Walk Through Darkness (2 page)

He made landfall in the early light of the rising sun. He collapsed with the organs bunched about him, watching the sky through the swaying reeds. It was done now. There was no going back. By now Humboldt would’ve found him gone. That white man would be consumed with rage. He would be shouting and cursing. The arteries in his forehead would bulge and wrinkle like worms beneath his skin. The other slaves would run to their work, but he would find one to beat and abuse. He would vent himself by cracking black skin and watching it go red. And when all that was completed, he would send out a cry across the land. He would call the motley agents of slavery to him and invite them to a hunt.

That evening William huddled near a stream, covered again in that film of sweat, beads that neither ran nor evaporated but that simply clung to him like a part of skin. He tried to count the minutes and figure the hour, but he wasn’t even sure whether or not time was passing. The drone of insects never changed. The stream was silent as it flowed, slow and currentless and deceiving. One minute folded into the next and left no true sign of its passing. But he waited as he’d agreed to.

He sighed in relief when he finally heard the woman. She moved haltingly, the crackling of branches and leaves marking her progress on the far side of the water. She crossed the stream and emerged with wet ankles, brogans sloshing with each placement of her feet. He was up and questioning her before she had even reached him, but she shushed him quiet. She would get to that, she said, but first she bent and spread out the supplies that had laden her: hard flats of wheat bread, a bag of cornmeal, and a few slices of bacon wrapped in grease-soaked paper. Those were for his journey. To feed his immediate hunger she produced a clutch of five chicken eggs, hard-boiled and still warm from the cooking.

“Kate, where’d you come by this?” he asked. “I can’t hardly take all this from you.”

“Don’t worry bout it. Ain’t every day a runaway comes a-calling on your back door. Sorry this was all I could get.”

William was still slow to accept the gift, but Kate motioned that there’d be no more conversation until he got some food in him. She knelt a few feet away. She was ten years older than Dover, had a different father, and looked almost nothing like her. She was tall and full-bodied, while Dover was spare and compact. There was an anxious energy at the corners of her mouth, although her body moved with the calm assurance of age and motherhood. They were similar only around the eyes and in their high foreheads, but this was enough to mark them as the sisters they were.

“Who told you?” she asked.

William paused with a half-peeled egg in his fingertips. “Couple of Humboldt’s slaves come down with a fever. Nance came across to take up some slack. He told me, but I didn’t know to believe him. I mean, I did believe him, but I had to see for myself.”

Kate nodded and motioned for him to eat again. “Nance told you true,” she said. “And I’ll do the same. Dover left in the spring, headed North with Miss Sacks. Don’t think she just up
and run off or something. It wasn’t like that. Miss Sacks gone back to her people in Philadelphia. You know the Missus come from deep money there. She never did care for down this way. She finally caught Sacks hisself up on the back of that girl Sally. That sight made up her mind. Packed her bags and left the house that very evening. Couple days after she hired a coach to Philadelphia.”

Kate paused and listened to the night. It was as before and she continued. “That’s all fine. Problem is she took Dover with her. Gave her that one night to gather her things. And that’s what my girl did, one long night a grief and next morning she was gone. I know this gonna hurt you to hear, but it don’t happen every day that a slave gets took to a free state. Think bout that. I don’t know what’s happened to her since, but she must be living a better life then us down here. ’Cept she ain’t got no family around. And she ain’t got you with her.”

William bit into his fourth egg. Though the first few had been rich and strong, he didn’t seem to taste them anymore. He just chewed the soft matter and swallowed it down and flicked the shells from his fingertips. It wasn’t that Kate had told him anything different than what he’d imagined. Nance had given him an abbreviated version of the same story. Kate just confirmed it. But he had always hoped that Nance had made some mistake. Perhaps Miss Sacks had only left the Annapolis house for their country home. Perhaps Dover had never gotten on that coach. Perhaps the mistress had changed her mind halfway and turned back. A part of him had believed that he would find Dover here, just as he had left her. He would end the journey simply, lay his eyes and hands on her again, then return to another beating and more labor on Kent Island.

A dog barked in the distance. Three clipped notes that came and went and left the world slightly different. William’s fingers touched the ground, ready to push him to his feet if need be. But no more howls followed, and the other night sounds took
their places around them. The man plucked his fingers out of the soil. There was something else he had to ask and both of them awaited it.

