Walk Through Darkness

by David Anthony Durham

  “No, I haven’t,” Redford said. “Perhaps that’s why I know that the world is much larger than what you’ve been allowed to see.”

  “I’ve seen things.”

  “Okay, then I’m talking about myself, not you. It is not possible for me to be Negro and a free man and Christian in good faith if I ignore my brothers in bondage. Slavery binds us all, lowers us all and makes beasts of us. I fight for your freedom because I want to guarantee my own. If I offend you somehow it’s not intentional, but I would happily offend a man to aid his freedom.”

  A knock on the door yanked all three of their heads up in unison. A moment passed in silence, only eyes moving, snapping from face to face around their triumvirate, darting away to the door and to the window and to the closet. Then the knock came again, three raps of the knuckles, calm, evenly spaced, with no clear message encoded in their rhythm. Redford flipped the map closed and handed it to Dover. He motioned for the couple to silently remove themselves to the bedroom. They did so, although the floor came alive beneath them, creaking and protesting their gentle steps.

  The couple slipped into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. They stood facing each other, so close that Dover’s round belly touched William’s. Her gaze was hard to read. It was frank, as was her way, but whether that frankness hid reprimand or not was hard to say. William, for his part, set his lips and stared back, hardly blinking. They stayed that way, hearing nothing of note until the outside door closed, a motion that shook the house, like an exhaled breath strong enough to jiggle the bedroom door in its frame. William reached out and took hold of Dover’s hand, an unconscious gesture that broke the spell between them.

  The door sprung open. Redford stepped in and grasped William by the forearm. “It’s okay. That was a messenger from Mr. Ferries. We’ve found you a safe haven.”

  That evening allowed William and Dover their first solitude since their reunion. Dover told her mistress that she was attending a prayer group. Redford was engaged till late in the night, meeting with the man who had offered William a hiding place. The couple was left alone in the tiny set of rooms, the air charged with an energy that might have been euphoric, but was tense and difficult instead. Their proximity created a tension neither knew how to quell. It showed in both their gestures. She was steady and calm in her actions but never fully opened herself. He was shy of her eyes, fretful and hungry for motion. He paced the room, looking at her only with passing glances. It wasn’t meant to be like this, he thought. This wasn’t what had pulled him from Kent Island and propelled him through each successive hardship. He should wrap her in his arms the way he had imagined. He should run his hands over her belly and push his fingers through the folds of her dress and touch her naked flesh. He should be swelling with the pent up desire that he had woken with on so many mornings. He should stand before her naked and complete and masculine, as she had asked him to do so often. And yet the thought of that was almost unimaginable now. He didn’t know where to start, how to break down the barrier between them and set things right again. When he spoke he did so in a voice he barely recognized, with an anger he wasn’t even sure he felt.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “Him out there talking to some white man. Don’t know if I can abide it. How’s that gonna do us any good? What white man ever did you a turn?”

  “Your captain took care of you,” Dover said. She sat on the sofa, studying the flame of the oil lamp on the table before her. A ripple in the glass shield cast a dark ribbon on her face. It bisected her features diagonally through cheek and eye, rendering her in a surreal composition, as if the two halves didn’t quite fit together to make a whole. “Redford knows what he doing. He’s a good man, and you’ll just have to trust him.”

  William strode to the far corner of the room, turned and watched her from the safety of that short distance. He brought his feet close together and backed his shoulders up against the two diverging walls. “I gotta trust him?” he asked. “And what about you? You trust him?”

  “Course I do.”

  “Course you do. How’d you meet him, anyhow? He ain’t like no colored man I know.”

  Dover explained that she had met him at church. She had been more active religiously since coming north. A Negro church was one of the only places she felt at home. There she was surrounded by Negro voices and smells and sights, stuck shoulder to shoulder with people she almost felt at home with. Redford had been born a free man, she said, the child of a minister father and an abolitionist mother, both of whom had come up from slavery by means she wasn’t aware of. His father built a congregation within a thin-walled church. His mother urged him to set the sights of his holy wrath on the injustice suffered by those still enslaved. They did not forget where they came from or how tenuous their liberty was.

  “Least that’s what Redford told me. Said they the ones taught him all the important things he knows. That was a goodly time back, though. They dead now. Seem like since they passed Redford felt the calling that much more, calling to help people, I mean.”

  William was quiet for a moment, watching her, glad that she didn’t turn toward him. He pressed his palms against the wall and felt the dry grain of the wallpaper. “Dover, tell me the truth, he been after you?”

  The woman’s eyes didn’t lift from the lamp, but something in her expression soured. “As big as I am? Come on now, don’t embarrass yourself.”

  “You saying he wasn’t after you? Or you just not answering the question?”

  Dover exhaled an exasperated breath and turned toward him. For a moment she seemed ready to chastise him, but in taking him in her expression softened. “Let’s not talk about it. Whatever mighta happened didn’t. You’re here now. That’s what matters.”

  “If something mighta been then it mighta been … And if that’s the truth we got us something to talk about.”

