A Dream of Daring Page 32

  “Why would you want to go there?”

  “It was pretty much the only contact I had with anything outside of Miss Polly’s plantation. I was Ladybug, a little critter that couldn’t fly far and had to keep from getting smashed. But when I played at the factory, I felt somehow . . . powerful . . . when I moved boulders and fallen trees around with the pulleys and when I saw how things worked. Why, I could even start the waterwheel! I read all the papers, diagrams, and books that were left behind. I understood the machines and was amazed by them.”

  “I see,” he said, recognizing an interest that he understood well.

  “So when I saw the invention the senator brought in, I was curious. You see, nothing exciting ever happened at the Crossroads. I served Miss Polly tea, I stoked her fire, I read to her, I fetched her shawl, I arranged her clothes. But there was a whole world out there that had nothing at all to do with Miss Polly. And on the day of her funeral the senator brought something here from outside.”

  She pronounced the last word as if it were heaven.

  “I slipped into the old carriage house and studied the device. I traced the tubes and rods and chambers to figure out what they did. I found papers in a compartment. There were diagrams showing how to start the motor and run it, and drawings that showed it doing farm work, and amazing calculations of how the machine could do more work than a whole field of men. I studied everything.

  “In one of Miss Polly’s magazines, I remembered once reading an article called ‘The Horseless Age.’ It described a search that was going on for a new kind of motor, a little engine that could operate small vehicles. I realized I was looking at one of those new inventions of the horseless age. I was looking at the future.”

  He studied the face that livened with intellectual curiosity.

  “If this machine meant that slaves wouldn’t be needed any longer for farming, if machines could do the work faster and better, then that could . . . change things . . . I thought. I climbed into the driver’s seat and pretended that I, Ladybug, was plowing a field faster than a whole gang of prime hands!” She smiled. “I even thought of slipping away during the funeral and going back there to start the engine when nobody was around, just to hear how it sounded, but the papers said to expect loud noises that scared horses and people, so I figured I’d better not cause a commotion.”

  “You were wise.”

  “Of course, I wasn’t around long enough to attend the funeral.”

  He heard pain creeping into her voice.

  “As I sat there on the machine, I heard two men’s voices outside. They were coming toward the shed. I had forgotten danger, and there was no time to get away! I slid off the seat and hid inside the old coach that was there.”

  Her eyes stared ahead as she relived the disturbing events of a life-changing day.

  “Senator Barnwell walked in with Bret Markham, Miss Polly’s overseer. They closed the door behind them, as if they were having a secret meeting. The senator described the device to Markham and offered him a lot of money to—I couldn’t believe my ears—to smash it. He said it had to be done that night because the inventor would be taking it away the next morning. The senator never mentioned you by name. He said only that a crazed inventor, a demon among them, had wild plans to destroy their lives with that machine.”

  Tom felt his anger rise.

  “I was shocked,” she continued. “Why would the senator do that? What was he . . . afraid . . . of? As I hid there in the coach and listened to him that morning, I realized that I was right to dislike him. And, you know, he made it sound as though he were saving the world. He said, ‘Providence has placed the device in my hands for this one night.’ ” She spoke pompously, imitating him. “ ‘Yes, fate has chosen me to save us from the Satan in our midst who created this monster and must be stopped before he destroys himself and the rest of us.’ ”

  Her eyes narrowed in contempt as she recalled the incident.

  “He was a thief and a destroyer, but he pretended he was a saint. He was going to smash someone’s work and future and make it sound noble. Well, that made me mad!”

  Tom nodded as he listened to the only person he had heard speak the truth about Barnwell. He wondered about people like the senator who pose as benefactors while doing evil deeds.