“And the baby?”

Kate watched him before answering. “Guess Nance done told you everything. Yeah, she got a chile in her. Your chile.”

William took the news with his eyes closed, face motionless, brittle.

“Look here, William,” Kate said, but having said it, she faltered for the right words. She reached out and rested the palm of her hand on his shoulder. “Dover never had a choice in all this. Missus told her what she was doing. Didn’t ask her inclination on it. Just told her. Even so, she almost didn’t go and that’s cause of you. But she had a chance to take her baby into a free state. That’s why she went along with it, just thinking bout the best for that chile. Remember that before you lose hope or get angry or run out of here after her. She was thinking about what was for the best. You might want to do that too.” Kate drew her hand back, not sure where to place it or whether the contact between them was helping.

“I shoulda known all along,” William said. He opened his eyes but didn’t look at Kate. “How’d I go all them months without knowing? Dover with a child in her … Don’t that seem wrong? Me just getting up each morning and going on bout the day. Don’t that seem wrong? Man should know something like this. Should just know it.”

“Don’t start worry on right and wrong just now,” Kate said. “You couldn’t a known nothing bout it. I know it seems like you should, but that ain’t the way God put us together.” She paused and watched him. He still didn’t turn toward her. “Wish I had some wisdom to ease you.”

William shook his head, knowing that the gesture seemed to say that he didn’t need her wisdom, or that he thanked her for what she had already given. But inside he was pushing her away.
She couldn’t know how he felt. Yes, she had a mate that she might imagine losing. Yes, she had three children of her own. But this was
his
pain. Part
of him
had been torn away. It felt as if the fingers of a vengeful God had reached down and snatched Dover up. And it wasn’t just her the physical being. Even more he had been robbed of all the ways she made life livable. He understood something that he hadn’t before—that he could’ve spent his entire life as a slave so long as she would’ve borne that life with him. And as for the child … He didn’t even know it. He had never seen its face. Never touched it. But even unborn it was part of the world. He knew that now, and he knew in all likelihood that the child would be born and live and die without ever knowing his father. How easy was that for another person to feel and understand completely?

He began to sort through his supplies, stuffing all the gifts inside his sack, including the one remaining egg. He knew this seemed abrupt, but he couldn’t stand still before her, not with his emotions so close to flooding out of him. He focused on the work of his hands. They trembled, but that just made him work faster. He hefted his bundle up to his shoulder and tested the weight of it. When he was finished he met the woman’s gaze again.

“Kate,” he said, “one more thing, the folks Dover’s with—what name they go by?”

“Family name’s Carr. That’s all I know.”

“Carr.” He repeated the name several times. Once he heard it sounding within him, he raised a hand in thanks.

“You know what you doing?” Kate asked.

William understood the question but didn’t answer immediately. Of course he didn’t know what he was doing. He had no idea of the geography of the country before him. He had names of cities and notions of things Northern, but only in the vaguest terms. He had no true strategies for getting through the obstacles ahead, just motion and will and all the instinct he could
muster. The question was too daunting to answer in any detail, so he answered simply.

“Going to find Dover,” he said. “I just want to stand before her and that baby of mine and see if we can’t make a life, the three of us. That ain’t too much to ask, is it?”

The two parted with a tentative embrace. Kate moved away as she had come, the same passage through the slack stream, out on the far bank and away. William stood with his supplies draped around him, rolling his shoulders, eyes moving from shadow to shadow, solitude complete upon him as soon as the woman faded out of hearing. It wasn’t that far from this very spot that he had last met Dover. But it had been a different season then. Ice cold. Silent. Brittle. Standing there, in the heat, delaying, he remembered their last evening together. It was back in January, just after Humboldt had decided the fate of the next year of his life.

He had waited for her behind the Sackses’ house. He whispered his news in the crystalline evening air, and the two walked to the cabin she shared with her family. They sat on the loose straw that sufficed as her bed. A tallow candle burned on the floor before them. It was almost out, little more than a congealed puddle of fat in which the tail of the wick leaned precariously. In its sputtering light Dover was all the more beautiful. She was slim, a brevity of muscle and bone, although one forgot this when looking at her. There was pride in the width of her full lips, in the dark, majestic brown of her skin. Her cheeks curved upward in smooth, diagonal lines. Her nose had a gentle bridge, with small nostrils, spaced wide and delicate. Her eyes, recessed far back into her skull, looked out at the world with a defiant directness. She rarely faltered or looked away from the eyes of the person to whom she spoke.

