Liberating Atlantis Page 3

  II

  The morning after: one of the more noxious phrases in the English language. It must have seemed pretty noxious to Henry Barford. He’d come downstairs the afternoon before to view the catastrophe. Unless you were dead, you couldn’t help coming to take a look at something like that. He hadn’t been dead, but a wobble in his walk said he’d already been tight. He’d looked, shaken his head, and gone back to his bedroom. And he’d finished the serious business of getting drunk.

  And now, on the morning after, he was suffering on account of it. His skin was the color and texture of old parchment. Red tracked the yellowish whites of his eyes the way railroads were starting to track the plains of Atlantis east of the Green Ridge Mountains (only a few reached across them; the southwest was the USA’s forgotten quarter). His hands shook. His breath stank of stale rum and of the coffee he’d poured down to try to counter the stuff’s effects. His uncombed hair stood up in several directions at once.

  He looked at Frederick with a certain rough sympathy on his face. The Negro felt at least as bad as the white man. But what Frederick knew was fear for the future, not regret for the past.

  “Well, son,” Henry Barford rasped, “I am afraid you are fucked.”

  “I’m afraid so, too, Master Henry,” Frederick agreed mournfully. He was a year or two older than the man who owned him, but that had nothing to do with the way they addressed each other. The brute fact of ownership made all the difference there.

  “Matter of fact,” Barford continued, “I am afraid you fucked yourself.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Frederick said. “That God-damned floorboard! Take oath on a stack of Bibles piled to the ceiling, sir, I didn’t know the end had come up.”

  “I believe you,” Henry Barford said. “If I didn’t believe you, you’d be dead by now—or more likely sold to a swamp-clearing outfit, so as I could get a little cash back on your miserable carcass, anyways.”

  Frederick gulped. Slaves in that kind of labor gang never lasted long. The men who ran the gangs bought them cheap, from owners who had good reason for not wanting them any more. They fed them little and worked them from dawn to dusk and beyond. If that didn’t kill them off, the ague or yellow fever or a flux of the bowels likely would. And even if those failed, the swamps were full of crocodiles and poisonous snakes and other things nobody in his right mind wanted to meet.

  Barford paused to light a cigar: a black, nasty cheroot that smelled almost as bad as his breath. He sighed smokily. “I believe you,” he said again. “But no matter how come it happened, what matters is, it did happen. My wife, she’s mighty mad at you—mighty God-damned mad.”

  Frederick hung his head. “I’m sorry, Master Henry. I’m sorrier’n I know how to tell you. I tried to apologize to Mistress Clotilde last night, but she didn’t want to listen to me. Honest to God, it was an accident.” He hated crawling. If he wanted to save his own skin, though, what choice did he have?

  “One more time, Fred—I believe you,” Barford said. “What I believe right now . . . don’t matter one hell of a lot. Something like that happens when we’re sitting down to dinner by our lonesomes, maybe you can say ‘I’m sorry’ and get away with it. Maybe. Shit goes wrong. I know that. Everybody knows that. When you go and ruin somethin’ Clotilde’s had her heart set on for months, now, and when you make her look bad in front of all of her friends . . . And we ain’t even talking about how much all the fancy dresses that got ruined cost, not yet we’re not.”

  How close had he come to selling Frederick—and maybe Helen, too—for whatever he could get? (This was the first time in his life Frederick was halfway relieved none of their children had lived—they would have been sold, too.)

  Gowns of silk and lace and endless labor didn’t come cheap. Frederick knew that, all right. He remembered his mistress complaining about how expensive the dress she’d worn to the gathering—only one of the gowns Frederick had wrecked—was. All the money he’d saved . . . He didn’t offer it. It not only wouldn’t be enough, it would be so far from enough that the very offer would seem insulting.

  Henry Barford blew out another ragged puff of smoke. “So I got to make you sorry for real,” he said. “Won’t be any peace in this house till I do. And you know you’ve got it coming. Can’t hardly tell me you don’t.”

  “Reckon I’ve got somethin’ comin’,” Frederick said cautiously, “but what do you mean, ‘make me sorry for real’?”

