“I don’t understand,” George said. “You didn’t buy me?”
“According to the laws of the marketplace, yes, I did buy you,” Ulrik answered. “However, I do not condone slavery. When I bring blacks to my plantation, they work for me for a period of seven years. During that time, I put money aside for them as wages, provide an education and, at the end of seven years, I release that person.”
“You … you mean, you set your niggers free?”
“I release my indentured servants. Yes.”
The black man’s eyes gave away his disbelief, but he didn’t dare voice his doubts. Ulrik chuckled.
“I understand you are reluctant to believe me,” he said. “But you will soon meet Jeb, my field foreman. He was released five years ago but chose to stay here and work for a regular wage as my field foreman.”
“You mean, you gots a nigger foreman? He was a slave?”
“At one time he was a slave,” Ulrik said, nodding. “I purchased him at auction, just as Mr. Macomb purchased you today on my behalf. Jeb fulfilled his obligation as an indentured servant and I released him, as promised. He could have left here, able to read and write, but he asked to stay.
“You were brought here today because another former servant was released last week and did choose to leave,” Ulrik continued. “I need more help in the fields. Do you find these terms agreeable?”
“Yessuh!” Now the man leaned forward eagerly.
Ulrik was about to say more but a knock on the open door of his study interrupted him. He looked up and found his foreman there. “Ah, here is Jeb now.” He waved the man in. Jeb smelled of raw cotton and grease from the gin. Ulrik introduced the foreman to his new worker, then told George, “Go with Jeb. He’ll show you to your quarters and go over our work schedule.”
Ulrik watched the two black men leave the office. Macomb came to the desk and sat in a chair next to the one George had just left.
“I still say this is a bad idea,” Macomb said. “Yeah, you let Freddie go last week. Do you know where he is now? He’s in jail. Supposedly he made some rude comment to Phillip Bradley’s daughter two days ago. Folks say the nigger forgot he was black because of the way you treat your slaves. Then you go and make them free men. He’ll likely hang. And people in town are talking mean about you.”
“What they say does not concern me,” Ulrik answered.
“I’m telling you, it better concern you. You can’t keep doing this. Letting these niggers go free like that. Enough good white folk get together, they may come down here carrying torches and guns. Me and the missus are worried about that. You better believe it.”
Ulrik had picked up the bill of sale on George Jackson. Something about the tone of Macomb’s voice made him put the paper down and study his business manager more closely. “Indeed?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“I am sorry to hear about Freddie. He is a good man. You may go, Raymond. Please ask Jeb to come back here when he is finished talking to George.”
Ulrik watched his business manager leave. An hour later, his field foreman returned. Ulrik motioned him to a chair.
“You have been an excellent employee,” Ulrik began. “However, I think our time here is about to end. Freddie has been arrested. He will likely be dragged from jail and lynched soon. Perhaps even tonight.” Ulrik paused, then sighed heavily. “I believe a man I trusted may have become influenced by those who do not agree with my policies. The mob, I think, may turn its attention to this house when it is finished with Freddie. We cannot prevent the lynching, Jeb, but we can save ourselves.”
Jeb rolled his limp brown hat in his hands but remained quiet. Ulrik handed him a metal box.
“Inside that box is the paperwork to free every Negro working for us, Jeb. I want you to take it and hide it. At the first sign of trouble, you lead the workers into the woods and hide there until the trouble is over. Then, distribute those papers, divide up the cash that is included, and give everyone my deepest gratitude and best wishes.”
“Mistah Ulrik, sir, what are you sayin’?”
“I am saying that, if the mob comes, as I suspect it will, our time here will be finished. They will do their damage. Many will die. But you will not see me again. Do you understand?”
Jeb nodded his head.
“Say nothing of this to Mr. Macomb,” Ulrik added. “Avoid any contact with him for a while. I suspect he has betrayed us.”
“Why would he do that?” Jeb asked.
Ulrik shook his head. “Pressure from those around him, Jeb. I pay Mr. Macomb well for his services here. That allows him to socialize with a wealthy class of white people who do not like the idea of free Negroes. Because I do not socialize with those people, they speak their minds to Mr. Macomb. I thought he was a stronger man. Maybe I am wrong now and he is a strong man. I suspect we will know the truth soon enough.
“Now, go and hide that box and spread the word to the servants that they should be prepared to follow you in the event of an attack on the house.” Ulrik watched the foreman leave and sat quietly in his office for a moment before returning his attention to more paperwork that would secure his assets.
The attack came that night.
Ulrik watched from an upper window of the mansion as a crowd of torch-bearing men marched up the road. He heard the sounds of livestock being released to flee, of women calling to children and men calling to women. Lisa, a young black maid who had worked for him for three years, came into the room behind him.
“Mister Ulrik, they’s comin’.”
“Yes, they are. You should go, Lisa. Go with Jeb. Stay hidden until this is over.”
“Ain’t you gonna come, Mister Ulrik?”
“No.” He heard the woman move closer to him. He turned his gaze away from the approaching flames and was surprised to see tears in the servant’s eyes. “What is it?” he asked.
