by Daren Wang
“Malcolm,” she said. “There’s never been a kinder man. You should have seen him worrying over your brother. He went into town and stole that sack of quicklime. I know he hated to do it. He left some coins he had, but he had to take it in the middle of the night. Your brother, he told me Malcolm was a good man and that I could trust him, and he was right.”
By the time Joe and Malcolm returned, the three of them were laughing as Alaura told how Malcolm had convinced a Pennsylvania ferryman to give them a free ride as a tribute to Clement Vallandigham.
After the meal, Nathan brought out a jug of late fall applejack, and they sat in the parlor while he and Mary told stories of Leander as a boy.
At the end of the night, Alaura went up the back stairs to Katia’s old room, and Joe and Malcolm walked through the night’s snowfall to the cabin.
The kitchen was empty when Mary came down in the morning, but Malcolm and Alaura soon came stomping through the back door. As everyone gathered for breakfast, Alaura stood and invited them to ride downtown with them the next day for their wedding.
“This is all so fast,” Mary said, after embracing Alaura.
“We’ve been through so much together,” Alaura said.
“I had to see Joe first,” Malcolm said. “I had to ask his blessing.”
Joe nodded. “He couldn’t get the words out fast enough,” he said with a chuckle.
In the afternoon, Mary walked down to the station and wired Father Thomas to make arrangements and spread the word. In the morning, they all walked down the hill and boarded the train.
Downtown, Mary took Alaura shopping for a dress. Afterward, they sat in the lobby of the American Hotel for lunch, ignoring the passersby that stared at the unusual pair.
Sophie had herded together nearly all of the parishioners, and laid out a broom at the church entrance. “Whoever jumps higher rules the house,” she said to Mary as the couple held hands and leaped over it together.
Alaura’s feet were a good six inches higher, and Malcolm, laughing, demanded a second chance.
Father Thomas ushered the crowd into the little church, and read from his worn Bible. Joe escorted his sister up the aisle and Palmer stood with Malcolm while Mary and Sophie stood beside Alaura.
Afterward, they all sat and watched the newlyweds dance, then the congregation took their turns on the floor. After Mary had danced and Joe had hopped to the sound of a fiddle player, her father motioned for her to take the chair next to him.
“I’m going to stay downtown tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’m going to the army to arrange for the funeral. He’ll have full honors or there will be hell to pay.”
Mary nodded. “I’ll send Joe back tonight and you and I can go and see to it.”
“No,” Nathan said. “You two go back home. I will do this for him.”
Nathan watched as Alaura and Malcolm twirled together on the floor, laughing.
“Here’s something you don’t know,” Nathan said. “I almost married another before I met your mother.”
Mary choked on her drink.
“I never regretted marrying your mother and I loved her as much as any man could love a woman, but there’s still a fondness for Hattie. And some shame.”
He reached for his daughter’s hand.
“Her real name was Konwanhata, or something like that,” he continued. “She let me call her Hattie, because I could never get her real name quite right. I swear to God she changed it every time I got near it just so she could laugh at me.”
He chuckled, and she saw a glint in his eye that she did not recognize.
“Her family took me in when I first came west, and her brothers helped me build the barn and the mill. She was a beautiful girl, daughter of the chief. I’d have married her, but I was afraid of what people would say about me.”
He rubbed his face, and scratched at his scar.
“I’d come out into the wild to be my own man, and there I was, too much of a coward to marry the woman I loved.”
Nathan took his daughter’s hand and lifted it to his lips and Mary noticed a glistening in his eyes. Then he rose and hobbled into the fray to take up a little jig among the other dancers.
Afterward, when they walked to the train station, Mary took Joe’s arm. She steeled herself for any confrontation that would come of it, but no one seemed to care on the cold Buffalo streets.
It was late when they finally walked up the snowy hill to the dark and cold house. Mary took Joe by the hand, and they climbed the stairs, and he undressed her slowly there in her room. They woke, entwined in the morning light, and together they went down to the kitchen and he sat at the table as she made him coffee and breakfast.
NIAGARA
Harry was warming his feet by the applewood fire and watching the orange of the setting sun sparkle on Lake Erie when Champ raised his head and yipped at the yacht plowing through the vast lake’s cold water.
He’d come out as he did most evenings, leaving Katia in the house to wash up and put the twins to bed while he had himself a whiskey. She allowed him just the one each night, but he poured the blue Mason jar nearly full and if he’d worked hard that day, she did not object.
He never argued with her. He had stood on the dock the night of the riot and he had promised he would mind her, and he had.
If the girls were asleep and it was warm enough, she’d pour herself a glass, shorter, and come sit with him and watch the sun go down.
It had snowed again that afternoon, adding to the foot or so already on the ground, and he expected that she would stay in the house.
That was fine with him, he liked the quiet. But as much as he liked the hush of a new snowfall, he had to admit that he missed having the pickers around.
When the fruit had started to ripen in the late summer, he and Katia had hired a crew from the same encampment where Palmer and the others had come from. They’d brought their families down to the orchard and set up a camp in a nearby field.
