Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “Tell them also that I have made Mrs. Lindsey’s favorite dish,” commanded Grete, ushering Mary out the door with a wave of her wooden spoon. Laurence gave Bel a confident nod at the mention of her mother. The milk in the pan puckered and began to boil. Grete whisked it off the metal surface and stirred a dark syrup of sugar, water, and cocoa powder into it, staining the white liquid in quick swirls. The chill of the pantry had made Bel realize how fast the temperature was dropping outside, but Laurence seemed unperturbed, as if her allegiance in the matter was all that he had sought. After the cook handed a cup to each of them, brown and hot, Bel gulped hers too quickly and scalded the back of her throat without even tasting the sweetness.

  Chapter Three

  “Do you know that when the Little Giant was an infant, his father was holding him in his arms, sitting by the fire with his friend James Conant?” began George Lindsey as he sawed into Grete’s schnitzel. “And the good Dr. Douglas had a heart attack just then and nearly dropped his son into the hearth. Conant barely managed to save little Stephen from the flames, but his father was dead.”

  “Perhaps that is what stunted his growth,” murmured Faustina, who had favored Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas’s taller challenger for the famous Senate race.

  Laurence, at the other end of the table, laughed a short, humorless bark. In his restlessness, he had already spilled his water glass twice, and he fidgeted in a damp huddle, trying to catch Bel’s eye while the adults droned on.

  “That’s quite a story, George,” encouraged Pattie Lindsey, the dull, pretty socialite who had bestowed on Laurence his straight blond hair.

  Instead of acknowledging her, George glanced sharply at his brother’s wife but could not meet her lowered green eyes. “It does not seem in your good heart to jest about someone’s height, Faustina,” George said, finally mastering the schnitzel.

  “I only jest about Stephen Douglas. There I draw the line,” Faustina said.

  Bel folded her hands into fists, making the nails bite hard into her palms. How long would her uncle talk before they could get her mother alone? Faustina and George always argued about everything: the railroad lines, politics, and especially the issue of slavery. George teased Bel’s mother for her subscriptions to the abolitionist papers, and in turn she defiantly recited word for word Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the Vermont constitution, and any other official document that talked of human freedom. They were like two spring robins, always chasing and pecking at each other.

  “We saw the most cunning thing today in Frank Leslie’s,” Lucia interposed, talking mainly to her mother. “Tell them, Anne.”

  “It was a Druid’s cape,” pronounced Anne, touching her piles of dark blond hair. Bel didn’t think either of them was especially pretty, but somehow their many attention-seeking mannerisms worked on the boys their age. Aunt Pattie was always bragging about their list of callers.

  “It has a darling little hood, and it drapes down the back with a fringe,” Lucia added.

  “A green fringe, like the forest,” said Anne solemnly. “That’s what Frank Leslie said.”

  “Well, and would it enable you to make the trees do your bidding?” asked Daniel.

  “Oh, Uncle Daniel.” Lucia giggled, shooing him with a braceleted wrist. “We would have to own one to know that.”

  “I was thinking it might save us thousands of dollars if the trees could just cut themselves down,” Daniel concluded, and Pattie and her daughters laughed enthusiastically. “Would you like one for Christmas, too, Isabel?”

  Her father’s well-intentioned inclusion of her made Bel blush. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t want one, Papa. I don’t need any new clothes.”

  “What would you like, then, Bel?” Faustina asked, noticing her daughter’s discomfort.

  “I should like…” Bel thought fast, wanting to impress Laurence. “I should like drawing lessons.”

  “Drawing lessons!” Pattie said. “My daughters never asked for those, although they can play a few tunes on the piano. Can’t you, girls?”

  “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” interrupted Faustina. “Perhaps she could paint all our portraits one day.”

  Hoping to avoid further notice, Bel shrank back in her seat, one of the eight oak and velvet thrones that rounded the table. These, too, had come from Germany, a wedding gift from Faustina’s father. They possessed the curious power both to raise and diminish their occupants, so that down at the other end of the table, her twitching cousin looked as if he were trying to swim up from a dark sea of cloth.

