this time. In that moment all the rage of everything from my mother to Maynard to Sophia to Thena to Corrine, all the lies, all the losses, all that they had done to me in the jail parlor, all the violation, all my impotence for the little boy in my cell, for the old man who loved the wife of his son, for the days they’d chased me into the woods—all of it came up there and vented itself on a dead man.
Finally tired, I doubled over on my knees. The fire was now burning low. But I could see Bland standing there with a girl and a man, and the man stood in front of the girl to shield her from my anger, and it occurred to me then that the man was the girl’s father.
“Are you finished?” Micajah Bland asked.
“No,” I said. “Not ever.”
We are all divided against ourselves. Sometimes part of us begins to speak for reasons we don’t even understand until years later. The voice that took me away from the Underground was familiar and old in me. This was the voice that conspired to come up off the Street. This was the voice that consigned my mother to the “down there.” It was the voice that had spoken to Thena, and so callously left her behind. It was the voice of freedom, a cold Virginia freedom—freedom for me and those I chose. But now a new voice was rising, one enriched by the warmth of the house of Viola White, and the ghost of my aunt Emma who from somewhere deep within admonished me, Don’t forget, family.
We walked through the woods until we reached a town where Bland had left his horses, carriage, and a cart. I was aware now of the blow I’d taken earlier, as my head was pounding steadily, seemingly in rhythm with every step we took. I sat in the cart with the girl and her father. Morning was just beginning to break over the horizon in a fan of orange and blue. We had gone a few miles when we stopped. I turned and saw Bland talking to a small woman standing in the road, her whole body wrapped and covered in a shawl. Then she turned and began walking to the back of the cart. When she was close enough, she put a hand on my cheek, and then my forehead and then the back of my head, which was sore to the touch. I could now see that she was, judging by her countenance, only slightly older than me, and yet in her approach, in her confidence and command, I sensed someone much senior.
“Got ’em, did you?” she said, calling back to Bland, even as her hand was still on my face.
“Yes,” Bland said. “They had not even made it that far out and the fools decided to stop and have a banquet.”
She turned to Bland and said, “Glad they did.” The she turned back to me and said in a soft voice, “But you, boy, what were you doing? And what kind of agent let them hounds get under him like that? Mmmm-hmmm. Almost carried you off.”
I said nothing but felt my face burn. She laughed and pulled back her hand.
“All right,” she said to Bland. “Y’all get gone.”
The cart began to creak as the horses moved. The woman waved to us and then walked off into the woods to our rear. I could feel some excitement in the cart now. The man and the girl started chattering with each other. When I didn’t join in, the man leaned over to say, “Don’t you know who that was?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
“Moses,” he said. He waited for a moment as if to recover from the effect that speaking the fact of things had on him.
“My God…” And he paused again. “That was Moses.”
* * *
—
There seemed to be as many names for her as legends. The General. The Night. The Vanisher. Moses of the Shore, who summoned the fog, and parted the river. This was the one of whom Corrine and Hawkins had spoken, the living master of Conduction. I did not register all of this at that moment. Too much had happened, and I was mostly in shock at all that had befallen me.
An hour later, the girl was asleep in her father’s lap. Bland pulled over the cart and called for me to join him in the front. We rode for another few minutes