Free March by Geraldine Brooks Page B

the difference that I chose volumes according to my own desires rather than Mrs. Clement’s. So it was for more than a year, until the following fall. Mr. Clement had gone ahead to his daughter’s plantation, where a family celebration was to be observed. His son was to follow on the eve of the gathering, and he decided he would bring a brace of wild turkey for the occasion. He went out alone, and did not come back. It was Mr. Harris who found him. Apparently, he had got his boot tangled in some honeysuckle thicket and his fowling piece discharged into his face. Mr. Harris carried the body home here and I tried to tell him that it would be best to get it in its box before the master returned. But he said he wouldn’t do anything until he knew Mr. Clement’s wishes. Well, of course Mr. Clement rode back here in a distraught state and insisted on seeing his boy. I had done my best, but that didn’t amount to much.” She looked at me then, and I could see the condition of the corpse just from the memory of it in her eyes. “He sat up all night by the body. The next morning, I noticed a tremor in his hand. I thought it was exhaustion, merely. But it was the beginning of his long decline.
    “Mr. Harris did not stay here long after. He got a better offer and he took it. His ties had been to the young master. I think he really loved the boy, in his way. He certainly spent more time with him than Mr. Clement, who made it cruelly plain that his own son bored him. It was Mr. Harris who praised the boy when he mastered some aspect of farm work. I think you know that Mr. Clement never troubled to conceal his contempt for estate matters or those whose minds they occupied. You could not have known how it galled Mr. Harris, that morning of his return, when he came into the kitchen for refreshment and learned from Annie that you had been dining with Mr. Clement every day. He himself had never been invited to do so. Not once, in nine long years of service. So, I suppose you could say that Mr. Clement had no right to the man’s loyalty.
    “In any case, the place has never been well run since the day he left. The replacement Mr. Clement hired was a swindler: he made off with a year’s profit. The next man was a brute—” She stopped for a moment, dealing with memories that were evidently so bitter she could not give them voice. “Mr. Clement dismissed him after two of our best hands, Mose and Asa, ran off Until that time the Clements had never had a runaway. By then, the place had a name for mismanagement, and the only person Mr. Clement could find to take it on was a man who spent all night drinking applejack and all day sleeping it off. That was the year Mr. Clement started selling people, to make ends meet. The speculator wanted to sell me: I overheard him say that a “yaller girl” like me would be worth more than any other three hands down in New Orleans. But Mr. Clement wouldn’t hear of it. He sold Justice and Prudence instead. The day the speculator took them, Annie went to the river. Mr. Clement always maintained that she slipped on the rocks, but it wasn’t so. She just walked out into the channel until the water closed over her head.” I felt a hard lump form suddenly in my throat. Grace stood, abruptly, and busied herself lighting the lamp against the gathering dark. Before the wick flared, I dashed the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand. “As soon as we got word that the Union army was camped across the river in Poolesville, half the remaining hands ran off. That left but three of us, and the other two left here a fortnight ago, during the battle for the island. ”
    “Grace,” I said, standing and taking a step toward her. “Why do you not go, too? The colonel told me he had offered you a place in a hospital in Georgetown ... You could begin again there ...”
    In answer, she turned and looked down upon the sunken face of Mr. Clement. She bent over him to adjust his coverlid. He was snoring now;