Chasing the North Star

by Robert Morgan

  And then Jonah saw the boys. They were barefoot and wore overalls held up by only one gallus. They wore straw hats and were skipping rocks into the river, making flat rocks hop across the surface of the splashing stream. Jonah stayed near the middle of the river, far from the boys who stood by the east end of the bridge hurling rock after rock. The rocks lit sparks of splash across the water, as if something invisible was dashing across on tiptoe.

  It was too late to swing over to the west side of the river. Jonah paddled faster, trying to ignore the boys. The rocks they threw skipped in front of the boat and one hit the side of the craft. He didn’t dare yell at the boys or go to the shore to confront them. Nothing could be stupider than to get into a fight with white boys. They’d see the clay and see that he was African. But if he ignored them they might think that was strange also.

  Jonah kept his head low and paddled hard. Rocks came dancing across the water in front of him and beside him. Another rock thunked again on the side of the boat. He held the paddle in his right hand and raised his fist at the boys. They laughed and yelled and pumped their right arms at him. He was within ten yards of the bridge when a rock bounded across the water as if the river was made of rubber and smacked him on the cheek. Jonah’s face stung and he tasted blood in his mouth. He spat and heard the boys laughing. Tears welled in his eyes, and he was glad he was so far from the bank no one could see the tears. The tears would melt the clay around his eyes.

  Another rock danced over the river and hit Angel square on the shoulder. “Ouch!” she said and rubbed the place that had been hit. She shook her fist at the boys on the bank and turned to look back at Jonah. “See how much good your white clay does.”

  The bridge ahead was blurred by his tears, but he aimed between two sets of pillars in the middle of the stream. As he shot under the planks, hooves and wagon wheels thundered above him. And when he came out into the sunlight again he saw the boys following him along the east bank. Thrilled by their success at hitting him and Angel and the boat, they ran along the bank scooping up more rocks. “Hey!” he called to them and shook his fist, and the boys yelled back and slapped their knees. They threw rock after rock, and one landed in the boat and one hit him on the knee, but it had run out of speed and didn’t hurt much. The current was sweeping them away and the boys couldn’t catch up. Besides, they’d had their fun, and were ready to turn to some fresh amusement. Jonah spat out bloody spit. His jaw hurt and he hoped the rock hadn’t broken a tooth or a bone. More likely it had bruised the gum and made it bleed. He dared not wash his cheek or mouth with river water. The river was moving faster and he couldn’t take his eyes away from the rocks and snags. He paddled ahead of the current. As he came around a bend he saw the town ahead. There were houses on both banks, but more on the east bank. It must be Asheville, he thought.

  In the bright daylight Jonah guided the boat just where he wanted to go. He could twist the paddle to the left or right to guide it. After two days he was sure of his strokes and shot the boat around rocks and dropped through charging chutes. His skill with the paddle gave him new confidence. At this rate he could go many miles in a day. He was moving fast in the right direction. All he needed was to get rid of his passenger.

  “Is that Asheville?” he said.

  “Don’t you know nothing?” Angel said. “Sure it’s Asheville.”

  A long, low building ran along the bank on his right, a warehouse of some sort. And beyond that, houses and brick buildings clustered on top of a hill. The banks were high as bluffs, and Jonah saw only three or four docks down by the water. He kept to the middle of the river, which tore itself apart on snags and gulped around rocks, gathering speed. He wiped more blood from his lip.

  If God sees everything and foresees everything, then he must have foreseen I’d be hit by that rock, Jonah thought. If God is all-powerful, as preachers say, that must mean he intended for me to be hit by the rock. It was a thought so scary, he couldn’t get his mind around it. If he followed that logic, it meant that God wanted him to be hurt. If God controlled everything, then he must have wanted Mr. Williams to accuse him of stealing and whip him. And God must want some people to be slaves and some to be masters. If God was in charge of everything, then he must know how much cruelty there was, and how hard most people’s lives were. And he must have meant for fat Angel to get in his boat and slow him down.

