Wilderness Run
Page 2
“Laurence!” She saw that her cousin wore the same frowning grin as on the day he had made Bel steal a horse with him and go riding to the edge of Allenton.
“Hush, Bel, I know what I’m doing.”
As the boy clattered awkwardly to the lakeshore, Bel regarded the stranger from her safe height. Aside from the extraordinary outfit, his most prominent feature was a white scar curving like a fishhook below his left eye. The round cheek it marked made her remember a sketch of Hottentots in one of her mother’s issues of Frank Leslie’s Fashion Gazette, a thin volume that came every month with stories of Africa and Arabia, fairies and magicians, and the intricacies of fashion in Paris and New York. While the Hottentots had a certain comfortable roundness to them, this man was wiry and short, with a chest that bulged beneath his shirt like a laborer’s. His eyes were the ugly gray of wet mud.
Everyone knew that some people in Allenton secretly helped the runaways get to Canada, where slavery was illegal, and Bel had heard her own mother proposing it to her father in hushed tones one evening when they thought she was already asleep. But the Lindsey brothers were public supporters of Stephen Douglas, the Vermont-born senator from Illinois, who was in favor of letting each state choose on the issue of slavery. They would never approve of Laurence trying to rescue a runaway.
“Canada.” Laurence pointed up the lake, then took off his coat, offering it to the man.
The man snatched it with one quick hand. “Friend of a friend,” he repeated, and patted his stomach with the other.
“He’s hungry,” Laurence said, his eyes shadowed with a strange triumph. “We’ll have to take him home.”
“What, just march him up the street?” Bel demanded, suddenly angry with her cousin. “He could be dangerous.” She didn’t like the way the man clutched the black coat hard to his hip, as if he thought Laurence might try to take it back.
“If he wanted to harm us, he could have done so already, Bel. We hardly noticed him creeping up.”
“But what will your father say, or mine, for that matter?”
“They don’t have to know. Unless you tell them,” Laurence added with heavy emphasis.
“They don’t have to know?”
“Your mother will help us.”
Bel tried to envision her mother’s response but could see only the color darkening across her father’s high cheekbones and his blue eyes going to ice. Daniel’s left hand would begin to shake, and she would feel instantly ashamed. His misshapen three fingers were only a slight disfigurement, but they made Bel love her father with a deep, pitying devotion. As a young girl, she had often asked him to tell her the story of the injury, relishing the details of the molasses barrel tipping slowly from a wagon, crushing his fingers as the sweet brown sludge spilled over his arm. He was standing in the wrong place, he always said. He didn’t get out of the way in time.
This slowness to act still pervaded his decisions. Although Daniel favored abolition in theory, he didn’t believe the system could change overnight, and Bel recalled his response to her mother’s whispered request. He said that he could help the slaves the legal way, by voting and campaigning, but never by harboring runaways. That is a job for other men, who have less to lose than myself, he had said. What good will it do for me to get arrested?
Bel wielded the phrase on her cousin. “What good will it do if we get arrested?”
“Bel. We’re young. We don’t know any better.” Without his coat, Laurence’s shirt flapped like a sail, and his ruddy cheeks had begun to mottle with white patches. The runaway’s eyes rolled toward the lumberyards. “Canada,” he muttered, pulling his burlap hat lower.
Laurence shook his head. “If we don’t help him, he’s going to keep going and die. I think we should hide him up the creek a ways, and I can come back to get him after dark. Come on, sir.” He motioned for the African to follow him and started back toward town.
Bel didn’t move. Her legs ached from the coldness of the ice seat. The cry of a nearby gull sounded harsh in her ears. The man gazed up at her, and back at Laurence, then planted his feet.
“Please, Bel. He won’t come if you don’t,” Laurence said. “You’ll always regret this if you don’t help him. Things aren’t going to stay the way they are.”
Still confused, Bel stood up from her throne. As she stepped onto the steep glassy bank, her right boot slipped and she lost her balance. The sky wagged above her, blue and gray. After a moment’s hesitation, the runaway dropped Laurence’s coat and reached out to lift her down the way a gentleman would help a lady from a horse. Against her ribs, his fingers felt hard as sticks stripped of their bark.
