by Daren Wang
“You couldn’t let him in,” he said. “He would ruin you.”
“What can I do?” she asked. “What will make him better?”
She curled up and put her head on his lap.
“Closing that door was the hardest thing I ever did.” She sobbed. “What could I do?”
He pulled her hair from its bun and ran his fingers through it.
“We’ll take care of him,” he said. “I’ll take care of him.”
She cried again, not just for how lost her brother had looked, but also for the kindness of the man that held her then, the forgiveness that allowed him to help someone who had wronged him so badly.
They lay like that until the fire died, then he retrieved the lantern from the cabin and, arm around her, led her back up the path to the back door of the house.
“I’ll watch for him,” he said.
It did not surprise her that Katia was not in the kitchen when she came downstairs the next morning.
She spent the morning gathering a bushel of tomatoes and several pint baskets of strawberries for the men to take to their families.
She watched as her brother climbed into the wagon with the other men. She wanted to rush out to him, tell him to stay, put him in his bed with toast and tea like she had when he’d been sick as a boy. She wanted to fix him, but she knew that she could not.
Joe stood in the yard, watching as the wagon rolled away until he caught her eye, and motioned that he would ride with them. She nodded, then found her lip quivering again. Twice in three days. She would not survive much longer in this world if she let sentiment rule her. She gritted her teeth and set her mind to work. One of the old sows had gotten too ornery, attacking another’s piglets, and she roused her father from the parlor and asked for his help.
Palmer had offered to have one of the men handle any of the slaughterings, but she had raised these animals from nothing more than warm handfuls fresh out of their mother, and she’d not let them see their end by any other hand. Instead, she preferred to take it on when the men were away and the farm was quieter, the animals more calm.
She and her father went out to the pen. He leashed the old sow and led it to the hang, where Mary stuck it. It kicked briefly as it bled out.
They worked as they always had, she scalding and scraping, while he salted the hams and bellies then set them to smoke.
As the afternoon went on, Mary left him to finish stuffing the sausages and took a loin into the kitchen to roast for dinner, but Katia was still not there.
She climbed the back stairs to the girl’s room, but as soon as she opened the door, she could see that it had been cleared out. Even the old carpetbag Nathan had given her years before was gone.
Mary slammed the door.
She went down to the kitchen and stoked the cold stove.
In the evening they went onto the front porch with their plates. Her father kept standing, walking the length of the porch.
She listened to the sawing of the cicadas, looking for the courage to tell him that Katia was gone. Instead gunshots echoed up from the crossroads.
“Redcoats,” Nathan hissed.
Mary poured him more rum.
Her nostrils were still filled with the smell of smoking hickory and pork fat, but there was something else in the wind, some other fire. There were more shots.
Mary motioned her father back to his chair as she stepped off the porch and out into the center of the quiet highway. A reddish glow lit the southwest sky. She triangulated as flames flicked above the tree line.
“The mill,” she muttered, then climbed back onto the porch and rushed her father through the front door. She reached for her pistol, but the peg was empty.
“Goddammit,” she hissed and swore at Katia under her breath.
“It’s the lobsterbacks,” her father said, stomping around the parlor. “They’ve finally come.”
“Please, Father,” Mary said, pushing her hair behind her ears. “Please just sit here quietly.”
He sat down in the green leather chair and nodded.
She locked the front door and dashed through the house, out the backyard, and through the wheat field toward the mill.
The flames were already towering over the trees, turning the night sky orange and yellow. The waves of heat knocked her to her knees as she ran into the clearing. Coughing, she crawled away and climbed to her feet. She circled around to the creek, dove into the millpond, and swam toward the burning building. She surfaced, gasping, but the hot air seared her lungs. She turned away, fighting for breath as burning cinders rained down around her.
The smoke twisted into a tall column and flames singed the leaves of the nearby trees. A deck support gave way and the platform fell into the creek, sending sparks and steam into the air.
She looked in the direction of the hamlet and spat. Not one of the farmers had come to help.
She swam to the far bank and watched, helpless, as piece after piece of her father’s mill peeled off and fell burning into the water.
Soon, burning timbers floated everywhere in the mill pond.
Another sound penetrated the crackle and groan of the fire.
She cocked her ear, listening.
It was the house bell. Her father was ringing the bell.
She swam across the creek and climbed onto the shore, then tried to run back to the farm, but the brambles and burrs pulled at her wet skirt and slowed her down. Her lungs burned and her eyes teared from the smoke. She could hear the peck of rifles and the thrum of a shotgun and the sound of men shouting.
As she came into the barnyard, she stopped short at the sight of a man writhing on the ground, screaming in pain. Moonlight glistened off the patch of blood on his chest.
He flailed for his rifle, feet away. She crept into the shadow of the barn.
The light of a shotgun blast flashed from the kitchen window, illuminating the yard. A pistol shot answered weakly.
“Son of a bitch, Jesse,” the man lying in the yard bellowed. “Get me out of here.”
Mary bent lower, but the smoke in her lungs sent her into a coughing fit.
