Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
over the top of the buildings. I ducked into an alley, and then another and another. I jumped over street sleepers, past dark groups of laughing men and a closed carriage pulled by a galloping horse. I turned the corner and narrowly avoided the grasp of a drunken woman leaning against a building. I heard my feet in the street and felt the air burn my lungs as I ran past mad laughter toward the smell of high tide.
At the harbor I boarded my ship and stood breathless at the rail while the gangplank was raised. I was doing what I had dreamed about for years, going home again. I thought I should feel overjoyed, but as the dull lights of London slid backward into inky darkness, I felt oddly disconnected and lost. I knew I stood where I stood, on this ship, as a direct result of my decisions, my actions—and yet instead of pride I felt as powerless and sad as I had the first time I’d boarded a ship, my hand in my father’s, to sail away with the tide.
BUT MY MELANCHOLY WAS fleeting. On the third day out we got word from a passing schooner that Fort Sumter had been attacked and the war between the states had begun. I thought of O’Keefe of the Sword, and of his call to arms—when politics call for a drop of blood, for many thousand drops of blood—and on that long ocean voyage, I dreamed myself a warrior. Each night I gave thanks to Providence for dropping in my lap a righteous war: a fever to burn my diseased country to health. Not only would I find and free my mother but I would now have an opportunity to fight for an even greater cause. I would make available the strength of my arm and the courage of my heart for the just cause of freedom for all.
In this determination I grew happier than I had ever been. In the evening I stood on the deck and watched the sun set into the sea off the bow—the sea that now contained my father’s very bones. I watched wild colors grow upward from the horizon, fill half the sky and the surface of the water before me, and then begin to shrink and fade. Just before the stars came out there was a moment of twilight when all that separated sea from sky was a thin silver line. It was then that the nature of things stood before me as clear as they had ever been. I wished Mr. Collins were there, for the mystery was revealed, or so it seemed, and I was part of the mystery, part of creation, no longer separate. I was my father and not my father, my mother and not her, too. My freedom was everyone’s freedom, and everyone’s freedom was mine and all of us were endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights.
Inalienable because if they were denied I would fight for them. I would kill for them. Die for them.
I breathed all of that new sea air and felt the euphoria that comes with having a purpose, and with having what in my youth I could only imagine to be a realistic chance of success.
Then night fell, full night. Looking west into the darkness across the broad belly of ocean toward the still submerged dreamland of my past and my future, I felt for the first time what I imagined my father must have hoped I’d someday feel when he kissed me on the forehead and sent me away to be free.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.