A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [122]
“Thank you, grandfather.” He nodded to the flattened weeds behind the cypress knees. “There’s not much cover here.”
“They’re searching, all around the woods.” Dark eyes like clear coffee considered him from within an eon of wrinkles, like the eyes of a tortoise on a log. He was a middle-size man who looked as if he’d been knotted out of grass a thousand years ago, dry and frail and clean. Tribal scars like Uncle Bichet’s made shiny bumps in the ashy stubble of his beard.
“They say they look for a runaway field hand, but no field hand wears boots or needs them.” He held out an arthritic claw and took January’s left hand, turned and touched the powerful fingers, the raw welt that the rope had left when they’d bound him. “What they think you pick for them, flowers?”
January closed his hand. “No dealer in Natchez is gonna ask about why a field hand’s got no calluses, if the price is cheap. Thank you for sending them on.” He reached down for his bundle, but the old man caught his right hand with its crusted wad of wrappings, and turned it over in his bony fingers.
“And what’s this, p’tit? Do they know you hurt? They’ll spot you by it.”
January shook his head. “I don’t think they know.”
The old man brought the bandage up to his nose and sniffed, then pushed at the edges, where the shackle had chafed raw the skin of his wrist. He nodded a few times, and said, “You a lucky child, p’tit. Old Limba, he look out for you. But headin’ on back to town, that the first place they look. Stay in the bayous, down the southwest across the river, or back in the swamps. You can trap, fish, hunt.… They never find you.” His grin was bright, like sun flecking off dark water. “They never found me.”
“They’ll never look.” January settled his weight against the tug of Lacrîme’s hand. “Not so long as I’m out of their way. Not so long as I don’t come back to the city. So long as I don’t come forward as a free man, claiming what’s mine, they don’t care if I’m dead or a slave or on a ship heading back to Europe. Just so long as I don’t bother them. And I’m not going to give them that.”
It was the first time he’d said it; the first time he’d expressed to himself exactly what it was that had carried him against the current of the river, that had kept him moving through the long exhaustion of the previous days and nights.
The songs in the field. The blue bead on his ankle. The twisted steel cross in his pocket. They were verses in a bigger song, and suddenly he was aware of what the song was about. And it wasn’t just about his family, his friends, and his own sore heart.
Lacrîme peered up at him with those tortoise eyes. “They who, p’tit?”
An old man who figured an innocent black man’s life was worth less to him than the life of the son whom he believed to be a murderer. The boy who hadn’t the guts to go against his father’s will.
The woman he’d taught to play Beethoven, all those years ago.
And whoever it was that she would lead him to.
“White men,” he said. “I’m going on to town. Is there a path you can point me out to get there?”
Lacrîme took him by way of the swamp tracks, the game trails, the twisty ways through the marsh country that lay back of the river, toward the tangled shores of Lake Pontchartrain. They were old tracks, from the days when networks of marron settlements had laced the boscages. The old man looked fragile, crabbed up with arthritis and age, but like a cypress root he was tough as iron. He scrambled with bobcat agility through thickets, bogs, and low-lying mud that sucked and dragged at January’s boots and seemed to pull the strength out of him.
“T’cha, you get soft in this country,” the old man chided, when January stopped to lean against a tree to rest. “Soft and tame. The boss men all ask for a man bred in this country, a criolo, instead of one who came