Читать книгу The Burning Barn: Speed and Hattie In Civil War Missouri - Richard Boone's Black - Страница 6

The report of the musket had brought Speed back to a reeling pain-saturated consciousness. He lay looking up at the cobalt blue sky where the evening star swirled as a tiny gold pinprick. He wanted three things: to make the point of gold stay still, quench his thirst, and escape the pain that throbbed rhythmically from his calf to a place just behind his ears. He could command only one resource, his own will. He found that with concentration he could slow the motion of the star, and so he fixed on it with all the more determination. He would stop it. He could stop it. He did stop it. He found he was still powerless against the thirst and pain, but his success in arresting the star gave him confidence to cry out to his mother. He felt her hand under his head, the cup she put to his lips, and the subsequent cushion of her bosom as she held his head to herself. After a sustained period when the star stayed fixed, Speed felt Joycie offer him a few morsels of some meat and then gently lay his head back down on the cotton sack of his belongings.

When Speed awoke the next morning, he found that the sun had been up for several hours. His mother stared vacantly at a ripple in the water three or four yards from the side of the flatboat, while Sid and Simmons, their eyes on the western sky, were engaged in serious conversation from the stern of the cumbersome vessel. Speed, wondering if his mother was overwhelmed by the trip, wanted to sit by her to refocus her thoughts. He rolled onto his hands and knees, drew the knee of his good leg up under his chin, and thrust himself upright. With the first step on his bad leg, the searing pain shot up his spine to the base of his skull, but the leg held. He did not collapse. Instantaneously he put his weight on his good leg and then threw himself down next to his mother.

“Why, Speed, I woulda come to you,” said Joycie.

Speed said nothing, but leaned himself against his mother. He noticed that the two men were now both looking at his mother as they continued their conversation, and he was relieved he was conscious again. If he had to, if they threatened her, he pictured himself bumping them into the river, then beating them on the head and shoulders as they tried to climb back aboard. He would leave them to drown while he and his mother floated on to Missouri. When Joycie rose to bring Speed water, he abandoned his murderous fantasy, propped himself upright, drank the water proffered him, and grasped the knee above his still swollen calf so he could flex his leg. A few minutes later he staggered to the down-river end of the flatboat, where he collapsed, only to arise again after an interval and rock the flatboat as he swayed to where he had been sitting.

“That’s what I like to see, boy. Use that leg. Work that poison out,” Simmons called. “No reason to lie around. See that bend up there?” Simmons pointed ahead to where the Cumberland twisted out of sight. “Every time we go around a bend, you walk those paces. You’ll have that leg back in no time.”

Speed feared Joycie would sink into another languid stare, so he was relieved when she gave him an assignment. “Go over to the box, get your Bible, and I’ll give you a passage. You read scripture, then walk. Read and walk. That’s how it’ll be.”

Speed lurched over to their small pile of possessions, which he had dumped on the deck a scant twenty-four hours before, opened the box, and retrieved Ruth’s Bible. Joycie said, “Genesis Three.” Speed began the passage with “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field…” When he finished he clapped the book shut and rose to stagger to the stern, where he overheard Sid say, “Anyway, where did you hear this Birney fellow?”

As Speed returned, he overheard Simmons say something about a James Birney at a Presbyterian church. “Exodus 3,” Joycie called. When Speed came to the phrase about the land of milk and honey, he paused and asked, “Is that like Missouri, Ma?”

“Well, we can hope. We can always hope,” said Joycie.

His mother’s tepid response made it easier for Speed to abandon thoughts of Missouri to listen to the men’s conversation. Sid was finishing a rather long discourse by asking emphatically, “How’s Birney going to get enough money to buy all them Negroes and send them back to Africa? That’s more dollars than they got in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia put together.” Who were they talking about? Speed wondered. What were they saying about the Negroes?

Since Simmons seemed to be taking time to respond, Joycie said, “Maybe you can read what come just above Exodus 3. Seems like it’s what they are discussing.”

Speed read, “And it came to pass in the process of time that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of bondage….”

“That’s slavery,” Joycie interjected.

“And they cried and their cry came up to God by reason of the bondage,” Speed read and then trailed off so he could start to stagger toward the men in the stern and their conversation.

“Them niggers is no better than monkeys that can work. Best thing that happened to them is we brought them over here and they know it,” said Sid, snapping at a fly with a cupped hand.

“I don’t think we know what’s in people’s heads, “said Simmons. “I think some of them is just waiting. Look what that black man Turner did with slaves over in Virginia. Killed more than fifty men, women, and children before the militia caught up with them.”

Both men were silent for a while, and then Simmons said, “Birney’s right, Sid. People is people. They ain’t property. I know it’s legal all the way to Missouri, and who knows what will happen in the territories. But folks are getting pretty worked up. Seems like we got to take care of this before more people get hurt.”

Speed made one of his limping dives to the bow of the craft. On his return he lurched to the right side of the craft so that his weight and momentum nearly drove it under water. Simmons righted the craft by leaping to the left side of the flatboat while Sid gave the boy an angry scowl. After the boat resumed its steady progress, Speed asked in a quiet voice so that the men could not hear him, “Ma, you think people should own slaves?”

“Read me Galatians 3:28,” she replied.

He had to sift through the pages at the back of his volume, but eventually he read in a quiet voice, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.” He paused and then asked, “What does that mean, Ma?

“It means we are all God’s children.”

“But is slavery wrong?”

“Your pa always said nobody could tell a man what to do with what was his. Guess you get to figure slavery out for yourself.”