bathing. I had been with drovers a time or two up home, and it was all I could do to hold my breath until they were done with me.
“He is no drover by trade, but he sure is a fine figure of a man.” Laura leaned close and whispered to me, and her tears had stopped. “I’ve known him all my life, but of course we didn’t see each other any more once we stopped being little children. We just lost track of each other, I reckon, for our paths would never cross in the ordinary way of things.”
I was toting up all she said, trying to work out what she was getting at. “Surely you’d see him at church, Laura.”
She shook her head. “Oh, no. If he went to church, he would go with his own people.”
I had it now, but I was so thunderstruck by the news that I could not even speak to interrupt her.
She got all moony-eyed, remembering meeting up with him again. “I had gone to see Cousin Ann, and he was out on the road, chasing a brindled calf that had got loose from the pen, and it near took my breath away to look at him. I didn’t even recognize him at first. His black hair was spilling out from underneath his hat, and his skin was the color of a buckeye nut, and, though it was September, I reckoned he had a touch of the sun.”
“It sounds like
She nodded. “He says his granddaddy was a Shawnee. But of course, the coloreds mostly do say that around here. They seem to think it is shameful to be kin to the people that owned them, though I can’t see why. It’s no fault of theirs.”
“And who were the people that owned him?”
She leaned even closer, barely whispering it to me, as well she might. “His people were slaves of Wash Anderson’s family over on the Stony Fork Road. Johnny is free now, of course, but he still lives with the Andersons, and works on that farm of theirs, between the Meltons and the old Bates Place. But he says he’s wanting to go west, where life is easier for such as him.”
I sifted through this piece of news.
She was too caught up to see the sneer on my face, and I took care to wipe it away quick, before she did spy it. “He’s a-wanting to go west real soon, and he says he’ll take me with him.”
“How do you come to be with him?” I said quickly, to stop myself from asking why any man bent on heading west would want to be saddled with my drab and penniless little cousin.
“Well, when I met him a-chasing that calf in the road, I stood in front of the beast and flapped my apron to make it run back toward him. He put the rope around its neck, and stopped to thank me for my help. Then I took a more careful look at him, and I remembered who he was, so I smiled back. He asked me how I was, and said he was sorry to hear that my mama had died. I walked on back to the Andersons’ barn with him while he put the calf back in its pen, and we talked about how we all used to play together as young’uns. I remember that he was always good to me in those days. He’d skin up a tree to bring me an apple, or pick berries for me, even in the briars, and when we all took cane poles down to the river to fish, he’d put the slimy old worm on the hook for me. Then we got to talking about how everything has changed since we were young, on account of the War and all.”
I didn’t suppose he was sorry that the War had changed things, for it had given him his freedom. I wondered what they found to talk about beyond that. They ought to have been worried about somebody seeing them passing the time of day together. Plenty of folks around would take exception to that, and if they had a mind to teach him a lesson, he’d be lucky to escape with his life. But Laura was too far gone to be reached with common sense. “After that, I started walking that way most every week on purpose, and we got to be friends again. His name is John, and he treats me better than Tom Dula ever thought about.”
Well, he would, I thought, for one harsh word or a slap from him, and his fine white lady-love could let out a squawk that would get him strung up from the nearest tree. “So he is called John. What’s his other name?”
She shrugged. “Still calling himself Anderson. As light as he is, I guess he may have more right to the family name than most slaves do.”
“And the other-you know-his neighbors? Do they know?”
“There aren’t many colored folks in Reedy Branch, and if there were, they wouldn’t care what Johnny and me do together. We lost so many young men in the War that a woman is lucky to find any kind of man at all. It’s him or a fat old widower, I reckon, for Tom Dula ain’t the marrying kind. The freed slaves mind their own business, same as we do. And maybe they think it serves the white folks right for him to take up with one. Like winning a little battle for all of them. But we don’t care about that. We’re the same as we were as children-just… kind to each other.”
I thought John Anderson was playing conkers with the devil to be risking his neck for the likes of Laura, but that was his lookout. I just wished he had picked Ann, is all. I wonder how that would have set with Tom Dula. And I wondered if James Melton could be bothered to care if his wife took up with him instead of Tom.
I looked at Laura, trying to figure out what she was planning to do. “So you have sworn off Tom now?”
She shrugged. “He comes by now and again, and I don’t say no. No point in it, is there? Locking the barn door on Tom after he’s already had it? I can’t undo that.”
She would get no argument from me, because I never could see the sense of what folks call “faithfulness,” nor why they would want it. The chicken don’t care if you eat her egg or another hen’s for your breakfast, and I didn’t see that there was much more to it than that, but I do know that, for some reason, most people do mind about such things.
“And, anyway, people in the settlement know about me and Tom. It keeps them from looking for anybody else taking up with me.”
The stew would have boiled away if I had not got up to stir it, for Laura was sitting at the table, twisting a plait of her rabbitty brown hair, and looking calf-eyed into the fire. “I do miss Johnny something fierce, but we can’t meet too often, for fear we’ll be seen together. Once people got to talking, there’d be no shutting them up, so I keep having to do with Tom, and seeing Johnny only now and then. I feel like a bear in a cage. There ain’t nothing else to do around here, except chores. If I didn’t have something to do besides washing and cooking, I’d take leave of my senses. Tom is as good as anything else. Us being together is nothing to either one of us, but just a way to pass the time that don’t feel like working.”
It always felt like work to me, but I nodded like I understood her nonsense. “So your heart is set on your nut brown boy-if he keeps his word about taking you away with him?”
She slapped the table with her open hand, and the stirring spoon clattered off on to the floor. “Not if! When! He swore it. Johnny says he plans to light out of here when the weather gets warm-near the end of May. I’ve made up my mind that when he comes through here, I’m packing up my clothes, and going with him.”
I laughed. “Well, you’d best not let word get around that you are fixing to run off with a freed slave, Cousin. Else he won’t get any farther than the end of a rope.”
She so far forgot herself as to shout at me. “Don’t you think I know that? I ain’t told nobody but you, Pauline. I’m counting on you not to give us away.” Right away, she clapped her hand over her mouth, and looked around, fearful that somebody had come in and overheard her, but nobody was there except the baby, asleep in its pallet on the floor. It stirred and moaned at the sound of its big sister raising her voice, but Laura cast a fearful look at the baby and quieted down at once. It tossed a time or two, and rolled over so its back lay to the fire, and went on sleeping.
“Oh, please, Pauline,” she said, whispering again, and grabbing at my sleeve with her fingers. “You have to keep my secret. Don’t let on to nobody that I told you. It’s only for a couple more weeks, and then I’ll be shut of here for good.”
I shrugged. “It’s nothing to me, Laura. I just hope your man realizes the chance he is taking. If he gets killed for messing around with you, it’ll be on your head, not mine.”
“But you promise you won’t give me away?”
“I will not tell anybody that you have any lover other than Tom Dula. I swear.” It makes me smile when I can tell someone the absolute truth, and still be planning their destruction. None of them could see more than a yard in front of their noses. But I could. I had everything I needed now to bait my trap, and so long as it ensnared Ann Melton, I did not care a damn who else got hurt. That was their lookout.
