Noise in the forest, this scare Black slavegirl very bad. Trees grab her, owls screech out telling where they find her, this river just laugh at her all along. She can’t move cause she fall in the dark, she hurt this baby. She can’t stay cause they find her sure. Flying don’t fool them finders, they look far and see her even a hand of hands away off.

  A step for sure. Oh, Lord God Jesus save me from this devil in the dark.

  A step, and breathing, and branches they brush aside. But no lantern! Whatever come it see me in the dark! Oh. Lord God Moses Savior Abraham.

  “Girl.”

  That voice, I hear that voice, I can’t breathe. Can you hear it, little boy-baby? Or do I dream this voice? This lady voice, very soft lady voice. Devil got no lady voice, everybody know, ain’t that so?

  “Girl, I come to take you across the river and help you and your baby get north and free.”

  I don’t find no words no more, net slave words or Umbawa talk. When I put on feathers do I lose my words?

  “We got a good stout rowboat and two strong men to row. I know you understand me and I know you trust me and I know you want to come. So you just set there, girl, you hold my hand. there, that’s my hand. you don’t have to say a word, you just hold my hand. There’s some White men but they’re my friends and they won’t touch you. Nobody’s going to touch you except me, you believe that, girl, you just believe it.”

  Her hand it touch my skin very cool and soft like this lady voice. This lady angel. this Holy Virgin Mother of God.

  Lots of steps, heavy steps, and now lanterns and lights and big old White men but this lady she just hold on my hand.

  “Scared plumb to death.”

  “Look at this girl. She’s most wasted away to nothing.”

  “How many days she been without eating?”

  Big men’s voices like White Boss who give her this baby.

  “She only left her plantation last night,” said the Lady.

  How this White lady know? She know everything, Eve the mama of all babies. No time to talk, no time to pray, move very quick, lean on this White lady, walk and walk and walk to this boat it lie waiting in the water just like I dream, O! here the boat little boy-baby, boat lift us cross the Jordan to the Promise Land.

  They were halfway across the river when the Black girl started shaking and crying and chattering.

  “Hush her up,” said Horace Guester.

  “There’s nobody near us,” answered Peggy. “No one to hear.”

  “What’s she babbling about?” asked Po Doggly. He was a pig farmer from near Hatrack mouth and for a moment Peggy thought he was talking about her. But no, it was the Black girl he meant.

  “She’s talking in her African tongue, I reckon,” said Peggy. “This girl is really something, how she got away.”

  “With a baby and all,” agreed Po.

  “Oh, the baby,” said Peggy. “I’ve got to hold the baby.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Papa.

  “Because you’re both going to have to carry her,” she said. “From shore to the wagon, at least. There’s no way this child can walk another step.”

  When they got to shore, they did just that. Po’s old wagon was no great shakes for comfort—one old horseblanket was about as soft as it was going to get—but they laid her out and if she minded she didn’t say so. Horace held the lantern high and looked at her. “You’re plumb right, Peggy.”

  “What about?” she asked.

  “Calling her a child. I swear she couldn’t be thirteen. I swear it. And her with a baby. You sure this baby’s hers?”

  “I’m sure,” said Peggy.

  Po Doggly chuckled. “Oh, you know them guineas, just like bunny rabbits, the minute they can they do.” Then he remembered that Peggy was there. “Begging your pardon, ma’am. We don’t never have ladies along till tonight.”

  “It’s her pardon you have to beg,” said Peggy coldly. “This child is a mixup. Her owner sired this boy without a by-your-leave. I reckon you understand me.”

  “I won’t have you discussing such things,” said Horace Guester. His temper was hot, all right. “Bad enough you coming along on this without you knowing all this kind of thing about this poor girl, it ain’t right telling her secrets like that.”

  Peggy fell silent and stayed that way all the ride home. That was what happened whenever she spoke frankly which is why she almost never did. The girl’s suffering made her forget herself and talk too much. Now Papa was thinking on about how much his daughter knew about this Black girl in just a few minutes, and worrying how much she knew about him.

