Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  October 18

  Laura Sue Hunter

  Mint Springs Farm

  Staunton, Virginia

  Dear Laura Sue:

  I am glad to hear the news, but I ask you, what does it mean that your brother’s taking a shot at your beau is the occasion for your marrying him? How far we have come from the Southern Ideal, in which, I seem to recall, the women tearfully tried to restrain the men from their Duels, instead of rewarding them? Or perhaps I had it backward. Seriously, little sister, please accept my Congratulations, and my apologies for all that was said before. My compliments, also, to my future brother-in-law and former Adversary. With luck, I will be home by Thanks Giving. How is Father? I fear the worst.

  Your Loving Brother,

  Thomas (Targetus)

  Our second trip was a week later, and started like the first. I met Cricket at the firehouse at midnight, and we picked up the lantern, and two miles down the road, at the little whitewashed Westall’s Road church, crouching under the steps, the revolver. Cricket waited until then to put the mask on my face and warn me again to say absolutely nothing. This time our contact waited in the bushes near the ford of Greasy Creek, not waiting for the cooing dove but coming out of the bushes eagerly. “Liberty,” he said, getting (I think) the password backward; this time it was Cricket who answered, “Death.” He was a man of about thirty, a stooped, mournful slave disfigured from a whipping, whom I had seen around Charles Town on Sundays. “Hey, sport,” he said, reaching for the side of my head as if to scratch it, as men do to boys when no dogs are around; but Cricket slapped his hand. The slap was startlingly loud and must have stung. No words, Cricket said, with no words. The man had a gun that Cricket reached for and handed to me. This was no English fowling piece. It was a loose old trade musket, the stock split and held together with wire. But it had a cap fitted, so I guessed it was loaded. Again Cricket poured small stones down the barrel and tamped them with a biscuit before trusting me with it. Insurance again—not only that the gun was loaded, but that I couldn’t miss anything at close range. Things were a little grim after the slap, and we paraded through the night in single file, in perfect silence, Cricket in front, the man in the middle, and I at their back with the shotgun. The moon sank behind the Cumberlands far to the west, and the valley put on the darkness like its own black mask. We kept to the road with one eye on the fence rows. The only place we were in danger of getting caught out was at Iron Bridge, across the Shenandoah, where if the paddy rollers came we would have no place to hide: bad for both them and us, since I had resolved to kill at least one slaver before I traded this soldiering for death; but we were across and in the dark wood-shaded road on the other side in less than a minute. We were taking a different route to the same quarry, I guessed. At a steep cut, Cricket swung up off the road into the laurel on an invisible trail. Our ‘traveler’ hesitated; “Go on,” I said before remembering I wasn’t supposed to talk. The two of us were alone. The older man turned and looked at me, then grinned and followed Cricket. Unlike the woman the night before, he was careful not to snap the branches back in my face. I wished Cricket hadn’t been so hot-blooded and slapped him. We ended up in the same quarry, entering from a different side: I could tell, even though this time it was pitch black. We picked our way across and around huge boulders with square edges, white and ghostly; I could make out their shapes, even though we couldn’t see them; and sat down on a flat rock somewhere near the center of the space. I was all ears, curious to discover what signal Cricket was waiting for before lighting his light. We sat silently. Cricket broke a dry biscuit and handed us both a piece. The ‘traveler’ fumbled in his pocket and I smelled tobacco. He struck a match and Cricket just as suddenly struck it out of his hand, whispering, “Fool.” In one of those inexplicable acts of prescience by which our individual destinies are shaped, I pulled back the lock of the gun. It was quiet again. I ate my biscuit. Then suddenly we were jumped from behind. I heard Cricket groan and go down hard. I twisted away from a claw that held my shoulder and smelled the sharp unwashed smell of white men as I rolled backward off the rock, my feet reaching for the sky. The gun went off, I don’t know how—I had neither the presence of mind nor the control to fire it—and there was a scream. There was another shot. My feet found dirt and I lit out running. Somehow I found the woods, or perhaps I should say they found me, taking me into their dark enfolding arms as a woman takes up a terrified child, while behind me a white man screamed, “My eye, my God, I’m shot, my eye, my God, my eye!” Another voice screamed, “Shut him up, by God!” All this screaming about God made me realize my own eyes were shut; I opened them, but I couldn’t see; yet I knew perfectly where to go. I slipped like a shadow between two rotten logs and lay breathing, listening desperately for Cricket’s footsteps behind me, in front of me, or at least his voice somewhere; but I heard nothing. I thought then they had cracked his skull. I heard our ‘traveler’ say: There was a little one, there was a little one! And I knew—I had already known it—that he had betrayed us. The white man was still screaming. “Shut him up,” another said. “Shoot him?” another asked. “No, God d— it, just shut him up.” I don’t know what they did, but there was silence. Then, startlingly, there was another shot and a voice yelled, “What? Are you shot? God d—, he shot the other ‘nigger’!” “I thought he was out.” “Don’t kill him, don’t kill him.” Chillingly, I heard Cricket groan again. Then the others talked more calmly, “Let me tie this ‘nigger’ up and get Will to the doctor.” . . . “Help me drag him.” . . . “Where’s Harrison with that God d— mule?” . . . “Help me tie this ‘nigger’ on that mule.” “Forget him, the back of his head is gone.” Gone. I knew then that they had killed Cricket, and while they were still making noise I slipped away, leaving the gun which I had no way to reload, to rot forever under the logs. It was six miles to Charles Town, and I was all the way in the fence rows. I arrived at dawn with my arms slashed and bleeding from the blackberry bushes. I was amazingly calm and clear-minded, as if I had just awakened from a dream. My mind was as empty as a turned-over washbasin; it rang like tin. I knew the betrayer had known me and would be coming to get me, but it never occurred to me to run, not with Cricket dead. All I could think of was to sell my life dear. I re-stole Deihl’s old horse pistol, primed it, cocked it, loaded it with ‘insurance,’ and climbed with it into the corner of the hayloft just as the sun was coming up. There I must have fallen asleep. I woke up hearing boys shouting in the street. It was afternoon. They were bringing Cricket into town on a wagon in chains, while boys raced after him, shouting he was going to hang, hang, hang. It wasn’t Cricket who was dead but our ‘traveler,’ our betrayer, whom he had shot. Thus he had saved my life. Luckily Deihl was down the Valley, and it was Mama who found me in the barn and put me behind the stove in the kitchen, where I slept all night, she said, tossing and muttering in what the old Africans call ‘conjure dreams,’ in which your dreaming self is awake. In the dreams Cricket was dead again, and John Brown was an old woman, like a granny woman, an African; and she carried him through the door of the house, over and over, as they do when a woman dies in childbirth, to free the baby’s spirit so she can’t keep him with her in death, for the dead are jealous. But Cricket wouldn’t wake up. Wouldn’t wake up. Wouldn’t wake up.

