by Nick Arvin
“I came because Radnor sent me.”
“My beloved brother Radnor is a proud, high-minded fool, and you are a boy with clabber for brains, carrying a baby for I cannot imagine what reason. The sensible thing to do is to feed both of you in small pieces to the snapping turtles.”
Henry shakes his head, irritation overwhelming his worries. “No one knows exactly where I am, but my brother has some idea. This baby is my brother’s son and Suthers’s grandson. If we vanish, Suthers will have parties of white men searching all through here.”
Hollis says, “Now you threaten us.”
“I didn’t begin the threatening,” Henry cries.
“Saul,” Hollis says, leaning back a little, “what do we do with him?”
Saul gazes at Henry, and the others watch Saul. Saul nods to Henry. “Go on.”
Henry explains about the coins that Suthers has hidden, and his encounter with Radnor. “Radnor said you would know where the hiding place is. It is an enormous fortune. I can buy you and Charles free, and buy my father out too. Now that you know the coins are there, you could go after it yourself, but I can travel there freely, without risk, and I can negotiate a price for you with Suthers. Also, if you go to Suthers with the coins, he will simply put you back into slavery and take the money for himself.”
“He might do much the same to you.”
“I won’t let him have the money until the terms between us have been completed, and he’ll not abuse me for it because he thinks that I’m his son.”
Hollis cocks his head and squints his sightless eyes. “He told you that.”
“Do you think it’s true?” Henry asks.
“Your voice is very like his. You bite your words like him.”
A terrible dismay comes on Henry: his own voice a traitor to him.
Saul stirs, rises. He is so tall that he has to bend his head under the ceiling. He gazes at the baby that Henry holds. The baby, with his large staring eyes, seems to gaze back. The only sound is the settling of the fire.
“You can feed me to the turtles if you have to,” Henry offers. “But please, not the baby. He’s a good baby.”
“He looks,” Saul says in his soft voice, stepping back a pace, as if to better see the baby, “like a surprised badger.”
The baby wriggles, begins to cry.
Henry tries to shush the baby, but he only grows louder. After a minute the tall woman holds out her hands. “He’s only a few days old, isn’t he.” She rocks the baby a moment. “He’s hungry.”
“It took us a while to come here.”
“Well,” the woman says, unsmiling, “it will not be the first time I’ve nursed a white man’s child.”
“If you obtain all of this money,” Hollis says to Henry, “you will simply keep it to yourself.”
“I brought the baby, my brother’s baby,” Henry says, “for you to hold against my return.”
Everyone laughs. Saul’s laugh is like the sound of someone chopping wet wood.
“You’re mad,” Hollis says.
“Radnor said you wouldn’t trust me if I couldn’t leave something that you knew I’d return for.”
“The baby!” Hollis cries. “By God.”
But Charles coughs and taps on Hollis’s hand. And then the others begin talking all together in confusion.
The discussion goes on and on. Henry sits to one side, watching, wondering what it feels like to be eaten by snapping turtles. Faces loom in and out of the firelight as they talk. Saul says little. He sits like a tree amid chattering birds. The tall lean woman argues against Henry’s plan. But it seems there are too many people here—so many slaves have slipped away in the war’s turmoil and found their way to this place. Freedom for Hollis and Charles would create needed space.
They fall to whispering, and Henry cannot hear. He dozes.
Someone touches Henry’s hand. He looks up and finds Saul gazing down. The firelight gleams on the scars on his face. Hollis too has his blind gaze on Henry. “I’ve told them,” Hollis says, frowning, “though with great reservations, that your mother aided us, once. That, perhaps, you might do as you say, assuming that any sensible person could possibly think of trusting a scrawny white boy.”
“Mother thinks,” Henry says, “that a family should be together. And Father said you should be free.”
“Never said it to me.”
“Well, he needed his luck to turn.”
“I don’t think that bears on it.” Hollis shakes his head. “And I also don’t think that’s what he needed.” He sighs. “Almost surely we will regret it, but we’ll keep the baby against your return. If needed, we’ll deal directly with Suthers.”
“Suthers shouldn’t be trusted.”
“Nonetheless. Charles will take you to where you met him and indicate to you where to go. On the seventh night after tonight, Charles will come for you at the same place. If you’re not there with the contract for our freedom, then we’ll approach Suthers.”
The baby is in the tall woman’s arms. She scowls at Henry as Henry kisses the fuzz atop his nephew’s head. The baby stares with his great, dark, uncanny eyes. They seem to accuse, with terrible gentleness. Henry wrenches himself away. He isn’t at all certain that this is the right thing to do. It requires all of his will to move up the ladder.
As they come out of the ground, it’s still dark. Henry dons the blindfold. Charles poles the boat. Mother says, The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Henry isn’t sure what she means by that. He feels too low to ask.
When they land, Charles removes the blindfold. The day’s first light simmers on the horizon. Charles draws a map in the dirt. Henry asks some questions, and Charles draws some more. When Henry nods, Charles departs.
As Henry comes into the garden, Franklin appears out of the far wood. “Where’ve you been?” Franklin is running, shouting, shaking, eyes agog. “Someone’s taken the baby!”
