by Daren Wang
“Where did those come from?” she asked.
“I hung them before I came to your door,” Charles said.
The snowfall had tapered off, but a thick blanket covered the ground and the wind gusted, stirring the flakes into low, whirling dances. The shadows of the bare limbs shifted across the perfect white land as the lanterns swayed. Except for the twitching of Timber’s ears, all else was still.
“I’ve seen nothing more beautiful,” Mary said. Even as the first intimations of the coming train reverberated in the west, she grasped at the fading moment of peace.
They could see the headlamp in the distance, the yellow light reflecting off the snow-dusted twin tracks. The train crested the hill less than a half mile away.
Wordlessly, they climbed out of the sleigh as the chuff and the rumble grew louder. Joe steadied himself on Mary’s right arm, and she grasped Charles with the other. Her face, red from the cold, broke into a wide smile and her eyes shone in the lamplight.
“Here he comes,” she whispered with excitement, not caring that she sounded like a little girl.
The field trembled under the vault of the wakening sky.
The locomotive was close enough that they could see the red, white, and blue streamers, sodden, limp, and stained by the coal exhaust. The whistle let off three quick blasts, and she laughed at the acknowledgment. The engine passed, heat, steam, snow, and soot blowing in their faces, the engineer waving from his perch high above them. They stood together as five crowded cars passed, but it was the last one, nearly empty, where they saw the distinct silhouette against the window. The light from the swaying lamps shone on his face for an instant, flashing on those deep-set eyes. He had been standing in the moving car, staring into the dark and breaking country.
He tipped his stovepipe hat in their direction before slipping back into the gray of the early morning, leaving them alone, already exhausted before daybreak.
SWEETWATER
Mary felt like she was being watched all the time.
Snowshoe tracks had appeared overnight under the eaves and around the barn, and someone had broken into the vacant worker’s cabin. Once, she’d even seen Wilhelm, his face masked by a scarf, riding the highway back and forth in front of the farm.
She’d blocked the little window in the cellar, and each evening before sitting down with Joe, she’d pull on her coat and walk around the house just to check to see if he was there.
She had been slopping the hogs, trying to decide which one she’d lead back to the slaughter shack when he finally arrived with the marshal. It was her first time doing chores since laying up for a week with a cold. Her nose was chapped, her ears plugged, and she shook with bouts of sneezing each time she knuckled her itchy eyes, but she was enjoying the feel of the bright morning light and the sound of the pigs nosing around her boots when she fell under the shadow of the two riders.
The shock of his face, still raw and infected, left her breathless. The wound, trailing from his mouth nearly to his ear, gave him a gruesome death’s head grin.
“Mary Willis?” the marshal asked her from atop his draft horse.
She nodded, feeling his eyes on her, turning her attention again to the hogs.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
She upended the bucket and dumped the last of the slops before she spoke.
“I don’t think so.”
He said nothing, trying to draw her eyes, but she did not look up. If the marshal recognized her from her run-in with him at the train station years ago, he’d tear the place apart until he’d found Joe.
Nathan came up from the coop, an empty feed bucket dangling from his loose fist.
“Commissioner Willis,” the marshal said. “I’m Marshal Dwight Kidder.”
“I know who you are,” Nathan said.
“I’m here to search your farm for a renegade slave. This man claims the trail for the slave that attacked him leads here. Do you understand that if you or your daughter here are caught aiding a fugitive slave, it will entail a thousand-dollar fine and a year in prison?”
“This man is a thief,” Nathan said, pointing at Wilhelm. “I caught him stealing some of my livestock many years ago and I sent him to jail for it. He is a vindictive man, with no proof of anything. By what sense should I let him trample through my house?”
“He says he tracked the slave to your farm, and the law says we get to search the premises,” the marshal said.
“The Willises are the thieves around here,” Wilhelm said, the wound twisting with his grin. “Wouldn’t surprise me to find all kinds of stolen things here.”
“It’s the law,” the marshal said.
“I remember when Millard Fillmore signed that bloodstained piece-of-shit treason into law.” Nathan spat on the ground. “They say the ninth circle of hell, the deepest part, is reserved for traitors, and when that son of a bitch finally shuffles off this mortal coil, president or not, you’ll find him there, along with the so-called Confederates he aligned himself with. My father fought at Saratoga over searches like this.”
“Let’s get this over with,” the marshal said.
Wilhelm demanded to see the house, but Nathan led them first to the chicken coop.
“I think I saw a fugitive crawl in there this morning,” he said, pointing to the run covered in droppings. Why don’t you crawl in and take a look, Mr. Wilhelm?”
At the smokehouse, he pointed to the grease-covered dirt and said, “I saw one digging a hole in here last week. Might want to get down on all fours and dig around.”
“Enough,” the marshal said. “Let’s see the barn.”
“He could be in the apiary,” Nathan said. “Are you sure you don’t want to check the apiary?”
“The barn,” Kidder said.
Nathan led them under the white horseshoe and into the barn. Mary flinched when Kidder walked in and picked up the bloodstained horse blanket she’d covered Joe in.