The odor of sweat and leaves and earth filled her nose, so unlike her father’s clean lemon scent. Daniel had stopped lifting her in his arms years before, but now Bel remembered the delirious sensation of being swung, the power and the surrender. She squirmed in the runaway’s hold. He gripped her tighter, his face so close, she thought his parted pink mouth would swallow her. Her toes met the flat ice. When she stood safely on the lake, the runaway let go, and the two of them backed away from each other warily, like boys who have decided not to fight.
“Are you all right?” Bel heard Laurence in the distance of the moment. But she was already running, her steps sliding away even as she took them, her leather boots making soft hammer taps on the ice of Wilderness Run, Potash Brook, the creek that swelled with rain from the farmers’ fields and spilled it into the lake. Laurence called her name twice, three times before she turned around. Despite her exertion, she was hardly fifty feet away from them. The runaway had not moved at all. Laurence looked at her, at the man, and back at Bel again.
“He won’t hurt you,” her cousin said in a disappointed, accusing tone. His shoulders quivered with cold, but he rooted himself like a soldier facing an advancing army. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
Bel shook her head. She did not lessen the distance between them, breathing in deeply to erase the smell of the runaway. It clung to the back of her throat, thick as chocolate or clay.
“I’m going to rescue him.” Laurence folded his arms. “You go home if you want to. I know your mother will help me.”
Bel swung around to face the brook as it wound up the hill and into Allenton. The white path stretched before her, pocked by summer stepping-stones. There was nothing alive, nothing moving in the frigid air but a tuft of dead blond grass rustled by wind. The breeze flattened her coat against the ribs the runaway had touched. A chill spiked up her spine.
“I’m going home,” she announced to the emptiness before her. Laurence did not answer. She heard only the subdued trickle of water below her as she passed over the fragile roof of ice but did not fall through.
Chapter Two
By the time Bel reached her house, the sun was just a wedge of light behind the Adirondacks. Dusk made the city lonely and infinite. Snow-laden boughs dipped over hushed yards, the iron gates shaken of their whiteness into a stark and guarded black. Bel plowed two blue-shadowed furrows through the street with her boots, turning around often to see if Laurence followed her trail. He did not. Instead, a red sled coursed over the hill and past her, pulled by a lone black mare whose hooves alternately kicked up and vanished as she trotted through the drifts. The smaller of the two passengers called back over her shoulder.
“Hello, Bel Lindsey! Where are you going?” It was Mary Ruth Cross, one of the many Allenton girls Faustina tried to make Bel befriend. Mary Ruth’s face shone like a misplaced moon beneath her fur hat. The way her wide nostrils aimed outward reminded Bel of a piglet, but Mary Ruth was generally accepted among the adults as the girl who would grow up to be the heartbreaker around town. Her fair hair and blue eyes were so admired that Mary Ruth had already begun to acquire a bewildered string of boys who tripped over themselves to do something sweet for her without knowing why.
“Home,” Bel said.
“But where is your darling cousin?” Mary Ruth’s question drifted faintly back as the sled
picked up speed. Apparently, the driver had no interest in his charge’s conversation.
Bel pretended she didn’t hear Mary Ruth and stared instead at Laurence’s house as she passed it. A French château-style with long awnings on the second story, it never looked more like a fortress than in that moment, when the crimson brick absorbed the day’s last light. Only the awnings diminished this vision. Completely unsuited to Vermont’s heavy snows, they sagged and dented each winter under the white weight, and each spring, Laurence’s mother stubbornly tried to beat them back into shape.
In contrast to the ornate proportions of George’s mansion, Daniel had designed Greenwood during his wife’s pregnancy to be a stately but simple expanse of brick and wood. Greenwood had only one decoration in its two stories and gabled attic: the peculiar windows, set into the walls, each with a small arch above and a lip below for Faustina to plant boxes of flowers. These delicate decorations looked like lashes and every window a feminine eye that peered out on the elms in the front yard and the garden behind. Greenwood was always cool inside, summer and winter, and smelled faintly of the cedar doors from Lebanon that Faustina had installed in the upstairs closets to keep the moths out.