“William,” she had whispered, “let’s just do it now.”

He knew what she meant. It wasn’t the first time she had proposed it.

“Dover, it’s the dead of winter,” he said. “We can’t run now.” He slid an arm around her and felt how her shoulder fit into his side. He could smell her hair, a scent of nothing in particular except of her, a fragrance he couldn’t have described by comparison to anything else. He inhaled it and explained once more that it was just the wrong time of the year. They didn’t have the proper clothes for the weather. They’d freeze solid before they’d left the county. And what would they do for food? In the summer they might steal right from the fields, but in the dead of winter there would be no easy forage. They’d leave tracks in the snow for any fool white man to follow. And what was the use in trying something that was bound to fail? It just didn’t make sense. Patience was the key.

“Anyhow,” he had said, “it’s only a year. That’s a painful long time, but it’ll pass. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“A year? You think that’s what this about?”

“Naw, that ain’t what I’m saying. That ain’t it at all, but …”

Dover slid away and turned her gaze on him. “How many years you think we got? These people eating up our lives, William. They eating us up and you letting them. You act like you just glad to be at the dinner table, no matter that you’re the main course.”

He tried to interrupt her, but her eyes cut him to silence. She went on, letting him know through pauses in her speech just how considered her words were. She told him how she felt for him, how she had wanted him beside her and inside her since the first time she saw him. There was a part of her heart that was his completely. But she wanted more, more for both of them. She wanted freedom, and sometimes it felt like she was tugging him along behind with a rope. She was pulling hard to keep him with her, but he wouldn’t budge and the effort of it was wearing her down. That rope was sliding through her grip. “You hear? That rope trying to burn me, and I ain’t about to get burned. You hear what I’m saying? William, one day you gonna
learn the rage. You all right now, but you gonna be beautiful then.”

Those words were some of the last she had spoken to him. He had pulled her to him and whispered meaningless excuses, invoked patience and said again and again that the time just needed to be right. He covered her with kisses and peeled the clothes from her body and made love to her with a painful urgency. Perhaps that was the night. Perhaps that final embrace planted a new life. Of course he couldn’t know, but now it seemed so obvious. There was a part of him that was angry with her for leaving and taking his child away, but he was already forgetting this anger. It was loosening its fingers and fading away. It wasn’t her fault. She had made the only choices she could. He had, after all, burdened her and pressed his reluctance on her. He had failed to recognize the resolve behind her strong words and had set the stage for the events that followed. Now he was finally beginning the journey that she had proposed. Strange that he was heading for the land of freedom without her whispering in his ear. Strange that he wasn’t thinking of freedom at all, but only of her, of an unborn child, of love. He had so many things to set to rights. Freedom wasn’t even foremost on his list.

T
WO
When Morrison appeared along the banks of the Chesapeake he had already walked a thousand miles. If he had been of a mind to talk, he would have had a thousand tales to tell. He entered Maryland through the Cumberland Gap, leaving behind the aged Appalachians and the hills and the plains and the city of St. Louis, which had been his gateway to the heart of the continent for some twenty years. He had been as far west as the Front Range of the Rockies, far enough
north that he entered a marshy land of lakes and blackflies, and far enough south that he had viewed a panorama of craters, barren spaces, and skeletal protrusions that betrayed the earth’s mortality. He had walked across native lands, sparred with native warriors, and slept with native women. He had watched one man scalped, seen several hanged by the neck and had spied from a distance as a group of soldiers swarmed upon a village of the old and infirm and set them all ablaze. He had made a life of killing Thus he knew the internal structures of beavers and raccoons, deer and caribou, grizzlies, mountain lions and buffaloes. There was a space of years in that past when he had discovered he was inordinately skilled at taking human life. His body and mind found through violence a clarity denied him in quiet thought. All this he had done so that he might forget the country of his birth and leave behind the memories of his youth and fill his days with images of sublime beauty or instinctual violence. As he returned into the land of brackish water he knew he had failed on all accounts. A note had brought him back, a piece of paper, thirty-two sentences written in a tremulous hand.

