Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  “Hello, we just heard it on the radio, we’re on Mars! The Lion has landed.”

  Alarming even herself, Yasmin burst into tears.

  Doc, for that is what he had me call him, and I beat south for two days, using the roads when we could and the fields when we couldn’t. I had not yet passed from the shrewd clarity of the old child into the ignorant opacity of the young man, so I knew that Doc was not exactly what he seemed, though I didn’t suspect that he was an actual abolitionist—the same surgeon I would later serve as assistant On the Mountain. He was even blinder than I, though. I had fooled him into thinking that I was good with horses; all that remained was to fool the horses, which was not difficult. The first morning out of Charles Town, he saved me from paddy rollers by posing as my master, the role of the Virginia gentleman coming pretty easy to him. The country was filled with bandits. In Winchester, I watched several thugs eye the wagon, which was filled with costly medical supplies—which I was determined to steal myself and deliver, somehow, to Brown and Tubman; as a hero, though I hadn’t quite worked out the details. The irony was that the Doc was delivering them to the rebels himself, but I didn’t know that. That morning while the Doc was relieving himself (in a thicket: the Virginia gentleman), I double-loaded his two pistols, which were already primed and loaded, with a handful of insurance (gravel) and tamped them with a biscuit, following Cricket’s trick, which had saved me once and was to serve again. That afternoon the Doc delivered a child, with me helping. He had a gentle way about him. The mother was little more than a child herself, and it was extremely sad; the baby born dead. A boy. I was right to expect bandits; I was, as it happened, napping under a blanket in the back of the Townerley when a gang stopped us. I woke to hear the Doc trying to bluff them down, but with little success. Peeking out from under the blanket, I counted four, in torchlight. I had removed the pistols from their walnut case, and when the bandit leader made his move, I fired into his face, which was lighted with a torch. He screamed (all the men I killed that year screamed) and fell backward with his boot twisted in the stirrup. Our Morgans lunged forward, and I fell. In the moonlight I could see the bandit’s horse dragging him through a downed fence of that new barbwire from Baltimore that was going up all over the Valley, then stopping for the others. There were no shots from them, and no further pursuit, my guess being that they were not real highwaymen but soldiers, plundering and less than anxious to be discovered. At the same time they dropped behind us, so did the night, and it was dawn, or at least its beginning, dawn’s dawn. The Doc was bleeding from a torn ear but exhilarated. So was I. I had killed another man, and so far, great-grandson, I liked it.

  March 10, 1860

  Miss Emily Pern

  Queens Dispensary

  Bath, England

  Dearest Emily:

  My father died last week, after a lingering illness. It is one benefit of my Work here that I am on hand to deal with the family business in a way that leaves the others free to express their Sorrow. I am now master of Mint Springs. The event is one of war’s ironies: I can no longer manumit my slaves since that would endanger my Work here. However, they have manumitted themselves, leaving us only with the old and infirm. Human souls are of no cash value in the Valley any more.

  I miss Philadelphia more than I suspected I would. The same forces of war and revolution that have made Staunton an intellectual and moral Graveyard, are making Philadelphia shine and soar. According to my contacts still there, not since Byron’s days in Greece has one seen so many international adventurers, revolutionists, reformers, and sundry Idealists in one seaport. I hear New Orleans is even more exciting, having risen like Paris in ‘48 and detached itself from the inland regions when the Quarter took arms. The poet Whitman has gone South to join Brown, and the main body of Garibaldini are heading north across Texas. In Concord, Emerson and Thoreau are not speaking, having ignited their own Civil War to match the one raging through the Abolitionist movement in general. Viva la revolucion!

  An added irony: the young Negro, Ayrab, who saved my life, has run away, stealing one of my matched pistols given me by my father, rendering the set worthless.