The sled swept over the crest of the hill as Bel scuffed through Greenwood’s open gate. Johnny Mulcane, the tall, gruff hired man, was standing on the porch roof, sweeping the snow from it. His silhouette loomed across the lashed windows, the broom brushing wide arcs of white down onto the yard. Johnny acknowledged Bel with a tight little nod as she passed. Ever since she had evangelically tried to teach him to read a few summers before, he had grown silent and cold in her presence. She remembered pressing her small hand over his, trying to reveal the triangle of the letter A, the first of the alphabet, like a small pointed house, an Indian tepee—the way her tutor explained it. Before she got to B, Johnny Mulcane had retracted his hand and lurched off to the garden, his shoulders bowed. The half-finished A, spindly and large, had remained on the copybook, embarrassing Bel when her tutor checked her progress the next day. She stoically did not confess its author.
As she reached the kitchen door, the entrance that she and Laurence took out of lifelong habit, Bel looked back one last time, hoping to see her cousin. A snowy cascade swept across her sight, blurring the street beyond. She thought she glimpsed the two of them, boy and slave, creeping through the dusk, their backs bent together, heads propelled forward like dogs searching for a scent. But when the air cleared, this vision vanished, and the tip of Johnny Mulcane’s worn boot appeared at the edge of the roof. She knew he must be watching her, but Bel did not look up at the beardless, balding man who always wore the same wrinkled gray trousers that bagged about his legs and smelled of something dark and foreign. She missed Laurence with the suddenness she felt after receiving one of his letters from Boston, when she realized it would be months before she saw him again.
The kitchen door opened just as she was about to twist the brass knob. Grete appeared in the threshold, ruddy, fair, and obstinate in posture, as if she were always being buffeted by a strong wind. If Mary’s official domain was the linen closet, Grete’s was the kitchen, and she ruled over it with wooden spoons and the heavy shields of bread dough she thumped on the counters.
“So,” Grete said, deepening the vowel so that it bore both the sound of discovery and the grief that such discovery was not pleasing at all. “Where is the Laurence?”
“He’s coming,” Bel said quickly, wishing she had prepared some excuse. “One of his old friends wanted to have a snowball fight, and I was cold, so I came home.” She peeked guiltily up at Johnny Mulcane’s boot, as if he might somehow contradict her testimony, but the cracked black sole was gone and she heard the scraping sound of his broom resuming its arcs. Johnny was collectively shunned by Mary and Grete, who had determined long ago that he had some Indian blood, which made him unworthy of their Irish and German attention. Not to mention the fact, Mary hissed to Grete one day when she thought Bel wasn’t listening, that he ain’t God-fearing like the rest of us. I tried to get him to go to church with me, and the man said no, outright no, like I had insulted him.
Grete widened the door slightly to allow Isabel passage into the interior. A wave of warm rich air swept out, making Bel suddenly ravenous. Grete’s mother was from Germany, and she had been brought to the United States by Faustina’s own father, who had cultivated a taste for all things German, particularly his table. Isabel grew up with the pungent beef of sauerbraten, the pounded crispness of schnitzel, and clouds of cream cakes on Sundays, when her mother enforced Kaffee in the late afternoon. Grete was an excellent, if disgruntled, cook, whose burly shoulders and pinned blond hair were far more formidable than the lines of soldiers a local general commissioned every year to practice on the town green.
Grease crackled in the skittle on the claw-legged stove. Bel entered the dry heat of the room and paused, her cold cheeks stinging.
“You are too late for cakes,” Grete announced dramatically. The cook used the word cakes indiscriminately for all sweets. She jostled past Bel and began to crack eggs into a bowl. Bel watched the yolks slide from their shells, top-heavy and bright. She did not want to leave the kitchen until Laurence came back. She wanted to tell him, wanted to say she was sorry, or wrong, or both. When was the last time she had opposed her cousin? She couldn’t recall refusing him anything, especially now, when they saw each other so seldom.