  Jonah rubbed his cheek and was already tired from thinking such thoughts. There must be something wrong with his logic, for the plan of things could not be as crazy as these thoughts made it seem. Why would everybody be brought into the world to suffer? It seemed that if there was a secret to things, that secret was cruelty. He paddled hard around rocks as the river seemed to move faster. The stream appeared to be running away from itself faster than a man could walk. He dodged a snag sticking up out of the riverbed. The river was running away as he was running away. The river was his partner. He guided the boat with an assurance that surprised him.

  “Ain’t you gone let me paddle?” Angel called back.

  “No time to let you paddle.”

  “There’ll be time if you hit a rock,” Angel said. “Plenty of time then.”

  As the river gathered speed beyond Asheville, it seemed to have a different smell. Above the town the water had the scent of dirt and rotting leaves and sticks. It was the smell of mud. But below the town the smell was darker, in raw and seething white water, but with a hint of filth, as if something foul had spilled out of the ditches from the town into the river. He didn’t see any filth, but the water appeared to be darker, as if it had soot in it.

  Woe to us, Jonah whispered as he plunged into the gorge that wound between steep mountains. The river was going faster, and he paddled faster to stay ahead of the tide. If the current could catch the boat crossways, it would turn it over. The river moved at different speeds in different sections. He tried to find the zone where the boat could be controlled best. He shifted from one section to another, keeping the boat pointed downstream.

  By the time it began to get dark, they were far down the river. When he came to a long stretch with no houses or cleared land in sight, he paddled to the shore and pulled the boat up on the bank.

  “What you gone do now?” Angel said.

  “I’m going to catch some fish,” Jonah said.

  “Then I’ll build us a fire,” Angel said.

  He turned over rocks until he found some earthworms, and then he tied the fishing line to a stick and baited the hook. It took him half an hour to catch two fish, a trout about ten inches long, and one about twelve.

  Without a knife it was hard to clean the fish. But he managed to rip open the belly with a stick and rake the guts out. He couldn’t scrape away the scales without a blade, so he pulled the skin off a piece at a time. With the grease on his hands he rubbed off some of the scabs of pine pitch. And then he washed his hands and saw Angel had made a fire to roast both fish and corn.

  “You took my money and my knife last night,” Jonah said.

  “Wasn’t me,” Angel said.

  “Now I got no knife,” Jonah said.

  “But you got me to help,” Angel said and laughed.

  The corn was not fresh but the fish was, and both tasted mighty sweet. He took the bigger fish and gave Angel the smaller one. They ate the corn between them. Then he washed his hands again and broke open the cantaloupe on the edge of the boat. The melon flesh was warm but very sweet. Jonah gave half to Angel and ate until he was full and began to be sleepy. But before he slept he knew he had to plan his strategy for tomorrow. He’d eaten all his rations and he had no money and no knife. However, he did have the tablet and pencil. He was going to have to be smart and think of some way to use them.

  “Put out the fire,” he said.

  “I want to sit by the fire,” Angel said.

  “You want everybody passing by to see us here?”

  Jonah put out the fire and they sat in the dark listening to the river. The river sounded like hundreds
of people talking in low voices, maybe praying, maybe telling stories or gossiping. Whatever it was saying, the stream wasn’t speaking to him. The river talked its own talk and ignored him. Maybe it was the ghosts of Indians that once lived on the banks talking. Jonah wished he was a hundred times smarter and a thousand times luckier than he was.

  A plan began to form in his mind, a scary plan, that went something like this: he’d have to find the name of a landowner out in the country and go into town pretending to be a servant to the landowner. It would have to be an owner far out in the country, for all the slaves closer to town would be known. He’d have to write a note that was convincing, otherwise he’d be arrested for attempting to steal. The note would have to read: “Please give this boy ten dollars from my account,” and it would be signed with the name of the plantation owner in such a quick scrawl it would be hard to read.

  His scheme was dangerous because it required him to go into a town in daylight and walk into a bank. He could easily be cornered there and seized. And there was always a chance that the signature he scrawled would not resemble the landowner’s. It was such a risky plan that outright stealing from gardens and chicken houses might be safer. But he needed money for a knife and more matches, for shoes and bread. The alternative would be to go into a house looking for money, or to rob the till of a little store.