  Emily, life here is bleak. I don’t exactly miss my father; we were not close: but I miss having one. Politically, I find myself fearing discovery almost less than Success, which commits me to an endless solitary clandestinity, even while attending dismal rounds of socials and patriotic balls, cloaked like the whole town in mistrust and dread. People here never look up, fearing what they will see: the beacon fire on the Blue Ridge to the east; another on the Cumberlands to the west. It’s like being afraid of the stars. There have been four raids on Lee’s pickets in the past two weeks, and after each the Federals say the raiders were caught. Most ominous of all, last week they hanged a white man, a trader from Tennessee accused of selling horses to the abs, for gain rather than politics. (All the more portentous, America!) From here the fire on the mountain dominates heaven. I alone of the whites in Staunton look up—but secretly. I have already had some success in getting medical supplies up the mountain.

  In the meantime I am warned that certain forces are inquiring about me, perhaps tipped off by their sources in Philadelphia to my secret role here. Ironically, my Uncle Reuben defends me, as a reformed idealist. And who could be more Trustworthy than the Master of Mint Springs, who waits in secret for word of his loved ones. Of Lev? And of Emily?

  Your Faithful and Affectionate,

  Thos &c. &c. &c.

  March 27, 1860

  Mrs. Emily Levasseur

  Queens Dispensary

  Bath, England

  Dear Emily:

  The betrayals of Destiny and the vagaries of the mail in a country torn apart by war are such that I got your letter and Lev’s, written three weeks apart, on the same day. What is more tragical, to lose a heart’s desire, or two friends at one blow? What is more loathsome, his apologetics or your justifications? The fact that he was in Prison until recently partly explains his long silence; but yours? A little honesty might have saved me much humiliation, if that ever entered your calculations. I return herewith your few letters. Farewell.

  Thos. Hunter, Esq., M.D.

  Mint Springs Farm

  Staunton, Virginia

  The third Merican was Grissom. He hadn’t felt like waiting in the car. The two hikers had to get to the campground by the Potomac before dark, but they couldn’t just walk away from a crying woman. Not knowing what else to do, the older of the two opened a pocket on his teenage son’s pack and took out a burgundy-colored foil blanket, shaking it out of a package smaller than itself. He handed it to the one-legged man, who wrapped it around the heaving shoulders of the n’African woman sobbing loudly on the blackened ring of stones overlooking the Shenandoah Valley.

  Grissom sat down beside Yasmin as Harriet was kissing her mother’s cheek and getting up.

  “That’s a real space blanket,” said the boy to Harriet. “Is that your mother? Do you want some club soda?”

  “Help me build a fire,” Harriet said. “She’s crying for my father. He was killed on the first Mars voyage.”

  “I see,” said the boy’s father, looking wonderingly from her, to Harriet, to Grissom, who nodded.

  “It’s okay,” Harriet said. “It’s time to cry. I already cried. It was a long time ago.”

  The boy looked at Yasmin, then back at Harriet, amazed. “Was he the Lion?”

  “He sure was.”

  It was getting cold. In October the warmth of the day goes quickly with the sun, which was almost touching the low blue wall of the Cumberlands far to the west. Yasmin stopped crying; she looked around and saw Harriet behind her, piling up sticks with the boy.

  Grissom was sitting beside her, examining his boot, rolling his foot around inside it. “The problem with a one-legged man is, he gets all his blisters on one foot,” he said.

  Yasmin started crying again.

  Grissom put his arm around her. Jesus, he thought. “I’m sorry yo
u missed watching the landing with your ring-mother,” he said.

  “Oh it’s probably all right. I’ll be there tomorrow. We’ll watch them put the plaque down. We’ll have a good cry.”

  “Promise, comrade?”

  She laughed. “Promise, comrade. I can’t believe you walked here.”

  “It’s not that far, really, from the car. I saw these guys cross the road and grabbed my crutches and followed. You know I hiked from Quebec to Nova Africa twice; the doctors tried to get me to keep it up after the war. But it’s not the same.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “But you miss it. But you know about missing things.” He stood up and reached for her hand. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Plus, a one-legged man gets all his blisters on one foot.”

  “You already said that.”

  “So? You want to talk about something else, comrade?”

  Yasmin laughed. She stood up and folded the space blanket and returned it to the boy’s father.

