Читать книгу San Antone - V. J. Banis - Страница 17

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Chapter Eleven

By day, nearly thirty slaves were grateful to ride packed into the Hartes’ second wagon. At night, Lucretia and William slept alone inside while the others found room on the ground about and beneath.

Lucretia loved William because he was an essentially good man. He was, as well, an uncomplicated one, that rarest of all the plantation master’s possessions, a slave without resentment of his slavery. His acceptance of his status mirrored that of the white masters he had served all his life: It was the natural order of things. Born and reared at Eaton Hall, he had known only one way of life, and that, for a slave, had been singularly lucky. His father had been major domo under the old massa; his mother, cook before Lucretia. As a boy, William had been beaten only twice, and both times he had regarded the punishment as fitting. As a man, he looked down with kindly conceit on most of the other slaves he knew; and had prejudice been less ingrained, he would have seen himself as the better of many whites, too.

Lucretia both admired and despised him for his tolerance. She was not so lucky. There were days in the old house, in South Carolina, when she had not dared pause before a mirror, nor glance in the direction of her own reflection, lest her hands rise of their own accord and try to strip the blackness from her face.

Lucretia’s first beating had been a matter of color. She had been five, perhaps six—she was no more certain of her exact age than her mistress was—when she had stolen into the bedroom of Joanna’s mother, in itself enough to bring punishment down upon her head. She was found there seated at the vanity table, her face hidden under a thick mask of lotions and creams, and over them a caked layer of white powder that crazed and cracked when she howled at her punishment, falling in chunks to the floor, ground back into powder by her flailing feet. All for nothing. What she had seen of her handiwork in the vanity mirror had been punishment enough.

She loved Joanna, and hated her, too; hated herself for loving her, hated herself for hating her. She thought sometimes she would be happier under a harsher mistress. Joanna was kind and gentle, good to her slaves, good to Lucretia in particular. And how could you not resent the necessity of feeling grateful for that? What soul could not fester, bearing such a wound?

How lucky she had felt when Joanna first helped her learn to read. But why, then, had it come to feel a gift she gave the writer, too, something essential to the very urge that had driven him in the first place? Why did only she bear the burden of obligation for something the inherent rightness of which seemed to blossom and spread like a field of dandelions within her?

Oh, the hunger that had spawned, insatiable, gnawing, making the hunger she fed in others seem puny indeed.

Words, clogging her innards, threatening to break through the fragile shell of her skull and print themselves across her brow, for all to realize her guilt.

Like a secret drunk she was, stealing at night into forbidden rooms, dens and studies and parlors; pawing with trembling hands through trunks and valises and letters bound in molding ribbons, thirsting for words, words, more words.

Books, smuggled under her apron. Letters, the possession of which meant the hide off her back. Labels on patent-medicine bottles, and the ragged scraps of newspapers, discarded by those who could read without danger.

For she knew the danger; it had come up like gorge within her. She had awakened one night in a cold sweat of terror and known in an instant why the others did not let their slaves read, and why she dared not let even Joanna know of the books and letters, of the pages and the thousands and thousands of tumbling words that beat against the backs of her eyelids.

It wasn’t the words. They were only seeds. It was their harvest of ideas, that was the danger; she’d known that when the first one rotted in her mouth and made her world taste sour.

That was the bitterest lesson of all, and she could thank Joanna for it as well. She could look back now and see, its seed had been planted in the very first lesson (“A is for apple....”): There was no unthinking an idea.

So, she lay in the dark, with her William snoring beside her, and listened to the sounds of slaves creeping away in the darkness, and did not move to stop them or warn her mistress. She wished them well, and ached for what lay before them; envied their courage, and mocked their foolhardiness. She knew what they felt, what drove them to the risks they took. And her burden was worse than theirs: She had the words for it. And the idea of it.

And now, like a fragile bud she had cupped in her hands, lest her very wishing crush it, she had the dream of it, too.

Their own land. The freedom of it, for her and William, and the children whose sprouting waited in her belly, and the children to come from them.

