The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

  “Somehow,” she said. “But he is not himself.”

  She looked down at her fingers, picking at her thumb nervously.

  “I have so much to say to you,” he said. “I’ve written you, but now that I’m here with you, I’m too embarrassed for you to see it.”

  He held up the filthy ream of paper.

  “You must let me see it,” she said, reaching for it. He smiled and held it away. She laughed and reached for it, playfully, and he breathed deep, taking in the smell of soap on her skin.

  She settled back into her seat and looked him in the eye, serious again, but not fearful, as she had been in the station. He felt dizzy as the train rattled and swayed as the track curved toward Town Line. He wanted to reach for her hand, to hold it as he had before she’d covered him with the tarp a lifetime ago, but he knew that such an act, and the things that could follow were more dangerous than anything else he could imagine.

  He set his face grimly, looking back at the smattering of passengers that were watching them.

  “You’re alone there, aren’t you?” he asked.

  Her face darkened, first with sadness, then a wave of anger.

  “Don’t you dare pity me,” she snapped. “Not you. Not coming from that place.”

  The conductor came through the car and she fished the tickets from her bag.

  “You must be starving,” she said. “You look almost as skinny as the day you first came to me.”

  “Of course I’ll stay,” he said.

  When the train slowed for the Town Line station, he stood to get off, but she pulled him down.

  “Not here,” she said. “The wagon is at Doc Pride’s in Alden. I won’t go through the crossroads if I can avoid it. They spit at me in Town Line.”

  In Alden, people on the sidewalks stared at them as she drove through the center of the town. She looked ahead, her back straight, ignoring them all.

  TERMINUS

  Joe’s worked the mill nonstop for months. Tomorrow, we’ll take the fourth load in as many weeks downtown. Perhaps with that money in hand, this clenching in my chest will finally subside.

  My load has already eased so much with him here. It’s more than the work he does. I feel now that there’s a way forward, that all is not lost.

  He helped birth an early lamb today. He held up the squalling thing and suggested we name it Katia. I laughed so hard, I fell to my knees beside him. I can’t say how long it’s been since I laughed at all.

  It’s an early spring. Leaves are already opening on the trees. I’ve been searching high and low for a crew to work the fields, but even if I could find them, no Union men will come to a seceded town.

  Joe tells me he’s heard there’s black men over the border looking for work, so we’ll ride over to see what we can find after we make the sale.

  —MARY WILLIS’S JOURNAL, APRIL 14, 1862

  A weak sun burned off the last of the morning fog as they drove side by side through the crossroads in the lumber-laden wagon.

  In Cheektowaga, they rode through a band of blue-uniformed soldiers marching toward the waterfront, and Mary looked at them closely, scanning for any faces she might know. Though she doubted they’d want anything to do with her, she longed to see any of the old Town Line boys alive.

  At the docks, they were able to sell the timber right off the wagon at a price so high that Mary would have felt guilty collecting it if she did not need money so badly.

  After the wagon was emptied, they rode onto the ferry for Fort Erie.

  As the flatboat left the dock, they both leaned against the wagon, watching the water and chunked ice pass under the high blue sky. Half-frozen Erie stretched out vast on the port side and Mary tried in vain to find the plume of Niagara Falls to the North.

  “I stowed away on one of those on the Allegheny,” Joe said, pointing to one of the many steamers on the lake. “It’s how I got upriver. An old cook hid me below and brought me what food he could. In the middle of the night, he took me up to the deck, and he gave me a little keg. He said, ‘I hid a little bit of food in here and it should keep dry. Now, when you can see some lights on the shore, take it with you and jump overboard. It’ll keep you floating until you get to shore.’

  “It was about New Year’s Day,” he said, facing into the cold wind coming off the lake. “The water was so cold I thought I’d die. I held on to that keg with everything I had and kicked my feet and came up on that eastern shore. I think if I’d gone off the west side, I might be in California now.” He paused. “I always wanted to go to California. I read they have trees there bigger than mountains.”

  “I have a friend there, a roommate from school,” Mary said, looking west for a long moment. “She told me the walruses and seals climb right up and sit next to you on the beach. I’d love to see that someday.”

  “The railroad will be done soon,” he said. “It will take you all the way to San Francisco. You should go see your friend then.”

  Mary turned and looked at his dark eyes, “Why haven’t you gone? You could have left all my troubles behind you.”

  He looked down.

  “You might guess,” he said and touched her elbow lightly through her coat. She felt something run through her.

  He turned to look at the docks receding behind them, and then back at the oncoming shore. “I think we’re past the halfway point, don’t you?” he said.

  “I think so,” she said distractedly, her hand on the place where he had touched her.

  “I’m free,” he said, almost a whisper.

  She looked at him, confused.

  “We’re in Canada,” he said. “I’m a free man.”

  The boat rocked under her feet, and she stumbled a little as she looked into his face. She had been so caught up in her own worries that she hadn’t considered what the trip meant to him. Emotions played across his face, first joy, then sadness, then regret.

  “I wish Alaura was here,” he said.

  He moved to brush away tears, but she reached up and stopped his hand.

