by Alyssa Cole
“That’s just as bad!” Shelley rolled her eyes.
“Oh, I can hardly blame him. I think I earned his distrust. But then something happened. In a moment where he could have thought only of himself, he thought of me first. He protected me. And he probably would have done the same for anyone, because that’s the kind of man he is, but no one had ever done that for me.”
She was taking their brief shared past and bending it just enough so it wasn’t exactly a lie. Daniel knew this, knew what had really happened, so why did it feel like the truth? They were two Loyal League detectives playing the roles of traveling lovers, but she wouldn’t look him in the eye any longer.
“Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a pain when he wants to be.” Janeta tugged at the hem of her glove. “But I admire him very much. And I want to be worthy of his admiration, too.”
Daniel didn’t find the weather cold, like Janeta did, but the contrast between the autumn air and the sudden heat suffusing his body was stark. He wanted her to be lying, because if she wasn’t, that meant the truth was that she admired him. Him. She had told him so with compliments that he’d brushed aside like pesky gnats, but here it was, said out loud in front of all these people. Now they would all think him admirable, too.
She was wrong. They were wrong. But it ached like an abscess how much he wanted them to be right.
“Oh, you can tell how sweet he is on her, just look at his face,” Shelley said, then sighed wistfully. “All right, we should probably get a move on.”
Daniel took up the rear, and Augustus joined him.
“Shelley probably embarrassed you, but that Miss Sanchez is real sweet on you, too, if that eases the pain at all.”
Daniel nodded, then busied himself listening for anyone who might be following them with ill intent. That was much more practical than listening to the thump of his own heart in his ears, racing along with anticipation instead of panic. It was better than recalling Janeta’s words and being warmed by them.
His mother had once told him a story about haint fires that would lure travelers off roads in the dead of night. They burned bright and hot, but they sucked the heat from you while you gloried in the illusion. He couldn’t trust the delicious warmth spreading through his body. He couldn’t afford to.
He walked, alone, and he listened, and he reminded himself that it wasn’t admiration he wanted, but revenge.
* * *
After they ate a dinner of grits and salt pork, everyone retired to sleep and Daniel took up first watch. The occasional cooing of the chickens, who had lived to see yet another dawn, could be heard during the lull of the wind rushing through the leaves overhead.
Over dinner, the adults had shared their stories of meeting their husbands and wives as the children had interrupted with questions and charming demands for attention. Janeta had sat beside Daniel, but not too closely, her low laughter confusing him with the thrill it sent through him. Everyone was speaking of their first loves, and he should have been thinking of Elle with the same anger and regret he usually did, but instead he’d fondly shared peering over the fence as a boy and seeing her after her family had moved in.
“So you were always one to make quick decisions?” Janeta had teased.
“Decisions that perhaps weren’t always correct,” he’d bantered back, not feeling the usual shame at his rejection.
“I think we all make bad decisions when it comes to love,” Janeta had said, hugging her arms around her knees. “But we learn from them, and maybe we can make better ones in the future. We learn what we want, and how to ask for it. That way we don’t imagine someone can give us things they cannot.”
Something seemed to stretch between them in the flickering firelight, like a thin, nearly invisible strand of a spider’s web. He didn’t feel caught by that web; it was a silent telegraph line between them through which unspoken feelings were being transmitted.
It was a connection. And as the evening passed and Daniel listened and then laughed and then joined in the conversation, he felt the connections between him and each of the others fall into place. Moses came over and settled against his knee, leaving a smudge of pork grease on Daniel’s already filthy trousers. Shelley asked him about being born free, and he’d asked her about her life as well.
When he’d been kidnapped and enslaved, he hadn’t known how to communicate with the others on the plantation. He’d never been farther South than New York City, and it had been like waking up in a strange land, where he wasn’t sure how to speak the language. He’d been unable to process his new life—he’d been bitter and resistant. He hadn’t cared about making friends. He’d been angry at the way people just carried on, how no one fought back.
And then he’d fought back and learned why no one else did; not because he was more intelligent than them, but because they knew that the consequences were worse than Daniel had been able to imagine. There was a time and a place for rebellion; he’d chosen incorrectly and had acted without thinking of others. Everyone had suffered because of that.
By the time he’d tried to reach out, after he’d been broken by rope and by lash, many had written him off as a nuisance who brought them nothing but trouble.
Listening to his traveling companions speak of their lives—the good, joyful parts of their lives—struck him deeply. Instead of feeling his usual guilt and recrimination, he forced himself to focus outward, on others. To focus on the good memories they shared, and the full lives they’d lived in a society designed to squeeze the very joy out of them. The world wasn’t suddenly a better place, but perhaps it wasn’t so hopeless as he’d imagined.
Now Daniel sat as everyone slept, his head so full that it may as well have been empty. He’d allowed himself feeling and memories, and now his thoughts turned to Elle. He didn’t feel pain or shame or anger; those things had nothing to do with her anyhow. All he knew was that he missed his friend, the person who had always pushed him forward and never let him off easily. He missed Elle, and she clearly missed him if she insisted on continuing to write. Now that he wasn’t so focused on his own misery he realized that his effort to spare her from his weakness had likely felt no different from hurting her. And, despite what he’d told himself, perhaps he had wanted her to hurt as he had.
