The leader backed his horse and tried to stay calm. He balanced his spent rifle on the horn of his saddle and reached for his revolver. He had trouble getting it free. All the time his mount backed and shied and Saxon came on steadily. The white man got his revolver free, but as he brought it up to aim his horse reared up and his shot went wide. The horse found this more disturbing yet. It twirled. The man’s head became entangled within the low branches of a tree. As he fought to free himself he misfired again. The horse balked, yanking the man to the side of the saddle. So he was when Saxon reached him: arms fighting with the tree, legs frantic in their grip on the horse, he losing at both efforts. The black man swung up his chains and caught the man’s torso. The horse bolted, snapping the man’s forearm between two branches before he gave up the saddle. He hung for a few frantic seconds in the air, then fell. Saxon was instantly on top of him.
The little man rose to his feet and pulled the Frenchman up with him, the latter barely able to stand. Saxon stepped toward him as if to steady him, but instead brought his two fists down hard across his face and smashed the bridge of his nose. The man dropped to his knees, shouting for mercy in the name of God. This only fueled the black man’s rage. Saxon turned, snatched up the tobacco-chewer’s rifle and dropped to his knees. He placed the weapon at the base of the Frenchman’s throat, stared into the white man’s face for a few seconds, then pulled the trigger. A spray of dark moisture sprang from the top of his head, followed by larger bits of solid matter. They all surged up in silhouette, caught before the background of the green summer afternoon. The Frenchman collapsed. Saxon threw down the firearm and began rifling through his clothes and pockets. Finally, he pulled a knife out of a sheath tied to the man’s ankle. He measured its weight in his hand. He tested the edge, then leaned close and tilted the point of the knife into his flesh.
William wanted to look away. There was a wild beating of hooves behind him. He knew without looking that they came from the boy’s horse, riding not into the action but away at breakneck speed. He tried to make his eyes move, to turn his body, to twist his neck. But his whole being betrayed him. He watched as Saxon sliced the man’s flesh in-line with his jaw, behind the ears and up along the edges of his scalp. He stared as Saxon tossed away the blade, wormed his fingers beneath the edges of the cut and ripped the man’s face from his skull. He stood and lifted the flap of flesh on the palm of his hand, like an offering to God. His forearms dripped with the mingled blood of his victim’s face and of his own wrists. Then he spoke for the first time.
“Next time they come for me I tell them Saxon not a nigger,” he said. “I say, ‘Look, look my white man’s face.’” He held the Frenchman’s face against his own for a second. When he pulled it away his eyes touched on William. His mouth cracked open and he laughed, creating an image William would sleep with that night and many more nights to follow.
With the white men dead, the other slaves searched among their corpses and came up with the keys to unlock themselves. Freed of his chains, Saxon leapt into the saddle of the leader’s horse. The mount spun beneath him, wheeled and bucked for a moment, then fell still and accepted him. The little man likewise mounted up. Together they bounded down the lane beneath the low canopy of trees. William followed them with his eyes until the path turned and they disappeared. He stared after them at the space into which they vanished, experiencing a quick progression of emotion: fear, awe and disbelief, wonder and a physical revulsion that twisted his insides into knots. While he stood transfixed the rest of the slaves made fast their escape. He caught movement from the corner of his eye, heard the sounds of bodies crashing through the woods. Within a few moments they all had vanished. He stood alone on the pathway. His chains hung from his wrists. The empty sockets that had once contained Lemuel bumped against his shins.
It took him some time to find motion. In the end the same creatures that had first caused the men to pause spurred him on. He spotted their movements, faint and tiny though they were. He stepped forward through the slashes of blood on the ground, until he realized what he was looking at. Snakes. The Frenchman’s rifle butt had smashed the head of a pregnant garter snake, killing her and pinning her flattened skull to the packed soil. But life had not ended with her death. She had been fat and ripe for birth, and her children squirmed out of her still warm body. One after the other: four and then seven and then more than he could count. With their tiny, dead eyes, they were perfect miniatures of the mother. Their motions seemed otherworldly and unnatural, crawling as they were out of a corpse, tongues tasting the air, hungry already. William turned from them and found himself on his knees, heaving up bile from low in his stomach.