  “William …” Dover shook her head, sighed and took her chin within her fingers. Some things were better left in silence, she said. Least it seemed that way to her now. She was a changed woman. Perhaps not the woman he used to know. Life could quiet even the loudest voices. Things pile one upon another and sometimes you look at yourself and wonder who you are and how you became so. She said this quietly and let it sit for some time. But as William stared at her and his questions yawned unanswered she finally took them up. The answer was yes. Red-ford had proposed that the two of them get together. He offered it in the manner of an honorable man, knowing that she was pregnant with another man’s child. He said he would’ve raised the child as his own without a second thought about it. He would’ve helped her get free for good. Would’ve lived with her as man and wife.

  “Yes, William, he did make that offer. That what you wanted to hear?”

  “And how’d you answer him?” William asked quietly. He was afraid of the question but he asked it anyway because he had to. He needed to know how, or if, she had answered the man or whether his arrival had interrupted what she might have said. It occurred to him like a sudden inundation just how much his appearance had spun turmoil into her world.

  “Gave him the only answer I could or would,” she said. “Told him no. I answered him some weeks ago and that was that. You can’t blame me for thinking on it. I didn’t know I’d see you again. All I knew I was gonna be raising this chile on my own, with no family around. He gave me something to think on. You can’t blame me for that.”

  “Didn’t say I blamed you. Just wanted an answer.” William peeled himself from the wall and stepped forward. He was silent for a moment. Without his being aware of it, the heat of anger had fled him completely. When he spoke his tone was resigned, so quiet that he might have been talking to himself. “All the time I been thinking bout how far I walked, the things I been through to get to you. Didn’t hardly think about the confusion I’d be bringing to you. Running with the law behind me, bringing all that hate with me and closer to you. All I really did was put you in danger.”

  Dover’s hands settled over he
r knees, which she cupped within her palms. She breathed a few slow breaths. “William, sit down. Sit down next to me.” She waited as he did so, then slid an arm around his back and turned into him. “I ain’t treated you right since you got here. I’m sorry for it. We’re both of us in a mess. But don’t think for a minute that I don’t love you and want you here. I do. I just didn’t expect it. Hadn’t even let myself dream it. When I saw you, part of me filled to the top with joy. Other part of me sunk down with the fear of it all. Not just cause of the danger you talking bout, but cause I don’t know if I can take losing you again. That’s the thing, William. If I pull you in close to me I’ll never be able to lose you again. That’s a frightful thing. Slaves ain’t supposed to think like that.”

  The two sat some time in silence. William wanted to speak but when he cleared his throat he felt the emotion contained there and was shamed even though he knew there was no shame in it. He would’ve told her that he understood her completely and felt the same. There was nothing for them to do but to put slavery behind them and be bound only by each other. The anger within him was only partially anger and the rest was fear, longing, desire. He would’ve told her this but he knew she understood it already, for this distance between them was no real barrier. It never had been. It was the tension of an evil world. Between them was something greater and she was right—it need not all be uttered aloud.

  Dover took him by the wrist and placed his hand against her abdomen. His hand would’ve trembled if hers hadn’t held it in place. He knew why she did this and put all of his attention in his palm. But still it was a shock when he felt the movement, one quick rumble, like a stomach growl amplified and made physical. It was so sudden, unexpected even though he had awaited it. It came again. And there was beneath his palm a moment of pressure that he understood as the crook of a limb rotating, as an elbow or a shoulder or the heel of a tiny foot. He whispered God into their presence, strange for the words came without his calling them. How great the burden of this; how large the promise. He thought then that he would do all and everything possible to see that little heel touch down on free earth and that it never wore an iron anklet.

  “Feel that?” Dover asked. “Our baby’s a tumbler. She’s in there tumbling, getting ready for this world. Thing I can’t figure out is if she’s tumbling for joy or outta rage. I do feel she knows what’s coming better than we do. Knows it, and she’s getting ready one way or another.”

  William nodded. He still didn’t try to speak. He put himself completely in his palm and tried to read the infant moving beneath. He didn’t think to question her assertion of the child’s gender. He just touched and waited, knowing that such moments come rarely. For once he paused to give it all of his attention.

  The chosen place was at the edge of a rambling estate beyond the city limits. Redford led William out there as the sun slanted the world into being. It was a Sunday morning, and they maneuvered through the greater part of the city unnoticed. By the time the faithful began to emerge from their homes, the two men were already out into the city’s farthest fingers. William carried a satchel of food slung over his back; Redford a bedroll tucked under his arm. They were scant supplies, but they all hoped this wilderness exile would be brief. They strode along lanes that wound at their own leisurely pace through wood and rock, along streams, past country homes glimpsed only partially, set back as they were in the illusion of deepest nature.

  For the greater part of the journey the two men didn’t speak. Their feet kept up a dialogue of sorts, scuffing across the dirt, snapping twigs and crunching leaves. Occasionally, one of them kicked a stone dancing into the path ahead of them. The other was always careful to step over that stone in passing, as if something would be lost or stated or given away if they acknowledged where the other had trod. At the crest of a hill the two men stopped and looked back at the city. They shared the view in silence and then marched on as if it were nothing worth commenting on. William thought of Anne as he walked, ashamed that he hadn’t sent word to her of the recent occurrences. He remembered the touch of her hip against his side, the click of her knitting needles, her chuckles as she told scandalous stories of her tenants. He had known her so briefly, but in that time she’d become a core part of his life. It was harder to leave her behind than he would have thought.