  “Markham was much cruder and more honest about what he was doing.” She imitated the overseer: “He said, ‘If folks won’t need no more lackeys in their fields with this here contraption, then they won’t need me supervisin’ them none neither.’ So he was happy to destroy the invention. Besides, Barnwell offered to pay him, and he grabbed the chance like a dog grabs a bone. The senator told Markham to make it look like the slaves were up to mischief and stole the invention. Markham was happy to do that; he even volunteered to line up the slaves and whip every one of them for the imagined crime. He said they needed whipping anyway, and this was as good an excuse as any. I huddled there in the coach, loathing the two of them. Maybe I was just a ladybug, I thought, but a ladybug could fly and dance on flower petals, while those two could only wade in the mud.”

  Tom listened intently, picturing the scene she painted and the paradoxes it implied, with the town’s most distinguished citizen and its least wallowing together in the mud, and with someone else—the ultimate outcast of all—the only one to recognize the glory of his invention. Who did the dying age destroy more completely, he wondered, its subjects or its rulers?

  “Barnwell gave Markham money and promised more when the job was finished. Then the senator walked toward the window. He seemed to want to be sure that no one saw him give Markham a purse. He was so close to me that I could hear him breathing. Then the worst possible thing happened. He saw a patch of my dress and discovered me there in the coach!”

  The drama of the moment was apparent on her face.

  “The senator was furious! He dragged me out of the coach. Markham told him I was lazy and given to daydreaming. I was glad for that excuse, because I didn’t want the senator to know that I understood the invention and I didn’t want him to smash it.”

  Involuntarily, Tom’s eyes swept over her. She seemed too distraught to notice.

  “He ordered Markham to whip me, then he left. Markham always carried a whip, so he took it out. He said, ‘This’ll teach you yer place!’ With Miss Polly no longer there to protect me, he used that whip with great glee. He knew that I—a slave—thought he was depraved, and he knew it was true. I don’t know whether he was more angry at himself for being what he was or at me for seeing it, but he was merciless. As that horrible whip hit my back, he taunted me. He said, ‘This’ll teach you to look down yer snooty nose at me!’ ”

  Her cheeks reddened and her forehead glistened with perspiration, as if she could still feel the lashes. She paused to blot her face with a handkerchief she found in the dress pocket.

  “After the lashes, I staggered out of the carriage house. My dress was untied and hanging off my shoulder. I leaned against a statue, shaking from the pain. I pulled my hair up to catch a cool breeze on my skin. I noticed a man, a stranger who was coming for the funeral. He approached me. He saw my birthmark and was curious about it. He wanted to look at it close up. This was so odd. No one had ever mentioned the birthmark before. He frightened me, so I quickly tied my dress and ran away! I rushed into the kitchen and up the ladder to the cook’s loft. The cook helped me; she wiped away the blood on my back and gave me a clean frock.

  “The next thing I knew, Senator Barnwell came looking for me. He grabbed me and threw me into a wagon. I was afraid, so I resisted. He locked my hands and feet in irons and dragged me away. He took me to Stoner’s Saloon at the docks. I knew what that meant.”

  Her voice broke. She slid down off the arm of the daybed into Tom’s arms.

  “Why would he have me beaten—I mean, why would he damage the goods—if he intended to sell me? He seemed to have a sudden change of heart about keeping me. I don’t know why.”

  “I do.” Tom thought of N
ash and the telltale birthmark he discovered. “I’ll explain that to you later.”

  “Barnwell sold me to a disgusting man who was in the saloon, Fred Fowler. To my great misfortune, he took a liking to me. Fowler was here from Baton Rouge. He was a gambler, and I think he was here to collect money someone owed him on a bet. My one day with him started and ended the same way . . .”—she dropped her head—“with . . . rape.”

  She buried her face in Tom’s chest, her voice reduced to a whisper. His arms tightened around her as he imagined himself beating Fowler to a pulp.

  “To my horror, Fowler said he didn’t have a wife to object to me! I couldn’t bear to think of what my life would be like with him!”

  “So that skunk Barnwell didn’t sell you to a nice family after all!”

  “Is that what he told people?”

  Tom stared introspectively out the window, making other connections about the man who had condemned the woman before him to a life of unspeakable cruelty. “Now I know why nobody cried for him when he died. No slaves, no friends, not even his family. They knew him. Everybody knew him. They wouldn’t admit it, but deep inside, they knew he wasn’t worth any tears.” Then Tom turned back to her, waiting to hear the rest.

