Freeman (35 page)

“Beg your pardon,” he said, and to Sam, his voice sounded hollow as a cave.

The girls had not noticed the two men watching them. Now they turned wary eyes and did not respond.

“Is one of y’all named Leila?”

The two girls shared a look. After a moment, the first girl stood. “How you know my name?” she demanded.

Ben’s legs deserted him then. He staggered like a drunk, then crumbled in sections until he was on his knees. His mouth moved, it even croaked sounds, but he seemed unable to construct a sentence.

Sam stepped forward. “Leila, is your mother around?” he asked. The little girl nodded, her eyes never leaving Ben. Sam said, “Would you fetch her out here, please?”

The girl spun around and ran inside. The second girl stepped down off the stoop. “Why he cryin’?” she asked, pointing.

At that, Ben mashed impatiently at the tears on his cheeks. Sam reached down to touch his friend’s shoulder. “He is just happy,” he said. “He has been trying to find his way here for a very long time.”

The girl’s mouth drew up in skepticism. “He don’t look happy to me,” she said.

The door slammed open. A slender, pretty woman with arms folded protectively about her waist spoke Ben’s name in the way you would speak a ghost’s. He looked up, then clambered to his feet, unsteady as a toddler. “Hannah,” he said. “It’s me. I come home to you.”

She said something stricken, something that was not quite a word. And then she was in his arms, crying into his chest and the girls were watching with wide, scandalized eyes. “Oh, Ben,” she sobbed. “I thought you was dead. It’s been so long. I thought you was
dead
!”

He held her back from him so he could get a look. “Ain’t dead,” he said. “Ain’t nearly dead. And ain’t passed a day I didn’t think about you—you and my baby. Soon’s the war ended, I took off walkin’. I
walked
all this way here, Hannah, all the way from the North, just to see you. There were days I thought I’d never find you. But praise the Lord I did and we’s together now and I ain’t never gon’ leave you again.”

He leaned forward to close the distance between them with a kiss. She stopped him with a hand on his chest, and turned away from the questions that pooled in his eyes.

“Hannah? What’s wrong?”

“I thought you was
dead
, Ben.” It was an accusation now, and it made her voice tremble.

“But I ain’t dead.”

“I can see that,” she said. “Oh, Lord, I can.” She caught her tears in her hands, took a definitive step back from him. He reached for her. She flinched from his touch.

“I ain’t dead,” he said again.

She lifted her eyes. “You might as well be,” she said, the accusation sharper now, her eyes glittering like wet stones. “For seven years you might as well been dead. You can’t stay away for seven years, then come back and expect ever’ thing gon’ be just like you left it. Time move on, Ben. Time move on!”

“Hannah? What you mean?”

But that was when the door opened and a man appeared on the steps. He was tall, thick in the chest, had skin the color of crow’s feathers and wore overalls with no shirt. “Hannah, what’s going on out here? Who this?”

She looked back at him helplessly as a drowning woman looks at a far shore. Ben’s chin came up, a primal challenge. “I’m her husband, that’s who I am! Who the hell are you?”

The big man stepped down, his giant hands fisted. “The devil you say!”

Hannah pressed her hand into the other man’s large chest. He stopped advancing, but his eyes never left Ben’s. “Henry,” she pleaded, “it’s all right, sugar. It’s all right. He just don’t understand, is all. He just don’t know.”

“Understand what?” Ben screamed it with a rawness of pain.

Sam pulled at him with his one good hand. “Ben,” he said, “come with me.” His friend shoved him off with surprising violence.

“Understand
what
?” demanded Ben. His voice was gravelly and urgent and Sam realized he needed to hear her say it, needed it even though he knew—
had
to know—what was coming.

Hannah faced him. “Ben,” she said, “this Henry.
He
my husband now.”

The nakedness of his confusion was painful to see. Ben looked like a man who has suddenly learned that snow falls out of the sun. “How he gon’ be your husband?” he asked. “
I’m
your husband.”

“Ben, when you run off, you said you’d come back and get me in a year, two at the most. Ben, it’s been
seven
years.”

“But the war come. You can’t blame me for the war!”

“Ben, ain’t nobody blamin’ you. And I hope you know, you can’t blame me, neither. Can’t nobody blame nobody for nothin’. It was never our choice to be slaves, and it was never our choice to be separated for so long. All we wanted was to be free to love each other and raise our babies. But seem like what we wanted ain’t mattered a whole lot. So we got to make the best of it. That’s all we can do.”

“What?” Ben laughed his disbelief. He turned to Sam, as if for confirmation this odd new equation made absolutely no sense.

Snow falling from the sun
.

“What?”

But he was talking to the back of Hannah’s head. “Henry,” she said, “this the man I told you about. Me and him was owned by Marse Albert and Miss Sue. We was together, before.”

Henry nodded. The anger in his eyes had melted down to a dull pity. His fisted hands had fallen open.

She turned to the little girls, standing transfixed by the confrontation between the adults. “Leila,” she said, and her head nodded toward Ben, “this here is your real father.”

The little girl’s eyes raked over Ben and she spoke with a scorn accessible only to children. “Nuh
uh
,” she said. “Daddy’s my daddy.” And to emphasize it, she hugged the man named Henry around one of his massive legs. He made a half-hearted effort to push her off, knowing what the sight of it would do to the stranger in front of his home.

