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someone behind her whispered. The man to Ruth’s left leaned over her and said he heard that all the Rhode Island–born slaves could claim their freedom if they were twenty-one, but a woman on her right warned that the masters were fighting it one by one, arguing how this man was born somewhere else, or that girl was too young to count. Worst of all, you needed a paper to prove it, and what master was going to put it on paper?
The talk upstairs got so loud, the parson slapped his hand on the lectern to quiet the noise. Three times he pounded, but it did no good. Ruth saw proof that the news was true from the looks on the upturned white faces; some of them seemed scared, some sad, all of them plainly unsettled.
That night, Ruth watched the full March moon rise over the bay and felt herself grow lighter. Until that morning, being a slave had seemed a lot like being a woman: something you got born into, hardships and all.
Ruth knew that she was smarter than her mistress and that she could run the plantation better than her master. But now, the notion that they owned her was no longer merely cruel—it had always seemed cruel. Now, it was nonsense.
The Prescotts might as well claim to own the sea or the sky as Ruth or anybody else.
She hugged her knees to her chest and decided to leave as soon as the traveling got easier. She would head north to Cape Ann and visit her mother’s grave. Mimba used to sorrow over the way her own mamma’s bones were all the way across the sea in Africa, and she fretted that no one there would go to cheer her spirit with food and conversation.
Surely a murdered mother needed more consolation than
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most. Ruth knew that Mimba would have approved her plan, even though it meant her own grave would be lonely.
She took a little comfort knowing that Mimba had Cato right next to her.
On a moonless May night, Ruth put Cato’s extra clothes into an old burlap sack, along with Prescott’s best stone chisels, wedges, and his good mallet. She left one of the four silver dollars she’d found sewed into the corners of Cato’s mattress by way of payment and never looked back.
She walked until dawn, when an old African man in a buggy stopped and offered her a ride. There was a paper pinned to his shirt; he pointed to it. “Says I own myself and this wagon and no one can take me.” Ruth slept in hayricks by day and traveled by night, eating whatever she could find, wearing out her shoes on the way to Cape Ann.
From a chilly granite perch on Halibut Point, Ruth held her head in her hands and measured her days since that long trek fourteen years ago, from Narragansett to her meeting with Henry Brimfield. In all that time, she had found neither comfort nor satisfaction. Even her freedom had provided her little more ease or consolation than the moon above warmed her tired bones. Ruth had come so far and lived so lonely only to learn that she was the daughter of a rapist and a murderer. She was half-sister to a smug fool who would probably have used Phoebe as ill as his father, had he been given the chance. And even though she finally knew where her mother’s blood had been spilled, Ruth still did not know where her bones were buried.
The sound of barking startled Ruth out of her reverie.
A wet, hoarse bawl rose from the rocks not a hundred yards from her, where a dozen otters lay, their sleek pelts
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gleaming in the moonlight. One of them had rolled onto one of his fellows, who had made the loud, doggish complaint. The animals shook themselves and settled, much like the pack she knew so well. Ruth realized that there had been no sea monster in Gloucester Harbor, just flashes of these glossy backs in the water, tricking the eye into imagining one big creature that did not exist.
There had been no portent of Brimfield’s arrival, or of anything menacing. Otters were uncommon visitors in those waters, but nothing unnatural or ill-omened and they would disappear back into the sea, without explanation or consequence. The way of the world, she thought. Whales breach and vanish. One slave girl is killed and another is born, and both are forgotten.
The wind cut through Ruth’s spray-soaked shirt. With numb feet and aching knees, she suffered the last miles back to where she’d started out the day before.
The boulder seemed insignificant in the dawning light.
It was just a large rock, flat as a table, but nothing as grand as the natural monuments considered odd enough to be christened. “Peter’s Pulpit” and “Whale’s Jaw” lured the tourists who speculated about visits by ancient Viking travelers or some other nonsense.
The rocky altar where her mother died was nothing but one more of the countless stones that gave rise to the hoary joke that Cape Ann was the last place that God created, since it was where He dumped all the rocks that were of no use elsewhere.
Ruth lay her cheek on that granite table and shivered. She was ashamed of herself for letting Brimfield go.
He might have been lying about the murder, but even if
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