The Tinsmith (30 page)

Over the weeping and the praying, the grunts and sighs of bodies adjusting to the crammed space, John was surprised to hear voices almost as plain as day. Through the thin walls came McElvane's voice imploring the new driver to leave his coffles unwhipped.

“They're good niggers, and I especially don't want the bright girls marked at all.”

“Yeah, I noticed them. Right pretty. Wych has told me there's most money in the handsome ones right now. The houses in Atlanta can't get enough.”

“It's the talk of war does it. It makes some men mad that way.”

“Nothing mad about it,” Jensen said. “A man's got to take his pleasure. Can't work hard with no promise of pleasure afterwards.”

McElvane said, “I expect as much as two thousand for each and so I need their faces clear.”

“Nobody cares about the face, eh, Matt,” Jensen said and snickered. “It's not the face that gives the pleasure. But I won't deny that the lighter skin's an attraction.”

The voices seemed to float around the room.

“Well, I'd appreciate it if . . .”

“Sure. By the way, what's the story with the boy with the brand on his cheek?”

“He's a good worker. A house servant, but he was hired out too. Knows some carpentry and tinsmithing. A prime boy. I expect no less than a thousand for him.”

“All right you don't have to tell me. It don't matter. I've sold Indians to free niggers before. The money's the same colour, even if the niggers don't have so much of it.”

“It's a strange world, that's so,” McElvane said.

And then came the sound of chairs scraping back. A door slammed. The voices ceased. Now the air over the blacks hung thick.

The hatred rose in his throat again and he tried to choke it down. But he couldn't. It came out in quick, violent gasps. After a while, he curled into himself and tried to press the letters on his cheek into the dirt. But the iron collar and padlock kept his skin from the floor. Across the room, he heard crying. But something else caught his notice, something he recognized because it burned with the same intense energy that had risen up in him. And he didn't have to see clearly to know who the energy came from. It was frightening. He lay inside it all night, waiting for it to subside so that he could sleep. But it did not subside. He rubbed the worn leather on the little pouch between his fingers, thinking that he could calm the energy that way. But it flowed on; he could not slow it. Daybreak found him trembling, his skin as cold as his chains.

Across the room in the grey air he saw Daney. She sat upright against the wall, Jancey's head in her lap. He wanted to tell her that it was no good, there was no way she could save the girl now. She should have made the attempt when it was just McElvane. Because even if the attempt had failed, he would not have been severe in his punishment. But now, with the new driver and his assistants, escape was unlikely, and there was no telling what the punishment might be for trying. Don't, the boy heard himself say. Just wait. Maybe I'll be able to help. After all, Jancey means as much to me . . . But he did not speak. Daney's face, fierce in the grey light, rigid as iron, had gone beyond anything he could say. She was a mother. She wouldn't wait.

They moved on again just after first light, without breakfast. Jensen dashed along the line, cracking the whip and shouting. “Come on, you niggers.”

McElvane's coffle set the pace because the blacks belonging to Jensen had been driven harder and treated more cruelly. John had never seen such listless people. He wondered where in Maryland they had come from. Perhaps they had been purchased farther afield and had entered Maryland simply as a way to reach South Carolina. Their clothes were little more than coarse pieces of hemp and thin cotton. Most of the men wore old scars as well as open whip marks; several had elaborate iron collars with spikes sticking out. But it was the women who lagged behind. Jensen kept riding back and threatening them that if they didn't keep up he'd soon put a stop to their damned tricks.

“Pregnant one's trying to take advantage,” he said to McElvane as he rode forward to the lead coffle. “But if she thinks I'll be soft on account of her belly . . .”

“We're making good time,” McElvane said. “We can stop a while.”

“Hell, no! I want to make the Potomac by sundown. The faster the journey, the higher the profits. I've a good mind to go by rail the next drive. It's getting so this way's hardly a savings. Heeyah!”

Jensen kicked his horse's flanks and turned back down the line.

A half-hour later, he ordered all the blacks to stop. John figured that they had finally earned a rest, but Jensen's blood-flushed and contorted face told him otherwise.

