and then what you think happened?”

Abby is silent, saucer-eyed, but her tears have stopped.

“Why, they whipped Scipio heaven high and valley low and then they poured brine on his back and then they done it all over again with the stock end of the whip. But don't you worry, Miss Abby—the story don't end there. Don't you believe that Scipio wanted revenge? Oh, yes, he did, you know he did. But he couldn't get no revenge on Richmond, cause that was too easy to figure. No, Scipio decided he was gonna work revenge on the whipping man, that dumb overseer, who ain't had no sense a smell and was half-blind in the one eye. That man was just mean as a snake. So Scipio waited real patient for his chance. He waited three long months, counting every minute. Now, he knowed his way all around that great house and he knowed the overseer smoked a ivory pipe alongside Master every Thursday evening in the front parlor while they talked the business. Well, Scipio done made a show of acting real sorry and sad and like that, but when nobody was in that great house, he sneaked in there with gunpowder he stole from the gun cupboard, and he packed that gunpowder in the overseer's pipe nice and tight under the tobacco. It smelled real strong, but the overseer, he ain't had no sense a smell at all. See, Scipio just sealed it good and tight and he ran back to the quarter and for a whole day suffered the awfulest fear that maybe he packed the wrong pipe and Master was fixing to blow hisself up instead, but no, come the next evening, there was the biggest bang from the great house and all the colored folk and all the white folk, they was running all over the yard, the Missus was hollering and they took that bleeding, jaw-busted overseer near sixty miles to a special doctor down in Perryville and he stayed gone nigh on seven weeks. When he come back, he hadn't had no tongue, his head just crooked as a scarecrow's, and nobody was the wiser, but they all knowed he was the most ignorant white man there ever was, packing his own pipe with gunpowder. And, sure enough, he also knowed he was the most ignorant white man there ever was, cause he whipped on the wrong nigger, but he done whipped on so many, he ain't even knowed which one.”

Laughter erupts from Abby, a piercing bright sound of delight before Scipio clamps his hand down on her mouth again, saying, “Hush!” but she's laughing, her breasts heaving, her belly shaking, and he has to cover his own mouth with his free hand, because he too begins to laugh; he's laughing so hard it rocks him, but he also thinks of his mother dead and cold in the ground, who used to say to him, “You my onliest love and de whole world ain't no count if you ain't in it,” and he can't tell whether his tears are laughter or despair, they burn his eyes like acid just the same.

In the morning, their laughter has echoed away, and he doesn't mention Mason County again, or the skiff, or her need to veer east. They resume their northward trek, Scipio in the lead. He pushes ahead with renewed vigor, passing through open pasturage at times, sensing—knowing—that the river is not far now, not if they have covered close to ten miles a day, what would have been twelve or even fifteen without a pregnant woman at his side. But that is no matter now. Because of her story, or perhaps because of his, she stays close to him, sometimes grabbing out at his shirt when she stumbles or trips, but he doesn't seem to mind; she's broken him. Scipio will keep them safe. He will conduct them to the far side.

At midday, as he's gathering berries for them, she makes a deep, chesty sound, what he initially mistakes for singing under her breath, but when he turns, she's bent and hesitant, sweating, her hands spread for balance in the air. When he goes to her, trouble on his brow, she straightens up and blanks her face, says, “I's fine. Walk on, Scipio.”

On the last day of their walking, the land grows increasingly hilly and curvaceous, much more so than Scipio had expected. No more obliging fields with forest enclosure, but hikes so steep that Scipio is hauling Abby up the inclines and her whole body trembles with the effort. She speaks no words today, as if every faculty she possesses, including speech, is sacrificed for this last consuming effort and it is the last, because at the break of the hill, she stumbles into Scipio, who has stopped suddenly. Through a natural window in the trees, they spy the Ohio River down below, that dark dividing line made by God but named by men, and they are standing at the watershed where all of life flows north to freedom. Scipio raises his arm and points and she peers around his shoulder with a hard sigh. He realizes with some dismay that though he can see the red brick and smoke of Cincinnati to the west, they are some distance from the city and there's nothing to be done about it. They'll swim from the bank directly below them.

