Soon Be Free (15 page)

“Thee can count on me, Miz Pru.”

“Well, then.” A smile spread across her face, which was the color of pecans but as wrinkled as a walnut shell. James noticed that her hands were wrinkled, too, and stained from sorting hemp plants by feel alone.

Callie had told James, “Miz Pru looks like she's a hundred years old, but she's no more than fifty-five or sixty. Conjurers don't age smooth like regular folks. She used to pick cotton down in Alabama till the master sold her North along with her husband. Her life was a little easier at Bullocks', but Miz Pru, she worked just like the rest of the field hands, from can see to can't see.”

“What's that?” James had asked.

“For a smart Northern white boy, you sure don't know much. That means from sunrise to sunset.”

Now Callie was clunking a wooden spoon against a black cast-iron kettle that hung over the hearth. “You smell something good, Mama Pru?”

The old woman sniffed the air, and Solomon said, “Lizbet, she told me all about these fishermen who leave a shack open for any of us to come home, leave something simmering over the embers for our empty bellies.”

“Wouldn't none of you have found it, though, if I hadn't
seen
it in my back mind. Didn't I tell you, James Weaver?” Callie swirled the wooden spoon around in the kettle and lifted a hot, grayish spoonful to her lips. “Potato soup,” she announced with such abiding pleasure that they all raced to the hearth to have a taste.

James longed to drop a dipper into that kettle and pull himself up a feast, but he saw the eager eyes of the others, heard Miz Pru smacking her lips, and he drew back to wait his turn. In his
back mind
he tasted sweet bits of onion, a mooshy chunk of potato big enough to fill his whole mouth. Salt stung his lips from this marvelous soup, so hot that it burned his throat as it slid down toward his growling belly. He watched Callie slip a spoonful into Miz Pru's mouth, careful to catch every drop in her hand below the old woman's chin.

Miz Pru said, “Needs pepper. Fishermen can't cook worth nothing.” She reached out and squeezed James's arm. “I've felt snakes thicker than you. Talking pretty ain't gonna get you no meat on your bones. Take you some of this potato soup.”

Gladly!

While Sabetha ladled them up mugs of soup, Miz Pru held court. “Me, I like a man with meat on his bones. My Sully, now there was a fleshy man.”

Solomon sat on the floor at Miz Pru's knees, warming his hands on the mug of soup Sabetha had
just given him. “Miz Lizbet used to talk some about her daddy, Sully.”

“Old Sully, he worked at the hemp factory over in town,” Miz Pru continued. “Came home every Saturday night, and Law, didn't we have a time!”

“Where Daddy be now?” Homer asked, from the floor on the other side of Miz Pru.

She clipped the side of his head. “How many times I gotta tell you, baby, your daddy with Jesus.” Turning back to the rest of them, she added, “The Monday Fever done it, sucking in all that hemp dust till he was breathing through wet sponges in his chest.”

Sabetha said, “You don't have to talk about it if it makes you sad, Miz Pru.”

“Only thing makes me sad is Sully never held to my conjuring. Called me an old goofer. Said, ‘Prudence Biggers, you be attending to our daughter, Lizbet, not half the folks between here and Aferka. You got magic, girl? Use it on that poor, simple-minded boy of ours, or Homer ain't gonna live long enough to get free with all the smarts the Lord done give him.' ”

“Yes, suh, the Lord done give me smarts!”

Miz Pru grabbed his chin and squeezed his cheeks together until his lips puckered. “Well, jest look. Me and Homer outlived Sully Biggers by years.” Shoving Homer's face aside, she reached out for Solomon's hand, which she worked like she was
wringing out wash. “If only my Lizbet could have lived to see us sitting here drinking soup like the rich white folks. Solomon, reckon she's home free?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Solomon said quietly. “Miz Lizbet Charles is about the freest person I ever knew.”

• • •

Their bellies full, Miz Pru dozing in the only chair, they sat on the floor talking about what to do next, and then they heard the door of the shack inch open on creaky hinges. Solomon scrambled to his feet and pulled Miz Pru's chair into a shadowy comer, and the others scurried behind Solomon and James, as if they could hide in this one little room.