  “Well . . .” His master stretched out the word in a way he didn’t like. “My wife and me, we spent some time last night talkin’ about that.” Most likely, Clotilde had spent the time talking and Henry listening. He stared at the coal on the end of the cigar, and at the thin column of smoke rising from it. He doesn’t want to tell me, Frederick realized, and ice spidered up his back. At last, Barford spoke again: “What we decided was, we got to give you five lashes and send you out to the fields. Don’t like to do it, Fred—wish like hell there was no need. Got to, though. Damned if I can see any way around it.”

  “Ohhh!” The air wheezed out of Frederick as if he’d been hit in the belly. He’d known they would have to punish him, but. . . . “Is that really fair, Master Henry? I didn’t hurt anybody, and five lashes’re sure gonna hurt me.”

  “Got to do it.” Barford didn’t sound happy about it. To give him his due, he didn’t enjoy hurting his animate property, as some masters did. But he did sound very firm, and he explained why: “Isn’t just on account of you mucked up Clotilde’s fancy gathering. Those dresses you ruined . . . Only way I can keep some of those damned biddies from going to law with me for hundreds and hundreds of eagles is to show ’em I made you sorry. Clotilde wanted I should give you ten, but I managed to talk her down some.”

  “I’ll—” Frederick bit down hard on what was about to come out of his mouth. I’ll run off was the last thing a slave wanted to tell a master, especially when it was true.

  Biting down hard didn’t do him the least bit of good. “You’ll do no such damnfool thing,” Henry Barford said, as if Frederick had shouted the words in his face. As if to underline that, Barford drew a flintlock pistol from his belt. It was an over-and-under affair, with a bullet in the top barrel and a charge of buckshot in the lower one. Percussion revolvers could fire many more rounds, but at short range a piece like that one would kill a man quite nicely. “Now you come along with me. We’ll stash you away till tomorrow mornin’. Don’t do anything stupid, or I’ll be out even more jack.”

  “What about me?” Frederick asked bitterly as he got to his feet.

  “Hey, I wish you didn’t do it,” his master said. “But you did, so this is what you get. Step lively—but not too lively. You don’t want to know how good a load of double-aught buck’ll ventilate your carcass. Believe you me, you don’t.”

  Frederick did believe him. A bullet as fat as a finger wouldn’t do a body any good, either.

  Tied to the whipping post. The plantation had one. Frederick couldn’t imagine a plantation without one. But it didn’t get used much. Yes, Henry Barford might have made a much crueler master. Which, of course, did Frederick not an eagle’s worth of good, or even a cent’s.

  I should have tried to run away last night, he thought as the overseer stripped the shirt off his back and shackled his wrists to the post. But the slave cabin where they’d stuck him was fixed up to make it next to impossible—and it had been guarded, too.

  House slaves and field hands watched the proceedings with wide eyes. Frederick didn’t want to think about the expression on Helen’s face. And he especially didn’t want to think about the expression on Clotilde Barford’s. He understood Helen’s anguish. But the master’s wife looked as if she was right on the point of reaching a climax. Would she, when the lash began to bite? Frederick feared he’d be too busy to notice.

  After he’d been manacled, Henry Barford slipped a thick piece of leather into his mouth—cut from a belt, or maybe from a harness. “Bite down on that there,” the master said. �
�It’s supposed to help a little.”

  How do you know? Frederick wondered. He couldn’t even ask, not unless he spat out the strong-tasting leather. He didn’t. Instead, he settled it between his jaws as best he could. Anything to distract him from what was about to happen.

  Barford stepped away. “Reckon all of you’ve heard why we got to do this,” he said to the assembled slaves. “Doesn’t make me happy. You know me. I like it when things go smooth. But when they don’t, you got to set ’em to rights, and that’s what we’re gonna do here. You ready, Matthew?”

  “Sure am,” the overseer replied. He didn’t sound pantingly eager, the way some men in his line of work would have. Instead, he was as matter-of-fact as if Barford had asked him if he were ready to shear a sheep. Whip a nigger? All part of a day’s work, his voice seemed to say. That might have been more daunting than if he had seemed to look forward to it.

  “All right, then,” Barford said. “Five lashes, well laid on.”

  Frederick closed his eyes. Well laid on. Why say such stupid things? What else was Matthew going to do? Tap him with the whip? Frederick wished the overseer would, but what were wishes worth?

