Chapter Eighty
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All that second night I walked while carrying the thoughts about that child in my mind, and it both weighed me down and kept me buoyant, blotting my fears of possible interception and capture—who knew what slave hunters or horsemen waited on the fringes of the marsh? However, by the next morning I felt strange and awful, a living playground of chills and then after a while what felt to me like heat rising on a sun-bright day in autumn.
Frogs croaked, birds splashed into the swamp to fish for them. Snakes wound their way through the tree branches. In the distance birds called to each other, singing about fish and snakes.
“You must try to rest,” Liza said.
“How can I rest when you—?”
“Hush, you,” she said, taking me like a child in her arms. “You must sleep.”
“And you?”
“I’ll try,” she said. “Yet when I close my eyes I begin to hear sounds—”
“Splashing, as if horses are tramping through the swamp?”
“Yes.”
“Voices, that turn out to be swamp birds?”
“Yes, I heard them.”
“You sleep and I will keep watch,” I said. “And then you can keep watch and I will sleep.”
“Let’s turn that around, Nate,” Liza said. “You sleep first. Then me.”
“You must have your rest. You are…” I could scarcely think the word let alone say it.
She shook her head and laughed lightly in her throat.
“It is as strange to me as it is to you, Nate.”
I pushed my head against her breast.
“I never knew my mother beyond my seven or so years,” I said. “But she was a good mother, she was. I have the hope that you will be, too.”
“And yet I worry about this child,” she said. “I have talked to the other women about it. We, you and I, being cousins…”
“I have heard stories,” I said. “There is a danger. But not as great a danger as if we had not ever met.”
She pressed me in her arms and touched her lips to the top of my head, holding me as though I myself were her as yet unborn child.
“You are sweet to say that, Nate.”
“Your sweetness lingers on my lips as I say it.”
And as I spoke a sudden convulsion of coldness and heat overtook me, and I said, with teeth chattering, “I love you, Liza. I want never for us to part.”
“Hush, now,” she said, “we’ll save all that for when we’re free.”
“I was once a free man, but now I am your slave.”
“Tish,” she said, “tish, tish.”
“Sometimes the brute truth sounds harsh and brittle. But this truth is soft and sweet and full of music.”
“Yankee words,” she said. “Trying to knock me off my guard.”
“Words I say to the woman who will become my wife. Words I say to the woman who carries my child.”
Liza bowed her head as if in prayer. I would have spoken but another wave of chills passed over me again, and I did not know if I was sick with fatigue or if the thought of marriage gave me fright—or wild hopefulness!
“You will marry me, will you not?” I said.
“Hush, now,” she said, whispering a lullaby in my ear as I sank further into her arms, closing my eyes and attempting to keep myself awake with thoughts of the child within her womb. When next I opened my eyes Liza was asleep, slumped against the tree, her arms wrapped around herself in an even more gentle version of the posture in which she had held me. Charles slept, curled up at her feet.
The swamp too had settled into a delicious, yet ominous, stillness. Even the bright daylight, turned a shade of deep green by its reflection against so many green plants and trees, seemed to retract into itself, as though it were trying to become in broad daylight as close to dark of night as it could. But even as it grew darker, its odor became broader and stronger, so that even its fetid stink began to have a stench all of its own on top of its odiferous self.
I settled myself, listening intently for any signal or sign that we might have hunters on our trail.
Nothing.
And nothing.
And nothing.
Until I heard a faint clacking, as though some bird were peck-peck-pecking on a tall tree nearby.
(A-hah! I felt like such a fool when I realized it was the noise of my own teeth!)
All the rest of nature settled down as I quieted myself once more.
And caught my eye on a nub of dark plant floating in the pool of water mid-distant between our tree and the far clump of plants that made up an island, like a stepping stone, in the marsh. I studied this small mark upon the placid inlet, bore my eyes down on it.
With a flip of a lid that startled me back into the shivers, it opened an eye on me.
And then another.
It floated toward me, rising a little as it moved, so that soon I could see the knotted hair, the broad and spectral brow, the woman as brown as Liza, hair spiked like star-shine, her breasts ascendant as she rose out of the water.
Charles! I cried out, but my throat went dry and so I could say nothing.
Liza!
As if I had called her name, whatever she or it might be, she floated, her breasts buoyant and rising, her glance falling directly on me.
What could I do but shield my eyes and cry out, Run, Liza, run!
Forgive me, but I was afraid and fascinated all at once, hypnotized and mystified by this apparition of the swamp—for surely she was a hallucination, and I was losing my mind. Did I wake or sleep?
Nate! I heard the woman calling to me. Goodbye, Nate! I’m running!