Free Night Birds, The by Thomas Maltman

palms take hold of the top rung. One shove and the ladder and Jakob would be spilled onto the hard ground below.
     
    “Don’t,” he cried. “I don’t mean you harm.” Jakob let the pitchfork fall and it clattered against one of the stalls. When he looked down he saw the circle of lantern light on the floor and the constellations whirling and spinning around it. He closed his eyes to steady himself. When he looked back up, the hands had disappeared. He kept coming up the ladder, his hands slick with sweat, one greasy rung at a time, drawn like a fish with a hook through its gills. At the top rung he hefted himself into the loft and crouched there.
     
    While his eyes adjusted in the shadows of the bales, Jakob listened. A dark shape breathed in the corner. The smell of hay, welcoming and warm with the memory of summer, pervaded the loft. A slat had been busted out in the side and through the gap Jakob saw his moonlit fields and the black woods beyond.
     
    “Who are you?” he said, but the shape didn’t answer. He could make out the white rims of two eyes looking back at him, eyes framed by a wild tangle of coarse, shorn hair. A girl, a runaway. He smelled the scent of her now, an acrid, fearful undercurrent in the hay. When he came closer she drew herself into a ball and hissed. Her ivory teeth flashed.
     
    “I don’t mean you harm,” he said again. Her breathing had become hoarse. She trembled before him like something chased for so long that what was human in her had faded for a time. “You’re Ruth, aren’t you?” He thought by naming her he could bring her back. She didn’t answer that night, but he knew it at once, had known it when he first printed the ad. It was as if his words had called her into being and summoned her to this place.
     
    When she spoke her voice was parched, but the words formal. “Mister,” she said. “I could’ve hurt you, but I didn’t.” Jakob had heard slaves talking among themselves before, though he hurried onward, pretending not to see them and putting them out of mind as soon as they were out of sight. This girl sounded nothing like them. She spoke in a careful, measured manner. She spoke like him, like some forgotten part of him he was just discovering. Once she said those words she began to cough violently.
     
    He wanted to comfort her with a light touch, but didn’t wish to frighten her any further. “I’m not going to turn you in,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you for days and now I understand why. Whoever did that to you, they don’t deserve you. Not that I believe in it anyhow, the idea of owning another human being.” He realized he was babbling and that he had not spoken his convictions aloud until this moment. She looked back at him, her eyes chalky in the shadows.
     
    For the next few nights Jakob claimed to be carrying out food for the barn cats, but he climbed that ladder and brought the leftovers to her. He would sit and watch her eat, the way she licked her fingers clean, her habit of muttering a prayer in words so quiet he couldn’t hear them. The second night after she finished eating, she stood and stretched, yawning. They had not discussed yet how to get her across the river and beyond that to Ioway country and freedom. Simply by hiding this fugitive he had dragged his own family into territory he didn’t understand. She was taller and thinner than he expected her to be. The frayed calico dress she wore was pale against her skin and showed the bare flesh of her arms and legs, a pretty umber color. His eyes traced the smooth shape of her calves up to the ragged edge of pale cloth. She felt his eyes on her and turned away. Her hands smoothed down the low mound of her belly as she looked out the busted slat to the empty night beyond. “You’re pregnant,” he said, his breath low.
     
    “It’s why I ran away,” she said. “I didn’t want any baby. . . .” She didn’t finish. She turned to him again. “Could I live here