Cy in Chains Read online

  Rosalee was right: that evening, Cain appeared at the icehouse. It was dark, but he held a lantern.

  “Ready to get outta here and behave yourself?” he asked.

  Cy kept his eyes fixed on the dirt. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’d die in here if I wanted you to. You know that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Or I could bring you out in front of them others and whip you to death.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But I ain’t gonna do that,” Cain assured him. “You never gave me no trouble before, so I’ve decided to show you mercy.”

  Cy knew all about that kind of mercy now. “Thank you, sir.”

  There was a sound behind Cain, and the lantern light showed Prescott.

  Cy pushed himself farther back into the corner.

  “Is he tamed?” Prescott asked.

  “Appears so. Never can tell with ’em, though. Look at me,” Cain ordered.

  Cy raised his eyes.

  “You got two choices. Mind yourself from now on, let the others know how sorry you are for what you done, warn ’em about tryin’ any such foolishness themselves, and you’ll be all right. No more whippings. Maybe even be a leader again one day. I got Jess to take charge in your bunk again, since you let me down. And that was after he messed up. I’m all for giving folks a second chance. You’d like another chance, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cy lied.

  “Or you can be a troublemaker. Let the other boys look up to you like some kind of martyr.”

  He didn’t know what Cain meant.

  “If that’s what you choose, you’re gonna find yourself digging coal before you know what hit you. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have him wash up, and get him a clean uniform,” Cain told Prescott.

  “What gang you want him with?”

  “Same one.”

  “With his pals? You think that’s a good idea?”

  Cain turned on him. “You let me do the thinking, Onnie. Hell, yes, it’s a good idea! Give him a chance to show if he can keep his word. If he’s tempted to get sympathy, it’ll be from his buddies—Jess, Mouse, that idiot Billy.”

  “Right, Cap’n.”

  “Let him clean up and get to bed.” Cain walked off.

  Prescott smirked. “You smell like just what you are. Remember what I told you the other night. You ever say one word, I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do.”

  You wrong, Cy thought. You the one gonna die.

  Prescott took him to the washtubs. Cy hated undressing in front of him. If Prescott said one more word, he’d go for him, no matter what. But his tormentor was silent.

  Things in camp looked the same, but Cy was seeing through different eyes. It was between supper and bedtime, and the boys were spending the time like they usually did—some standing and talking, a few gambling for pebbles with dice they had made from bits of wood. The whipping post was gone.

  “Cain says for you to eat,” Prescott said. “Rosalee got somethin’ for you. Then you’re free until bedtime.”

  Free.

  “Cain wasn’t jokin’ about what he said. You’ve had your last chance.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t want no more nights in the icehouse.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Remember, I got my eye on you.”

  At the kitchen, Rosalee handed him a plate of cold rice and neck bones and a slice of bread. She filled a cup with water and waited while he drank it dry three times.

  “Thanks for comin’ to help me,” Cy told her.

  “I didn’t mind.”

  “Pook all right?” Not that he cared. It was something to say, nothing more.

  “He okay. Good as he can be in a place like this.”

  Cy wasn’t sure why he asked the next question. “Why you stay here, Miss Rosalee?”

  “That ain’t none of yo’ business. Now, go and behave yo’self.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t say ma’am to me! I ain’t yo’ mama.”

  “Thank you for the food.”

  “I tell you to git!”

  He did.

  Cy wandered away from the kitchen. He desperately wanted sleep, but for some reason he wanted to see Jess too.

  Something touched him, and he jumped. Mouse took his hand, but Cy pulled away. “Where Jess?” he asked.

  “With Billy. I show you.”

  Mouse led him to the fire where Jess and Billy sat. Jess’s arm lay over Billy’s shoulder.

  Cy sat down next to Jess, who glanced at him, then looked away. If Billy realized Cy was there, he gave no sign.

  “What’s with him?” Cy asked, gesturing toward Billy.

  “He gone away for a while.”

  “What you talkin’ about?”

