Free Night Birds, The by Thomas Maltman Page A

with you?”
     
    “No,” he said immediately. “It’s not possible.”
     
    “I can be useful,” she said. “I’m a hard worker. I know all sorts of things. I even know how to cipher; my childhood master had strange whims. I can cipher and recite the Psalms and Shakespeare.” She paused as if hesitant to reveal more. So this was the reason she spoke so fluently. It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. As she spoke her hands at her hips kneaded the dress and pulled it up to expose more dark umber skin. She looked at him, her lips parting. He felt breathless of a sudden. He longed to see the scar, to touch a wound he had no right to touch, to know the path he was setting upon was right.
     
    He was going to tell her then of his plans for her: How he was going to approach the reverend who had spoken so ardently about abolition. Surely he would know people in Illinois where he was from. But then he heard the barn door creaking open. A voice called up to him. “Jakob?” His wife’s voice. “What are you doing up there?”
     
    A long pause: “I thought I heard rats. I climbed up to check.” Ruth sat back down and huddled in her corner, her eyes wild once more.
     
    “I heard voices, Jakob.”
     
    “You know how I am,” he told her. “Always talking to myself.”
     
    “I used to know how you were,” she said.
     
    He pushed down a mound of hay for the milch cows. Then he climbed back down the ladder and smiled at his wife. Her eyes were still on the loft, where even now the boards creaked again. There was no point in further lying.
     
    “A runaway,” he told her. “The one I printed the ad for.”
     
    Kate inhaled sharply. “How long has she been up there?”
     
    Jakob shrugged. “A couple of days,” he said. He saw the suspicion in her eyes, the anger that he had kept this secret and he remembered his earlier resolve. “I am going to buy her passage out of here.”
     
    Kate’s hands had curled into fists. She was a large, formidable woman, but Jakob kept his ground and looked up into her eyes. “Have you gone mad?” she said. “It’s one thing for you to write your nonsense in a news- paper decent people don’t read. But if you break the law. . . . Jakob, she belongs to somebody.”
     

    The next night he dreamed he was running from hounds. He plunged through a forest of thorn and felt branches rake his skin. He tried to catch his breath and stumbled over an exposed root. The sound of their barking closed in all around him.
     
    His breathing came in short gasps when he sat up.
     
    “What is it?” his wife said, taking hold of his arm.
     
    He shushed her. He was awake now and there were dogs loose in his woods. The hill behind the cabin echoed with the sound of baying. The pack came closer. They crossed the haymeadow and he pictured their sleek forms bounding through the tallgrass. One gave a high, sheering bark of recognition. The hounds came past his cabin. Their claws skittered on his porch and for a moment he thought it was him they came for. But the hounds continued beyond his cabin until the sound of their barking faded in the far woods.
     
    Beside him, his wife said. “You see. You see what you’ve done now.” Jakob heard male voices trailing behind the dogs. A gruff voice called out for them to come back. He thought of confronting the men for trespassing. It would take only a moment to prime the rifle hanging over the mantle, but Kate, sensing his thoughts, laid a hand on his chest. Whatever else came between them, they loved one another. They depended on their arguments to add some spark to their lives. Now this touch, even though he was angry with her, brought a stillness inside him. She loved him enough to be afraid for him.
     
    Jakob lay back in the dark, but did not sleep, for it came to him that if his advertisement had in some way summoned the slave, it had also brought the hounds that now hunted her through the dark. He huddled deep in his layer of quilts,