He didn’t flagellate himself. Instead, he took a deep breath and reached into his pocket for Elle’s latest letter.
Maybe it was the alignment of the stars above. Maybe he’d simply grown tired of hating everything and feeling nothing. He didn’t know how long his bravery would last; he ripped open the envelope.
Daniel,
I’ve been made aware that you haven’t been reading my letters, so I shall start this one the same way I have started the previous ones: I miss you dearly and if I ever have the good fortune of meeting you again in this lifetime, I will kick you soundly in the left kneecap before hugging the life out of you.
I hope you are well. I hear things because, well, you know why. It’s what I’m good at. And because when it comes to you, I want to hear it all.
I won’t ask why you are angry with me, though I’m sure we could have a lively debate over your reasoning, but I must ask why you seem to be angry with yourself? I don’t care if you’ve truly become mean-spirited and dangerous, as some are saying. I don’t care if you’ve done some of the more outrageous things being gossiped about. I do care why you are behaving this way because I’m not sure you know the answer to that yourself. I say that not to judge you, but to let you know that I am here, I am listening, and I care. If you take anything from this letter, then please let it be that. I CARE.
If you’d rather not discuss anything serious, then I shall take it upon myself to reminisce about something you may have long forgotten—that summer when Caroline Dunst felt fond of you and began baking you blackberry pies, not knowing you hated blackberries. Luckily for us both, I had no such character flaw. I haven’t had a good blackberry in some time, and never a pie so delicious as poor Caroline’s. I hear she’s a
baker now, and perhaps if this war turns out as we wish, we might stop by her establishment when next we visit home.
Things are going well with me. I have quite taken to marriage now that I’ve learned that it doesn’t mean sitting around the house mending socks (Malcolm is very good at mending, so I need never worry about that). So much has happened that I want to share with you. I will still write from time to time, and I hope that one day you see fit to do the same, my friend.
Yours with love and consternation,
Elle
P.S. All right, I am going to admit that pretending to be patient is not my strong suit. Write to me at your earliest convenience or I will tell everyone that your favorite pastime was whittling kitten figurines. Let’s see how your “monster of the 4L” reputation survives that. Is this a threat? Yes.
Daniel read the letter once more, a smile in his heart if not on his lips, then folded it and put it away. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—recriminations? Taunts and jests? Why had he ever worried that Elle would try to do him harm? There was a difference between not loving him as he’d wanted her to and purposefully hurting him.
She was happy, it seemed. And she cared for him, even after all this.
He’d worried that she would pity him, or treat him like a broken man, as his parents and friends had, but she hadn’t tiptoed around his feelings. He couldn’t say he enjoyed reading about her marriage, but Elle wasn’t one to hide the truth to make him feel better. That did him better than knowing she cared. She didn’t know the man he had become, but she wouldn’t be deterred from making his acquaintance. Perhaps it was time he did the same with himself.
He stared into the fire for some time after that, his sleeping blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his ears strained for sounds that would indicate danger. After some time passed, he heard Janeta’s light steps approaching him, and the fact that he wasn’t sure if they meant danger meant she probably was.
Daniel remembered that he threw himself headlong into danger these days.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said as she approached. “I will be quiet if you don’t want to talk, but I wanted to sit by the fire. This cold is unbearable.”
She dropped down to the ground with clear fatigue and tucked her skirts tightly about her legs.
“You look like you’ll drop off at any second,” he noted.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t tired, I said I couldn’t sleep.” There was a bit of an edge to her voice, but he knew how irritable lack of sleep could make a person.
“Did the conversation over dinner rouse some unwanted memories?” He told himself he was poking at her, not that he actually cared to know her answer. She’d mentioned a man back home who had sent her off. Maybe she was thinking of him while stuck with a damaged imposter.
She didn’t seem to feel stuck while describing how we met earlier.
Daniel tried to evade that thought. They were lying about their relationship to further their work. That was it.
“It did,” she responded. When he glanced at her, her brows were raised in surprise that he had asked. “I feel like every day . . . every day I wake up and I might be someone different. And I don’t know if that person is good or bad or a fool.”
Daniel chuckled ruefully. “That sounds somewhat better than waking up certain of who you are, and wishing you were otherwise.”
She sighed. “There is always something in the way of happiness, no?” She shrugged. “All this talk made me think. Well, I’m always thinking, but it made me think more. I’m sad because the man I thought loved me did not. Not the real me. But perhaps that is asking for too much when I’m not sure who I am myself. I know this babble makes me sound like a child.”
She looked up at him and the vulnerability in her gaze moved through him fast and clean, like a blade.
“There’s nothing childish about it,” Daniel replied quickly. “We’re always told that we have to know who we are and what we stand for. When I returned from my imprisonment and forced labor, the thing that seemed to bother everyone the most was that they no longer knew who I was. ‘You’ve changed,’ they’d say in this disappointed tone, and I never knew how to respond. Of course, I had changed!”
