by Murray Pura
As if he’d been reading her mind, he glanced back at her through the swirling snowflakes. “I wouldn’t trouble myself too much if I were you, Miss Clarissa Avery Ross. If I want you to know who I am, I’ll tell you. If I don’t, it will be the secret I take to my grave.”
Oh, how did he know what I was thinking? And who told him my real name? I could strangle the man! Speaking of graves!
“Don’t flatter yourself, sir!” snapped Clarissa, unafraid of how loud her voice was, since the rising wind was even louder. “No man on earth could be farther from my mind. I would prefer to memorize Greek verb conjugations than dwell on any aspect of your unfortunate existence.”
“I know Greek,” Liberty responded quickly.
Perhaps too quickly. For Clarissa sensed that he regretted he had told her even that much about himself. When she pressed him for more information on his linguistic abilities or urged him to say something in Greek from the New Testament, he remained silent as if he had not heard her voice through the noise of the growing storm. She was certain he had heard but had no intention of letting anything else about himself slip from his lips.
“There!” Liberty stopped and pointed. “The station!”
Prickert’s farm did not look like much, Clarissa reflected, not for the first time or the last. It was small and, so far as Pennsylvania farms went, down in the mouth. But it was a safe haven. And with its lights all out but one (“One if by land, two if by sea” after the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that had been published earlier that year, which she knew served as a signal that all was well) and a column of smoke rising as straight as a pencil from one of its two chimneys, it was a place of refuge for the five passengers until another conductor guided them to the next station on the Freedom Train to Canaan.
“Run!” ordered Liberty.
It was dark and stormy, and everything was obscured by the heavy snowfall, but still they ran across the open ground. They ran at a crouch, like they always did, and Clarissa half expected a musket shot to ring out, like she always did, because conductors on the Railroad had been shot and killed before.
But they reached the barn and slipped inside, and the stationmaster, the perpetually smiling Brian Prickert, met them with thick woolen blankets, hot stew thick with chunks of potato, and mugs of steaming coffee. She helped him brush the snow off the runaways and get the blankets around their shoulders and the bowls of stew in their hands. Liberty stood back and watched but didn’t lift a finger. He merely turned up the lantern so that it was a bit brighter and a bit warmer in the barn.
“Thanks for all your help,” snipped Clarissa.
“You’re welcome,” Liberty responded.
She kissed the older women on their cheeks, the boy and girl on their foreheads, and gave the young man her best smile. They all found places to sit, using stools or settling onto mounds of hay. Liberty was the only one who remained on his feet while he ate and drank.
“Will ye stay the night then?” Prickert asked Liberty and Clarissa.
Liberty had already wolfed down his stew and drained his coffee mug. He shook his head.
“Joshua may,” he said, “but it wouldn’t do for me not to be present in Gettysburg as usual come Sunday morning. It might give rise to unfortunate suspicions considering the dangerous times we live in.”
Clarissa ignited like powder in her Navy Six revolver. Joshua may?
“But the storm is fierce,” protested Prickert.
“I am fiercer. Ask the slave catchers who thought they had me in their grips last fall.” Liberty turned to Clarissa. “You can stay until the storm blows itself out. Your family knows what you’re doing, and you won’t be missed by anyone else.”
The powder flashed. “I beg your pardon?”
“It is snowing quite hard and—”
“And what? I’m a damsel in distress? I most certainly will be missed, and I have no intention of waking up in any other bed than my own in the morning. And be sitting in my pew at church by eleven.”
Prickert was staring at her.
She could only imagine the sort of carriage wreck she’d present to the world after a night in the winter woods, and she knew very well how wild and blazing her green eyes appeared when she had her “Avery Ross” up. But no way on God’s green earth, or His snow-covered one for that matter, was she going to let Liberty play the man and return through storm and ice to Gettysburg while she cowered in a barn like Little Miss Mousy, too afraid of snow and cold to venture out till all the world was sunny and bright and safe. Is that what Harriet Tubman—Moses—is that what Harriet Tubman would do?
