Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [88]
Was it only a dream? A raven?
I started up in bed at the sound of a door closing—or was it opening?—and wandered into the hall, seeing a shadowy figure a few paces ahead of me, who then descended the back stairs.
I went to the top of the stairs, paused, and then descended.
The door to the back rooms opened, and I pursued the person who had opened it. Not until out under the night sky did I see the figure of my cousin Rebecca like a ghost illuminated by a half-full moon, and that she—worse gods!—was following someone herself.
Her prey—and again I walked a bit too quickly and reduced the distance between both of them and myself to a proximity dangerously close—turned out to be her husband, my cousin Jonathan. Oblivious—or, who knows the truth, utterly uncaring—as to whether or not anyone saw him, and his wife following him and in this rather comic than sinister procession me following both of them, he proceeded in the direction of the cabins. The hour was late, and in the quarters where the slaves resided, in those small structures made of porous timber and mud plastered in the chinks between the crudely carved out boards someone was singing, a song all the more outstanding in its lyric because of the quiet that surrounded all else.
My old missus promise me
Shoo a la a day,
When she die she set me free
Shoo a la a day
Across the small lane that separated the row of cabins another group of men huddled together in harmonies.
Massa sleeps in de feather bed
Nigger sleeps on de floor,
When we’uns go to Heaven,
Dey’ll be no slaves no mo’…
My cousin Jonathan went up to the door of a cabin near the edge of the encampment and without hesitating stepped inside.
His wife, my dear cousin by marriage, Rebecca, who often made this trip herself in daylight to help some of their charges learn to read, stood there a moment, lost in the presumably dark act that her husband had performed—and then, as she turned, turned himself, which meant that I turned, though, because of her hurry to return to the main house—I could hear this in her steps—I turned toward the barn and stepped just inside to allow her to pass me as she made her way to the rear of the house and, presumably, up the back stairs and up to the upper hall where she returned to her room.
I was left, under that half moon, breathing in the rich dung odors of the animals, in the barn, asking myself not only what I had just witnessed but why I had made myself to witness it—but then Rebecca could just as easily ask herself the same questions. The only thing I did not know was how many times before my cousin Jonathan had taken his little journey from the house to the cabins, and just how many times his wife had followed him as witness to what could only be deeds darker than a night in the country without a moon. Neither of them appeared to hesitate in the way that a novice at this business would hesitate.
I stepped out of the barn, about to make my way back to the house, when I saw yet another shadow pass along the path to the cabins. I ducked back inside the entrance of the barn and squinted through the dark, trying to make out whose figure this was walking along, later than even these other late walkers I had been stalking. Imagine my heartbeat when I recognized Liza!
Of a sudden a breeze came up, the fields making a rustling noise, as though some god were breathing across the high grass and small trees. I waited until Liza passed the barn and went on toward the cabins. I followed her almost all the way, until by the light of a fading cook fire, I saw yet someone else appear against the dark. Isaac meet Liza with an embrace, and I watched, until I could see them no more in that same dark.
Chapter Thirty-eight
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Old Dou and the Doctor in Consultation
Lyaa, in the throes of labor, writhed and screamed, calling out names of goddesses and gods, crying for help. Normally, it would have only been Old Dou, the African woman who ran everything for the family as an army sergeant