After freeing himself, William covered several miles before he reached the shores of the lower Bay. It was well into the night, a still evening, close around him. He followed the ragged shoreline to the northwest. Eventually, the woods gave way to geometric shapes of thicker darkness and ground worn smooth by traffic. He crept into the town, keeping to the darker regions, moving the heavy soles of his boots with all the care he could muster. He heard voices off to the left, where the main body of the settlement seemed to be. He moved away from them, careful to slide from shadow to shadow along the shore, never even opening himself to the starlight. In this way he crept along the edge of town and out to the far reaches of the docks.
He still had no clear thought when he stepped onto the planking of the pier. It was lined along most of its edge with cargo. He looked for some sign as to whether it was newly unloaded or was waiting to go out, but he couldn’t tell. He sunk between two crates and took his weight off his legs. Once settled, he looked out across the river at the dancing lights cast from the far shore. He could just make out the shape of the houses over there, dwarfed as they were by the thick jumble of trees just behind them. The water was calm; the night sounds muted. The tide lapped at the pylons of the pier. A fish jumped, its body caught in a sliver of silver, a splash of white, then tiny rings echoing across the surface. Strange how tranquil the world could be, the same world that had created the day’s bloody scenes. Images that had been kept at bay through motion came back to him. The eyes of the maddened horse, the way the beast’s teeth snapped and its hooves smashed crescents into the skull of the man trapped beneath it. The black hole of Saxon’s laughing mouth. The Frenchman’s brain shot through, with a fan of crimson hung like a sheet upon the summer light. The same man’s face upheld and eyeless upon Saxon’s palm. The serpents. William closed his eyes and pressed against them with his fingertips as if he could blot out the images with pain.
When he looked up again a shape stood out that he had not noticed before. There was a ship docked at the end of the pier, a medium-size brig, with the short, stout build that marked her as a cargo vessel. There was no light about her, no sign of crew or watchman. He thought this over. He had reached the northern point of the land, and he had no heart for swimming any more. He was sure his legs would pull him straight to the bottom. But if he could climb aboard that ship and find a place to hide … There would have to be hidden depths to it, crates and boards and black spaces into which he could twist himself and not be found.
The decision was made. He crept aboard and stole his way far down into the belly of her. He wedged himself in against the backbone of the ship, tight between a moist wooden beam and the corrugated side of some crate. It was a most uncomfortable bedding, and yet he was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes. It wasn’t until he felt the ship move early the next morning that he wondered where the vessel might be taking him. But by then it was too late, and he had to ride it out. Yes, the boat was moving, but if he rode it out, he thought, if he slept through it, perhaps somehow he would awake to a world less ruled by chaos.
ONE In the weeks after they lost the runaway’s scent Morrison and the hound continued their search by other means. They traveled the busier roads and stayed in the larger towns. Morrison tried to think out some logical route for a fugitive across the land’s features.
He spoke to men on horseback, hitched rides in the back of wagons and walked along beside fellow pedestrians, asking everyone about the man he was hunting. He stopped in boardinghouses and stables, spoke to farmers and even posed his questions to children. It was hard for him—all this conversing—for he was not a man for many words.
Something in the process reminded him of his early days in America: having to learn the landscape, asking strangers for help, sleeping in barns at the fringes of civilization, the hunger of a search for something elusive. It was years ago now, but he had not forgotten. Those first months were as hard on him and his brother as anything that came before. Their first work was butchering the carcasses of dead horses at a glue factory. It was coarse work. Neither of them had the stomach for it. Neither was adept at treating the parts of a once-living animal like so much fodder for the vat. The younger brother would wake up lashing out at his bedsheets, troubled by dreams of vengeful horses rising up from soup in which they boiled. They quit this work within a fortnight and cleaned chimneys instead, Lewis squeezing himself into small spaces as if he were an urchin of the Glasgow slums. This work singed the clothes and clogged the lungs. Twice the younger brother got himself so wedged in the confined spaces that the older joked that he was stuck fast, at least until the owner saw fit to kindle a fire beneath him. They quit that work before long and found employment as hewers of wood, and then as haulers of manure and, finally, as diggers of graves. It was lonely work, forlorn in its purpose. But it was steady.
