Washington and Caesar. Christian Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ slave-takers owned her.

      But just as he lost himself in the act again, that last thought burned through him, so that his whole body stiffened a little and she made a little grunting noise like a question. She was very good at reading him.

      She belonged to the two slave-takers. He knew their names, now: Bludner and Weymes. And he wondered why two white men owned the most beautiful black woman near the swamp and didn’t use her.

      It was his third time with her, and only now, at the brink of his own vast satisfaction, did he really wonder why she lay with him. It might have unmanned him completely—the icy hand of betrayal on his prick—but she opened her eyes wide, and her cunny gave a little pulse, as if grabbing him to her, and he was past his fear, and she seemed the only thing in the world. He pinched her nipples, hard, and held her face in his big hands, and they both spasmed together, beyond ecstasy for a moment. Then he didn’t know where she went; he went straight back to the fear of betrayal.

      He rolled off her, stroking her with his left hand to keep her passive while he looked out of the long crack between the barn’s boards. He could see down into the yard. The old slave couple were willing conspirators, warning them when anyone approached the barn, but Virgil had known from the first that the old woman didn’t fancy young Sally one bit. Perhaps her man wanted Sally, old as he was. That would be no odd thing. Or perhaps Sally didn’t talk to the old couple any more than she talked to him. She was odd, a sort of magical creature, too handsome for the dirt and tangle of real life. Even now, as he watched for the two white men with the long guns and assumed that she had betrayed him, he wanted her.

      “Them slave-takers comin’ fo’ me?” he asked, suddenly.

      She turned her face a little away.

      “Sally,” he started, and then couldn’t think of what to say. A profession of love didn’t seem appropriate; he lacked the will to threaten her. He turned her head to face him, and stared into those deep golden eyes that seemed guileless. “Sally, I need to know. Wheah ah they?”

      “Don’ know.”

      “Is they comin’ fo’ me?”

      “They don’ wan’ you.” She turned on her side so that her heavy breasts rolled on to the straw, a movement that always caught his eye. She smiled when she saw how he watched her, even now.

      “They know I’m heah?”

      “They don’ wan’ you. They wan’ the otha’ man, the one killed all the white folk.”

      “They know wheah he is?”

      “They follow you, big man. An’ they wan’ follow you today, to be sho.”

      He stopped stroking her. Somehow, she had said too much—enough to let him know how well she knew the slave-takers, how much of their plans she understood, how little she cared about him. He didn’t really expect her to resist them; it was too hard for a slave woman to resist a man, and he knew it too well. But there were other ways to rebel, and she wasn’t following them. He thought now that he could guess why the old woman disliked her. He pulled his breeches on and his shirt; he had laid the shirt under them to keep her off the scratchy old straw, and it smelled of her. She just watched him, naked. The first woman he had ever known for whom nakedness seemed to mean nothing, as if she preferred it to clothes. His wife had been much shyer.

      “I won’ be back. You need to get clear of they two slave-takers, girl.”

      “I may. Fat lot you know about me.” She wasn’t sullen, just direct, and again he wondered at how little he knew her. He still had one of their two pistols, and he checked the prime, stuck it in the back of his waistband. Then he jumped, caught a beam and swung to the hard-packed floor of the barn, avoiding the creak of the roped wooden ladder that let on to the little loft. He didn’t know where they were or how they were watching him; for all he knew, she was signaling them even now. That didn’t seem so bad, if he could get one of them before they got him, but he suspected they knew he was armed. He suspected they knew all about him. The barn had only one door and he slipped through it and into the tall weeds in seconds, expecting a rifle ball in the back as he moved, but there was no shot, no movement, no call for a chase. He began to breathe a little easier, and then he realized that there was no sound of voices anywhere; that the farmer and his old male slave were still in the field, but no one else seemed to be around. He had expected to find the boy, Jim, who waited for him every time. He wanted, suddenly, to know, and he looked for Jim in the brush at the edge of the clearing. Failing that, he moved as cautiously as he could into the brush pile behind the little windowless cabin where the two old slaves lived. He slipped up on the little cabin from the big cabin’s blind spot and scratched the door with a stick.

      “Who theah?” called the old woman.

      “Virgil,” he answered softly, going through the door.

      “You best be off, boy.” She was cooking on her little mud hearth, making johnnycakes on a flat rock with some meat fat. They smelled delicious.

      “You seen my Jim?”

      “I seen more than Jim. Damn, all you young men is fools. They two men is followin’ yo’ Jim, and they’ll take him, an’ you too. All because you have to wet yo’ prick.”

      Virgil felt his face get hot; it was like being admonished by his mother or aunt. But he could think quickly when it mattered, and he knew that the camp was in danger if Jim was running for it with the two whites on his trail.

      “How long back did they start?”

      “Half an hour. They took guns, boy. You bettah run.”

      “I got a gun of my own, momma. You take care.”

      “It’s that Sally, ain’t it, boy? She sets you up and they takes you?”

      “She jus’ does what she has to, momma.” He couldn’t raise an anger for Sally; and the old woman really reminded him of his mother. Virgil found himself thinking about things he hadn’t troubled himself about since he came to the swamp. He shook his head as if to clear it of thoughts. He slipped out the door and back into the weeds, found Jim’s trail, and started to notice what he hadn’t seen before—clear sign of two big men in boots following the boy. He checked his prime again and set off at a run.

      Up in the barn, Sally wiped herself with a bit of tow she kept to hand and then wiped her body with straw before she pulled her shift on, and then pulled her petticoats over her head and then over her breasts. She never liked taking a man in her clothes; it was so much nicer being naked. She wriggled a bit to settle the petticoat, and then pulled her strings taut and tied them off, and began to look for her pockets and her apron. The men who owned her didn’t care if she did a lick of work beyond what they kept her for, but she didn’t like to be called useless by a wise old woman like Old Sukey. She went down to the garden where Virgil had found her and got her hoe, humming a little in her throat.

      

      Virgil ran and ran, slowing from time to time to listen to the swamp, or just to get his breath. After the third stop his breath was ragged and uneven, and he felt winded. He was in good shape, but the uneven diet told, and running in the swamp was as fatiguing to the mind—which had to make judgments every second—as it was to the body. He checked his priming again, tapped the powder back to the bottom of the pan, and moved off no faster than a quick walk. It was the best he could do.

      

      Caesar СКАЧАТЬ