He sucked in a breath and lowered his voice. “Of course, I’d changed. But they wanted me to smile, and sleep through the night, and act as if nothing had happened. To talk of the war and freedom, but not to talk about the truth of slavery. It’s one thing to read it in a pamphlet and another to hear it over dinner.”
He expected her to offer him pity, but she was silent for a moment. “I think that’s what people usually want. The pleasantries, based on what they consider pleasant. I know it’s what they want because I gave it to them and they were never disappointed with me. If you look at a person, at how they look at you and speak to you, you can see what they expect and then give them that. And then they are content.”
“But are you?” Daniel asked. The life she described sounded miserable. He thought of the first thing he’d noticed about her, how she was always watching and reading the room. “I must say that this trait is quite useful for a detective, but perhaps not the best adaptation for everyday life.”
Janeta made a sound something like a chuckle.
“I was not happy. And it’s horrible to say that I’m happy right now, but I am. My father is imprisoned and this country may destroy itself, but I feel different. More sure of myself.” She smiled at him and there was nothing of the temptation she’d used when talking to the Russians, or the coy intelligence she’d used on the ship’s lieutenant. It was an honest smile, and that was more enticing than any of her others. “Maybe this is the most me I’ve ever been.”
He pulled out the piece of wood he whittled at when he needed something to do with his hands. “Do you regret it? Joining the Loyal League because your lover asked you to?”
“No,” she said. “I regret that I had reason to join. I regret my father being imprisoned. But I don’t regret this.” She yawned, her lush lips parting before she covered her mouth with her hand. “I think I may be able to sleep now.”
“Good night,” Daniel rumbled.
He listened to her footsteps as she headed toward the wagon. Janeta said she knew how to make people happy when she spoke to them. He wondered if that’s what the unfamiliar feeling in his chest might be.
CHAPTER 13
Janeta had never plucked a chicken before. She had never killed one, either—Shelley had figured that out when Janeta dropped the fowl she’d been handed with a shriek and grabbed her skirts. The small woman had taken it up by the neck and given it a quick, sharp swing, amusement on her face, before handing the carcass over to Janeta to be plucked.
Now Janeta sat with a dead chicken in her lap, panic rising in her as she tried to formulate a reason why she couldn’t give Shelley what she needed. More importantly, why she wouldn’t know this simple act of homemaking. She was good at lying, but this was so basic, like not knowing how to comb one’s own hair—Janeta had figured that out quickly enough, though she still sported snarls that she hoped weren’t detectable. They’d have to be cut out when she had time to deal with such matters.
There were so many things she’d never had to give thought to before leaving, like how her food was prepared. She could cook basic things, but she’d never had to do the dirty work of plucking or skinning, let alone actually killing the poor creature that would become her meal.
Moses sidled up beside her, a dubious expression on his small brown face.
“Want some help, Miss Janeta? Cook showed me how to do it real fast back home.”
“Thank you, chiquito,” she said helplessly.
The boy grabbed the bird and began plucking dexterously, small hands flying as he explained what he was doing, just as someone had obviously explained to him. Janeta grinned, but the sudden realization of why such a young boy possessed this skill pulled her mouth down.
He was a slave. This small, beautiful, friendly boy who was afraid of mo
nsters was owned by someone, and likely only knew how to pluck chickens because it served his master that he knew such things. Moses looked up at her, one hand gripping the chicken, the other full of feathers, and nausea roiled through her as she remembered that little girl who looked like her in the cane field. That girl, all the children and the adults on the plantation, had been owned by someone: her father.
Papi is a good man. He didn’t know better. If he had known, he would not have made his living this way.
She held out her hand for the carcass, trying not to let her dismay show.
“You are such a good, helpful boy, Moses. Thank you for teaching me. I will do the rest now.”
He beamed with pride, handing the chicken over to her before rejoining the other children, who played quietly alongside the wagon.
She began plucking again, and though she was at least making progress, she was nowhere near as fast as him. She was disappointed with herself, but she didn’t let it show, and the tears she blinked away weren’t from frustration, but from shame.
She was slow because her family’s slaves, the people dark like her but whom she hadn’t been allowed to mix with, had taken care of that work for her. And she had left Palatka, full of guilt and anger, to help make sure those people would always have to take care of others. That hadn’t been her intent, of course, but she wouldn’t lie to herself any longer. If she aided the Confederacy, she may as well slap shackles around Moses’s wrists herself.
How could she be part of this? Why had she not given this thought before she’d left?
Because if she had, the lies that held up her very identity, variable as it was, would have come crashing down. Perhaps it should have come down earlier, before she’d built over two decades of selfhood on who she wasn’t instead of who she was.
Papi had never been cruel to her like Augustus and Jim’s father. The brothers were the result of a similar union, though their skin color would have gained them more acceptance from Sanchez family friends than hers had. Would their father have married their mother if it’d been allowed in the States, as it was in Cuba? Did it make a difference in the end, when both of their fathers still owned slaves? The man refugeeing these slaves owned his love and his own children. He forced them to work for him. The thought sent Janeta reeling.