  Do you want to know what I know, Papa? I know why you do this. You’re not like Po Doggly, Papa, who doesn’t think much of Blacks but hates seeing any wild thing cooped up. He does this, helping slaves make their way to Canada, cause he’s just got that need in him to set them free. But you. Papa, you do it to pay back your secret sin. Your pretty little secret who smiled at you like heartbreak in person and you could’ve said no but you didn’t, you said yes oh yes. While Mama was expecting me, it was, and you were off in Dekane buying supplies, you stayed there a week and had that woman must be ten times in six days, I remember every one of those times as clear as you do, I can feel you dreaming about her in the night. Hot with shame, hotter with desire, I know just how a man feels when he wants a woman so bad his skin itches and he can’t hold still. All these years you’ve hated yourself for what you did and hated yourself all the more for loving that memory, and so you pay for it. You risk going to jail or getting hung up in a tree somewhere for the crows to pick, not because you love the Black man but because you hope maybe doing good for God’s children might just set you free of your own secret love of evil.

  And here’s the funny thing, Papa. If you knew I knew your secret you would probably die, it might just kill you on the spot. And yet if I could tell you, just tell you that I know, then I could tell you something else on top of that, I could say, Papa, don’t you see that it’s your knack? You who thinks he never had no knack, but you got one. It’s the knack for making folks feel loved. They come to your inn and they feel right to home. Well you saw her, and she was hungry, that woman in Dekane. she needed to feel the way you make folks feel, needed you so bad. And it’s hard, Papa, hard not to love a body who loves you so powerful, who hangs onto you like clouds hanging onto the moon, knowing you’re going to go on, knowing you’ll never stay, but hungering, Papa. I looked for that woman, looked for her heartfire, far and wide I searched for her, and I found her. I know where she is. She ain’t young now like you remember. But she’s still pretty, pretty as you recall her, Papa. And she’s a good woman, and you done her no harm. She remembers you fondly, Papa. She knows God forgave her and you both. It’s you who won’t forgive, Papa.

  Such a sad thing, Peggy thought, coming home in that wagon. Papa’s doing something that would make him a hero in any other daughter’s eyes. A great man. But because I’m a torch, I know the truth. He doesn’t come out here like Hector afore the gates of Troy, risking death to save other folks. He comes slinking like a whipped dog, cause he is a whipped dog inside. He runs out here to hide from a sin that the good Lord would have forgave long ago if he just allowed forgiveness to be possible.

  Soon enough, though, Peggy stopped thinking it was sad about her Papa. It was sad about most everybody, wasn’t it? But most sad people just kept right on being sad, hanging onto misery like the last keg of water in a drouth. Like the way Peggy kept waiting here for Alvin even though she knew he’d bring no joy to her.

  It was that girl in the back of the wagon who was different. She had a terrible misery coming on her, going to lose her boy-baby, but she didn’t just set and wait for it to happen so she could grieve. She said no. Plain no, just like that, I won’t let you sell this boy south on me, even to a good rich family. A rich man’s slave is still a slave, ain’t he? And down south means he’ll be even farther away from where he can run off and make it north. Peggy could feel those feelings in that girl, even as she tossed and moaned in the back of the wagon.

  Something more, though. That girl was more a hero than Papa or Po Doggly either one. Because the only way she could think to get away was to use a witchery so strong that Peggy never even heard of it before. Never dreamed that Black folks had such lore. But it was no lie, it was no dream neither. That girl flew. Made a wax poppet and feathered it and burnt it up. Burnt it right up. It let her fly all this way, this long hard way till the sun came up, far enough that Peggy saw her and they took her across the Hio. But what a price that runaway had paid for it.

  When they got back to the roadhouse, Mama was just as angry as Peggy ever saw her. “It’s a crime you should have a whipping for, taking your sixteen-year-old daughter out to commit a crime in the darkness.”

