Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

“Ben finally left his bed last night. Agreed to have a tipple with me,” Pete said. “We drunk from Friday night into this morning. Culver threw us out at dawn. Said we was unruly. So we walked to the waterfront downtown.

“We stood on the wharves. We looked at the ferries. I got paid Friday, so I still had a few coins in my pocket. The wind was blowing the stink of the river into our faces, but we was happy. We was the closest thing to free any nigger’s ever been,” Peter told us. He stopped for a minute, his eyes wet.

“We went to go sit down by the water, to rest awhile. We was going to sit on the bank, near the wharves, when suddenly Ben Daisy lifted his head. All around us, we could smell flowers. I swear to you, Doctor, the air changed. The wind coming off the river was so soft and warm. Ben, he caught a whiff of that water, and he looked up and out across the dark river. He smiled. And then he bolted.

“Before I could stop him, he ran to the end of the wharf, calling ‘Daisy!’ He leapt into the river, and the water closed around him. And he was gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Mama said.

“I tried to call someone to help me get him out.” Peter rubbed at his shoulder. “Some of the kids who live by the wharf, they dived into the water to try and find him. Dived in right after him, they did, but when one of the boys came back up, he only said Ben Daisy was gone, and then they all scrambled out of the water, as if they’d took a fright. That boy wouldn’t tell me what he saw down there, but none of them would go back in, even when I begged them to.”

Pete Back Back took something out from underneath his shirt. “Only this was still there, floating on top of the waves.”

It was Ben Daisy’s hat, the pink-and-white pansies I’d pressed for him still tucked into the band, the whole thing dry as bone.

“I can’t bring myself to tell Miss Hannah. So I stopped here first,” Pete Back Back said. He still would not meet Mama’s eye.

That night, after Peter left, Mama said three prayers: one for Ben Daisy and one for his sister, and the final one for Daisy herself. “May her spirit finally rest.” And then I watched as she took her ledger down, the one she’d been keeping her notes in about the experiment, and, with her pen, scratch something out, write something new on the page. Then she tore the whole page out of the book altogether and took it with her to her bedroom, and I never saw it again.

The proving was over. Mama wrote the conclusion for it herself, so I do not know how she explained it. She would not let me read it, and she never published anything about this study. In a few years’ time, this failure would be overshadowed by the hospital for women and children that would make her name, and the consulting room downtown, and my eventual life of ladyhood. But that particular night, she bundled up the last little bit of seahorses in a brown envelope and carefully placed it on the highest shelf.

Nobody in our village would say that Ben Daisy had died. Miss Hannah, in her grief would not allow it. She stayed on with us, her eyes hollow. Ben Daisy’s hat with the dried pansies she took to wearing on her own head. And when we spoke to her of him, if we ever spoke to her of him, we only said the river had him.

That first night when we’d learned of Ben Daisy, I asked Mama, “What happens to the dead?” We had cleaned the examination room, put everything in its rightful place, and we stood side by side, washing our faces and hands before bed.

“Why, they go to heaven with our Lord and Savior. You know this.”

“But what happens to their thoughts and minds?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where does their will go?”

Mama looked as if she was about to cry. “It has been a long day. Hush, please, Libertie.”

“But what happens? Where is Ben Daisy? Is he in the same place Father is and … and … everyone else?”

“Libertie, you ask too much of your mama sometimes.”

And so I understood. Mama did not have an answer. Mama did not know. That great big brain of hers could not tell me where Ben Daisy was. And because Mama didn’t know, the dead were not to be spoken of. They were all of them in another country.

Eventually, we learned, from whispers, what the boys said they saw when they jumped in the river to rescue him. That underneath the water, the boy swimmer had seen Ben, had tried to pull him up, but he was stopped. Ben was wrapped in the arms of a woman, her skin glowing golden in the waves, the pink of her dress flashing through the murk of the river, her hair long. She had looked at the boy as he swam close and reached for Ben Daisy’s hand. He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and she’d beckoned to him, as if to welcome him into her arms, too. He said he was overcome with the desire to swim into them until she smiled at him—with a mouth full of thousands of pointed teeth. Then Ben had tugged his hand out of the swimmer’s, had waved softly and turned his whole body inward, like a baby’s, to be cradled in the arms of the woman in the water. And the boy kicked away, up to the surface, before he could be tempted to join them.

Ben Daisy and his woman sleep in the river

Sleep in the river

Sleep in the river

Ben Daisy and his woman sleep in the