Chapter 15

“No!” I scream. I’m not ready to leave. The word echoes inside my chest.

“Stop that damn yelling,” Tempe says. Her rough hands grab my waist. “It ain’t nothing but knee deep and you acting like you ’bout to die.”

I spit. Brush the hair out of my eyes. Shiver. “I did die,” I say.

Tempe pulls me to my feet. She shakes her head. “How you have time to die? You ain’t been in but a minute. You fell in, I walked in after you.” She snaps her fingers. “It wasn’t no longer than that.”

“There were hands pulling me under the water.”

Tempe laughs. “Course there were hands. How you think I pulled you out? With my teeth?”

“Not your hands.” I bend down, press my face to the water. I can’t see beneath the reddish murk. “There’s somebody down there.”

“What the devil are you doing? Come on, we gotta get back to Mama.” She yanks me up by the back of my head. Her fingers catch in my hair. “I don’t know if you got knocked in the head down there but if you don’t stop this foolishness I’m gonna knock you in the head right here.” With one hand still in my hair, she puts a fist up to my face.

“You gonna hit me before you leave me? Or after?”

“What you talking about?”

“You gonna marry Edward, he gonna buy you, and you gonna leave me and Mama right here.”

She lets go of my head. My scalp tingles. Tempe just stands there watching snot and tears stream down my face. She stares for a full minute. “That what Edward say?” She ain’t even trying to hide it. She’s so excited she’s doing a little dance right there in the river. It would serve her right if she slipped and fell right in.

“It’s true, then. You’d leave us?”

“Ain’t nobody leaving nobody. If he talking about marrying and buying my freedom, I can buy yours and Mama’s too.”

“How you gonna save enough? Walker ain’t gonna hire you out.”

“I don’t know. Edward ain’t even ask me yet. I got time to think on a way.”

“What if he just up and leave, like Watson did?”

Tempe don’t say nothing for a long time. She gets out the river. I follow.

“If he can, Watson will come back for you. If he can’t, once we buy you free, you’ll find him.”

“Okay, Tempe,” I say, like the world isn’t much bigger than acres and acres of Walker land, like either of us has ever been off this property, like I’ll ever see Watson again. Maybe it won’t matter. As long as I got Mama and Tempe, what else do I need?

Tempe and me are sick in bed when Edward comes around a few days later with a wheelbarrow full of slates, nails, scraps of wood, and baubles to ask Mama if she needs any work done around the cabin before he leaves. He stands out on the porch, hat in hand, blocking a good view of the outside. Even after days of Mama’s onion, lemon, and honey elixir, my chest is full of phlegm. Tempe’s too. That don’t stop her from jumping up, slipping something over her head, and running out to the porch faster than Mama can say no. She’s too late. By the time she reaches the porch, Edward is gone.

“Oh, Mama,” she wails without even trying to be respectful. “Why you go and run him away?”

“Child,” Mama warns.

“Mama, there’s plenty a man like Edward could fix around here.”

“Tempe,” Mama says.

Tempe keeps right on talking. “Look at this porch, you always saying it’s rickety. You liable to fall clear off it one day. And what about this door?” She bangs it shut. It pops open. “See? No privacy at all. Some strange man wandering up the road could see all the good Lord,” she slides her hands over her frame, “created right through this open door. The roof too. Between the rain and the squirrels dropping through the roof, it’s a wonder we ain’t all about to die!”

“Girl, if you would just listen!”

“There’s plenty of work for a man like him.”

“Excuse me,” Edward interrupts, “I found the tools out where you said they was. I’ll just start round back so as not to,” he pauses, “interrupt you ladies’ discussion.”

The porch creaks. I turn my back to the door, shut my eyes, snore loud. Tempe flies inside. Her breath takes up the whole cabin.

“If you feeling good enough to run like that, you well enough to help out again. Go on out there and help Edward in the garden,” Mama says. “I been meaning to fix up that fence back there for the longest.”

Lilac. Tempe grabs a lilac-scented cloth from my things. I picture her wiping under her arms, around her neck, between her legs—just in case—scrubbing any bit of skin that Edward might see, touch, or smell.

