By noon all my fingers hurt. I switched the heavy iron pot from hand to hand, moving it from one knuckle to another, trying to favor the most sore places. I walked with a searing pain in my side, my legs trembling from exhaustion. Patience walked somewhere behind me. All stayed quiet. All walked in fear. We walked on without stop, walking until some of the weaker ones fell out, and the Indians put them upon their backs and carried them! I saw two girls and one grown man carried upon the backs of the warriors.
When they did that, the Indians also carried what the captives had carried, taking the boxes of sugar and bundles of tied onions. That evening followed almost the same as the one before it, with stew made from what we carried and two more goats. That night, even Rachael ate the porridge. The next day the Indians told the men captives, by demonstrating what they wanted, to carry some of the children. Master came to choose me, for I was the lightest burden, but I looked him in the eye and said, “I am not weary one whit, sir. Choose one of your own daughters.” I picked up my kettle and started down the path, pushing to the front of the column behind the Indian man who had first caught me in the brushes. I put my feet in his tracks.
It had never before occurred to me that there were better or worse ways to die. Perhaps Mistress Hasken’s death was merciful. At least, one quick fatal blow such as Mistress received would be preferable to the suffering agony Lonnie had endured. The first death I had known was Allsy’s. We were ill at almost the same time with the same disease, though I recovered. I knew, I thought, what her suffering contained. I had heard men fighting and cursing and beating each other aboard ships. Hangings. Whippings with the cat. A quick blow to the head was a kindness, indeed.
These Indians were a puzzle too large for my learning to sort, too complicated for my mind. I wanted to ask Pa what was to be thought of them, since I could not fathom it myself. I thought of Pa, floating in the bay, face to the sun, smiling as if in sleep, the way he did on a Sunday afternoon, resting from the week’s work in a hammock on the front promenade of the house. I thought of the crystal-blue waters of our bay, and the coral-lined coves, and the warm sun and balmy, fragrant breeze. Coffee flowers and roses, Ma’s gardenia, almost too strong to enjoy except at a distance, plumeria and cocoa blossoms. “Oh, la,” I said aloud. “When shall I get home again?”
An Indian came up behind me and said something that sounded to me like “Kzomi mannossa,” although I could not speak the word again. He knelt and motioned to his back, and took the iron kettle from me. I nodded and climbed upon him. As he walked I leaned against his back and wept for the first time in weeks. My feet burned with the relief of not having to use them. My fingers throbbed without the narrow handle of the iron kettle cutting into them. My heart ached and ached and ached with the lack of some new injury to it, as if all the others were enough, stored there, just now felt, like a thorn that had worked its way through the sole of a shoe.
Oh, Ma, I thought, when I see you again, I shall never cease being good and kind and forever look upon your dear face, my most trusted and loved life’s companion. How dear it would be to climb into your lap once more, held in that blessed peace.
We had traveled four days and slept in the forest three nights when on the fourth night, I awoke from a terrible dream of being in the Saracens’ hold. Instead of the wee Irish girl being pulled from the cell, the men had come for me. Patience, in the dream, was not there to keep me from them. Instead of taking me abovedecks to be fed but thrown overboard, one man pulled my arms, one pulling my head, one on each foot, until I came apart in pieces like a wooden toy whose threads had sprung. I lay awake shivering, for I was lying next to the man who had carried me, and rather than curling up around each other as the prisoners were wont to do, the Indians slept like logs, straight, as if they felt no cold and needed no warmth. I wiggled closer to him, putting my side against his arm.
I stared upward at the sky. The moon was bright again, MacPherson’s lantern, as it had been that night in Jamaica. I whispered toward it, “What have I done wrong to have ended in this place, O God?” Yet even as I said the words, I thought about Allsy and how I had been the one meant to die. How could I go back and trade my life for hers, even if I wished it? A person could not turn backward. Time went onward to tomorrow, and so if I were still alive as Patey said, and this was not Purgatory, it was still penance for having lived when others died. I sighed and raised my head above the man to look toward the place where the evening fire had been. The embers seemed alive, coursing red to black to red again, giving no light. I put my head back down. The man next to me snuffled a little.