She would get it; she would use her mistress’s own goodness against her to get it, and without shame.

Because that was the shape the words had taken for her, the idea that had come to live in her, and become her: Freedom was a right. You owed no thanks for it. And the very loving goodness that would make a gift of it was in itself a chain that must be broken if you were to be free.

* * * *

Joanna did not learn until the midday stop the following day that three more slaves had run away during the night.

She stood, worrying at the far horizon. Why was this happening now, here, of all places? She might have understood it in South Carolina, where they at least knew the lay of the land, but here, in this trackless wilderness—or was that the point? All that space, it made you dizzy almost; you felt barely anchored to the earth. And it would be easy enough, surely, to lose yourself; given enough time to put distance behind you, it was hard to imagine anyone ever finding you.

“But they’ll die out there,” she said aloud.

“Pro’ly,” Lucretia agreed.

“All for the sake of freedom?” She could see an effort to live free; but simply to die free—could it be worth it?

Lieutenant Price came up then, with the suggestion that perhaps she would like to ride ahead for a while. “I have to scout the next water hole,” he said. “And now that you’ve got a driver....” He cocked an eye in the direction of William Horse, who looked not at all happy with the suggestion.

Joanna, however, jumped at the chance to put the wagon train and its problems, temporarily at least, behind her. “My sidesaddle’s in the wagon,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” Gregory offered, and headed for the rear of the wagon.

“I’ll have one of the men fetch a horse,” the lieutenant said, but the Nasoni said, “That is not necessary. My horse is here.”

The lieutenant gave the pinto a dubious look. “I don’t know. That horse looks half wild to me.”

“He is an Indian pony,” William Horse said, as if that explained everything. “Here, I will show you.”

He gestured for Joanna to approach the pony with him. She had to admit, though she was a good rider, the pinto looked plenty skittish.

“Do not be afraid,” William Horse said. “Animals smell fear. Here, breathe into his nostrils, like so.” He snorted hard and loud up the horse’s nostrils. To Joanna’s surprise, the horse responded in kind, his nostrils flaring as he breathed a powerful stream of air into the Indian’s face.

“It is the horse’s way of greeting a friend,” the Indian said. “Now, you do it.”

Joanna approached the mount shyly, feeling a trifle foolish. The pinto whinnied nervously, but his large, limpid eyes regarded her with a steady appraisal.

Well, she told herself, it was already obvious that she wasn’t going to conquer Texas without a horse, and who better to teach her about horses than an Indian?

She leaned forward till her nose was almost touching the pinto’s, surprised that the horse waited patiently and motionless. She breathed out hard, trying to direct her breath up his nostrils, and was rewarded with a blast of hot breath that all but choked her.

“Again,” William Horse said. She repeated the strange ritual. “Now,” he said, sounding satisfied, “he is your friend, you can ride him anywhere.”

The horse gave a friendly-sounding snort and, when she reached up to pet his muzzle, rubbed gently against her hand.

“Well, I’ll be,” Lieutenant Price said, clearly impressed. William Horse, looking pleased with himself, went to take the saddle from Gregory.

A short while later, William Horse—and a great many others in the camp—watched Joanna ride off ahead of the train with the handsome army lieutenant.

* * * *

Gregory, on the other hand, was not watching his mother, but William Horse. Jay Jay was enthralled with their new driver, Gregory uncomfortable, and not entirely sure why. He bristled like a jealous suitor whenever William Horse looked at their mother, and because he was constantly watching for such things, he knew the Indian looked at her often.

His reactions were peculiar when you considered that he was not at all perturbed by Lieutenant Price’s attentions to their mother, and they were far more obvious. But in a sense, Lieutenant Price’s presence was official; he would have been there, looking after them, even if he didn’t like them. Good feelings just made it all the better.

It wasn’t that William Horse was an Indian, either; to some degree, that was in his favor—Gregory could not help being interested in the first Indian he’d ever met.