  Now the adults were talking about something else, which had to do with the price of paper and how it might affect the lumber trade, and George was saying that soon there would be no trees left in Vermont and it was best if they didn’t rely on them. Her uncle’s main passion in life was business, what would make his family and his city rich. Although both he and her father frequently traveled to Boston, they loved their native state, and remained devoutly loyal to all the generations that had come before them. Bel’s grandfather Lindsey had made his fortune breeding the merino sheep given to him by the ambassador to Lisbon. And Faustina’s father, the lumber baron Henry Gale, had worked in concert with Mr. Lindsey to tame the wild forests of Vermont to pastures and stone walls.

  Bel saw Laurence jerk his head, signaling his impatience—but he had promised that they would include her mother, and Faustina seemed not at all inclined to leave the table. When Bel didn’t respond, he pushed his chair back with a scrape.

  “May we be excused?” Laurence said, interrupting his father’s lecture on the superiority of the American train stations to those of Europe, the latter of which lay on the outskirts of town rather than in its center.

  “In England, the passengers arrive at the dismal, swampy limits of the city. In New England, they disembark in the middle of it all,” said George, glaring at his son as he concluded.

  “I suppose you may,” Daniel said mildly, looking at Laurence. He sat like a strung bow opposite his wife, his long spine arched toward the table.

  “I want dessert,” Bel said, obstinate. Her mother still showed no signs of getting up; Faustina had fixed two sad eyes on the window, as if some wintry creature out there were the cause of all suffering.

  “As I was saying”—George searched the table for someone still interested in his tirade—“the centralized station just proves that the railroad has become the vibrant heart of our culture, every track an artery—”

  “Your father would hate to hear it,” Faustina broke in. “He adored his Morgans. He thought they were the heart of our culture.”

  “He adored horses because he didn’t know any better,” said George. His gray hair wagged in agreement to his words. “But who would want to trade the smooth ride of the railroad for the bumpy, ditch-ridden conveyance of a wagon?”

  “What about the canals and steamships?” Daniel protested. Bel’s father had once dreamed of being a ship captain. He could stand all day watching the boats move up and down the lake. In the summers, he often crept off at dawn to swim, something only the young boys did, daring one another in races across Lake Champlain’s scattered coves. “You seem to have forgotten how our fathers sent the lumber south.”

  “Miasmal, winding little waterways.” George drew a curve into the tablecloth with his knife, then crossed it with a straight line. The fabric furrowed around his knife. “Railroads can take a man right to the desert, to the mountains, and someday all the way across our country, Allenton to San Francisco. Why long for the soggy steamship or the lame horse when you can ride in a fast, dry, comfortable car?”

  “Because a man had all the time in the world back then. Time wasn’t a commodity the way it is now,” Daniel said.

  “You’re always mooning about the past, Daniel,” George said dismissively. “You don’t even like horses. You’ve been afraid of them your whole life.”

  Daniel sighed at his empty plate. “‘Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s e
ye?’” he intoned, hiding his left hand in his pocket. A silence fell at this bitter recitation. Bel felt ashamed for him, and, for the first time, a little defiant. Her father would never dare to help a runaway slave, she realized. He would just talk about it. The realization set her firmly on Laurence’s side.

  “Your father,” said Faustina, breaking the silence, “would say precisely the same thing as Daniel. Horses, unlike machines, have a motion familiar to our own—”

  “Familiar enough to make my rump ache,” George grumbled.

  Faustina tossed up her hands and refused to continue. The last bit of meat Bel swallowed was still sticking in her throat. The runaway must be so hungry by now. Out on the ice, she’d had a bread crust in her pocket to feed the few winter birds. Why hadn’t she remembered to give it to him?

  “George, please don’t use that kind of language at the table,” said Pattie. “Girls what were you telling me about Thomas Van Sicklin and the youngest Pomeroy daughter?”

