Chapter 7: An Unexpected Guest
It was early November. The night sky was falling and the household was settling in for dinner. Ruth was pulling a quilt she had been airing out all day from off the porch banister when she saw something strange in the distance amongst the trees. She squinted. The evening sky barely provided enough light. The figure grew closer and closer. It was limping.
"Jean!" Ruth shouted for her husband. She pulled the quilt inside and rushed back onto the back porch with him.
She could finally make out what it was. It was a man. He and was limping severely towards them but he collapsed into the grass. Ruth flung herself from the porch without thinking and rushed to him. Jean followed quickly behind her. She knelt down. Her blood ran cold. Whipping marks were bleeding through his shirt. She flipped the young man over and looked at his face. She knew immediately that he was a runaway slave.
"Laura!" Ruth shouted back at her friend who was standing on the porch, "get Occum!"
Occum was strong enough to carry the heaviest burdens with ease. Jean tried to make the young man sit up but he had gone dead weight. He was slipping in out of consciousness.
Occum picked him up with ease and ran back with Ruth and Jean into the house. Ruth stopped dead in her tracks when she heard dogs barking. She turned around and saw torches coming from the trees in the distance. Her breath became erratic. She tried to calm herself. It was bringing back memories from the war she had tried to hold down for so long. Jean tried to pull on her arm to coax her inside but she ignored him. Occum rushed inside.
"Hide him quickly!" Ruth shouted back. Laura nodded and Ruth held her ground. Jean sighed and joined her. A few moments passed before she could see who the men were. It was Old Wilkins. She shuddered.
"Where is he?" the old man looked down at Ruth from his horse, "he was coming this way."
"What are you talking about?" Ruth lied.
"I think you damn well know," he hissed, "A runaway isn't an easy thing to miss!"
"A runaway?" Ruth tried to act as innocent as she could. Jean was standing completely still. His hand was ready to pull the trigger of the pistol he had grabbed before Ruth ran out to investigate the figure approaching the house.
"You seem awful tense, Mr. Villeneuve," one of the men with Old Wilkins joked.
Jean didn't respond and kept his eyes on him. He knew what men could be like when they were in a pack like wolves. Their senses were dull when they were grouped together and thirsty for retribution.
"Why are you looking here?" Ruth asked him, "you're wasting your time. He's probably half way to Pembroke by now."
"I don't think he could run that far that fast. Not with the wounds I dealt him," Old Wilkins laughed. Ruth looked up at him in rage but she realized James was amongst the men. He looked completely out of place. He almost looked reluctant to be there.
"Be off with you!" Ruth shouted at him before heading up the steps. Jean didn't turn his back on them like she did. He stood his ground and glared up at Old Wilkins for a few moments. Ruth turned around, wondering what was about to happen. The old man growled and pulled the reigns of his horse.
"Let's get going!" he shouted at the group before he turned to look back down at Jean, "Mark my words, Mr. Villeneuve. I know how you French are with our customs here. If I find out you are harboring my property I will see to it that I take something of yours." He looked up at Ruth and Jean caught what he meant.
Jean raised his pistol and pointed it threateningly at Old Wilkins, spooking his horse. It reeled up and the old man held on. Some of the men tried to keep from laughing. He gained his grip on the horse and it placed all four of its hooves on the ground before he rode off. The dogs followed reluctantly and continued on with the party.
"What were you thinking?" Jean turned to Ruth after they were gone.
"I know how to handle myself," Ruth defended.
"Non," Jean said angrily, "those men are out for blood."
"They know the law-"
"They might but they rarely abide by it," Jean said as he went up the steps, "Especially when the leader of the pack doesn't recognize the law of an independent nation as what he has to abide by."
Jean and Ruth head back into the house where Laura was rushing up the stairs with a bucket of water and some cloth. Ruth followed her and found that Laura had placed the young man on a small bed in one of the spare rooms. He was laying on his stomach and Laura had ripped his shirt off to treat the wounds. She washed them and then handed Ruth a cloth which had a clump of some sort of thick opaque substance wrapped in it. Ruth sniffed it and realized it smelled like pepper and herbs.
"It's supposed to help with the pain," Laura said. She looked as if she had seen it all too often. Laura didn't even flinch and swiped some up with her hand, placing it on the sounds and ignoring the yelps of pain coming from the victim.
Ruth followed and began to dab the salve on his back but she wasn't as forceful about it as Laura. They finished applying the salve and the young man laid perfectly still for a moment before Laura decided to finally ask him a question.
"What's your name?"