  And he had to think what to do about Angel. As long as she was with him, everything was more complicated. But maybe he could think of some way she could be helpful to his plan. Angel had laid down on the other side of the dead fire and she’d been so quiet he thought she might be asleep. Remembering the night before, he reached over to touch her. He wanted to raise her gown over her hips. As long as they were traveling together, he might as well make the most of it.

  “What you doing, boy?” Angel said and pushed his hand away.

  “Last night you were more friendly,” Jonah said.

  “Last night be jubilee,” Angel said. “Just because I come with you don’t mean I be your concubine.” Concubine was a word he knew from the Scriptures. It surprised him to hear Angel say it.

  “I bet you can’t even read,” Jonah said.

  “I can read your mind well enough,” Angel said.

  Jonah lay for a long time in the dark thinking how strange it was to have gone to jubilee and to have Angel beside him now. Nothing turned out the way you expected it to. He tried to reconsider his plans, and dropped off to sleep still studying his schemes.

  THE NEXT MORNING AS soon as there was light Jonah woke and saw Angel was already up and in the boat. She sat in the front like she was determined not to be left behind. “How long have you been up?” he said.

  “Long enough to see how lazy you is,” she said.

  She’d made a little fire, but there was nothing to cook over the flames unless he caught more fish. He knew he should get on down the river. Jonah put the fire out and pushed the boat off into the river and began paddling. His hands were still sore, but he worked steadily, avoiding the worst shoals, staying near the middle of the river, watching the stream ahead and the fields and ridges on either side as they came into view. As it got lighter he saw there was a heavy dew, and the first sun made the fields sparkle. He saw women milking cows at pasture gaps, and men chopping kindling wood. He passed a Negro woman starting a fire under a washpot. Farther on some men were cutting hay with scythes. They stepped and swung the blades in unison like people dancing together. And then a town hove into view. First there were a few houses close together along the road and riverbank. Then he saw a steeple, and another taller steeple. There was a brick building that must be a courthouse. Houses stood so close together, there must not be gardens between them. A landing pier stuck out into the river. From the boat he could see a tan yard, where leather soaked in troughs of acid, and a blacksmith shop. There was another, smaller church, and a store with flowers planted in front of it.

  “Ain’t you gone stop here and get something to eat?” Angel said.

  “Won’t do no good to stop here in broad daylight,” Jonah said.

  “Do you mean us to starve to death?”

  “I got a plan,” Jonah said.

  “Yeah? I want to see your plan.”

  As Jonah paddled beyond the town, looking for a place to land where no one would see him, he began to think how hard it would be to follow through with his scheme. How would he find out the name of a plantation owner out in the country without asking people in town or at other farms? If he had to ask around he’d raise suspicions. If he didn’t have the right name the people in the bank would not be fooled.

  But would they give money to a black boy in any case? Jonah began to see how far-fetched his plan really was. In his dirty, smelly clothes they’d run him out of the bank anyway. No matter what kind of note he wrote, they’d chase him away in his ragged, dirty overalls. They might call the constable and put him in chains, for all would see he was a stranger. By the time Jonah found a place where he could go ashore, he’d decided his only hope was to break into a store and find some clothes and a knife and perhaps a little money. If he stole only a little money maybe it wouldn’t be missed. And if he stole only a few clothes and a pocketknife they might not be missed either. A country store would be the best bet, for he could hide in the woods until dark and there would be few houses around it. And even if he was seen in a country store, he might be able to escape into the woods.

  Jonah paddled on down the river, and after about an hour he saw a road running along the edge of the fields on the east bank. Far ahead a large white building stood by the road, and as he got closer he saw a sign over the doorway: CHITWOOD’S GENERAL MERCHANDISE. A horse and wagon were stopped in front of the store. A kind of shed stood beside the white building, maybe a cow stall or workshop. Jonah continued down the river for at least a mile, then paddled to the right bank, where a branch entered the river between birch trees and hazelnut bushes. He got out and pulled the boat up on the bank.