  But Papa didn’t answer. He didn’t have to, once he carried that girl inside and laid her on the floor before the fire.

  “She can’t have ate a thing for days. For weeks!” cried Mama. “And her brow is like to burn my hand off just to touch her. Fetch me a pan of water, Horace, to mop her brow, while I het up the broth for her to sip—”

  “No, Mama,” said Peggy. “Best you find some milk for the baby.”

  “The baby won’t die, and this girl’s likely to, don’t you tell me my business, I know physicking for this, anyway—”

  “No, Mama,” said Peggy. “She did a witchery with a wax poppet. It’s a Black sort of witchery, but she had the know-how and she had the power, being the daughter of a king in Africa. She knew the price and now she can’t help but pay.”

  “Are you saying this girl’s bound to die?” asked Mama.

  “She made a poppet of herself, Mama, and put it on the fire. It gave her the wings to fly one whole night. But the cost of it is the rest of her life.”

  Papa looked sick at heart. “Peggy, that’s plain crazy. What good would it do her to escape from slavery if she was just going to die? Why not kill herself there and save the trouble?”

  Peggy didn’t have to answer. The baby she was a-holding started to cry right then, and that was all the answer there was.

  “I’ll get milk,” said Papa. “Christian Larsson’s bound to have a gill or so to spare even this time of the night.”

  Mama stopped him, though. “Think again, Horace,” she said. “It’s near midnight now. What’ll you tell him you need the milk for?”

  Horace sighed, laughed at his own foolishness. “For a runaway slavegirl’s little pickaninny baby.” But then he turned red, getting hot with anger. “What a crazy thing this Black girl done,” he said. “She came all this way, knowing that she’d die, and now what does she reckon we’ll do with a little pickaninny like that? We sure can’t take it north and lay it across the Canadian border and let it bawl till some Frenchman comes to take it.”

  “I reckon she just figures it’s better to die free than live slave,” said Peggy. “I reckon she just knew that whatever life that baby found here had to be better than what it was there.”

  The girl lay there before the fire, breathing soft, her eyes closed.

  “She’s asleep, isn’t she?” asked Mama.

  “Not dead yet,” said Peggy, “but not hearing us.”

  “Then I’ll tell you plain, this is a bad piece of trouble,” said Mama. “We can’t have people knowing you bring runaway slaves through here. Word of that would spread so fast we’d have two dozen finders camped here every week of the year, and one of them’d be bound to take a shot at you sometime from ambush.”

  “Nobody has to know,” said Papa.

  “What are you going to do, tell folks you happened to trip over her dead body in the woods?”

  Peggy wanted to shout at them, She ain’t dead yet, so mind how you talk! But the truth was they had to get some things planned, and quick. What if one of the guests woke up in the night and came downstairs? There’d be no keeping this secret then.

  “How soon will she die?” Papa asked. “By morning?”

  “She’ll be dead before sunrise, Papa.”

  Papa nodded. “Then I better get busy. The girl I can take care of. You women can think of something to do with that pickaninny, I hope.”

  “Oh, we can, can we?” said Mama.

  “Well I know I can’t, so you’d better.”

  “Well then maybe I’ll just tell folks it’s my own babe.”

  Papa didn’t get mad. Just grinned, he did, and said, “Folks ain’t going to believe that even if you dip that boy in cream three times a day.”

  He went outside and got Po Doggly to help him dig a grave.

  “Passing this baby off as born around here ain’t such a bad idea,” said Mama. “That Black family that lives down in that boggy land—you remember two years back when some slaveowner tried to prove he used to own them? What’s their name, Peggy?”

  Peggy knew them far better than any other White folks in Hatrack River did; she watched over them the same as everyone else, knew all their children, knew all their names. “They call their name Berry,” she said. “Like a noble house, they just keep that family name no matter what job each one of them does.”

  “Why couldn’t we pass this baby off as theirs?”

  “They’re poor, Mama,” said Peggy. “They can’t feed another mouth.”

