by Rita Woods
She stretched her neck, and pain corkscrewed through the bottom half of her face. She opened her eyes. At first she could see no difference. Everything around her was bathed in an oily darkness, but as her eyes slowly adjusted, she saw that she was lying in a huge building, a barn. High above her head, a half-dozen hooks, a band saw, and other farming tools dangled from the ceiling.
Why? Where?
She turned her head, and the ground seemed to wobble beneath her back. Her mouth felt swollen, tight. Muddy light seeped through the cracks in the walls of the barn, forming a pale crisscross pattern over the piles of broken furniture and discarded tools that littered the floor. She tried to sit up and another lightning bolt of pain shot through her jaw and teeth. Moaning, she crumbled back to the cold floor.
“You’re awake.”
Her head snapped around and a violent wave of nausea washed over her. She jerked her head to the side and vomited again and again into the moldering straw heaped next to her, until she lay gasping for breath.
“You okay?”
Cautiously, she raised her head to peer into the shadows toward the voice, her teeth clenched against another wave of nausea. A man, a boy really, stepped from the gloom by the door, into a finger of light.
Winter tried to scramble away, her palms and knees scraping against the barn floor. One ankle was suddenly gripped hard and she went sprawling spread-eagle onto her stomach. Screaming, she rolled onto her back kicking fiercely at what held her.
A thick band of rusting metal was clamped around her ankle, connected by a thick chain to a loop in the floor.
She was chained to the floor.
She stared, incredulous, the scream dying in her throat. She blinked, unable to make sense of what she was seeing.
“Are you okay there?” the boy asked again, approaching slowly.
There was a horse stall a few feet behind her, and Winter dragged herself painfully toward it. She pushed her back against it, ignoring the metal band slicing through the skin at her ankle, a low gurgle of panic rising in her throat.
“Whoa, whoa there,” cried the boy. “Settle down there, now.”
Winter opened her mouth to scream again, to tell him to stay away, but no sound came out.
“It’s alright,” said the boy, squatting down a few feet away. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. I just brought you somethin’ to drink.”
Winter stared. He was thin, almost skeletal, his face made up of sharp angles and lines. His hair was the color of winter wheat and hung limply against his face. His pale eyes were rimmed with dark circles. He smiled at her.
“I ain’t going to hurt you,” he said again.
He leaned toward her to get a closer look, then recoiled in shock as she lunged at him, clawing at his face.
“Hey!” he cried.
Winter slid down against the stall wall and wrapped her arms around her chest, tears running unheeded down her face. The boy watched in silence for nearly a minute, then, shaking his head, turned and walked away.
Winter stared at the barn door, straining to hear, afraid the boy would come back. When he didn’t, she looked down at the chain. She pulled on it, gently at first and then harder, and harder still, until her ankle had swollen tightly inside the rusting band and blood streaked the top of her foot.
“No,” she screamed. “No.”
She collapsed to the floor and buried her head in her arms.
“No,” she sobbed.
* * *
When she opened her eyes the next time, the barn was brighter. She raised her head and looked around. Now she saw that there were in fact three horse stalls, but it was clear there’d been no horses in them for a long time. Still lying on her side, she gingerly ran a hand over her face. Her lip was swollen and two of her bottom teeth were loose. There was a goose egg on her forehead. But nothing was broken and none of her injuries seemed permanent.
Something moved behind her and she shot upright, her lips pulled back in a snarl. It was the white boy again.
“Frank said to bring you somethin’ to eat,” said the boy. He set a pot of something steaming near her, then backpedaled so that he stood just beyond the reach of the chain. When Winter remained motionless, watching him warily, he gestured toward the pot.
“Go on,” he said. “It’s oatmeal. Got real butter in it and everything. Frank says it’ll perk you up some.”