  “You were right to criticize me for playing the old lady’s game,” Grissom said.

  “You’re right I was right. Class struggle doesn’t stop just because folks get old and pitiful. Plus, she wasn’t so damn senile.”

  “I think the museum makes me greedy.”

  Yasmin observed with a new, still unsteady calm that it was actually getting dark.

  “I’m starving,” she said to Grissom.

  “I brought the sandwiches from the car.”

  In front of her, thirty klicks across the Valley, she could see the disappearing sun painting the clouds and the tops of the Cumberlands with fire. It was a little late to be wondering if she was still afraid of the dark. Behind her she could hear Harriet breaking sticks.

  It was no easy thing to join the Army of the North Star, at least not in the spring of 1860. My ambition was to be a guide as Cricket had been, but without Mama and Deihl I was without a cover, and in Staunton I lacked the mobility I’d had in Charles Town. After helping the Doc for a few weeks with his horses, I said my farewells (not in his hearing) and made my way back north toward Charles Town. Since Brown was moving his troops toward Winchester in what white folks hoped and Lee thought would be the decisive battle of the war, the famed ‘Winchester Feint,’ the traffic north was lighter and the paddy rollers not so bold. Having learned that the only safe place for a ‘colored’ boy in the Shenandoah in 1860 was in the company of a white man, I attached myself to a German journalist, a Marxian socialist who taught me in two days a habit it took me thirty years to overcome: snuff. I still miss it. Like Tubman, I carried my pistol (I had left one of the pair for the Doc) in a tow sack, like trifles. The troops were thick around Winchester, so I went all the way to Charles Town with my German, then remained while he headed back South, still looking for his story. Like Lee, I had missed Brown again. The army, and Lee’s hope for a decisive victory, had disappeared even as Lee encircled it (leading folks to call it the Army of the Morning Mist that spring). For the next few weeks the soldiers took out their frustration on the few Africans left around, so I laid low for six days and nights, living in Deihl’s still unoccupied livery barn on a ham I swiped from a neighbor’s smokehouse. I still can’t eat country ham. Here I was back where I had started. I had a gun but no money or food, and no idea of where to go. The hurricane lamp on the wall, the calling of the night birds, made me miss Cricket more. It was March, great-grandson, and cold. I succeeded through dumb luck, as I sometimes do. After a week in the barn, I decided to head South again, and even though it wasn’t on the way, I went out to Green Gables to visit Cricket’s grave. The home house at Green Gables had burned, and all the slaves had either run away North, been sold South, or gone Up the Mountain. I cut through the canebrake to the secret site of the graves of Brown’s men. They were neglected, and I raked them with a bush and straightened the area. Then I went to look at my own grave and Cricket’s, side by side. I was so cold and lonely that I welcomed my grief like a friend, wrapping my arms around myself. “Well, Cricket, what now?” I said, the first words I had spoken out loud in six days. Then I saw some money! Cricket’s grave, like mine, had been decorated with bottles, and one of his contained four fifty-cent pieces. They had to have come from Mama. I counted them out, kept two and put two back to be fair, then took one more for myself since Cricket was dead and I wasn’t, not yet anyway. To make it up to him, I split the colored stones he’d put on my grave between mine and his. Just then, darkness covered me like a cloud and arms trapped me from behind. I fell to the ground, not daring to scream, my first, unbidden thought being that it was Cricket’s ghost. Then I smelled the harsh smell of unwashed men, and I knew I was done for. But these didn’t smell like white men. Without a word they took my gun and my money. I was still pretty small for my age, and I was pulled headfirst into a tow sack and thrown over a mule, still without a word. “Help,” I said, which is a foolish thing to say to your captors. Then a black voice clucked and said, “Up, Jen,” and we were moving through the canebrake. “Help,” I said again. A thick, black old man’s voice dark as sorghum, and as sweet, and as slow, said: “Honey, you with the Army of the North Star now, so hush that racketness up.”

