The Eulogist by Ms. Terry Gamble

Author:Ms. Terry Gamble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

1837

A late-summer mist had settled on the river occluding the opposite shore. Sweat trickled down my neck, settled between my breasts. Now I’ve done it, I thought. Now I’ve crossed the line.

Almost twenty years before, we had sailed from Belfast, leaving our home for a strange land about which much was said. Each night beneath a twang of rigging as insistent as frogs, we had counted the stars, marking the North Star in particular. We watched our land disappear as the world tipped and the horizon loomed, a full week before the reek of our waste intruded upon our reverie of nostalgia and hope. We still had our treasure then. The distant shore did not seem far.

Not so the shore of Kentucky that Handsome and I could see as if backward through a telescope of time and place.

“You sure about this?” Handsome said, wiping his brow with his hat.

We had waited an hour in Maysville for the steamship before learning it had engine trouble. I had pitched a fit to think I might have to stay another night in Kentucky. As much to quiet as to deposit me on the Ohio shore, Handsome had hailed the barge. Once we were on the Ohio side, it seemed as natural as air to start down the road. Only now the sun was lowing, and we were a mile beyond Aberdeen.

We might not have stopped at the stable for oats. We might not have started down one road and, when we came to a fork, decided to proceed on the high one away from the river.

“You’ll go back?” I said. “After what you told me about your wife?”

“I ain’t saying I’ll go back.”

“What, then? Run? You can’t run without me. You’ll get stopped before you know it.”

“I run once before.” Handsome chewed his lip and stared at the top of the horse’s head. “Woulda kept running, too, but there was this minister, see? Goes talking about Potiphar and Joseph, and how Joseph was a slave who walked away from his mastuh, so I got up in the overseer’s face thinking he the one sassing my Delilah. All that done was get me slapped in the clamps.”

One night while on the chain gang, he told me, Handsome had worked his shackles loose on a rock, shushing the boy beside him, and finally clunking him over the head with that same rock when the boy wouldn’t shut up.

“I was wild, you know. I didn’t know where I was going. We wasn’t but a few miles out of Maysville. I knew about the North, but wasn’t sure how to get there, or how I was going to saunter across the river like I had business on the other side.”

“And you were caught?” I looked around as I said this, imagining the dogs, fearing the same fate for us.

“Not so much caught as returned.” He was chewing so hard his bottom lip seemed to disappear. “Jes’ my luck to run into that ol’ preacher agin, and him as sick as a dog.

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