He searches the northern slope of the hill, where sweet gum, mulberry, and beech trees congregate in clusters, until he finds a thick limestone berm, where the hill just begins its precipitous, gravelly fall to the river. The thin, level space is sheltered by the broad cordated leaves of plants so tall on their scapes, he initially mistakes them for trees. A mass of verdant foliage encases the ledge, making a cool shelter there.

He says, “This is where we gonna spend the night. I aim to wake you when it's still dark, and then we gonna climb down and swim. Save your strength, Miss Abby.”

She nods her head and Scipio detects the sharpening of fear in her eyes as she contemplates the hillside and the rustling river far below, but when he sits under the leaves, she follows his lead meekly and is almost instantly asleep, snoring gently, though fitting and starting, her mind darting here and there just beneath sleep's surface—he recognizes the motion, because he sleeps like that too, his spirit riven by fear. His brief dreams are like jars shattering. For twelve days, he has lived in terror. He shudders, turning his head away from Abby's bedraggled, restless form and huddling deeper into himself, feeling not just weary but crippled in his pained exhaustion, so that if a patroller were to point the snout of a rifle into their leafy hut, Scipio would be altogether unable to run, or even rise. But they are well hidden in the foliage and though he can just spy the quick river below, the vegetation shuts out the light, forcing an early evening in their bower, over which evening slowly descends: First, a crepuscular smudge at the edges of eastern time and the sky is brushed with crimson and damask, then shadows are knit from the darkest remnants of day, the dark sprawls, daybirds mourn and nightbirds vivify, bony egrets sweep along the tributaries of the river and their flapping wings sound like brown paper crinkling, and bank swallows burrow in the dirt banks, the falling light is gay laughter in another room, the waterside plants hang sorrowful heads from slender petioles, the river speaks in low, brooding tones, the river is a coal seam exposed in a hollow, the river is black velvet unspooled from its bolt, the river is a vein opened, the river is decay, every fine line grown indistinct in the gloaming. A bird trills from the southern shore and the northern shore echoes the call, near intimates but never intimate, now a single lush billow of wind suggests rain and a muggy wet woolen is tossed over the shoulders of the land, the river valley swaths herself in wedding gauze, misty evening hums, this is a shroud or a mother's shhhhhhhh, a droning prayer, this river is a lullaby and a dirge, this river is a promise made in daylight but upheld by night, and soon there will be no color because the night is coming on and nameless animals now call roll for the absent overseer and beneath the crenellated edge of the dew-soaked plants, Scipio's eyes are draping shut against his will. But the crooning of a mourning dove or a mockingbird—the latter so infinitely variable, who can distinguish them—pierces the air and starts him from his momentary rest. He forces a final reconnoitering glance at the river, which holds one last fistful of scattered light, and he thinks, it ain't so wide after all, and then he grasps the absurdity deep down in the marrow of his bones, how this very night the mask of slavery will be lifted from his face by geography, this arbitrary fact of twelve hundred feet, this quarter mile God laid down for beauty's sake. Your humanity depends upon the ground beneath your feet. You cannot straddle this river. You must choose a side.

Later, he wakes from fitful sleep in the dark but forces himself to be still, waiting for that precise moment when the night has grown late but the morning star is yet to rise. He waits and waits, until he can't bear it another minute, and then he wakes Abby. She comes to with a soft cry.

“We got to go now,” he says, and they slip out from under the shelter of the plants into the dark, which presses them from both sides. They are suddenly electric with wakefulness. Hand in hand, they navigate the descent to the flat plane of the river, stumbling on exposed roots and the frangible soil of the hillside, the slippery spots where exposed limestone is slick with dew and the scat of animals that passed here just hours before. Through masses of tangled vegetation, Scipio catches brief snatches of the river, and he knows it is the river only because it is blacker than any other black in the night. Just as planned, he has arrived on a moonless night so there is no light to play on the water, or to light their figures for any patrollers who might be waiting and watching.

Abby cries out suddenly and Scipio whips around to shush her, but she is doubled over, gripping her belly with fingers that appear carved from stone.

“Miss Abby!” he whispers, but she doesn't reply, doesn't move. “You close? You can't cross with no baby pains!”

Still doubled, Abby grapples for his shirt and grips him firm to keep him from leaving, but he has no intention of leaving, no intention at all. He can't run away from this woman. He has a vision of them crossing, it's firm in his mind now like a story told to him a long time ago, a story which he now believes with all of his heart.