by Daren Wang
“He’s sick?”
“Passed out,” she said. “He’s all bloody, looks like a corpse.”
She followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen where he pulled his coat on.
“This isn’t good,” he said. “Even if Doc can save him, what are you going to do with him? He can’t stay here. If the marshal finds him out here…”
He trailed off as Katia came in with a basket of eggs.
“I know,” Mary said.
Mary boiled some rags and took them back to the barn. She dug through her apron’s cluttered pocket, found her slaughtering knife, and cut away the rags that covered the fugitive. The smell that rose when she cut the ruined shoes from his feet reminded her of cutting into a hog’s entrails.
She bathed him with a kitchen rag, tentative around his swollen and split feet and the festering wound in his left calf.
Wincing, she ran her fingertips over the whip scars on his back.
She doubted herself for sending for the doctor. It was unlikely the fugitive would survive, but she’d turned the frail old Quaker into an accomplice in her felony.
She straightened up and opened the door when she heard the buggy in the barnyard.
Doc Pride greeted her with his usual nod, but grimaced when he saw the black body on the ground. She raised her hands, palms up, a wordless act of supplication and apology.
“Nearly froze to death,” he said. “Are there dog bites as well?”
Mary pulled the blanket back to reveal the bleeding leg.
“I thought it was a wolf,” she said. “How did you know?”
He didn’t answer, but set to examining the body. He was cleaning the wound when Mary’s father came in from his morning walk of the pastures.
“You’ve turned the family doctor into a felon before breakfast,” he said, looking down at the fugitive and propping his shotgun against the rough plank wall. “What next? Dig up John Brown’s grave and mount an insurrection?”
Mary straightened up and wiped her hands on her coat.
“I couldn’t just leave him to die on the barn floor,” she said, pursing her lips.
“This must be the one that nearly killed Karl Wilhelm night before last.” Doc Pride grimaced.
“He attacked Wilhelm?” Leander asked.
“Harry Strauss showed up at my door in the middle of the night begging me to save him and gibbering over his dead dog. Made it sound like a black Goliath was wandering the woods.”
“Now you are telling stories,” Nathan said, raising his eyebrows. “This dust rag doesn’t look like he could put down a woodchuck, much less that ogre. Will Wilhelm survive?”
“He’ll live,” the doctor said. “But I’m not proud of the job I did stitching his face back together. He won’t be a pretty sight.”
“Poor Harry,” Leander said. “I can’t picture him without old Jep trailing along.”
“Riling up Karl is about the worst thing this one could do,” Nathan said. “He’s as mean a son of a bitch as I ever seen, and now he’s got cause.”
“Ever since you caught him stealing that pig ten years ago, he’s had it out for you,” Pride said. “I hear him griping about you every chance he gets.”
“Gives me the stink eye every time I go into the Corner House,” Leander said. “I think he sometimes spits in my beer when I’m not looking.”
“Maybe you should stay home and do some work instead of giving him the chance,” Nathan said.
“I guess I’ll be working plenty once I’m down in Buffalo,” Leander said.
“We don’t need to discuss this again,” Nathan scolded. “And we most certainly don’t need to involve Doc Pride in it.”
The doctor straightened up.
“He’s starved to death, frostbit, and dog-bit just for the hell of it,” he said. “He used every bit of himself to get this far. Go ahead and kill one of those fine Rhode Island chickens of yours and make him some broth. If you can manage a decent cup of tea with the sulfur water from that infernal well of yours, see if you can get him to swallow that, too. Even if he gets better, I doubt the leg will. It’s festering already. Chances are it’ll have to come off, but the amputation would kill him now. I’ll send a poultice back and come check on him tomorrow.”
“Leander will take you back to town,” Nathan offered.
The doctor looked grave as he pulled on his coat. “I saw Harry again yesterday,” he said. “He’s got revenge for Jep on his mind.”
