Odessa wailed at Abram’s feet.
An early winter chill whipped through the hills of the Kelly plantation and in and out of the bodies of owners and slaves alike. Days later, it settled deep in the chest of her love.
She couldn’t lose him. Not now. Lord Jesus, not ever.
She was supposed to go first. Fall in his arms and rise in the arms of Jesus. That was the way it was supposed to be, the way it had to be because he was the strong one. The rock. Her strength. She needed him. God knew she needed him. Had never made a step without him.
“Please, Lord.”
She draped herself over him, pressed her cheek against his chest, his hot, damp chest, rising and falling, higher, drawing his stomach tighter, lower until his ribs poked through the rags of thin cotton. She closed her eyes, listened to the rattling of sleep coming from blankets across from her, the wheezing of death beneath her. Ruth and Lou had stayed up until bloodshot eyes begged to close, but she had no choice. She had to fight. She kissed the scar in the middle of his palm, leaned in, pressed harder, whispered into his pores, spoke to him. Spoke through him. Her face lifted with his every breath, dropped with each exhale. Together they battled. His body, her prayers. One spirit fighting to live.
It wasn’t the first time.
Decades before when she, Abram, and Ruth were on the Whitfield plantation, it was she who needed saving.
“I got you just where I want you, girl.” Young master, their owner’s son, stepped toward her.
Odessa squirmed in the corner of the dim work shed where she had been waiting for Abram, her love. He had promised to meet her there each day for a week, but every evening she had waited in vain.
She tugged on the folds of her dingy dress, stretched it past her ankles, sweeping it against the floor, but it still wasn’t enough. Lustful eyes looked past it, saw through it. She needed a real covering.
Lord, help me.
Master Tim made his way through all the slave girls, ones she had brought into the world with her own hands, and now he wanted women, even ones old enough to be his mother. She had prayed she’d never see the day but it had arrived, streaking in as a harsh ray of light across her enemy’s face. He was close enough for her to see him well. Every detail. Four beads of sweat, clinging to his upper lip, ran together when he grinned.
He stepped forward into the shadows.
Please, God.
“I’ve been waiting for this a long time. I’ve been watching you.”
Another step closer.
Jesus, You there?
“Now I’m a see if you been worth the wait.” His fingers trembled when he reached for her. She screamed for Abram and shrank away from his hands, from those nails. They were the shortest nails she’d ever seen, rimmed in dirt or blood, bit so deep the tips looked longer than normal. The ugliest hands she’d ever seen.
“Come here, girl.”
“Please, sir, please. Don’t do this. Please!”
“Where you going? You playing shy?” Laughter spilled from his pursed lips. “I like that.” Hot words seared her face.
His fingers clutched her thigh. She screamed.
“Please, no! God, no.” Help me, Father. She struggled to break free, to move his hand, but his hold was tighter, stronger than she could manage. She swung forward, her right hand tearing his face with her fingernails.
Two red lines stretched from his temple to his jawbone. His eyes narrowed. He threw her down against the wall. “You crazy—”
Please, Jesus, come for me.
“Leave her.” Ruth’s trembling voice turned their heads in her direction. She stood with a knife, holding the red handle like a pistol between both hands, her legs spread wide apart under the sway of her skirt. “Leave her alone.”
Master Tim leapt toward her friend and grabbed the blade from her hands. It was the moment, the tragedy Odessa would never forget, the horror she would never forgive that would change all of them, each as much as the other. Ruth’s dark brown eyes widened just before the blade sliced across them and they gaped with blood. Odessa screamed as she watched her friend collapse in the hay.
There was no sound, only the horror of a red stream trickling down a stricken face, a white shirt, a burlap skirt. The flow that would not stop, would never dry from her own eyes.
Master Tim stood staring at the injured woman at his feet. It was the last thing Odessa remembered before a scarred hand wrapped around her mouth, pulling her to her feet. Suddenly she was lifted and carried away. She slept for hours before she awoke safe on her cot, wrapped in wool.
