Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  “Me,” Grissom laughed. “He emancipates the whites from having to give up any of the land they stole. From having to join the human race.”

  “And Lee?”

  “He survives the war, and loses it. But he sits a horse well. Speaking of which—I notice your daughter’s living shoes finally came around to looking good. What was it, the rain?”

  Feb. 12, 1876

  Mrs. Laura Sue Hunter Bewley

  Mint Springs Road

  Staunton, Virginia

  Dear Mrs. Bewley:

  Perhaps you will recall writing to my wife, Emily Pern Levasseur, some fourteen years ago on the occasion of the death of your brother, Dr. Thomas Hunter. I am returning your letter along with his correspondence with my late wife, who died last month after a long illness. These letters were among her most valued possessions, and I feel they should be in your family now, forming as they do a partial portrait of a brave and generous soul. Thomas Hunter was a friend of mine as well as hers, and even though events came between us, I am honored to have called him my comrade. Also, these letters reflect more on the destiny of your country (and its new neighbor, Nova Africa) than on this fog-shrouded Albion where I find my exile.

  Sincerely,

  R. Levasseur

  Plymouth, England

  “The Jacobin outlived most of his comrades,” Grissom said. “It’s not in the letters, but I researched it. He was wounded twice—first in England, as part of a group robbing a mail train to finance a ship for the Sea Islands. He must have made it because later, in the siege of Atlanta, he lost a leg. I don’t know which one. With legs it doesn’t much matter.”

  “How’d he die then?” Yasmin leaned against Grissom’s shoulder, half listening. Behind them, Harriet was breaking sticks and fiddling with the fire, enjoying the comfortable feeling of grown-ups ignoring her.

  “The Commune. Paris, 1879. After Emily died, he managed to get to Italy, then France. He was with the Internationals when they broke the encirclement. Even with one leg. Probably driving a wagon.”

  It was growing cold. A thousand feet below, Yasmin could see the Valley looking cold and peaceful in the October moonlight.

  Above it were the stars, which she hadn’t looked at in five years, since Leon hadn’t come back. Well, there they were. She looked straight back at them. They still looked like a graveyard, but that didn’t bother her so much now.

  She came from a people who knew about graveyards. Yasmin thanked the old doctor, Abraham, for bringing her up here. She kept her eyes closed and imagined him walking with her between the graves in a dream—what had Harriet called it, a conjure dream? He was old and young at the same time. A kid with an old man’s knowing silence. They held hands, looking at the family graves, and it was as it should be. There was Cricket’s, decorated with half the pretty stones. There was his own. There was Leon’s with its black plastic plaque, and another little baby grave under a willow tree. They all three cried a little, looking down at that unknown one. Yasmin squeezed his hand in her waking dream and told him it was good to cry. I’m having another baby, Leon, she whispered out loud. The only one you and I had turned out pretty good. I miss you. Didn’t you know I would? Like a fool she was crying again.

  “Mama.”

  Yasmin looked up. Grissom’s hand felt old in her own. In the firelight across from her, Harriet looked like her great-great-grandfather’s oil portrait at Douglass Medical Center, lacking only the gray hair and the stiff blue suit. Allowing for her Daddy’s humorous oak-brown eyes.

  “Mama.”

  There was the little fire in her belly again.

  “Mama, we want to go down,” Harriet said. She stood up with Grissom and brushed herself off by the fire. The two of them had cooked up a plan. Harriet wanted to see the fire from the valley, so she had piled up wood. The plan was to throw it all on the fire at once, then hurry down the mountain in time to look up and see it blazing.

  “During the Centennial,” Grissom said, “you should have seen it then. We kept it burning every night for a week. We shouldn’t really be doing this now, with no one to watch it. But look how wet it is.”

  “Let me give you two a head start,” Harriet said. “Then I’ll throw all the wood on and catch up.”

  Yasmin held the flashlight for Grissom, who swung speedily along the path on his crutches. He moved pretty good for an old man, she thought. She could hear Harriet racing to catch up. They reached the car in record time, and Grissom got into the driver’s seat without being asked.