“You been so good to me, Mister Ulrik,” she said, then sobbed and tried to hide her face.
Smiling sadly, Ulrik took her into his arms and hugged her. “This is no time for tears, Lisa. They will be here soon.” He released her and she dabbed at her eyes with her apron.
“You just … my last master … you know he would come and hit me and – and make me lay with him. You never done none of that. You been so good to me.”
“Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. You are a free woman now. Go north. Be careful. Do not draw attention to yourself. When this is finished tonight, quietly go north.”
“Yes, sir, I will. Jeb done told me what you done for us. Thank you.”
“Come. I will walk you downstairs,” Ulrik said, taking the woman’s small arm and guiding her from the room. He studied the walls, the curving staircase, the rich furnishings, most of which had come with the house when he purchased it at the turn of the century. He knew that by morning it would all be reduced to ashes.
Ashes and blood.
He opened the front doors and escorted Lisa to the porch. Jeb was approaching the house.
“There you are, girl,” the foreman said. “I been lookin’ for you.”
“Go with him,” Ulrik urged, releasing her. The young woman threw herself at him one final time, hugging him about the neck tightly, then hurried off the porch and ran for the row of servant dwellings behind the mansion.
Jeb joined Ulrik on the porch. “What will you do?” he asked.
Ulrik smiled. “I will go among them like a ravening wolf, my friend.”
“They gonna kill you?”
“Oh, that is unlikely. They are in for more fight than they suspect.”
“We could stay and help you.”
“No. Absolutely not,” Ulrik said. “It is one thing for a white man to fight and kill them. It is something you cannot risk.” He extended his hand and took Jeb’s rough hand and shook it. “You are a good man and I wish you well. Now, you must hurry. Go and take care of our people.”
“Yessuh. I will, sir.” Jeb followed after Lisa.
Ulrik t
urned his attention to the small white house to the east of the mansion, the house where his business manager lived. He stepped off the porch and walked toward it, shedding clothes as he walked. His last act as a man that night was kicking in the door of the house. Then, he let the wolf come forward.
Raymond Macomb’s wife, Rose, screamed when the man-shaped wolf filled her doorway. Raymond turned his attention from the window where he was watching the light of the approaching torches. Ulrik knocked the woman out of his way. The man lunged for a pistol laying on a small table beside him. He raised the gun and Ulrik grabbed his wrist and tore the arm away from the torso. Macomb shrieked. Ulrik dropped the arm and took the man’s head in his fur-covered, claw-tipped hands. He snapped the neck of his business manager and let the body fall to the floor. Without another glance at Rose Macomb, Ulrik left the house, letting the transformation complete itself as he moved.
The torch-bearing townsfolk and neighbors were fifty yards from the house when the wolf brought down a man at the back of the herd. Ulrik had killed three before the first torch was thrown through a window of his home. Two more men died in his teeth before another saw the beast among them. Several torches had gone through windows and the fire was spreading quickly through the mansion. The clearing around the house was lit with orange light spilling from the broken windows of the house. A shout of alarm went up. Guns were pointed here and there at dancing shadows. Ulrik slipped between panicked bodies, tearing at hamstrings and thighs, then finishing the job when the wounded were down. Shots rang out, missing him but sometimes hitting a man he’d just passed.
The crowd broke and ran back up the lane toward the road. Ulrik gave chase, bringing them down one by one in the dark. He let five escape to tell the tale, then returned to sit on his lawn, still in wolf shape, and watch his house burn to the ground. No one came from neighboring plantations to try to save his house or check on his safety.
When the house collapsed and the fire had burned itself out, Ulrik turned and slipped into the woods.
* * *
In a very similar house in Mexico, the much older Josef Ulrik shook his head at the memory. He had spent the next twenty years helping runaway slaves get safely into free states, usually by killing the hounds trailing them and sometimes the white men trailing the hounds. He had become known as a devil of the forest, cursed by whites and whispered about by blacks. Then he’d moved to Oregon and met Tony Weismann.
“Another betrayal,” he said.
He looked at the phone, then at the watch strapped to his wrist. The hours between now and Douglas Summers’ next call would seem an eternity.
Fenris
“He’s made it out of the basement and over the back fence. Kelley and Gary are following him.”
Fenris looked up from his National Geographic magazine and smiled. “It took him long enough. He used the wire handle from the shit bucket to carve holes in the dirt wall to the window?”
“Just like you said he would,” Brian Moore answered.
“Honestly, I am a little surprised he did not try to take the girl with him,” Fenris said. “I suspected he was more noble than that.”
Brian shrugged. He was a tall man who kept his head shaved. His heavy eyebrows seemed even more pronounced because of the ridge over his eyes. “So, what do you want to do with the girl? Kill her?”
“No. She’s one of us now. It will be good to have a young one. And, you never know, she may come in useful. The boy we want seems to be fond of her.”
“We did go to a lot of trouble to get her,” Brian agreed, looking at a new scar on his right arm where a plucky doctor had cut him with a scalpel during the raid on the hospital.