There was a grunt behind her. She whirled around, her hand on the slaughtering knife in her pocket, but it was only the pigs in their pen, woken by the commotion.
“Mary,” her father called out. “They damned near got me, but I made ’em pay.”
Then there was another sound. Something else, guttural and wild.
She circled around to the cabin, then into the line of poplars where she’d heard the pistol. Every tree frog, every cicada sounded like someone was just behind her, but all she found was a spray of blood on the silvery poplar leaves. She kept circling around the front of the house, and to the side yard, then around toward the barnyard. The man in the yard had stilled, and she crept out into the moonlit yard to take the rifle.
His lifeless eyes stared into the black of the night.
The guttural noise rose again, syncopating oddly with the noise of nighttime insects.
Cradling the dead man’s repeater, she circled the house again and again, but there was nothing.
When she finally went inside, the house was dark as pitch and the smell of gunpowder hung in the air. The night wind blew through shattered windows, twisting her mother’s drapery into ethereal, dancing shapes. She called for her father and he answered from the parlor.
He sat in the dark, still pointing the shotgun at the moonlit landscape, his face haggard but his eyes ablaze.
“I’ve been calling the Haudenosaunee,” he said.
“I hope they come,” she said, biting her lower lip.
“It’ll be good to see Chief Parker again.”
He sat and waited for his long-dead friends late into the night. She tried to sit with him, but jumped at each creak of the old house. She patrolled from room to room, staring out into the moonlit night. The smell of the still-burning mill mixed with the gunpowder haze that floated through the house. When her father finally started to doze, she took
his shotgun and put him to bed.
“They’re not coming,” he whispered just before he began to snore. “They’ve left me.”
She closed the door behind her. Alone in the empty hallway, she began to shake as the fear of the night took hold of her, but she clenched her teeth until they ached.
She went from room to room, keeping her distance from the windows. Finally, she settled in the parlor, listening through the broken windows, shivering in the night air. The wind kicked up and she nearly fired the rifle three different times at the moving shadows the swaying trees cast in the moonlight.
Finally, she went down into the cellar, pushed away the wardrobe, and crawled onto the pallet that she’d made for Joe years before. She did not find sleep in the dark, but lay there listening to her own breath and the sound of the house around her.
She wasn’t sure how long she lay there when she heard the back door creak open and then his voice calling her.
“Joe,” she called back, her voice quivering.
There was the pop, step, pop, of him descending the stairs for her, and then he was there.
“You’re safe,” he said in the dark. “You’re safe.”
She came out of the tunnel to meet him and collapsed herself into his chest as the fear drained out of her.
“You’re safe,” he repeated over and over, his voice soothing.
She reached a shaking hand up to his lips to quiet him, and with her other, she took his hand and led him to the pallet where he had lain helpless for weeks.
“I love you,” she said as she pulled him down onto her and covered his mouth with hers.
1864
PHILO PARSONS
Washington, D.C., October 11, 1864
Maj. General John A. Dix,
Commanding at New York:
There is reason to believe that a plot is afoot by persons hostile to the United States, who have found an asylum in Canada, to invade the United States and destroy the city of Buffalo; that they propose to take possession of some of the steamboats on Lake Erie, to surprise Johnson’s Island, and set free the prisoners of war confined there, and to proceed with them to attack Buffalo.”
—TELEGRAPH FROM EDWIN STANTON, U.S. SECRETARY OF WAR, TO BUFFALO
It was near midnight when Yates Bell boarded the Philo Parsons at Toledo and paid the captain to stop at Amherstburg during the ferry’s circuit around the western end of Lake Erie.
The October night was cold, and Yates went belowdecks to warm himself. A card game had started among the passengers and a skinny man hawked whiskey. He sat on a bench and dozed in the warmth for a while before climbing back onto the deck to wake himself.
Something was wrong with the heavens.
Bands of light gyrated across the northern sky, casting green light on the soft waves of Erie. He stood entranced, imagining that only his hands on the rail kept him from floating into the swirling vault.
The captain came up beside him.
“You don’t get the aurora borealis down South, do you?” he asked.
“No. Normally, no,” Yates said. “But a few years back they flashed over the battlefield after Fredericksburg, a sign from God that he’d ordained the victory.”
The captain took off his cap and scratched his head for a minute, then spit tobacco juice over the gunnel.
“When the lights are strong, they don’t even need electricity on the telegraph lines,” he said. “They power the lines, instead of the other way around. You can send messages clear across Canada on them. Can you imagine that?”
Yates grunted, not taking his eyes from the sky.
The captain hunkered down, his voice low.
“I have a friend who worked in the telegraph office in Montreal. Whenever the northern lights were dancing, he would always take a few minutes to stop with the dots and dashes, and he’d just leave the circuit open. I was there with him once. I sat and listened and I heard something. I swear I heard a voice in that crackle and buzz. I heard the voice of the lights.”
Yates took his eyes from the sky and looked at the browned leather face of the sailor in front of him.