“Sissy?”
“Child, what is it?” Her friend stirred and turned to face her, her eyes still slit from sleep.
“How did I get here?” She scrambled up and looked around. “I went to go meet Abram at the shed, but Master Tim…” Ruth. The image of Ruth shook her. How had she been able to sleep?
“What did that boy do, Dessa?” Sissy rose wide awake. “He touch you?”
“No. That’s the thing. He was about to. He was in my face, Sissy, all over me, oh, it was awful.” She bit back the pain. “I thought for sure he was going to… Oh, Sissy, I knew this was it, there was no getting away this time. I was all alone, hunched up in a corner, when Ruth came. Ruth is dead.” She sobbed. “Ruth is dead, but I was saved. I was saved. Somebody, I didn’t see him, but somebody with a scar on the inside of his hand, right in the center of his palm, put his hand over my mouth and took me out of that place. I don’t remember nothing else, but I’m here and I’m saved.”
“My God…”
“You think, you think Jesus came?”
“Who else, Dessa? Who else?”
Odessa stared at the tears in Sissy’s eyes and thought of the shed blood that saved her.
But Ruth wasn’t dead. Yet and still, something had died in Odessa. An innocence, a trust, a peace cut out of her. The knife had sliced through her mind, made all her reasoning separate parts of a whole. Her words came out slowly as she linked her thoughts like the pieces of a puzzle, but when she couldn’t, she cried. She had cried every day since.
The next afternoon, Odessa waited for Abram at the shed and he showed up. When he extended his hand, she gasped, nearly fainted. Her heart beat double when she saw it.
“Where you get that scar?” It was the first thing she asked him.
“Ain’t nothing,” he said for hours until late that night when they were alone. “Last week me and Sammy decided we was gonna do something. Not just sit around and let them hurt our own. We’re willing to risk our lives if we have to. We’re going to save our women. That boy has to be stopped. Anyway, we used that hot poker to prove we were tough, that we could take whatever came our way. I got mine in the hand. Sammy’s is in his right foot.”
“It’s just the two of you? Saving folk?”
“Just the girls, from that no-good—” He bit back the words. “Yeah, the two of us. We were the only two fools crazy enough to believe we could do something. The only ones crazy enough to burn ourselves.” He chuckled.
A year later, Sammy stopped him, slit his throat like the man had sliced Ruth’s eyes, but the price was high. Master Whitfield beat him until he was unrecognizable and hung his body out by the slave cabins and dared anyone to take him down. He stayed up there until the stench filled every log house on slave’s row, until you could taste death in every bite, in every drink consumed on the land. His body stayed there until the slices of skin that were left peeled away under the boiling sun and his flesh was pecked by the wild at night.
None of it was good for Odessa’s mind. None of it was good for any of them, but while the others continued walking around the swinging corpse, choosing to move through the day like it was normal to see a dead man, a friend, somebody’s son twirling by a rope around his neck, Odessa couldn’t. She sat and cried.
“Old Man Whitfield’s an evil man and that bad seed passed right on through to his boys,” Abram said. “At least one’s gone. All we have to deal with now is J
ackson, and he’s a young one who don’t seem to have a thing for dark skin. Don’t want none of us in his sight mostly. Suits me just fine.”
“I can’t believe ya’ll was so brave.”
He shrugged.
“How many girls you rescue, Abram?”
His head dropped before it shook.
“Abram?”
“I don’t talk about that, Dessa. I don’t ever talk about that. When they killed Sammy, I let it all go. He was the brave one. He was the one who died.”
And yet Abram was the one honored. The healer. So many years ago.
Odessa stared at the man lying before her. Ruth and Lou returned to her side.
“Lord, I’m so scared You gonna take my husband from me. Then what I’m gonna do, Lord? What I’m gonna do?”
“Odessa,” Ruth interrupted, “you gonna pray or you gonna worry? Can’t do both, child.”
“Leave Dessa alone. You all right, baby. Just talk to Him the way you want to. He knows your heart.”
