A Reckoning by Linda Spalding

Author:Linda Spalding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

37

John’s mare cantered along the road, slowing for the clumps and clefts she knew well enough while John bent his frame under branches though he could not deceive himself; he did not know any longer where he was going. Or why. The woods were his history. He’d been over the county and beyond it for years: He that Listeneth to Me…The furrows and paths were not filled with hostility; there was many a home that would take him in, offer him food and a bed, but the image he held was of his youngest child being handed up into the wagon, being given up by none other than himself. After such an act, how could he reasonably ask for shelter from a Christian family? He had taken old Reuben several miles out of the district, connecting Reuben’s mule to a little cart that would serve as seat and resting place. Get along now, he’d coached the old man. Keep your letter of freedom safe.

Reuben had looked up at him without a word of thanks, climbed up in the cart, and muttered: Better you not to go lookin for more trouble.

But John had turned his mare toward Tennessee and now, miles away from that scene, he had a craving to get out of the saddle and sit in the dark and think of how Gina had clung to him. He’d started out with a clear idea of what he was doing and where he was going, Better you not to go lookin, and lost it on the road or in the unreadable woods. Directionless, he unclamped his hands from the mare’s tangled mane and she stood nosing at a clump of green while he slid off her back and onto hard ground. Bitter and still loving all of it, he had left the brick house with the long table at its core where Emly had served a thousand meals, a thousand spicy cakes, her famous rounds of cheese. And perhaps it was his intention to find her in Tennessee, where she would be marketed as a body to be used by drooling men or perhaps he was just afraid of death. First, I will save the woman I didn’t protect. That’s all it was – an act of contrition. But a jab of rage hit him and he rubbed at his chest. He remembered a moment when his mother had grabbed him and then pushed him away and he had run around and around the house. Mama, he whispered now. But he could not remember the hunger he’d felt for his mother, or even the burden of her disinterest. What he remembered was Bry ten years old. They’d been born the same year, but sometimes Bry liked to play with Jemima best. They had a cave that John was not allowed to enter and maybe John ran to Rafe and told him that Bry was ten years old and it was time for him to be working the fields. Ten. Take him back.

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