I was up immediately, carefully stowing the strand of hair from Harriet into my right skirt pocket, stowing Travis’s in my left. We began walking. My purse, heavy with one of the guns, slapped my side.
“Does it mean they’re alive, if you can follow them this way?”
“No,” Eli said.
Eli was acting like he was blind except for the path only he could see. I had to steer for him. I took his arm and used pressure to control him. My hands were full with keeping Eli from bumping into someone or stepping out in front of a car. He wasn’t following a scent, like the bloodhound would have done. I don’t know what he was following, but he was definitely fixed on going that way.
Eli chose that moment to cross a street. I had to hold him back from stepping off the curb into the path of a car. It was like shepherding a very large sheep.
I was real glad there weren’t many people out.
“Eli,” I said. “Listen to me.”
He stopped walking. That was something.
“I’m going to get the car and come pick you up. Can you stand still here until I get back?”
Eli nodded without looking at me. He was holding on to the track. He couldn’t waver in his focus. Temperature was going up fast, and he was sweating.
It took me fifteen minutes to run back to the Pleasant Stay, run up to our room to get my gun belt, get in the car, and return. I was scared the whole time that Eli wouldn’t be there when I got back, but there he was. People were walking around him, giving him as wide a berth as they could, because he was simply still.
I had to jump out of the car and run around to open the door. Then Eli climbed in after I pulled Harriet’s gun from the back of his pants. He pointed forward, and off we took. I was driving slow so I wouldn’t miss a change of direction. If I turned the wrong way, I might jar him loose.
I had four guns now, but it didn’t seem enough.
We left downtown behind and drove through the pleasant streets where the people lived who had plenty. After that ran out, which didn’t take long, we were on gravel instead of pavement. These were folks who were less lucky. Their yards were messy and any cars were beaten and rusty. The children wore faded hand-me-downs. And they threw rocks, sometimes.
Then we were driving on packed dirt. We were among the shacks and shanties of the very poor. As far as I could see, the people in this neighborhood were all black. I knew there must be some white people just as poor, but even at the most desperate level the two races didn’t mix.
If we were in Texoma, this was where I would live. The houses were kind of cobbled together, most of wood with the shine of age and weathering, a few with walls or roofs of tin, some with a pen of chickens and a garden, one or two with a cow in the yard, and every now and then a mule. There was always a vegetable garden. Children of all sizes played outside. Some were lucky enough to have a tire swing or a baseball or a jump rope.
But all these pastimes stopped when we rode slowly by. The children didn’t follow us asking questions like kids in Segundo Mexia would have. These children stood in silent clumps as we passed.
These kids knew that white people in their part of town couldn’t mean anything good.
And still I drove with my silent Eli, very slowly, windows down to admit whatever breeze might happen by. The sweat trickled down my back and under my breasts. This skirt might have to be burned after today, and I wasn’t even thinking about the petticoat and the panties and the bra.
We drove at our creeping pace till there were open fields stretching far as the eye could see. The flat land was only broken by a little gentle roll here and there, or a strip of trees edging a bayou. The farmhouses were spaced wide apart and set back from the road, surrounded by trees. Some were real big and fancy, some were shacks, some were degrees in between.
A man passed us. He was riding a horse. He gave us a sideways look of alarm and urged the horse on. Odd. This was the only person we’d seen on this road, and he was going in the same direction we were.
We’d only passed the occasional farm vehicles rumbling down the road, and in the distance I’d seen small wooden sheds at the corners of the fields. I couldn’t figure out their purpose. I learned later that was where cotton was stored when it was being picked by hand. Then it would be loaded on a truck and taken to the cotton gin in Sally. Other than that, the vast landscape seemed empty except for the rider.
I began to feel even more uneasy than I’d been, and that was saying something.
We’d been jouncing around on a dirt road that had not been leveled in a long time. Eli had not given me any signals in a while. I hoped we were nearing the end of our drive.
I caught a flicker out in the field on my left, and I leaned forward to look. A cluster of black people were walking through the cotton. They were empty-handed, most of them, and they were all heading for town. In a hurry. Surely taking the road would have been easier; maybe longer, though.
Eli hadn’t spoken this whole time except to say “left” or “right.” But now he said, “Stop.”
Where Eli said to stop, there was a graveled driveway to our left leading to a huge white house, two stories with an attic. The windows all had green shutters. A broad front porch extended the full width of the house, and there were pillars supporting the porch roof. As we approached, I could see a big terrace at the back of the house, a sort of patio. Then there was a line of trees and bushes, planted as a screen.
Beyond that, there were little white cabins, planted all around with flowers, to make poverty pretty. There was a huge vegetable garden and an equally large woodpile. There was a long, low building that might be a garage for farm machinery or cars, or both.
This had to be the Ballard plantation. I had never seen the like.
Here was the oddest thing: at first glance, nothing was stirring. There wasn’t even a breeze making the leaves flutter on the pecan trees. Not an old man rocking on the porch, not a bird flying across the grass.
Eli was coming back to himself, but I could tell it wasn’t easy. I began talking to give him some time. “No way we can sneak up,” I said. “Even if we got out of the car and crawled on our bellies. Probably someone in the house watching right now.”
“They’re there,” Eli said, from a far distance.
“Harriet and Travis are in that house?”
“We must go find them,” Eli said. He seemed stiff, like the long spell had taken away his sap.
“So here we go,” I said, though I didn’t want to even go close to that place.
I felt like… I felt like we were going to a hangman, as I turned the car to glide down the driveway. There had been no rain for a while, and the driveway was baked into a crust. The car’s tires turned up a cloud of dust.
As we parked in front of the house, I saw I had been wrong about the place being empty. There was a black man standing by the blooming bushes that decorated the front of the house. He was clipping them with hedge shears. He had to have seen and heard us, but he was pretending we were not there.
I got out of the car first and faced the man squarely. I had one of Harriet’s guns in my right hand, the one I’d pulled from my pocket. I’d kept the other in my purse, but if I had one on show, I might as well have the other. Wasn’t doing me any good in the purse. I pulled it out. I was saving my guns and my rifle in the trunk.