Matthew approached them where they stood alongside the wharf. Zed saw him coming first. The huge man touched Berry's shoulder, who looked up, followed Zed's gaze and smiled when she saw their visitor.
"Good afternoon!" she called to him. Her smile became more of a sideways grin. Today she was an eyeburst of colors, as befitting her artistic nature. She wore a wide-brimmed red hat and a floral-print gown of red and yellow. A light green wrap covered her shoulders and arms, and she wore gloves of yellow wool that exposed her fingers, the better to control the crayon.
"Afternoon," he answered, and walked to her side to look at what she and Zed were drawing. On each pad were partially-completed scenes of boats arriving at the wharf. Zed's were created with much more force and intensity, each line as thick as a finger. Again, as in the drawings of Zed's that Matthew had seen in the attic, they had an alien quality. The boats looked more like long canoes, with scrawled, menacing figures aboard that seemed to be carrying spears and shields.
To be sure, the sight of a slave drawing a picture at the waterfront was not common, and several people paused to glance and mutter, but the printmaster's granddaughter had been seen around town on many occasions with McCaggers' man, both of them drawing as easily as if they'd been talking. Of course everyone knew the printmaster's granddaughter was a bit strange-an artist as well as a teacher, you understand-but as long as McCaggers tagged along to keep his man under watch there was no need for fear. Still the size of that man; he could go mad with rage and tear down a building, as it was said he'd done to the Cock'a'tail tavern just last month.
"'Lo Matthew," said McCaggers, offering one hand while keeping the handkerchief near his nose. "How are you feeling?"
Matthew shook the hand. "Almost myself again, thank you." He took in a deep draw of air. There were the smells of the briny sea, the wet timbers and the fresh fish. Very invigorating, he thought.
"We were just about to move along," McCaggers said, with a hopeful note.
"Before you do, I have this." Matthew held up the envelope. Berry and McCaggers stared at it, but Zed had returned to his art. Matthew broke Cornbury's seal, removed the parchment from within and unfolded it. "Ah," he said when he saw the crimped and altogether ugly signature. No matter, it was the intent that counted. "The writ of manumission," Matthew said, and showed it first to McCaggers, then to Berry.
"My God." McCaggers sounded stunned. "I can't believe you actually secured it." He turned to look at Zed, who was concentrating on further thickening a line and paid the others no attention whatsoever.
"Matthew? May I tell him?" Berry asked.
"Tell him? How?"
"Let me," she said.
He gave her the document.
"Zed?" When Berry spoke his name, he immediately turned his head and looked down at her. She held up the writ. "You are free," she said. "Do you understand that? You are free." She touched Lord Cornbury's signature.
He frowned, his fathomless ebony eyes moving back and forth from the parchment to Berry. There seemed to be no comprehension of what he was looking at.
Berry turned the document over, put it down on her pad, and began to draw something. As Matthew watched, a fish took shape. It was leaping out of the water, like one of the many drawings of fish Zed had done and kept in a box under his cot. When she had finished, Berry showed him the picture.
He stared at it, his tribal-scarred face immobile.
Slowly, his mouth opened. He gave a quiet gasp, from deep in his throat.
"Yes," Berry said, nodding. She offered him a kind smile. "You are as free as that."
Zed turned his head toward the market itself, where the catch was being laid out on tables beneath a roof of brown canvas. He moved his gaze across the many dozens of shimmering silver, brown-patterned and green-streaked bodies brought up on the lines and in the nets, across the seabass, the snapper, the fluke, the cod, the flounder, the bluefish, the mackerel, the cunner and the hake. He was a fisherman too. He knew the difference between a dead fish losing its magnificent colors and shine on a wet table as opposed to the fish that had slipped a hook or sensed the fall of a net and gone deep into the blue, deep where no man might catch it, deep where it might swim for yet another day as a bird might fly through the air.
Matthew realized what Berry had already figured out.
The fish that Zed drew were the ones that had gotten away.
And in his mind, that was freedom.
Zed understood. Matthew saw it dawn in his eyes: a spark, like a distant candle on the darkest night.
He looked at them all in turn-Berry, Matthew and McCaggers-and then brought his gaze back to the girl. She smiled and nodded once more-the universal language of yes-and he nodded also but it was hard for a man in an alien world to smile.
He dropped the pad and crayon. He turned away from them, and he began to walk along the nearest pier out toward the water. As he went, he removed his shirt. Fishermen stepped aside, for he was a mighty force in motion. He kicked off one shoe, then the other, and now he was running, and anyone who had stood between him and his destination would have gone down as if hit by a moving wall.
"Zed!" Berry cried out.
He dove off the end of the pier, into the cold river water where the sun sparkled in bright ribbons. But even as big as he was, he hardly made a splash.
They shifted their positions to see past a boat and caught sight of his head surfacing, followed by the broad shining shoulders and back. Zed began to swim with powerful, deliberate strokes, following the river's current as it flowed to the Atlantic. He kept going, past the point where Matthew thought he must surely stop and turn back. He kept going.
"He'll come back," McCaggers said, the reflection of sun and water in his spectacles.
But Zed did not pause in his forward motion. Through the chill water, he swam on. "He won't go too very far," McCaggers said.
What was too very far? Matthew wondered if on all those nights Zed had studied the stars he'd calculated the way home, and now he was bound to get there if only in his last dream as he swam downward into the blue, away from the hooks and the nets.
"Zed!" McCaggers shouted. In his voice was a hint of panic. Matthew realized that McCaggers had likely considered Zed not a slave but a companion. One of a very few he could claim, for who wished to be friends with a man who spent so much time with the dead?
Zed kept swimming, further and further out, toward the wide expanse of the sea.
McCaggers said firmly, "He'll come back. I know he will."
A little waterbug of a boat moved majestically between them and Zed, its patched sails flying. When the boat passed, there was no more sign of the man.
They stood there for several more minutes, keeping watch.
At last McCaggers bent down and picked up the pad and crayon, and he gave them to Berry.
"He's a good swimmer," Berry said. "We just may not be able to see him from here."
"Yes," McCaggers agreed. "The sun's bright on the water. We may not be able to see."
Matthew felt he ought to add something, but he could only think that one attribute of being truly free was choosing how one wished to depart from life. Still was it a triumph or a tragedy?
McCaggers walked out onto the pier. He took his spectacles off, wiped the lenses with his handkerchief and put them back on. He stood there for awhile staring in the direction Zed had gone. When he came back, he said to Berry with a note of relief, "I think I saw him. I believe he's all right."
Matthew said nothing; he'd already seen what looked to him like a treetrunk with twisted branches being carried out toward Oyster Island.
The work of gutting fish had begun. McCaggers turned his face away from the sea, caught sight of a bucket full of fish heads and entrails, and focused on Berry. "Will you accompany me," he said, "for a cup of coffee?" He had a yellowish pallor. "On Crown Street?"