The Indian had, however, thrust himself upon them, unlike the lieutenant. Grateful as Gregory was for his help—and he was grateful; there were many things he just couldn’t do yet for his mother— he was wary, as well, of any deliberate intrusion.

Besides, the lieutenant didn’t exactly belong just to them; he had the whole wagon train to look after—and more than that, you could see that he belonged to the army first and foremost. William Horse was suddenly and simply there, with them, riding in the wagon, driving it most of the time, or right alongside it, with nothing to occupy his attention but them—with nothing most of the time, it seemed, to occupy his attention but their mother.

Being occupied so much with her himself, Gregory couldn’t help noticing, or minding. Gregory thought of himself as his mother’s partner in things. An apprentice, to be sure, with much still to learn, but it was understood between them that he would take over more responsibilities as time passed. It had always been that way; it was what he had sacrificed his childhood for.

He’d never actually played, for instance, with other children. Not that they wouldn’t have let him, or even that he wouldn’t sometimes have liked to. Take Jay Jay, for example. His brother was an evil, evil child; there was nothing so dangerous or so monstrous that he couldn’t delight in it, thrive on it. Gregory would have worshiped him if it hadn’t seemed like going over to the enemy somehow.

Or his father. Gregory loved to cope, he loved to make something his duty merely for the sake of doing it. And he could well have been father to the man whose son he was.

But when the time had come for choosing sides, his father had been on the wrong one. Because no matter what he had done for his father, it seemed as if he had always known it was his mother who managed. His father had problems. His mother solved them. It hadn’t been difficult to choose between those two directions. Not for him, anyway.

Jay Jay and Melissa never really had chosen, but that was a choice, too, wasn’t it? For himself, he had to belong, and if he could only belong to one of them, then that belonging must be total.

Which made him wary of people like the Indian seated next to him, who otherwise by now might have become his friend, if more than one were permissible.

And wary, too, of the fact that his mother was changing, he could see that, and it worried him, because he didn’t yet know how he was supposed to change with her.

* * * *

There was a moment, when they first started to ride from the camp, when the lieutenant glanced at her, frowned, and reined in his horse abruptly.

“Oh, no,” he said, “you’re not taking that with you.”

“Taking...”—she looked around, puzzled—“...what?”

“Whatever it is that’s making you frown like that,” he said. “Don’t worry, if it’s that serious, it’ll wait here till you get back.”

She laughed self-consciously. “You’re right,” she said. “Very well, I promise.”

“Good.” He rode ahead and she followed, the pinto moving easily and gracefully in the wake of his huge stallion.

It felt wonderful to ride, to feel the problems fading into the distance behind her, as the wagon train faded. She had liked to ride in South Carolina, too, but that had been different. She’d almost always been on Eaton Hall land, and even when she was out of sight of house and buildings, even out of sight of all the people on the plantation, she had still felt hemmed in.

But you couldn’t feel that here; by the time they’d crested a ridge and ridden down into a shallow in the earth, it seemed as if they were alone and a thousand miles distant from everyone and everything else.

For a while they rode without talking. They mounted another ridge, the lieutenant pulling ahead and then slowing to wait for her to come alongside him. She saw water in the distance and pointed. “Our watering hole?” she asked.

So he explained to her about mirages, those illusionary pools of water that vanished as you neared them; vanished as this one was vanishing while they rode closer.

“Men have died following them across the desert,” he said, “going straight away from the real water they needed.”

After a moment, she asked, “Is that what my husband is doing, here in Texas? Following a mirage?”

“Hard to say.” He pointed down; at their feet, a brief stretch of wagon tracks could just be made out in the tall brown grass. “At least he’s not the first.”

“It’s hard to imagine anyone else has ever been here,” she said, marveling.

“The land heals itself. That’s part of what I like about Texas. People keep coming, more and more of them, and there’s so much Texas, it just soaks them up, the way the desert soaks up the spring rains, till there’s scarcely a trace of them, and the land is still just as big and open and wild as it ever was.”

“Will it always be, I wonder?”

“There’s something in me likes to think a part of it always will be. If God had anything in mind when he made Texas, it must have been to let a man know what freedom feels like.”

