Ridgeway didn’t hide his disdain for Terrance Randall; the man had what he called an “ornate” imagination when it came to nigger discipline. This much was plain from the moment his gang turned down the road to the big house and saw the three gallows. The young girl was installed in hers, hooked through her ribs by a large metal spike and dangling. The dirt below dark with her blood. The other two gallows stood waiting.
“If I hadn’t been detained upstate,” Ridgeway said, “I’m sure I’d have scooped up the three of you before the trail got cold. Lovey—was that its name?”
Cora covered her mouth to keep in her scream. She failed. Ridgeway waited ten minutes for her to regain her composure. The townspeople looked at the colored girl laying there collapsed on the ground and stepped over her into the bakery. The smell of the snacks filled the street, sweet and beguiling.
Boseman and Homer waited in the drive while he talked to the master of the house, Ridgeway said. The house had been lively and inviting when the father was alive—yes, he had been there before to search for Cora’s mother and come up empty-handed. One minute with Terrance and the cause of the terrible atmosphere was evident. The son was mean, and it was the kind of meanness that infected everything around. The daylight was gray and sluggish from the thunderheads, the house niggers slow and glum.
The newspapers liked to impress the fantasy of the happy plantation and the contented slave who sang and danced and loved Massa. Folks enjoyed that sort of thing and it was politically useful given the combat with the northern states and the antislavery movement. Ridgeway knew that image to be false—he didn’t need to dissemble about the business of slavery—but neither was the menace of the Randall plantation the truth. The place was haunted. Who could blame the slaves their sad comportment with that corpse twisting on a hook outside?
Terrance received Ridgeway into the parlor. He was drunk and had not bothered to dress himself, lounging on the sofa in a red robe. It was tragic, Ridgeway said, to see the degeneration that can happen in just one generation, but money does that to a family sometimes. Brings out the impurities. Terrance remembered Ridgeway from his earlier visit, when Mabel disappeared into the swamp, just like this latest trio. He told Ridgeway that his father had been touched that he came in person to apologize for his incompetence.
“I could have slapped the Randall boy twice across the face without losing the contract,” Ridgeway said. “But in my mature years I decided to wait until I had you and the other one in hand. Something to look forward to.” He assumed from Terrance’s eagerness and the size of the bounty that Cora was her master’s concubine.
Cora shook her head. She had stopped sobbing and stood now, her trembling under control, hands in fists.
Ridgeway paused. “Something else, then. At any rate, you exert a powerful influence.” He resumed the story of his visit to Randall. Terrance briefed the slave catcher on the state of affairs since Lovey’s capture. Just that morning his man Connelly had been informed that Caesar frequented the premises of a local shopkeeper—the man sold the nigger boy’s woodwork, supposedly. Perhaps the slave catcher might visit this Mr. Fletcher and see what developed. Terrance wanted the girl alive but didn’t care how the other one came back. Did Ridgeway know that the boy came from Virginia originally?
Ridgeway did not. This was some sort of jousting about his home state. The windows were closed and yet a disagreeable smell had moved into the room.
“That’s where he learned his bad habits,” Terrance had said. “They’re soft up there. You make sure he learns how we do things in Georgia.” He wanted the law kept out of it. The pair was wanted for the murder of a white boy and wouldn’t make it back once the mob got wind. The bounty accounted for his discretion.
The slave catcher took his leave. The axle of his empty wagon complained, as it did when there was no weight to quiet it. Ridgeway promised himself it would not be empty when he returned. He wasn’t going to apologize to another Randall, certainly not that whelp who ran the place now. He heard a sound and turned back to the house. It came from the girl, Lovey. Her arm fluttered. She was not dead after all. “Lingered another half day, from what I heard.”
Fletcher’s lies collapsed immediately—one of those weak religious specimens—and he relinquished the name of his associate on the railroad, a man named Lumbly. Of Lumbly there was no sign. He never returned after taking Cora and Caesar out of state. “To South Carolina was it?” Ridgeway asked. “Was he also the one who conveyed your mother north?”
Cora kept her tongue. It was not hard to envision Fletcher’s fate, and perhaps his wife’s as well. At least Lumbly made it out. And they hadn’t discovered the tunnel beneath the barn. One day another desperate soul might use that route. To a better outcome, fortune willing.
Ridgeway nodded. “No matter. We have plenty of time to catch each other up. It’s a long ride to Missouri.” The law had caught up with a station master in southern Virginia, he said, who gave up the name of Martin’s father. Donald was dead, but Ridgeway wanted to get a sense of the man’s operation if he could, to understand the workings of the larger conspiracy. He hadn’t expected to find Cora but had been utterly delighted.
Boseman chained her to the wagon. She knew the sound of the lock now. It hitched for a moment before falling into place. Jasper joined them the next day. His body shivered like that of a beaten dog. Cora tried to engage him, asking after the place he fled, the business of working cane, how he took flight. Jasper responded with hymns and devotions.
—
THAT was four days ago. Now she stood in a black pasture in bad-luck Tennessee, crunching burned wood beneath her feet.
The wind picked up, and the rain. Their stop was over. Homer cleaned after their meal. Ridgeway and Boseman tapped out their pipes and the younger man whistled for her to return. Tennessee hills and mountains rose around Cora like the sides of a black bowl. How awful the flames must have been, how fierce, to make such ruin. We’re crawling in a bowl of ashes. What’s left when everything worthwhile has been consumed, dark powder for the wind to take.
Boseman slid her chains through the ring in the floor and secured them. Ten rings were bolted to the wagon floor, two rows of five, enough for the occasional big haul. Enough for these two. Jasper claimed his favorite spot on the bench, crooning with vigor, as if he’d just gobbled down a Christmas feast. “When the Savior calls you up, you’re going to lay the burden down, lay that burden down.”
“Boseman,” Ridgeway said softly.
“He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done, sinner, He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done.”
Boseman said, “Oh.”
The slave catcher got into the wagon for the first time since he picked up Cora. He held Boseman’s pistol in his hand and shot Jasper in the face. The blood and the bone covered the inside of the canopy, splashing Cora’s filthy shift.
Ridgeway wiped his face and explained his reasoning. Jasper’s reward was fifty dollars, fifteen of that for the tinker who brought the fugitive to jail. Missouri, back east, Georgia—it would be weeks before they delivered the man to his owner. Divide thirty-five dollars by, say, three weeks, minus Boseman’s share, and the lost bounty was a very small price to pay for silence and a restful mind.
Homer opened his notebook and checked his boss’s figures. “He’s right,” he said.