She’d never do me any harm if she could help it.”
We walked on a few feet farther into the woods, so that passersby on the road wouldn’t spot us. We settled ourselves down on the pine straw, Laura nestled up against John, who was careful to keep his distance from me, and we kept our voices low as we talked. I kept quiet at first, not knowing what he might take offense at, and half hoping he’d forget about me altogether, so that I could listen to their plans, but I made him too jumpy for that. He watched me the way I had kept an eye out for snakes in the untilled field.
“My cousin tells me you are wanting to go west,” I said, watching his face when I said it.
He nodded. “I’m tired of being a farmhand around here. I’ll take what work I can get over the mountain.”
“Were you free before the War, or just lately?”
He gave me a hard look. “I’m free now, and that’s all that matters. The rest is over and done with.”
“Well, I hope you get your new start then.”
Laura kept saying, “I’ll be so glad to get shut of this place!” and then she’d reach up and stroke his cheek, or lay her head on his shoulder.
Finally, because the boredom of watching the two of them was making me sweat, I said, “So you mean to make a run for it, you and her, do you?”
He glanced left and right, as if he thought I had salted away a regiment of soldiers in the bushes. But there was nobody around but just us three. “I’m moving on west to Tennessee, maybe farther. Miss Laura here, she has a mind to go with me.”
I almost laughed at the “Miss Laura,” but he was right to be careful. Best not even to drop the “miss” in private, lest you make a habit of it, and slip up one day in public. “How are you planning on going?” I asked him. “On foot? You’d better not let her daddy catch you, else he’ll beat her like a tin drum, and I reckon they’d just hang you.”
He didn’t flinch when I said that. But that didn’t surprise me. He would have to be more crazy than brave to have taken up with a white woman in the first place, so I knew he was what folks would call uppity and dangerous. Well, so was I, but mostly I had enough sense to keep anybody from finding out about it. Maybe he did, too, but I doubted it. You could read his feelings on his face like watching clouds scud across a March sky. He’d live longer if he went west. And longer still if he went alone, but I could see that he meant to take her with him.
“We would have a horse,” he said at last.
“Just the one?” I inclined my head toward Laura, who wasn’t paying our talk any mind. She was leaning up against him, and plaiting blades of grass into a ring, while she hummed to herself.
“Just the one.”
“You’ll not get far enough fast enough with two of you on one horse.”
He smiled at that, but his eyes stayed cold. “They’d hang me quicker for a horse thief than for taking off with her, don’t you figure?”
“Best not to get caught at all. You know, her daddy has a horse.” I don’t know how he came by it, him being a sharecropper and all, but he sure enough had a little white mare that was about as drab and scrawny as his daughter was.
Laura looked up when I said that. “Yes, that’s the one. We mean to take Daddy’s horse. They couldn’t do much to me, could they? If it was me that took it?”
“Of course they couldn’t,” I said, not because I believed it, but just to speed things along. “I reckon you’d stand a better chance of getting clean away if you each had a horse, though. Else they might catch up with you on the road before you reached Tennessee.”
They looked at each other then, like the horse was already taken and they were galloping away to the west- they was seeing it happening in one another’s eyes. I kept still, to let the thought take hold in their heads. I was watching a mayfly buzzing around in the field, looking for cow dung. Mayflies flit above the ground on fairy wings, but they don’t live long.
“We will make do with one,” John Anderson said.
“Do you think we could?” said Laura, catching both his hands in hers, her eyes shining like mayfly wings. “Just take Daddy’s old mare, and light out of here before anybody misses us?”
He hesitated, and glanced over at me again.
“You ought to start early,” I said. “As near as you can to sun-up, before too many people are about. Just meet somewhere and go. They’ll not hear about your plans from me, now or ever.”
That decided him. “Let’s go tomorrow. First light.”
“You don’t want to go to her house,” I told him. “Somebody might see you, and then they’d hunt you down for sure. Best to meet up someplace where you won’t be seen.”
“She’s right, John. I’ll pack my clothes and take the horse come sun-up. Where can I meet you?”
“At the Bates’ place. It’s only a stone’s throw from the Andersons’, so no one will see us together on the road. We’ll meet there and head straight for the mountains.”
Laura hesitated. “What if somebody was to see me on the road before I get there? They’ll know I’m running away.”
“Why, tell them you’re running off with Tom. Nobody would mind about that, and by the time they find out any different, the two of you will be long gone. You mustn’t tell anybody-anybody-who you’re really going with. If you do, you’ll get John hanged for sure.”
John Anderson nodded, liking the plan. Then he turned back to me. “Swear that you won’t tell about us running off. On your life. Swear it.”
And I swore, hand on heart, and eyes awash with tears. I meant it, too. Oaths are nothing to me. Some fool who can’t keep a secret is trying to make sure that somebody else will, that’s all. So I always tell people what they want to hear. But this time I meant it.
An hour or so later I hurried back to the Meltons’ place to tell Ann that Laura Foster was eloping-
PAULINE FOSTER
For once I didn’t mind the long, muddy walk back from German’s Hill, for I needed every mile of the journey to think out what to do next. It was like trying to piece together squares on a quilt to make a pattern, only sewing is stupid and tedious work, and I had always hated it-but this cutting and piecing together of people’s lives makes my heart quicken with excitement.
I walked back along the trace, following the fading sun, which was just about to sink below the blue mountains in the distance, where I’d come from back in March. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the clouds stopped and the mountains began; they had that same blue hazy look against the sky, as if one was no more solid than the other.
I didn’t meet anybody on the road, and I’d scarcely have taken note of it if I had, for my mind was running faster than a snow-melt creek, thinking on what I would say and who I needed to talk to before morning.
I could have ended Laura’s fine plans for an elopement then and there, I think, if I’d told her secrets in the right ears. If I’d warned her daddy that he was about to lose both his mare and his daughter, I reckon he’d have put a stop to it. Or if I’d told some of the neighbors-or that high and mighty Colonel Isbell, who thinks he is the lord and master of everybody in the valley-that Laura Foster was fixing to run away with a colored man, they’d have stepped in. And if I had just told that nut brown boy of hers that Laura was afflicted with the pox-I doubt if even her white skin would have made her a prize to him then. Being hanged for running off with her or catching the deadly pox from her-it was all the same in the end. Death. And more than she was worth.
But I had no particular score to settle with Laura Foster, except for the fact that somebody loved her. She was making foolish choices, and she would bring about her own ruin without any help from me. I reckoned that I had more wrongs to repay in other quarters, and I meant to see those debts of cruelty paid in kind, hurt for hurt. It would take a careful piecing together, though, this blood quilt in my head. One dropped stitch and all would come undone.
When I neared the Melton place that evening, it was already gathering dark and the wind had picked up some,