“You niggers are going to see this! And then you'll know to keep up!”

They were on a dirt road in the middle of the country. Treeless rolling hills stretched away to either side for miles.

“Matt, start driving the stakes. Billy, keep your gun on the niggers. I'll take care of the rest myself.”

Jensen dismounted and strode to his cart. He took a spade from the back. Just off the road on a flat piece of grass, the assistant began driving in wooden stakes.

The pregnant woman, very black, her head scarved in dirty red, began to cry, “No marse please marse I'll keep up I promise marse please.”

The baby in the mother's arms wailed and she tried desperately to hush it. Jensen took no notice. He feverishly dug a hole in the centre of what turned out to be four stakes. His breath swirled around him.

John looked at Daney. She had almost vanished in a loose circle of women seated on the ground around her, but he could see the intensity of her eyes. Their fire was a stark contrast to the dull cast of the other blacks' eyes.

Jensen finished digging and marched over to the coffle of women. He roughly undid the pregnant woman's ropes and dragged her to the stakes.

“Take off that shift!”

“No marse please marse!”

“I said take it off!”

Still pleading, the woman did so, revealing a dark belly smooth and tight as a drum skin. Her breasts were large, the nipples erect with the cold.

Jensen forced her onto her knees.

“Shut up and lie down there! You hear!”

When the woman merely covered her face with her hands, he grabbed her arm and dragged her and pushed her face down so that her belly fit into the hole. She whimpered as he roped her limbs to the four stakes. At last he stood back, breathing hard, and said to the blacks, “I told you what I'd do. And it's gonna be worse for you from now on.”

All this time McElvane sat on his haunches at the side of the road, chewing a piece of bark. He wore a pained expression but did not interfere.

John felt the restlessness of the men travel along the chains. Their faces were wet masks. He tried to take their hatred into him, thinking it would increase and strengthen his own. But he also knew that there was a greater force at work and his eyes kept returning to it. Even when Jensen began to whip the pregnant woman's bare back, even as she cried out and the men's chains shifted and all their breath rose as if it came from the earth itself, even then he stared at Daney. She was not watching. She was holding her daughters close. Her eyes were struck flint. He could not believe that the whites didn't notice.

After twenty lashes, Jensen stopped. His hard breathing and the woman's weeping hung in the air together. Nothing else stirred for miles. Despite keeping his attention on Daney, John found that he'd clenched his fists so hard that his fingernails had dug into his palms.

McElvane returned to his horse. He led it by the bridle up to Jensen.

“Better hurry if we want to make the river by dark.”

Then he mounted.

Jensen untied the woman. He dragged her to her feet, her belly dripping bits of earth and grass, her back torn and bloody. Meekly, she pulled on her shift and returned to the coffle.

Once the whites were all on horseback again, the drive resumed at a faster pace. The boy held his chains and jogged over the hard ground, his eyes on the horizon. But it was Daney's eyes that were searching; he felt them on his back but he could not see what they were seeing. The air was rich with sweat and wet earth.

By dusk, they had reached the Potomac, at a point of considerable width. Coming out of a clump of oaks, they were driven straight to the river's edge and told to rest. John gaped at the pewtery expanse of water stretching several hundred yards to a far bank of oaks and other hardwood, bare and black like twisted iron. A low, broken mist slid slowly off the water and over the bank. The icy cold of it set his teeth chattering.

“You'll have to signal,” McElvane said to Jensen. “He won't hear us.”

“Matt's a powerful voice. Give a holler, Matt.”

The assistant's shout rolled along the banks and died away.

“It's too far,” McElvane said, “and the river's up.”

They waited, listening. The current under the ghostly mist made a low, rushing sound.

“I'll light a torch,” McElvane said and busied himself about his cart. In a few minutes he raised a burning stick high in the grey light. After a while, a lantern flashed on the opposite bank.

John stared at the grey, darkening water. It gave nothing back, not even the dull sky. McElvane took out his little book and pencil stub and scratched away while a small light in the distance grew larger, its edges yellow and blurred.