As winter set in it was more than that. With the first frosts came new harvests of the dead, the young and the old mostly. The two brothers bundled themselves as best they could against the cold, sewing stray swatches of wool inside their garments, lining their jackets with the cheapest material they could purchase, Negro cloth. Lewis went so far as to wear a triangle of wool on his head, atop which sat a crinkled straw hat which was held in place by a ribbon that ran under his chin. It was a most awkward headdress, and the older brother looked at it with skeptical eyes. But when other laborers poked fun at Lewis, Morrison fashioned for himself a similar hat. Bearing it proudly, he challenged any to offer their jests. They did not. Warmth cometh before pride, he confessed, but pride is a right close second.
By December the ground was a frozen corpse. It was a thick skin that fought against their shovels. Day long they labored at a work that the younger brother called another form of butchery. It was hard on the hands, wearing into them till they were blistered, callous mallets, wooden fingers so stiff one had to flex them with quiet concentration. The younger brother developed a pain in his torso that sometimes sent jolts like sheet lightning fanning across his back. This was no work that suited him. But it was a life, Morrison said. A life leading to grander things. And that was the way it was between them. Every doubt the younger brother voiced the older shot down. Every fear he unveiled. Every longing for things past he disdained.
But behind his assured words Morrison’s mind reeled unhinged. This land was bursting its seams in a way that had no parallel. It was a land of many tongues, many faces, many nations being boiled down into one. And this did not seem possible. How does a nation contain within itself the English beside the French, Germans beside Swedes, Catholic and Calvin and Quaker all intermingled? How could they exist at the edge of a continent already peopled with men of such a different hue and temperament? And what sense could one ever make of the strange bondage held over the race called Negro? Morrison kept these thoughts mostly to himself, but Lewis couldn’t help but speak of his amazement. He admitted that from the first moment he’d laid eyes upon these black people he longed to touch their skin. He wanted to verify beneath his own fingers the nature of the stuff, to confirm that its form and function was the same as his own. He would speak to his brother late at night, asking aloud why God had created humans in such different hues, wondering if there wasn’t some puzzle in it, a riddle that mankind was yet to solve. Morrison never answered such questions. He kept his fingers deep within his pockets and told his brother to think of other things. They had enough troubles of their own. Leave the accursed be.
This was why Morrison complained to their employer when a Negro man was partnered with them at their work. He asked him did he think that he and his brother were nothing but slaves? Were they to work the same ground as a black man as if they were equals? This employer was not swayed to sympathy, making it clear that he and his brother could both be replaced if the terms didn’t suit them. So Morrison returned to digging. He didn’t speak a word to the black man, only gesturing roughly to communicate. But Lewis seemed happy to talk to the slave. Overhearing his conversation, Morrison learned that the black man had been hired to this labor and that his wages went into the hands of his master. Lewis found something in this to remind him of his homeland. He asked his brother if that didn’t sound like a Lowland custom, growing rich off the labor of honest men? But Morrison would not be brought into partnership with the Negro. That evening he berated his brother. Did he really think they were so like these niggers? Did he believe they shared anything in common with that flat-faced, mumbling creature? Must he talk with them as if they were equals, for if he acted so then other men would believe so and they’d never fare better than slaves. To most of this the younger brother was silent, and in his silence were the first inklings of dissent.
