deep it seems, came up on the other side of silence, where the nightmares gallop. In this dream I am the headless chickens and I am the fox snapping their necks. That’s all wrong. That weren’t how it happened. There’s a tap tap tap that I wake to and my girl Rue’s in my arms, thank the Lord, sleeping undisturbed. She ain’t forgive me for leaving Varina, and I don’t care if she never do.
“Who there?”
I hear the tap tap tap again and I know who it is right off. It’s Ol’ Joel and his goddamn cane. The one Marse Charles give him. The one he think as good as Moses’s own staff. He’s rapping it at my door, impatient.
I open the door to him, not caring I’m in my nightclothes, and the old filthy man has a long, slow look from my bare feet on up, before he finally gets to the reason he’s woke me up while the moon is still shining.
“It’s the new ’un,” he says.
And I say, “Which?” fearing it’s one of them sisters.
“Jonah,” he say and I bristle at it. Surprised he’s even bothered to get the boy’s name.
I throw on a shawl against the cold night air and Ol’ Joel looks disappointed at the loss of my pricked-up chest.
“He hurt?”
“Bleedin’ bad.”
I grab the healing things, ones good for when there’s no forewarning what the danger might be: yarrow and oak bark and comfrey root come to hand. I have one tallow candle left to light, and I can see Ol’ Joel looking at it with envy as I draw it out and set the wick afire. The shadows writhe something sinister. I all of a sudden want to stop and kiss my girl, but there’s no time for that. She doesn’t stir even as I draw the light from the room. Outside, Ol’ Joel moves slow with his cane and I’m too frustrated to wait on him to lead.
“Where’s the boy?”
“By the creek,” he say and I run off in the direction of his crooked, pointed finger. The night’s set in too deep to see the water, which runs black as ink in the thicker parts of the wood. I follow its lapping sound awhile and I feel it the moment I’ve left the bounds of Marse Charles’s lands, though I can’t say how. Still, Jonah ain’t too far from home when I do find him and I gotta wonder who put the whisper in Ol’ Joel’s ear that this would be the place the boy would be.
The nighttime screeching of wild hogs is a strange, awful thing, for they ain’t nighttime animals and they know it, but the poor starved creatures ain’t stupid neither. They know a feast when they see it, and this boy is the feast, doused as he is in bacon grease. Somebody’s tied him to a tree by his wrists, covered him in hog fat and offal. Them wild beasts is eating the remains of their captive cousins with feral glee and eating up Jonah along with it. He struggled I can see by the deep red gashes the rope made on his wrists, rubbed raw down to the bone. Now he’s suffered so long, he ain’t even making a sound no more. He dead?
I swing my candle at the hogs—it’s the only weapon I’ve got—and they scream and grunt and hiss at me awhile and I worry that they’re so ravenous they’ll turn on me next but they don’t. They trudge back into the wood as my flame swings near, and they take their awful grunting with them so that finally I can hear the low whimper coming from the boy.
“Jonah.” I speak to him to keep him hearing sense. “Jonah. Boy. Jonah.”
He chatters his teeth and looks at me like I’m hollow, like he’s seeing through me to some other place. “Stay here now, Jonah.”
It seems like forever ’til Ol’ Joel catch up, like he took his time. He’s brought with him two other sturdy men and I suspect the delay was in waking the overseer, in asking permission. They pick up Jonah like he’s nothing at all