Her stomach growled and she tried to remember the last time she’d eaten. She wondered what day it was, how long she’d been here. Wherever “here” was. The boy nodded encouragement as Winter slowly rose to her feet and shuffled toward the steaming pot. Bending, she picked it up, cradling the hot cereal gingerly with her fingertips. She stared at the lumpy gray goo. There was indeed butter, sitting like a yellow sun in the center of all that gray. A lump formed in her throat and her stomach hitched.
“Go on, now. Eat it,” urged the boy. “Paddy made it, so it likely ain’t all that good, I gotta admit. Best to gulp it down while…”
The rest of his sentence was swallowed up by an agonized scream as his face vanished beneath a layer of scalding oatmeal.
“Damnation!” he screamed, staggering blindly into one wall, bringing a washtub down on himself. “Damnation and hell!”
His screams brought a man to the door. Framed there, the sunlight lit him from behind so that all Winter could make out of him was that he was big. She added her voice to the white boy’s.
“Let me loose!” she shrieked. “Let me loose! Let me loose right now! Let me loose!”
The big man strode into the barn. She recognized him instantly—the man who’d first grabbed her in the clearing, the one David Henry had bashed with his gun. He wore the purplish bruise from that blow on his left cheek. The slaver caught the howling boy by the scruff of his neck. “What in hell…?”
He shook the boy like a wayward puppy until the boy’s screams settled into pained whimpers. Winter yanked wildly at the chain on her ankle, twisting this way and that, ignoring the throbbing in her face and in her knees.
“Let me loose!” she screamed. “They’re coming to get me! They’re coming to get me and then you’ll be sorry!”
The big slaver strode toward her, the boy still grasped by the neck. “Shut it!” he roared. He pushed her hard, sending her sprawling onto the filthy barn floor. Her swollen ankle flared red hot.
“And you,” he yelled, giving the boy another shake. “We got no food to waste. You just lost your supper, boy! Feedin’ you puts no coin in my pocket. Feedin’ her does!”
He thrust the boy through the barn door, then followed after, yanking the doors shut, leaving Winter once again in half darkness.
Curling on her side, Winter squeezed her eyes tight, her breath coming in strangled bursts. Something crawled up her leg and she whimpered.
In a minute Belle will call me to breakfast. I’ll have baked apples and then Mother Abigail will come and fuss at me about practicing my skill. I’m in Remembrance and it’s almost breakfast time. Any minute … any minute now, Belle will call me to breakfast.
Outside the barn there was a crash, followed by cursing. Winter flinched and pressed her fists against her ears.
I’m not here! I’m in Remembrance!
She murmured this over and over until everything else—the curses of the slavers, the rustling of the mice in the straw, the throbbing of her face—receded into the background, drifting there like a half-remembered nightmare.
31
Margot
The settlement was bathed in scarlet light as the sun began to sink behind the hills. Though there was snow in the air and it was bitterly cold, all of Remembrance was out. Every man, woman, and child lined the path leading to the cemetery, silent as ghosts, even the babes in arms.
Four men carried the rough pine coffin, two at the head, two at the feet. They had come to bury Thomas, the blacksmith. A night and one full day had passed since the attack on the settlement, and initial disbelief had settled into a numb outrage. And now ni
ght was falling again and Remembrance was pulled taut, waiting, waiting for the trigger that would send all that emotion—rage, fear, revenge—bursting out into the open.
Margot watched from the shadow of the tree, near the top of the trail. These were not her people. This was not her grief. Not quite. She had her own sorrows.
David Henry passed, following the coffin, his jaw set in a hard, straight line. He caught her eye and something flickered across his face, a moment of recognition. She nodded and then he was past her, moving slowly down the trail. In her old life, she would never have noticed a man like him. So … ordinary.
But not ordinary, no.
After the attack, she’d watched as he moved through the settlement: dragging people from their cabins where they hid like sheep, pushing them to the job of living, with a joke, a calm word, and, if necessary, a threat. But beneath the smiles, Margot sensed steel. His eyes never stopped moving, scanning the trees, the trails, his finger never off the trigger of his rifle.
