I was kinda anxious to meet Laura’s nut brown boy. I reckoned he’d be more interesting than the sorry old farmers around Elkville, but we never did get all the way to the Andersons’ farm. Maybe he knew she was coming, though she had not said so. For all of Laura’s hugs and honeyed words about what a boon companion I was to her, I knew that she had got in the habit of lying to keep folks from finding out about her lover. And she had not told him about having the pox, which is a silent lie. So I had no cause to think that she would be entirely truthful with me, for all her fine sentiments of friendship. Perhaps she was not such a fool as I took her for, which was just as well for her lover, for she could get him killed quick enough. I might have told on the pair of them just to see the fur fly amongst those dull farmers in Elkville, but for the fact that I had other mischief in mind.
Anyhow we never reached Reedy Branch together, for before we had gone more than three miles, at a place where the road was bounded on either side by woods, a voice called out to us, and Laura clutched my arm and motioned for me to stop. I peered into the woods, trying to catch sight of a figure among the trees, but it was late in the day and the shadows lay deep in the pines.
A moment or so later, I heard a whistle from the woods, and before I could utter a word of caution, Laura had left the trace, and was hurrying toward the thicket, with her skirt hitched up to her shins, the better to run. I muttered a foul word under my breath, and set off after her.
I had resolved to be cheerful and welcoming no matter how awful the fellow was, but when I reached the edge of the woods, she was in his arms, and, when I caught sight of his face, I had to admit that he looked a durn sight better than I thought he would. You can’t put any stock in the descriptions a besotted woman gives you; they can’t see straight. But Laura’s part-Shawnee-or whatever he was-had a lean face with dark eyes over sharp cheekbones, and his skin had a copper cast to it that did put me in mind of the Indians. He was dressed shabby, like any old farmhand, but I had known better than to expect anything else. I couldn’t see what he’d want with drab little poxy Laura, but maybe her pale skin made up for the rest of it. I reckon it must have. He acted right glad to see her.
I caught up to them then, threading my way through the tall weeds of that overgrown field and into the woods, mostly keeping my eyes cast down looking for snakes.
“This here’s my cousin Pauline Foster. She knows about us,” Laura told him.
He met my stare with one of his own, and he nodded slightly, just to show he had heard her, but he looked none too pleased to see me standing there. I guess his dealings with people hadn’t given him any reason to trust strangers, especially white ones.
I smiled anyhow, because I choose my enemies with care. This man didn’t matter to me one way or the other, so I had nothing to lose by being civil. Sometimes, if people are fools, friendliness makes them think you’re on their side. “You’ll get no hindrance from me,” I told him, which was true enough.
He looked down at Laura and back at me, and then he said, “Well, all right then. I’ll take her word on that. She’d never do me any harm if she could help it.”
We walked on a few feet farther into the woods, so that passersby on the road wouldn’t spot us. We settled ourselves down on the pine straw, Laura nestled up against John, who was careful to keep his distance from me, and we kept our voices low as we talked. I kept quiet at first, not knowing what he might take offense at, and half hoping he’d forget about me altogether, so that I could listen to their plans, but I made him too jumpy for that. He watched me the way I had kept an eye out for snakes in the untilled field.
“My cousin tells me you are wanting to go west,” I said, watching his face when I said it.
He nodded. “I’m tired of being a farmhand around here. I’ll take what work I can get over the mountain.”
“Were you free before the War, or just lately?”
He gave me a hard look. “I’m free now, and that’s all that matters. The rest is over and done with.”
“Well, I hope you get your new start then.”
Laura kept saying, “I’ll be so glad to get shut of this place!” and then she’d reach up and stroke his cheek, or lay her head on his shoulder.
Finally, because the boredom of watching the two of them was making me sweat, I said, “So you mean to make a run for it, you and her, do you?”
He glanced left and right, as if he thought I had salted away a regiment of soldiers in the bushes. But there was nobody around but just us three. “I’m moving on west to Tennessee, maybe farther. Miss Laura here, she has a mind to go with me.”
I almost laughed at the “Miss Laura,” but he was right to be careful. Best not even to drop the “miss” in private, lest you make a habit of it, and slip up one day in public. “How are you planning on going?” I asked him. “On foot? You’d better not let her daddy catch you, else he’ll beat her like a tin drum, and I reckon they’d just hang you.”
He didn’t flinch when I said that. But that didn’t surprise me. He would have to be more crazy than brave to have taken up with a white woman in the first place, so I knew he was what folks would call uppity and dangerous. Well, so was I, but mostly I had enough sense to keep anybody from finding out about it. Maybe he did, too, but I doubted it. You could read his feelings on his face like watching clouds scud across a March sky. He’d live longer if he went west. And longer still if he went alone, but I could see that he meant to take her with him.
“We would have a horse,” he said at last.
“Just the one?” I inclined my head toward Laura, who wasn’t paying our talk any mind. She was leaning up against him, and plaiting blades of grass into a ring, while she hummed to herself.
“Just the one.”
“You’ll not get far enough fast enough with two of you on one horse.”
He smiled at that, but his eyes stayed cold. “They’d hang me quicker for a horse thief than for taking off with her, don’t you figure?”
“Best not to get caught at all. You know, her daddy has a horse.” I don’t know how he came by it, him being a sharecropper and all, but he sure enough had a little white mare that was about as drab and scrawny as his daughter was.
Laura looked up when I said that. “Yes, that’s the one. We mean to take Daddy’s horse. They couldn’t do much to me, could they? If it was me that took it?”
“Of course they couldn’t,” I said, not because I believed it, but just to speed things along. “I reckon you’d stand a better chance of getting clean away if you each had a horse, though. Else they might catch up with you on the road before you reached Tennessee.”
They looked at each other then, like the horse was already taken and they were galloping away to the west-they was seeing it happening in one another’s eyes. I kept still, to let the thought take hold in their heads. I was watching a mayfly buzzing around in the field, looking for cow dung. Mayflies flit above the ground on fairy wings, but they don’t live long.
“We will make do with one,” John Anderson said.
“Do you think we could?” said Laura, catching both his hands in hers, her eyes shining like mayfly wings. “Just take Daddy’s old mare, and light out of here before anybody misses us?”
He hesitated, and glanced over at me again.
“You ought to start early,” I said. “As near as you can to sun-up, before too many people are about. Just meet somewhere and go. They’ll not hear about your plans from me, now or ever.”
That decided him. “Let’s go tomorrow. First light.”
“You don’t want to go to her house,” I told him. “Somebody might see you, and then they’d hunt you down for sure. Best to meet up someplace where you won’t be seen.”