Dare waited. Eventually the Englishman would cross the boundary and would have to be driven off. Usually it was just his Indians who let their nets drift over the line, and they picked up and left at the first raising of a gun. Lately, however, the Englishman himself tested the limits. He did not go so far as to stay over the boundary when approached, but he patrolled it with his gun visible, protecting his skiffs as his Indians picked salmon from the nets. Salmon that didn’t belong to them. The Englishman grew bolder by the day.
Dusk was settling fast. The sun, like a gutted fish, spilled its crimson as it sank. Large flocks of fowl bruised the sky at the horizons. Dare watched them over the grey-white sails of his competitors’ skiffs—there must have been a hundred boats, a hundred dingy canvas sails catching the last of the breeze that had come up with the tide change. The birds rose and spread like black smoke above them.
He floated on the middle of the river, the banks miles off to either side. But the war and the doctor felt close, almost at his shoulder, whispering. The sky and river darkened. A salmon thrashed in a nearby net, pulling the tins on the corkline down. Three of his own skiffs formed a loose and drawing-in circle around him. One of the Indians softly chanted as he picked fish from the linen meshes. Brine hung heavy on the air. Dare breathed it in with the smell of the blood and slime of the catch. The chanting stopped, resumed; it was like the chanting the negro contrabands had done when they buried the dead.
Now the river turned black, the sky blue-black. The Englishman grew faint, but Dare knew he was there, waiting. All the skiffs on the river, all the dirty sails, were drifting to the one point. The fleets of the Scotsmen and the Swede and the other Americans. The workers of the men who wanted to drive him out. But there was time yet. He could sit still on his stretch of river, the stretch he had protected for seven years, and watch. And when he was forced to move, he wouldn’t hesitate; he would be smarter, quicker, stronger. Again.
Dare rubbed the soreness deeper into his eyes and watched the pilot star brighten far over the delta. As always, the night sky calmed his blood; how often he had relied on the stars’ loyal patterns when life seemed only a roiling confusion. Another salmon thrashed, its death throes deepening the briny flavour of the air. Dare tasted the salt; it sat heavily on his tongue. The water near him broke again, louder this time. He tried but he could not keep what was behind him from rising up in the echoes of the sound.
They’d travelled several miles a day, he remembered, in a general southwesterly direction, with their meagre clothes offering little protection from the cold. McElvane, though not as cruel as the overseer had been, was nonetheless a negro driver, and he drove them hard. That he was able to do so without resorting to violence or even threats was on account of his generosity to Daney; all the slaves realized that he had purchased her out of mercy in order to allow her to remain with her daughters. But they also knew that mercy was a fleeting quality in those who bought and sold them. The trader, they did not forget, viewed them as merchandise to be brought to market. No matter how often he let them rest or take a drink of water, he always remained the man driving them south.
There was little conversation. They each seemed locked in their own forebodings as they were locked in their own chains. The monotony of the slightly swelling fields and dark woodlots was punctuated by rare plumes of smoke from isolated houses and by the occasional small herd of cattle or sheep. The air was crisp and clean, the sky pewter with a blurred sun that gave minimal warmth. If there was birdsong, they could not hear it over the dragging of their chains and the dull hoof-clop of the trader’s horse.
The men led the way, the women trying hard to keep up. He—John they called him then, and he had never tried to separate the name from the memory—had little chance to observe Daney and her daughters, but he suspected that they maintained the pace, again out of a curious blend of gratitude and terror. Nights, they slept around large fires, fires over which McElvane parched the corn that constituted the main meal of the day. Still no one talked much, though the women tried to soothe the young boys. McElvane repeatedly stared into a small book that he drew nervously from his shirt pocket. Muttering, he’d push a stub of pencil across a page, then look up at the starless sky and shake his head. A few times he spoke to the blacks, almost as if to himself, saying that a good nigger brings both a tall price and a good home. Whip marks, he said, generally send you to the rice fields, and that’s a hard lot.
John remembered keeping silent then, like everyone else. The chains were heavy, and once he’d eaten and lain by the fire, all he wanted was for sleep to blank out the world. With the others, he remained in a state of shock. Everything had happened so quickly, from the overseer’s arrival to Caleb’s whipping to the escape attempt of Daney’s girls and finally to this drive south. Only his burning hatred for Orlett sometimes stirred him out of his numb despair and gave him thoughts of escape. He didn’t even think of a future apart from revenge, for he did not wish to escape anywhere except to the satisfaction of squeezing his hands around the overseer’s throat. Whenever the hatred abated, the letters on his cheek began to burn. He felt them even more than the iron around his neck.
Late one afternoon they crossed a wide river, the Patuxent, and it was on the other side of it that everything changed. They reached a small village, not unlike Sharpsburg, and on a dirt road before a grey-planked building with iron-barred windows joined up with a much larger coffle. Fifty or so other blacks, mostly men, boys and young women, including one who was pregnant and one carrying a baby, were similarly chained and roped. But their driver was a different sort of man. He carried a black snake whip across his shoulders and kept up a steady torrent of threats and insults. He rode up and down the line, cracking the whip and yanking back on the reins so that the horse would rear up and snort great breaths in the air between its flailing front legs. Meanwhile, his two assistants, much younger men, scruffy and sullen, rode close by, shotguns at their chests.
McElvane deferred to the new driver. From what John could gather, both men worked for a Mr. Wych, a slave dealer in South Carolina. But it was what they all learned that night—after the drive had finally stopped, exhausted, at a shabby public house that the new driver called an “ordinary”—that brought the terror back in force.
They were driven into a bare room and made to sleep on the straw-covered dirt floor, the men on one side, the women on the other. The new driver, Jensen, forbade any conversation. “I don’t want you niggers giving each other any foolish ideas,” he said and shut the door, leaving them in darkness.
Over the weeping and the praying, the grunts and sighs of bodies adjusting to the crammed space, John was surprised to hear voices almost as plain as day. Through the thin walls came McElvane’s voice imploring the new driver to leave his coffles unwhipped.
“They’re good niggers, and I especially don’t want the bright girls marked at all.”
“Yeah, I noticed them. Right pretty. Wych has told me there’s most money in the handsome ones right now. The houses in Atlanta can’t get enough.”
“It’s the talk of war does it. It makes some men mad that way.”
“Nothing mad about it,” Jensen said. “A man’s got to take his pleasure. Can’t work hard with no promise of pleasure afterwards.”