Their Canadians neighbors seemed none too happy with Harry for it, but the way the wives had fussed over the twins had charmed Katia so much that she promised that she’d hire them all back for the spring pruning.
It didn’t hurt that they all had been treating her like a hero ever since the night of the riot. He knew better than to argue that things had ended well because of her.
After they’d watched Joe ride the old swayback back toward Town Line, they’d turned back to Keith, only to find that the Confederate had died.
“We need to get you away from here,” Palmer said to Katia. “Plenty of people saw you with that gun, and they’ll send the police. Or worse. We’ll get you over the river as soon as the streets are all cleared. We need to hide you in the meantime.”
As Palmer ushered them out of the street, Katia picked up Keith’s bag from where it lay beside his corpse and stuffed it into her own carpetbag. After Father Thomas had guided them into a closet-sized hiding space in the labyrinthine cellar, she opened it and found wads of Union currency.
Before Palmer guided them down to the waterfront the next night, they had asked the old black priest to preside over their vows, and he did so right there in the sanctuary.
“My first ceremony with white folks,” he said with a smile.
A rowboat ferried them across the river under a starlit sky, and Harry remembered thinking it would have been a beautiful night if he hadn’t been so worried about somebody coming after them.
They sent money to Old Man Snyder to pay for proper headstones for the Zubrichs, but they had both agreed never to cross the river again. Katia was worried that the police were looking for her and that she’d end up in the same cell that Joe had occupied.
Harry wanted nothing more to do with any of it. The war. The Union. The Confederates.
He thought of the way he’d helped turn the Town Line farmers into an angry mob, and he thought of the terrified women and children he’d seen on the streets of Buffalo, and he was ashamed of himself.
&nb
sp; Katia had sent a letter of farewell to Nathan, and he had answered, offering his blessing of the marriage. There was a terse note from Mary enclosed as well, offering her sympathy for the loss of their friends the Zubrichs. Harry supposed that was more than he had a right to ask for.
They talked about going farther west, but Katia said there was plenty of good land right there and since she’d never really said the money in the bag was his, too, he didn’t argue.
She could not remember much from her early childhood in Germany, but she had dreamed of living on the water ever since the day her father had taken her to swim in Bodensee. She had hired a cab to take them along the Niagara River to look for farms along the banks, but Harry didn’t want to have to stare at the Union from his front porch, so they’d agreed to look on the shore of Lake Erie where the water met the horizon.
They bought the orchard a month later from a Confederate deserter. In the end, the call of the man’s kin had become too much for him and after a late August cold snap, the Alabamian deserter had been eager to leave before winter set in. Five acres of apple orchards, a tidy little house, and a stretch of rocky lakefront beach with a dock.
“I hear they’re giving Confederates free land to raise cotton down in Brazil,” he said, counting the bills that Harry had just pushed across the table. “This here will help me buy a breeding couple to get back up and running. My brother’s going to meet me there with a few more. We’ll have ourselves a plantation in no time.”
Harry looked at Katia, his lips pinched together into something like a half scowl and half smile as the Southerner walked out the door of their new home.
Sophie had been there to midwife when the girls, Melinda and Belinda, came into the world. It was early spring, and that night Harry sat by the fire with one in each arm while Katia slept, and he knew that he had done better than he had any right to expect.
That spring he spent hours with the girls in the orchard, the petals falling from the trees and tangling in the little tufts of hair poking out of their bonnets.
He even found himself a puppy, a yellow sheepdog with a white mane and white stripe down his snout. Champ wasn’t half as smart as Jep, but he stuck close and had been known to pull up a groundhog every now and then.
When he wasn’t pruning trees or tending the garden patch, he took his little skiff onto the lake and pulled chinook from the deep waters. On warm Sundays, they’d take the wagon and ride up to the falls just to feel the earth shaking underfoot and the mist on their faces.
His memories of everything before the orchard felt like a story someone else had told him around a campfire.
Until Champ yipped and Harry looked up to see the Abigail sliding across the lake.
He’d seen just about every kind of boat there was on Erie, but the yacht’s profile was lower and sleeker than anything else in the water. He didn’t need to see the name, but he read it in the evening light anyway. He watched as it skimmed the water in the twilight, the lights in the cabin already ablaze, and he knew he had to do something.
He jumped, spilling his whiskey, and swatted at Champ nipping at his heels as he climbed up the gentle slope to the house. He banged the door open and rushed into the warm house.
“What?” Katia asked. “What is the matter?”
“The Abigail, it’s right in front of the house,” Harry said, taking his new shotgun from over the mantel. He froze in the middle of the room, his eyes scanning for anything else that might be useful.
The babies, disturbed by the commotion, started to cry, their voices rising in a distinct pitch that made Harry grin.
“What?” she repeated.
“Compson” is all he said, pointing out the window at the lake. “He’s right there.”
After she saw the boat gliding on the water, she slammed the door and spread herself against it.
“No,” she said. “No more killing.”
She closed her eyes, and for the first time he could see something in her face like regret for the shots she had fired in the streets of Buffalo.
“No more,” she whispered.
He nodded, feeling the cost of his vow to always listen to her was higher than he could ever remember.
