We stood there a little longer and then walked up from the gulch together and then out of the woods. By then the sun was setting over Lockless. We paused at the edge of the woods. Sophia said, “I had best go ahead alone.” I nodded and watched her walk out and disappear. And then I came out, up from the forest toward the house, until I could see the tunnel beneath into the Warrens. And standing there in that tunnel, with her arms crossed, was Thena.
Thena was also transformed by my new vantage. I was running off, a young man with a young girl, toward a new life, the first true life we’d ever have, one that these old coloreds were afraid to pursue. I had tried to save them, save the whole of Lockless, but that was over now. They were lambs waiting for the slaughter. The elders all knew what was coming. They knew what the land whispered, because none lived closer to the land than those who worked it. They lay awake at night, listening to the groaning ghosts of tasking folk past, those who’d been carried off. They knew what was coming and still they waited for it. And all of this sudden shame and anger, rage and resenting for they who let this happen, who stoically watched their children carried off, all of this I now heaped upon Thena, so that when she saw me there coming up from the woods, and I saw her, with her arms crossed, waiting for me as I approached, and I saw the disapproving look on her face, I felt an incredible anger.
“Evening,” I said. She rolled her eyes in response. I walked into the tunnel and toward my quarters. She followed me. When we were inside, she turned up the lamp on the mantel and then shut the door. She sat in a chair in the corner and I saw the flame of the lamp casting shadows on her face.
“What is with you, son?” she asked.
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“You still fevered or something?”
“Thena…”
“Been mighty strange these past few weeks, mighty strange. So what is it? What’s got you?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“Alrighty, lemme ask it like this. What in all of creation done possessed you to run round Lockless with Nathaniel Walker’s girl?”
“I ain’t running round with nobody. Girl choose her company, sure as I chose mine.”
“That’s what you think, huh?”
“Yep, that’s what I think.”
“Then you as dumb as you seem.”
What I now did was cut my eyes at Thena, in a gesture I had learned from children rebellious against their parents. And I was a child, I know that now, a boy overrun with emotion, undone by a great and momentous loss. And I felt it, just then, though I could not name it, I felt all that I had lost when my mother fell into that black hole of memory, because standing before me was someone whom I stood to lose again. And I could not bear to lose her, to look her in the eye and confess my plan, to leave the only mother I had ever known. So when I spoke, it was not with sadness or honesty but with anger and righteousness.
“What I done to you?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Whatever, in all of creation, have I done to you to speak to me so?”
“Speak to you so?” she said, and the look became almost bemused. “Hell you care bout how I speak to you? You fell to me out of nothing, I never asked for any of it, but what I do every evening, after breaking my back for these folks? Who fry up your bacon and corn-cakes? That girl ever done that for you? Who guard you against what these folks try to make of you with all their schemings? And what have I asked from you, Hiram? Whatever have I asked?”
“And why start now?” I said. Then I fixed Thena with a long hard stare. It was not a look fit for anyone, nor any woman who had loved me, and certainly not the woman who had so cared for me.
Thena looked back at me as though I had shot her. But the pain quickly passed. It was as if her last hope that this wicked world would admit some justice, some light, had vanished before her and what was left was the crooked end she had expected all along.
“You gonna regret all this one day,” she said. “You gonna regret it more than any evil that come along with that girl, and evil will come to you, I assure you. But this moment here when you speak as such to those who loved you when you was most frail, you gonna regret.” Then she opened the door, looking back only to say, “Boy like you should be more careful with his words. Never know when they the last ones he might put upon a person.”
I didn’t have to wait long for the promised regret to bloom inside me, but in that moment it was overwhelmed by another portion of me, the one that thought only of my impending flight from this old world, with its dying land, its fearful slaves, and its low and vulgar whites. I would leave it all behind for the freedom of the Underground, and made no exception for Thena.
—
The remaining days passed until finally it came, the morning of Georgie’s fateful promise, came like life itself, long and quick. I woke to that day filled with unease. I lay awake in my bed, hoping that the day might remain there with me, but then I heard the shuffling of the Warrens and the hum of the house above, and this awful music announced that the day was a fact, and my promise was a fact, and it could not be backed away from. So I rose to the darkness and walked with my earthen jar toward the well and saw Pete on my way there, already dressed and on his way to the garden, and I remember this because it was the last time I ever saw him. Outside in the distance, I saw Thena at the well, all alone, drawing water for laundry. It was such hard work—hauling up the water, firing up the wood, beating the garments, preparing the soap—and she did all of it. I remember standing there, knowing how I had wronged her, scorned her, heaped on disrespect, feeling the sharp shame of it, and beating it back with my anger, with my “Who does she think she is?” I waited for her to finish and watched from the tunnel as this old colored woman hauled the water all alone, knowing even then that I would regret this, that for the rest of my life, those last words to Thena, when I stood apart from her, would haunt me.
When all was clear, I walked to the well and filled my own gourd, then walked back and cleaned myself and dressed. I came to the mouth of the tunnel and watched the sun come up over Lockless, and for one final, weighty moment pondered the step now standing before me. I thought of oceans and all the explorers of whom I had read during those long summer Sundays in the library, and I wondered what they had felt stepping up off the land and onto the deck, looking out over the sea, the waves, which they must cross into some unknown realm. I wondered if fear took them, if they ever were compelled to run back into the arms of their women, to kiss their young daughters, and remain there among them in the world they knew. Or were they like me, aware that the world they loved was uncertain, that it too must fade before time, that change was the rule of everything, that if they did not cross the water, the water must soon cross over them? So I must go, for my world was disappearing, had always been disappearing—Maynard called out from the Goose, Corrine from the mountains, and above all, Natchez.
I jogged myself out of the reverie. I walked up the stairs and spoke with my father, who had now found a task for me—work in the kitchen with the remains of the wait staff, beginning tomorrow. “One last day of freedom,” he said. But I was, by then, past any care for such things. I simply nodded and then assessed him for any sign that he had caught on. But he was cheerful, more cheerful than I’d seen him in weeks. He spoke of Corrine Quinn, and her promise to visit later that week, and I felt an incredible relief at the fact that I would by then be gone.
I walked to the library. I thumbed through the old volumes of Ramsay and Morton. Then I walked back down toward my quarters. For the rest of the day I kept out of sight. I could not bear to eat. I could not bear to see anyone else. I was by then done with all the reminiscences and fantasy. What I most wanted was for the appointed moment to come. And it did, I tell you, it did. The sun set, bringing on the long winter night, and then the house quieted and the hum of the day faded until all that was left was the occasional creaking. I brought nothing with me save ambition, not clothes, not victuals, not books, not even my coin, which I now pulled from the pocket of my overalls, rubbed one last time, and deposited on the mantel. I met Sophia at the edge of the peach grove. We used the road to mark our path, but stayed in the woods, out of sight, in case we were spotted by any of the patrols. We talked and laughed in our normal easy way but with lowered voices, until the road bent and then in the distance we saw the bridge across the Goose. And feeling that this was the moment, the place from which none would dare turn back, we were quiet, struck dumb by fear and awe. We stood there looking out at the bridge, which was but a long dark span against the greater dark of the night. I heard the creeping things of the earth calling out to each other. The night was starless and overcast.