Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “Can we go now?” Laurence asked, oblivious.

  “Once we find you a coat.” Faustina rose, smoothing the blue wool of her skirt. Bel looked back at the windows as they exited the library. A frost had embroidered the edges with the silver shapes of fallen leaves.

  * * *

  Much as she tried to stay awake that night, the deep warmth of Bel’s goose-down quilt stole her resolve, and the next thing she knew, her father’s bass voice woke her. She opened her eyes to the filigreed sun the lace curtains drew across her bed.

  “I can’t understand you, Mary,” Daniel Lindsey was saying impatiently. “Please slow down.”

  Bel dressed quickly and crept along the hallway, to see Mary and her father at the foot of the spiral oak staircase that wound through the center of Greenwood. She watched the top of her father’s black hat bobbing, his shoulders already encased in his mink winter overcoat. He looked small and stiff, like a figure in a tableau.

  “He—he’s got fangs and a head of fire,” Mary stammered, her brogue thick. The maid’s usually tidy appearance was marred by a torn petticoat peeking from beneath her hem.

  “Where?”

  “In the c-c-coach barn, sar,” she said, shifting out of Bel’s vision.

  “Cerberus in the coach barn? I didn’t know we were so close to the gate of Hades,” Daniel Lindsey mused aloud. “Perhaps this war…”

  “Sar?”

  “You say there’s a dog in the coach barn?”

  “Not a dog, a Negro!” Mary burst into ugly sobs.

  Daniel’s hat tipped back and he slapped his calfskin gloves against his wayward left hand. “We’ll see about this. Tell Johnny to get my pistol right away and meet me out by the barn.”

  “Wait!” Bel called from behind a balustrade. “Papa, I don’t feel well.” She uttered this with her best impersonation of fever.

  “Then find your mother, please, sweet girl. I have some business to attend to,” he said without looking up, and put on his gloves, the left hand unsteady, yanked on finger by finger. He turned to Mary. “What were you doing in there anyway?”

  “Oh, sar.” Bel saw Mary’s skirt spread over the floor in a deep curtsy, the petticoat a smile of white. “Sometimes Nicky will leave me a present there.”

  “Hmm,” Bel’s father grunted, and Bel heard him open the door to the quiet morning. December’s silver light spilled around his feet. “Tell my wife and daughter to stay inside.”

  When he shut the door, Bel hesitated for a moment, considering. Her mother would not emerge from her room for hours, and then what could she do? Admit that she had tried to hide a runaway slave against her husband’s wishes? It was better that it was Bel’s deceit. She thundered down the stairs, flying to the coat closet to pull on her boots. “You can’t go out there!” she heard Mary say in a waspish voice as she ran after her father.

  “Traitor,” Bel hissed over her shoulder, and fell into an unladylike sprint across the stiff crust of snow.

  * * *

  Her father was standing in the doorway of the coach barn, preaching to a congregation of family-owned carriages, tipped down from their high wheels. His thin legs spoked from beneath the long mink coat. “You had better come out, or I shall have to get the constable. I don’t want to do you any harm, but I will not violate the laws of this country to save you.” After each statement, he would pause and peer into the gloom, staring past the carriages toward the ladder to the hayloft.

  “He can’t understand you,” Bel said, touching her father’s cuff. The silky fur slipped through her fingers. You can’t understand him, she added to herself, remembering with shame her own flight the day before.

  “Bel! Get back in the house!” he ordered.

  “He can’t understand you, Papa, so he won’t come out,” she repeated, backing away from his hard blue stare, his gray beard burned metallic by the winter sun.

  “How do you know?”

  “I found him. By the lake. He was hungry and cold, so Laurence and I brought him home, and I told Mother that a peddler wanted to sleep in the coach barn,” Bel said, lying. “She said that was all right, and asked Grete to fix him a plate of food.”

  “I will not harbor runaway slaves,” Daniel said, as if repeating something he had memorized.

  “But you will let someone die in the cold?” Bel thrust her chin at her father. As she did so, Johnny Mulcane appeared, humped in his coat, the pistol dangling from his fist. His red face belied nothing of his actions the night before.