Grete began whisking the eggs, muttering about the people who always invaded her kitchen at exactly the wrong time, people who had no respect for those who worked, day in and day out, to keep others comfortable.
“People,” she concluded with a grunt, as if the very word were enough to disgust her. Her white apron shook as she swept past Bel, holding the whisked yolks, and began to pound pieces of pork flat with one of Johnny Mulcane’s mallets.
“May I have some hot chocolate?” Bel asked, hoping to stall until Laurence arrived.
“If you fetch the milk.” Grete brought the hammer down on a pink slab. Bel sighed. Grete always managed to persuade someone else to retrieve things from the cramped, unheated pantry, where she kept the perishables in winter.
Soon after Bel headed in the direction of the pantry, Laurence stormed in. “Where’s Bel?” he asked, his voice like a plucked string. Bel ducked past the jars of canned peaches, cucumbers, and cabbage and into the yellow room. As she poured the milk from a metal pail into a pot for the stove, she heard Grete’s rumbling retort. The liquid looks like melted bone, she thought, remembering the hard, fleshless fingers of the slave.
Laurence’s reflection flared across the jars behind her, his head made long and spoon-shaped by the curve of the glass, his shirt still radiating cold air from outdoors. When she set the pail down and raised the pot in front of her chest, Bel’s wrist shook and the milk sloshed against the sides. Her cousin stood just beyond the pot, wearing a tense, exultant expression. She could see the tiny hairs spoking between his eyebrows, and smell his sour, boyish breath.
“I’m sorry.” The words swept out of her.
“Are you?” he said, almost in the same instant. “He came with me anyway. I’ve got him hidden under the last bridge. Behind the hemlock tree.”
Bel imagined the green spray of branches, the runaway crouched behind them, his knees clutched against his chest. She couldn’t remember his face, just the burlap hat, the newspaper sticking in his frizzy black curls.
“Will you help him?” Laurence pushed closer to her. The milk spilled against the coat she still had not taken off, making a stain. Laurence’s eyes were deep brown, chipped with almond lights.
Grete’s hammering increased, the pound-pound-pound shaking the floorboards beneath them. Bel swayed against the shelves, while Laurence remained still, unaffected by the mild vibrations, gazing at her. She nodded, finally, letting her chin dip toward the white liquid and then raising it. She shoved the milk pot at Laurence, making him step back. A splash of white fell with a smack against the floor.
“Of course she’ll help.” Laurence said quickly, but he was staring at Bel as if he were seeing her for the first time. Bel stared back. A fleck of dirt was stuck to his lower lip, and she reached up to brush it away. His red mouth closed around her finger, gently holding it a moment before he let go.
The hammering stopped, and they both blushed and looked down. When Laurence still did not move, Bel pushed the pot ahead of her again, this time slowly, so nothing spilled.
* * *
Just after the two young Lindseys emerged from the pantry, Mary appeared in the doorway, her hands fisted on her hips.
“Laurence, were you out that whole time without a coat?” Mary had the near-translucent skin of a true redhead, and an entire constellation of freckles now darkened with worry at the sight of Laurence’s blotched face.
“No, I forgot it at a friend’s house.” He tried to act nonchalant, but a shiver cracked his sentence in half.
“On a night like this? Oh, sar, your mother will be worried sick!”
“If you tell, I’ll say I saw you go meet Nicky in the coach barn the other night,” Laurence threatened. Nicky, Mary’s longtime beau, was a blacksmith. He came to take her for walks on Sundays in the summer and fall but showed no signs of interest in marriage. At this threat, Grete emitted a hoarse, unfriendly chuckle and set Bel’s pan of milk onto the stove.
“Laurence! You wouldn’t. It’s not true.” Mary attempted to stare him down.
“I would. And it is.”
“Well then, I suppose I’ll just tell them that you’re finally home,” Mary snapped at Bel, who was an easier target than Laurence. Bel nodded, preoccupied, her finger still tingling from the light pressure of Laurence’s lips. She rubbed it against her dress, trying to erase the sensation.