The January wind whips my face with cold flakes of snow that sting my pink cheeks. I look across the river and I say, “Go, just go for it.”
The river taunts me with its width, as if it knows my weakness, as if it knew my fear. The wind licked my ears and seemed to call my name and pull me closer until my foot was on the ice.
Suddenly I heard a hand pistol and the clip-clopping of several horses making their way through the dense forest I had called home for many of the months before. They had tracked me, that’s all I could think. After feeling safe for so long they’d always been just around the corner.
As if by instinct, I started to run across the river. It was a good thing my feet were so numb because I would occasionally step on a small piece of ice that would stick up. I hadn’t had a pair of shoes since November when I had stumbled upon a bear. I had gotten away with just a scratch, but I had lost my shoes. I started to get winded from the running so I stopped to catch my breath.
As if out of nowhere I heard a loud, high pitched noise, almost like the noise my master’s wife would make after finding yet another one of her dresses missing. Only the noise I had just heard was much worse. It pierced my ears and left them ringing, the same noise I had heard the same noise not so long ago. I froze and slowly looked down to find a huge crack in the ice between my feet.
I couldn’t believe it, I was only halfway across the river. I looked down trying to see through the thin, glasslike ice. It was deep, I could tell that from the shade of the water. I knew that if the ice gave way and I fell in that I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out. Why did I have to choose to cross so late in the winter. My pulse began to quicken and I began to feel panicked.
“Calm down Liberty, calm down,” I said to myself, but it wasn’t very convincing since my voice was shaking. Slowly I began to slide my way closer to the Ohio shore. I looked down and saw that the water was still very deep under the thin ice I was standing on, it had to be a couple feet deeper than I was tall. When I saw that the shore was just several yards away I began to feel less panicked and happier.
Everything that happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. I heard a loud gunshot and a hole was shot into the ice right next to where I was standing, I turned around very quickly to see the man who was the cause of my life in the way it was at that moment, and as I was going to turn back around and run the rest of the way to the shore, the ice broke and I fell into the cold water that went way over my head. Then…nothing.
***
Just last year the people I was owned by pulled me out from the field and made me help with the inside chores. I was told to wash all of the laundry and hang it up to dry, wash the dishes after meals, and take care of their everyday needs.
The second day after being pulled out of the field was laundry day. I washed all of the clothes as if they were my own and they were made out of spider silk. Once they were all washed I went up to the spot by the house where I would hang them up. It was a small clearing in a patch of trees, but it seemed as if they had a machine to produce wind because all of the wind would come through a small opening and blow on the spot where the clothes would hang. Today the boy whose parents owned me was practicing croquet.
I looked down at my basket of laundry and tried to concentrate on not slipping or tripping. He was my age and was a very handsome boy, and not once have I seen him try to hurt one of us. I walked on past him as if he wasn’t there and started to put the clothes onto the line. The line was a foot or two taller than me so it was hard to reach. I could feel the boy’s eyes boring into my back. “Why was he staring,” I thought.
When I couldn’t take it any longer I turned around to ask him what was so interesting. The problem was that I was stepping on the hem of my dress and I fell down spilling the clothes onto the still dewy ground.
Embarrassed, I got up, brushed myself off, and put all the clothes back into the basket. But before I was even halfway through picking the clothes up I began to panic. I began to panic because I saw that the clothes had grass stains all over them. I would surely be whipped for my mistake.
“Oh, oh, oh, no why now?” I whimpered to myself, they would put me back in the field for all of my life. There was no way I could get myself out of this one. I looked up at the boy, who had come forward as if to help me up, and I looked back down at the clothes I had so cautiously washed. As if sensing my dilemma, the boy came over to me a started to hang the clothes up.
“I have to wash them again, they’re stained from the grass,” I said, standing up to take them back down.
“Please, I know what to do,” the boy said. I looked at him in a puzzled way and he smiled. Once the clothes were all hung up he took his croquet stick and started hitting the ground so that mud would come up onto the clothes, then, if that weren’t bad enough, he started going around with the muddy stick and hit the clothes.
“Oh stop, please stop, stop, stop!” I yelled, but he just looked at my horrified face and started to laugh. How horrible could people be? Then I heard his mother calling to him.
“How is your croquet practice going,” his mother called out to him and she started to come out to check on him! I was dead for sure. She came into the clearing and saw her son, still kicking up mud with his croquet stick, she saw the clothes, and then she saw me trying to take the clothes off of the line.
“You,” she said, “you’ve ruined our clothes!” She started coming towards me and I fell down on the ground cowering.
“Mother, it’s not her fault. I was frustrated by my lack of concentration today so I hit the clothes. It was me, not her, so if you’re going to hit anyone, it should be me,” the boy said. He took his mother’s raised hand and brought it down, she put it on his cheek.
“My darling, my sweet, sweet son, always thinking about others. I’m sorry about your frustration but I would never hit a child,” his mother said. She took one more disgusted look at me and left the clearing.
I brought my hands down from covering my head and I looked up at the boy who had just saved me. I was also looking up at him because he had come over to help me back up for the second time. He offered me a hand and I pulled myself up with it. When I was up I dusted myself off and he said, “I’m Gage, nice to meet you.”
After a few months Gage and I had become very good friends and we told each other everything. He would come to my hut’s window and wake me up so we could get up early before my chores started. That morning he tapped on my window and beckoned for me to come out. I got up and walked outside to find at least a foot of snow.
“Oh my goodness,” I said looking up into the sky so that I could watch as the light snow flakes fell on my face.
“I know, and the lake is frozen too,” said Gage. His family owned a huge plantation that had a lake. It had been slowly freezing over the past week or so. I pointed to the lake and he nodded and we began our race. We would race to the lake every morning. I got closer to beating him every day and today I felt extra lucky. I was right because I did beat him, even if it was only by a few inches. Unfortunately I tripped over a tree root hidden by the massive amount of snow. I fell, tripped Gage, and rolled over just on time and Gage didn’t crush me as he came down.
“Thanks a lot,” he said rolling over to look at me.
“My job is to make you happy,” I said but he just got this depressed look on his face. “What, what did I say?”
“You didn’t say anything,” he said, “It’s just I don’t think you should be here, working for us, you aren’t even getting paid.”
“Lighten up,” I said and I tried to get up, but he got up before me and lifted me up by my hands.
“Not until you’re gone and I can be rid of you,” he said smiling.
“And you will if President Lincoln gets his way,” I said back to him. The civil war had been going on for a while now and I just wished it would be over soon. Then he said, “I’ll race you to the middle of the lake.”
I didn’t have time to think about the anything so I just ran and didn’t notice how thin the ice actually was. The next thing I heard was a loud piercing noise that left my ears ringing. I looked over and saw a huge crack in the ice. I only had enough time to look up at Gage’s horrified face before I fell through the ice.
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