“What did it say?” Yates asked, looking into the man’s eyes.
The captain took off his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief.
“That’s the secret I’ll take to my grave,” the captain said. “But I guaran-goddamn-tee you that it wasn’t ‘Go out and kill each other.’”
He laughed loudly and nodded at the sky.
“Fools.” He laughed, slapping Yates on the back. “Those boys down in Fredericksburg were just plain fools. God drops a dancing curtain of lights on their pointy little heads, and all they want to do is murder. Well, I want nothing to do with it. Just leave me alone out here on my lake with my boat and the borealis.”
He turned and walked toward the pilothouse.
“By the way, I came out to tell you that we’ll be in Amherstburg in just a few minutes,” he said over his shoulder.
Yates watched the man walk away, alternately whistling and laughing into the night.
He had become something of a lake man himself in the year since he’d arrived at Windsor. His beard had grown full and the rest of his face was the same permanent red of the windblown men that tossed their nets into the water each morning. When he wasn’t running Confederates across the lake, he poked around on the water, learning the coastline, the hidden coves, the currents. He thought of Scott and Nelda often, and had wondered why he hadn’t just bought some nets like the man had told him to.
There was something about time on the water that shifted a man’s perspective. He’d felt it himself, and he saw it in the men he ferried in the night.
They’d feel the boat’s slow rocking and listen to the quiet lapping of the waves and they would take the drawling sailor as their priest and the sky of stars as their confession booth. As the Swan skipped across the water, they would voice their stories of killing and loss, and beg him for solace that he had no idea how to grant.
Sailing in the dark was no easy thing, so Yates would say nothing to his passengers, nodding his grizzled head at them as he guided the boat across the water. When they landed on Canadian soil, he’d put a hand on their shoulders as he guided them out of the boat, and they would thank him as if he’d saved their lives.
With each one of them, he found the war more pointless.
When Compson had finally come to at the western outpost, he immediately sought out Yates.
“At least you still sound like a Southerner,” he’d said. He pulled out a tattered Yankee bill and put it on the table. “You’ll need to shave and get a decent shirt, at least, before the mission.”
Yates had laughed.
Compson, of course, had a grand scheme to change the course of the war. His others had been the talk of the remnants of his men at the outpost. There was the fizzle of a riot in Buffalo, and the torching of an orphanage in New York during the riots there. Even among the ragged criminals of Windsor, that was seen by many as a coward’s move. Lately, there’d been talk of a raid on a bank in Vermont. And just a few weeks before, Yates had ferried a friend he’d known back in the John Brown days that talked of a plan to kill the tyrant.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he’d said. “You could pass as a gentleman again if you’d clean yourself up. I could use another hand.”
Yates had turned down his old friend. If he were honest, he didn’t have much taste for killing anymore. The end of the war seemed near, and he didn’t place hope in any of these desperate acts to change its course.
And it did need changing. The news had been bad for a long time, but nothing he read in the newspapers convinced Yates that the cause was lost more than Compson’s sallow face and the disrepair of the man’s clothes.
Yates had almost left after that first meeting.
It wouldn’t take much to get the Swan north up the Detroit River to Lake Huron. No one would bother him there. He had some money. He could buy a nice cabin and some good n
ets. Find himself a squaw.
Perhaps it was the other soldiers he ferried. Despite himself, he couldn’t help think he’d helped them.
Yates went to the barber and got shaved.
When he arrived back at the boathouse, he found Compson at a table with a pistol and a stack of papers in front of him. The commander pushed the gold pin across the table to him, the three stars of a captaincy in the Confederate Navy.
“You can go home after this,” Compson had said.
“What’s at home?” Yates said. “The Yankees are at Walnut Grove, and the lawyers won’t let me have it.”
“They’ve moved on,” Compson said. “It’s there, waiting for you. Your birthright.”
“That’s mighty convenient,” Yates said, smirking.
“No, it’s not,” Compson said. “I wish I was lying, but that battalion just burned Atlanta to the ground and is heading for Savannah as we speak. There’s nothing left for the Yankees at Harpers Ferry.”
“But there’s something else.”
He paused, drawing Yates in.
“I found your runaway.”
Yates felt the ground shift under him.
He jumped across the table, grabbing Compson by his frayed lapels.
“Son of a bitch. You said he was dead,” he growled.
Compson rested his hand on the pistol.
“I spent four goddamned years chasing him, and you knew where he was all this time,” Yates said.
“I’m sorry,” Compson said. “I swear on my honor I didn’t.”
“I should kill you,” Yates hissed. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t.”
“He’s about to file papers,” Compson said. “I’m the only way you can stop him from taking Walnut Grove.”
He paused, letting the message sink in.
“You can kill me, but that won’t stop Joe from becoming the master of Walnut Grove.”
Yates felt like he was adrift on the lake with no shore. He loosened his grip and slumped back in his chair.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“The Michigan,” Compson said. “One understaffed Yankee gunboat guarding three thousand Confederate prisoners on Johnson Island.”