“I know you ain’t asleep,” she calls before closing the door and leaving the scent of lilac behind.

It can’t take no more than a minute for me to get up, pull a dress over my head, fix my side of the bed, and get to the door, but Tempe’s already around back before I hit the porch. I haven’t stepped one foot outside before Mama stops me.

“Might as well set out here with me. She’s gonna be a while.”

“Not if I help, she won’t.” I lean toward the step.

“Ain’t no rush. Sit down a while,” Mama says. She tucks her skirts, scooches over, and pats the space beside her.

“I won’t be but a minute,” I say. My heart’s racing, my underarms itch. Sweat drips down my back. “I’ll come right back when I finish helping Tempe and them with the chores.”

“Tempe don’t need no help, Spring.”

Maybe Mama don’t know how Edward watches Tempe when he thinks nobody’s looking. Maybe she don’t know how Tempe watches him back. I bet if she knew Edward was planning on buying Tempe away she wouldn’t be so quick to push them together. I inch closer to the edge of the porch. With Mama near blocking the step, there isn’t much sense in acting like I can’t just step clear off the edge if I want to.

“Mama, I been meaning to do some fixing up around here. There’s plenty I can do to help.”

“I got some work you can do right here.”

She pats the spot next to her again. I sit. My legs spill over the porch. I tap my feet.

“How you doing? Been a while since Watson run off, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I had someone run off too,” Mama says.

She rubs my back in wide circles. I check to see that it ain’t Agnes staring back at me but it ain’t. “Told me we was gonna run away together. Guess time just seemed right and he run off.”

“He ain’t come back for you?”

Mama shook her head.

“Ever hear what happened to him?”

Mama shook her head, mouthed no.

“Something must have happened to him. He wouldn’t have just left you. Maybe he’s dead. I hope that’s what it is.”

“That ain’t nothing to hope for,” Mama says. “I was angry when he run off, hurt, disappointed. I wanted them to catch him, drag him back. Until I learned what that means. You know what would have happened to him if he come back for me?”

I want to say they would have run and kept on running till they got to freedom. Like me and Watson will do. But it sounds childish. I shake my head.

“They’d have killed him. His body or his spirit or both. He wouldn’t have been mine no more. Before I figured that out, I just waited. I waited so long that when there was something needed doing, something I could have stopped, someone I could have helped, I didn’t see it. I was too late. Don’t spend your whole life waiting.”

Mama don’t seem in too much of a hurry to do anything this morning. Laughter drifts to the porch from around back. What kind of work can they be doing that’s so funny? Their laughter makes Mama smile. I can just see it: Edward chasing Tempe through rows of fresh-planted vegetables. Her sashaying and side-stepping vines and roots I hadn’t cleared yet. Both of them tripping over rocks and tumbling, her first and him on top, onto the ground. Ain’t nothing to be smiling about. The laughter stops. Mama rocks back and forth on the porch, waiting.

“What you think they doing back there?” I ask. If she thinks they digging up turnips, she has another think coming.

“What you think they doing?” she asks.

Giggles. Tempe is too old to be giggling like that with a grown man.

“Not working,” I say.

“Sound like work to me,” Mama says. She scoots closer. We sit arm to arm, both of our feet tapping the ground. “I got a job in mind for Edward.”

“What you need doing that I can’t do?”

“Marrying.”

Without wanting to, my breathing matches hers. My body rocks with hers. But my heart races.

“What’s gonna happen once they get married?”

Mama looks at me full in the face. She gives me her mothering look. “Well, first Edward will—”

“Not that, Mama! I know all about that!”

Mama looks at me strange again.

“I mean,” I say, “I heard all about that. Where she gonna live?”

“I suspect Edward will have to live here or visit her till he saves enough to buy her.”

I about fall off the porch. “Buy her freedom, you mean?”

Mama stares at her feet. She wiggles her toes, buries them in the dirt. “I want to see both of my girls free before I die,” she says. “Not runaways, free.”

“That why you set on Edward marrying Tempe?”

“He bought his mama. He can buy my baby too.”

“If he buy her, she be his slave?”

“When he buy her, she’ll be his.”