Will leaned against the wall and lifted his crutch for a weapon as a man poked his face in. An animal-skin hat was pulled to his pitcher ears. “Name's Clooney. You folks is safe,” he said. His voice was scratchy, as if he'd been shouting into the wind all day.

“Safe from
what?”
Will asked. “Could be a trickster.”

Callie yanked the raised crutch out of Will's hand. “It's one of the fishermen. Gray beard, white hair, beaver hat, just the way I saw him in my back mind.”

“You sure?” James whispered.

“Ask him does he have a finger missing.”

The fisherman stepped into the room holding up his left fist and let his
fingers spring open. Four fingers. Clooney said, “No time to waste, folks. Ferry's waiting.”

• • •

“Indiana,” said Callie dreamily as they all scrambled off the ferry on the north bank of the Ohio River. “I've been hearing about this place all my life.” She dug her toes into the rich soil. “I believe I'll just take root right here and grow like that sycamore.”

Clooney tamped the earth with his scuffed-up brogans and said, “You've got a ways to go yet, folks. Fact is, there's peril every road you walk—slave catchers for hire to send you back South, even runaways themselves who've gotten free and turned against their own kind for cold money.”

Sabetha said, “I just don't believe they'd
do
that.”

Miz Pru huffed, “What's all this I been hearing about being home free once you cross the river?”

The fisherman nodded soberly. “You heard right, ma'am, more or less.” He gazed back across the river and stroked his dangly sideburns, as if searching for words that wouldn't scare them too badly. “All I'm saying is, just watch who you trust.” And he gave Solomon the location of a farmhouse within a night's walk. “You'll be in safe harbor there. Folks there can send you on to the next place, and that place knows the next one and so on. It's the only way this Underground Railroad works worth spit.”

James said, “Thee's been very kind, Mr. Clooney.”

“What's that you called me? You never heard my name. All you know about me and my buddy is, we catch fish for the steamboats, catch 'em and sell 'em. What else we do and who we are, why, it's nobody's business, you get me?” He doffed his beaver cap at the ladies and shook hands with all the gentlemen.

Homer grinned and pumped Clooney's hand as if he were drawing water from a well, and the fisherman said to him, “You take care of these ladies, hear? See they get safe to their destination.”

“Yes, suh!”

The sunlight shone brilliant and clear on Faith Cloud's porch. The only thing that wasn't clear was her iced tea, and I wondered what it had been used for in its previous life. Mike actually took a sip of that stuff, but then Mike can chew up jalapeno peppers like some people chew popcorn.

He asked Faith about the Lenni Lenape legend.

Faith tilted her head and said coyly, “Oh, I'll tell it, but first let's refresh ourselves with my secret-recipe tea.”

It flitted through my mind that Faith might be a crazy woman and we'd all be poisoned by her strange brew, but she took great swallows of it, and besides, Wolf seemed to trust her. Still, I set my glass behind a plant.

Faith looked out the window as though she were reading the legend in the trees and wind. “We believe a great guardian spirit hovers in the sky and looks after us.”

“Yeah, it's called God,” Mike said, as though he'd heard it all.

“Maybe,” Faith conceded. “But with Indian
peoples, God takes lots of different forms. For the Lenni Lenape, he's an eagle with wings spread real wide to shelter us. When we do things he doesn't like, he makes the rain flood our rivers until they're overflowing their banks. My people say that the thunder is his angry roar, and the lightning is the flashing of his angry eyes. You don't want to be in his path when he's mad, no way!”

I glanced over at Mike. He was sitting at the edge of the rattan chair, intrigued and pouring his tea into a yucca plant beside him.

“But when we do things that please him, he's real generous, like a father. He makes the corn grow tall, and the buffalo herds dense and plentiful enough for whatever we need.” Faith finished her tea and didn't keel over, so I sipped mine, too. It tasted like the codeine cough medicine I forced down last winter.

“Of course, that's our job—to please the Great Eagle Spirit, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't. We're only human, you know. But sometimes we go way past his expectations, and times like that he'll let a feather float down from way up there to let us know he's proud that we've been put down here to share this sweet, sweet, green earth.”

“That's the feather in the painting?” Mike asked.