  When they reached a certain bend in the road Redford indicated that they were almost there. Soon, they crested another rise and turned off the road, following an old lane up through the trees. It had been out of use for some time and was thick with a low level of undergrowth. Wagon ruts lay beneath the ferns and thorns like scar tissue beneath a new growth of hair. The trees that lined the lane gave it definition, but overall it was a work of man being reclaimed by nature. Off to one side a field stretched a good distance across the hillside, gently sloping, undulating terrain perfect for cow pasture, but grown tall with disuse.

  A little further on, William caught his first glimpse of the carriage house. It seemed an unusually low structure for its purpose, though this may have been an illusion brought about by the tall grass and vines that crept up its walls. It was a dark structure of loose, moss-covered boards, canted to one side as if the hill had been slipping away beneath it over time. The dark mouth of the thing gaped open as they approached, and the two men stood at its threshold for a few moments before stepping in. They found a door at the far wall of the garage, which opened into yet a darker room. It had a moist dirt floor, cluttered with various pieces of lumber and bracken of no obvious function or design. The rafters above were ribboned by tiny shafts of light that pierced through numerous cracks and holes. A hornet’s nest clung to the underside of the doorframe, and a bird hopped along a beam at the rear of the building, bobbing its head and warning them away with short, nervous calls. The whole place smelled of dirt and mildew and, faintly, of some animal’s urine.

  “Well, this is it,” Redford said. He had worn a hat for the journey. He took it off now and fanned his face. “I know it’s rough, but it’s the best we could come up with on such short notice. The old house itself is just up the hill a ways, though I don’t think you’ll find anybody much comes out here.”

  William looked the building over. “I’ve abided in worse,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guessed that you might’ve.” Redford set the hat back on his head and looked back the way they’d come. “You’d hardly know there was a whole city just the other side of those hills. Almost makes me wish I didn’t have to go back to it. I sometimes fancy I’d be suited to a country life.”

  William turned and shared the man’s view. It was true, one could see no sign of the city from where they stood, but he felt no inkling of the notions the other man referred to. As quiet and secluded as the spot was, he couldn’t shake the illusion that the whole bulk of the city huddled just beyond those hills. He imagined that the entirety of it—the brick and iron and human life and human waste—had merged together into an ogre that lurked just out of sight. He didn’t speak this thought aloud. He didn’t share any other thought with the man who brought him here. Their solitude brought them into too intimate a proximity, and William stood with his eyes studying anything but the other man, anxious for him to go.

  Before long he did. William watched him slide in and out of view among the trees of the lane. He emerged into the sunlight at the bottom of the field and stepped onto the road. He looked back at the last moment, raised a hand in farewell, then disappeared over the ridge and into the waiting mouth of that beast.

  FOUR Morrison first saw Humboldt’s cohorts gathered on the dock in Philadelphia. They were unkempt men, hollow-eyed and stoop-shouldered. They smiled in Humboldt’s general direction and seemed to view his arrival as a precursor to mirth. There was a tall man among them who had no front teeth whatsoever. He showed no embarrassment in this fact as he opened his caved interior to the sky. Another was so dark of skin that he must’ve carried within him native blood, or perhaps that of some warm-climed foreigner. There was a fat man who
wore a badge and rested one hand on his holstered revolver, and there was a young man with bright red hair and fair skin that reminded Morrison of the land of his birth. Lastly, there was a boy, no older than his early teens, with black hair that hung to his shoulders and framed a face pockmarked by pimples. They all wore scars on the outside to indicate the damage they carried on the inside, pains that they each in their own way wished to inflict upon others and thereby find some solace. In a different time and place they would’ve been deemed criminals. They would’ve been pickpockets and cutthroats, rapists and murderers. They would’ve been the scourges of other nations, jailed, hung, and deported to distant lands. But in this country, in this time of slaves and masters, they were considered agents of God’s laws of nature and man’s laws of property. They carried badges and papers to this effect and could lawfully compel others into their service. They walked with the power of life and death, and as this was their only power they luxuriated in it.

  There were other men among them also, but they came and went so readily that Morrison didn’t distinguish them as individuals. He stood among them as all were introduced and he nodded his head in turn and met those eyes that would meet his. The hound took no comfort in this company and stood a few feet away, whining just loud enough to be heard, as if her protest was meant to be a secret for Morrison’s ears only. But the tracker did not acknowledge her just then, a fact that confirmed the dog’s suspicions that all was not well.

  Humboldt called the informal meeting to order. He laid out the situation as he saw it. He explained their mission and the time frame he thought appropriate to its completion. He asked the men what they knew of this girl, the bitch fat with child. They knew plenty. They knew her whereabouts and customs and daily routines. One of them had a nickname for her and another said he had come so close in spying her that he could’ve patted her on that watermelon of hers.