The rest of the girls are pulling on their boots and heading out the door, so I hurriedly do the same. I barely have time to spare a thought for Katherine. Did she wake up in a feather bed, toast and coffee served on a silver service? Wherever she got to, it has to be better than this.
The sound of many boots on the back stairs rolls like thunder, and as we exit the saloon a couple of bleary-eyed cowpokes leaning against the back of the building raise their heads and curse us out. No one I’m with says anything, so I stay silent, too.
Once we’re out on the street we fall into two lines. The boys are pouring around the back of the general store. They must have a room up above it, like we girls do at the Duchess’s. No one in our group looks to be much older than twenty, and I wonder if everyone here is like Ida, someone rounded up from one of the patrol schools and sent out here.
I crane my neck to see if Jackson is amongst the boys, but I don’t find his ocher skin anywhere. A midnight-skinned boy, tall and rangy, catches my eye and gives me a wink, but I look away before he can get the wrong idea.
The sheriff comes down the street atop a large, ill-tempered-looking beast. I elbow the person next to me, a small girl from Georgia who Ida introduced as Sofi.
“Is that a . . . ?”
Sofi looks at me from the corner of her eye. “A horse? You for real? Ain’t you never seen a horse before?”
I shake my head, and I wonder what kinds of places in the Lost States have horses amongst so many shamblers. The animal is big and the color of cinnamon, with a long nose and a tail of straight hair. There’s more hair along the thing’s elongated neck, and its hoofed feet make a hollow clip-clopping sound in the packed dirt as it walks down the road toward us.
“We ready?” Sheriff Snyder calls, and I crane my neck around. Behind me are Bob and Bill, each on a horse of his own, their shotguns slung across their saddles. They give a curt nod, and the sheriff turns his horse around and starts off toward the edge of town, the thing walking pretty fast with its long, spindly legs.
The columns on each side follow at a trot, and I glance over at Sofi as I realize that we’re supposed to run wherever we’re going. Her face is impassive, as is everyone else’s, as we’re herded forward.
Old Professor Ghering called Negroes livestock the night of the fateful lecture. I can’t help but think of him as we scurry along.
The pace ain’t too fast, nothing like the wind sprints we had to do at Miss Preston’s, but my boots are new and I haven’t had much to eat over the past couple of days, so even a little bit of a run feels like too much. By the time we’ve cleared the rickety buildings of the town and get into the outskirts of the settlement I know that this trip is going to be brutal. The horse in front of us kicks up too much dust, and I’m still weak from the train ride, but I get the feeling that not keeping up would be much worse than a few blisters and a side cramp.
We’ve gone about a mile at our shuffle run when one of the boys calls, “Sheriff, sir!”
The sheriff, who is rolling a cigarette, glances back over his shoulder. “Mm-hmm?”
“Might we sing, sir?”
The sheriff strikes a match and lights his cigarette, then gives a curt nod.
I have no idea what the whole conversation pertains to until the same boy closes his eyes and sings out, “You get a line and I’ll get a pole!”
Around me everyone responds with a chorus of “Honey! Honey!”
“You get a line and I’ll get a pole,” the boy calls out again, his voice strong and even. This time everyone responds with “Babe! Babe!”
And then everyone sings together “You get a line and I’ll get a pole, and we’ll go down to that fishing hole, honey, oh baby mine!”
The sound of that many voices raised in song brings goose bumps to my arms. It reminds me of home, the way the field hands would sing during the worst of the work, the hard things like hoeing or tilling. It was a way to make the work go faster, to take their minds off the difficult task at hand. They’d sing about far-off places and about days gone by, about silly things like peach cobbler and the devil trying to steal their soul. It was something I always felt outside of back on Rose Hill, since Momma wouldn’t let me go into the fields. She always said it was too dangerous, but I wondered if maybe it was something else, like she was afraid that she could lose me to a song.
I ain’t sure how I feel about the need for work songs in a place like this.
We sing as we shuffle along for the next few miles. Eventually I get the hang of it, and I join in, grateful for something to take my mind off the blisters forming on my feet.
When those shamblers gather round,
Honey! Honey!
When those shamblers gather round,
Babe! Babe!
When those shamblers gather round, swing your scythe and bring them down,
Honey, oh baby mine!
Ain’t no use in looking sad,
Honey! Honey!
Ain’t