  It had quit raining by the time Yasmin neared the top of the ridge. The wind was blowing the clouds away like leaves, and the leaves away like clouds. Now there was almost a view, but she wasn’t interested. Where was that child? She was glad she had come ahead. Grissom had quit trying to talk her out of climbing the mountain once she had convinced him that (a) walking was good for pregnancy and (b) it was her daughter up there, so she was determined to go. He had given her two raincoats and a map, dropped her halfway up the mountain where a road crossed the trail, then driven in her car to Bear Pond Gap to wait, so they could drive down instead of walking.

  Yasmin felt like a Jewish mother on a vid comedy, chasing her daughter with a raincoat through t
he rain. The odd thing was, she liked it. Her legs felt strong, and the fire in her belly seemed to warm her, float her over the stones rather than slow her down, as she’d thought it might (without telling Grissom). As she neared the top of the ridge, she could make out the valley below, looking scrubbed in the new sunlight peeping out between the clouds and the Cumberlands far to the west. Only an hour or two of daylight was left. Was she going to get stuck up here in the dark?

  She should have called Staunton.

  Where was that child?

  The trail wound through a little nest of rocks before leveling out at what looked like the top, and Yasmin, no lover of nature, wondered: what if there’s a bear? She went ahead. It wasn’t a bear she heard, but a sound as ancient and elemental.

  She heard a child crying.