“That from him?” Wilhelm asked, pointing at the stain.
The marshal turned to look at Mary as she shifted her feet.
“This is a farm,” Nathan said. “There’s blood near every day.”
“He’s here somewhere,” Wilhelm said, and turned to glare at Mary. “If you give him up, they might let you out of prison early.”
Mary pursed her lips but kept quiet, positioning herself behind stacked barrels of corn to keep her face from Kidder’s sight.
After checking the stalls and behind the equipment, the fat marshal struggled to follow Wilhelm up the ladder into the loft. He stood panting while Wilhelm kicked through the hay, sending a rodent scurrying.
“I guess we have to see the house,” the marshal said, finally.
“I told you to check there first,” Wilhelm said, finally. “They probably squirreled him away by now.”
They walked in through the back door and into the kitchen, their muddy boots echoing on the wide plank floors as they stepped past Katia, elbow-deep in bread dough. Mary worried that she might blurt something out, but the girl acted as if lawmen trod through her kitchen every day.
“We’ll check the bedrooms,” the marshal said. “Up the stairs.”
Wilhelm turned into the study, and Nathan followed him in immediately.
“You’ve got some mighty nice things here,” Wilhelm said. “Mighty fine indeed.”
“Do as the marshal says,” Nathan growled. “Or I’ll take matters into my own hands.”
“Just being thorough,” Wilhelm said, smiling. He toed the black safe behind the desk with his dirty boot.
“What you got in there?” he asked.
Mary remembered her own curiosity around the big iron cabinet, and thought of the disappointment she and Leander felt the first time their father had opened it to reveal a ledger book and a neat stack of contracts.
“There’s no need for him to be in here,” Nathan said over his shoulder to the marshal.
“Let’s go, Mr. Wilhelm,” Kidder said.
Wilhelm pi
cked up the pen from the desk and held it up as he turned to leave.
“Very nice,” he said. “Do you have a receipt for this?”
Nathan snatched it from his hand.
The three men went from bedroom to bedroom as Mary hung back, her hands plunged deep into the pockets of her apron.
“Check the wardrobe,” Wilhelm said when they stood in Mary’s small room. “And under the beds.”
Kidder cocked an eyebrow at him, but lifted the heavy winter bedclothes so they could peer under the little bed.
They straightened and stood in a circle, and the marshal shrugged.
“There’s a cellar, isn’t there?” Wilhelm asked. “Let’s see the cellar.”
Kidder looked at Nathan.
“At the back of the house,” her father said, and led the way.
Mary nicked her finger on the knife in her pocket, and brought her hand to her mouth, sucking nervously at the blood.
The two men followed her father down the stairs, Kidder bracing himself against the stone wall of the foundation as the stair planks bent under his weight. Mary listened to him wheeze as she climbed down after them.
The marshal found the oil lamp sitting on the table and struck a match.
The rafters, hung with baskets and dried herbs, crowded down on the four of them as they struggled to fit among the crocks, barrels, and discarded furniture.
Kidder lifted the lamp and held it close to Mary’s face.
“I know you from somewhere,” he muttered.
He tried to catch her gaze, but she turned her eyes to the floor, only to see the gouges the wardrobe had left in the dirt. She raised her chin to keep his eyes from the ground and granted him the long look he had been wanting. After a long pause, he turned away, swinging the lamp around the cramped space.
“Nothing much here,” he said. “Have you seen enough?”
“He’s here somewhere,” Wilhelm said. “You saw that blood.”
He jerked the wardrobe open. As it rocked on the uneven floor, the lamplight shone on the empty space inside. Mary nearly bit through her lip, thinking of Joe listening helplessly behind it.
“If he was here, he was likely gone by the time you found me,” Kidder said. “They generally don’t wait around to get caught.”
“Thanks for the tour,” Wilhelm said, the raw wound writhing with his smile. “It was quite enlightening.”
After they were sure the riders were gone, Mary went back down the stairs and pushed the wardrobe out of the way.
Joe was sitting on the cot, his face as ashen as the day Mary found him in the barn.
“They’re gone,” she said and took his shaking hand.
But they did not seem gone to her, and she could not shake the sense of violation. Every time she went to bed, she could feel Wilhelm leering into her wardrobe and under her bed, and she could only imagine the fear Joe had felt in the tunnel.
* * *
Charlie arrived one afternoon with a box of tools, some harness leather, and a burnished hickory limb.
“If he’s going to make his way in the world after he leaves, he’s going to need a peg,” he said.
Charles fitted the piece to Joe’s stump, and rigged a piece of rope to the back of the wardrobe, so he could crawl into the tunnel and pull it into place.
After that, Joe spent long hours hobbling around the cellar, at first bracing himself against the wall, then standing free.
Out of the tunnel, he could sit at the table and read, and his dark mood lifted.
