The Healing

Chapter 26





Granada fought to stay awake, determined to have no more dreams.

Before blowing out the lantern, Polly had instructed once more, as she had each of the previous three nights since the mistress had gone away, “The remembering has begun. Don’t be scared of your dreaming. Go where it wants to take you.”

“I don’t want to dream no more,” Granada whimpered. “Make them go away.”

She was accustomed to dreams that were vague and fuzzy, vanishing like morning dew after she woke. But the remembering dreams were like the one she had the morning of the fire. They seared themselves into her memory like a hot iron and instead of fading away with daylight, grew in strength and vividness, until the dream felt so real she knew one of two things had to be true: that the events in the dream had already happened or that they were about to happen.

Polly said there really was no difference. “When you stand in the river, downstream or upstream, it’s all the same water.”

For three nights now Granada had dreamed of floods bringing great snakes that devoured the master’s house and everyone in it. She dreamed of getting lost in dark, endless tunnels that had no exit. She dreamed of the mistress falling into a bottomless well, her shouts growing fainter. Each morning Granada’s own screaming woke her. And each morning Polly was sitting by the bed, asking what it was the girl had seen.

Polly assured her the dreams were a gift of sight, but how did she know that envisioning bad things didn’t make them come true? Maybe the mistress would still be here if she hadn’t dreamed about her.

“I didn’t ask for no gift,” Granada had argued. “I don’t want it.”

Polly’s amber eyes flashed. “You don’t want it?” she snapped. “Wanting ain’t got nothing to do with it. The sight ain’t no gift to you. It’s your gift to the people.”

Despite Polly’s scolding, Granada battled against sleep in every way she could imagine. She pinched her arm, and threw her legs off the side of the bed, and softly sang the words to a silly song Chester had taught her. She counted the croaks of a rainfrog hiding nearby. But she couldn’t win. Tonight, as all the other nights, sleep eventually took the girl, and as Polly had predicted, the strange dreaming returned.

I’m naked, standing before a dense growth of trees, thick with interlacing limbs and woody vines. A narrow, cave-like opening offers the only way in. As I step toward it I hear terrible voices, moaning, and sobbing, the grinding of teeth, the raspy whispering of mysterious words.

Polly comes up behind me and tries to push me forward, but I kick and scream. Something reaches out and prickles my cheek, like the legs of a giant spider.

I swat at my face, trying to rid myself of the hideous creature.

She woke herself up. Blood was surging in her ears. Her body was coated with a thin film of sweat and the darkness seemed to quiver before her eyes.

But this time waking did not stop the sounds. Again she heard a voice, but now it spoke her name and she felt the spidery legs once more on her face. She grabbed at it. In her fist was a switch from the althea bush that grew by her window.

“Granada,” she heard the voice say, “wake up.”

She glanced up and saw a face like a pale moon gazing down on her. “Little Lord!” she gasped. “What you doing?”

The boy shushed her. “I’m going to find Momma,” he said. “You got to go with me!”

At the mention of the mistress, Granada was at once up on her knees in her cot, face-to-face with the boy in the window. “You know where she is?” So far no one seemed to have any idea where the master had taken her.

“I heard Daddy say he was going to keep her in Port Gayoso until they could catch a steamboat to New Orleans,” Little Lord whispered. “If we hurry, you and me can catch her.”

The boy’s rascally grin reminded Granada of her homesickness for him. He hadn’t been down to see her in months. “Why you want me to come?”

“There ain’t nobody else.”

Granada could hear the panic rising in his voice.

“Daniel Webster run off after Momma last night and Lizzie said she’s glad Momma’s gone and hopes a gator gets Daniel Webster!”

“Lizzie’s probably looking for you right this minute.”

“She’s drunk on Daddy’s brandy,” he said. “She told me, ‘First your momma, and now the monkey. You the only one left!’ That’s when she passed out. I think she’s going to kill me if I stay.”

Granada nodded and looked over in the dark to where Polly lay snoring in her bed. “I got me the same problem.”

“Aunt Sylvie said Polly put a spell on Momma and made her start that fire.”

Granada again nodded. “She say she don’t do hoodoo. I reckon that makes her a witch and a liar both.”

He leaned in closer and in a whisper so low she could barely hear him, he asked, “You learned enough yet to take a spell off somebody?”

Granada figured on the question for a moment. If she said no, would he still want her to go with him? “I been studying her close,” she said. “I seen her doing some things I might can copy.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“You’re smart. You’re the quickest person I ever seen at learning. I bet you can make Momma well in a minute. Look,” he said lifting his leather game pouch, “I took some stuff for us to eat.”

“How we going to get there? It’ll be first light before long. Somebody bound to see us on the road.” The thought of the fierce slave-catching hounds popped into her head. But surely Mr. Bridger wouldn’t sic those flesh-ripping animals on the master’s boy, would he?

“We’ll take my canoe down the creek.”

“No!” she gasped, remembering her dreams. Snakes lived in that creek. “We can’t, Little Lord.”

“Sure we can. Barnabas taught me. I’ll show you how. It’ll be easy. The water’s still high enough to take us right up into town.”

“We’ll get bit for sure!” she said. “Mocs swimming in the water and coppers crawling on the banks. Rattlers up under every log and leaf. Snakes everywhere. They even dangling from the trees.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mother’s derringer. “I’ll protect us,” he said in a way that sounded uncharacteristically manlike.

Granada was so touched by the thought of Little Lord wanting to watch over her that without thinking, she reached out and patted his arm. She quickly caught herself and drew her hand back like she had touched fire. Aunt Sylvie would have slapped her face.

But Little Lord didn’t seem to notice. “Granada, please,” he begged, boylike again. “If we can get to Momma, you don’t never have to come back here. We can stay with her until we grow up and then you can be my slave and we can live wherever we want to.”

Granada knew there were a lot of things out there his momma’s little gun couldn’t protect her from. She hadn’t even mentioned the gators and whirlpools and quicksand and bears and panthers and buffalo gnats. But she decided against arguing. She didn’t want to scare Little Lord out of going.

Besides, she thought, as long as he was taking her, it wasn’t like she was running away. She was doing her master’s son’s bidding. She really had no choice.

“You got to promise me, Little Lord. If we get caught, you got to swear you made me go.”

“I promise, Granada,” he said, crossing his heart and then laughing. “I’ll tell them I was going to whip you good if you didn’t.”

Granada felt around on the floor for her brogans and slipped the freshly laundered calico dress over her shift. She listened for a moment to the light, steady snores across the room and then crawled out the window.