From her place in the shadows, she stared after him and felt a stirring behind her breastbone. She tried to imagine David Henry as a slave, tried to imagine him cowering beneath the blows of a whip. She could not.
At the entrance to the cemetery, the men laid the coffin gently on the ground, and a frail-looking woman, her headdress undone, her hair streaked with gray, threw herself across it, sobbing silently. The men who had been at the coffin’s feet, boys really, wrapped their arms around each other and then the woman, shielding her within the cocoon of their bodies. They held each other like that until the woman straightened. Holding herself rigid, chin out, she laid a horseshoe on the coffin and then folded with her sons into the ranks of her neighbors.
And then he appeared, as if shot from the ground.
Josiah. Mother Abigail’s friend.
There was a collective gasp as the old man strode to the coffin and slammed his palms against the top, once, twice, three times, then jerked upright, as if poleaxed. From somewhere deep within his throat came a sound like a growl. An elderly man not far from Margot began to hum, the sound a refrain to Josiah’s growl. Then a young boy a few yards in front of her took up the sound, and the woman next to him, who appeared to be his mother. And the man to her left. Until the whole cemetery reverberated, pulsing with a dark, primitive, primeval noise that echoed in Margot’s head, cutting off her breath.
“Mere de Dieu!” she whispered. “Mother of God!”
She stumbled backward, tripping over a tree root. And then Josiah seemed to be staring at her, through her, his mucoid eyes holding her in place. The sound in the cemetery grew and Margot struggled to breathe. The air around her throbbed. It was cold, but she felt sweat forming beneath her cloak. The boy in front of her raised his arms.
“Yes,” he moaned. “Yes, Jesus, yes.”
On and on it went, until Margot’s heart beat to the rhythm of the chanting in the cemetery. Everything, the faded wooden grave markers, the trees, even the dirt on the trail where she stood, seemed to glow. Looking up, she thought she saw shapes twisting in the treetops.
He is calling to them! The old sorcier is calling the spirits. And they answer, mon Dieu, they are answering him!
A memory came to her: her grandmother on her knees in the back gardens, alone after a night of wandering the dark streets of New Orleans, whispering, her face a ghostly mask in the light of a candle. Margot had been what? Eight? Nine?
“Who are you talking to, Grandmere?”
“The spirits, chére. They are everywhere, always. And if you are quiet, they will speak to you.”
“What do they say?”
Her grandmother smiled and blew out the candle, leaving them only the light of the moon. “They tell you the things you must know, chére. They guide you toward what you are meant for.”
The cemetery pulsed: light, dark, light. She saw the flash of faces in the darkness, caught for a broken piece of time in the flickering lamplight. And those faces were calling to her, speaking in the voices of all the settlers. Around her. Inside her. Trying to tell her …
Grandmere?
And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. Once again the cemetery was filled with a thick silence, broken only by muffled sobbing. Josiah seemed to shrink at the side of the coffin, his years suddenly writ large on him.
“This a day of homegoing, for Brother Thomas,” he said. “The spirits will guide his way to heaven. He truly free now.”
Sir Galahad, the goat man, stood over the coffin and shattered a small mirror, scattering the pieces around the grave. “This is so the spirits can see their reflection in Thomas. They will see themselves in him and him in themselves. We sad, but they be pleased that he joins with them … with all the ancestors,” he said.
Josiah placed an egg in the grave, his hands trembling slightly. “For his new life just beginnin’.”
Margot clenched her fists tightly against her chest. For a moment her vision blurred and there was a roaring in her ears. She felt something brush against her arm and jerked, but there was nothing there. Something flickered deep in the trees again, a movement just over her shoulder. But whatever it was, whoever it was, stayed just outside her line of sight. Shivering, she turned and hurried back to her little shelter.
* * *
By the time she crawled out again, it was completely dark and she was light-headed with hunger. The smell of things cooking drew her toward the Central Fire. She remembered the floating hog’s head from a few days before and winced.