  July 10, 1862

  Dr. Emily Levasseur

  Queens Dispensary

  Bath, England

  Dear Dr. Levasseur:

  You don’t know me, I am the sister of the Late Dr. Thomas Hunter, Esq., of Mint Springs, Staunton. I know of you because he confided once to me of his great Admiration for you and that you were friends. I am writing this to let you know, unfortunately, that Thomas is dead: a Rebel, as you know, he was killed at the Second Battle of Roanoke, where they say he had stayed behind to help the Wounded and is buried in our family graveyard, G.R.H.S., with his Father and our cousin Johnny, also killed in the War. Even though he had left the Bosom of his Family, he is Missed by all those who knew and loved him; it is truly His most pure whom God calls Home.

  Sincerely, in Sorrow

  but Trust for God’s Grace,

  Laura Sue Hunter Bewley

  “There was only one place to go,” Grissom said. “South. Follow the ridgetops. Later they slipped east, across the valleys, as well. By the spring of ‘60, the fires appeared on other mountaintops, to the west, to the east, so that no one was quite sure where the Army of the North Star was hiding. But at first it was just a few men, and just one fire, right here.”

  “But how could they move a whole army without people knowing?” Harriet asked.

  “There weren’t as many of them at first as people thought. At most fifty. Usually less.”

  “So how could they beat Lee?”

  “They couldn’t,” Grissom said. “That’s why they were so careful never to fight him. Small groups they could beat, even when they were outnumbered.”

  “They knew the land better . . .”

  “No, not really,” Grissom said. “That’s another myth. Remember, these were abolitionists from the North, a few n’Africans but mostly whites, and runaway slaves who had never had the mobility to know the country well. No, at first their enemy knew it better: the local whites, the hillbillies. They knew it well enough to know that once up on the mountain, Brown’s men would be hell to get off. No, they were hard to fight because they had better weapons. Higher ground. And less to lose.”

  “And more to win,” Yasmin added.

  It was dark. She stirred the fire Harriet had built, and she could almost imagine that the sparks that flew upward were what was filling the rapidly darkening sky with stars.

  “The Mericans wipe out the buffalo, string the country together with railroads and barbwire; annihilate, not just defeat, the Sioux, the Crow, the Cheyenne, the Apache, one after the other. Genocide is celebrated by adding stars to the flag. The Cherokee and the Creek languish in Oklahoma, stripped of their land. Settlers run the Mexicans out of California and Texas, or turn them into serfs, and move north to Alaska and south into the Caribbean, e
ventually seizing the entire continent . . . ”

  “Gross,” said Harriet.

  “Ridiculous!” said Yasmin. “The author would have all of history hanging on one strand of rope with poor old Captain Brown.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Grissom said. “It’s a white nationalist fantasy, and somewhat overdone. But you must admit, John Brown’s Body gives food for thought. What if the war had been started not by the abolitionists but by the slave owners? The political balance of forces was pretty precarious in the 1850s. What if the war had been fought to hold this nation together, instead of to free yours?”

  “But the whole continent? That’s ridiculous,” Yasmin said. “The rest of the world, especially the League, wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “There’s no League in the book. In John Brown’s Body there’s no socialist Africa—it’s all broken up into colonies of Europe.”

  “No Paris Commune? No English Civil War? No Russian, no Egyptian revolution?”

  “I’m telling you. Socialism exists, but only as a threat. The world is basically ruled by the same people who built the railroads and the textile mills—British and then Merican capital. For a hundred years. And on into the future, until the end.”

  Harriet shivered and threw another stick onto the fire. “That’s why I don’t like science fiction. It’s always junk like that. I’ll take the real world, thanks.”

  “The funny thing is, it doesn’t make them happy,” Grissom said. “The Mericans, I mean. Having taken over the world, they turn on each other. They gorge on fat. They eat their own children. For a white supremacist fantasy the book has a certain grim honesty. It ends in this hideous...”

  “Please,” Yasmin said. “I think I’ll pass. John Brown the traitor, huh?”

  “Worse; a madman. A murderous fanatic. Lincoln, on the other hand, is a hero. The great emancipator.”

  “Who does he emancipate?”