  “We could help with that,” said Mama. “We have extra.”

  “Just think a minute, Mama, how that’d look. Suddenly the Berrys get them a light-colored baby like this, you know he’s half-White just to look at him. And then Horace Guester starts bringing gifts down to the Berry house.”

  Mama’s face went red. “What do you know about such things?” she demanded.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mama, I’m a torch. And you know people would start to talk, you know they would.”

  Mama looked at the Black girl lying there. “You got us into a whole lot of trouble, little girl.”

  The baby started fussing.

  Mama stood up and walked to the window, as if she could see out into the night and find some answer writ on the sky. Then, abruptly, she headed for the door, opened it.

  “Mama,” said Peggy.

  “There’s more than one way to pluck a goose,” said Mama.

  Peggy saw what Mama had thought of. If they couldn’t take the baby down to the Berry place, they could maybe keep the baby here at the roadhouse and say they were taking care of it for the Berrys cause they were so poor. As long as the Berry family went along with the tale, it would account for a half-Black baby showing up one day. And nobody’d think the baby was Horace’s bastard—not if his wife brought it right into the house.

  “You realize what you’re asking them, don’t you?” said Peggy. “Everybody’s going to think somebody else has been plowing with Mr. Berry’s heifer.”

  Mama looked so surprised Peggy almost laughed out loud. “I didn’t think Blacks cared about such things,” she said.

  Peggy shook her head. “Mama, the Berrys are just about the best Christians in Hatrack River. They have to be, to keep forgiving the way White folks treat them and their children.”

  Mama closed the door again and stood inside, leaning on it. “How do folks treat their children?”

  It was a pertinent question, Peggy knew, and Mama had thought of it only just in time. It was one thing to look at that scrawny fussing little Black baby and say, I’m going to take care of this child and save his life. It was something else again to think of him being five and seven and ten and seventeen years old, a young buck living right there in the house.

  “I don’t think you have to fret about that,” said Little Peggy, “not half so much as how you plan to treat this boy. Do you plan to raise him up to be your servant, a lowborn child in your big fine house? If that’s so, then this girl died for nothing, she might as well have let them sell him south.”

  “I never hankered for no slave,” said Mama. “Don’t you go saying that I did.”

  “Well, what then? Are you going to treat him as your own son, and stand with him against all comers, the way you would if you’d ever borne a son of your own?”

  Peggy watched as Mama thought of that, and suddenly she saw all kinds of new paths open up in Mama’s heartfire. A son—that’s what this half-White boy could be. And if folks around here looked cross-eyed at him on account of him not being all White, they’d have to reckon with Margaret Guester, they would, and it’d be a fearsome day for them, they’d have no terror at the thought of hell, not after what she’d put them through.

  Mama hadn’t felt such a powerful grim determination in all the years Peggy’d been looking into her heart. It was one of those times when somebody’s whole future changed right before her eyes. All the old paths had been pretty much the same; Mama had no choices that would change her life. But now, this dying girl had brought a transformation. Now there were hundreds of new paths open, and all of them had a little boy-child in them, needing her the way her daughter’d never needed her. Set upon by strangers, cruelly treated by the boys of the town, he’d come to her again and again for protection, for teaching, for toughening, the kind of thing that Peggy’d never done.

  That’s why I disappointed you, wasn’t it, Mama? Cause I knew too much, too young. You wanted me to come to you in my confusion, with my questions. But I never had no questions, Mama, cause I knew from childhood up. I knew what it meant to be a woman from the memories in your own head. I knew about married love without you telling me. I never had a tearful night pressed up against your shoulder, crying cause some boy I longed for wouldn’t look at me; I never longed for any boy around here. I never did a thing you dreamed your little girl would do, cause I had a torch’s knack, and I knew everything and needed nothing that you wanted to give me.

  But this half-Black boy, he’ll need you no matter what his knack might be. I see down all those paths, that if you take him in, if you raise him up. he’ll be more son to you than I ever was your daughter, though your blood is half of mine.