Henry looks at the ground.
Franklin seizes him by the shoulders and lifts him, vibrating, to eye level. “Help us find him!”
“He’s—”
“What?”
“He’s being minded.”
“Wait.” Franklin lifts Henry further aloft while he thinks. “You took him? That’s what Mary said, that you took him. She said, Henry’s gone, baby’s gone, Henry must’ve took the baby. I said she was wrong. You took him?” He grips Henry’s shoulders painfully.
As Henry explains what he’s done, Franklin takes on an expression of horror. Henry trails away, exhausted and sick in his stomach.
“Henry,” Franklin says, “you have to take me to my son.”
“I don’t know how. I was blindfolded. We have to find the coins.”
“Put him down,” Mary says. She has come up behind Henry. She may have been there for a while.
Franklin looks at her, looks at Henry, drops Henry.
Mary springs forward and sets into Henry with a series of blows and wrath that knock him to the ground. He curls on himself.
“Henry took him,” Franklin says.
“That’s what I told you,” Mary says. She kicks Henry in the ribs. Henry closes his eyes, tries to call to Mother. But his mouth is in the dirt, and he cannot speak.
When nothing more has happened for some time he looks up with one eye. Franklin and Mary sit wretchedly watching him.
Henry feels fortunate; when he saw the look on Mary’s face, he expected worse. Now she’s grinding her teeth. “Forgiveness,” she says bitterly, as if it were the name of an enemy. “But why?” she says. “Why? Your father will only go into debt again.”
Henry says, without thinking, “His luck is due to turn.”
Franklin looks at the ground. Mary’s eyes bulge.
“And it’s what Mother wants,” Henry says.
“He still hears her,” Franklin says.
“She doesn’t talk as much as she used to,” Henry says.
“She’s dead,” Mary says, “and my child is worth ten thousand talking corpses.”
“He’s got no sense,” Franklin says. “Things have gone hard on him. He’s seen too much. He’s only a boy.”
“How do you summon them back?” Mary says. “Hollis and Charles know me. They’ll listen to me.”
“They’ll return in a week. They won’t come back any sooner. And we need to have the money then.”
“I’m trying to forgive you, because I made a promise,” Mary says to Henry, “but I don’t know.” She bores into him with a look that could kill small animals. “If this doesn’t come out right,” she says. “I’ll—”
She twitches, turns, rises, sets away, leaving the brothers to follow.
Mary, riding Libro, sets an unsparing pace, keeping the Phipps brothers always at her back. Franklin carries his army knapsack with flint and steel, some rope, a little salted meat, a wooden canteen. The place indicated by Charles’s map is along a stream feeding the East Branch, an isolated place, but not far away. Looking at the map scratched in the dirt, Henry thought first that there was a mistake, but Charles insisted. It seems that Suthers rode him around in a great circle. The stream they crossed, where Henry nearly fell off, was likely the East Branch. Henry doesn’t know where the crossing that Suthers used might be; he decides to cross at the bridge at Bladensburg, and then find a way north to the road where he abandoned Suthers.
In the long sloping meadow over Bladensburg where the battle was fought, Henry turns for the orchard.
“Mother?” he says. “Mother?”
She says distinctly, Henry!
“Mother!” He bursts for the apple trees. Franklin calls after him, but Henry runs, heedless.
He finds the chokecherry patch, and the cart and the barrel—the barrel lies on its side in the cart, the lid wide open. He can’t see if Mother is there until he circles around: she’s tumbled half out of the barrel, looks like something that floated up out of a bog.
Franklin says, “What’s that?”
“Someone must’ve found the cart—” Henry says, panting, vastly relieved. The brine has all run out; the ground below is still damp. Flies are gathering. “They looked inside the barrel, saw her, ran off. Why, it must’ve happened only a short time ago, or the animals would’ve gotten into her by now. We’re lucky. Oh no! Where’s the dress?” For a moment he panics and looks frantically. He finds Mother’s gingham in a ball, tossed on a the ground a few feet away.
Franklin’s gaze moves from the dress to the body. “That’s—”
Mother says, Henry. Don’t, don’t leave me.
Gently, Henry puts her back in, rights the barrel.
You’ve left me too many times, now, Mother says. You have to take me.
Franklin, wide-eyed, says, “That’s her?”
Henry says, “She says we have to take her with us.”
“She’s dead, Henry.”
Henry closes the lid. Mary comes up on Libro. “What’s that?”
“She looks dreadful,” Franklin says.
“You have rope,” Henry says. “Rig a harness. Libro will pull.”
“Pull what?” Mary says.
“It’s Mother,” Henry says. “Do you want to see?” He moves to open the lid again, but Franklin stops him.
“This,” Franklin says, “will haunt my sleep.”
“We will not,” Mary says, “slow down to drag around a dead woman in a hogshead.”
It’s awfully important, Mother says. You must bring me with you.
“We have to take her,” Henry says. “Someone found her. They’ll be back. Or they’ll tell someone who will come back. Not for her, but for the cart and barrel, and then what’ll they do with her?”