Abram stirred.
“See there.”
Ruth reached down and touched the limbs in front of her. “That you, Dessa? She’s on his foot, Lou. Wouldn’t you wake up if all that was on you?” Odessa threw a tattered patch at Ruth. The women chuckled.
“You all right, love?”
He coughed, struggled up, and fell back.
“Stop trying to be strong. Rest now, you hear?”
He nodded, wiggling to his side. By midnight, he lay helpless in a pool of sweat. All heads bowed in prayer. Odessa wept.
“Abram, you got to make it. For me.”
Ruth and Odessa took turns wiping his forehead, keeping him dry. Tremors quaked through the broken vessel.
“Come on, get up, Abram! Get up.” Odessa gripped a chunk of his flesh and squeezed, twisting his skin purple under Ruth’s watchful hand.
“Stop that, Dessa, you hurting him.” The blind woman slapped her fingers away. “That’s a terrible way to die.”
The room fell silent.
“I’m sorry. Dessa, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. You know I always say too much.”
“I ain’t gonna make it without you.” She slumped over her husband’s body. “You kept me here in this world,” she mumbled, every word muffled against his ribs. “Without you, I would’ve been gone. Would’ve gone to Jesus a long time ago.”
Lou and Ruth swayed with her, calming her with gentle hands and a thick melodic hum. A death hymn, slow and dark. She was losing him and they all knew it. Each moment, he slipped further from her and this life, this world. It would be just the women left in The Room.
The ladies dozed in a layered pile until a wind whistled through the cracks of the walls. Shifting tumbled the stack awake.
Abram lay cold and still.
“My baby’s gone,” Odessa cried, gripping the hands of her sisters. They sobbed over the motionless body.
When Abram’s eyes flashed open, they screamed.
“Abram? Abram! You ain’t dead!”
He blinked, coughed, hard and long, and sat up on his forearms. “Wouldn’t you wake up with all that on you?”
Odessa put her hand on his forehead. “Fever’s gone.”
Lou leaned against the wall and pulled to her feet. She bounced in place, her hands pressed together, head down one moment, both hands and head raised the next. She shuffled herself breathless to her own rhythm.
“Welcome home, Lazarus.” Ruth squeezed Abram’s hands. “Welcome home.”
Odessa let the tears come. Wet love streamed into the crevices of her face, raced through the maze fast and steady until they dripped down her chin onto her husband. She snuggled next to him and spoke to him. Only him.
“That night when I was in that shed, I know it was you that saved me.” She struggled with each word. “I knew. I always knew. I saw your scarred hand, Abram, before you rescued me.”
Abram struggled up and stared at her.
“When I thought you was gone, that I had lost you right now, I was sad I didn’t say thank you.”
“Dessa…”
“I know, Abram. I’ve always known. You had the power to heal. You had the power to save.”
“No, love, you don’t understand. I never rescued nobody.”
“Sure you did. I—”
“I ain’t never rescued nobody, Dessa. Felt bad for years about it, too, that Sammy died the only real savior. He killed Mr. Tim, died because he did, died a horrible death. And I didn’t do nothing. Never got the chance to help one girl.”
“Sammy had a scar on his hand, too, then. In his right palm?”
“You know he didn’t. You saw him hanging there. Body hung for weeks. We was crazy, Dessa, but believe me, one wound was plenty enough. I stuck that poker on his right foot and he seared my right hand. Near killed each other when we did it.” Abram coughed through a pain edged with laughter.
“But I was saved… And the hand, I remember the hand. Ain’t nobody else you know scarred on the inside of they hand?”
“What are you talking about, Dessa?”
“Thank You, Jesus!” Lou hollered. She couldn’t stop shaking her head. “Can you believe it, Dessa? He’s alive! This here is a miracle if there ever was one.”
Odessa nodded. A miracle indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Here you are,” Jackson said, swinging the bedroom door open with a flair and a movement much more grandiose than Lydia expected. She laughed.