  “Of all my childhood imaginings, there was one role, above all others, that I playacted in my mind over and over. And that was how I would escape. Now, on that desperate day when I was sold, Fred Fowler brought to a head all of my yearnings to make that dream real. He took me up the bluff to Greenbriar, where he rented a room for the night, a ‘purtier’ room than at the docks, for us, he said. My gosh, I was horrified. It was like his wedding night! Later, as I sat there in his room, with him drunk and passed out on the bed, I knew this was my chance.”

  The painful recollections pulled her features into a silent cry.

  “I felt so desperate that horrible day. Miss Polly’s protection was gone. Barnwell was cruel. Fowler was intolerable. I summoned my courage and made my plan.”

  Her features flashed before him the tumult of her feelings on that dreadful night. Her mouth tensed in fear of her plight, yet her eyes held the hope of breaking free.

  With her identity revealed and the fear of Tom’s discovering her past now gone, her manner toward him was changing. He was amazed at the transformation in a face that had been unreadable to one that now flashed at him a range of emotions. He felt as if a door had opened to a secret place he wanted to enter.

  “And your plan was . . . ?”

  “Miss Polly had taken me to Natchez several times to visit her cousin there. Once, the road we took was flooded, so our coachman tried a less-traveled route, which passed through an old Indian trail by Manning Creek. I memorized the route and imagined that I would one day use it to run away. I figured that if I crossed the state line into Mississippi, that might slow down anyone trying to catch me.”

  Tom nodded. Greenbriar was less than twenty miles from the Mississippi border, and Natchez was the first major port city beyond that. With its interacting population of whites, free people of color, and slaves, Natchez was a place where a clever runaway might slip by unnoticed for a time.

  “What were you going to do when you reached Natchez?”

  “I was Ladybug. I was going to do what I had always done, only this time for real.”

  A grin slowly formed on Tom’s face as he realized what was coming.

  “I was going to get the cosmetics and outfit I needed to pose as a white woman, then buy a ticket on a steamer headed to the North. With my hair cut short and pulled under a bonnet, and with gloves and boots on, no part of me needed to show but my face. With my English features and a little ivory face powder like Miss Polly’s, which I had already sampled to see the effect, I thought I’d have a chance. I was going to play the role of a lady, while being just a bug.”

  He smiled at her characterization, at the many paradoxes of the dying age, and at the question raised in his own mind: If a burning desire to hold the deed to one’s life and to break free of society’s paper claims was the measure, then of the women around him, who was the true lady?

  “I had a stash of money from things I had produced on my own and sold in town over the years. And I had a knife from Miss Polly’s kitchen that I had hidden with the money. I rehearsed a story that I’d use on the steamer about who I was and where I came from. I was going to feign illness and stay in my cabin as much as possible, but when I had to converse with others, I was going to use my best manners, my best speech, my familiarity with Natchez and its people from Miss Polly and her cousin, and my knowledge of places and culture from my readings.”

  He grinned at her daring, and then his smile vanished as he thought of the part of her tale still to come. “What happened next?”

  She moved back, away from the reach of his arms, and straightened her shoulders, bracing for an unpleasant task and determined to get through it.

  “I got Fowler’s horse from the stable near his lodging. He had me bring the horse in earlier, so the sleepy stableboy didn’t question me when I took it. I also grabbed a long rope that I could use as a harness, because I was going to a place where something else was in danger. It deserved to live too, and I had a plan for that to happen.”

  He realized that the courage he had mistakenly attributed to Barnwell for defending his device actually belonged to the woman facing him.

  She continued, her voice solemn.

  “I went back to the Crossroads. I dug up the knife and money I had hidden. Then I went to the carriage house and looked inside the window. In the moonlight, I could see the invention was still there. You see, Markham drank. I knew his habits; everybody knew them. He was still at his cottage drinking. I had a chance to take the invention away before he could destroy it. I opened the door, careful not to make a sound.