  Lucia and Anne, sensing discord once again, turned the conversation back to a gossipy river of reflections about the various young couples in Allenton. Bel watched as the windows around the table went indigo. Greenwood lay beneath a darkness deeper than the sea, and somewhere a man was freezing, waiting for them to rescue him. Mary brought out dessert, a flaky strudel made from the apples Grete kept in the root cellar beneath the house.

  Letting the hum of voices wash over her, Bel examined her father’s creased forehead, the way his eyes flicked to his wife now and then as if to measure something in Faustina. Always quiet and bookish, he rarely seemed passionate about anything but his own designs for the new train station, or a reservoir, or a canal that would branch down beside the lake. With his good right hand, he sketched for his family his dreams that one day Allenton would have a pavilion along the waterfront, where the lumberyards and warehouses now bustled, dirty and loud. A park where ladies could walk, and a few restaurants that served tea and sandwiches along the shore—this he imagined for his wife and daughter; this was his version of happiness.

  About the approaching war, Daniel said little, refusing to believe in it. How could brother fight against brother? was his refrain. Above all, we are brothers, under the same laws, the same flag. To this, his wife would give an indulgent, if strained, smile and change the subject. Because Bel loved her father fiercely, she had tried to agree with him, and grew angry with her mother’s cynicism. How do you know? she would begin when they were sitting together in the afternoon, Faustina teaching Bel how to stitch. Maybe the people in Virginia are saying the same thing as Papa. Faustina, in the midst of her embroidery, would pause, needle raised. Your father has never been much of a prophet, because he is no good at predicting human ugliness. He does not believe in it. And the needle would pierce the fabric again with a small tearing sound.

  Her uncle stretched back from the table to smoke, offering a cigar first to his brother. Daniel refused with a frown. Soon, a bittersweet cloud ensconced George from his daughters, who continued with their own dimly pleasant talk. Laurence, thin and restive, swiped the crumbs back and forth across his plate, not even faking an interest in the conversation.

  Just when Bel was about to invent some reason to get her mother alone, she felt the table shake. Her father stood up.

  “If you’ll all excuse me,” he said. “I have some work to attend to.”

  “At this hour?” said Bel’s uncle.

  “Stay with us, Daniel,” Faustina pleaded.

  “Let him go.” George shook his head. “It pleases my brother to build castles while the rest of Allenton dozes by their hearths.”

  “If they have a hearth,” Laurence said, gazing straight at his cousin. But Bel was watching her father depart without answering her mother, the top of his shoulders bowed as if he carried a light but constant weight.

  Chapter Four

  “I wonder what they did with the swan after they were together forever,” mused Bel after Faustina finished reading to them the “Lay of Milun,” by Marie de France. In the story, two lovers, parted by the lady’s marriage to another, communicated with each other for years via a white swan. They had a son together, who was raised by her sister, and when he grew up, he went off in search of his father. By then, the lady’s husband had died and the reunited lovers lived together happily, with no further mention of the messenger bird. The book of lais was Bel’s favorite; each story began with a plate that showed armored knights, damsels leaning from their towers, and even dragons, baring rows of blue razor teeth. Its pages were painted gold on the end, the color of treasure.

  “I imagine they gave him his very own pond outside their window and threw him cake crumbs every morning,” her mother said after a moment, her face yellowed by the candlelight. As she approached womanhood, Bel despaired that she would never be as pretty as her mother, whose lustrous brown hair still fell in curls around her smooth cheeks. At forty, Faustina seemed ten years younger than Aunt Pattie, although they had been born in the same year.

  “Or they let him go free,” Laurence said. His eyes had the hot dryness of an old man’s. He and Bel had managed to steal Faustina away after dinner by asking her to read them a story in the library. This was a dated tradition in the Lindsey family, largely abandoned after the children learned to read themselves. Entering the room with its high bookcases and smell of mildew and age, Bel felt a wave of memory pass through her, of being small enough that she had to be lifted to her chair beside the thick oak table, of the seat’s coolness seeping through the fabric of her dress as she waited for the story to begin.