  “In his mind. He ain’t spoke much since Cain whip you.” Jess kept his eyes on the fire.

  “They let me out of the icehouse.”

  “So I see.”

  “Thought you be happy to see me.”

  “Should I be?”

  Cy didn’t expect the cold shoulder—especially not from Jess. It hurt. He realized he’d come looking for sympathy. “If I could of got away, would you be glad?”

  “Glad that you tried to escape without botherin’ to tell yo’ friends goodbye, without carin’ how Cain would take it out on the rest of us?”

  “That ain’t the way it was! I can explain—”

  “They ain’t no point goin’ over all that mess now,” Jess said. “Maybe you should go somewheres else. Billy an’ me don’t want no more trouble.”

  So that was how it was. Cy started to get up. He didn’t need Jess to feel sorry for him. But then he sat down again. There was something he had to talk about, something more important than his hurt feelings. Could he trust Jess not to betray him, the way Arnold had?

  “Jess?”

  “What?”

  “We got to get out of here.”

  Jess moved to get up. “Come on, Billy.”

  “No, wait. Just listen, all right?”

  Jess sat down again. “I told you, Cy. They ain’t no way. And I don’t want to hear nothin’ more about it. Understand? You keep bringin’ this up to me, I won’t be able to talk to you no more.”

  “Don’t say that! We got to talk about it. Gettin’ away’d be easy, only we can’t see it! Daddy say Cain run a sorry operation. Our chains ain’t strong. We could get ’em off easy.”

  Jess started to his feet again, but Cy grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Three men ain’t enough to stop us. We got to try! If we don’t, we all gonna end up dead.”

  Jess looked him in the eyes. “You wrong. You think Cain and his men gonna stand by while we try and break these chains? They gonna give us nice new clothes, hand us some fried chicken and biscuits, and wave goodbye as we head down the road, singin’? We’d have to kill ’em first, and I don’t want nothin’ to do with that mess.”

  Billy must have heard, but he didn’t move. Jess was right. He’d gone far away, somewhere deep into his own mind.

  “Killin’ ain’t a bad idea,” Cy told Jess. “Question is, do we got the guts to try it?”

  “You don’t mean that. Bible say the one who live by the sword, die by the sword. One day, I got to stand before the judgment throne o’ God, an’ I rather not have the blood o’ any man, black or white, on me. I come too close to killin’ once before, and I ain’t takin’ no more risks.”

  “The man who beat you so bad?”

  Jess nodded. “Prettyman. I tried to kill him. I wanted to kill him. Would have, but he too strong for me.”

  “That’s why you here! If you’d of killed him, you could of got away.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I could of escaped, gone up north or somethin’. But I didn’t. So I’s here, and I know it ain’t fair. But my hands is clean, and I won’t dirty ’em with no man’s blood. I got to be ready to meet God when that day come.”

  “Pleas
e, Jess!”

  “If we could get outta here, what then? What about the sheriff? And men on horses with dogs? Where you think forty runaway black boys gon’ go and be safe? The whole world against us.”

  Maybe Jess was right, but Cy didn’t want to hear it, and he didn’t like being talked to as if he were a child. “I don’t care,” he shot back. “What you rather do—stay here and wait to die?”

  “Naw—stay here and pray to God to free us.”

  “Any black man who believes in God is a fool!” Cy was shocked to hear Arnold’s words come out of his own mouth, but they were true.

  “You really believe what you said?” Jess asked.

  “Yeah! Way I figures it, they ain’t no heaven, and hell is right here on earth.”

  Jess looked pained. “It natural you so bitter. I know what Prescott done to you.”

  Shame swept over him. “How?”

  “Ain’t important how.”

  “Everybody in on it?” He hated the thought that others knew.

  “Naw. And I ain’t gonna tell. Nothin’ like that oughtta happen to nobody. Prescott is one evil man. He gonna have a bad time come judgment day.”

  “Maybe you don’t care ’bout yourself, but what about all the others?” Cy insisted. “Mouse, Ring, Billy. Next time it could be any of ’em. We got to protect ’em. We got to do somethin’!”