“I can’t let him just go,” Harry said. “Not after everything.”
“No more killing,” she repeated.
He leaned the shotgun against the wall.
“Okay,” he said. “But I’m going after him.”
She rolled her eyes.
“In your little boat?”
“Yes,” he said.
She rubbed her face with her hands, laughing, and looked up at the ceiling.
“I guess. How much trouble can you get into in that tiny thing anyway?”
She opened the door and he dashed outside and ran down the hill, Champ trailing behind him.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she shouted.
He leaped into the skiff, feeling like a little boy. Champ tried to climb in after him, but he pushed the puppy back onto the dock.
“Stay here, watch out for Mother,” he said, shoving off.
The yacht had already passed the orchard, but he could still see it and he set his back to the oars. He didn’t know what he would do if he caught it, but the smirk the Confederate had given him the night of the riot still haunted him.
Out on the lake, the cold of the water radiated up through the boards of the boat and the soles of his boots and into his feet. The skiff nosed through the occasional paper-thin skim of ice. When the sun dropped below the horizon, the frigid cold of the night came down quickly. Small cabins dotted the shore, their windows yellow against the now-black wall of trees.
Just as the lights of Buffalo came into view, the Abigail steered north toward the mouth of the mighty river. The sound of its engine changed, shifting down as the current pulled it forward.
Harry fell in behind it, following the light of the brass lamps that lined the yacht’s deck. The current took up the boat and he rested from his rowing.
The Abigail kept moving, turning wide around a hook in the shoreline, and he followed.
He heard the encampment before he saw it. The sawing of fiddles, the dull mumble of voices. The sound of men at ease, food and drink in hand. Around the hook the black of the woods opened onto a stone ruin, yellow under lamplights. A long dock extended from a landing on the shore. Two men stood at attention under a lantern on the landing while a third stood at the end of the dock, awaiting the line tossed from the Abigail.
Harry jammed an oar into the sandy mud of the bank to hold the skiff out of the circle of light.
“Commander Compson,” a loud voice shouted. “Welcome! Bring your whole crew ashore. There’s more than enough.”
Compson climbed into view, and even across the water, Harry could see the man’s bluster had left him. His shoulders slumped and he seemed to shrink next to the boisterousness of the man that greeted him.
“Fresh provisions have been hard to come by,” he muttered. “They’d be happy for a good meal, I’m sure. But I don’t want to impose.”
“Not at all,” the other man said, shaking Compson’s hand. “We’re about to decommission anyway, time to clean out the larder.”
“Decommission?” Compson asked, disappointment in his voice.
“Yes,” the other man said. “It seems we are closer to the end than the beginning, and there’s little reason to keep the men here over winter. It was all for show anyway. If Her Majesty had been serious, they’d surely have rebuilt this old fort. The Yankees burned it fifty years ago, and it’s hardly a signal of confidence to leave it in ruins.”
“Closer to the end than the beginning,” Compson said. “Yes, I suppose so.”
Compson motioned and his crew disembarked onto the dock.
“Leave your worries at the water,” the host said. “We’ve roasted a pig and there’s plenty of fine Canadian whiskey. I’ll leave my man to stand guard.”
The smell of roasting pork wafted through the night,
and Harry licked his lips even as he shivered in the cold night, watching the band of men climb the stone steps of the ruined fort’s embankment. He watched as a bored guard sat on a stool, his back to the water, staring up at the party. Harry stilled himself as if he were perched in the woods waiting on a buck, watching as the guard’s head drooped as he drowsed under the glow of a torch. The Abigail sat lifeless, rocking quietly in the small waves of the river.
Pulling his oar from the mud of the bank, Harry let the skiff drift until he could reach out and put his hands on the smooth wooden hull. He stood up, guiding his tiny boat to the river side of the yacht. His eyes on the guard the whole time, he floated the skiff to the Abigail’s stern, where he tied up to the cleat on the gunnel. Finally, he climbed onto the deck. It took him less than a minute to pull the mooring lines off the dock, setting the Abigail adrift.
The whole operation had been silent but for Harry’s stifled giggling.
The river pulled the loosed boat toward its center where the current was swift and irresistible. Harry listened for the sound of the party to fade as he watched the lights of the fort slip out of sight. When he could no longer hear the sound of the gathered men, he burst into loud peals of laughter, stomping his feet.
He ran around the deck, slapping at all the slick wooden surfaces, braying into the night. He wished the whole world could see what he’d just done. He wished that someone was there with him. He wished for Hans and he wished for the others, but most of all, he wished for Leander. Nobody loved a practical joke like Lelo.
“You sons of bitches,” he shouted into the wind. “You should have stayed home. We could have had us some fun.”
The boat jerked as it slammed a rock and spun around before continuing downstream. Harry checked to make sure his skiff was still there and went belowdecks.
He found a lamp and matches. Shadows jumped to life on the dark-wood walls. He went to the liquor cabinet first, and found a bottle of the bourbon he’d been dreaming of since Compson had poured him his first glass. He was about to take a long plug from the bottle, then stopped, and found one of Compson’s cut glass tumblers.