  “Mama?”

  Yasmin, getting into the car, turned and saw Harriet outlined in the dash light, still out of breath from the run through the woods.

  “I’m not saying it’s going to be a boy, Mama. But if it is, let’s name him Cricket.”

  Te-oonk

  “Oh, no!” Grissom said. The starter motor made a dying sound. The engine rattled like broken crockery.

  “Get in, Mother,” Harriet said. “You’re pregnant.”

  There was no time to waste, if they wanted to see the fire; and there was no point in worrying about the car. Luckily, it was already turned around. Harriet got it rolling easily and then jumped in, out of breath and laughing. Grissom went easy on the brake, and when they hit the straight stretch leading to Iron Bridge they were doing over 100. As they raced across the bridge, Grissom took something off the dashboard and sailed it out the window, into the Shenandoah River.

  “What was that?” Harriet asked.

  “Was that what I thought it was?” Yasmin asked.

  It was. Grissom grinned. The book was gone. “She should have known better than to leave it with me,” he said.

  “Slow down!” Yasmin said. “You’re passing the shop.”

  But instead of pulling in at Cardwell’s, Grissom let the car roll on by, out of the trees, onto the westbound Charles Town road. They rolled to a stop in the wheat field. Yasmin remembered what they wanted to see, and she got out of the car with Grissom and Harriet; and they all three looked back and up together.

  There it was, on top of the ridge, blazing. Like a star.

  November 16, 1880

  Mrs. Laura Sue Hunter Bewley

  Mint Springs Road

  Staunton, Virginia

  Dear Mrs. Bewley:

  The enclosed letter was written but never sent, on the eve of your brother’s death at the Second Battle of Roanoke. When it was found among certain effects that turned up in Atlanta this year, it fell to me to try and find its intended recipient, as I had been your brother’s orderly and, one might say, apprentice, as well as his closest companion in his last year. Since Mrs. Levasseur had died, and her husband disappeared, I thought the letter should devolve to your family, even though our nations are again at war, as it is the legacy of a warm and generous heart, who, though estranged from his country, never forgot his love for his family, and in particular the little sister of whom he often spoke with uncommon pride and warmth.

  I was privileged to call him my friend, though there were twelve years between us.

  My best wishes to you and your family.

  Yours truly,

  Dr. A. Abraham, M.D.

  Vesey Memorial Hospital

  Atlanta,

  Nova Africa

  May 30, 1862

  Dr. Emily Levasseur

  Queens Dispensary

  Bath, England

  Dear Emily:

  I hope you are not too surprised, or sorry, to hear from me. Greetings to you both (though I have written separately to Lev). If this reaches you, please know that I am recovered from my Sorrow, apologize for my Rage, and greet you as a Comrade.

  I have been with the Army of the North Star now for almost two years, since my ‘practice’ in Staunton came to a swift and almost fatal end. I was betrayed by my own uncle, Reuben, who was motivated as much by the desire for my property as patriotism; and I was saved by young Bewley, the very brother-in-law who had once tried to kill me; whose love for my sister and genuine horror at
the War overcame his weakening federalism. As one of Lee’s line officers, he knew and warned me of their plans. A gothic ending to a family tragedy, non?

  Such are the fortunes of a civil war, which is what the Africans’ Independence War has become for us Americans, as more and more whites who didn’t have slaves either join or support the rebels for their own reasons, usually having to do with land. In fact, my uncle is one of the few who gained, instead of kept, a plantation by supporting Lee!