Jensen said, “Some take the chains off as soon as Virginia, but I have to see the town limits of Columbia before I'm comfortable. Even so, I feel better over the Potomac.”

“Any body of water slows a runaway down,” McElvane said.

Though it was almost dark, the day was warmer. The breath of the blacks no longer hung visibly. John tensed and turned. But the dusk had hidden Daney's face among the women's. It had been only days and miles, yet his old life seemed a distant memory, effaced by the hatred building in his veins. He could imagine seeing Orlett's doglike grin in the ferryman's widening lamp glow as it spread over the black water. It seemed sometimes that the overseer had burned that grin into his brain. As the ferry reached the bank, John lifted a cuffed hand to the letters and pressed the cold iron there.

Jensen began to drive the coffles onto the scow. It was broad and flat, like a barn floor, with thick ropes low around the sides. The ferryman, pinch-faced and elderly, had two large blacks as helpers. Their job was to move the ferry by means of two long wooden poles that they wielded with powerful grace. In the glow cast by the lantern, everything appeared larger. Shadows splashed over the deck like buckets of thrown river water. A ragged mongrel chained to an anvil at the ferryman's side yipped and growled as the coffles boarded.

“We'll have to make two trips,” Jensen said. “We're in a hurry. Can't you make those boys pull fast?”

The ferryman spat out a chaw of tobacco. “Never met one of you Georgia traders who weren't in a hurry. My boys pull as fast as the river allows. No hurrying a river.”

The scow pushed off into the current. John stood near enough to the dog to smell it; it strained at its chain and bared its teeth. He looked away. At the opposite end of the ferry, standing behind McElvane's horse and cart, Daney seemed to look straight back at him. Her eyes caught and reflected the lantern's glow as she slowly lifted one hand and touched the rope at her neck. She shifted slightly. Now her body seemed cut in half by the board of McElvane's cart; she might have been sitting in it. The boy glanced at the dog, which leapt and threw itself forward and fell back again. McElvane's horse shied, its hooves battering the wooden deck. McElvane approached and patted the horse's neck, then bent his head to it. Beyond him, Daney's body dipped quickly and vanished. John saw her lift one of the iron balls from the cart and turn.

“No!” he shouted. “Nooo!”

The women screamed. McElvane's head shot away from the horse's as the blacks' poles hung in the air. In his effort to jump forward, John pulled Daney's eldest son, Robert, down against him. But he kept his eyes on Daney. She held the ball cradled at her stomach and pulled the coffle toward the edge. It happened so quickly that the others had no chance to resist. Before McElvane could reach the ropes, all the women had gone over. Jancey had gone over. The ferry drifted away from the rapid sequence of splashes until the ferryman heaved an anchor into the current. The women's screams continued for a few long seconds above the dog's barking as the scow turned sideways. The broken water where the women had gone under quickly healed. Frantically, McElvane ordered the blacks to sweep with their poles.

“Try to catch hold of the ropes,” he shouted and bent so far over the edge that it seemed he must fall.

The ferryman rushed over with the lantern and pulled him back.

“Don't be a fool, man,” he cried. “There's no chance of getting them up in time.”

Robert was panting. He tried to pull the whole line of chains forward. But the men resisted. For his part, John was willing enough to join the women; at least he did not have the will to fight Robert's grief. The face of Daney's son was raw and tear-scalded. His eyes rolled back in his skull as he shouted for his mother and sisters. The ferryman ran to a wooden box near the chained dog and removed a shotgun. He trained it on the coffle.

“First one who wants to, dies.”

John helped to hold Robert still. McElvane continued to direct the blacks with the poles. “She can't hold them all down,” he cried.

It was impossible to see where the water had been broken. “Oh, pray! Oh, pray!” repeated the old man, Motes, as the current flowed around the scow. The dog began to howl, and McElvane, looking conflicted, finally left the edge of the scow and calmed his horse before it bolted and plunged over the side with his cart full of iron. His face shook like paper being eaten by fire.