Early in the new year the Bay froze fast, trapping within it boats and bringing much trade and commerce to a halt. As such, it was a bad time, but as with all aberrations of nature it also invited men to moments of mirth. The brackish water made a strange ice, ridged and translucent and somewhat soft to the touch. It gave way beneath their feet when the two brothers ventured on to it. They stumbled and clutched each other, shouted nervously and listened as the stuff cracked. They had never seen the likes of it before—frozen seawater. They walked out dangerously far, looking back over their shoulders as the black line of the shore grew thin. The younger brother joked that they could run all the way back to Scotland.
The older brother said, Aye, but you’d be daft to try it. Daft and alone you’d be.
But even as he said this he wasn’t sure what actions might or might not be called sane. He looked to the distance, at the white, lumpy carpet of the Bay, to the shoreline and the sad conglomeration of houses there, structures he still believed could be blown away should this land ever produce a storm like those of the North Sea. It was a sad picture. That shore was not a shore worth the name. It was a pathetic melding of sand and water. It was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. The land never rose but for the smallest hills, never dipped but for the shallowest of depressions. It was a land meant for the till, aye, but it was a sorry sight compared to the country that bred these brothers. How different was that homeland, where the black waves cast their full bulk upon the rocks, where the two forces engaged in battle. There the sea was the muscle of nature and the shore was a craggy stone wall thrown up against it. The interaction between them was a grand confusion of sound and spray and motion, constant through the day and night. That place was built in bold features, where the land never tired of change, rising from loch to glen to mountain. That was a land. It was harsh in many ways, but one could never mistake it for a sandy rise in the water. And once having seen it, one could never forget it.
Lewis pulled at him then, and the two slipped on the ice and laughed and tried to scrape up chunks of it to throw at each other. In action thought was reprieved, dreams deferred, life moved on. Motion pushed them on, and this, Morrison thought, was good. Neither realized that objects in motion couldn’t stay so indefinitely. They must, at some point, collide.
TWO William knew they were coming. He had heard them move about near at hand more than once. He could distinguish them from the rats by their voices if by nothing else. But this time they were closer than before. He tried to slide himself further back between the crates, but there was no place to go. His spine was twisted, his body at a cant, the space so small he couldn’t even sit w
ith his shoulders straight. So he paused and waited for them, patient, watching the light of a lamp creep across the beams above him in strange fits and starts.
When the two white men appeared, William just stared at them. They said something. He knew that they were speaking because their mouths moved, but he couldn’t hear their words. For a moment he couldn’t hear anything. The world had gone quiet. He just watched the men’s puzzled faces, knowing that they were questioning him. Eventually, one of the men reached down toward him. His outstretched hand hung in the air, beckoning. William reached up and met the man’s grasp.
That’s when the spell was broken. The man’s palm was callused, warm and very real. Reality spread out of it, down through William’s forearm, up his shoulder and into his head, which cleared in an instant. This was no dream. They hoisted him up onto his stiff legs and led him through a maze of crates, wooden beams and shadows. He stumbled in the dark and found himself leaning on the man beside him. He tried to pull away, but just fell against the other man and progressed along supported by one or other of them in turns. They reached a ladder that William ascended by wrapping his arms through and around the rungs. They walked the length of the next level, mounted another ladder, and then pushed through a series of narrow doors.
Light pierced to the back of his eyes. Fresh air slapped his face, salt-tinged and moist. The world came alive with sounds. Nothing was muted. Sails snapped in the wind. Waves sliced open before the ship’s bow. Seagulls cried their rude calls one to another. And he heard the voices of men, harsh at times and gay at others, men hard at a type of work that gave them joy. As his eyes adjusted to the light he saw the visual manifestations of those sounds. He was on the brig. But instead of a dim shape in the stillness of the harbor, the ship was at full sail through a white-capped ocean. Studding sails stretched far out on either side of the vessel, billowed by the wind, driving them onward. The coastline was some distance off to the left, and to the right the water stretched to the horizon and beyond. They were no longer in the shallow waters of the Chesapeake. This was the open Atlantic.
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