He pulled harder now, found a rhythm to calm himself. And yet he still heard the taunts as he headed for the slough; they seemed to rise up out of the river and surround him.
The Englishman moaned from the gunwale where Dare had adjusted his body. For a moment, Dare froze, the air on his nape warm as the mulatto’s breath. He knew his bullet had not struck the man; he knew he had aimed at the sky. So why did he feel the awful, descending chill of a haunting? What ghost had come for him out of the slime and salmon blood? He shook the chill off. On the horizon, a small moon hung faint and dirty, the dark pressing around it. Marbled pig’s flesh. The overseer’s cheek. Only the black smears on the moon were wrong; they belonged to another face. Dare drew a deep, ratcheting breath, then pulled to meet his image, the boy the overseer hadn’t killed, the boy who escaped the rice fields and ran, starved and terrified, with only the stars and his hatred to guide him. But the man who had returned to Antietam could not keep what was behind from coming up with each lifting of the dark water.
The letters were gone. He had scraped them off his flesh with a dull blade not long after joining up with the great backwash of people following the Union army. But he could still feel them under the larger, messier scar he’d made, even without raising a hand to his cheek. Sometimes they burned even more than when he’d hidden in the master’s house after the great battle and waited for Orlett to return. Those hours had been among his worst. Each small sound fired his blood; he was so close to the revenge that had kept him awake nights, so close to wiping out the doglike grin and Caleb’s red back and the quick splashes beside the ferry. But as time passed and the overseer didn’t return to the master’s house, the pressure became too much. He had to act. He had to go out again and search. Sometimes it seemed that every moment of the overseer’s continuing life subtracted a moment from his own. It was harder than the drive south or the long year toiling under the whip in the rice fields because then he knew he had obstacles to overcome. Now, this close, the delay felt like a failure that might prove permanent. Besides, he needed to contribute to the Union cause. Daney had been right about the war, and he was going to do all he could to make sure she’d be right about the freedom too. Waiting in the master’s house to exact his private vengeance felt almost selfish. But he decided there was no reason that he couldn’t do both. After all, just that morning he had removed the uniform from a dead soldier; so it was only right that he should continue the work of that soldier’s army.
The war had surrounded the farm, washed up against it like a great bloody tide that, receding, had left a beach of rotting debris. Within a hundred yards of the house, the bodies lay thick, fallen almost in perfect rows. Beyond, for a half-mile north and south along the dusty turnpike, solitary figures and small groups of three and four men moved among the dead and wounded, slowly as wasps over rotted fruit. Farther to the north, banked against the woods like the ashes of a fire, the bulk of the army rested.
But he did not think in terms of armies and battles: the cries of the wounded circled his legs and threatened to pull him down, for they were cries that contained the same suffering he had witnessed in Daney and Caleb and their children. Except, in the case of these fallen soldiers, he could still do something.
So he walked the body-strewn battlefield, picking up the wounded, one after another, and taking them to the hospitals, the barns, and houses on the neighbouring Mumma and Roulette farms that had been converted for that purpose. His fear had gone. He did not feel like a fugitive slave anymore, he did not tense, waiting for the baying of a bloodhound or the shouts of a patrol. He had been through that terror. The battlefield was almost a relief, or it would have been if not for Orlett. But where was he? A black from another farm said that the overseer had not left when the battle threatened, that he was too greedy and too drunk to leave his property unprotected. So where was he?
John cradled the wounded white men and watched out for the overseer. From the bodies of the dead he took whatever food and drink he could find. When soldiers approached, he either lay low or sought to blend in. The soldiers, however, took little notice of him; most were searching the battlefield themselves or were limping away from the front lines.
Hours passed quickly. By nightfall, he had returned to the master’s house, to the elaborately carved veranda running along every side of it and to the large dormered windows and turreted roof. Inside, the house seemed even emptier than before, the darkness having swallowed what shreds were left of the finest furnishings—a bunched bit of velvet drapery like a puddle of blood. If the overseer had sought to protect his property, he had failed. But then it occurred to John in a flash what the “property” referred to. He decided to search the shacks.
The battle sounds had ceased. Only the occasional crack of a picket’s rifle echoed over the stillness. Across the fields he could see the flickering lights of the hospitals. The wounded would be many, and he had to fight off the urge to help. It wasn’t that he cared so much for the soldiers; it was because they were Daney’s army, his army too. Their survival and eventual triumph were the black man’s. That was why so many blacks had attached themselves to the federal troops and why he was able to blend in with the contrabands through most of Maryland. It was also why he could slip away for his own purposes and assume the guise of a soldier. In the chaos of battle, he knew he had his chance. But he also knew that chance wouldn’t last long.
The shacks were empty, stripped of their meagre tin utensils and homemade wooden furniture. He stood in Caleb’s and felt the strange acceleration of time—how quickly the world had changed. The air around him even seemed cleared, as if a whirlwind had passed through. Yet the longer he stood there, the more the shack refilled with its recent miseries. As soon as he remembered Orlett’s grin again and heard the unbuckling of his belt and heard his grunts and Jancey’s cries, John hurried on.
Back at the master’s house, he realized that he had not made a thorough search of it from top to bottom. The instant he started down the cellar stairs, he heard the low thumping. It was very faint, and he might have ignored it if he had not known the house so well. Behind a false wall, down a short flight of stone steps, he found a thick oak door chained and padlocked. A hectic search of the cellar uncovered nothing that would help, so he left the house at a run and entered the barn. There he found an axe and hurried back to the cellar.
He put all of his hatred for the overseer into his axe swings. But the last year and a half had taken its toll. Overworked and underfed, almost starved on his run from the rice plantation, he had only begun to regain his strength once he’d joined up with the federal troops. Now his arms weakened as the axe splintered the wood. With each pause, he listened to hear if his actions had brought others to the house.
But it remained silent as the axe finally struck the decisive blow. John stooped through the jagged opening into a putrid, dirt-walled room with a low ceiling. The air stank of sweat and excrement. He heard breathing. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he made out the bodies sprawled on the dirt, their hands chained; some wore iron collars.
“Is you from de North?” a voice said weakly. Another croaked for water.
John noticed there seemed to be about a dozen bodies, all men. He quickly assured them that he was a friend as he tipped his canteen into several mouths. At the fifth mouth, he drew back, shocked by the loose-skinned, almost toothless old face. John dropped the canteen, spilling the water. It was Caleb.