  “I discovered the top wasn’t on the engine. It had been on that morning! I wondered how long it would be before I could locate the inventor to let him know where his machine was. I thought of the dirt that could get into the engine when I moved it. I thought of the rain and leaves washing down on the new motor and the animals that could nest in it if I didn’t put the cover back on. I struggled with the weight of it, and it slipped out of my hands. It made a loud clang, and I hoped to heaven that no one was around to hear it.

  “Moments later, a lantern shined in the shed and exposed me. I saw the senator at the door. He must’ve heard the noise. With Miss Polly gone and the funeral over, I didn’t expect anyone to be staying in the big house, so I was shocked to see him. I never wanted to . . . meet up . . . with him, but only to get my things and take the invention.

  “The senator put down his lantern. He lunged at me and smacked me. I stumbled and fell. He pulled me up by my hair and smacked me again. He told me if I made a sound, he’d beat me to a pulp. He said I had no business there, and I was going back to Fowler. I told him Fowler raped me, but he said he didn’t care. He smacked me again and told me to shut up; I was going back, and if I resisted, he would cut off the tips of my fingers, one by one, until I stopped fighting him.”

  Tom had heard of mutilations like that used to punish slaves, but only on rare occasions and only by unusually cruel masters. Now he learned that the town’s most distinguished citizen had no compunction about resorting to that brutality.

  Ladybug continued. “I begged him not to take me back to Fowler. My defiance riled him, and he tore at me again. He didn’t see the knife, which I had tied to my leg. As he came at me, I pulled it out and plunged it into his chest. He made the most horrible groan I ever heard, then he fell.”

  She covered her face and composed herself.

  “I needed to have the knife, so I pulled it out. I could feel it tearing his flesh.” She closed her eyes in revulsion. “I tried to stay clear of the . . . blood. I wiped the knife on his robe, and I managed to get the cover on the engine. Before I got there, I had made a primitive collar and harness for the horse with the rope. I thought it would hold because I was planning to g
o only a short distance to the factory with the invention. So I swung out the rods on the side of the machine that were there for pulling it, tied them to the rope ends, and hauled the device away.”

  He listened, stone-faced.

  “I knew the old road feeding the factory, so I took the tractor along it to stay out of sight. Once I got to the North, I would find out who the inventor was and write to tell him where I put his device. Surely he’d run a notice in a local newspaper, looking for information about his machine. Or a news article would mention his name in a report about the Barnwell . . . death. I would find a way to learn the inventor’s name and address, I hoped.

  “When I got to the factory, I found the old block-and-tackle from my childhood. I think the factory workers used it to move machinery around. When I saw it, I remembered how it pleased me to lift large objects much heavier than myself, how it gave me the only sense of power I ever had. I figured I could use it to hide the invention. So I got the pulley system to the road on the ridge above the factory, where I had left the invention; then I dragged it up the hill and fastened it to a sturdy tree trunk. I hitched one end to the invention and the other to the horse, and I was able to pull the device up the hill. When I finished, I hid the pulleys in the brush up there.”

  She sat in a mound of red silk and black lace. He smiled at the notion of the slight figure before him hauling his tractor up the slope.

  “The storm that came at dawn I think washed away any tracks I might’ve left on the hill. And since runaways and slaves fish in the stream and take shelter in the factory, I figured that any dust I disturbed wouldn’t arouse attention. I left your invention alongside an area of tall shrubs at the top of the hill, so I think it’s inconspicuous and safe.”

  “I see,” he said simply. His solemn tone said he was profoundly grateful.

  “I was heading north in the storm when a violent flash of lightning struck a tree near me. It was frightful! My horse bucked and threw me; then he got pinned under the tree. I was frantic. I still had the rope with me that I had used to haul the invention, so I tried to free the horse with it. I wasn’t strong enough, and the rope was about to break. I felt I’d rather crawl under the tree and die there with the horse than go back to Fowler. It was the most wretched moment of my life. That’s when you came along and freed my horse.”