Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “Then why did we wait so long?”

  “Because I wasn’t ready to meet thee halfway.”

  “And you are now?”

  “I think so. But no further.”

  Whittier had foreseen it: her passion had been unleashed like waters from the desert-rocks of old. But as he lay in the darkness while she slept, his arm under her head and her knee over his, but cautiously, he thought about what would happen next. How could he leave now, as he’d planned? He felt the weight of panic in his chest, her leg pinning him to the bed.

  11.

  He was sharpening an ax in the kitchen. Rachel had asked him to take it to the barn, but he said it was too cold and he was almost finished and he would clean it up when he was finished. She was dipping candles on the stove when they heard footsteps on the porch. Moody stood and went to the door: two runaways, a boy and a girl, threadbare clothes and no shoes. He had been wondering when something like this would happen. Rachel ushered them into the kitchen. The boy said they’d waited down by the creek until it was dark, and had come up when they saw light in the kitchen window. The boy was all right, a little muddied and cold, but the girl’s dark skin was pebbled and scabby around her nose and mouth, her hair like matted river weeds, and her eyes rimmed with green pus. The cold seemed to have kept her intact, but now that she was inside she was shivering herself apart.

  Rachel inspected the girl and took her out to the barn with a pan of warm water and some soap and towels. Moody stayed in the kitchen with the boy, who was scared to death of Moody, possibly because he was still holding the ax. He kept looking to the window, maybe after the girl, maybe just out into the night. There was a bad smell in the room.

  “How’d you get here?” Moody asked him, to pass the time.

  “Follered de ribber,” he said.

  “Where from?”

  “Massa’s.” He pointed south.

  “That your sister?”

  He didn’t answer. He looked as though he didn’t understand the question.

  “You hungry?” Moody asked.

  No answer this time, either. Moody guessed he hadn’t taken it as an offer of food. He got up and put some fried catfish left from their supper on a plate and set it in front of the boy, who stared at it like he thought it might flip up and bite him if he touched it.

  “Go ahead,” Moody said. “Watch out for bones.”

  Carefully, the boy broke the white meat in half, shoved one piece into his mouth and set the other back on the plate. Then he sat back and looked at Moody while he chewed. Moody got up again and put another portion of fish on the plate along with a slice of crackling bread. The boy did the same with those, broke both in two, ate half and left the other for the girl.

  “What’s your name?” Moody asked him.

  Before he could not answer again, Rachel came in with the empty pan. “Julius,” she said, “take that food out to your friend. We’ll be along in a minute.”

  When the boy was gone, Rachel looked at Moody and he looked at her. She set the pan on the stove and poured more hot water into it. Moody remained seated at the table, letting her see how calm he was.

  “How long have you been hiding runaways?” he asked her.

  “Since we came here. Before that, really. My mother hid them in her boardinghouse in Huntsville.”

  “Do you have some place you hide them?” he asked, thinking someone would be along shortly looking for them.

  “Robert built a false wall in the back of the barn,” she said. “I haven’t put them in there yet, but I will.”

  “We better tend to it now,” Moody said. “They don’t seem to have come from too far away.”

  They went out to the barn, Rachel carrying the pan with more hot water and some fresh towels, Moody scanning the ridge above the road and wishing he had a rifle. His leg hurt. Dante and Beatrice, both stolid horses, looked up from their stalls and fluttered at them when they came in, expecting grain. Satan was in the fourth stall. There was no horse in the third stall, and that was where Rachel had put the two runaways. The girl looked less terrible than she had. She was sitting up eating. Rachel had washed her and given her a clean dress. Julius still looked terrified and Moody wondered if something wasn’t wrong with him after all, something less visible than whatever was wrong with the girl.

