Free Night Birds, The by Thomas Maltman Page B

praying the girl had stayed hidden in the loft.
     

    In the morning he climbed the ladder, knowing even before he reached the top that she would be gone.
     
    That afternoon he ate lunch at Burton’s. The door swung open, admitting the slave catchers he had heard in the dark. One was lean with a pointed chin and arrow-shaped beard, the other short and clean-shaven, even his scalp hairless and gleaming with perspiration. Both wore dirty fringed buckskin and coon caps and their eyes were red-rimmed from exhaustion. Jakob listened closely as they approached the barkeep, Timothy Burton, a genial, aproned host with his hair lying slick against his skull. They ordered pork chops, johnnycake, a bottle of rye whisky to split between them.
     
    “Jumped right in the river,” the lean one said. His voice had a twang to it. “Never did see the like, thought she was a bird and could fly clean to the other side.” The bald one kept his silence. He breathed through his nostrils, the red-rimmed eyes taking Jakob in and then looking away again.
     
    “I just hope we get something for the body,” the lean man continued.
     
    “You found her then?” Jakob asked.
     
    “Had a time of it though,” said the man. “She was tangled in some branches down the river. Not a mark on her, but her mouth hung open. Her belly was so full of gasses and water that when I lifted her out the damn thing groaned like she was complaining.” He shook his head, grinning, his mouth jagged with yellow teeth. “Scared me so bad I dropped her back in the current and had to fish her out again.” Jakob looked away from the man, left a silver coin on his table, a dime like he had been paid for the ad, and went out back.
     
    The hounds were tied to a post and lay sleeping in the dust. They didn’t even stir as he passed. Flies swirled around a mule and tormented its watering eyes. He could see the round mound of the tarp draped over the mule’s back, and one hand with broken fingernails swinging below the canvas. Flecks of gray mud were caught beneath the milky nails. In his mind’s eye he saw the muddy current pulling her under, the girl trying to claw her way back toward light and air. He looked at the hand of the slave woman named Ruth for a long time. The mule’s flanks twitched and drops of mud shook loose from her fingers and spattered the ground below her.
     

    Outside in the rain the voices followed after her, or maybe she would only imagine this, for memory cannot be trusted and her mind would often return to this scene and fill it in with new details. When her father spoke of the tarring, years later, she imagined herself back in that room with him and Kate and Josiah. The eaves dripped spooling waterfalls into barrels on either side of the cabin. She stood there for a minute before a flash of lightning lit up the ground around her and she noticed a rabbit shuddering before her feet. Tricked out of a long winter drowsing by a warming spell, the animal trembled in terror. Caught between the girl and the storm, its long ears flattened against its skull and it hunched down against the smooth surface of the pine porch. Hazel wanted both to run her hands through the soft fur and also to scare it away before her brothers returned. She nudged it gently with her toe, but it remained motionless as stone. Years later, in her moments of greatest terror, the girl would imagine herself like that rabbit. A thing as still as stone while the shadow of the owl passed over. A thing that could not be touched in its silence and stillness. Neither moved, both creatures listening to the spilling sound of water and the undertone of voices rising from the cabin.
     
    “There’s a way out of this and that’s if your husband takes back his words. You don’t want the entire county calling you abolitionists and nigger-stealers. You don’t want what happened to that reverend.”
     
    Kate’s voice came back, sharp and high-pitched. “You don’t care about us. You