The Tinsmith

by Tim Bowling

  The sun bloodied and the dusk fell and the first wave of fish struck the corklines of the linen nets spread across the rivermouth. The tide was approaching slack. Dare slipped the oars and let the skiff settle. He glanced at his shotgun resting in the thwarts and then stared downriver for the Englishman. They were still some distance apart, more than a hundred fathoms, but Dare knew Thomas Lansdowne by his barrel shape and slouch hat. It had become a familiar sight over the years, the Englishman, with his shotgun at his chest, glaring across the sun-dazzle of water.

  Dare waited. Eventually the Englishman would cross the boundary and would have to be driven off. Usually it was just his Indians who let their nets drift over the line, and they picked up and left at the first raising of a gun. Lately, however, the Englishman himself tested the limits. He did not go so far as to stay over the boundary when approached, but he patrolled it with his gun visible, protecting his skiffs as his Indians picked salmon from the nets. Salmon that didn’t belong to them. The Englishman grew bolder by the day.

  Dusk was settling fast. The sun, like a gutted fish, spilled its crimson as it sank. Large flocks of fowl bruised the sky at the horizons. Dare watched them over the grey-white sails of his competitors’ skiffs—there must have been a hundred boats, a hundred dingy canvas sails catching the last of the breeze that had come up with the tide change. The birds rose and spread like black smoke above them.

  He floated on the middle of the river, the banks miles off to either side. But the war and the doctor felt close, almost at his shoulder, whispering. The sky and river darkened. A salmon thrashed in a nearby net, pulling the tins on the corkline down. Three of his own skiffs formed a loose and drawing-in circle around him. One of the Indians softly chanted as he picked fish from the linen meshes. Brine hung heavy on the air. Dare breathed it in with the smell of the blood and slime of the catch. The chanting stopped, resumed; it was like the chanting the negro contrabands had done when they buried the dead.

  Now the river turned black, the sky blue-black. The Englishman grew faint, but Dare knew he was there, waiting. All the skiffs on the river, all the dirty sails, were drifting to the one point. The fleets of the Scotsmen and the Swede and the other Americans. The workers of the men who wanted to drive him out. But there was time yet. He could sit still on his stretch of river, the stretch he had protected for seven years, and watch. And when he was forced to move, he wouldn’t hesitate; he would be smarter, quicker, stronger. Again.

  Dare rubbed the soreness deeper into his eyes and watched the pilot star brighten far over the delta. As always, the night sky calmed his blood; how often he had relied on the stars’ loyal patterns when life seemed only a roiling confusion. Another salmon thrashed, its death throes deepening the briny flavour of the air. Dare tasted the salt; it sat heavily on his tongue. The water near him broke again, louder this time. He tried but he could not keep what was behind him from rising up in the echoes of the sound.

  • • •

  They’d travelled several miles a day, he remembered, in a general southwesterly direction, with their meagre clothes offering little protection from the cold. McElvane, though not as cruel as the overseer had been, was nonetheless a negro driver, and he drove them hard. That he was able to do so without resorting to violence or even threats was on account of his generosity to Daney; all the slaves realized that he had purchased her out of mercy in order to allow her to remain with her daughters. But they also knew that mercy was a fleeting quality in those who bought and sold them. The trader, they did not forget, viewed them as merchandise to be brought to market. No matter how often he let them rest or take a drink of water, he always remained the man driving them south.

  There was little conversation. They each seemed locked in their own forebodings as they were locked in their own chains. The monotony of the slightly swelling fields and dark woodlots was punctuated by rare plumes of smoke from isolated houses and by the occasional small herd of cattle or sheep. The air was crisp and clean, the sky pewter with a blurred sun that gave minimal warmth. If there was birdsong, they could not hear it over the dragging of their chains and the dull hoof-clop of the trader’s horse.

  The men led the way, the women trying hard to keep up. He—John they called him then, and he had never tried to separate the name from the memory—had little chance to observe Daney and her daughters, but he suspected that they maintained the pace, again out of a curious blend of gratitude and terror. Nights, they slept around large fires, fires over which McElvane parched the corn that constituted the main meal of the day. Still no one talked much, though the women tried to soothe the young boys. McElvane repeatedly stared into a small book that he drew nervously from his shirt pocket. Muttering, he’d push a stub of pencil across a page, then look up at the starless sky and shake his head. A few times he spoke to the blacks, almost as if to himself, saying that a good nigger brings both a tall price and a good home. Whip marks, he said, generally send you to the rice fields, and that’s a hard lot.

  John remembered keeping silent then, like everyone else. The chains were heavy, and once he’d eaten and lain by the fire, all he wanted was for sleep to blank out the world. With the others, he remained in a state of shock. Everything had happened so quickly, from the overseer’s arrival to Caleb’s whipping to the escape attempt of Daney’s girls and finally to this drive south. Only his burning hatred for Orlett sometimes stirred him out of his numb despair and gave him thoughts of escape. He didn’t even think of a future apart from revenge, for he did not wish to escape anywhere except to the satisfaction of squeezing his hands around the overseer’s throat. Whenever the hatred abated, the letters on his cheek began to burn. He felt them even more than the iron around his neck.

  Late one afternoon they crossed a wide river, the Patuxent, and it was on the other side of it that everything changed. They reached a small village, not unlike Sharpsburg, and on a dirt road before a grey-planked building with iron-barred windows joined up with a much larger coffle. Fifty or so other blacks, mostly men, boys and young women, including one who was pregnant and one carrying a baby, were similarly chained and roped. But their driver was a different sort of man. He carried a black snake whip across his shoulders and kept up a steady torrent of threats and insults. He rode up and down the line, cracking the whip and yanking back on the reins so that the horse would rear up and snort great breaths in the air between its flailing front legs. Meanwhile, his two assistants, much younger men, scruffy and sullen, rode close by, shotguns at their chests.

  McElvane deferred to the new driver. From what John could gather, both men worked for a Mr. Wych, a slave dealer in South Carolina. But it was what they all learned that night—after the drive had finally stopped, exhausted, at a shabby public house that the new driver called an “ordinary”—that brought the terror back in force.

  They were driven into a bare room and made to sleep on the straw-covered dirt floor, the men on one side, the women on the other. The new driver, Jensen, forbade any conversation. “I don’t want you niggers giving each other any foolish ideas,” he said and shut the door, leaving them in darkness.

  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.