  Rachel led Moody to the end stall. Satan looked mean, but she was in fact the gentlest of the three. Moody backed her out, and Rachel moved aside a piece of burlap that was nailed to the side wall, revealing a jagged hole about the size of a hand and looked like it had been kicked in by a demented horse. She reached through the hole, turned a wooden catch, and the wall slid open. Expert carpentry; no visible hinges or saw lines in the wood, weighted so it would slide quietly. Moody wouldn’t have seen it was a door even if he’d been looking for one. Behind it was a narrow space, no more than four feet wide, that ran along the width of the barn. He put the lantern through and saw a table at the far end with a jug of water and a few candles on it. Room for maybe ten people, if they didn’t fight. Rachel brought Julius and the girl.

  “You’ll be safe in here,” she told them. “There’s good air and no light gets out. Stay until one of us fetches you, do you understand that?” The girl nodded. “You hear anything going on outside, horses or voices or anything, you just stay put. Not a peep, you got that?” She nodded again.

  Rachel closed the door and replaced the burlap, and Moody put Satan back in the stall. The big animal seemed to take her role as guard horse seriously.

  When they were in the house, Moody refilled the kettle to make tea. He’d have preferred whiskey, it might have helped the pain in his leg, but he’d told Rachel he didn’t drink, which was true because he didn’t have any. He felt virtuous. She sat at the table and rolled up her sleeves as though readying for a fight, but he wasn’t going to fight her.

  “What’s wrong with the girl?” he asked.

  “She’s fifteen and she’s had two babies already. Whoever owned her kept her in a cage and bred her like an animal. She doesn’t seem to have been given a name, Mr. Moody, not so much as a name. I don’t know what all’s wrong with her. Starvation. Parasites. Infection. She needs a doctor.”

  “Where we going to find a doctor who will treat a slave?” he asked.

  “They’re not slaves,” Rachel said. “We don’t recognize slavery as a human condition. They are children who are suffering.”

  “Still,” he said, “where’re we going to find a doctor who will look at them?”

  “I know of one in Huntsville. The same one I would have taken thee to if thy wound hadn’t healed.”

  “That’s a day’s ride from here.”

  “What do you suggest, Mr. Moody? That I send them on their way with her in that condition? You’ve seen her. She needs proper care.”

  Moody reached across the table and took her hand. “How soon can we move them?” he said.

  “She needs a day or two.”

  “If anyone’s coming after them, they’ll be here before that. I don’t suppose you have anything here we can defend ourselves with?”

  “We don’t defend ourselves. We have done nothing that requires defense.”

  “I doubt they’ll see it that way,” he said.

  12.

  They came the next afternoon, a father, son and another man who had the surly look of an overseer. Moody caught the sun glinting off their buckles and heard their horses coming down off the ridge, and readied himself on the porch, keenly feeling the lack of a weapon. He suggested Rachel go inside, but all she did was take off her bonnet.

  “At least let me do the talking,” he said.

  They stood on the porch trying to look like two people receiving unexpected company.

  “Huddy,” the older man, the father, said.

  “ ’Day,” Moody answered. “What brings you boys up here?”

  “We’re just out huntin’,” the man said. “Followed some tracks up the crick.”

  “Oh?”
<
br />   “Two of them. They stop just here.”

  “What kind of tracks were they,” Moody asked, “this time of year?”

  The man looked at Moody as though wondering if he were new to the Earth. “You’re Robert Tanner, ain’t you?” he said.

  “No,” Moody said. “Name’s Moody.”

  “I heard your name was Tanner and you hide runaways.”

  “You heard wrong, then. There’s no one named Robert Tanner living on this farm.”

  Rachel gave a kind of grunt beside him, but he hadn’t told a lie and he kept his eyes on the men. The son was short with a large head, hair cropped close to his scalp. His ears stuck out and he didn’t seem to have any eyebrows. He grinned all the time, as if looking forward to doing something he loved doing. He reminded Moody of men he’d known in the militia, the kind they were sorry they had to unleash on the enemy, but they did. The one Moody thought was the overseer had an old muzzle loader sitting crossways on his lap and he kept his right finger on the trigger. To shoot, he’d have to raise the barrel over his horse’s head, which would give Moody a few seconds. To do what?