  Snap-crack! Frederick jerked and groaned. That wasn’t a lash, was it? It had to be fire across his back. Without the rude leather mouthguard, he might have broken teeth biting down. For some reason, he wasn’t much inclined to be grateful to Henry Barford.

  “One,” the master said solemnly.

  Snap-crack! Frederick had told himself he wouldn’t scream. So much for good intentions. The leather muffled his howl, but didn’t block all of it.

  “Two,” Henry Barford intoned.

  Snap-crack! More of the shriek escaped this time. Frederick wanted to die. And he wanted to kill everyone who’d had anything to do with this. Clotilde Barford, Henry Barford, Matthew . . . They could all perish. Horribly.

  “Three.”

  Snap-crack! As these things went, Matthew was merciful. He didn’t lay stripe on top of stripe, which would only have added to Frederick’s torment. But these things didn’t go very far in that direction. Frederick howled like a dog run over by a brewery wagon.

  “Four,” Henry Barford said.

  Snap-crack! Shrieking louder than ever, Frederick hardly realized it was over. The flames consuming his back ate up the whole world. He slumped against the post, utterly exhausted. Tears and snot and sweat ran down his face. Something wet ran down his back, too. He barely cared if he was bleeding to death back there. If he was, everything would be over soon.

  “Five,” Barford said. “That’s the end of it. Let him loose, Matthew, and help him to the cabin. I expect his woman’ll take care of him from there.”

  “Right you are.” Matthew was as businesslike unlocking the manacles as he had been fastening them or delivering the whipping. When Frederick spat out the piece of leather Henry Barford had given him, he didn’t quite spit it at the overseer’s feet. “You need to lean on me to walk?” Matthew asked him.

  “Let me see.” Frederick managed a couple of steps away from the post. The world swayed around him. Seeing him so shaky on his pins, Matthew grabbed his elbow with a strong right hand to steady him. The hand that whipped me, Frederick thought. He was glad for its support even so.

  The overseer steered him toward one of the field hands’ cabins—not the closest, but one that had stood empty since the old man who’d lived there gave up the ghost. “Show’s over,” Henry Barford told the rest of the slaves. “Get on back to work. It ain’t like you got nothin’ to do.” Frederick heard him as if from very far away.

  Three rickety wooden stairs. If not for Matthew’s hand under his elbow, Frederick might not have made them. But he did. It was dark and musty inside the cabin. A couple of stools, a cot, and a chamber pot—that summed up the furnishings. “Lay down on your belly,” the overseer said. “Your gal, she’s got a pot of ointment to slather on you. You’ll be ready to go out and weed in a couple of days.”

  Frederick wouldn’t have lain down on his back for all the gold in Terranova. The straw and maize husks in the mattress rustled and crackled as his weight came down on them. The bed creaked. He wondered if it would break, but it held. The musty smell got stronger. Sharp things poked him through the worn-out mattress ticking. So this is how field hands live, he thought dully.

  “I got to go keep an eye on things,” the overseer said. “Soon as you’re up and about, I’ll be keepin’ an eye on you.”

  He clumped across the floor and was gone. Softer footsteps came across the cabin toward Frederick. “You were brave,” Helen said. “You stood it as good as anybody could have.”

  “I’ll kill them all,” Frederick whispered in a voice no one who wasn’t right beside him could have heard. “Every last one of them. You see if I don’t.”

  “’Course you will, sweetheart,” Helen answered, as if he were a little boy. “Now you hold still while I put this stuff on you.”

  She dabbed it on with gentle fingers. It hurt anyway. Frederick jerked and twitched at every touch, almost as if he were under the lash again. “What’s in it?” he asked, as if he thought it hurt him because of what it was made from.

  “Lard and honey,” Helen said. “Got it from one of the cooks. He said it’d soothe you—some, anyways—an’ it’d make the stripes less likely to fester.”

  “Maybe,” Frederick said through clenched teeth, meaning, You must be joking. Nothing could soothe his poor, abused flesh. Wishing he could drown the plantation in white men’s blood came closest, but even that was no more than a momentary distraction. “How bad does it look?”

  “How bad does it feel?” Helen countered one question with another.