  “You stay here while I go to that store to get some things,” he said.

  “How long you be gone? I come with you.”

  “If you come we’ll both be caught,” Jonah said. “You’re a jinx on my journey.”

  “You ain’t done too well on your own.”

  “I’ve made it this far,” Jonah said. “You keep your fat butt here while I get some supplies.”

  “You the man,” Angel said and laughed. “Reckon you the big boss man.”

  Jonah took off his clothes and washed himself in the branch water as thoroughly as he could. The clay melted away with washing, but some was left in the pores of his skin. His arms were dotted with gray spots the size of pinheads. When he was as clean as he could make himself, Jonah found his way through the woods to the edge of the field behind the store. There was no place to hide in front of the store, so he had to watch it from the back. From behind some sumac bushes he saw people on foot and horseback, in buggies and wagons, stop at the store. The building beside the store was indeed a little barn where the store owner kept his cow and horse. A set of stairs in back of the store led up to the second story, and Jonah figured the owner and his family must live there. He’d have to break into the store while the owner was upstairs.

  Late in the afternoon Jonah dashed to a haystack closer to the store. He watched the owner’s wife come out and milk the cow and draw water from the well. She gathered eggs from the little henhouse and scattered corn on the ground for the chickens. After she went back inside Jonah could smell bread baking and meat cooking. He was so hungry he felt sick. A little later a man, who Jonah thought must be the storekeeper, came out the back door and locked it. He placed the key under a bucket that sat beside the stairs to the second story. Jonah could hardly believe his luck: he’d seen the key, and knew where it was hidden.

  While he was concealed in the dusty hay, time stalled and drifted. He watched lights appear in the second story and he listened to whip-poor-wills in the trees by the river. A man on horseback thumped al
ong the road, and chickens clucked and quieted in the henhouse. A dog sniffed around the stairs and then trotted out of sight. Jonah dared not approach the store until all lights were out. His only hope was to wait until the storekeeper and his wife were asleep. Even then he’d have to move an inch at a time through the dark, hoping the dog didn’t return. The minutes passed so slowly, he wondered if time could pause in its tracks and go backward. Was time just something you only thought of, and not an actual substance itself?

  Finally the light went out in an upper room of the store building. Jonah waited for a few minutes more and then stepped out from behind the haystack, his legs stiff from crouching and kneeling so long. Slow now, he whispered to himself. He tried to recall the way the yard looked in daylight, the place of the woodpile and washpot, the clothesline. He’d have to move so slowly that even if he ran into something it wouldn’t make any noise.

  A dog barked down the road and the whip-poor-will called again from the trees along the river. A horse moved about in the stall. Something snapped in the field behind him, as if someone had stepped on a stick or dry weed stalk. He paused and listened, but the noise didn’t come again. Jonah had almost reached the stairs when a window opened on the left side of the second story. There was a whisper and splash and Jonah guessed the storekeeper was pissing from his bedroom window. When the swishing stopped he waited for several more minutes, until he thought he heard snoring through the open window.

  His foot touched the bucket by the stairs and the metal rang a little. Jonah stood perfectly still and counted to a hundred, then he reached under the bucket and found the key. Feeling his way along the wall, he touched the door and located the keyhole. Once the key was in place, he turned it cautiously. The lock must have been old and rusty, for the wards groaned and rattled. The key froze as if blocked, and he had to jiggle it to make it turn farther.

  As soon as the door was unlocked he replaced the key under the bucket. He planned to leave the store by the front door if he could, and when he closed the door he locked it from inside. The storekeeper must never suspect anyone had entered. The store smelled of harness and coffee and cloth, as most such stores did. There was also the scent of rope and molasses. Jonah knew he couldn’t feel his way around the store without knocking something over. There would be too many things to trip on or send crashing to the floor. He struck a match and saw the racks of clothes, the shelves of cloth, the hoes and rakes. First he’d find the money, and then he’d take some clothes. He’d not be greedy, but select only things he needed most. With luck the storekeeper might never miss them.