I found him in the barn, milking the Andersons’ one old cow. I was surprised that he had stayed around after what happened, but then the government had set all the slaves free four years back, and he hadn’t gone off then, so maybe he was the staying kind. As soon as I thought that, though, it came to me that John Anderson had been wanting to run off with Laura Foster, and maybe he still wanted to get away-more than ever now that she was dead. But he had seen that when Tom Dula tried to run off, it just made everybody think he was guilty of killing Laura. John Anderson couldn’t afford to have people wondering things like that about him. Somebody might have seen something while they were keeping company together, and if folks put two and two together, he’d hang for sure.
He glanced up when he saw me, and I saw him startle for an instant. All he could see was a shadow against the bright light outside, and Laura and I were like enough in form and height-both of us little and scrawny-though many would say she was more fair of face. I didn’t care, though. Look where it got her. After a couple of heartbeats, he worked out who I was, but he had to finish the milking, so he just nodded how-do, and went back to what he was doing. I stood there just inside the barn until my eyes got accustomed to the light, and I watched him squirting jets of milk into the pail. I could smell it, the hot sweet smell mingling with the odor of fresh-cut hay and cow piles glistening with flies.
He was leaner than the last time I had seen him, and he seemed a little darker, maybe from working in the summer fields-or else the dim light in the cow byre made him seem so. He had a fine chiseled face, though, that put me in mind of a mountain back where I come from that they called The Grandfather. He was handsome enough, but I don’t reckon most people bothered to look at him. All they’d see was somebody’s slave, good for doing the farm work, and that’s all. It’s a wonder Laura ever saw more than that, but I reckon she did. He’d not find a woman like her again-and maybe he’d live longer for the fact of that.
When he finished the milking, he stood up and hoisted the pail out of reach of the cow’s hoof. He set it down near the door, and turned to look at me. “How do, Miss Foster,” he said, quiet and careful, in his white-folks voice.
I smiled. “You don’t have to bow and scrape to me, John Anderson. I know you of old.”
His face stayed as blank as the cow’s. “Was there something I could do for you, ma’am?”
“I kept your secret all this past year, John. Come sit a spell with me, and tell me how you are.”
“I can’t see how that concerns you, Miss Pauline.”
I settled myself on top of a pile of clean straw, and the cow wandered back outside, so after a minute of standing there with his fists clenched, he sat down an arm’s length away from me, eying me like I was part rattlesnake.
“You went away,” he said.
“I did. I have people up the mountain, and I went back to stay with them. I thought it might be perilous to stop on here for a while. I’ll bet you’d have left if you could have.”
He nodded. “I used to dream about it. Only in my dream, it would be me and Laura astraddle her daddy’s mare, heading up that mountain that looks like it rises up out of the woods behind the back pasture. Reckon I’ll never see those mountains up close now.”
I took a blade of straw and twirled it between my fingers. “People forget, John. A year has come and gone. Give it another one or two, and nobody will even mark your absence. You are a free man, ain’t you? Go as you please.”
He leaned back and pointed out the barn door and up at the sky, where a full golden moon was just coming up over the ridge. “See how big the moon looks when it rises? Looks like it’s almost touching the ground. When I was little, I used to think that if you climbed to the top of the mountain, you could touch it. But one night I climbed all the way up the ridge, and when I got there, the moon was as far away as ever. Now, I reckon freedom is like that. You think that if you just go someplace else you could touch it, but when you get there, it will still be a million miles away.”
“You and Laura might have made it, if you went far enough out west to where they don’t care about such things. Indian Territory, maybe.”
“Well, that is past praying for. Laura is dead and gone. And I am thinking that once the harvest is over and done with, I will get away from here. At least then I won’t have to look at that ridge where they found her buried. Maybe I could sleep better then.”
“Where would you go?”
“The Andersons have property over the county line, at German’s Hill. I thought I might do some sharecropping on my own over there, if Mr. Washington is willing to let me try. I think he will. It’s only Caldwell County-not over the mountain, not Indian Territory, but maybe I can start living again there. Find me another woman.”
I smiled at his foolishness. “Another gal like my cousin Laura?”
“No!” He hit the straw with his fist. “As little like her as ever was. I have done with that. I’ll find me a good steady woman of color, who can help me tend a farm, and make a life over there, where we don’t have to sneak around in fear of our lives.”
It was like listening to James Melton all over again. The Foster women seem to have the power to bewitch a man, like the fairy queen in the old ballads, but sooner or later, he wakes up on a cold hillside, with a handful of dust and ashes, and after that all he wants for the rest of his life is a plain ordinary woman who will share his burdens, instead of a moonshine maiden who gives you dreams and leaves you with nothing.
The moon had climbed higher than the ridge now, and it was so dark in the barn that we both looked like shadows. I leaned back in the straw, feeling drowsy and peaceful. Neither one of us said anything for a while. Then I heard John sigh, a heavy, weary sound like a tired old horse.
“What?”
He sighed again. “It’s just that you put me in mind of Laura, sitting there in the hay like that, all in shadow. You favor her.”
“Laura and me were blood cousins, so we ought to.”
“I’ll miss her until the day I die.”
I thought the day he died might have come sooner if she still walked the earth. I didn’t say that, though, because I was mindful of what I had come about. So I leaned close to him in the soft darkness of that summer evening, and I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned close. “She was mighty lucky that she had you to make her happy, John. I never had anybody.” I made my voice quaver, and it was too dark for him to see that I shed no tears. Before he knew what was happening, I was in his arms, and then I just let nature take its course. He called me “Laura,” and I never said a word, just went on kissing him and running my hands over his body. Never saw a man yet that didn’t take to rutting given half a chance. He wasn’t but twenty-two or so, and Laura had been dead a year and more. By the time he remembered himself, it was too late to matter.
He turned his back to me when he was done, and I thought I heard him crying softly in the dark. I left him be for a minute or two, while I righted my skirt, and picked straw out of my hair. Finally, I said, “Tom Dula is getting a new trial around harvest time. And then Ann will have her day in court. And I reckon you know more than anybody about what really went on that day.”
“I know Laura wasn’t running off with Tom Dula. It was me she came to meet. I never told anybody, though.”
“See that you don’t. I reckon you know what would happen to you if people knew about you and Laura.”
“I know. But they already sentenced Tom Dula to hang in that one trial. If the next court does the same thing, they’re going to kill him. And he’s an innocent man. He had no call to kill my Laura. None at all. I keep thinking I should tell somebody that.”
I leaned in close again, but there was no softness about me this time. “You won’t tell anybody anything, John Anderson, for if you do, it’s you that will hang.”