I headed to Cottage Point, where Fanny and the others were bivouacked. The streets were dark and mostly quiet on account of the curfew, until a few minutes along, when I heard the crack of gunfire in the distance. I asked myself should I go toward it. It was medium far away, maybe out by River Road, at the city’s edge. A short volley from what sounded like Harpers Ferry muskets (our weaponry) was offered as reply, then silence.
After several minutes, there was no further gunfire nor signs of an organized response, nothing that might necessitate my aid.
All was still at the shelter-house, so I let myself in. I removed my brogans for lighter footfalls, climbed the stairs, and made my way to the master’s chambers. There, a determined goose honk trumpeted through the closed door. This had to be Pompeii, for it was unimaginable to me that my narrow little Fanny could bellow such a big noise.
Would she be able to sleep through it? Could anyone?
Fanny was lying on a pallet only feet from me, perhaps unsleeping also, but safe. I slipped down the wall and pulled my knees to my chest, then sat my chin onto them. My tired mind longed for sleep, but restless thoughts would not permit it. They circled back to the gunfire from minutes before, and I wondered, Had Patrick been the author of the initial potshots? He was out here somewhere—a Partisan Ranger, a sneak-murdering bushwhacker.
I removed the postcard from my haver and by the glow of the moon through the nearby window reread Sarah’s coiling script: He said that, before, endeavors such as this pen-work were about all that he did better than you, but that soon this would no longer be the case.
The desolate beach, the crumbling hut. Paddy, wretched Paddy! What had that boy gone and done?
A memory came to me then, vivid and strong. It was of the day I’d told him about Fanny—maybe a year past, after the fall of Sumter but still months before Roanoke was overrun, before anyone understood the full meaning of it all. Few knew about her and me. I hadn’t even told Fields. Patrick and I were in the barn, grooming John B.’s stock. Patrick loved those horses nigh on as much as did John B., and he often joined me in carrying out horsely duties. The scree-screeing of cicadas from outside the open barn door was a music we worked by. Even if, with age, we occupied diverging stations, we still talked much, too, open and free. We were debating how best to treat Syntax—she was the prize of the stable but had been favoring her hind leg. Patrick wanted heat but I knew cool to be better, to keep the swelling down. It went my way, as Patrick tended to trust my judgment on such things.
As I cool-wrapped the leg atop the fetlock, he showed me a picture he had drawn. It was nice, right nice, of a shipwreck, with Sand Bankers on the dunes working to salvage the lumber and sails. He’d titled it Graveyard of the Atlantic and had captured justly the ominous look of the dark, heavy surf. I was no judge; all I knew of fine arts and picture-making were illustrations in books and the portraits of famous Etheridges that lined the walls of the Etheridge House. But to tell by Patrick’s drawing, he had a flair for it.
He said, “You’re pure hell with a horse, you boat well and fish even better, but here’s something I’ll always best you at. I can draw the hairs on a fly’s arse and get the shading just right.”
Patrick could crow with the best of them.
I told him, playful, “Mass John B. thinks it impractical and not a good use of your time.”
I’d cast the words jokey but meant them as a caution also, to forewarn of John B.’s inevitable outburst of anger. He had little patience for Patrick’s interest in art.
But Patrick retorted: “Uncle John thinks that whatever I do, if he did not bid it done, is a poor use of my time. I’ll make my fortune one day on my skill with pen and ink, with oil painting, and Uncle John will see that I’m all the man any Etheridge ever was, and me, by my own path.”
I reached the picture back at him.
He smiled broad and would not take it. “Go on and keep it. You can be my first customer.”
“But I ain’t paid you aught for it,” said I.
“Well, you can still be my first customer, so long as you don’t tell anyone I gave it away for free. Tell them I made you muck out the horse stalls for it or something.”
“Smokes, Paddy-boy, I got to do that anyway.”
It was moments such as this one that recalled our closeness coming up, fondly, with a regret hardly befitting a soon-to-be full-grown man, and none too wise of a slave ever, no matter the age. And so I wanted this now rare feeling to last. I wanted Patrick to know about Fanny, about the thing that had blossomed between us—about our fugitive midnight moments together at Uppowoc Creek, about her tenderness and heart, about her bewitchery and beauty.
I said, “I think I might make a gift of your art-piece to Fanny.”
Not asking permission, mind you, just confiding.
“Annie Aydlett’s handmaid?” he said. “You got something going with her?”
It wasn’t joy for me that I saw in his look, but something other.
“Well, let me tell you,” he continued. “You ain’t the only bull in the yard sniffing after that heifer. I tried to get her into the woods myself just the other week.”
Crowing again, raw and ugly. He was not done. “She wasn’t having none of it. But you know it’s just a matter of time. A nigger gal ain’t keeping nothing from nobody.”
Even then I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I tried to teach him better. “Is that what you think of me, Paddy? Am I just a nigger, too?”
“I’ve known you all my life,” he said quickly, seeming dismayed, as though he’d not recognized his words to be cruel and the knowledge was only now dawning. “It’s different with you, we come up together. You’re like family.”
“Like family? Patrick, you and I are family.”
My defiance brought on his anger, which was always close at hand and ignited high-hot. “Nobody ever whipped you! You tell me one time you was whipped, maltreated. Hell, we learned you letters. You sleep well right here beside us, eat well. What more do you want?”
I dropped my eyes—not out of deference, no!—but because to not do so was to take the next step in this rising encounter, and that could only end poorly. I understood just then something about the source of his constant rivaling with me. If I bettered Patrick at most-all, it was because overseeing me and the others rather than working alongside us had softened him by comparison. I was sure he fared well when with other whites. But when with me or Fields or Dorman, when with Lawrence or Riley? Not hardly.
To see his face—clenching, even as his eyes darted elseways—it was as though in that moment he recognized it as well.
Silence blanketed the barn, so thick that it smothered the nature noises beyond the open door.
He said, his voice subduing, “We ought to take Uncle John’s sloop over to the Alligator River come Sunday. Black bear is pesking this time of year. I bet you if we laid some traps we could get us one.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure we could.”
“It’d be fun! And well worth it—for the hide and claws.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “if you wish it.” All but calling him “Mass Patrick.”
He realized I would not join in his empty banter. Pointing toward the stalls, he spat a command about me mucking them once I was done with Syntax, then stormed out. And I did so, making sure to leave his sketch among the droppings and chips that I carted off.
He said that, before, endeavors such as this pen-work were about all that he did better than you, but that soon this would no longer be the case.
I’d read Patrick’s picture postcard so often, I now knew the words from memory. But where, before, I’d interpreted them as a tortured admission of his decision to join the bushwhackers, a new meaning began to present itself. In the barn that day, I’d made known to him my love for Fanny, its full worth. And so I’d assumed that the one time he’d tactlessly blurted out about trying to get “that heifer” into the woods had been the whole of it. But had there been more, later advances after that—even after he knew she was my girl?
Surely not, Paddy. Surely no . . .
More back-and-forth gun banter distracted me from the distressful considerations. I sat in the house at Cottage Point, knees pulled to my chest and chin sunk onto my knees, listening for signs of an organized response. I would have felt better out there in it, doing something other than this. There was no response, no apparent need of succor.