The Underground Railroad Read Free Page B

carpentry—it was not, as was often the case, a lie put out by the trader to bump up his price. He built a little house for his mutt and tried to induce compliments. The kind words were genuine, for the doghouse was a handsome piece of work, of nice proportion, with clean angles. There was a door on a hinge and sun and moon cutouts along the back wall.
    “Ain’t this a nice mansion?” Blakeasked Old Abraham. Blake had come to value the man’s sometimes bracing candor since his arrival.
    “Mighty fine work. That a little bed in there?”
    Blake had sewn a pillowcase and stuffed it with moss. He decided that the patch outside his cabin was the most appropriate spot for his dog’s home. Cora had been invisible to him but now he sought her eyes when she was close, to warn her that she wasinvisible no more.
    She tried to call in a few debts owed her mother, the ones she knew about. They rebuffed her. Like Beau, the seamstress Mabel had nursed back to health when she was struck with fever. Mabel had given the girl her own supper portion and spooned potlikker and roots into her trembling lips until she opened her eyes again. Beau said she had paid that debt and then some and toldCora to get back to Hob. Cora remembered that Mabel had extended an alibi to Calvin when some planting tools went missing. Connelly, who had an aptitude for the cat-o’-nine-tails, would have stripped the meat off Calvin’s back if she hadn’t concocted his defense. Would have done the same to Mabel if he’d found she was lying. Cora crept on Calvin after supper: I need help. He waved her away. Mabelhad said that she never discovered to what purpose he used those instruments.
    Not soon after Blake made his intentions known, Cora woke one morning to the violation. She left Hob to check her garden. It had been a cool dawn. Wisps of white moisture hovered over the ground. There she saw it—the remains of what would have been her first cabbages. Heaped by the steps of Blake’s cabin, the tangledvines already drying out. The ground had been turned and tamped to make a nice yard for the mutt’s house, which sat in the center of her plot like a grand mansion in the heart of a plantation.
    The dog poked his head out of the door as if it knew it had been her land and wanted to signal his indifference.
    Blake stepped out of the cabin and crossed his arms. He spat.
    People moved in the cornersof Cora’s vision: shadows of gossips and scolds. Watching her. Her mother was gone. She’d been moved into the wretch house and no one had come to her aid. Now this man three times her size, a bruiser, had taken her stake.
    Cora had been mulling strategy. In later years she could have turned to the Hob women, or Lovey, but this was then. Her grandmother had warned that she would knock open thehead of anyone who messed with her land. That seemed out of proportion to Cora. In a spell, she walked back to Hob and plucked a hatchet off the wall, the hatchet she stared at when she could not sleep. Left by one of the previous residents who came to one bad end or another, lung sickness or peeled open by a whip or shitting their insides out on the floor.
    By now word had spread and bystanderslingered outside the cabins, heads tilted in anticipation. Cora marched past them, bent as if burrowing her body into a gale. No one moved to stop her, so strange was this display. Her first blow brought down the roof of the doghouse, and a squeal from the dog, who had just had his tail half severed. He scrambled to a hidey-hole beneath his owner’s cabin. Her second blow wounded the left side ofthe doghouse gravely and her last put it out of its misery.
    She stood there, heaving. Both hands on the hatchet. The hatchet wavered in the air, in a tug-of-war with a ghost, but the girl did not falter.
    Blake made fists and stepped toward Cora. His boys behind him, tensing. Then he stopped. What happened between those two figures in that moment—the burly young man and the slender girl in