  “Don’t,” she said. “They may be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  He held her eyes, and put his rough callused fingertips on the back of her hand. She looked down, straightening her coat and her bonnet.

  “I should be ashamed of myself. How could I have not considered this occasion?” she said. “I should have planned something, brought a gift or some such thing. I guess I stopped thinking of you as a slave long ago.”

  He smiled. “That’s as much of a gift as I could ask.”

  When they drove the wagon off the flatboat, Joe took the reins and turned north. The roadway was overhung by red maples. The new leaves glowed ruby in the spring sun like the stained glass of a cathedral.

  They came into the village of St. Catharines and found a pocket of ramshackle buildings where black faces peered out from opened doorways. A woman with a baby in a sling pointed them to the church, a simple brick building with pointed arch windows and a twin staircase.

  “I heard there’s chicken and slicks tonight,” the woman said, her Kentucky accent thick. She looked them over and added, “But y’all don’t look like you need food.”

  “We need workers,” Mary said.

  “For what?” she said, her eyes lidded.

  “Farmwork,” Mary said. “Good work for a decent wage back in the States.”

  The woman’s face clouded.

  “You pay a good wage and come all the way up here to hire black folks?” she asked. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Eyes watched them from shaded porches and through dark windows.

  Behind the church, a clutch of women were gathered around a steaming cauldron under a ragged canvas canopy. Laughing children chased each other through the muddy field behind them.

  When Mary and Joe climbed down from the wagon and approached, a black priest with a fringe of snow-white hair and soup-steamed spectacles pushed his way through the women.

  “Can I help you?
” he asked, wiping his hands on his white apron.

  Men filtered over from the houses, some holding knots of wood.

  “We’ve come looking for hands for the season,” Mary said. “Back across the border.”

  “That so?” the priest asked. “Not sure we can help you.”

  Mary eyed the skinny children. Their mothers followed her gaze and called them to their hips, where they stared silently at the white lady and the one-legged negro.

  “I’m offering a good wage, a bunk in a watertight cabin with a warm stove, and three square,” Mary said, defensively. “I would think there’d be men eager for the work.”

  “There’s nobody here going back across that border with you,” the priest said. “You might as well turn around and tell that to whoever sent you.”

  Mary shifted on her feet.

  “Nobody sent us,” she said.

  Slowly, wordlessly, the women in the crowd slipped back while the men stepped in front of them.

  “This is a fair offer from a good woman,” Joe said. “I’ve been on this farm for a good while, always been treated good. You can trust her.”

  “And who are you?” one of the men in the crowd growled. “I don’t know you.”

  “What’s going on here?” Mary said. “What have we done to you?”

  “You bounty hunters come up here, offering up this or that to get people back across that border,” the priest said. “We know your ways. There’s always someone waiting on the other side with chains.”

  The circle of men had closed in and she could see no way past them. The men stared back at them with hard eyes.

  Joe pushed his way in front of her.

  “If you don’t want the work, then we’ll just leave,” he said.

  “Yeah, you will,” one of the men growled, but the crowd tightened in on them.

  “Is that you, Miss Mary?” a woman’s voice shrieked from the back of the crowd. Mary turned toward the sound.

  “Lord, it is,” the same voice called out.

  A woman shoved her way to them, jostling the men out of her way.

  It took Mary long seconds to recognize the woman she’d helped come up from Alfred years before.

  “Sophie, look at you!” Mary blurted, though she was shocked at how gaunt the woman had grown in the years since they’d ridden side by side in the first-class car of the New York and Erie.

  “You get away from her,” Sophie said, putting herself between Mary and the line of men. “She ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  She took Mary into her arms.

  “You’ll have to go through me to get at her,” she warned. “She’s the one who saved me and my little Abbey. I told you all about her. She’s the brave one, faced down that old fat marshal, bought me and my baby a ticket on the train. I told you all before.”

  Shoulders dropped and eyes softened across the crowded faces.

  “Yes, I remember, Sophie,” the priest said, motioning the men back as he extended his hand.

  “I’m Brother Hiram,” he said. “Forgive us our rudeness. You are most welcome here. Times are so that we can’t tell our friends from those who would do us harm.”

  “Who you got here?” Sophie asked, eyeing Joe.

  “This is Joe,” she said. “He works on the farm.”

  “You really hiring black folks?” Sophie asked, her voice rising with interest. “I just don’t believe it. But if anyone would do it, it’d be you, Miss Mary. You just ask, we’ll be there in no time. Me and Palmer and little Abbey. Malcolm will come, too.”

  Mary hesitated.

  “Malcolm and Palmer only,” she said. “It’s not safe for women and children. The folks out there won’t be happy when I show up with a wagon full of negroes.”

  “These men can hold their own if there’s honest work,” Brother Hiram said. “How many do you need?”

  “I can use a half-dozen men for planting, and come summer, perhaps one or two more to help on the sawmill, and then another four or five for the harvest.”

  “I think we can come to an agreement,” Brother Hiram said.

  They dickered over arrangements while the priest tended the soup.

  “It’s one chicken in a pot for thirty people,” he said. “A humble meal, but we’ll share what we can. The men will all be here, and we can work out who will go with you. They’ll be ready in the morning.”

