47

_11.

I heard all the words but I didn't really care about anything but the insinuation that Miss Eloise was sick.

Back then in my s/avemind, as John called it, I thought that Eloise was the closest thing you could come to an angel here on Earth. She was to me the most beautiful girl in all the world. I loved her in my heart as Brother Bob told us we had to love the Lord. Every night when I remembered to say my prayers I asked Him to keep her safe. I felt that if anything happened to Miss Eloise that I would die too.

Eloise was a beautiful child, that's for sure. And I learned later that she was a good person too. But now I realize that I loved her whiteness when I was still a slave because that whiteness meant freedom, and freedom was what I wanted more than anything in the world even though I didn't know it.

As soon as John and I were away from the back door of the mansion I asked him, "Did you see Miss Eloise?"

He didn't answer me right off. Instead he walked with me in silence until we got to a fence behind the chicken coop. We climbed up and over the few rungs and went maybe a dozen paces into the bushes. There, behind a big bramble bush, was a downed cottonwood tree that made a perfect seat for someone who needed to take a load off without being seen. I had never known about that resting place and I wondered how John knew to walk right to it. But I was too upset about Miss Eloise to question him about it.

"Did you see her?" I asked again.

John sat back on the cottonwood trunk and pulled his knee up to his skinny chest.

"Yes, I did," he said after a moment's thought. "Tobias asked me if I knew anything about healing. He said that Andrew Pike said that his wife thought that the runaway slave was a healer. I told him that I wasn't Pike's runaway, even though I am, and he said that I didn't have to worry about Pike, that Pike owed him two slaves and so that I was safe with him. All he cared about was if I was a healer."

"And what did you say?" I said, trying to move the story along.

"I told him that my people knew about healing."

"And so? Did you see Miss Eloise?" I asked for the third time.

"Yes. Tobias brought me to her. Her room is filled with sunlight. It was brightly painted and the windows were open. But she had bad color and was sleeping badly. She had fever."

"What's wrong with her?" I cried.

"I was only allowed to take her pulse," John said. "But I'm pretty sure that she has a blood infection. It seems to have gone to her brain."

"Naw it ain't," I cried, putting my hands to my head. "I just saw her last week swinging on the swing in the garden with her girlfriends."

"She was probably already sick but it was only since then that the infection entered her brain."

"Don't say that!" I yelled. I didn't want to hear something that might cause the beautiful Miss Eloise to die.

"We have to go looking for herbs," John said, not seeming to be very concerned. "Tobias gave us permission to wander around the woods here gathering the medicines they think we'll need to save her life."

With that John got up and strode off into the woods. I followed him, somehow realizing that these were the first steps to an education that would take me I knew not where.