The girl was trembling, but he did not try to soothe her fear. She knew well enough what he wanted, and it did not matter to him how she felt.
In the darkness of the tiny cabin, he lit another corona and watched the girl. She went to the washbasin and splashed the cold water onto her face, washed her hands.
“Take off those rags,” he ordered when she didn’t rush to do so.
She pulled the thin cotton dress over her shoulders, doing it so as not to look at him.
“All of it,” he added when she did not immediately slip out of her thin petticoat.
As she pushed off her petticoat, she began to cry.
“Stop it!” he told her, and in one quick motion, he sprang off the bunk bed and slapped her face.
Sarah slid to the floor, clutching his leg, still crying. He kicked out, but her arms were clutched around his leg, and he stumbled against the wall of the cabin.
Now he swore and, reaching down, seized her shoulders and lifted her to his face.
She weighed nothing. His massive hands held her easily off the floor. Her face was inches from his. He could smell her frightened breath, smell her flesh. Her kinky hair smelled of smoke, her body of the river musk, of her own animal sweat. He loved the smell of black women, even more than he loved their flesh.
He kissed her, forcing his mouth over hers, digging his tongue into her gasping mouth. She tried to struggle, and he quickly slipped his arms about her, pinning her naked body to him.
She cried out, but her small voice was muffled by the heavy beating of the paddleboat, the noise of the river.
“Scream,” he told her, laughing, enjoying her helplessness. No one would hear her. Then he pushed Sarah away and studied her face.
She was almost as beautiful as a white woman, he thought, with the same thin features, the small mouth of an English woman, and wide, bright, chocolate brown eyes. Her skin was copper colored and smooth. There was white blood in this bitch, he thought next, and he felt her small breasts.
She gasped, and he laughed again, clinching the tiny corona in his teeth.
“You like that, huh?” he asked. “And this?” He grabbed her sex with his right hand and hoisted her up.
She screamed and went to hit him, but he struck first, knocking her across the small cabin.
“Get up, bitch!” he ordered, “and over here.”
He turned to the small bed and took off his coat, then sat down and told her, “Pull these boots off, girl.” He reached down and pulled his small pistol from the top of his right boot and tossed it on the soft bed covers. “Hurry, you!”
Wordless, she crept over to him, still crying from the beating, took hold of his right boot, and jerked it off. “There,” he said, “that’s better.”
He raised his left leg, and she pulled off the boot. She was still on the wood floor of the steamer cabin, and she carefully placed the boots together at the foot of the small bunk bed, then slowly, still in pain, she pulled herself up. She was so small and thin that her whole body did not take up any space in the tight room. He towered in it. He crowded her.
“Forget about your Major Smythe, Sarah. I have no plans to put you back in those cotton fields. I have better plans for you. Plans of my own, girl, if you have the right temperament. How would you like to visit New Orleans?”
He was pulling off his ruffled shirt, placing the pearl buttons on a tray, and then she suddenly reached, like a hungry child seizing food, and he saw she had grabbed the derringer.
“Bitch!” he shouted, reaching for her arm.
She fired at once, not looking, screaming and terrified. The single shot would have been wild, but he stumbled forward and was hit in his left eye. The bullet smashed the socket and drove up into his brain, and the blood splattered her naked body, and then the walls and ceiling of the tiny cabin as he turned and stumbled to his death, crashing against the washstand, spilling the water and breaking the large porcelain pitcher.
No one heard the shot. No one heard her cry out in fright, and she wasn’t sure whether she was really crying or whether the rage and horror were only in her head. She sat for a while, trembling in the corner, watching him across the cabin. He no longer moved, and the blood spread like sewage around his body and across the floor, seeping into the wood.
Toward morning, the first song of the slaves rose from deep in the river steamer, and she awoke. The voices called to her, came to her through the vastness of the boat. It was a funeral song. Some slave had died in the hold of the steamer.
Sarah stood and, moving so that she wouldn’t see or come too close to the sprawling dead man, she retrieved her dress and petticoat and then dressed with her back to the man she had killed. She only looked at him once to be positive in her own mind that she didn’t know him, and then she opened the cabin door, slipped out into the empty passageway.
On the deck she went at once to the back of the steamer, knowing that at any moment she would be seen, shouted at by the white men. But it was still early and quiet on the river. Sarah could see the green shores and the calm river. It would be a lovely day, she thought, reaching the paddlewheel.
Someone shouted, and she glanced around and saw a black man, one that had helped load the cargo of slaves. He was waving, motioning her away from the spinning wheel, and getting up off the deck to come to her. Sarah smiled, thinking that she was a free woman now, and that she loved her God in heaven, and that she was glad she had killed the white man before he violated her. Then she jumped—as any young girl might, full of life and energy—into the twisting of the giant paddlewheel and disappeared down into the foamy white and deadly-churning paddlewheel water.
CHAPTER NINE
“I THINK I KILLED them,” Jennifer told Tom, holding the teacup in both trembling hands. The cup was warm and comforting. She sipped the tea slowly, letting it warm her whole body. She was in Tom’s apartment, sitting in the corner of his leather couch. She had telephoned him to meet her at once at his place.
Tom was in a chair on the other side of a glass coffee table. He listened patiently as she described what had happened in the foundation bathroom. He kept interrupting with questions, and he scribbled notes on a legal pad while she talked, as if she were his client instead of his lover.
“Don’t,” she told him.
“Don’t what?” He kept writing, using the gold Cross pen she had given him.
“Don’t take notes. It makes me feel like a criminal.”
“You’re not a criminal unless you’re convicted.” He finished a note, then sat back in the soft, light brown leather chair and watched her for a moment. She knew what was coming. He was framing his statement, trying to make it sound less threatening, but before he could speak, she stood and walked to the windows of the apartment, staring out across the Hudson River at the bleak industrial shores of New Jersey. The day had cleared. It had stopped snowing, and a hard-edged blue sky had reappeared. “We’re going to have to talk to the police,” he said behind her, trying to sound casual.
“No!” She felt a wedge of panic and reached out to touch the windowpane with the palm of her hand, as if to let the cold glass calm her. “No,” she whispered.
“We’re looking at justifiable homicide,” he went on, speaking in the same soft, measured tones.
She had first met him on a grand jury trial, and she remembered how she had been captivated by the way he cross-examined witnesses. He was like a bird of prey, a dark handsome falcon hovering, circling, closing in. Slowly, softly, without raising his voice or seeming to intrude, he had backed each poor witness into a corner, and then stripped him bare, exposing the lies.