Freedom. Yes, she’d been thinking something like that earlier; that was what she’d sensed here, since they’d left Galveston. Those pushed-back horizons, faded far off into the distance; why, even the boundaries of her marriage seemed to have moved back from her, to give her room she’d never had before.

She tried to look at this moment in time over her shoulder as it were, as it would look when she had gone on into the future.

Wouldn’t it be funny if this, here, turned out to be happiness, the happiness she’d been waiting for all her life, that had seemed always to elude her. This immense dome of sky, faded to a washed-out blue-gray. The endless, wrinkled prairie unfolding itself before them, and the tall grass burning brown in the hot sun. The sky-searching of a hawk, her hair loose from its pins, whipping in her face, and the steady thrumedy-thrumedy-thrum of horses’ hooves on the iron-hard ground.

She laughed aloud. Webb Price gave her a surprised look, and then he laughed with her. Suddenly, he spurred up his horse and with a loud yell, Yippee-i-o, he raced forward. She kicked the pony’s flanks and ran after him, the two of them thundering over the plains. The rest of her pins came loose and her hair made a golden red cloud trailing after her, a web to catch the shining rays of the midday sun.

“There,” he said, pointing to where a greener patch of grass and a low outcropping of brush marked the location of the water hole they were seeking.

They slowed to a more sedate pace. “It got to you, didn’t it?” he asked, grinning. “Texas? It does that, it gets to you all of a sudden. I may as well warn you, once it’s in your blood like that, you like to never get it out.”

She laughed, and shook her hair about her face. “I like it,” she said. “I like it here.” And she did, as simply as that; she felt suddenly as if she’d come home, home to some place where her heart had been all along, without her even knowing it.

“It can be a rough country, too. Hard to tame,” he warned.

“I don’t know that I’d want to tame it, exactly,” she said, looking around with a newfound sense of recognition.

“Like a horse, you mean, just tame enough to stay on, and still wild in the heart.” The way a man wants a woman, he was thinking, but didn’t dare say. The way I want you.

“Like this pony,” she said, and he was immediately sorry for his analogy.

They had reached the water hole. He dismounted and came to help her down.

Their touch, when he took her hand, was like a flash of lightning crackling about them. The tension that had long been mounting between them broke. Whether by accident or by design, she half fell into his arms, against his chest, and somehow, never knowing quite how it had come about, he was kissing her—her lips, her throat, her hair, even the closed lids of her eyes. She crowded into his senses, merged with the scent of hot prairie and tall grass and mirrored surface of the pool. Something pierced his chest like a knife, but sweetly for all its pain.

“Joanna,” he murmured, and in her name alone was his declaration of love.

Suddenly she was struggling against him. For a few seconds he held her tight, body crushed against body, softness yielding to rocklike hardness.

“Don’t, please,” she cried.

He let her go then. She took a step backward, half staggering drunkenly. He could still feel the heat of her breasts where they had been crushed against him.

“I’m married,” she said, breathing heavily.

“Your husband....”

“...Is my husband, for better or for worse,” she finished for him.

“Most would say for the worst.”

“And so you would make of me a poor wife? A cheap woman?”

“You could never be that.”

“I would be to a husband I betrayed. And what man would ever be sure afterward that he could trust me either? Is that what you want, Lieutenant Price? Because I can tell you truthfully, you are very dangerously close to having it. To something we can’t do without feeling ashamed afterward.”

For a long moment they regarded one another steadily. Then, with an angry set to his mouth, he turned away from her. “No” was all he said.

Their horses, mindless of the passion hovering in air, had gone to drink at the muddy pool. They waited silently for the animals to finish, then mounted again and turned back toward the wagon train. He let her ride ahead of him, but when they had ridden a short distance, he spoke her name, in a formal, businesslike voice.

“Mrs. Harte?”

She looked back at him, trying not to show the pain that distant tone caused her. “Yes?”

“I think you’ll be happier here if you learn to manage a western saddle.”

San Antone

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