She turned to the five passengers and hugged each one. “You will get to Heaven. You will reach Canada. I am sure of it. My prayers will be constant and fervent.” She took Brian Prickert’s hand in both of hers. “Thank you again for your courage and your faith. Until the next time.”
Then she brushed past Liberty and stormed out the barn door.
“You may follow my lead, sir!” She bit out the words. “That way you will be sure to end up in Gettysburg before dawn rather than miss your road and wake up in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.”
Sunday morning
Gettysburg
I hate the man! I absolutely detest him! From the bottom of his ugly booted feet to the top of his silly hooded head!”
Stormier than the storm, her mother thought as Clarissa blasted into the house with the wind and snow at her back.
Clarissa threw her snow-covered hat into one corner and ripped off her scarf, almost hitting her father as she hurled it into another corner where he happened to be standing.
“I try to be polite. I try to be kind. I try to be gracious. But he’s enough to make a saint drink hemlock. Twice.”
“We’re glad to see you back safe, dear,” her mother interjected, helping her daughter with her snowy coat. “Did you have trouble with slave catchers?”
“Slave catchers?” Clarissa gave her mother a wild-eyed look. “Slave catchers would be a treat compared to him. At least I could shoot them.” She pulled off her boots with a savage fury, one after the other. “Seven miles from the Mason-Dixon Line here and you’d think I could get a few of them to use my Navy Six on. But no. I get him.”
“Who, dear?”
“Liberty. The great and mighty Liberty.”
“Liberty?” Her father repeated the name, setting Clarissa’s wet, muddy, and icy boots on a straw mat by the door. “Not Harriet Tubman’s Liberty?”
“Oh yes indeed, Father, Harriet Tubman’s Liberty. And she can have him. I’ll send him to her in a gift box. A pine box would be best.”
“Clarissa Avery!” Her mother put a hand on her daughter’s arm. “Hush!”
“Oh, but no, we can’t harm our precious Liberty. He’s too important to the Railroad.” Clarissa jabbed a finger at her mother and father. “I have to go all the way to Prickert’s with him and all the way back. I’m trying to be a Christian woman. Trying to carry on a conversation with the man. And all the time he’s letting me be the one who breaks trail. What sort of gentleman does that? I’m jabbering away about who knows what, hoping to get some sort of response from a fellow human being, tramping through the snow and muck, leading the way, thank you very much, sir … and then I spot Gettysburg through the storm and I turn to him to tell him we’ve made it, and what do I see?”
Her parents waited several long moments, staring at her white face and her freckles and the wet hair unraveling about her head, but it was clear she wasn’t going to say another word until she was prompted. So her mother supplied the necessary words—“What did you see, dear?”
“Nothing!” Clarissa exploded. “Absolutely nothing! Heaven knows how long I’d been talking to myself. Miles. I couldn’t even see boot prints. Why, he’d abandoned me long before we reached Gettysburg. Of course, anything could have happened to me. A branch heavy with ice might have fallen on my head and rendered me unconscious, and there I’d be, lying in a snowdrift, freezing to death, and him
not caring one whit whether I might get to town alive. Not one whit. Slave catchers could have surrounded me. I might have fallen through the ice of one of our creeks. But where was the hero of the Underground Railroad? At home by then, no doubt, and soaking in a hot bath. I hate the man. I’m sorry to be so unchristian, but there is nothing worth saving in him. And I haven’t even told you the half of it. The first thing he did when he met up with us was throw me to the ground.”
“Oh my,” her mother responded. “And why would he do that?”
“Oh, to save me from slave catchers, apparently. He thought I might talk too much and give us away, and so he clamped a hand over my mouth too.”
“Oh no.”
“Can you imagine? The blackguard.”
“Were there slave catchers?” asked her father carefully.