  “My name’s Judd,” the father said, raising his eyebrows. “Silas Judd. This here’s my boy, J.J., and that there’s Sam Lerner, my overseer.”

  “ ‘Afternoon to you all. There’s no slaves here, Judd, neither yours nor ours. I come from Texas,” he said. “I know how much trouble runaways can be.”

  “They surely can,” Judd said. “Fun to hunt, though, ain’t they?” He turned to his son, laughing. “Well, I guess that nigger we whipped was wrong, we’ll have to whip him again. He said you was Quakers and you helped a lot of my runaways.” He looked speculatively at Rachel. “Mind if we look in your barn, ma’am?”

  “I surely do mind,” said Moody. “That would be the same as calling me a liar.”

  “They might have snuck in there in the night.”

  The son made a noise that sounded like air escaping from a bloated cow. He got off his horse and walked to the barn. Moody contrived to look unconcerned. Judd looked unsure, as though he could stop the lad if he wanted to but didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the others. He must have been losing a lot of slaves to be placing such a large bet on these two.

  “J.J. has something wrong in his head,” Judd said, touching his hat. “But sometimes he’s right.”

  The overseer thought it was his turn to speak up.

  “We just want the buck,” he said. “J.J.’s done with the female.”

  Moody looked calmly over to him. There were just two of them now, the father and the overseer, both waiting for something to happen. He could see Lerner gauging the distance between himself and Moody and how long it would take him to get his musket over his horse. Maybe too long. Maybe the ball had dropped out of it. He wouldn’t know about Moody’s bad leg; Moody himself didn’t know how fast he could move with it. The overseer yawned and Moody tensed. Yawning usually signaled a stupid move on the way.

  Just then the boy came out of the barn alone, and the moment passed. He looked at his father and shrugged, which Moody took to mean he hadn’t found anything but wasn’t convinced there was nothing to find.

  “Sorry to bother you, then,” said Judd. “We’ll be on our way.”

  “If I see any slaves I’ll let you know. Where’s your place at?”

  “Just up along,” he said, nodding back the way they’d come.

  “We’re neighbors, then,” Moody said.

  “Yep,” said Judd, turning his horse. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other. Come on, boys.”

  Moody and Rachel watched them ride off. Only J.J. looked back, like a child being pulled away from a carnival.

  13.

  They waited until it was dark, then another half hour, before going out to the barn. Moody was certain the Judds would be watching from the ridge. The moon was almost full and the night cloudless. They took an unlit lantern and kept to the shadows as much as possible, then darted across the barnyard like a pair of foxes. Satan was in her stall, eyes as big as teacups when they lit the lantern. Moody led her out and Rachel opened the door to the hide. Julius came out first, and Rachel went in for the girl. Then she called, “Mr. Moody, please.” Moody told Julius to stay where he was and not stick his head outside or even stand near the door, and went into the narrow room. The girl was lying on a bundle of sheets; she seemed to have shrunk. He put a blanket around her, picked her up and carried her out. Even soaked in sweat she was as light as a dead sparrow. Moody stood inside the barn door with her in his arms and Julius behind him while Rachel went out to look around. When she called they made their way to the house the way they had come. In the kitchen, Rachel blew out the lamp and told Moody to put the girl on the cot, which was still beside the stove. Then she made up a bed for Julius on the floor beside the girl.

  “Her fever’s gone up,” Rachel said. “We’ll have to get her to town soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “First thing tomorrow, I’d say. She might not even make it that long.”

  Moody considered their chances of getting past the Judds in daylight.

  “I’ll take a look around before it gets light,” he said. Maybe he could get behind one of them, take him down with a club or the ax and get the man’s gun. He was thinking like a soldier, weighing the consequences of having a weapon, that it would escalate a simple confrontation into a two-against-one shoot-out. He was confident he could win such an encounter, and wanted to go ahead with it.