He followed Leander out into the yard, leaving Mary to wring her hands.
“We should move him to the cellar,” she said to her father.
Her father grunted and bent down to help her lift the body.
They carried him across the barnyard, up the slope to the big house, and down the back steps. Nathan could not fit into the tunnel and watched as Mary made a pallet, crawled into the hole, and pulled the fugitive in. By then Leander was back with the poultice, and Mary applied it before pushing the wardrobe back into place, entombing the fugitive.
LEANDER
The hamlet of Town Line had formed at the crossroads of an ancient Seneca highway and the surveyor-straight road that marked the border between the fledgling towns of Lancaster and Alden. There wasn’t much to it until Nathan Willis sold passage through his rye fields to the New York and Erie line on condition that they install a station at Town Line Road. The narrow three-room building was identical to a dozen others along the line and like them it served as a water stop, telegraph, and post office all in one. The settlers and their mules came soon after, then Snyder’s General Store, then the preacher.
Leander Willis had been seven years old when the Zubrichs came, built the parsonage, and brought the gift that all his father’s money and influence could not supply: a playmate.
Soon, there would be other boys, but Hans Zubrich was always first.
The first time they met was at the general store, both boys hiding behind their fathers’ legs, but the moment they became friends for life was still vivid in Leander’s memory twelve years later.
They had been sitting under the lonely elm waiting to greet the five-fifteen train when Hans told him of the war back in Bavaria. He talked about his brother, ten years older than him, and the night he was dragged out of their house by the soldiers, never to be heard from again.
The train had rattled by, the engineer tooting his whistle and waving at the boys, but Hans, his new friend’s arm on his shoulder, did not raise his tear-covered face in response.
The small crossroads hamlet offered little for the boys to do, but the two friends hiked in the woods, they fished and swam, and they built a fort of scrap wood held together by rope and bailing wire, a last outpost fortified against a looming invasion of redcoats and big sisters.
It didn’t take long for Leander’s father to find the dilapidated hovel. One morning he followed Leander to the clearing with his toolbox and sack of nails and announced he was going to give the two boys a lesson in how to raise a building. Hans took the well-worn level in his hands and made a game of settling the bubble between the scored marks on the glass tube, but Leander snatched the tool from his friend and handed it back to his father.
“This is my place,” he’d declared.
And it had been ever since.
There the two boys whiled away the summer, plotting elaborate tricks on Leander’s sister, and hiding from Hans’s father, Town Line’s resident master of the hickory switch.
The roof collapsed onto them while they were waiting out a late summer thunderstorm, and a board opened a cut on Hans’s forehead. The scar eventually faded to a faint white trace, but Leander knew it pulsed red whenever his friend was angry.
They rebuilt the shack using the same sack of nails that Leander had previously refused, this time made acceptable by the act of pilfering them from Nathan’s workbench.
They abandoned the cabin over winter, and when they returned in the spring, they found a boy living in the little hut with only a mottled ora
nge pup named Jep for company.
Just a year older than they were, Harry Strauss had jumped off the back of the same orphan train that had brought the Willises’ new ward, Katia, to town. He had presented himself to her at the back door of the Willises’ kitchen soon afterward, professing his love as only a ten-year-old boy could. Flattered by the attention, she pointed him toward the boys’ fort and snuck him food throughout the winter.
Nathan Willis watched them tear through his fields that summer and called the orphan a third to their pair. He was fond of the boy, and in the following years welcomed him to his table many times, but Harry Strauss would not be domesticated.
He and Jep soon moved out of the fort, taking up for a while in the workers’ cabin on the Willis farm, then into a room over Wilhelm’s tavern. When the weather was fair, he’d camp by the creek or under the Town Line Road bridge, and sometimes he’d go back to Leander’s shack.
Leander had always admired the way Harry was the master of his own fate, but now that his father insisted he move to downtown Buffalo, Leander sometimes dreamed of moving into the little shack himself, leaving behind his father’s many demands on his time to instead spend his days hunting, fishing, and playing baseball.
