Walk Through Darkness Read Free

produced a clutch of five chicken eggs, hard-boiled and still warm from the cooking.
    “Kate, where’d you come by this?” he asked. “I can’t hardly take all this from you.”
    “Don’t worry bout it. Ain’t every day a runaway comes a-calling on your back door. Sorry this was all I could get.”
    William was still slow to accept the gift, but Kate motioned that there’d be no more conversation until he got some food in him. She knelt a few feet away. She was ten years older than Dover, had a different father, and looked almost nothing like her. She was tall and full-bodied, while Dover was spare and compact. There was an anxious energy at the corners of her mouth, although her body moved with the calm assurance of age and motherhood. They were similar only around the eyes and in their high foreheads, but this was enough to mark them as the sisters they were.
    “Who told you?” she asked.
    William paused with a half-peeled egg in his fingertips. “Couple of Humboldt’s slaves come down with a fever. Nance came across to take up some slack. He told me, but I didn’t know to believe him. I mean, I did believe him, but I had to see for myself.”
    Kate nodded and motioned for him to eat again. “Nance told you true,” she said. “And I’ll do the same. Dover left in the spring, headed North with Miss Sacks. Don’t think she just upand run off or something. It wasn’t like that. Miss Sacks gone back to her people in Philadelphia. You know the Missus come from deep money there. She never did care for down this way. She finally caught Sacks hisself up on the back of that girl Sally. That sight made up her mind. Packed her bags and left the house that very evening. Couple days after she hired a coach to Philadelphia.”
    Kate paused and listened to the night. It was as before and she continued. “That’s all fine. Problem is she took Dover with her. Gave her that one night to gather her things. And that’s what my girl did, one long night a grief and next morning she was gone. I know this gonna hurt you to hear, but it don’t happen every day that a slave gets took to a free state. Think bout that. I don’t know what’s happened to her since, but she must be living a better life then us down here. ’Cept she ain’t got no family around. And she ain’t got you with her.”
    William bit into his fourth egg. Though the first few had been rich and strong, he didn’t seem to taste them anymore. He just chewed the soft matter and swallowed it down and flicked the shells from his fingertips. It wasn’t that Kate had told him anything different than what he’d imagined. Nance had given him an abbreviated version of the same story. Kate just confirmed it. But he had always hoped that Nance had made some mistake. Perhaps Miss Sacks had only left the Annapolis house for their country home. Perhaps Dover had never gotten on that coach. Perhaps the mistress had changed her mind halfway and turned back. A part of him had believed that he would find Dover here, just as he had left her. He would end the journey simply, lay his eyes and hands on her again, then return to another beating and more labor on Kent Island.
    A dog barked in the distance. Three clipped notes that came and went and left the world slightly different. William’s fingers touched the ground, ready to push him to his feet if need be. But no more howls followed, and the other night sounds tooktheir places around them. The man plucked his fingers out of the soil. There was something else he had to ask and both of them awaited it.
    “And the baby?”
    Kate watched him before answering. “Guess Nance done told you everything. Yeah, she got a chile in her. Your chile.”
    William took the news with his eyes closed, face motionless, brittle.
    “Look here, William,” Kate said, but having said it, she faltered for the right words. She reached out and rested the palm of her hand on his shoulder. “Dover never had a choice in all this. Missus told