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horse barns and night damp and fish that had
soured on their stomachs. He could hear them breathing in the dark.
    "You men ran from your
owners?" Willie asked.
    But they would not answer him.
In the glow of the moon through the barred window their faces were
running with sweat, their eyes red, their nostrils cavernous. He could
see the pulse jumping in one man's throat.
    He had never seen fear as
great in either man or beast.

Chapter Four
    LATER that same night Flower
left her cabin and crossed the cane field through layers of ground fog
that felt like damp cotton on her skin. She entered a woods that was
strung with air vines and cobwebs and dotted with palmettos and
followed the edge of a coulee to a bayou where a flatboat loaded with
Spanish moss was moored in a cluster of cypress trees.
    The tide was going out along
the coast. In minutes the current in the bayou would reverse itself,
and the flatboat, which looked like any other that was used to harvest
moss for mattress stuffing, would be poled downstream into a saltwater
bay where a larger boat waited for the five black people who sat
huddled in the midst of the moss, the women in bonnets, the men wearing
flop hats that obscured their faces.
    Two white boatmen, both of
them gaunt, with full beards, wearing leather wrist guards and
suspenders that hitched their trousers almost to their chests, stood by
the tiller. One of them held a shaved pole that was anchored in the
bayou, his callused palms tightening audibly against the wood.
    A white woman with chestnut
hair in a gray dress that touched the tops of her shoes had just walked up a plank onto the
boat, a heavy bundle clasped in
both arms. One of the white men took the bundle from her and untied it
and began placing loaves of bread, smoked hams, sides of bacon and jars
of preserves and cracklings inside the pilothouse.
    Flower stepped out of the
heated enclosure of the trees and felt the coolness of the wind on her
skin.
    "Miss Abigail?" she said.
    The two white men and the
white woman turned and looked at her, their bodies motionless.
    "It's Flower, Miss Abigail. I
work at the laundry. I brung something for their trip," she said.
    "You shouldn't be here,"
Abigail said.
    "The lady yonder is my auntie.
I known for a long time y'all was using this place. I ain't tole
nobody," Flower said.
    Abigail turned to the two
white men. "Does one more make a difference?" she asked.
    "The captain out on the bay is
mercenary, but we'll slip her in," one of them said.
    "Would you like to come with
your auntie?" Abigail asked her.
    "There's old folks at Angola I
got to care for. Here, I got this twenty-dollar gold piece. I brung a
juju bag, too." Flower walked up the plank and felt the wood bend under
her weight. The water under her was as yellow as paint in the
moonlight. She saw the black head and back and S-shaped motion of a
water moccasin swimming across the current.
    She placed the coin in
Abigail's hand, then removed a small bag fashioned out of red flannel
that was tied around her neck with a leather cord and placed it on top
of the coin.
    "How'd you come by this money,
Flower?" Abigail asked.
    "Found it."
    "Where?"
    Flower watched the moss moving
in the trees, a sprinkle of stars in the sky.
    "I best go now," she said.
    She walked back across the
plank to the woods, then heard Abigail Dowling behind her.
    "Tell me where you got the
gold piece," Abigail said.
    "I stole it from ol Rufus Atkins' britches."
    Abigail studied her
face, then touched her hair and cheek.
    "Has he molested you, Flower?"
she said.
    "You a good lady, Miss
Abigail, but I ain't a child and I ain't axed for nobody's pity,"
Flower said.
    Abigail's hand ran down
Flower's shoulder and arm until she could clasp Flower's hand in her
own.
    "No, you're neither a child
nor an object of pity, and I would never treat you as such," Abigail
said.
    "Them two men yonder? What do
you call them?" Flower asked.
    "Their names?"
    "No, the religion they got.
What do you call