  “I told you. I is doin’ somethin’. Lookin’ after my boys. And prayin’.”

  Wastin’ your time, Cy thought. “So you won’t help me?”

  “Help sentence all these boys to somethin’ worse’n what they got here? Have ’em shot down in the woods? Tore up by dogs? No, sir. You best forget the whole idea.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then don’t say nothin’ more to me.”

  So that was the end of it. Jess would sit back and wait for the next disaster to happen. This time it had been three whippings and—no, he refused to think about the other thing. Next time, someone would die.

  You all alone, he told himself. Best face it. You don’t need Jess. You don’t need nobody.

  Then Cy realized Billy wasn’t staring into the fire. The boy’s eyes were fixed on him. How much had he heard? How much had he understood? Cy looked into Billy’s eyes and wished he could read what he saw there. But everything in those depths was black—blacker than night in the icehouse.

  Fifteen

  WHAT NOW? CY WONDERED, LYING AWAKE after the others had drifted into sleep. Trust in Jess’s God? He wanted to laugh. That was like trusting in the wind. The only thing left to trust in was himself. If he wanted freedom, he’d have to find it on his own. When Mouse tried to snuggle next to him that night, Cy pushed him away.

  Before he fell asleep, Cy promised himself that starting the next day, he’d be looking for his chance. And when it came, he’d take it and run with it as far as he could go. Until he found his way to freedom or they killed him for trying.

  The weather turned bitter cold. Cain was forced to bring wood stoves into both bunkhouses and cut holes in the walls for the pipes to vent the smoke outside. He grumbled about the cost and the extra mess, and he made his men responsible for keeping wood on hand and the fires going. Stryker and Prescott just as quickly pushed that responsibility off onto the boys. The older, bigger boys made the younger ones do the hard work of lugging the wood into the buildings and the hot, dirty work of cleaning out the stoves. At least they could all sleep a little better, until the fires died out sometime in the night.

  Most of the boys were huddled around the stove one night before bedtime when Cy persuaded West to tell fortunes again. West retrieved his pottery hoodoo bowl from its hiding place and filled it from the small barrel that held drinking water. He pricked his finger with a needle he said he’d found in the cookhouse and squeezed some drops of blood into the water.

  “Why you askin’ to know yo’ fortune?” West asked Cy. “I already done it for you a while back. Man’s fortune don’t change. What’s set out for him is gon’ happen, sooner or later.”

  “You saw freedom for all of us,” Cy replied. “Billy, me, Mouse. But ain’t none of us free yet.”

  “It didn’t say when,” West replied.

  Cy noticed Billy standing in the shadows behind Mouse. Bit by bit, he’d returned to the world. As his back healed up, so did his mind, and now, most of the time, he was all right. Never said a lot, cowered when the white men came around, and stuck to Jess like a sand burr to a pant leg.

  “You can tell my fortune,” Billy said.

  “Come on, then. Hold out your finger.” He poked Billy’s finger, and the red blood dropped into the water. Then West closed his eyes and began humming. He peered into the water, holding the bowl close to his face to see better in the flickering light from the open door of the stove.

  “What you see?” Billy asked.

  “Same as before. You gon’ get free. It ain’t gon’ be easy, though. I still sees water ahead o’ you. And—I hear shots.”

  “Guns?”

  “Reckon so. You gonna have to be brave. Braver than you ever been. Do that, and you be free.”

  Billy stared at West. “You ain’t messin’ with me?”

  West shook his head. “I never do when it come to this. This is serious.”

  “You see my daddy there?”

  West gazed into the bloody water again. “Don’t see no black man. I sees—”

  West put the bowl down on the ground so hard that some water spilled.

  “What is it?” Cy demanded. “What you see?” A creepy feeling had been coming over him ever since West had begun. He was starting to regret asking for this. Now he felt sure West had seen something he didn’t want to share.

  “Nothin’,” West answered. “I didn’t see nothin’.”

  “You did! You just don’t want to tell it.”

