by Nick Arvin
Henry shies like a nervous animal. “I can’t,” he says. “I’m going home. My brother says I must.”
“What? What?” Morley cries. “Go home? Surely not. To what? What of your father?”
“If the British have gone, Franklin will be released soon,” Henry says, edging further back. “He’ll come home with his wife and baby. I have to prepare things for them.”
“That sounds dreadful,” Morley says indignantly. “There’s no profit in it. Surely you don’t want to go?”
“Franklin says I must.” The boy shifts from foot to foot, color rising to his face.
“Ah!” Morley’s instincts have quickened. “Perhaps I will accompany you.”
“Oh, no,” Henry says. “Our farm’s a meager place, muddy, poor, thick with mosquitoes and pestilences.”
Morley squints at the boy. He remembers well the coins that Henry described.
“I’m sorry,” Henry says.
“Sorry!” Morley says. “No need for apologies! I wish you all luck, my little friend. I predict a great fortune in your future.” He watches how the boy jiggles faster. “But, for now, family. Yes. It is the most important thing, after all. I’m sure you are right to do as your brother says.” He takes the boy’s hand, shakes it enthusiastically. “Godspeed!”
Henry heads away fast, nearly running. Morley watches him until the angle of the street takes him from sight.
Some five miles outside Baltimore Henry finds an abandoned encampment—it appears refugees from the city passed the night here, leaving behind broken biscuits and a bit of cooked squash, which Henry devours. He lies back, sleeps where he is.
He wakes mid-afternoon and travels several more miles before the sun falls behind the rim of the earth. He finds a place to lie down in a little hidden opening in a patch of pawpaw, tries to sleep, but for a long time he cannot. He listens for Mother, but hears only crickets and the scuttlings of tiny creatures.
The following day he walks through an intermittent drizzle of rain, soft as a patter of gnats on the skin. It keeps the road mud fresh. The animals are quieted by the silent rainfall, making a silent world, broken only by the fall of water off branches and leaves. Henry thinks about what Radnor said about collateral, something for his brothers to hold in exchange for the location of Suthers’s cabin. It seems impossible. He possesses nothing of value.
Few people are on the road. He sees no one for an hour, and then another. But glancing back, he thinks he sees a distant shadow, disappearing.
And a mile later, deeper into the forest, surrounded by heavy gray misting air, turning, he sights a glisk of movement far back on the road.
“Mother?” he says. He has not heard her in such a long time.
There seems to be a faint murmuring. Perhaps it is only the vaporous noise of mist on the trees. He pushes his pace. What if Suthers sent one of his men after him? What could Suthers guess about Henry’s intentions? He has the impression that Suthers might instinctively know Henry’s thoughts and plans, by means of some terrible blood connection.
But, worse, what if it is Mother following? Grown impatient, she loosed herself from the barrel; she walks the road behind him—for what? To bring him to her, to the realm of the dead?
Surely she wouldn’t do that! But he trots more quickly. Why couldn’t Mother rise up and wander about, if she wants? It’s horrible to think that she might have set out following him in agony and wrath. He might never be rid of her.
For a time he runs, until he’s lost his wind, and he slows to breathe. Soon he has a feeling at his back again, like lye on his skin. Turning quickly—he’s certain he sees a shape in the far road. He runs ahead, darts into thick brush, enters an open airy place under the canopy of the trees. Birdcalls sound far overhead. Drips of water strike the ground with startling crashes.
He picks up a heavy fallen limb. The earth lies soft underfoot, lightly scattered with leaves. He stomps ahead, creating a trail of footprints deeper into the forest. Then he circles back to hide behind a tall old maple, gripping the limb.
He waits, and the longer he waits the more he fears it is Mother, somehow lurching after him. If it is Mother, nothing will save him. He would be pleased to hear her, but to see her up and about is entirely another matter. He once saw a boy nail a frog to a tree to watch it spasm and strain; Henry’s heart feels like that frog, nailed to a rib.
