Walk Through Darkness Read Free Page B

had last met Dover. But it had been a different season then. Ice cold. Silent. Brittle. Standing there, in the heat, delaying, he remembered their last evening together. It was back in January, just after Humboldt had decided the fate of the next year of his life.
    He had waited for her behind the Sackses’ house. He whispered his news in the crystalline evening air, and the two walked to the cabin she shared with her family. They sat on the loose straw that sufficed as her bed. A tallow candle burned on the floor before them. It was almost out, little more than a congealed puddle of fat in which the tail of the wick leaned precariously. In its sputtering light Dover was all the more beautiful. She was slim, a brevity of muscle and bone, although one forgot this when looking at her. There was pride in the width of her full lips, in the dark, majestic brown of her skin. Her cheeks curved upward in smooth, diagonal lines. Her nose had a gentle bridge, with small nostrils, spaced wide and delicate. Her eyes, recessed far back into her skull, looked out at the world with a defiant directness. She rarely faltered or looked away from the eyes of the person to whom she spoke.
    “William,” she had whispered, “let’s just do it now.”
    He knew what she meant. It wasn’t the first time she had proposed it.
    “Dover, it’s the dead of winter,” he said. “We can’t run now.” He slid an arm around her and felt how her shoulder fit into his side. He could smell her hair, a scent of nothing in particular except of her, a fragrance he couldn’t have described by comparison to anything else. He inhaled it and explained once more that it was just the wrong time of the year. They didn’t have the proper clothes for the weather. They’d freeze solid before they’d left the county. And what would they do for food? In the summer they might steal right from the fields, but in the dead of winter there would be no easy forage. They’d leave tracks in the snow for any fool white man to follow. And what was the use in trying something that was bound to fail? It just didn’t make sense. Patience was the key.
    “Anyhow,” he had said, “it’s only a year. That’s a painful long time, but it’ll pass. I’ll be back before you know it.”
    “A year? You think that’s what this about?”
    “Naw, that ain’t what I’m saying. That ain’t it at all, but …”
    Dover slid away and turned her gaze on him. “How many years you think we got? These people eating up our lives, William. They eating us up and you letting them. You act like you just glad to be at the dinner table, no matter that you’re the main course.”
    He tried to interrupt her, but her eyes cut him to silence. She went on, letting him know through pauses in her speech just how considered her words were. She told him how she felt for him, how she had wanted him beside her and inside her since the first time she saw him. There was a part of her heart that was his completely. But she wanted more, more for both of them. She wanted freedom, and sometimes it felt like she was tugging him along behind with a rope. She was pulling hard to keep him with her, but he wouldn’t budge and the effort of it was wearing her down. That rope was sliding through her grip. “You hear? That rope trying to burn me, and I ain’t about to get burned. You hear what I’m saying? William, one day you gonnalearn the rage. You all right now, but you gonna be beautiful then.”
    Those words were some of the last she had spoken to him. He had pulled her to him and whispered meaningless excuses, invoked patience and said again and again that the time just needed to be right. He covered her with kisses and peeled the clothes from her body and made love to her with a painful urgency. Perhaps that was the night. Perhaps that final embrace planted a new life. Of course he couldn’t know, but now it seemed so obvious. There was a part of him that was angry with her for leaving and taking