Richard Zimler - Hunting Midnight

No nigger fate blew the wind the wrong direction toward the patrols. No, sir. Not a single staring white face gaped at us from a gate or doorway. The planters were all either snoring away in their feather beds or up-country avoiding the sickly season. And sure enough, Captain Ott had kept his word. At Petrie’s Landing, three rowboats peered out of the marsh grasses at us like they’d been waiting forever for us to make up our minds to leave. Mimi ran to them and nearly fell in the water. I guess she wanted to make sure they were real. We all did.

We lay John on his back in the largest of the boats. His pulse was as weak as a whisper. I wished Papa was there to help him. Or at least to hold his hand while he died.

We rowed as fast as we could. Twice, our boat and one of the others got stuck in some mud. Then the boat that Backbend, Lucy, and Hopper-Anne were in hit something, popped a leak, and started sinking. They were screeching something awful. We rowed to them and pulled them in our boat before they drowned, but it was close. And maybe someone had heard them too.

Fifty yards from the Landmark, one of the British sailors spotted us. Then they lowered down a couple of rope ladders that we had to climb up. They were forced to tie John under his shoulders with ropes to haul him onto deck. Captain Ott met us there and shook each of our hands like we were coming to his house for Christmas dinner. I begged him to get the ship’s surgeon for John. I handed him the coins from the lining of John’s waistcoat. But he patted my shoulder and told me to keep them for our new lives.

While the surgeon was operating on John in a small room below deck, we headed out to sea. John’s screams made me feel sick. Pacing outside the door where they were sewing him up, I had to sit right on the ground or risk falling over. A black sailor named Richardson, from a place called Hull, took me up to the deck, where I could breathe freer.

I guess those British folks had never seen so many black men, women, and children all together. They stared at us as if we’d been shipwrecked on a desert island our whole lives. And maybe they were right.

I sat by John’s bedside that night. I slept some, but I preferred being awake, because my dreams all seemed burnt at the edges.

He didn’t stir from his slumber, and I didn’t dare touch him, but I thought that if I whispered to him it might pull him back to us — back to life. So I told him some of the stories that Papa had entrusted to me and that he might have even heard before, when he was a boy. I was hoping that Mantis could save him, even if the surgeon and I couldn’t.

I thought that being free would fill me with joy, but I don’t think I was ever so tired as I was over those next days heading up to New York. I was weighted down with all the muddy soil of River Bend, clinging to every part of me.

In the early afternoon of our first full day at sea, John woke up, but he was real groggy. I made him drink a glass of water and eat some bread, since those were the surgeon’s orders. That evening his pulse started racing and his face was so hot I thought he’d burn to ash. At times, he got the chills too. When we were left alone I did what my papa used to do with me and spooned up behind him in his bed.

On our second day out to sea, his left arm grew gangrenous, the surgeon said. When I got a look at Dr. Brampton’s saw, I knew I hadn’t the stomach for what they were going to do to him, but there was no other way to save him. John’s screams could have shattered all the glass in all the churches of South Carolina and still flown over the border with enough force to break all the crystal bowls in Georgia too.

I wasn’t allowed to see him that day, so it was only the next morning I could go in. From the way he looked at me, I could see he was back with the living. “Are we free?” he whispered. He spoke as if he didn’t dare believe we’d made it.

He made me cry — because there he was without an arm and he’d used the word we.

John wanted to talk after that, as a way of forgetting what had happened to him, I think. So while he lay back in bed, we spoke about all sorts of things, including who might have betrayed us. I told him about Beaufort and the two men who’d helped us get our arms, Mr. Trevor and Mr. Rollins. He had a hard time believing that a Negro or mulatto would betray us.

“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “There’s plenty of us who just want to look good in a white man’s eyes.”

John said that Mr. Trevor might have needed to confide in a good many folks in order to get us our guns. Any one of them might have betrayed us and earned a few coins for his trouble.

One thing was for sure. Master Edward must have known for at least a few days what we had in mind. Maybe even for weeks. That was why he enjoyed having me flogged so much. He was getting revenge before the fact.

We reached New York Harbor two days later. John was fighting the pain as best he could but still couldn’t walk by himself, so Captain Ott had sailors carry him off the boat and put him in a carriage bound for his friend Violeta’s house. The rest of us walked behind. We had no bags, no money, no map. The folks in New York stared fierce at us, worse even than the British, and they whispered too. We were looking at them — and at the brick buildings, and at the carriages, and at the low gray sky, and at the church spires, and at one another — as if this was all impossible.

But it was possible, sure enough. By this time, the astonishing thing wasn’t that we’d made it up North, but that New York had been here the whole fifteen years I’d lived at River Bend, just waiting for me to come. Everything had always been waiting.

When I woke to myself, I tumbled into a panic so wide and deep that I thought it would swallow me whole and never give me up. How would I go on without an arm?

I kept very still, but I knew that wishing to be the man I had been was useless — there was no magic that would take me back to that time.

The ache of not being whole made me so sick that I had to reach for my basin. Thankfully I was alone, so no one heard my sobs. I muffled them with my pillow, rocking back and forth like a child.

Morri came to me while I was in this fragile and confused state. I gripped her hand and asked if we were truly free, since that was the only thing I could think of that might make my loss worthwhile. She said we were, and she lifted my hand to her cheek. I was moved that she had come to trust me, but I was so envious of her completeness of body that I could no longer look her straight in the eyes.

After she left me and I had another good cry, I decided to try to imitate a man with two able arms. Over the next days at sea, despite the constant waves of pain breaking over my shoulder, I smiled while conversing with Morri, Captain Ott, and the amiable crew, as though my stump were but a superficial wound. I lifted my glass to the surgeon and thanked him heartily for his swift work on my behalf. I knew this was a lie I’d pay for sooner or later, but I could not show them my true feelings for fear of going mad with grief.

It was a tremendous relief, of course, that Mother would not have to visit my grave, that my girls still had one of their parents. Yet I knew I should have to rethink a great many things about my life. And though I expressed my heartfelt thanks to Morri and the others when she told me how I had been carried by the slaves to the rowboats for the journey downriver, a shadowy part of me cursed everything and everyone.

Whenever any of the refugees came to visit me in my cabin, I wondered what being out of River Bend meant to them. Most spoke in happy voices, but they were plainly frightened of the prospect of a life where their own choices would command their destinies. Morri dropped my gold coins into my hand, saying that she’d not been obliged to offer any bribes.