Fenris got up from his recliner and went to the picture window of the living room. He looked out onto the street and neighboring houses of Ogden, Utah’s, lower-class neighborhood. Usually, after something like the hospital raid, he never would have taken up residence in a city neighborhood. But, it had been necessary this time. He turned back to Brian.
“Get the girl ready to travel. We’ll be out of here by sundown. Unless we get the good news we want, we’ll go to my ranch in California.”
Brian nodded. “I wish I could be the one to tear that McGrath fucker apart for what he did the other night.”
“It was a calculated risk. We lost that one. I, too, am sorry for our losses.” He patted Brian’s shoulder with one hand as he took his cell phone from its clip on his belt. He checked to make sure the battery was charged, then replaced it. “I think our first call will come soon. Our friend Chris had his wallet?”
“Yeah. It was still in his pocket.”
“Good. Go on and get little Jenny ready for travel. She’ll likely be waking up soon, so have some food ready for her. Get the truck ready.”
Brian nodded and left the room. Fenris returned to his chair and his magazine. Less than an hour later, his cell phone rang. It was Kelley Stone.
“He made the call from a gas station payphone,” she said.
“And?”
“It’s an Oklahoma number.” Kelley read off the number and Fenris wrote it down. “He wasn’t even smart enough to block the phone as he dialed. We didn’t have any problem getting the number with the binoculars.”
“Very good,” Fenris said. “I will call Nick in Oklahoma and tell him to be ready with his people while I find where this number goes. You continue following Mr. Woodman and make updates as necessary. We are preparing to leave here.”
“Okay,” Kelley said. “I don’t think Woodman got his call through.”
“Oh?”
“He slammed the phone down, waited a few minutes and tried again. Same number. He still didn’t talk to anyone, slammed the phone down again, then went in the station and bought some food. I guess we weren’t feeding him enough.”
“He likely will try to get a ride to Salt Lake City and the airport,” Fenris said. “Send Gary back for a vehicle. You stay with Woodman.” He cut the connection, put his magazine aside and went to the table where his laptop computer was set up. Thirty minutes later he was on his cell phone again.
“Nick, we’ve found her,” he said. “She is on a farm outside of Stillwater. How quickly can you get there?”
“An hour, maybe a little longer,” the man answered from the rental house near the home of Shara’s parents in Enid.
“Make it less. Take everyone. Take Shara alive. I would like to have McGrath alive, too, so he can suffer for what he’s done to us, but it doesn’t matter. Alive or dead, just be prepared to deal with him. Call me when it’s done.”
Fenris ended the call and shut down his computer to pack it for travel.
Ulrik
Ulrik heard a footstep outside his bedroom door and looked up to find John Redleaf filling the doorway. He met the Indian’s dark gaze and held it, thinking back over the centuries to other native people he had known. There was something hard about John Redleaf, something inside that kept him distant and cold.
“Yes?” Ulrik asked.
“May I come in?”
Ulrik nodded and motioned toward a chair near the desk where he sat. He cast a quick look at the ornate telephone, hoping whatever business the Indian had would be over before the phone rang. John sat, then reached up with his right hand and fingered the dark brown medicine pouch that hung from a thong around his neck. Ulrik was familiar with the plains Indians’ belief in the pouches.
“I was at Wounded Knee when your soldiers attacked,” John said.
“They were not my soldiers,” Ulrik corrected. “I have served in the army, but have never been involved in the Indian wars or Indian tracking.”
“I know of your personal resistance. But it was your people who did it. Three hundred Indians were slaughtered that day in December. My father and my brother were killed. I was left for dead, crawling away from the battlefield when night came. I took some of the earth where the blood of my family was spilled. The ground had turned to mud because of the spilled blood. I have it here.”
He held the medicine pouch forward.
“The white man has never treated the natives well,” Ulrik agreed. “Why do you tell me this now?”
“I convinced my father and brother to leave the land the government had given us in Indian Territory. We went away to the north, to the Dakotas. I traveled a great deal, though. I first met Wovoka in Nevada. I was there when he taught Kicking Bear the Ghost Dance. Then I returned to my father and brother and we joined others who were going back to hear the words of Wovoka. That’s when the soldiers came on us.
“Wovoka taught that a new world would come, like a cloud. He said it would be a whirlwind out of the west, crushing everything old and dying in this world. In the new world, there would be plenty of meat again. He said all the Indians killed by the white men were in that new world, waiting. The dead buffalo were there, too. They would all come back. He said the white man would disappear and the Indians would be able to return to their own lands and their own traditions.”
“Yes, I know of Jack Wilson,” Ulrik said.
“That was the white man’s name for him.”
Ulrik nodded. “What does this have to do with our situation?”
“Kiona took me to Europe to meet an old one, a white man who could become a bear. I asked her to do this for me so that it would be easier to take revenge on the white men for killing my family. She told me of the prophecy among the skinchangers, but I didn’t care. I still do not care. I am here because I am in her debt.
“I have seen one messiah,” John continued. “He is dead. His vision died with him. This boy we have brought to you, he is no messiah. He lacks the fire within his spirit. He is just a boy with a gift he fears.”
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