  “Couldn’t feel any worse,” Frederick said, which wasn’t quite true. This ache was bad. The venomous sting of the lash striking him . . . that had been even worse.

  “You’re gonna have scars,” Helen said sadly. She made haste to add, “Ain’t like you’d be the only one. Plenty of slaves do.”

  “Scars . . . They’ll pay for every damned one. So help me God, they will.” Yes, rage was almost enough to vanquish pain. What would Victor Radcliff have thought if he could have seen his grandson’s split and bleeding back? Would he have been proud of the United States of Atlantis?

  “Hush,” Helen told him. “Just you hush, now. Don’t go talking crazy talk—don’t go talking stupid talk. You land yourself in even more trouble than you’re in already.”

  That was good, sensible advice. Good, sensible advice came easy when you hadn’t just taken five lashes, well laid on. Frederick didn’t want to listen to it. Whether he wanted to or not, some sank in. “Didn’t only get me in trouble,” he said dully. “Got you thrown out of the big house, too.”

  “I could go back. Mistress Clotilde ain’t mad at me, ’cept ’cause I’m attached to you. Master Henry, he ain’t hardly mad at me at all. Yeah, I could go back.” Helen set a careful, gentle hand on Frederick’s shoulder, well away from any of his welts. “Sooner stay ’longside of you, though.”

  Tears welled up in Frederick’s eyes. Pain? Weakness? Fury? Love? All of them together, probably. Even so, he said, “You won’t think that way when you got to start doing a field hand’s work.”

  “It won’t kill me,” Helen answered, her voice calm. And she was likely right. A smart planter and a careful overseer didn’t work field hands to death. What was the point of that? You couldn’t get any more work out of them if they died, and you wouldn’t be able to sell their corpses, either.

  “God bless you,” Frederick said.

  “I love you.”

  “You must.” Frederick didn’t say what they both knew. Work in the fields might not kill a slave, but it was harder than any job in the big house. And they wouldn’t be eating pretty much what the Barfords ate any more. Maize meal, barley meal, molasses, bitter greens, every once in a while some smoked sowbelly or bacon . . .

  It was enough to keep a body going. It wasn’t much more than barely enough. Ove
r the years, slaveowners had learned exactly how little they could get away with feeding their two-legged property. You heard about fat house slaves all the time. You even saw them every so often. But Frederick would have bet all the little he owned that nobody in the history of the United States of Atlantis had ever seen a fat field hand.

  “Sooner or later, they’ll call you back to the big house. When they do, I’ll go, too,” Helen said. “Me, I bet it’s sooner. Ain’t none of the damnfool niggers there can do for the Barfords like you do. They’ll see. They can’t help but see, once they get over bein’ mad with you.”

  Frederick hoped she was right. But hoping wasn’t the same as believing. What he believed was that Clotilde Barford wanted him dead. Five lashes weren’t enough to make her happy. Ten lashes wouldn’t have been, either. He’d humiliated her in front of all the ladies for ten, maybe twenty, miles around. They’d seen her sit there dripping, with a scallion on her eyebrow. After that, she probably figured even killing was too good for him. Maybe she’d enjoy watching him sweat and fumble in the fields till he finally wore out. He was sure she’d enjoy it more than recalling him to the big house.

  “How’s your back?” Helen asked.

  Worrying about Mistress Clotilde had almost let him forget his pain for a few seconds. Almost—but not quite. “Hurts,” he said.

  “Well, I reckon. You don’t care to know what it looks like—best believe you don’t,” Helen said. “Want I should put on more ointment?”

  “Let it go for now,” he answered. The less she touched it, the less he would be reminded of it. “Maybe I can sleep.”

  If he could sleep, he wouldn’t feel a thing . . . unless he started to roll over onto his back. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make his eyes stay closed. He hurt too much for that.

  An undyed, unbleached cotton shirt, loose enough so it wouldn’t cling to the wounds on his back. An undyed pair of trousers of wool homespun. Thick wool socks, undoubtedly knitted by one of the slave women on the plantation. Stout shoes that were more than a little too big. A ratty straw hat. Put it all together, and it was the outfit a field hand wore. Matthew the overseer delivered it to Frederick, and its feminine equivalent to Helen.