A moth lands on his arm, rises away again. A mouse scuttles in half-rotten leaves. He hears nothing for a long while. Clouds part and sunlight comes down in canted lines. Just as he thinks he has slipped away unnoticed, and he can escape through the forest, the brush behind him rustles.
A step squelches in the wet earth. Someone is following his false trail. He hears a heavy breath, very near. More steps. By the sound, Henry is sure: this is not Mother.
A shadow cuts into a line of sunlight at Henry’s feet, and Henry steps forward, swinging hard as he can, working the weight of the branch like an axe.
He aims for head height, but because Franklin is so big, Henry’s blow strikes him in the chest.
“Oof!” Franklin says and falls to the ground.
“Franklin!” Throwing aside the branch, Henry yells, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Franklin sits up, wavering. He wheezes. “You idiot.”
“Me!” Henry cries. “You, creeping around, jumping at me—”
“Jumping? Who jumped?” Franklin pulls up his shirt, studies his chest.
“You’ll be fine,” Henry says. But he is trembling. “You shouldn’t have followed me. They’ll shoot you.”
Franklin shakes his head. “Had to.”
“No! You didn’t!”
“I couldn’t let you go alone.”
“You left me alone to go to the army.”
“I left you with Mother and Father.”
Henry regards him silently.
Franklin thinks. Finally he says, “Perhaps you’re right. But if I was wrong to leave you before, it would be doubly wrong now.”
“I don’t need your help,” Henry says, backing away.
“Henry—lots of folks are quicker than me,” Franklin says, “and you’re one of them. But I am your brother. You can think up ways to leave me behind. But I am your brother. You’re quicker, but I’m stronger. I can help you. That’s the how of how it has to be.”
There’s an odd little noise—Mary is coming up, and the baby at her chest is mewling.
“Them too!”
Franklin nods. “I couldn’t leave them in that whorehouse.”
“Already taking care of two hem-tuggers,” Mary says. “Might as well three.”
They make a motley assembly. Franklin has his rifle and that night they eat a possum he shot, and a turtle that Henry found in black still water beside the road. While the meat cooks, Henry spends several minutes wondering over the pattern on the turtle shell, like a map of some other world. Mary says turtle meat isn’t any good to eat unless ground and put into a soup, but Henry happily gnaws the stringy flesh.
Franklin refuses on principle to take anything from the farms that they pass, but when Henry appears in the morning with eggs, late season corn, and a piece of broken crockery holding a few spoonfuls of goat’s milk for Mary, Franklin bends his head and says nothing.
Mary keeps pace with the two brothers, but she lacks color, and when they stop she settles heavily and stares unseeing. She will not let the others carry the baby. The baby is strangely quiet. Even when hungry he makes only small animal sounds through scarcely parted lips. Yet otherwise he appears healthy and keeps his eyes open a great deal and gazes with more understanding than seems usual for an infant only days old, unable even to hold up his own head.
The next afternoon they are walking beside sycamore and hackberry lining a shallow muddy pond—an egret stands in the water, white as cotton, neck like a feathered snake
—when Mother shouts, The baby!
Henry nearly jumps out of the rope belt cinching his trousers. He looks around. The others are staring. Even the baby recumbent in Mary’s arms stares.
“Did you hear?” Henry asks Franklin.
Slowly, Franklin shakes his head.
But Henry hears her. She sounds now faint and far off, as if calling from beyond a hill ahead. He sets forward again, walking with one eye closed to listen, happy in his heart. He never could predict Mother’s exit from the black spirit, anymore than he could predict when it would begin.
The baby, she calls. It’ll have to be the baby.
He puzzles over this until it occurs to him what she means. Then he stops. “The baby?” He grinds his nails into the palms of his hands, stomps a foot. “No.”
Mary says, “What is it, Henry?”
He starts forward again, brooding.
Franklin walks beside him. “Tell us,” he says.
Henry says, “Seems that turtle has grown quarrelsome with my innards.”
Franklin looks doubtful.
Henry ignores him. The baby—offer the baby? He feels a terrible loneliness, although Franklin walks just beside him, and Mother hums again.