After a few moments he gathered the strength to talk, "Ephraim."
"You're a wanted man, Ephraim," Laura warned him, "If you stay here, don't go outside."
Ephraim seemed incredibly confused. He looked up at them and looked incredibly frightened.
"Where am I?"
"The Villeneuve home," Laura talked to him. A sudden look of relief rushed over him and he shook his head, letting it drop on the pillow. He fell fast asleep and Laura pulled Ruth with her out of the room.
"In the morning, I will take him to Ben," Jean said once they closed the door, "he'll know what to do."
Occum nodded in agreement. Ruth had never encountered a situation such as this before.
…..
When night lifted and the morning's sky began to show it's colors, Jean and Occum placed Ephraim carefully in a wagon and covered him with a few fur pelts to hide him in case Old Wilkins' search party was roaming about. Ruth jumped up onto the wagon seat next to Jean and they rode off to the Martins. Occum decided not to go along, knowing that if Wilkins' search party came across him and Jean on the trail, their suspicions would be raised even higher.
The wagon was old and rickety. It was rarely ever used by Jean. He had received it in a trade shortly before he began to build his home. It had helped him haul supplies but he put it away in a shed afterwards and never pulled it out again. This situation called for it.
Sure enough, Wilkins and his men were heading down the trail. they didn't have the dogs with them and Ruth assumed they had sent them back home to search that night on their own. She was relieved, knowing they would have given Ephraim away in a second. The men's horses were tiredly trotting down the path, heading back when the men saw Jean and Ruth.
"Did you find him?" Jean asked, trying to act normal. However, his reputation of treating slaves and freed men with respect did not help him seem normal when asking that question. Wilkins still didn't trust him.
"If I did, I wouldn't be here," he snapped at Jean as he stopped his horse. Jean kept going forward.
"Remember what I said!" he shouted back at Jean before he disappeared around the bend in the road.
Ruth breathed a sigh of relief when they were out of sight. they finally reached the Martin farm and Ben was standing on the porch talking to Charlotte as she was rocking in a chair. They looked up at the Villeneuve's in surprise.
"What brings you around here with that rickety old thing," Ben laughed. Jean stopped the horse and jumped off the wagon. Ben followed him to the back. Ruth turned around as Jean flipped back the pelts to reveal Ephraim. Ben barely looked phased when he saw the young man. He looked over at Jean shook his head.
"Oh Jean," Ben shook his head, "Is he the one Old Wilkins was so worked up about last night?"
"He came to your house last night too?"
"Jean, are you mad?" Ben laughed, "of course you are. I honestly can't say I'm surprised by this. You're a crazy Frenchman-"
"What did he say when he talked to you?"
Ben answered angrily, "He accused me of harboring a runaway and then he made a threat about Margaret if he ever found out I had anything to do with it."
"He made a threat about Ruth," Jean whispered. Ruth barely caught what they were saying and was running her hand on Ephraim's head to help with the pain he was gritting through.
"You're going to be alright," she whispered.
"Honestly, Old Wilkins can suck on a leather strap," Ben said as he crawled into the back of the wagon to carefully lift Ephraim and scoot him to the edge, "I hate that man with every bone in my body."
"Thank you," Jean said. He knew Ben was probably the only man in the area who would help in that situation. Many people would have slammed their doors.
"I can hide him on my farm until he's well enough," Ben said as he helped Jean lift him out of the wagon, "and then he has to run out of South Carolina as fast as he can. He needs to get to the Gullah camp as soon as possible. Wilkins can't find him there. Chances are he won't even go that far."
Ruth had heard of Gullah camps. They were places of refuge for many slaves who had either been freed or had ran away. The journey was perilous to get there but many of the slaves ricked it. It was better than what would happen to them if they were caught. Usually the runaways never ventured outside of the Gullah camp for the rest of their lives. They were so far out that many of the plantation owners gave up looking.
Ruth watched Ben and Jean heave Ephraim up the steps and into the house. Charlotte ran to ruth as she jumped out of the wagon.
"What on earth is happening?" Charlotte worriedly asked, "I had to have Margaret stay in the house today after what Old Wilkins threatened."
"He threatened Margaret?" Ruth asked in huff.
"I can't repeat what he said but I would suggest that you keep close to Jean for the next few weeks," Charlotte said, "I don't trust the Wilkins family and they rarely ever let their threats be in vain."
Ruth never heard about the Wilkins family spoken of in that manner. She knew James' father was a horrid man. After learning what James did during the war, however, she thought that it probably wasn't just his father she had to look out for.