But he knew he could never do it. And maybe Buffalo wouldn’t be so bad.
And he would have his going-away party there, back in the snow-covered woods, by the pond, under the stars, away from everything that was expected of him.
He climbed down from the sleigh and surveyed his domain. The little shack, sitting in the clearing above the frozen pond, looked like it had been assembled by a blind, drunk carpenter.
He opened the door, and chased a family of raccoons out. As he was setting up a cask of ale on the table, Hans arrived and set to clearing a place for a fire.
Leander filled two tankards that he’d pilfered from Wilhelm’s Corner House and handed one to his friend as he looked at the wood that Hans had carried over from Nathan’s sawmill.
“Couldn’t you find any clear scrap?” he asked. “Those knots are going to pop all night.”
Hans took a long draught and grinned.
“Susie Munn squeals whenever the fire pops,” he said.
The two friends chuckled and clinked the pewter of their tankards together.
“Have you confessed your sinful thoughts to your father?” Leander asked. “All these years of praying for the end of the world so he could see the sinners burn, he’s not going to be too happy to see his son first in line.”
Hans snorted. “On the contrary, I’m sure he’d enjoy that ‘I told you so’ more than any of the others,” Hans said. “Anyway, if I were to start confessing, it’d be a long time before I got to those particular sinful thoughts.”
“I’d like to eavesdrop on that conversation,” Leander said.
“I’m sure you would,” Hans said. “By the way, are you sure you want to have this little party of yours back here in the woods? It’s going to be a cold night. Everyone would have a better time at Wilhelm’s, or even in your barn. Your father told me he’d pay the tab at the Corner House if you’d have it there.”
“No,” Leander said. “We’ll have it here.”
They set to getting the place ready. Leander shoveled the snow from the frozen pond, swept out the shack, and put out the array of shoddy chairs and stools that had collected there over the years. Hans spit a side of venison and set it over the fire.
The first guests to arrive were a half-dozen Town Line farm boys. Along with Leander, Hans, and Harry, they made up the Forty-Eighters, Town Line’s baseball team. They embraced Leander, slapping their star outfielder on the back like he’d scored the winning run.
“How in hell did you convince your father to ship you downtown?” Vaness Weber asked. “My old man won’t let me go no farther west than Lancaster, and that’s only one station over.”
“You’re a lucky son of a bitch, I’ll tell ya,” Edward Eels said. “I’d do just about anything to get out of this town. There’s nothing but cows, barley, and slush as far as I can see.”
“It isn’t so bad here,” Leander said. “Better than some office. After tomorrow, it’ll be old men and ledgers for me, boys, while come springtime, you’ll be playing ball in the golden light of the sun.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Edward said. “Just before I came out tonight, my father sat me down and told me no more baseball. You guys will probably have to find someone else to catch.”
Word of Leander’s move had brought a collective sigh of relief from the farmers of Town Line. Nathan Willis’s status as the founder of the crossroads hamlet and as a county commissioner brought the family moral authority, and Leander’s presence on the team gave the other boys cover. But now that he’d been told it was time to put away childish things, the others were also expected to get behind the mule and plow.
The team all stood together in the fading February sun warming their hands on the fire and sipping ale.
A clutch of girls arrived, and the mood lifted. Susie Munn put a cherry pie on the table next to the cask of ale, brushed past Hans, and put a lingering kiss on Leander’s cheek as the boys collectively hooted.
“Don’t forget me when you’re down in the big city, Lelo,” she said, her red hair spilling out from her knitted cap.
“How could I?” he asked. “I’m sure Hans will fill me in on all your adventures whenever he has the chance.”
She stuck out her plump lip at Leander’s reaction.
“Is this a party or a funeral?” another one of the other girls shouted. She had donned ice skates and was gliding on the frozen pond. “Didn’t any of you boys bring a fiddle? Do I have to dance by myself?”