Next afternoon, they arrive at Suthers’s estate. Mary gazes at the pile of black char where the house stood. “How did this happen?” she asks.
“Redcoats,” Henry says.
She looks him over. “You know something about this, don’t you?”
Henry shakes his head, avoids her gaze.
In the orchard one of Suthers’s horses is pulling apples off the low branches. “Libro!” Mary says. She hands the baby to Franklin. Libro is a dun colored pony with one white stocking. He’s uncombed and muddy with a deep raw scratch on his flank, and he whinnies and shies, but Mary talks low and hums, and soon she has a hand on his neck. “Poor Libro,” she whispers, examining his scrape. Presently he allows her to mount and ride bareback to the hillside cabin, Henry’s home.
Franklin stares at the pile of pickled vegetables on the ground, stares at the hole in the cabin ceiling, stares at the spot below the hole. Weather has come in and muddied the floor, but the impressions where the cow fell and scuffled are still apparent. A sparrow flits in through the ceiling and lands on the mantle, and finally Franklin stirs, goes to the chest against the back wall, drags out Father’s old, ill-assorted set of carpenter’s tools. They are wrapped in a swath of oiled canvas. He takes the canvas to the roof and nails it over the hole. It covers the hole incompletely, so he takes up a bedsheet too.
Coming back into the cabin, Franklin says, “We have to find Charles and Hollis.”
“We make a fire at the point in the swamp.” Henry takes a breath, adds, “At first light.”
He watches Franklin warily. Franklin only nods.
Henry and Franklin clean the cabin to make it passable for a night. Mary binds a poultice to the scrape on Libro’s neck, then cooks a supper from a few things out of the untended weedy garden and some salted pork that Franklin finds hidden in the barn.
After nightfall, Henry lies awake.
About midnight he hears Mary rise to suckle the baby, shush him to sleep, bed down again.
He waits for what seems to him half an hour. Everyone breathes evenly. A scant light hovers off the low embers on the hearth.
Mother says, soft as a hum, Now now now.
Henry rises, stands gathering courage, heart a-going. Franklin smacks his lips. Mary nestles close to Franklin, on her side, curled tight. Beside her the baby sleeps wrapped in a strip of cloth, incredibly small.
Henry lifts him carefully, the small warm bundle of baby, happy-making.
The baby doesn’t stir. Henry cradles him in one arm, goes to the door, eases the door open, steps through, eases the door shut, walks swiftly away.
Mosquitoes throng the night. A waning moon stands a quarter way up the sky. Henry does his best to keep the insects off the baby, and he collects a few sticks as he walks.
At the end of the point he places the baby on the damp earth, gathers a few more branches, assembles a pile. He has brought flint, steel, and char cloth in his pocket. Soon a fire burns hungrily. He picks up the baby again and finds him silent but open-eyed. “I’m sorry,” Henry says to him. “But it’s for your grandfather, and it won’t be long, I promise. You are my nephew, and I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
He stares into the swamp. When a cloud blacks the moon he can see nothing past the light thrown by the fire. Small sounds rise from the water and reeds, little splashes, rattles, gurgles, peeps, whispers. Henry waves at the mosquitoes. “Likely,” he says, “you will grow up big like Franklin, and you’ll understand what it is to have a father, and what you would do for him, even if Father is a shirker and a talker and a drinker and a gambler and maybe in a way not your father at all. Still, he is your father. You’re no bigger than a possum now and know even less than a possum, but when you’re bigger you’ll see.”
The baby closes his eyes and sleeps again.
A moment later, a hand taps his shoulder.
Henry startles, yelps, nearly drops the baby.
It is Charles. He looks at Henry curiously, at the baby, at Henry.
“I’ve seen Radnor,” Henry says. “Only a few days ago. He’s well. I expect he’s halfway to London now. He told me how to find you, so that I can talk to you and Hollis.” He hands Charles the stick that Radnor notched.
Charles examines it, peers again at the baby.
“This is Franklin and Mary’s boy. Where is Hollis? I’ll explain to you both.”
Charles makes a tongueless huffing noise. He removes his hat, dips water into it, puts out the fire. He takes Henry by the shoulder, guides him along the point, into a canebrake.