“A little entertainment for the lady.” His hand remained on the knob. “Go on.” He nodded at her. “Have a look. Do you need some help?”
“No. No, thank you.” She had insisted on walking, hopping up the thirty steps to the entry of the manor though she had leaned against his grip on her elbow and rested midflight. She was winded but she would be fine. She glanced around the room. Hard not to be fine in this place.
Soft blue walls rose to a soaring arched ceiling over a high bed draped in white lace in the center of the room. In the corner there was a cedar armoire with three unlit candles and an ivory straight-back chair in front of a vanity. She hobbled toward the chair.
“I—I don’t know what to say. It’s so beautiful.” She was overwhelmed by the grandeur, the elegance, of the space. It was more than she had imagined.
“We’ll get this room filled with whatever you need,” he said, lighting the candles. “Let Annie know and I’ll see to it that you are well taken care of.” His face turned solemn. “So sorry to hear about your loss, Caroline.”
“Yes, thank you.”
It was a terrible loss. If he only knew how great. Everyone she loved was a memory to her now. She felt her spine curve under the weight of it. What was she doing here?
“I’m sure there are a few items Annie can gather to make you comfortable tonight. Let me know if there’s anything else you need. I’ll see you at supper.” He started toward the door. “Caroline. I’m glad you’re here.” He flashed a smile and closed the door behind him.
She was grateful to have a place to stay for the night. By tomorrow, she’d think of where to go, what she needed to do next. If she could walk on her sprain. She sighed. Tonight, she would rest and be thankful she had made it.
She touched the chair’s frame, running her fingertips over the curve of the backrest. The smooth wood had been buffed to perfection. She had seen Lizzy and Mrs. Kelly sit in one like it. Although this one was taller, wider, much more elegant in appearance. She sat and stared at herself in the mirror.
She was tired, weary to the bone, but beyond the structure of her features, there was something else in her appearance, a look that made her lean into her reflection and examine herself up close. There, in the wideness of her eyes, was a vulnerability, a fragileness she hadn’t seen before.
She unpinned her hair, raked through the tangles with her fingers, and swooped the length of it back into a low chignon.
Her skin was whiter, her features sharper in the flickering candlelight. She glanced at the thre
e orange flames jumping behind her. When she turned back to the mirror, she noticed a shadow behind her. Like John coming in through the trees. She startled and steadied her hand on the strand of pearls at her neck.
She moved to the bed and flipped back the covers of lace, brushing her palm across the cold satin ivory sheets. She lifted the pillow to her face and cried. No worn blanket, no purple and red one, nothing to remind her. She placed her hand where she dreamed he would lie, ran her fingers, over the pillow like it was the back of his head.
But she had made her decision. A new life now.
A tap on the door sobered her. She wiped her eyes and stood.
Annie poked her head inside.
“Miss…Miss? I don’t know what to call you.”
“Oh. Lydia is fine.”
“May I come in, Miss Lydia?”
And then she remembered.
“No!”
“No?” Annie began to shut the door.
“No, please, Annie. Come in. Yes, come in.”
Annie crept in tentatively with thick, white towels in her arms. “I’m sorry, I was saying no about the name. I prefer Miss Caroline, if you don’t mind.”
Annie looked at her for a few seconds before nodding. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I brought a couple of things for you before dinner. Setting them here is fine?” When Lydia nodded, she placed hair pins and a brass brush on the cedar cabinet. “Master Whitfield said you’re going to be needing more. Plan on staying awhile?”
“Not long. No.”
“Well”—Annie glanced at her—“I’d be happy to find out what you need now or after supper, ma’am.”
“After supper would be fine, Annie.”
“If there’s anything else I can get you, Miss Caroline, let me know.”
“Thank you.”
Annie stood there, her head slightly cocked, staring at her, studying her. Lydia’s heart quickened. The woman nodded and stepped out.
She would be one to watch.
“Did you get settled, Caroline? How is everything?” Jackson shook out the maroon linen cloth over his lap with a flip of his wrist. “Annie get you what you need?”
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