Franklin stands looking hard at the barrel.
“Most likely,” Mary says, “they’ll give her a proper burial.”
“She wants to go to sea,” Henry says, “with her family around.”
Franklin sighs. “I’ll rig up the harness.”
Mary purses her lips, and it seems she may cry. “I’ve joined a family of deranged people.”
But after a moment she climbs down and helps them rig the rope harness.
Henry finds a cart track, then an old Indian path, and Franklin helps to shove the cart through the brush and out of ruts, until they come into an old weedy road. It looks familiar to Henry, and soon they come to the peddler’s camp—the wagon with the drawers is here, and Hy and Dosia. They hail Henry with pleasure. Dosia runs into the road to kiss his cheek, and she invites them to come eat. “We are blessed with many fish!” Hy calls.
But Mary scowls and won’t slow Libro.
They cross a shaded, narrow, fast stream on a mossy old log bridge. They turn upstream, and the road is forced to swing out wide around a broad low swampy area where the red-winged blackbirds trill to one another. They pass the pond where Henry watched the newts. They pass the place where Henry left Suthers.
From here Henry doesn’t know the land, and Charles’s scratchings in the dirt seem terribly vague. They turn onto something hardly more than a deer trail to stay near the water.
It is slow going. The day reaches mid-afternoon. They move alongside a fast stream. Franklin shoves the cart while Libro pulls. “This is mad!” Mary cries. “Leave the cart. No one will find it here.”
Mother says, It’s just ahead.
Henry says, “It’s just ahead.” Hoping it’s true.
It is. A few minutes later Henry sights a cabin above the stream—old, mossy, and settled into the earth like an egg in a nest. He’s never seen it from the outside before, but he’s sure this is it.
Charles’s indications in the dirt showed a hiding place in the creek below the cabin. They find a little bluff over the water, and the creek running about fifteen feet wide and up to three feet deep at the middle, with tawny water, at bottom, showing a few stones and snagged branches. Henry can see no bags.
On the water’s edge he removes his boots, rolls his trousers. Underfoot he feels smooth stones and a fine silt that rises in turbid swirls. He crosses the creek, feeling step by step with his toes for the bags.
Franklin joins him. Mary ties Libro above on the bluff, then she too comes down into the water. The three of them move back and forth like herons stalking crayfish, Mary with her skirt pulled to her waist, all straining to see through the silt and the rot flowing ceaselessly from the swamps.
An hour and more passes; the skin on Henry’s feet puckers. Despair, all day a small hard seed in him, begins to open. A horsefly bites him on the neck, and he cries out with frustration and splashes about, kicking up the silt.
“Stop that,” Franklin says.
“I don’t think it’s here,” Mary says. “We’ve been all through here. Maybe it’s upstream.”
“Charles drew an arrow straight to the water.”
“This is madness. How does Charles know what my father did that day?”
Henry reaches down to probe between rocks, comes out with a black leech on his finger. He tears it free, grinds it into a rock. “When he came back into the cabin,” he says, “Suthers’s trousers were wet up to here.” He indicates his knee. “His sleeves were wet too.” He peers into the water again, reaches in, begins to turn over the larger rocks.
Libro neighs, yanks at his tether. “Libro, please!” Mary calls.
But Libro whinnies and pulls the tether again. Mary climbs the bluff to tend to him.
Henry flips several rocks. Coming to one that he cannot lift, he summons Franklin, and Franklin raises it high and hurls it at the shore as if to stave in the brains of the world.
Henry poin
ts Franklin to another stone, and another.
They have done this several times when Franklin stops, bends. “There’s a hollow place.”
He reaches deep, strains—rises up, with two streaming canvas bags.
“That’s it!” Henry cries.
Franklin opens a bag, peers inside. He laughs.
Henry shrieks, jumps, whoops, splashes water to all sides.
“Mary!” Franklin yells. He peers again into the bag. “I’ve never seen so much money.”
It is then, as if dictated by the inexorable mathematics of luck, that things begin to go wrong.
Franklin, turning to look for Mary on the bluff, stumbles and drops one of the bags. He goes down into the water after it. At the same time, Henry hears Mother yelp with alarm. Henry shouts to her, “We have the coins! See!”
But Mother is shrieking. Franklin comes out of the water with the bag and yells. “Mary!”
She doesn’t answer.
Franklin runs for the shore as best he can through the water while carrying the heavy bags. He’s on the sand below the bluff when Mary comes into view. She cries out—a strangled, inarticulate, indignant noise.
Behind Mary is a very ugly man holding a pistol.
“Morley?” Henry says.
“My boy!” Morley cries. “So pleasant to see you. A delight. Wonderful. Tracked you around for days. Not bad scouting work for an artillery man. Lost you for a bit, at times. A few times. Sometimes I wondered if perhaps I had misread the situation. But I counseled myself patience. I nearly lost your track again today. But now, we are here.” Theatrically, Morley levels the pistol at Mary’s head. “Be so good as to tell the big one to send up the bags.”
“You keep the coins,” Mary says to Franklin.