Walk Through Darkness Read Free Page A

her what she was doing. Didn’t ask her inclination on it. Just told her. Even so, she almost didn’t go and that’s cause of you. But she had a chance to take her baby into a free state. That’s why she went along with it, just thinking bout the best for that chile. Remember that before you lose hope or get angry or run out of here after her. She was thinking about what was for the best. You might want to do that too.” Kate drew her hand back, not sure where to place it or whether the contact between them was helping.
    “I shoulda known all along,” William said. He opened his eyes but didn’t look at Kate. “How’d I go all them months without knowing? Dover with a child in her … Don’t that seem wrong? Me just getting up each morning and going on bout the day. Don’t that seem wrong? Man should know something like this. Should just know it.”
    “Don’t start worry on right and wrong just now,” Kate said. “You couldn’t a known nothing bout it. I know it seems like you should, but that ain’t the way God put us together.” She paused and watched him. He still didn’t turn toward her. “Wish I had some wisdom to ease you.”
    William shook his head, knowing that the gesture seemed to say that he didn’t need her wisdom, or that he thanked her for what she had already given. But inside he was pushing her away.She couldn’t know how he felt. Yes, she had a mate that she might imagine losing. Yes, she had three children of her own. But this was
his
pain. Part
of him
had been torn away. It felt as if the fingers of a vengeful God had reached down and snatched Dover up. And it wasn’t just her the physical being. Even more he had been robbed of all the ways she made life livable. He understood something that he hadn’t before—that he could’ve spent his entire life as a slave so long as she would’ve borne that life with him. And as for the child … He didn’t even know it. He had never seen its face. Never touched it. But even unborn it was part of the world. He knew that now, and he knew in all likelihood that the child would be born and live and die without ever knowing his father. How easy was that for another person to feel and understand completely?
    He began to sort through his supplies, stuffing all the gifts inside his sack, including the one remaining egg. He knew this seemed abrupt, but he couldn’t stand still before her, not with his emotions so close to flooding out of him. He focused on the work of his hands. They trembled, but that just made him work faster. He hefted his bundle up to his shoulder and tested the weight of it. When he was finished he met the woman’s gaze again.
    “Kate,” he said, “one more thing, the folks Dover’s with—what name they go by?”
    “Family name’s Carr. That’s all I know.”
    “Carr.” He repeated the name several times. Once he heard it sounding within him, he raised a hand in thanks.
    “You know what you doing?” Kate asked.
    William understood the question but didn’t answer immediately. Of course he didn’t know what he was doing. He had no idea of the geography of the country before him. He had names of cities and notions of things Northern, but only in the vaguest terms. He had no true strategies for getting through the obstacles ahead, just motion and will and all the instinct he couldmuster. The question was too daunting to answer in any detail, so he answered simply.
    “Going to find Dover,” he said. “I just want to stand before her and that baby of mine and see if we can’t make a life, the three of us. That ain’t too much to ask, is it?”
    The two parted with a tentative embrace. Kate moved away as she had come, the same passage through the slack stream, out on the far bank and away. William stood with his supplies draped around him, rolling his shoulders, eyes moving from shadow to shadow, solitude complete upon him as soon as the woman faded out of hearing. It wasn’t that far from this very spot that he