She glanced up at the stars that twinkled like crystals against the black velvet sky. She was on edge, disoriented. She’d never planned on staying in Remembrance. This stop in Ohio was simply to have been a way station on the journey to Canada, the land of the Northern Star, a place Veronique had spoken of as if it existed in one of their fairy tales. Somehow, someday, in that place far beyond the reaches of the slave catchers, they would earn money and then they would go back to Louisiana and buy the freedom of their grandmother. Veronique had believed that, and though Margot had teased her sister mercilessly about holding to childish wishes, she had wanted to believe, too.
After things had gone so horribly wrong, after Veronique … all she’d wanted was a safe place to hide from the trackers, to catch her breath, to recover from the long trek north. And she’d ended up here. In this Remembrance. This asile. This madhouse. Where an old woman convinced people that they were invisible to the whites. She laughed bitterly. She’d been here less than a week and that had already been proven a lie.
No, she had never planned on staying here, but now she didn’t know what to do. There was snow on the wind now, promising a mean, early winter. This would be only her third winter season outside of Orleans Parish, the last one spent on a rocky hillside farm in Kentucky. She’d seen snow before: icy crystals that coated the cobblestones of St. Ann Street like sugar glaze, powdery coatings that covered the ugly rocks and dirt in Kentucky. But she had never experienced the true winter she’d heard some of the white visitors to the Prytania Street mansion—those who came from the East and Middle West—speak of, the kind that buried the world, caught and killed the unsuspecting.
That was what she smelled on the wind now, what the conductor had hinted at before turning her over to Winter by the mulberry. No, she had no experience with that kind of winter, and if she left Remembrance now, she would surely perish. But if she stayed? With the slavers lurking in the shadows, waiting, mightn’t that be the greater risk?
Margot inhaled sharply, fighting tears. “A fine mess, non?” she muttered.
“Hello.”
The voice startled Margot from her dark daydream. She’d been so absorbed in her thoughts that she’d nearly tripped over the woman hunched at the edge of the Central Fire.
“Pardon me,” said Margot. “Hello.”
The woman smiled up at her. Everything about her was round. Her face, her large eyes, her hugely pregnant belly. She looked like a little doughball.
“Would you
mind helpin’ me up?” said the woman. “I sat down to shell peas and pure forgot I can’t hardly get to my feet by myself no more. I just roll around like one a’ these peas myself.”
Margot extended both hands and helped rock the woman upright.
“You are having twins!” She’d felt the two heartbeats as soon as her fingers closed around the woman’s hands. Strong. Healthy. One boy. One girl.
The woman narrowed her eyes, then broke into a broad smile. “Well, that’s a relief to know. I was sure I was ’bout to birth a calf. ’Sides, ain’t no surprise there, I reckon. Everybody who makes a baby inside Remembrance makes two.”
Margot frowned.
“Girl, don’t think about it too hard,” said the woman, laughing. “Or your head’s liable to bust open like a overripe tomato. It’s just one of those Remembrance things. You get used to it.” She patted her belly.
“I’m Petal,” she said. “So much excitement, we never got introduced formal.”
“Enchanté,” said Margot. “I am Margot.”
“’Course you are. I probably know all your business by now better than you do your own self. Even if some of the busybodies had to make up a bucketful.” Petal laughed. “New folks comin’ in is big news around here.”
Her face darkened. “Though not as big as recent doin’s, I expect.”
Petal squinted at the basket of peas at her feet. She smiled when Margot bent and reached it up to her.
“Where has everyone gone?” asked Margot.
Another shadow crossed Petal’s face. “Folks scared. Hidin’ mostly. Plannin’ on what to do next. Winter’s gone. Mother Abigail’s took sick. Thomas…” She shuddered in the flickering firelight.
“And can’t no one seem to find Louisa now, either,” she went on softly.
Margot rocked back. “What does this mean?”