  I think the hardest lesson I ever learned was that war was not, nor was it ever meant to be, nor could it be bent to be, the answer to a boy’s prayer. I learned this when they hung Cricket on Sunday afternoon, October 23, 1859, at 1:00 P.M. By noon the square was filled with white folks. They do love a hanging. Not just the Kentuck and Tennessee roughnecks I knew every day from Mama’s (and if they only knew it, probably from the quarry as well), but the little old churchgoing ladies, their baskets filled with beaten biscuits and chicken wings, their whiskers floured with disappearing powder; and the children, the white boys my age: all of my rivals and allies from those long-ago times when we spent afternoons chucking rocks at toads set loose on shingles on the river: as long ago as Adam and Eve, and sic transit terror, the toads at least were thankful. They were exactly one half hour off on the time. At half past noon the marshals brought Cricket out from the back of the jail. They mostly dragged him; he couldn’t walk. Mama found out later when we buried him they had cut off his toes and botched it; had done it clumsily, poorly, incompletely, like everything those despicable sorry crackers did. With a dull ax. His face was swollen and his eyes were almost swollen shut. His hands were tied behind his back over a short pole so that he looked at first as if he were going to be crucified. I hardly recognized him. Perversely, I was glad. I was afraid he would see me and signal me to help him, and then what would I do? We had a hundred signals but none for this. But Cricket made it much easier than that for me. He looked like a sleepwalker, oblivious to the whole ceremony. In fact, I think the hard part was over, for him, and the hanging was a welcome end. Lee’s bailiff read an order, and there was a smooth drum roll (they always managed that well), and the crowd hushed and surged forward, although many on the street still passed by on their normal everyday business. This was, after all, the Shenandoah in late 1859 and hanging a ‘nigger’ was hardly an occasion. There was a wide gallows on the square, left up from last week when a man and his wife and her father had all swung together. The hangmen were all white. They wouldn’t use black hangmen until later in the war. I was so confused and agitated that I searched the crowd in vain for the black Judas that had betrayed us, then remembered that I was alive because he was dead; that the shot I thought had killed Cricket had killed him; and that Cricket had shot him and saved my life, because he knew me. I forced myself to look at Cricket’s battered face and grew very conscious of the scratches on my face and arms from my flight through the fence rows. In terror (again) I backed up and looked all around me, but white folks never notice anything about us except our attitude toward them. Understand, great-grandson, at this point I was not myself (or perhaps I was): I was at the same moment angry, scared, vengeful, and even confident: like a church organ some madman was playing, with every stop open and every pipe surging with a different emotion, all unknown and new. How many must ever watch a brother hang? (For I was to find out later that very day that Cricket was not my cousin but my brother.) Mixed with my terror was hope, from my conjure dream. I knew Brown had a plan, else why the dream? The weed of hope grows wild in the soil of desperation. I wanted to catch Cricket’s eye and tell him not to give up, that Brown and Tubman would never let him die, but I was too far back in the crowd. I had been backing away and now I could barely see him. I slipped forward through the crowd, making myself small, as kids can still do at twelve, until I was at the front, by the scaffold. Too close now. Cricket’s eyes were blank like a dead man’s. He stared off toward the Blue Ridge, where there was no fire that day, and seemed to feel and hear nothing. Two white men held his stick while a third bent down and tied his feet. It looked like a scene from the Bible, and I have never wondered since why those bloodthirsty crackers loved that book so well, that encyclopedia of torments; it is their favorite story. I moved back into the crowd, now afraid Cricket would see me, point at me, call like a dove, give me away. My blood was pounding: fear, hate, love. I was listening for that sweet rolling thunder of horses, like the night at Green Gables. I was waiting for the crack of Sharps carbines. I scanned the rooftops where Lee’s marines stood looking down, bored, never suspecting that in a second, or maybe two, black hands would cover their faces while knives opened their throats like books for the sky to read. Oh, did I yearn for that blood! I heard a whicker and a creak of harness behind me, and I turned, almost expecting to see that African warrior I had mounted on Sees Her, his face a storm of righteousness, his Sharps like held lightning. But it was only old Isaac the milk horse who had heard, I now believe, the Angel of Death fly over. Those dry wings. I turned back and my dreams were gone. The crowd was gasping, thrilled, and they were hanging Cricket. I would have screamed, but there was no scream in my throat to scream; like Cricket, I couldn’t breathe. I ran backward, my arms flapping at my eyes, sucking for air, then hit a Kentuck’s bony knee and fell sprawling. He bent down and lifted me up, but not as a man lifts a fallen child. No: grinning. As easily as if I were a four-year-old, he lofted me high over his shoulder, saying to his friends: Let’s give this little ‘nigger’ a better look. Another took my feet and they pushed me forward even as Cricket was spinning, spinning, spinning at the edge of the air. There was no John Brown. No Tubman. No Sees Her. Cricket’s one good eye was open now, and bright, as if hanging restored rather than took away life. I got my breath and screamed, and he saw me:

  I don’t imagine this, great-grandson, but know it for a certainty; his one opened eye caught mine in a look so unalarmed, so unhurt, so deep and forgiving and sweet that my terror departed me all of a sudden, in a rush; and I vomited all over the matty hair and smelly deerskins of the Kentuck who was holding me up. He yelled and dropped me like a camp potato. I hit on my feet and ran sideways through the crowd while they laughed, not at me but at their friend, who was shaking my vomit out of his greasy locks. I looked back once at Cricket to apologize for Brown and Tubman and myself, but Cricket was dead again, this time forever. Spinning slowly as he would spin forever. Home, I crept into the house and stole the ragged old quilt from the dog’s bed behind the wood stove. I was shaking with fear and horror and hatred, like a fever, sick again. Mama called from out front, but I didn’t answer. I went and hid in the barn and she came to find me. That night she told me my true, secret story: that Cricket was my brother, not my cousin, and that she was not my true mother but my aunt. (Thus, legally, I belonged not to Deihl but to old man Calhoun.) I didn’t want to hear it. Shivering with rage and fever, I kept waiting for her to leave. That night the fire on the mountain burned as if nothing had happened, as cold and distant as a star. I hated it. I hated Brown. I hated Mama and even Cricket. I hated all black people.

  November 1859

  Miss Emily Pern

  Queens Dispensary

  Bath, England

  Dear Emily:

  I admit that I was as disappointed by the contents of your letter, as I was eager for its arrival. You say that you treasure friends like me far more than suitors, with their wearisome declarations. You are responding, though you are too kind to say it, to my overly bold confession the night before my duel. I was in the fevered state of the Condemned, and now I wish I had been either more, or less, direct.

  But I will not apologize for admir
ing you.

  So I reap my just reward: neither refused nor encouraged, a state appropriate indeed to my political position here.

  I expected to be gone from here by Thanksgiving, but we won’t make it. Our supplies were discovered and destroyed, even the wagon, and two of our number beaten by Copperheads; none killed. We must now replace it all. It is doubly difficult for me since I can perform no role in these events but must play the proper Virginia gentleman.

  Things here in the City of Brotherly Love are violent and degraded by turns. Last night a mob of Copperheads raided a lecture by Mr. Martin Delaney (who has not held back from support for Tubman and Brown) but were beaten off by the ‘Friends of David Walker,’ a militia that includes a few whites as well as the free black longshoremen who are the stern guardians of Abolitionism in this city, and the main reason why the reactionaries have not carried the day.

  Levasseur, since leaving for England two months ago, has fallen into a great Silence. Tell him, if you see him, he must write. We had twenty Englishmen here this week, calling themselves Charterists, disguised as immigrants for the Kansan Plain. Stout, both of principle and arms. Word is that a forty-five-ton sloop has been outfitted in Port-au-Prince for the Sea Islands of Carolina with munition, marines, and Toussaint’s famed Jacobin Mule mountain cavalry. These are Haiti’s best, and when they hit the South, God help slavery if indeed God loves it as much as the preachers allude. We hear that a brigade of Garibaldini are striking into Texas from Matamoras; they are expected to move North into what we call the South (and the Mexicans, el Norte) now that the Republica has been declared. There has been little fighting yet, the Texans apparently remembering the Alamo quite well, and in its true character, as a drubbing. Whether these Mexican Republicans intend merely to regain Texas or move deeper into the South is the question. In California, the Chinese, imported to slog the Railroads like the Irish here in the East, have joined with the Republicans, to re-raise the Bear Flag. The Irish in Baltimore are refusing to load tobacco for England. Emily, our dear Abolitionism has taken on an International as well as Revolutionary character!