She brought him something new every night with his dinner, and Charlie brought over books from Verona’s shelves, too. He read through the Emerson and Kane quickly. He even devoured her father’s books on the Gallic Wars. But it was Thoreau that he liked most, and he read that one again and again. She brought him a stack of newspaper clippings, essays Thoreau had written when John Brown had been hanged, and he read those and even copied some of them in his blocky handwriting.
She’d sit with him while he ate and they would talk about the books and newspapers he’d read. She found herself staying with him in the cellar, long after his food was all gone, talking about the books he was reading and how the states were peeling off from the Union more and more quickly.
The late winter was a busy time for Mary, but as she worked, she oftentimes found herself recalling things he’d said the night before, and looking forward to talking to him in the evening. She’d sit at his table, bone tired, but hoping the clock would slow and she could spend a little more time with him. One night he asked about the smell of wood smoke that seemed to trail her wherever she went.
“I’m making sugar,” she said.
Worry lines creased his brow.
“The sugar fields,” he said. “That’s what killed my mother.”
“That’s not how we make sugar here,” she said.
When she came upstairs with the dishes, her father was sitting at the kitchen table, gluing together a broken milking stool.
“This has been one of the longest winters I’ve ever seen,” he said. “But tomorrow will be warm and I think the ground will be soft enough to plant soon. We’ll have to push hard to get the fields plowed and the seed in.”
He paused, but she knew what was coming next.
“The farmhands will be here next week.”
He didn’t need to say more. She pushed a loose hair from her face and nodded.
“I’m taking the sugar and syrup to market day after tomorrow,” she replied. “I’ll take him downtown then.”
She knew that keeping Joe as long as she had invited disaster. He had been well enough to travel for weeks, but neither of them had made mention of Canada in that time.
“Leander is coming home tomorrow,” Nathan muttered. “Let Katia know. I’m sure you two will want to slaughter the fatted calf, but nothing more than a chicken, please. He has been nothing but a disappointment since he’s gone downtown, and I’m in no mood to celebrate his indolence.”
She nodded and slipped back to the kitchen to wash the dishes. She stared into the moonlit patch outside the window for a long time thinking that she would have to spend her evenings alone once again.
The next morning, she rose early and filled a picnic basket with sandwiches and pickles. She was nearly out the door when she went back, chuckling, and filled a pontil jar from the crock of rum punch and put it in the basket.
She went down the back stairs and found him already awake.
“Come with me,” she said. “Now, before my father gets back from his morning walk and stops us.”
He followed her up the stairs and to the barn where she helped him into the sleigh alongside the lashed-in barrels.
They drove into the dawn light and he smiled broadly as the sleigh hissed over the glaze of snow in the pasture and slid past the watering pond into the woods.
Mary stopped at a tall maple and climbed down to empty a tin bucket hanging from a tap pounded into the tree.
Joe gasped as a wolf rose and trotted away from a hollow in the roots of a nearby ancient oak.
“That’s just old Shana,” Mary said.
“She’s got a name? Like a pet?” Joe asked, raising his eyebrows.
“She’s no pet, but my father named her,” she said. “He likes to have something of the old wildness left. She’s too old to do much harm, and the others don’t come round much anymore, though they used to steal sheep near every night. Sometimes even worse. The Landers’ baby was snatched right through a cabin window. They say you can still hear his ghost squalling in the night. There’s many ladies that won’t go into the woods.”
She climbed back into her seat.
“But I do.” She grinned, and patted her pistol that she’d tucked in the seat cushion.
Timber knew the route so well that Mary did little to guide the sleigh. He led them through unseen breaks in the dense forest and onto hidden paths to stop at cluster after cluster of tapped maple trees marked with red rags. The barrels filled with slosh
ing sweetwater as the morning stretched on and they dodged the clumps of snow sloughing off the branches in the warming air. Deeper into the woods, they heard the creek rushing and churning up its steep bank, flooded by the spring melt. Joe flinched each time one of the ice slabs cracked against the shale embankment, echoing like a gunshot.
Her father’s sawmill sat on a jut of land above the dammed creek, surrounded by stacked lumber and cut trees drying under oilcloths and lean-tos. An iron cauldron hung on a tripod over a black firepit. Mary sent Joe to collect a basket of scrap wood while she used a bucket to move the maple sap from a barrel to the cauldron. Joe lingered at the mill a long time, studying the mechanism and running his hands over the rough boards stacked in neat piles on the platform.
Mary fiddled with the fire, shifting the embers until she was satisfied with the temperature, then pulled a rickety table and a pair of three-legged stools from the mill’s platform. She brought out the basket and laid the picnic out on a fraying checkered cloth. Soon, a column of smoke and maple steam rose above them into the windless sky.
“When I was a little girl, my mother always made a party of the sugaring,” Mary said. “All the families from miles around would come and my father would make maple taffy for all the children.”
She looked around at the scrub wood and sumac that threatened to overtake the clearing.
“This used to be an open meadow back then,” she said. “There were always so many of us running and playing around here. Now that she’s gone and it’s just me, no one comes.”
“I’m glad to be here,” Joe said, biting into a sandwich. “It’s just good to feel the sun again, though I’m not much of a party.”