Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [175]
He had felt at such loose ends before, in his rage and rapist rampage in the pantry, he had felt his blood turn so hot it nearly boiled his brain. But never ever had he heard a voice in his mind say to him such as, Go back to the house and read the Will.
As if led by an invisible hand he turned and walked back in the door and went through the kitchen and up the stairs to his father’s study where there he searched—it took only a minute or two—for the Will, which rested in the same place on the desk where Liza had first seen it. (He could not have known, of course, that Liza had been here before him. But almost as if he could read thoughts on the ether something caused him to go to the window, papers in hand, and look out toward the barns where Isaac was preparing the horses.) “Hurry, you nigger,” he said out loud, as if his voice could carry through the wall.
Glancing down at the papers, he read along, making quiet noises in his throat, noises of assent, until his eye stopped on a name.
“You, nigger!”
He dropped the Will on the desk and without looking back retraced his route down and through the house, out the back way and walking steadily toward the barn.
He saw Isaac leading the horses to him and barked out a command.
“Fetch my gun!”
“Yes, sir,” Isaac said, tying the horses to the back rail of the porch and going into the house.
In a moment he returned with Jonathan’s long gun.
“Going to catch us a runaway nigger,” Jonathan said as he took the weapon from Isaac. With a bit of clumsiness he held the weapon in one hand and used the other to mount the horse.
“Liza?” Isaac said.
“That is the nigger,” Jonathan said. “That is the one.”
They rode at a fast pace to the edge of the swamp and then slowed down. He knew full well that Liza had at least a half-day’s start on him. When in the distance he saw the young Jersey boy leading a horse upon whose back I lay draped, his heart sank. He wanted no impediment to his quest.
“Take him back to The Oaks,” he told the boy when they stopped and met on the faint trail into the swamp.
“Yessir,” said the boy.
“Now tell me which way she went,” Jonathan said.
Unprompted by the barely conscious passenger on the horse—the fever-crazed creature that I had become—the boy jagged a finger to the north.
“Up there,” he said.
“North?” Through his nose Jonathan made a snorting noise like a horse. And then almost with a kind of familial pride, he said, “I never took her for being that stupid. She is an educated girl. She knows her geography. The damned doctor taught her that.” And then, almost as an afterthought prompted by paternal pride, he added, “She has read many more books than most white folks.” He looked over at the boy and without a word flicked out his hand and slapped him across the mouth.
“Do not lie to me, boy,” Jonathan said.
“Yessir,” the boy said. Scarcely visible against the darkness of his skin, a thin line of dark red blood ran from his nose to his upper lip.
“Take my cousin back to The Oaks. Don’t you be running or I’ll set the patrollers on you quick as anything. Don’t know why they did not catch you all in the first place, running the way you were, noisy as hell, I would guess.” He said no more to the boy.
Without looking back, he goaded his mount and followed by Isaac continued along the road into the watery turf where muscly-vined trees raised their bushy heads to blot out the direct light of morning. They had not ridden more than another half mile when they saw a cluster of birds, turkey vultures jigging around and upon the bodies on the road.
“Isaac!” Jonathan shouted. “What is that?”
The slave—Jonathan’s half-brother, let us say it!—rode forward and stepped just short of the bodies. The birds cocked