Ben didn’t even see them.
Snow tumbling out of the noon sun. And rain leaping up out of the ground. And horses conversing like men. And…oh, God, the entire world turned upside down, all his expectations, all his hopes, spilling out on the ground like water from a broken jar
.

Ben’s head went down. His shoulders rounded. They waited for him. It took a moment. They waited. Even the little girl. Finally, Ben lifted his head like a weight and spoke in a voice rusty with pain. “You was the only thing kept me alive,” he told her. “Runnin’ through bullets, lyin’ in that hospital cot spittin’ up blood, walkin’ all those miles, crossin’ rivers and mountains and valleys and woods, you and her was the only thing kept me alive. ’Cause I knowed I was comin’ back here to you. Y’all kept me goin’. I thank you for that, at least.”

He turned from her. She touched him and he looked back. “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He smiled without smiling. “Me, too,” he said. “I won’t trouble you all no more.” Turning to go.

She touched him again, he looked back again. “You still got a daughter here,” she said. An invitation.

He looked past her to the little girl, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, clinging to another man’s leg as to driftwood in a flood, clinging to him as though her own father was a threat, as though her father who loved her more than he loved water and air, who had just walked across half a country on the mere hope of seeing her, would hurt her. “That ain’t what she say,” he said. And he walked away.

She called his name. He didn’t stop. She looked at Sam. Her eyes implored him but toward what, he could not say. He lifted his shoulders—
what do you want me to do?
—and followed his friend.

They didn’t speak. They walked without aim, walking itself being the entire point, putting distance between themselves and the nameless little alley where Ben’s life had broken to pieces. After a few minutes, they reached the river. Ben sat on a grassy bluff overlooking the water. Sam sat next to him.

“So,” said Ben, and his voice was quiet, “you got a quote for me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ain’t you gon’ tell me what some dead white man got to say ’bout this?”

Sam faked a smile. “You will be happy to know that I have lost a great deal of my faith in the ability of dead white men to explain what happens to us in this life.”

“Hallelujah,” said Ben. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Sam looked at him. “So what are you going to do?”

A sigh. “Don’t rightly know,” said Ben. “Maybe walk on with you. See if you have better luck when you find
your
wife. Lord know ain’t nothin’ for me here.”

“There is your daughter.” Sam spoke quietly.

“What daughter?” Ben snorted. “You heard her. She think that other man her daddy.”

“Then tell her otherwise,” said Sam. “She is still your daughter.”

He didn’t respond at first. The words just sat there between them like stones. From far away, they could still hear the faint sound of hammer tapping anvil. After a moment, Ben said, “She kind of look like me, I thought.”

“She does,” said Sam. “Around the eyes.”

“Maybe I might stay,” said Ben after a moment. “Mistress said she needed some help ’round her place. Maybe I go hire on with her. Leila the only family I got left in this world. Might maybe be good I stay around her for a while, see if she come around, let me be her daddy. Her other daddy, maybe.”

“I think that is a good idea,” said Sam.

Ben cut him a sharp look. “But what about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What you seen, don’t it make you wonder if maybe the same thing ain’t waitin’ for you?”

“You mean that Tilda might have another man?”

A shrug. “Might have another man or be moved on or even be dead. How you gon’ know? I was gone seven years and you see what happen. You been gone fifteen. That’s a long time, Sam.”

Sam watched the sunlight at play on the ridges of the water. The morning had gone still. But for the blacksmith’s song, they might have been the only people in the world. “I think about it all the time,” he admitted. “I think about it every morning when I wake up, every night when I lie down to sleep. But you know the only thing worse than finding out something like that has happened?”

“What’s that?”

“Not finding out. Living the rest of my life without knowing.”

“You say that now,” said Ben. “You might sing a different song, somethin’ happen to you like it done to me. Lord, ain’t nothin’ never hurt me that bad, Sam.
Bullets
ain’t hurt me that bad.”

“I know,” said Sam.

“Walked all that way, all them miles. And for what? Lord, it was bad enough Hannah say she married, but then Leila hug that man’s leg and say
he
her daddy? Lord. My heart like to drop out my chest when she said that.”

“I know,” Sam said again.

Again, silence filled the space between them. It was the silence of knowing what came next, but being in no great hurry to get there. For two months they had walked together. For 600 hard miles, they had walked, tracing the progress of war from the capital city out through the southwesternmost tip of Virginia, through the mountains of Tennessee, just to reach this moment on a morning by a river with disappointment sitting on the air like a smell. But the long journey, for one of them at least, was at an end.

After a time Ben stood up, clapping his hands decisively against his thighs. “Well that’s it, then,” he said. “Guess I’ll walk back up that hill and see if Mistress still want to hire me on.”

Sam stood. “So I guess this is where we part company.” A pause, remembering the impossible smile that had saved his life on a bridge two months and a forever before. “You have been a good companion, Ben. I have no idea what I would have done without you.” He extended his hand. “I wish you good luck.”

“Same here,” said Ben, pumping Sam’s hand in both his own. “You made the miles go by a lot faster. You be careful out there. Hope you find what you’re lookin’ for,” he added. “Seem like one of us ought to.”

At that, Ben turned abruptly, moving off at a brisk pace, and Sam knew he was crying. It was not yet noon. With luck, he could get another fifteen miles in before he lost the light—another fifteen miles closer to whatever was going to be.