She spun herself into a pirouette, eliciting loud shouts from the boys. Hans stepped out onto the ice, took the girl’s hand, and mocked a princely bow before twirling her to the rhythm of Edward Eels’s fiddle.
Hunks of venison were carved off the side and passed around, and a second cask was tapped. The boys told stories of the day Leander went six for six with three triples, or the time he made a diving catch for the final out only to come up with strands of poison ivy tangled in his hair.
The snow came down then in soft flurries and the girls chased the flakes with outstretched tongues as the boys jockeyed for kisses.
“My father used to stand in the pulpit and call down the wrath of God on Leander Willis and the pack of feral boys that he led through the crossroads,” Hans said. “He’ll finally have his way now that the scourge of Town Line is leaving.”
Leander guffawed.
“Little did he know his own son was climbing out his bedroom window to help lead the pack,” he said. “You remember when you, me, and Harry switched up every mule in town?”
They’d traded the story a dozen times in the years since the prank, but Hans doubled over laughing, just for the joy of it.
“It took two days for everyone to get it all straightened out,” he said. “And then Olaf Simke liked Alois Bohner’s more than he liked his own and wouldn’t give it back.”
“You remember how we used to play chicken on the train tracks?” Leander asked.
“Yeah, you’d go running at the first sound, even though the damn thing was still a mile away,” Hans said. “You could have run five minutes, stopped to piss in the woods, run back, and still gotten out of there in time.”
“You weren’t much better,” Leander said. “But Harry, damn that kid scared the shit out of me. I’d end up screaming myself raw thinking he was about to be hit, and he’d stroll up afterward with that shit-eating grin of his and demand his wager money. I wanted to pop him in the nose.”
“Yeah,” Hans said. “That kid is the best first baseman I ever saw and he’ll waltz around a racing train, but he can’t work up the gumption to ask Katia out for a barn dance.”
“The poor idiot,” Leander said.
Others came, from Alden and Lancaster, and even as far away as Darien. Players arrived to wish Leander well in h
is move downtown, but were just as glad to not have to face him on the field again. Jugs of rum appeared.
The children of Town Line had spent most of their lives together, and Leander watched as the threads of friendships and flirtations that had been woven and rewoven over the years were loosened momentarily between this or that pair and pulled taut between others.
Katia arrived, looked around, and asked the question that was on Leander’s mind also.
“Where’s Harry?” she asked.
“He was down at the crossroads early this morning,” Ed Eels said. “Some runaway killed Jep two nights ago, nearly killed Karl Wilhelm, too.”
Everyone quieted at the news.
“Shit,” Hans muttered.
“That dog always smelled bad anyway,” Katia said, though there was no missing the sadness in her voice.
“Harry better show up,” Leander said. “I won’t forgive the son of a bitch if he misses my shindig.”
“Then get yourself to not forgiving,” Ed said. “He’s convinced the escaped nigger is worth a thousand-dollar reward, dead or alive. He’d be on the trail anyway, but you add money in … rest assured, money and vengeance are going to outweigh your cask of ale.”
“I don’t know why the damned niggers don’t just stay where they are,” Vaness Weber piped in. “We sure as hell don’t want them up here, and sure as hell they don’t need to come through here messing with old Jep. That runaway better not cross my path, or I’ll kill him myself.”
Ed Eels started playing his fiddle again, but one of the strings snapped and cut into his finger. He swore in pain, hopping up and down until one of the girls kissed it and wrapped it in a rag.
“It’s cold out here,” Susie Munn said. “And with all this talk of dead dogs and killing, this isn’t much of a party. I don’t understand why we’re out in the woods like heathens instead of indoors like respectable people? If we were someplace nice, I could have worn a party dress and we could have some real dancing.”
She looked Leander in the eye.
“I might have been able to convince you to stay then,” she said. “Or take me with you.”