Free A Dream of Daring by Gen LaGreca

factory’s owner for a comment on why his company failed. The owner was
described as looking despondent. “You can’t change the soul of the South,” he
had said. “Anyone who tries is doomed.”
    The comment disturbed
Tom. A budding industry, a workers’ town, a burgeoning business, and a new age
had been suffocated. That was twenty-five years ago. The soul of the South had
remained unchanged. But the factory hadn’t been killed completely, he thought,
as he read the last paragraph of the story. The reporter mentioned that Henry
Barnwell was naming his new plantation Barnwell Oaks. Reading this twenty-five
years later, Tom realized that Barnwell Oaks was a name that somehow had never
caught on with the townspeople. The owner of the factory, Tom thought, had seen
the new age coming, because the name he had given his factory had attached
itself to Henry Barnwell’s plantation and endured through the years. The
plantation, like the factory preceding it, was called the Crossroads.
    When the rain stopped,
Tom was as eager to leave the place as one might be to end a visit to a
cemetery.
    The storm had left its
mark, he noticed, as he continued on the back roads to Ruby Manor. His path
took him through a live oak forest, where the lightning and winds had wounded
the great octopus-evergreens that seemed invulnerable. Among their sprawling
trunks and tentacle branches, Tom saw trees split like barrels and branches
broken like matchsticks.
    He thought of another
towering figure that had fallen, Wiley Barnwell, and how the women he left
behind would need help managing their own plantation and selling the
Crossroads. Tom would, of course, assist Charlotte and Rachel with their
business and financial needs. But what about their grief at a loved one
suddenly being ripped from their lives? He was helpless to fill that crater.
For the first time, he felt responsible for the unhappiness of others. He could
feel the women’s sorrow and hear their anguish. Their cries were
loud . . . vivid . . . frightful— He
suddenly realized that the cries he heard were real. They were coming not from
his imagination but from the woods ahead. He took off on his horse to
investigate.
    He soon discovered that
the cries were the frantic whinnying of a horse in distress. A fallen tree lay
across the midsection of the creature, a formidable black trunk slicing a roan
body, the animal’s limbs dangling helplessly in the air, its head bobbing up
and down, its deep-throated wails reverberating through the quiet forest. A
young mulatto woman was trying to free the beast. Her face looked as panicked as
the animal’s, but she was conspicuously silent and, Tom suspected, wouldn’t
dare cry for help because she appeared to be a slave caught in a runaway
attempt.
    She had devised a method
for freeing the horse, using what seemed to be the only tool she had: a long
rope. Tom visually traced the path of the rope from its one end tied to a tree
trunk, then swung over a thick, low-hanging branch of a giant oak on one side
of the animal, then curled around the trunk pinning the horse, then brought up
around another low branch on the other side of the animal, and then brought
down to its other end in her hand. The slim figure had tied a stick to the end
she was holding in order to form a handle perpendicular to the rope for better
leverage. She was pulling feverishly on it.
    Tom looked in amazement
at the makeshift pulley system that she had devised to reduce the weight she’d
have to lift to free the hapless horse. He noted her intelligent effort as he
watched her pulling on the rope. With the limited strength she had because of
her small size, she could lift the trunk from the horse only slightly,
insufficient to free the animal. She pulled again, adjusting her angle, trying
to improve her leverage, but to no avail. She looked up from her rigors to see
that the rope section around one of the branches was fraying and about to
break. She gasped in