back, and even if he heard Sophia it was clear he had no inclination to answer.
We sat there for a few moments, not quite sure what to do. Then Sophia turned to me with a wry smile and said, “You happy about this, ain’t you?”
“I ain’t unhappy,” I said. “Besides, way you was just talking, I’d think you felt much the same.”
“I do. I do,” she said. “But it is odd. I have never had it happen this way before.”
She was quiet for a moment, thinking to herself, turning over some recent theory.
“What?” I said.
“You probably did it,” she said. “Some sort of way, I am betting that this is all your doing.”
I laughed lightly, shook my head, and said, “It is amazing what you take me as, like I got powers over these white folks. Or I am some sort of conjure-man.”
“You some sort of something, I will say that.”
We laughed. I pulled the reins on the chaise and turned back around toward Lockless.
“I am sorry, Hiram,” she said. “You know I don’t want to be back there. I wanna be as far away as I can get. But if I got to do the work, I’d like to be done with it. Hate having this hanging over my head. I am a slave with him. But since you done come back, I feel myself to be as free as I have ever been. And though I know this is not the true article, it is something. And I want it.”
Then she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “I want as much of it as I can take.”
Oh, to be back there, and be young again. To be seated in the dawning hours of my life, the sun of everything breaking over the horizon, and all the promises and tragedies ahead of me. To be there in that chaise, with a day-pass, and a girl I loved more than anything, in the last doleful days of old and desolate Virginia. Oh, to be there with time to spare, with time to dream of riding out as far as that Elm County road went until fortune abandoned us.
We rode on, speaking of the old days and all the Lost Ones of Elm County—Thurston, Lucille, Lem, Garrison. We talked of how they had gone, how Natchez had taken them. Some quiet. Some singing. Some laughing. Some swinging.
“What happened to Pete?” I asked.
“Sent over the bridge about a month before you come back,” Sophia said.
“Thought Howell would never part with him,” I said. “That man had such a hand for them orchards.”
“All gone now,” she said. “Natchez. As are all the rest. As are we all, soon enough. All gone. All done.”
“Naw,” I said. “I think we are survivors, you and I. If by devilish means, we are survivors. Maybe not much more than that. But we are, I do believe, survivors.”
The winter had not yet given its full effect, and now we rode through a clear, crisp winter morning. We climbed high up on the road now, and I could see the Goose, and see across the shore over toward Starfall, and in the far distance I could see the bridge from which I had conducted myself into this other life.
“But what if we are not, Sophia?”
“What?”
“All gone. All done,” I said. “What if there was some way by which we might make ourselves more than all the misery we have seen here?”
“This more of your dreams without facts? All sideways. You remember how that went, right?”
“I remember well. But we are connected, just as you say. We are older than our years. The place has made us that way, by all we have seen. We are out of time, you and I. What was glorious to them is crumbling before our eyes. But suppose we did not have to crumble with them? We know well that they are going down, Sophia. Suppose we did not have to go with them?”
She was now looking at me directly.
“I cannot, Hiram,” she said. “Not like that. Not again. I know it’s something about you. And when you are ready to tell me what that is, then I shall be with you. But I cannot go on just a word, not again. Ain’t just me anymore, so if you have something, I have to know the all of it. I have said it. I would kill to be off of this, kill to save my daughter from it.”