12

MY KNEES BEND AND I BE ALMOST TO THE ground when Baby Girl start to scream. It sound like the Devil himself be screaming. A spike of fear shoot through me like lightning through a dry tree. This be Lydia’s baby. She ain’t mine to give away.

I stand up and pull Baby Girl closer to me, bouncing her as I come awake, her screams clearing my head. She ain’t gonna die here. Ain’t gonna be one of Mama’s babies, sold for blood and sex and magic, any more than I am. So close to the circle now we almost in it, I can see they all be gone, carried away on whatever Mama’s religion done to them. Even Mama be gone, rattling in her throat like to beat a storm down, smiling up at the sky.

When I duck under her arms, nobody try to stop me. Then we in the kitchen of the church, not more than a little room with a chimney hole over the cookstove, open to the night sky. And a door in the back. I open it real slow.

A rope bridge lead from the tree house to a nearby tree and switch back three times to the ground. That be how Mama Gentille made it up here. I tug at the bridge, tied to hooks in the doorway. Easy up, easy down. They can cut it loose if need be, and tie it up again. I go back to the kitchen and find a knife, still smeared with sweet potato and bits of pheasant meat. I don’t bother to wipe it off, just stick it through my belt behind my back, where Baby Girl can’t reach it. Then I tie her on tight and grip both sides of the bridge as I make my way to the ground.

Nobody waiting for us here. If there a guard, he at the rope ladder ’neath the tree. It be true dark now, and I know we be hard to see. If we keep quiet, maybe we get past them. The swaying of the bridge sound natural, like a cradle in the breeze. Then I be off the bridge with dirt under my feet instead of air. It feel good to be on solid ground again, even if the night be cold enough to bite after the warmth of the church.

We lucky to be alive, I know. I don’t take it for granted. I walk a ways from the church, ’til I know no one will hear me, and then I run.

• • • 

It be past midnight when I stop to find another hidey-hole, a foxhole like the one I avoided earlier in favor of the church. I won’t make that mistake again. Mr. Go’s place be better, but I’m like to fall down tired if I keep going.

Baby Girl stop crying, my running done took her breath away. But she still ain’t been fed. Now that I stop running, she catching her breath, maybe to start up hollering again. Quick as I can, I mix another bottle to keep her happy, and it work. She drink and I burp her. She close her eyes. I draw my legs in under the side of the fallen tree, drag some leaves and moss in around us. That’ll make a good diaper for her in the morning. But not now. I be too tired.

I watch her for a while, and then my eyes close, too.

• • • 

I be at the cottage again, hidden in the woods. Lovely, dark and deep, like that poem Daddy used to read. I got a vine in my hands and I be skipping it the way Mama say they used to skip rope. She got me singing a song she taught me about a mama chewing tobacco. It make me laugh, and she laugh with me. Mama got a young voice when she laugh, but her eyes, they old. She use them when she look at Daddy, and he look at her the same way, and I wonder why. But now I know why.

• • • 

I wake up. Nightfall come thick in the woods. Farther out there be starlight and the sky be almost white it so heavy with stars. I wish we be lying out beneath the stars now. I’d see if I could remember they names. But I be here in the dark with a crying baby what woke me. It ain’t safe to have a child crying in the dark when there be more than animals about.

So I mix her another bottle of formula fast as I can, and I spill some of it ’cause I be moving too fast. It cold, but she take it anyhow. We both cold, too, and I can’t stop shivering. We might die out here, Lydia’s baby and me. I could make it on my own. I wouldn’t be so stupid if I didn’t have this baby. This little screaming baby that don’t know how alone she really be. ’Til I get this baby out of Orleans, we be freesteaders. And freesteaders don’t stay free for long.

Like I called bad luck down on me, I hear a rustle in the woods, and another, and it be fast and low and I know they be dogs this time, real blood hounds, like the ones missing last night. Now they back to claim what be theirs. I stay in my foxhole, so scared I almost pee myself. My hands be shivering all over when I take away the baby’s bottle and put it in my waistband, ready to run.

Lord, oh Lord, help me. I crouch there in a sweat, baby crushed against my chest.

“No point in running when the dogs come,” Daddy told me. “They’ll only eat you alive.”

Last time I ran, I didn’t get eaten. But that ’cause they been too busy eating someone else.

I look down at Baby Girl, snuggled up against me. I want to run so bad, but she so tiny. Too tiny to hold the dogs off me for long. Then I close my eyes and feel hot all over, I’m so ashamed. Lydia ask me to look after her. I ain’t gonna throw her away.

The dogs almost here, men, too. I climb out of our foxhole so they don’t let the hounds drag me out. I sit on the fallen log, and when the dogs come I stand up, waiting. They snarl and snap, but they know not to bite. Blood hounds don’t attack prey ’less it run from them too far. Blood hunters don’t waste blood.

Baby Girl done eating and now she asleep up against me without a care in the world. I silently tell Lydia I’ve given her a few more seconds of life. Best I can do. A man step out from behind a tree, and there be three more with him, in long oilskin coats and low-brimmed hats. The first man, a big man, he got himself a whip and a length of chain. He grin at me around a chicory cigar, and I wrinkle my nose at the bitter stench of it. That make him grin even wider.

“What have we here?” he ask his friends. “An O-Positive, if the dogs are right. That was an OP howl, weren’t it, Vancey?”

Vancey, a skinny fellow with skin that look yellow even in the blue moonlight, nod and grin with teeth the same shade as his skin. “That right, Orvis. We’ll test ’er at camp to be sure.”

“And a brat, too.” He shoo the dogs away and clasp the chains to my wrists where they be cradling Lydia’s baby. He peel my hands away and look into the sling. “A new one. Fresh blood. Maybe not even the Delta taint. We can sell that for twice the price.”

“Three times,” Vancey say, excited.

My mind be racing. Baby Girl ain’t got to worry about growing up in Orleans no more. They gonna keep her alive for two weeks, just to drain her dry.

I don’t cry about it. I don’t scream. I don’t fight them, neither. Lydia told me to care for her baby, and look at me now. Good as dead, and sooner if I fight. So when they pull that chain, I walk after them. I follow and I stay quiet when they tie me to two others they found. In the dark, it be hard to see, but one of them a freesteader, sure as can be. He got a look, like he still surprised it finally happened to him. The other I don’t recognize. He wrapped all up in rags and look like a leper, like what the Ursuline Sisters tend to in the Quarter by the Market. I stay as far from that one as the chains will let me.

Maybe we be dead in an hour, maybe in a week or two, but as long as I be healthy and upright, I can survive.

I have to.