  Mary asked Sophie if there was a store nearby and Sophie directed her across town.

  She and Joe drove the wagon over and Mary spent some of the lumber money. They returned with a sack of cornmeal and another of flour and a bushel of cabbages. A trio of chickens squawked in a wicker cage and Mary plopped a pair of whiskey jugs in front of the pastor.

  “If the families have to be apart, then there should be a going-away party,” she said.

  Word of the feast spread quickly and the women dove into the provisions. The fire had been stoked against the evening dark and the tables were gathered around it against the coolness of the spring night.

  Sophie introduced Mary to all her friends like she was a prize she had won while Joe asked everyone he could if they’d seen a girl with different colored eyes, or anyone else from down near Harpers Ferry.

  When the food was gone, instruments appeared and the sound of music filled the night air. Couples took to a patch of hard earth and danced. A crock of applejack was passed around with the whiskey, and Mary drank freely. Joe heard a tune he knew and wobbled into the dancing crowd, hopping and jumping on his one leg, clapping in rhythm.

  He pulled Mary from the bench and into the crowd, and she laughed as he twirled her around. She slipped and he caught her in his arms, nearly toppling himself, struggling to stay upright as he balanced on his one good leg and his peg. She dangled upside down for a moment and she felt as if she floated in the heavens.

  Afterward, the pastor directed them to a farmhouse where the owner, a stern man with a large goiter, looked the two of them over before offering the foreman’s room to Mary and blankets and the adjacent hayloft to Joe.

  She helped Joe pull together a sleeping pallet in the loft and went into the room and closed the door.

  She changed into her nightclothes and lay in the cornhusk bed still humming the tune they’d danced to. The room spun and she wasn’t sure if it was the whiskey or the leftover sensation of dancing. She lay there for a long time, hot despite the cool of the room, listening to the farm animals and the wind in the eaves. She could still feel his arm on her back where he had caught her, his fingers on her elbow where he had touched her.

  She slept lightly, her dreams tangled with the smell of the animals in the barn below her and thoughts of him nearby. She woke before the dawn, and watched the light come up, feeling free of the weight of the farm, dreading the return to the obligations there.

  She opened the door to the loft where he lay.

  “We could go,” she said. “We could leave from here, never go back. Leave everything to Katia. We are not wanted back there.”

  “Mmm,” he said, sleepily. “Go where?”

  “California,” she said. “We could go see the trees taller than mountains, see the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.”

  Joe rubbed his face as he sat up. “California,” he said.

  He looked at her a long time, hope and sadness playing over his face.

  “Each day I feel a hole where the ones I left behind should be,” he said softly. “Such a thing would ruin you.”

  A cow lowed in the morning light and she dropped her eyes.

  They rode quietly through the morning to the church where a small crowd had gathered. Palmer held his daughter, while Sophie fussed over a towel full of biscuits. Malcolm chatted with the other men heading for the farm. Mary and Joe watched as one by one, the men stepped away from their families and climbed onto the wagon. Brother Hiram said a short blessing before the wagon rolled out of the little churchyard. While Joe drove, Mary turned and watched as the wives and children stood and waved good-bye.
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  GRAY

  Yates had been in a hotel in Montreal when he finally received Levant’s letter telling him that his father was dead. It was three months old by then, but it came just in time. He was almost broke and he wasn’t eager to take another winter in the Now, at last, Walnut Grove was his.

  It had been a year since he’d been home.

  He’d followed up on every one of the telegrams he’d taken from his father’s desk so long ago, and he’d been through the hovels of New York’s docks and the parlors of Philadelphia. He’d fallen ill in Detroit, and was laid up in a dirty room above a saloon with fever for two months, spending his days staring out over Lake Michigan and dreaming of the nigger.

  He’d torn through the fugitive hovels on the outskirts of Montreal the week before and was convinced that Joe wasn’t there.

  He was ready to concede that Joe had probably not made it out of the Allegheny River on the night he’d run.

  Yates rode south the next morning, crossing into Vermont near St. Albans and then riding down into the Hudson Valley. He camped deep in the woods as a precaution, but no one paid him much mind when they saw him.

  Through Pennsylvania, he saw more blue uniforms on the road, but he gritted his teeth and rode on past them.

  He was stopped three times near the Maryland border, twice by Yankees and once by Confederates. Each time he showed the madam’s letter. The Yankees waved him through, not caring much about an errant Southerner, but eventually a gray-uniformed Confederate took him by gunpoint into his CO’s tent.

  “What unit are you with?” the officer had asked.

  “I’m not with any,” he said. “I was with Bott’s Greys before the war, but have been in Canada most of the time since then.”

  The grim-faced man read the letter again, lifted it to his nose.

  “Why haven’t you enlisted?” he asked. “Surely you’ve been drafted.”

  “I’ve been north,” he said. “There was no way to reach me.”

  “But the whore found you.”

  “I have my priorities,” Yates said with a smile. The officer didn’t smile back.

  “Go home and get your affairs in order,” he replied. “Bott’s Greys are under Jackson now—they’re camped over near Manassas. I’m sure they’re expecting you.”