Her green eyes blazed at him. “What?”
“Were there slave catchers, my dear?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with it, but yes, yes there were. They came down the trail looking for us. No hounds, thank goodness.” Clarissa jabbed her finger at her parents again. “Do you know why he wears that ridiculous black hood? He does it because he thinks he’s important. Well, he’s not important. Just ugly. I swear that’s why he wears the hood—he’s as ugly as a wild pig.”
“Clarissa!”
“I’m sorry, Mother, but what’s ugly inside is bound to show up outside. You’ve told me that many times yourself. A person’s soul leaks into their face. And his soul is rotten to the core.”
Suddenly she slumped into a chair. “I’m exhausted.”
Her mother rushed to throw a thick woolen blanket around her daughter. “Of course you are. It’s four in the morning. You’ve been up all night. I have some hot soup and a mug of hot cider for you.”
Clarissa finally smiled a smile, the kind of smile that made her parents still marvel at how beautiful their only child was. “Oh, that would be marvelous. That would be top of the mountain.”
“And your father is going to put a hot brick in bed with you.”
The smile broadened. “Oh thank you, thank you. I’m going to sleep like a brick myself. Even my little toe on my left foot aches.” She laughed. “When that aches, it means the carriage called Clarissa is about to have a crash.”
“You can sleep until we’re back from church. We’ll wake you at noon and—”
“Noon!” Clarissa sat up straight. “No, I must be at church. I can’t have people asking questions about my absence.”
“Why, we’ll just tell them you’re under the weather, dear. Which is true enough.”
“Oh no, no, thank you, but no. I have to be at Christ’s Church. I absolutely must be there. I must be seen.”
“You must be seen? By whom?”
“Everyone. Anyone. I must be seen.”
“Oh. Well. Kyle Forrester has been out of town. I believe he was in Philadelphia on business. I’m not sure he’s back.”
Red sprang into Clarissa’s face. “It doesn’t matter if … if Mr. Forrester is at church or not. I must … I must be seen … by all the others.”
“So, I’ll wake you at ten?”
“Ten?”
“The service is at eleven o’clock and it’s only a five-minute walk to the church for us.”
“Ten o’clock?” Clarissa had gone from red to white. “I can’t get ready if I’m not awake till ten. Nine, Mother, nine o’clock. I don’t want to show up at church looking as if I spent the night tramping around the woods in a blizzard.”
“Why, you’ll get less than five hours sleep.”
“That’s enough. I don’t need more than that. I’m young.” She suddenly scowled. “He thought I was sixteen. Sixteen. Can you imagine? What a blackguard.”
She wolfed down the soup and cider and was up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom in six or seven minutes with a candle in its holder. After placing it on a nightstand and changing into a green flannel nightgown, one that was a match for her eyes when she was in a gentle mood, she stepped to the window and pulled back the curtain just enough to look out. It was still black as a pot of tar, but the white snowflakes pierced the dark like needles. She had insisted on having a bedroom in the highest part of the house since she’d been nine, but her parents had been reluctant to put her in the garret. Eventually, as in most things, she had gotten her way, and her father had fixed up what until then had been no more than a storage attic, including the pasting up of wallpaper with a variety of colored birds on it, and had also made a new bed in the shape of a sleigh for her.
Clarissa loved the privacy and seclusion of the garret. It helped her gather new strength and direction after long nights of rushing escaped slaves across the roughest regions of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Lingering at the window, she made out various houses and buildings and could see the cupola of her Lutheran church, swirling with flakes of snow as if they were wildly spinning moths and the cupola a flame. It was exactly like the cupola on the nearby Lutheran seminary except it was a lot smaller. Watching the cupola in its whirlwind of snow and darkness, her mind remained with the Lutheran seminary’s cupola and then shifted to the students who had rooms in the building beneath it. Kyle Forrester took front and center stage. Tall, strong, dark brown hair, a trim beard and mustache, lovely gray eyes, a smile that made her weak—and no one ever made her weak. She looked out the window, no longer seeing the storm or the cupola, and savored her memories of Kyle the way she would savor a Scotch mint in her mouth.
