We stayed in Florence another day, and another, and on after that. On the third day we walked over to the little cemetery together, Richard and Marion and I, and there we saw the plot where her mother rested.
She looked at me and smiled tenderly, then reached out and squeezed my hand. That’s what I remember best about her: aside from her liaison with Richard, the warmth of her, the feel of her hand and a smile that has followed me across three decades.
That night we sat on the back porch listening to the Negroes singing. The Wheelers had half a dozen blacks who worked around the inn, whether in bondage or as freemen, I never learned, though the father did not strike me at all as a slaveholder. Burton in particular was enchanted by these melodies: “Some of them are very similar to tunes of tribal songs I heard in Africa,” he said. “The only difference here is the white man’s addition, the inclusion of the Christian spiritual aspect.” He wrote quickly by the firelight, trying to capture the words and compare them with his memory of their African origins. He came out every night to scribble down the lyrics, and in odd moments throughout the trip I would hear him humming them softly, comparing them with others he was picking up across the Southern states.
We left early the following week. I looked back and saw Marion and her father watching our departure, but Richard never gave them a wave or a backward glance. I found that rather cold, considering the kind of friendship they must have had, and the certainty that they would never see each other again. “I said my good-byes earlier,” he told me. “There’s no sense going on about it.”
Charleston now seemed close at hand. But we had to endure another night, and a wretched one it was, on the road. It was too much to expect another grand inn in backwoods country, and we stayed in the worst place ever imagined by the angels of hell. The road from Florence to Charleston was a hundred miles of near-total wilderness. I had never seen its like; the choking thickness of it was unbroken except for an occasional settlement with a few scruffy citizens and the equally unkempt shanties they lived in. There were moss-draped trees, swamps, and all around them that brooding black pine forest: vast, unrelenting, increasingly intimidating. I have forgotten the name of the place where we put up that last night before Charleston. Burton seemed satisfied with it, and I had to be, for darkness was falling rapidly and even he did not wish to be caught on the road in such a night as these trees would bring down on us.
The inn was run by an old woman and two hulking simpletons who were apparently her sons. She had a hag’s face, gaunt and full of gaps where presumably teeth had once been; the men conversed in grunts and were well on the way to losing their teeth as well. The only name I heard for any of them was that one of the boys was called Cloyd. The woman tried to appear friendly but this had an effect that I found chilling. We were given a very poor stew, made of some mysterious stringy meat that I could barely manage to taste and Burton ate not at all. He had his suspicions even then, and we retired soon after our arrival.
“I don’t trust these people,” Richard said. “I think we should bunk together tonight and one of us stay awake at all times.”
This was alarming and what he said next was even more so. “I’ll bet there’s more than one sinkhole, each about the size of a man, out in that swamp.”
“What are you saying?” I asked stupidly. “That they would murder us?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time an innkeeper has done away with a guest to steal his purse.”
He volunteered to take either watch. It didn’t matter: I was tired from my restless nights but unlikely to sleep after that. I took the first six hours, abandoning my own room to sit on a chair in Richard’s. “If you get tired, wake me,” he said. “Don’t worry about the time. Six hours from now or six minutes, I don’t care.” By the light of a coal-oil lamp, he produced a gun from one of his bags. He slapped it into my hand and went to bed while I sat at the door and blew out the lamp. This was going to be a long, long night and I took my responsibility seriously. I must not, must
Richard was asleep at once. I sat in the most incredible black void listening to him breathe. He snored briefly and the minutes dragged by. I had no idea what time it was, and after a while time stood still.
At some point much later I heard the noise in the hall: a single footstep and the slight creaking of the floor. I stood with the gun in my hand. There was a bump outside the door and I turned the knob and opened it so slightly—just enough for a look into the hallway. I could see nothing at first, then the two hulks and the smaller one nearby. I heard them whisper, though what they said was much too faint to make sense. I pulled the door wider and cocked the gun. Its sound was loud and unmistakable in that quietude, and suddenly everything froze, all of us where we stood, except Richard, who was just as suddenly out of the bed and at my side. We waited but nothing happened: they had faded away and disappeared.
Inside again with the door closed, Richard lit the lamp. “Well, that settles that. We’ll have to stay alert.” I asked if he had slept, and he said, “Like a baby.” I felt a great sense of camaraderie and pride in his trust. I asked if he had any idea what time it was—my watch had stopped at half past eight. “My sense of things tells me it’s near midnight,” he said. “Your turn to rest.” I protested—I was not at all tired—but fair was fair and he insisted that I take the bed. So I lay down in the recess, still warm from his body, closed my eyes, and did sleep, soundly, for several hours. When the dawn broke I still felt that sense of kinship in what I foolishly imagined lingered from Richard’s body heat.
The proprietress and her sons were nowhere to be seen as we left. “They have no real courage,” Richard said. “They know we’ve figured them out and they will only return like vermin of the night, after we’ve gone. They remind me of Burke and Hare, the infamous Scottish murderers. One held while the other smothered, but I suspect these three had far quicker and more violent deaths in store for us.”
So we were on the road again. I had already studied my maps: I knew that Charleston was located at the end of a long, crooked peninsula, with wide rivers on both sides emptying into a spectacular harbor. It was easy for a