  “Johnny—” she pleaded, not wanting to reveal her mother’s part in this. The man ignored her, looking instead at her father.

  “Sir?”

  “Isabel Prinz, you will go in the house right now,” Daniel roared.

  Instead of obeying him, Bel skirted past and into the interior of the coach barn. Beyond the carriages loomed the darker cages of the empty coaches. They smelled of leather and wood: the one with the red satin pillows that Faustina loved, the one with the buffalo robe that her father had bought when he was in the West, and the delicate white surrey that Lucia had already requested for her still-nonexistent wedding.

  “Friend of a friend,” Bel whispered softly, heading toward the ladder to the hayloft. The worn wooden rungs extended through an open trapdoor. Sun from the upper window illuminated a thousand dust motes drifting slowly down.

  “Isabel!” she heard her father cry. She scampered up the splintered rungs, nearly tripping in her skirt. The wood was so cold, it burned her fingers.

  “Friend of a friend,” she called again, and the runaway’s burlap hat appeared above the trapdoor, its shadow shrouding his eyes. “Please come down. I know I can get my father to let you go free,” she promised in her gentlest tone. He didn’t move. She repeated her request, staying as still as she could, remembering what her grandmother had taught her about feeding wild birds. You must become a stone, her grandmother had said. You must become a tree, a reason for them to trust you.

  “Johnny, come here,” her father barked. “I see him.” There was a loud crack as Johnny crashed into the white surrey, snapping one of the thin wooden hitches.

  At the noise, the runaway retreated. What is a stone to a bird but a place to land? her grandmother used to utter like a prayer, making Bel repeat it silently while she waited for the sparrows to find the food in her palm. What is a tree but a home? But it wasn’t just her. It was what she stood for—it was the two men charging in behind her, and the leathery quiet of the carriages, and Greenwood beyond, a house too grand for its few occupants, and the gun in Johnny Mulcane’s hand. The runaway would not look down at her again, like the sparrows who used to guess her deception and fly away with a throat-caught sound.

  Her father moved closer, but she could only smell Johnny, rancid and musty at once. She heard the rustle of his boots across the frost-buckled earth. Keep climbing, she ordered herself. He’s coming. Her body froze in place, stuck like a wheel in the snow. She wished desperately for Laurence’s courage. If he were here, he would think of something, but she didn’t know what to do.

  “Don’t,” she said feebly, clinging to the rungs as her father reached up to peel her from them. The ladder swayed dangerously.

  “Let go, Isbael,” her father commanded, pulling her hands apart. One by one, her fingers tore from the wood. “Let go.”

  When she finally did, she sagged against her father’s chest, allowing even the bones to melt inside her body. In her mind, she would see the rest of that morning like a story her mother read at night, narrated with all the bright details an author can muster when talking about tragedy and what shouldn’t happen but always does: Mary’s cold, scratchy sleeves dragging her inside Greenwood to watch behind the starched lace of the windows, which did not muffle but somehow compounded the single shot and the thump of a man falling to his knees, a man used to running when he could run, and perhaps killing if he had to, who knew there was no hope for him now, even on this white, frozen brink of freedom. He slumped in Johnny Mulc
ane’s arms, dangling his shattered right foot, deprived of his last and only possessions, the will to flee and the means.

  The story would go on for years in Bel’s mind. She would be telling Laurence how it happened that they had lost the one thing they’d thought they could save, as the war came so quickly after that, and the end of all the young boys who raced their sleds, or stitched the fields to the headlands with their wooden plows, or battled for who would dance with the best girl. She would remember for both of them, because for eight days, Laurence would be ill with fever. Her father had Johnny carry the wounded man into Greenwood, stricken with what he had asked another man to do, and yet not quite asked; he would say this to himself and to Faustina, who, for almost a month, could not look at him with her full green gaze because that would mean forgiveness.

