Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [163]
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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.
Chapter Seventy-seven
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Darkness of the Dark
Darkness of the dark, black pitch tar-hole dead of night starless moonless abyss of nothingness nothing…The dark had a scent to it, the thick green stink of fecund plant, root and stem, bole and leaf, and the rot of still waters, and the spoor of invisible animals that swam or crawled in the pitch-black around us.
And the dark had a sound, which, when now and then when we stopped to get our bearings—or, I should say, Liza stopped us, and she figured our path a little further—and the horses quieted down, we could hear as a constant whirring of insects and an occasional chirp or squawk of bird or sigh of hunting animal, or the splash of some creature fishing in the swamp.
But it was not until we had ridden for what seemed like many hours in the pitch of night that I could distinguish darkness upon darkness and make out certain shapes and figures—trees, mainly, and more trees—against what had been a dark so empty that it took on heft and girth, and I could hear sounds buried under other sounds, and it seemed almost that I could hold my breath and appreciate the purring of ticks under the wings of sleeping birds and the liquid whispers of mother fish as they herded their fry beneath the placid liquid dark of the ditches and eddies of the swamp.
Now I could see Liza riding ahead of us and despite the first light I felt a terrible inward rush of emptiness and false bearings.
“Wait!” I called to her.
She slowed her horse and my Promise nearly collided with it.
“What is it, Nate?” she said.
“What is it? I still cannot rid my thoughts of this. You killed a man. And I am a party to it.”
“You would have done it, if I had not.”
I reached for the reins of her horse, but it skittered away.
“If you had not stolen my pistol, perhaps.”
Liza laughed a laugh all too gay given the circumstances, as though we might be waltzing about the lawn of the big house to the music made by violins.
“How can you laugh at such a time as this? When you have killed a man and we are running?”
“When we have killed a man,” she said. “You just agreed to that.”
A terrible thought occurred to me.
“What else did you take? Did you steal money from my dying uncle?”
“I took nothing that was not mine,” Liza said.
And by the early light of our new dawn together I saw her reach into the sack she had carried with her as we had made our escape from the house—in which she had kept, among other things, the pistol she had taken from my room—and extract one of the silver candlesticks, inscribed so long ago in an eastern country, and hold it up to show me, grinning a girlish grin that never would have allowed you to believe, if you had not been there when it happened, that she had shot and killed a man only hours before.
Now it was daylight, and we edged the horses into the narrow trail into the swamp, needing to find a place to hide for the long day to come.
***
Slavery is so simple, freedom so complicated. Here I was huddled in a damp hole beneath a towering swamp tree while the light of green day showed me my sleeping companions, Liza, her coffee-colored