  But West couldn’t be persuaded to change his mind. “Who next?” he asked.

  Mouse volunteered. West told him the same thing: he’d be free. Mouse allowed that he knew it, had always known it, and one day he was going back to the Okefenokee and find Tiberius, the old man who had taught him all about wild critters and their ways.

  “My turn,” Cy said. West took his blood and held the bowl close to his face.

  “What you see?’ Cy asked.

  West stared at him. “Freedom. First one kind, then another.”

  “What that mean?”

  “Don’t know. But that what I heard. The voice say, ‘First one kind, then another.’”

  “Nothin’ else?”

  West shook his head.

  Cy felt annoyed. He didn’t like West’s riddles. They could mean anything or nothing. Maybe he was just making everything up.

  “You ever look for yourself?” Billy asked.

  “I done told you once, no!” West’s voice was shrill.

  “Why you so bothered?” Cy wanted to know.

  “I ain’t!”

  “I bet you have looked for yourself before,” Mouse said. “Ain’t that so?”

  West dumped the water into the dirt and threw the bowl against the wall, where it broke into pieces. Boys warming themselves at the stove looked up.

  “Why you so mad?” Cy asked. “Is Mouse right?”

  “What if he is? Ain’t no concern o’ yours.”

  “If that how you want it,” Cy agreed.

  “You can tell us what you seen for yourself,” Billy told West, drawing up close to him. “Somethin’ bad?”

  West pulled himself together. “Naw. Nothin’ like that.”

  “Then why you break yo’ bowl?”

  “I dunno. Guess I’s just tired o’ messin’ with it. Nothin’ to it, anyway.”

  Christmas came and went. Cy wouldn’t have known, but West noticed that Pook had some new clothes and a little wooden horse that rolled on wheels. He asked Rosalee about it, and she let it slip that it was Christmas. As she dished up breakfast that morning, her eyes had a dreamy expression and she seemed only half awake. Chri
stmas also explained why Cain and Stryker didn’t show up for breakfast that day, and why Prescott was badly hung over and in an evil mood. They’d celebrated way too much the night before.

  Cy had never enjoyed much of a Christmas growing up. The Williams family had never earned enough extra for store-bought gifts. But his mama had always tried to make something nice for him, even if it was only a new shirt made of cheap cotton cloth. And Pete Williams always found a way to get hold of penny candy. Christmas dinner had been special—a chicken, maybe, or fried catfish if luck was on the side of the fishermen.

  In Cain’s camp, Christmas meant nothing except that the boys didn’t have to work palmetto. A free day, but the weather was cold and rainy, so everyone stayed inside, trying to keep close to the wood stoves that offered the only relief from the chilly, damp air.

  That night, Mouse developed a cough and a fever. Jess reported to Cain that he was sick, but Cain brushed it off as nothing more than a cold. What did anyone expect, given the weather?

  The days went by, and Mouse didn’t get better. Instead, a lot of the other boys caught the same thing. Coughing, sneezing, fever. Some days, the sickest boys couldn’t go to work, and Stryker or Prescott had to stay in camp to keep an eye on them. Cy almost wished he would come down sick, too, and spend his days lying in bed instead of cutting his hands to pieces on the biting teeth of the palmetto plants.

  One night, about two weeks after Mouse first took ill, he woke up the boys near him with his coughing. The coughing got worse and worse until it turned into a regular fit. His entire body shook with it.

  “Hey, Mouse, take it easy! Lemme help you,” Jess offered. He tried to slap Mouse on the back, but Mouse pushed him away. He doubled over, head between his knees, coughing as if his lungs would burst.

  “He bad off,” Jess declared. “Y’all make some racket, get Stryker or Prescott in here.”

  The boys, all awake now, obliged by shouting and clanking their leg irons as loudly as they could. The fit kept its grip on Mouse’s tiny body as he coughed, choked, gasped for breath. Finally, it stopped. Mouse tried to suck in a big gulp of air, and he made an awful, high-pitched whistling sound when he did. Then he vomited all over himself.