Free Gabriel's Story by David Anthony Durham

second but made no communication with the boy, turning instead and settling the bill.
    Outside, the two loaded up the wagon in silence. Solomon patted the boy on the shoulder, turned, and climbed onto the seat. Gabriel watched him, sour-faced. “That’s what you call being a free man?” He said it quietly, just a whisper, but clearly, so that his stepfather could hear it.
    The man paused before seating himself, thought for a moment, then let himself down onto the blanket. When he spoke, his voice was honest, half defeated and far from proud. “Naw, I don’t reckon we’re all the way there, but we’re on the way. Things could be a lot worse than somebody taking your plow. We’re still finding the course to better things.” He motioned for the boy to climb aboard.
    Gabriel looked around, considering other options and none too sure that the wagon was the best one. He eventually climbed in and settled himself, facing the back. He crossed his arms and sat in silence as the vehicle began its slow, creaking progress home.
    THE SKY THAT SUNDAY EVENING began calm and still. No breeze blew across the grass, and even the coyotes were silent, their familiar cacophonous calls absent from the night. Hiram sat beside a tallow candle, in its warm, flickering light, and read from the Bible, from the old tales of the pharaohs and the Israelites. Egypt seemed an incomprehensible land, and Gabriel could scarcely conjure images of that strange country and the deeds performed there. Hiram spoke of Moses and Pharaoh, he who spurned God’s wishes, of how Pharaoh was punished with miracles beheld by all, how he became repentant and wished to release the Jews. But each time Moses returned, God would turn Pharaoh’s heart hard and make him refuse and thereby bring upon his people a new plague. This they repeated time and again. Gabriel couldn’t help thinking that God was a cruel God, one who would toy with the souls of men and make them suffer against their wishes, who would choose one race of people over another and so mete out his curses.
    Hiram found the words moving to the core and soon turned the evening’s reading into a full-blown sermon. He spoke not as Hiram to his close kin but as preacher to a greater audience, with a fervor that made Eliza smile. He began by recollecting their distant homes in the South. He talked of that warm and humid land, of the beauty in its tragic history, and he spoke of the troubles of that place, the hardships they’d all known. They’d come here to escape some of that suffering, hadn’t they? They’d come to make a new life for themselves, to prosper, grow, and multiply. Wasn’t this so? He paused when they answered in the affirmative, and then said that they might escape many things in this country, but there was one force from which they could never escape. “Do you know what I’m speaking on, all of you?” He looked at the boys, who affirmed that they did. Hiram seemed to doubt this. He closed his eyes and stated, as if to a loved but naughty child for the hundredth time, “Ye cannot escape God’s laws, God’s sight, God’s blessing, and God’s judgment.”
    He went on to tell the story of Jesus’ life, summed up and abbreviated, stressing his love for the poor and devotion to the common man. With his own upheld arms he painted a picture of Jesus nailed to the cross, dying once again before their eyes, for their sins, so that man would not be destroyed but could live to be tested further. And later, with quiet words that caused the listeners to crane forward, he told of the man’s resurrection. His body became stiff and unwieldy, dead and frozen, and only gradually did he regain life, as the Lord breathed the spirit back into him and Jesus both.
    In the end, Hiram turned their eyes back out toward the fields. He read from the hundred and fifth psalm, verses forty-two, forty-three, and forty-five,