Liberating Atlantis

She pointed at Frederick. He noted with abstract horror that the soup had made the dye in her almost-up-to-date fashionable gown run; blue streaked the pale flesh of her arm. "You God-damned clumsy son of a bitch!" she snapped: a statement of the obvious, perhaps, but most sincere.

"Mistress, I-" Frederick gave it up. Even if he hadn't had most of the wind knocked out of him, what could he possibly say?

The crash and the screams made slaves from the Barford estate and those gathered under the trees rush into the dining room to see what had happened. One of them laughed on a high, shrill note. It cut off abruptly, but not abruptly enough. Whoever that was, he'd catch it.

And so would Frederick. Veronique Barker fixed him with a deadly glare. "You'll pay for this," she said. She wasn't his mistress, which didn't make her wrong.

II

The morning after: one of the more noxious phrases in the English language. It must have seemed pretty noxious to Henry Barford. He'd come downstairs the afternoon before to view the catastrophe. Unless you were dead, you couldn't help coming to take a look at something like that. He hadn't been dead, but a wobble in his walk said he'd already been tight. He'd looked, shaken his head, and gone back to his bedroom. And he'd finished the serious business of getting drunk.

And now, on the morning after, he was suffering on account of it. His skin was the color and texture of old parchment. Red tracked the yellowish whites of his eyes the way railroads were starting to track the plains of Atlantis east of the Green Ridge Mountains (only a few reached across them; the southwest was the USA's forgotten quarter). His hands shook. His breath stank of stale rum and of the coffee he'd poured down to try to counter the stuff's effects. His uncombed hair stood up in several directions at once.

He looked at Frederick with a certain rough sympathy on his face. The Negro felt at least as bad as the white man. But what Frederick knew was fear for the future, not regret for the past.

"Well, son," Henry Barford rasped, "I am afraid you are fucked."

"I'm afraid so, too, Master Henry," Frederick agreed mournfully. He was a year or two older than the man who owned him, but that had nothing to do with the way they addressed each other. The brute fact of ownership made all the difference there.

"Matter of fact," Barford continued, "I am afraid you fucked yourself."

"Don't I know it!" Frederick said. "That God-damned floorboard! Take oath on a stack of Bibles piled to the ceiling, sir, I didn't know the end had come up."

"I believe you," Henry Barford said. "If I didn't believe you, you'd be dead by now-or more likely sold to a swamp-clearing outfit, so as I could get a little cash back on your miserable carcass, anyways."

Frederick gulped. Slaves in that kind of labor gang never lasted long. The men who ran the gangs bought them cheap, from owners who had good reason for not wanting them any more. They fed them little and worked them from dawn to dusk and beyond. If that didn't kill them off, the ague or yellow fever or a flux of the bowels likely would. And even if those failed, the swamps were full of crocodiles and poisonous snakes and other things nobody in his right mind wanted to meet.

Barford paused to light a cigar: a black, nasty cheroot that smelled almost as bad as his breath. He sighed smokily. "I believe you," he said again. "But no matter how come it happened, what matters is, it did happen. My wife, she's mighty mad at you-mighty God-damned mad."

Frederick hung his head. "I'm sorry, Master Henry. I'm sorrier'n I know how to tell you. I tried to apologize to Mistress Clotilde last night, but she didn't want to listen to me. Honest to God, it was an accident." He hated crawling. If he wanted to save his own skin, though, what choice did he have?

"One more time, Fred-I believe you," Barford said. "What I believe right now… don't matter one hell of a lot. Something like that happens when we're sitting down to di

How close had he come to selling Frederick-and maybe Helen, too-for whatever he could get? (This was the first time in his life Frederick was halfway relieved none of their children had lived-they would have been sold, too.)

Gowns of silk and lace and endless labor didn't come cheap. Frederick knew that, all right. He remembered his mistress complaining about how expensive the dress she'd worn to the gathering-only one of the gowns Frederick had wrecked-was. All the money he'd saved… He didn't offer it. It not only wouldn't be enough, it would be so far from enough that the very offer would seem insulting.

Henry Barford blew out another ragged puff of smoke. "So I got to make you sorry for real," he said. "Won't be any peace in this house till I do. And you know you've got it coming. Can't hardly tell me you don't."

"Reckon I've got somethin' comin'," Frederick said cautiously, "but what do you mean, 'make me sorry for real'?"

"Well…" His master stretched out the word in a way he didn't like. "My wife and me, we spent some time last night talkin' about that." Most likely, Clotilde had spent the time talking and Henry listening. He stared at the coal on the end of the cigar, and at the thin column of smoke rising from it. He doesn't want to tell me, Frederick realized, and ice spidered up his back. At last, Barford spoke again: "What we decided was, we got to give you five lashes and send you out to the fields. Don't like to do it, Fred-wish like hell there was no need. Got to, though. Damned if I can see any way around it."

"Ohhh!" The air wheezed out of Frederick as if he'd been hit in the belly. He'd known they would have to punish him, but… "Is that really fair, Master Henry? I didn't hurt anybody, and five lashes're sure go

"Got to do it." Barford didn't sound happy about it. To give him his due, he didn't enjoy hurting his animate property, as some masters did. But he did sound very firm, and he explained why: "Isn't just on account of you mucked up Clotilde's fancy gathering. Those dresses you ruined… Only way I can keep some of those damned biddies from going to law with me for hundreds and hundreds of eagles is to show 'em I made you sorry. Clotilde wanted I should give you ten, but I managed to talk her down some."

"I'll-" Frederick bit down hard on what was about to come out of his mouth. I'll run off was the last thing a slave wanted to tell a master, especially when it was true.

Biting down hard didn't do him the least bit of good. "You'll do no such damnfool thing," Henry Barford said, as if Frederick had shouted the words in his face. As if to underline that, Barford drew a flintlock pistol from his belt. It was an over-and-under affair, with a bullet in the top barrel and a charge of buckshot in the lower one. Percussion revolvers could fire many more rounds, but at short range a piece like that one would kill a man quite nicely. "Now you come along with me. We'll stash you away till tomorrow mornin'. Don't do anything stupid, or I'll be out even more jack."

"What about me?" Frederick asked bitterly as he got to his feet.

"Hey, I wish you didn't do it," his master said. "But you did, so this is what you get. Step lively-but not too lively. You don't want to know how good a load of double-aught buck'll ventilate your carcass. Believe you me, you don't."

Frederick did believe him. A bullet as fat as a finger wouldn't do a body any good, either.