Lavender raised his eyebrows. He said: “Now it is likely if you was to go out there today you would run into some of his offspring, which it looks to me like you done. York was a first cousin to my granddaddy. I believe he was the most famous person in my family.”
“It could be,” says I.
“The more I think about it, the surer I am,” Lavender says, and then he leans over close to me, keeping his voice down: “I don’t mind telling you I’m fixing to go out there myself.… Now you go and mention that to Lucy and I’ll be in trouble.”
“You ain’t taking her along?”
“That’s my reason for leaving,” he whispers, while looking fearfully towards the doorway. “You let a woman catch you and you’ll have reason to be sorry for it every minute of the day. Now the Reverend bought me from my old master and he freed me according to law. I have heerd him say: ‘No man must own another.’ Then he makes me marry Lucy, for I expect he believe it’s all right for a woman to own a man. The way I look at it, I had one benefit from law and one defect, so I am even now and before I get to losing I want to go out where they don’t have any laws a-tall and are purely savage.”
“Maybe we should go together,” I said. Until that minute I never had thought of running away from the Pendrakes, for they had treated me well, but I had been in civilization for a couple of months now and still couldn’t see no sense to it whenever Mrs. P. wasn’t around. Now I was sick in this shameful way: you hadn’t ought to be made ill by the rain, which is a natural thing. What it meant was that I wasn’t living right. About the only time I felt proper in town is when I throwed that kid Luke English to the ground and went for my knife. And I believed my blood was getting watery from the lack of raw buffalo liver. The only thing I learned so far that seemed to take real root was lustful yearnings, and the Reverend told me they was wrong.
“If you can wait till I am better-” I began.
But Lavender frowned and said: “I ain’t going to listen to that talk. The difference between me and you is I am colored and you is a boy. Now nobody has no call to stop a colored man who ain’t a slave from running off, but if he takes a boy with him, he got trouble with the law again.”
“Listen,” says I, “once we get beyond Fort Leavenworth, I’ll be taking you.”
That hurt his pride and he mumbled some with his eyes down, and he allows: “Well, I’m going tonight, anyway. I would wait if I could, but I cain’t.”
“What difference would another few days make?” For I thought to be up within that time.
“Ever hour is a living agony,” says Lavender. “It is a monstrosity of nature for man to be ruled by woman.”
I figured he got them words from something Pendrake said, so I asked if Lucy give him so much trouble, why didn’t he get advice on it from the Reverend?
“Look here,” Lavender tells me, “I ain’t going to say nothing against your Daddy.”
“He is my Pa,” says I, “only in that law you was talking about, and it is a wondrous thing how a man can get himself new relatives by signing a piece of paper.” It made a real mark on Lavender that I never held a high opinion of law, either, and like himself was a victim of it, though not in his discomfort.
He sort of shrugs with his mouth and says in a low voice: “He ain’t going to get none in the usual way.”
My back started to ache from a twitch of muscle, and I shifted my position in bed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” But I knowed well enough, and my back felt worse at the new angle.
Lavender winced and drew back. “I don’t want to get me in trouble.”
“I thought you was going to run off tonight.”
He opened his eyes. “That’s right,” he says and grins in relief. “That’s right, I sure am.”
“You reach me over that paper and pencil on the desk, I’ll draw you a map of where to find the Cheyenne.” I told him quite a number of useful items on how to get along with the Indians, concluding with: “Now you can be friendly but don’t ever crawl on your belly before a Cheyenne no matter what he does, on account of he’ll do it worse then. I mention that because they have lately had a lot of trouble with whites and might carry a prejudice.”
“Against white men?”
“Of which you are a black-colored one,” I says. “I’m talking of what they believe, which is the truth when you live among them, like law is around here.”
I drawed that map, resting the paper against a book. Lavender couldn’t read, but he ought to be able to follow the lines of rivers.
“If you was going to wait a while, I’d teach you some of the sign talk and maybe Cheyenne as well,” I said.
“No,” he told me, “I cain’t tarry. But I thank you kindly.”
“Hold on,” I says as he starts to rise from the chair. “You never finished what you begun before about the Reverend.”
Lavender went out and looked up and down the hall, then he come back alongside my bed.
“He don’t lay with his Lady,” says he. “I expect on account of he is a preacher, but them other preachers in town has children, so it must not be against the law.”
“You mean never?” I asks. “For I’ve knowed Indians who wouldn’t do it for a time because of a dream they had or before a war.”
“Never,” says Lavender. “Lucy see that in the yolk of an egg. She got the gift of a witch. That’s the reason I’m leaving. Every time I go with another woman, Lucy see it in an egg.”
Lavender didn’t run off that night. He come in to see me again the next day and never even apologized for not carrying out his plan. Instead he talked as if he meant the next night, and the same happened the next, and so on. People who talk instead of do give me a pain in the arse. I reckon Lavender just wanted somebody to complain to, and that’s all right, but I wish he would of admitted it. On the other hand, I guess you ought to have a different standard for judging a man who had been kept as slave until the age of twenty-two. It takes him a while to know what’s possible, and maybe he should be given credit for just having the idea of real freedom.
Anyways, I oughtn’t to protest his staying, for he was the only person in that town I could talk to with ease. That boy I whipped, Luke English, come around to visit while I was sick. He still hated my guts and figured he had been tricked rather than beaten outright-whites always believed that when licked by Indians-but his Pa wanted to suck up to the Pendrakes, so sent him over with a cake his Ma had made. Luke stopped somewhere on the way and tongued off all the icing; which didn’t matter none to me, though, because I was still off my feed and couldn’t have ate a cannonball like that when well.
As soon as Mrs. Pendrake, who had let him in, went downstairs, Luke started talking indecent. Him and the Reverend could have gone around with a tent show, holding debates on the topic, for they represented the long and short of it.
“Say,” Luke remarked, studying round my room with his mean eyes, “you got quite a wigwam here. Did you ever sneak a girl in?”
“Did you?” I asked him in scorn.
“I don’t have it so private. I got to bunk in with three brothers. My old man and old lady went at it so hard they have filled the house. I also got four sisters. The oldest is just eighteen. Some feller climbs in her bed every night and has his way with her. Pa don’t know what to do about it.”
I was taken in and dumb enough to ask: “Why don’t he shoot him?”
“Oh,” says Luke, cackling, “it’s her husband.”
He sits down on the foot of my bed. “What’s it like with an Indin squaw? I hear they got quite a strong smell. I hear you want one, you throw a bean across the fire and the one it lands near has to go with you even if she’s married to the chief. I never had an Indin woman. The ones I seen have been mighty ugly. I’d druther find me a fat sheep if I couldn’t get nothing else.