  “Mother, we have something to ask you,” she said, her heart pounding.

  “I thought so.” Faustina shut the book.

  “Aunt Faustina, what would you do if you found a man in trouble, with no one to help him?”

  “I would help him,” Faustina said promptly. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Even if it was dangerous to do so?” Laurence ran his finger along the book’s gold edge, not meeting his aunt’s eyes.

  “Even if it were dangerous, Laurence, not was. But perhaps you should just ask me what you want to know. You’re a bit too young to succeed at Socratic questioning.”

  “We met a runaway on the lake today, Mother,” Bel said, ignoring Laurence’s glare. “A Negro.”

  “Are you certain he’s a runaway?” asked Faustina.

  “He asked us if we were the friend of a friend,” Laurence whispered. “I want to help him.”

  “We have to help him,” Bel said.

  Faustina fixed her gaze on both of them in turn. The musty smell of the library deepened. Books towered like judges from their high shelves.

  “Neither of your fathers would countenance this,” she said finally.

  “Do they have to know?” Laurence pleaded.

  “He looked very cold, Mother.”

  “He has my coat, Bel,” Laurence shot back.

  “He could sleep in the coach barn, at least, with a blanket,” Bel said.

  “Hush. Both of you.” Faustina held up her hand, and the three of them sat in silence for several anxious moments. Below them, Bel heard the distant tinkle of the twins playing the piano for her aunt and uncle.

  “Help me take down my hair, Isabel,” Faustina suddenly ordered, tilting her body sideways on the chair. Her mother’s hair was so thick that, pinned for a day, it would grow kinks that had to be painfully unraveled. Faustina preferred her daughter’s hands to Mary’s savage fingers and often requested Bel’s companionship at bedtime to undo the tangles.

  Laurence propped his cheek with his palm, watching Bel pull out dozens of silver pins and let them drop to the table. After awhile, he sat up and began making towers with them, only the tense, bobbing motions of his shoulders revealing his restlessness. Could the runaway wait even through this? Perhaps they had already taken too long.

  As the locks fell down her mother’s neck, knotted by their captivity, Bel wondered if one day she would have the same
problems with her own hair. It never bothered her now. Maybe she had her father’s texture, her mother’s color. She had never thought of being such a mix of them before—more that she owned one piece of her father, his eyes, another piece, his height, and two pieces of her mother, her hair and arched feet. It would be easier if she weren’t such a combination, for she never knew which side to take when they fought. Finally, one of Laurence’s towers clattered to the table, and her mother spoke in a low alto.

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “No,” they answered in chorus. Laurence swiped down all his defenses with one blow.

  “Where is this runaway?” The song below pounded to its finish and Bel heard the high, praising tones of her aunt.

  “Behind the hemlock near the first bridge over Potash Brook,” Laurence said.

  “He’s hungry, too,” Bel added, knowing this persuasion had worked on her mother when peddlers came to the door.

  “I need to send a man with you, Laurence,” Faustina muttered. Her loose hair made her appear suddenly young, capable of being rash and innocent.

  “Not Papa,” Bel said, hating the haste in her voice.

  “No, not your father.” Faustina swept the silver pins into a pile with her hand. They looked like the bars to a bright little cage. “He would want to turn the man in. But I—we—couldn’t, could we?” She stared at Laurence for confirmation.

  “What about Johnny?” Laurence’s question made Bel frown, remembering the way the hired man had watched her earlier that day. Not your father. But Johnny was always devoted and shy in Faustina’s presence. Johnny would do anything for her mother.

  “Johnny could take you. He’s big enough to intimidate the Negro, too.” Faustina began to nod.

  “He won’t try anything anyway,” Bel insisted, remembering the gentle way he had set her on the frozen lake.

  “Bel, have you ever not eaten for days on end?” Faustina shackled her daughter’s wrist with her ringed left hand. The fierce grip frightened Bel. She shook her head and tried to pull her arm away. “Then don’t presume to know what a desperate man will do,” her mother said before releasing her.