Chapter Seventy-six
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We began our journey by heading back toward the main road. It was a risk, but the choice lay between abandoning the horses and making off through the woods on foot, or taking our chances on meeting trouble on the road and keeping our superior means of travel.
“They may be waiting for us at the house!” I called to Liza over the noise of our animals.
“If Jonathan has gone after us, he is already on his way to town,” Liza called back to me.
“How do you know?”
“Isaac will have told him we have gone that way, and he will be leading him there. Jonathan will remember that you went to town to visit the shipping office.”
“Should not Isaac be running as we are?”
“He will not run,” Liza said. “He is too proud.”
Oh, I said to myself, and I have no pride, and so I am running. But another voice came to me and said, Yes, you are running, running with this woman to love and freedom!
Suddenly we broke into the clearing and looked back and saw the house still all ablaze with lights. I pictured my aunt and Rebecca gathered about my uncle’s body in the upper room, or huddled together for succor in the parlor, their ears inclined toward the sound of our passage.
Oh, Uncle, I called out to him in my mind, I am stealing what was not yours to keep! And what is not mine to take!
Perhaps my uncle replied to me from the world of the dead, but our horses made too much noise for me to hear anything but the beating of their hooves against the hard dirt of the road.
Pounding away they were as we raced down the tunnel of trees to the main road—and headed northwest instead of southeast.
“Do you have a plan?” I called to Liza as we hurried along. She didn’t turn to look at me, but the slave boy did, his young face showing no emotion as we moved under the dark trees on a part of the road I had never traveled.
“Lord,” I said to all and no one, “I wish I had my pistol!”
She did not reply, but the boy turned his head and gave me a knowing nod.
What did he know? Who was he, he still almost a child, who had boarded that ship in New Jersey and traveled with the wickedest man I had ever met, and then escaped, hiding at the brickyard at The Oaks all these weeks, harbored, of course, by the other slaves?
If he had truly escaped.
Long minutes passed. Liza noticed the animals were beginning to tire, and so we slowed down a bit, but still moving forward along the dark road. It was late for country life, and no one was on the road, and if there were other people living out in the fields along the road they were sleeping or sitting up awake in the dark.
“Liza?”
“Hush, Nathaniel,” she called back to me. “We’ll have time later to talk.”
“I should have—”
“Hush!”
I had spoken too soon, because I saw, as she did, a light flickering up the road far ahead, a light that danced and waxed and waned I hoped against hope it was a phantom lamp, one of those will-o’-the-wisp tricks of the darkish air, product perhaps of swamp gases and the dampness of the hour. But as we approached the light became still, and hovered at just the height it would if it were a torch or lamp held by a man on horseback.
It was in fact two lights, each held by a man on horseback.
“Whoa!” called out one of them as we slowed down on our approach, as if he were talking to his own horse.
“Liza—”
“Hush!” she cautioned me.
“Well, well, well, good evening, Mister Yankeeman,” said the patroller Langerhans, holding up one of the torches. “Out kind of late, ain’t you?” He turned to smile to his two assistants, who nodded back at him, smiling.
“As are you,” I said.
“I’m on patrol,” said the slave-catcher. “And you?”
“Me?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, slurring his esses.
“I’m going about my uncle’s business,” I said.
“In the middle of the night? With a slave girl riding along? And what? Who is that darky sitting up behind her? Wouldn’t be the young nigger we come out to look around for not long ago, could it?”
“He is nobody to you,” Liza said.
“Liza, I’ll take care of this.”
Langerhans made a clucking noise in his mouth.
“Will you?”
“Stand aside,” I said.
Langerhans shook his head, which gave his already rather monstrous aspect in the wavering light of the torch an even more grotesque appearance.
“I can’t do that. I get paid to keep niggers from running off and if I don’t my children aren’t going to eat.”
“She has a pass,” I said.
“Really? And does that boy have a pass, too? Where’re y’all riding in the middle of the night?”
“She is going to visit family,” I said. “North of here.”
“That’s funny. All the family I ever hear about is living north, when all the family I ever know about has gone south.”
“I’ll show you the passes,” I said, reaching into the inside of my coat.
“Slow,” Langerhans said. “Show me slow.”
“Of course,” I said, preparing to pat my pocket as though I had lost the paper, a ghastly empty place swelling in my heart because of the absence of my pistol.
“Slow!” he said again.
In the wavering light of the torch I saw a movement at Liza’s side.
Langerhans saw it too, and made a joke.
“Oh, my,” he said to his men, “do you see what I see? This nigger girl’s holding a pistol just big enough to take off a toe or the tip of a nose.”
The men laughed as Langerhans turned in his saddle.
“But she don’t even have it cocked. Might be loaded, though I doubt that, but it ain’t cocked. If you’re lucky enough to know it’s even loaded, how you going to fire a weapon it ain’t cocked, I ask you that?”
“Liza,” I said, meaning for her to lower the weapon.
Instead she moved her free hand across it and we all heard the sound.
“Lordy,” Langerhans said again, as though he were announcing a show, “looked what she done! She done cocked that weapon! Oh, oh, oh, ain’t she smart? I mean, smart for a nigger bitch!”
“Liza,” I said again, speaking but feeling unable to breathe.
“Liza,” Langerhans said, mocking my voice. “He wants you to put that gun down now. Even if it ain’t loaded.”
Liza in silence kept that weapon level and pointed directly at Langerhans.
“Liza, you hear him?”
Langerhans sounded a bit impatient now.
“Liza,” he said again.
“Liza,” I said.
“Come on, you bitch—” Langerhans reached toward her.
Came a loud blast and flash of light, a man screamed, the horses jumped about, I grabbed Promise’s reins. At that moment my heart felt as though it might break through my rib-cage and fly away like a terrified bird.
“Ride!” Liza called to me.
And we rode.
A second loud bang, and a flash spurred our horses even faster.
I heard a voice, a moan. It was mine, but it also echoed along behind us in the dark.
***
After about half an hour we slowed, then stopped, looked down the road and saw nothing, no light, nothing—and when the horses settled a bit, stopped their nickering and whinnying, we breathed in the dark, wondering, hoping, worrying, wondering.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“No,” she said. “But I’m not bleeding.”
The slave boy spoke up from behind me on the horse.
“I ain’t breathing.”
“You are if you’re speaking.”
“Then I’m breathing,” he said.
“Hurry now,” Liza said, giving her horse a start.
I rode up next to her, making up the way through the woods.
“How long have you been keeping my pistol?” I asked her.
“Long enough,” Liza said.
And we started off again, two runaway slaves and a Yankee, each of us now a murderer. I carried heavy regrets, oh, yes, I carried regrets, and a mixed burden of hope and despair. Liza and I were running, and I would not see the harvest.