“Oh Kyle,” she whispered, still standing at the window. “Be there, please, be at the church. God, Father, I need him there. I need him at the worship service tomorrow.”
Clarissa’s eyes and mind returned to the streets, to the carriage and furniture shops, the banks, the law offices, to the tanneries of the town she loved, so sweet and cozy and happily nestled into the ten roads that ran into it. As if the town were the center of all local existence. And it is, she thought, and so is he, so far as I’m concerned. Finally, she eased herself under the sheets and under the quilt the Amish had gifted her with for her work on what they called the Freedom Train. She loved the pattern of stars and locomotives. The quilt was heavy and snug, and her eyelids immediately began to droop. Her feet touched a thick blanket under the sheets that was wrapped around a hard and hot object. She smiled and pressed her toes into it, and her whole body quivered with delight. The brick her father had promised her. She would be fast asleep before it lost its heat from the stove.
A train was gliding along smooth steel tracks. Its smoke puffed gray and dark over the stars in the night sky. There was Ursa Major. And there was the North Star. It was stitched into her quilt too. Impossible to miss. She slipped like a shadow through the woods. But she was so tired. Eventually, she called for a stop and told the escaped slaves with her to sit and catch their breath and eat some of the bread and bacon she’d given them. Except she never thought of them as slaves and always referred to them as freedmen, pointing out that in the Genesis account in the Bible, man meant both male and female: “‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’”
Her lips moved in the dark, reciting the verse.
“You are all freedmen.” She spoke out loud, eyes closed, half-asleep. “Each one of you. And you always were. No matter what others say or do. You are as free as the birds. Free as the sea. Free as the north wind. As free as me.”
And she slept under the tree in the woods, and the snow covered her like a blanket, and she felt warm, not cold, and her feet found the brick in the snow, and she purred like a cat and was content and never dreamed anymore after that.
True to her promise, although she performed her task reluctantly, Clarissa’s mother woke her at nine and poured hot water into the basin on her daughter’s washstand. Clarissa was up in an instant, tugged aside the curtain, saw a white street and white rooftops sparkling in the sun under a sky as blue as a gemstone, grinned like a twelve-year-old,
skipped to the washstand, and began to clean her face and hands.
“There is a bowl of oats for you downstairs,” her mother announced. “Good morning, my dear.”
“Good morning.” Clarissa splashed. “With walnuts? And demerara sugar?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t be a minute.”
“Would you like me to brush out your hair?”
“Yes. After I eat.”
“And what dress can I get ready for you?” her mother asked.
“Oh, the jade one,” Clarissa responded, wiping her face with a towel. “It goes with my mood, and it only has six hoops. Which also goes with my mood.”
“Six hoops always go with your moods, any mood, Clarissa Avery.”
Clarissa laughed. “Well, that’s because I’m not a lady. I prefer riding pants.”
“But you can be a lady when you put your mind to it.”
Clarissa made a sour face. “It takes too much of my mind. And then there’s nothing left for any other thoughts.”
“Nevertheless, you play the lady in church.”
Clarissa nodded. “That’s true. I’m happy to do it there. For God. For you. For the other parishioners.”
“For young Mr. Forrester.”
Again, blood rushed to Clarissa’s white face, framed in a tangle of flaming red hair, at the mention of his name. “You said he might not be there.”
“He might not.”
“So, I’ll still play the Pennsylvania lady even if he isn’t.”
A half hour later, Clarissa was soaking in a tub. The steam made her crimson hair curl even more, if that were possible. Her mother began to brush it out the minute her daughter had toweled herself dry.
“Look at those curls.” Her mother smiled as she plied the hairbrush vigorously. “No wonder heads turn when you walk through Gettysburg.”