  Bel would tell Laurence of things she should not have seen, the bloody rags and shattered foot beneath, Mary tossing the burlap hat into the fire, the hatred in the runaway’s eyes when Bel touched his stiff fist. She would remember the blur of the doctor arriving, and that Johnny Mulcane stole the bullet from the basin where it lay, then vanished for three days. He was not punished by the pudgy, myopic constable, who spoke to the runaway in a loud voice about how the kind Mr. Lindsey had offered to buy his freedom if no slave owner claimed him for a week, and that this was unusual generosity, but in Vermont they didn’t believe that some men could not be free.

  She moved through that week numbly, knowing that Dr. Cochran had said the runaway’s foot would never heal entirely. She wished she could plot with her mother how to rescue him, but Faustina was like a stone underwater those days, moving only slightly with the current of life around her. Whenever Bel brought up the runaway, a shadow would cross Faustina’s face and she would send her daughter to Mary, who made the girl thumb clumsily through the rosary and ask forgiveness for betraying her father’s wishes.

  Meanwhile, Laurence tossed listlessly, his brown eyes wide with delirium. When Bel went to sit with him, he alternately muttered and shouted about ice and darkness, and mentioned his coat several times. His mother brought it to him, washed clean of the smell of the runaway, but he refused it, saying, This is not mine. As soon as he recovered, his father booked him on the next train to Boston, and Laurence did not even enter Greenwood to say good-bye, hunched to his chin in a heavy coat, his eyes already distant.

  Bel’s father buried himself in business, spending all day at the lumberyards. He designed plans for a new building on the nonexistent waterfront, a floating hotel that newlyweds could reach by a narrow walkway, because he did not fully believe a war was coming to drain his city of all the young men who might marry. Yet it was he who bore the news to his family, telling them that a farmer from Georgia had claimed the runaway, that he seemed like a good man, that they had already headed back together on the train. Why didn’t you buy him? asked Faustina. I was too late, replied Daniel, taking off his gloves and then putting them on again, over and over, as he spoke, his left hand sticking in the fingers.

  And if the law changes, Daniel, will you finally be ashamed, if the law tells you that we were wrong?

  We are prominent citizens of this city. If we break the law, who will abide?

  You and I no longer live in the same city, Daniel.

  In the story Bel told her cousin, this was one ending, her father and mother facing each other across the stairs, where Bel hid behind a balustrade on the second floor. The other ending was the continuing of time, her hope that the slave might have escaped again, more than a year passing, the first shots fired on Sumter, and her father going down to the green to watch the new Vermont regiments learning how to fight instead of hunt. The news came that Laurence had arrived from Boston to join the Second Vermont at the last minute. Bel’s cousin would march alongside farmhands and blacksmiths in a gray uniform faced with green to honor their ancestors in battle, the Green Mountain Boys. Most of the recruits thought they would be back for harvest. They were negligent in their kisses good-bye, their nonchalant waves as they boarded one of the Lindsey trains. They jostled one another for a seat by the door, where they could swing out and feel the wind take them—and then swing back inside to smell the sweat of men, to hear their voices again, far away at first, approaching like rain.

  June–July 1861

  Chapter Five

  “Likely to know your Bible by heart by the time you reach battle,” the accordion player observed, slumped against the hard seat. He was constantly adjusting his cap to a jauntier angle and did so now, turning the brim so that it aimed out the window. “Hey,” cried the accordion player, speaking louder to be heard above the commotion of the car. “You practicing to be a preacher or something?”

  Laurence looked up, covering the book with his hand. The volume of poetry had been banned in Boston, and he had secretly procured a copy from the author’s sister, whose husband ran a hardware shop in Allenton. “It’s not a Bible,” he said hastily.

  “Whatever it is, then.” The musician’s blue eyes strayed over the pure silver buttons Laurence’s mother had insisted on stitching on his uniform. “What’s your name again, sir?”

  “Laurence Lindsey.”

  “John Addison.” They shook hands, the other soldier’s grasp firm and lasting a little long, so that Laurence was the first to withdraw. They had been drilling together for two weeks in Allenton, but John Addison had always been flanked by a number of other recruits, who directed their jokes and comments toward his square red-blond head, searching for approval. This he doled out in barking laughs, making the whole company join in, as if all along the men had been waiting for the order to enjoy themselves.