He was a gaunt man, simply clothed. His trousers were thick and earth-toned and oft-patched, reinforced with leather around the shins and buttocks. His shirt had a similar construction to it, as if he made his own additions or subtractions purely as fitted function, with no concern for visual appearance. Across his back he carried a canvas pack and a bedroll, and over his shoulder he had slung a mountain rifle, a sturdy, short-barreled weapon weighing some twelve pounds. He walked with his chin lifted, body canted far forward, arms crooked at the elbow. His jawline was just as sharp as it had been during his youth, his nose just as prominent, and his eyebrows cut the same jagged lines they always had. Nothing in his visage disguised the fifty-odd years of hard life they’d seen, but neither had they been weakened by it. At least not in ways the world was likely to notice.

Beside him loped a long-legged hound of questionable parentage. She was lean around the rump and narrow when viewed from the front or rear. Her fur was a motley mix of strands at war with themselves, an undercoat of curly gray hairs and an outer of straight black ones, thick and
recalcitrant like metal shavings. Her paws were large and cumbersome, and her head was so flat above the eyes that she could have balanced a plate on it. But for all this the hound was a faithful one. She watched her master with quiet eyes and set her own moods and temperament in accordance with his.

The two travelers stood for some time on the outskirts of Annapolis, staring at the ruins of what had once been a cabin. It sat crooked and eschewed, with the haphazard look of flotsam caught against a riverside tree. The most noticeable thing about it was the great oak trunk that stood in the center of it. It provided the central, living support, around which the house was built. It pierced through the ceiling and branched out above the roof like some colossal accident of architecture. The man studied it for some time, humbled by the damage wreaked upon the world by the passing of time and amazed by the clarity of his memories. Eventually, he whistled to the hound and walked on.

He stopped next at the Annapolis town home of a planter’s widow. He received what information she could offer and moved on to the lumberyard of a man he had not spoken to in years and could not now for he was dead. He spent the early afternoon in a tavern and there he gained the most useful information yet. Before two he was patrolling the wharf area and by three he was aboard a sloop outward bound with a fair wind behind it. In that evening’s dusky light he rapped upon the door of a plantation house on Kent Island. He asked for the man in charge, one St. John Humboldt. When he appeared Morrison posed his questions and offered his services.

Humboldt looked the man and his dog over with skeptical eyes. You got any history hunting niggers? he asked.

Morrison kept his eyes lowered. No, he said, but I’ve hunted nearly everything else. Don’t see that a man’d be any different.

They a might bit different. Trust me on that. And you’re a bit old to be entering the trade. Where you from anyway?

St. Louis.

St. Louis? Hell, you ain’t from St. Louis. Where you from before that? I mean to say, where were you born?

Morrison looked from the ground to the man and to the ground again. A few moments passed and it was clear no further answer was forthcoming.

The planter chewed on this for a moment and then eyed the hound. That’s one helluva dog you got there, he said. What is it, part rat and part horse? The man smiled and invited mirth, but the other would not be led.

Well, you want I should tail this lad or no?

Humboldt said that he might as well, though there were others already out after him. He told him what he could of the runaway and of the circumstances of his flight, and he provided him with a shirt still ripe with his sweat. Morrison placed this before the hound’s nose and explained the situation to her. The dog seemed to understand the order of things well enough. She inhaled deeply and the muscles in her back began to quiver.

Now, Humboldt said, don’t go thinking I’m hiring you on wages or anything. This here’s a matter of pay on delivery or no pay at all. And I want that boy back healthy. He’s no use to me as a corpse. The man ripped off a portion of the shirt for the tracker to keep and told him where he might begin his journey. When all this was concluded the planter looked him over as if seeing him anew.

Ain’t you got a horse? he asked. You don’t mean to walk the boy down, do you?

Aye, Morrison said, I’m afoot. Can’t abide a horse.

With that the tracker turned and strode away, pack tied firm to his back and rifle swinging from one arm, horizontal to the ground and in line with his direction, like a compass point. The dog loped before him, paused and checked the man’s progress, then loped on again. The two of them were soon on the tree-lined lane, down it and away into the haze of the July dusk.