Come August, Come Freedom by Gigi Amateau Page B

every season, Gabriel let Nanny cry for a child, for a mother, for herself. One Sunday, Nanny’s tears stopped.
    “What happens if I’ve used up all the sorrow God gave me?” Nanny asked Gabriel. She lamented the wall enclosing her heart. “I’d hardly remember the looks of my own sisters if I didn’t see my own face in the creek.” She leaned against Gabriel’s strong arms.
    He held her close enough to him so that her heart could keep its mournful beat with his. “It’s all right to look at your own hurting, Nan. You’re safe with me,” he said. His face burned. Makin’ a fool of myself.
    Nanny took in a deep breath, then blurted out to him, “Even knowin’ what happens to a family . . . if I could choose any man in the world to make my child, I would choose you, Gabriel.” She confessed and then sucked in her breath, trying to recapture those words.
    She broke from Gabriel’s hold and ran from the green-apple tree, down through the greener hillside, toward the spring. In but a few strides, Gabriel caught up and took her hand.
    “Is that an invitation, Nan?” Gabriel finally asked. “Or just a thought?”
    Nanny answered him by kissing the scar on the inside of his forearm, a mark shaped like the scythe the people used every day in Colonel Wilkinson’s field.
    He rubbed his thumb across the raised bean of skin and explained. “My first good burn. From forging my own hammer. I needed a longer handle and a heavier head than what my teacher gave me, so he told me to make my own, and I did.” He opened his hand to show her more. “My second good burn — forging a rosette for a gate. I thought I had doused the thing in water, but I hadn’t.”
    She bent her face over the delicate brown flower singed into the pale pink well of Gabriel’s palm. Nanny kissed that scar, too, until Gabriel let go a deep, contented sigh.
    She touched the old gash on his forehead, the one made by Thomas Henry. “Not a burn,” Nanny said.
    “No, it happened when I was a boy.”
    They walked beside each other in silence along the hillside. He couldn’t help but let himself daydream a future day, one when Nanny and he might go down to the brook, a free man and his free wife. By then, he would have told her all the stories of all his scars and marks — his missing front teeth, the long gash down his brow, and the deep marks across his back. He imagined a night when he would have Nan all to himself. On that first night, he would let her explore all of these places with her eyes and her hands and her kisses. Whether scars of his trade or marks of the lie, he would give Nanny the whole of what he carried in his heart and on his person.
    Gabriel smelled the promise of plum and apple and pear come wafting up from Young’s orchard. He linked his arm with hers. Neither of them heard the final notes of the last hymn rise up from the preachment at the spring. Gabriel stopped walking and pulled Nanny close to him.
    She pressed the bridge of her nose into the contour of his shoulder. “I see the life I want,” she said, “but how can it come to be?”
    Gabriel had no answer for her. In just a few minutes, she would be gone from him for another week. He pulled her tighter into his arms and rested his chin on her head. “I been knowing you a long time, Nan,” he said.
    All of the forest seemed to recognize what passed from his heart to hers. The canopy let enter a golden glow, shining out from the clouds and directly down onto them. The smallest of yellow warblers and its fellow songbirds darted out of the creek’s soft edges; their voices filled Gabriel with hope.
    He shook his head and smiled.
    Nanny pushed on his arm. “What?”
    He twirled her the way he did when they danced in the forest. “Just thinking. Wondering ’bout how our child might turn out to be.”
    “Be like half you and half me.” Nanny let herself go free of Gabriel’s hold and ran to catch up with Colonel Wilkinson’s other women. The sunset’s fading