  Laurence quickly found his place as a loner and a bookworm, tolerated by the farm boys but largely ignored. His only friend was an awkward, blushing fellow named Lyman Woodard, who wished, of all things, to be an actor. A staunch abolitionist, Woodard pronounced views diluted straight from Greeley to anyone who would listen. All day, he trailed an eager half step behind Laurence, his blond hair sticking in the corners of his mouth.

  “Lindsey’s father owns the railroad,” Woodard interjected. Laurence gave him a baleful glance.

  “He and my uncle,” he amended, shoving the book in his haversack and waiting for the onslaught of questions. He considered himself the only boy alive not fascinated by railroads, although he had been once, before he decided he did not admire his father. Now he preferred horses, pausing on avenues to admire their muscled lines and sweet, grassy smell, imagining a world without the loud rumble of wheels and tracks.

  But the usual fury of railroad conversation—where the newest lines were being laid, what the best engines were, and who would win the race to cross the West—did not erupt, and Laurence realized from his comrades’ awed expressions that this was the first trip many had made by locomotive.

  “Can he get me a job driving them engines?” asked Pike Rhodes, one of John Addison’s acolytes. He was sitting in a jumble of elbows and knees beside his brother Gilbert, and he scooted forward to the edge of his wooden seat. Redheaded, boy-faced, and adorned with freckled ears that tipped forward in an expression of constant curiosity, Pike Rhodes had already become the object of much good-hearted humor. Now he was staring at Laurence with his mouth agape, body perilously balanced over the aisle.

  “Maybe.” Laurence hesitated, hoping to prolong the boy’s sudden interest. “I don’t know.”

  Gilbert reached over and clapped his brother’s mouth shut. “We have to whip the seceshers first, Pike,” he threatened, his black hair falling in his eyes.

  “That won’t take long.” Pike slid back into his old slot beside his brother. “I told Pa I’d be back for harvest.”

  “Told mine I’d be back for supper,” John Addison said, and grinned. His neighbors broke into obliging laughter.

  Laurence, looking down at his hands, did not join in. He was thinking of his father’s assessment of the rebellion. War, George Lindsey wrote to his son after the firing on Fort Sumter
, is just a peculiar kind of commerce, one where men’s lives are spent for land or ideals. It will take a long time for the rebels to spend every penny they have. I had hoped my boy was going to make an intelligent businessman, and would not be seduced from duty by all those buncombe speeches. There are plenty of other lives less precious or ready to serve for the love of serving.

  “What’s wrong, Lindsey?” asked Addison.

  “I don’t think they’ll give up so easily.” Laurence did not look up. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple, and he swabbed it with his sleeve.

  “Why’s that?” The question was not asked, but nailed on the air with a soft squeal of Addison’s accordion. Laurence felt a hundred eyes on him. No one had ever talked of losing the war, of even losing a single battle.

  “They’re defending,” he explained patiently. “It’s always easier to defend. Look at us against the British. Look at Troy. It only fell when they took the horse inside its walls.”

  “’S true.” Addison lifted his cap and let it settle slightly more askew, as if a branch had knocked it in passing. The train rumbled and clacked. They were far away from their own hills now and the blue sky drowned the flattening land.

  Noting the serious gazes of his companions, Laurence continued: “And you know what the horse is.” In his mind, he saw the lake and the runaway slave he and his cousin had failed to save.

  “What?”

  “Negro regiments,” he said triumphantly, but the soldiers’ faces hardened and he had to look away, out the window to the green fringe of trees beyond the pastures. Only Woodard nodded vigorously, his long nose stirring circles in the air.

  “If we listen to the schoolmarm, we might as well just toss our muskets into enemy territory and be done with it,” said Gilbert Rhodes, whose most prominent feature was his nose, broken in so many places that it no longer had the look of a single organ, but a composite, several jigsaw pieces glued together.