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By Root 1699 0

followed her. And when he reached a fork in the road, he took the way he thought she would go. It was a clear way, that road, one that would allow him to see the patrollers long before they would see him. He thought that was one of the most important things. He did not know enough about the world to know he was going south. He could have found his way around Caldonia’s plantation with no eyes and even no hands to touch familiar trees, but where he was walking now was not that place. The other three roads had bends and turns in them and he didn’t think Alice would have ever taken them. Why, he asked himself after he was well on the road, why would that dead man have his hat on in that road like that? It just didn’t make any sense at all. It was a good song to work by, but that was all it was good for.

He had left the door ajar and Elias used both hands to push it open all the way the next morning. Elias hunched his shoulders to the little gathering when he came out. People were still coming out of their cabins and Elias used that time to take the empty pan to his cabin and then he walked up to the house and asked Bennett if he had seen Moses, told him the overseer hadn’t come to work that day or the day before.

Elias came back from the house and told everyone that it looked like Moses had run away. Some people went to work, others went back to their cabins. Gloria and Clement slipped away amid the confusion of the morning. Bennett came down about eight that morning and told Elias to get everyone out to the fields and then he went into town to find the sheriff to tell him that the Townsend plantation had a runaway overseer on their hands. It would be late that day, after Skiffington had come and gone, that anyone would notice Gloria and Clement were not about. They would never be seen again.

“Don’t tell them a thing,” Celeste said to Elias after Bennett had gone. “Don’t send them to no fields. Don’t send them nowhere. If she want them workin so much, let her come out here and do it herself.”

They were in their cabin, their children playing just outside the door. The doll he had made for his daughter rested in the center of her little pallet, next to their sleeping youngest, Ellwood.

“Don’t do her work for her, Elias. Please, don’t do it.” He went to her and took her in his arms. It was a good day outside where their babies were playing; it was the kind of day made for running away. A good strong man without a family could run all the way to freedom and stand on the other side, his arms high above his head, and cuss out the patrollers and the masters and the sheriff, just cuss them out all day and get up the next day and do it again before getting on with the life God meant for him. Yes, a good strong man could do. He kissed the top of Celeste’s head.

Their children had been joined by others and one child screamed playfully, “Stop pushin me down. That hurt.” “I told you I was comin,” a child said. “I told you I was comin so look out the way.”

”Everything’ll be all right,” Elias said, and as soon as he had said that, she took herself from his arms. “Now, Celeste, you listen to me.” He was thinking: When they bring Moses back, Moses will see how the world went on without him. Elias took his wife’s hand. It was not much, a day or even a week of good work to throw in the overseer’s face; it was not worth a baby’s life or his wife’s sorrow, but it was what he had.

“It ain’t right,” Celeste said. “It just ain’t right to go and do what they bought you for. Why make it easy?”

“Now watch and see how far this here rock goes,” a girl outside shouted. “See. See.” “Oh, that ain’t nothin,” a boy challenged. “I can make mine go clean over there.” “You just showin off, is all.” “Cause I got somethin to show off about.”

Elias said, “Is this here thing gon grow up to be somethin bad tween me and you, honey?” Their son ran in and put his arms around Elias’s waist. “Come watch me run,” Grant said. Elias said, “Just answer me about if this here thing gon grow up bad tween me and you?”

Celeste was near tears. She looked through the tears