Henry sees dimly a little flat-bottom boat. Charles points for Henry to sit in the bow, then pulls a rag from his pocket, draws it over Henry’s eyes, ties it. “Suthers did this too,” Henry says, vexed. “I’ll soon be as used to it as your brother.” He hears a pole come off the bottom of the boat and slip into the water, feels the boat slide.
The baby squeals, a strange sound in the swamp’s immense solemn quiet. Henry shushes him. Soon, Henry worries, the baby will be hungry.
They glide with only a whisper now and again as the boat touches reeds, or a plash as the pole cuts the water.
He listens for Mother. She sounds a faint hum, happy, it seems.
Perhaps an hour has passed when he feels the boat scrape to a stop. Charles unties the blindfold. It’s very dark. Charles leads him along a gentle uphill slope, out of the swamp, through a few trees, then into an open area. Ahead is an orange glow that seems to smolder in the earth itself. Henry scents woodsmoke and hears an eerie singing of several voices at almost a whisper, slave songs he’s heard before in the fields, but transformed now by tone and place, made unsettling and spectral.
The light and song emit from a deep, square hole, about three feet across. Charles leads him to the edge, where Henry sees a ladder. Charles points to it. Henry settles the baby in one arm, grips the ladder with the other hand, descends.
He passes through a layer of earth upheld by beams and comes into an open space. The singing stops. Henry gapes. He says, “I didn’t expect—” He tries again, “I didn’t know.”
Henry has heard stories of a hidden place in the swamps where fugitive slaves live, sleeping by day and traveling by night on hidden waterways and Indian trails to forage and to trade with slaves on the farms. He never expected to find himself inside such a place. A small fire tosses wavering light in an underground chamber double or triple the size of Henry’s home. Areas for sleeping pallets on the floor have been divided off by sheets of homespun. Also hanging from the overhead beams are herbs, hams, and a chain of sausages. One corner is filled with cooking supplies—pots, crockery, knives, vegetables piled on th
e floor and on slats of shelving. A chicken wanders about. But mostly the space is crowded and warm with people, a score or more, including several children, an old woman with milky cataract eyes, a tall sinewy woman toddling a baby on her knee, and, seated in the middle near the fire, a giant man who seems heavy and rooted as an old worn mountain. His round face is marked by burn scars on one side like a spatter of lacquer.
They gaze at Henry from all sides.
Despite the hole in the ceiling it is smoky, and Henry’s eyes water. The giant burn-scarred man shifts a little closer to Henry. “Who’re you?” Despite his size, his voice is soft, lilting. He sounds genuinely curious.
Henry’s mouth clicks, dry.
“What is it?” Seated to one side, face turned blindly to the fire, is Hollis. “Who’s here?”
“It’s a white boy,” the giant burned man says.
“Carrying a white baby,” notes the tall woman holding her own baby, in a tone of grim wonder. Her child appears only a couple of months older than the baby that Henry carries.
Charles makes a heaving sound that might be a sigh. He communicates through a combination of hacking noises and quick, tapping finger touches on Hollis’s hand. Hollis says, “He says Radnor sent him.” He turns to Charles. “It’s a trick. You were followed.” Charles shakes his head, grunts, gives Hollis the notched stick.
Henry feels a grind of unease in his stomach, and the baby has begun making small movements in his arms. “I wouldn’t tell anyone of this place,” Henry says to the people looking at him. “Father always said black men should be free, and if Suthers’s property walks off, it’s nothing to me.”
Hollis rubs a finger over the notches in the stick on one side, then the other. “It’s dangerous for you to be here.” He doesn’t turn his blind eyes to Henry but speaks as if to the fire. “Never had any white person here before. Some folks have lived here for years. Saul—” Hollis nods in the direction of the giant man, who gazes contemplatively at Henry. “Saul first dug this place out, and no one knows how many years he’s been here, because he won’t say. They’ve taken in Charles and me. We’re their guests.” He scowls. “I think Charles shouldn’t have brought you.”