“Oh, yes, he's
real
pleased with my work.” Her weathered face broke into a grin, and she cradled her hands between her knees. “But there's more. When
you've got the gift of one of these feathers, when you hold it to your face, to your body, nothing can harm you. My language doesn't translate just right into English, but you could say that when this happens, you're
in.
In
vulnerable,
in
vincible, and
in
visible.”

“Wow! How come we can still see you?” Jeep asked.

“I'm letting you, is why.”

Mike said, “I've lived in Kansas all my life. I've heard of the Cherokee and the Pawnee and the Shawnee and the Kiowa and the Comanche, but I've never heard of the Lenni Lenape.”

“Of course not,” Faith said. “Oh, my, this isn't right.” She turned her head this way and that to study the canvas. She flattened a blob of red paint with the palm of her hand. A fortune-teller would be able to read the lines of Faith's skin in the paint. “There, that's better. No, you wouldn't recognize the name Lenni Lenape. It's our own name. The white man calls us Delaware.”

Delaware! More pieces were coming together.

“You know, kiddos, the Delawares own the land you're sitting on. Or should, if the government hadn't screwed it all up. My too-many-greats-to-count-grandfather, he had the papers to prove it. Wrote all about it in a book.”

Jeep pinched my arm, and I said, “Was his name Straightfeather?” Faith Cloud's eyes got wide as I said, “I've seen the book.”

“Oh, honey, you couldn't have. There were only ten copies printed, and the only one left on the whole blamed planet was my own, which got stolen this past winter, along with my
tee
-vee and VCR. Those thieves, I hope they're enjoying my
tee-
vee, or got good money for it. But I sure do grieve for that book.”

They hid in a barn with either Solomon or Will standing guard all through the day. It stung James that he hardly ever got guard duty, not that he'd be any kind of hero if someone stumbled onto their camp in broad daylight. Nevertheless he stayed awake most of the day just in case Solomon or Will dozed off and some farmer came tearing across the field with a pitchfork meant for the hayloft where Callie and Sabetha slept.

It was seventeen days since James had left home; it seemed like a year.

Miz Pru had a plug of tobacco in her cheek, and she was chawing away at it. “Good for wasp stings,” she told James when he saw her spit the black sinews of tobacco on the sawdust floor.

Sabetha said, “Miz Pru, that's just about the ugliest thing I've seen.”

Miz Pru just scowled and retorted, “If I ain't eatin', at least I kin be chewin'.”

Now, as the sun fell behind the barn, they bustled around preparing for another dark night of stealing away under a canopy of stars.

Even if he were a rotten watch guard, at least James could keep everyone's spirits up, so he fairly chirped: “By the day after tomorrow we'll be at the place the farmer sent us, sleeping in a proper room.”

Miz Pru grumbled, “I done slept next to a horse on the scratchiest of horse blankets this day. Y'all know what a horse smell like? And chickens walking acrost me all night? I sure could use me a bed tomorra.”

James's heart sank. “I'm sorry, Miz Pru, but tomorrow Solomon says we'll be sleeping in a cave near New Harmony, Indiana.”

“Hunh-uh, hunh-uh, no, suh,” Homer cried. “No cave, ain't gonna sleep in no cave.” Homer began bashing his head against the wall until half the barn rattled and the scrawny horse got spooked.

Sabetha threw her arms around Homer. “Hold still. You'll loosen those nails, and the walls are gonna fall down around us.” She clutched him and calmed him and pulled him down to the ground beside her. He sat on his knees and rocked back and forth. “Hunh-uh,” he kept saying, “no cave, nosuhnosuhnosuh.”

Sabetha stroked his huge hand and explained about his fear. She had a way of talking to you without ever looking at you, so some of her words floated away toward the horse, but James caught the gist of it.

“When Homer was nine, maybe ten, he was sold away from Miz Pru. He was a big boy. He could all but lift a horse, so master got a good price for him. But seller and buyer, neither one knew he was half gone in the head.”

Miz Pru took up the story. “Homer's job was to fetch water for the field hands. They was working tobacco. That new master, he rigged up a pole with buckets on each end and sent Homer down into hell.”