River Runs Deep Read Free Page A

scolding. From the likes of a slave, no less.
    Yet the truth of it was, Elias was more worn out from the chase than he liked to admit. He began fiddling with the end of a rope he found dangling from Stephen’s pack.
    â€œYou can read?” Elias asked. “And write?” To hear Granny tell it, Kentucky was hard on its slaves, worse than Virginia even, on account of they didn’t have so many and what they did have kept running off North to get free. Plus, it was against the law anywhere to teach a slave or a colored person to read.
    Stephen’s lip became a hard line. “I read,” he said evenly. “That all right with you?”
    Elias understood he’d offended him. He felt at once sorry for having done so and troubled for caring. Back home they owned a house girl and an outside man, and his mother and granny were nothing but kind to them. His own daddy had hired freedmen to work the docks and even to sail for him at times. Daddy’d said a man who didn’t look after his property didn’t deserve to have it in the first place; whether that property were a boat or a Negro, he didn’t see the difference.
    So Elias didn’t see any cause for Stephen Bishop to bristle at the question of his reading or not.
    Stephen flipped forward in his book, to a drawing with a series of notes next to it. “See that hole?” he asked, pointing at a trickle of water in the wall in front of him at eye level. Elias did. “That one opened up about three years back, or at least that’s when we noticed it first. So I’ve been watching it. Along with others.”
    â€œOthers?”
    Stephen gestured around him, at the cave beyond. “Little places where the water starts to weep through. This one’s grown nearly a quarter inch since I started keeping track of it.”
    A measly quarter of an inch after three years. Then again, caves were patient things after all. Too bad Elias couldn’t be.
    â€œWhere’s the water come from?”
    Stephen pointed. “Up there. Dropping from somewhere else.”
    â€œFrom the river, maybe?” Elias asked, starting over on a water knot. He missed the sound and smell of water almost as much as he missed his family. He’d lived by the ocean his entire twelve and a half years; the marshy area where the James met the sea was his whole world. And he’d seen no rivers to rival the James as they came inland following the Wilderness Road. The last one they’d passed had been slow and skinny and muddy green, flat-bottomed barges squeezing up it like eggs passing through a chicken snake.
    He’d not mind seeing a river down here.
    Stephen bent back over his work. “Rivers are both farther in and below where we are now.” He flipped briefly to the beginning of the book, the first drawing looking like nothing if it wasn’t a map. It reminded Elias of the nautical charts his father used, various lines showing shipping routes or navigable rivers.
    â€œHey!” Stephen said, noticing at last the knot Elias was working in the cord. He snatched it from him. “A piece of rope isn’t a thing to tangle up for fun. Not down here. You got no notion how many times I’ve been glad to have a rope—”
    â€œI didn’t tangle it,” Elias protested, adding, “yank on them ends.” Stephen did, and the knot came out clean and simple. “Water knot’s a sort of trick knot, but serves useful on ship.” Stephen looked at him curiously. “My daddy had ships,” Elias offered.
    Stephen coiled the rope slowly. “You know all kind of knots then, do you?”
    â€œReckon I do.”
    Stephen’s eyes flicked from the rope to Elias to the rope again. He was clearly considering something. “What would you say to helping me and the boys one night? Out here?”
    Elias sat up tall. Bother the ghost. A chance to do something, and with Stephen no less. Though he was