  “You try to get some sleep now,” Rachel said. She was kneeling beside the cot, looking down at the girl’s glistening face. “I’ll stay up with her for a while.”

  Moody took a candle and went into the bedroom. Of course he wouldn’t sleep. On the small table beside the bed was the book Rachel had been reading the night before, A Letter Concerning Toleration, by John Locke, her place marked by a Quaker tract condemning slavery “in all its forms: viz. the slavery of Negroes, the slavery of women, the slavery of children.” When he met Annie she had been all three. “Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ,” he read in the Locke, “must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices.” Moody’s lusts and vices remained unassailed. If they made it to Huntsville with the runaways, he would try to buy a rifle or at least a pistol, and he would defend Rachel from people like the Judds.

  “Mr. Moody, come quickly! The barn!”

  He jumped up and put his britches and shirt on and grabbed his boots. He was in the main room in time to see Rachel flying out the door. When he looked through the window all was luminous black and yellow. Julius and the girl were in the kitchen, looking scared but not getting up. He ran after Rachel and sat on the porch step to pull on his boots. The back half of the barn was blazing, smoke rolling out into the blackness through the spaces between the boards and under the eaves. He ran to Rachel, who was struggling to get the double doors open. They each opened one side, then ran in to release the horses. He threw an armful of harness into the wagon and pulled it through the door, letting it roll out into the barnyard. Rachel let Dante and Beatrice out of their stalls, and he ran to Satan. She was rearing and whinnying in a dead panic, her head going up into the smoke and then coming down hard. He opened her stall with her front hooves whistling past his ears, and she was gone. Three horses and the wagon. The smoke was so low by the time he and Rachel left the barn that they had to double over to run under it.

  They ran to the house without straightening, then stopped to look back. J.J. must have paced off the distance from the front of the barn to the back wall when he was inside, then come back later and paced off the outside, and known what the difference meant. He didn’t need to find the door to know there was another room back there. Rachel stood beside Moody, coughing and shivering. She and Robert must have known something like this was at least possible, if not likely. Quaker barns had been going up in flames all over the South. Robert had built his far enough away from the house that fi
re from one wouldn’t leap to the other.

  “Do you think the Judds are still up there?” she asked, looking up to the ridge.

  The fire was burning furiously, roaring and crackling as the hay they had recently put in the loft caught. The heat branded their foreheads even on the porch.

  “Yes.”

  “What will we do?”

  “I’ll go catch the horses,” he said. “We’ll take the children into Huntsville tonight.”

  “The children!” She turned and ran into the house. The kitchen was still dark but the firelight coming in through the window let him see the girl sitting up on the cot, squeezed into the corner like she was afraid of what was coming through the door. There was no sign of the boy.

  “Where’s Julius?” Rachel asked the girl, who shook her head but didn’t speak. “Where is he?” Rachel said again.

  “Massa take he.”

  “What?” Rachel cried. “What did you say?”

  “Massa J.J., him take Julius, da.”

  14.

  Back in Texas, if a man burned your barn down, you did what it took to teach him that, in general, burning down barns was a bad idea, and that burning down your barn in particular was monumentally stupid. It wasn’t for revenge, exactly, and you didn’t get your barn back, but it discouraged that person from burning down barns. It benefited everyone, including, if you wanted to be philosophical about it, that person. But this wasn’t Texas, a fact about which he was otherwise glad, so he let Rachel talk him out of going after the Judds.

  “I can’t counsel violence, Mr. Moody,” she said.

  “What if Julius got away from them somehow, what if he’s out there wandering around in the dark? I might find him.”

  “We need to get this girl to a doctor,” she said. “They won’t stop us taking her, now that they’ve got Julius. We should leave as soon as we find the horses.”

  “They’ll kill the boy,” he said.

  She looked at him wildly. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “It’s to their advantage to get him healthy again and put him back to work. Killing him would be a waste.”