  Emily, I was with old Brown when he died, a rare privilege. I’m now setting up a field hospital even as the war moves toward the West, with help from the Haitians and a brigade from England, raised by the communist Marx, whose doctrines, though industrial, fall on fertile soil here. The youth who stole my gun turned up again and has served two years as my apprentice, a young man with as sure a hand for medicine as he had for horses; I have made arrangements to bring him here to help in the hospital, and have undertaken to encourage him to study medicine seriously. He has made a lengthy passage along with the rest of his people, from slavery to a new nation, independent, with liberty and justice for (truly) All. Though still embattled, the government of Nova Africa has now been recognized by several of the Latin American powers; a newly freed Cuba and Puerto Rico have welcomed it into association, along with Eloheh, the government-in-exile of the Cherokee who joined us south of the Smoky Mountains. The Queen of England and the Chancellor of Germany be damned, there are delegations of working men here from both countries, building as well as fighting. Charleston is now a polyglot sea of strange faces and a beacon of new hope to the hemisphere. Meanwhile, California has rejoined Arizona, Arizona has rejoined Texas, and Texas has sent the Kentuckians packing and rejoined revolutionary, republican Mexico. I was twenty-six last month. I thought of you. I was in Charleston, first capital of Nova Africa, picking up medical supplies shipped from France, and witnessed the disembarking of the 2nd Haitian Brigade, their crimson cotton scarves fluttering in the southern breeze. And Emily, though I was one of only two hundred white faces in a cheering crowd of two thousand black ones, when I looked up and saw that now familiar green and black and red flag, I got a feeling I had never had in the Virginia that nurtured, or the Philadelphia that liberated me. I was home.

  I wish that every man and woman could know that feeling at least once. I sincerely wish it for you and Lev.

  I write to you both now, on the eve of a great battle, for we are surrounded in Roanoke (for the second time), and our retreat has been not very successful. Who knows what tomorrow may bring; but I fear the worst, as always. I wrote you twice on such occasions before, remember? Once on the eve of a duel, and once before heading South to Staunton. I think no man thinks of death more than I. I both despise and honor it, for it silences the very heart it bids to speak. Emily, I’m sorry.

  Whatever disappointment you might have given me, your friendship (and Lev’s) gave my soul so much more, by liberating me from a ‘peace’ fatal to Love itself. And so, for the third time, in a word,

  Farewell.

  Your Affectionate Comrade and Friend,

  Thos Hunter, M.D., &c., &c.

  Yes, great-grandson, I was there the day old John Brown died. I was honored to be one of the six chosen to bury him on a mountaintop, and sworn never to tell which One: which is why it is said that every Appalachian peak is his grave. He was sixty-two, and he’d taken a minie ball in the side of the head in the fighting at Sugarloaf. Doc Hunter had treated him for two months, but Doc told me that the ball was in the brain (under the dura), and even though the wound might heal he would never get better. He was like a stroke victim, but declining every day, seized occasionally by trembling rages and weeping fits, totally uncharacteristic of the man. He had lost by then all but one of his sons, Watson, who joined him but was not recognized. His wife was dead; his daughters scattered by the Copperhead mob that had razed his North Elba farm. In these last days, Captain Brown turned the pages backward in his Bible. General Tubman pleaded with the Doc to try everything, for she herself suffered from seizures due to a wound to the head, but hers were of a less severe order, and after a while even she gave up. It was she, and not Douglass, who gave the order that the old man be helped to die, that his dignity might not pass away before his mortal body. I was no longer a boy, but fifteen and a veteran of three years of war: and as an orderly and, one might say, apprentice, I was privy to every medical secret. Tubman, that odd measure of oak and willow, strength and softness, gave the order, then left, then came back. Douglass was with us in those days, having just returned from New Orleans where he had been treatying with the new rulers of the city; this was when forces were pushing them to unite with pseudo-republican France rather than revolutionary Nova Africa, and he feared this cabal, but principle prevailed over capital and it faltered. This was in our first flush of victories—we had taken Roanoke and the Sixth Column under Green (actually the second but denominated as sixth to confuse the enemy) was even then poised to spring on Atlanta like the Black Panther after which it was named. We had bad times to come, great-grandson—the fierce winter of ‘63 was still ahead of us, when the Brits entered the war on the side of the Yanks and we lost Green’s army and much of the land we had taken; but win or lose, it was a contest and we were no longer a little band on a mountaintop avoiding all encounters. We were an army. Roanoke sits in a great hollow surrounded by peaks, and we were then in possession of the town and all its buildings, though as a matter of policy the Army of the North Star quartered neither its troops nor its horses on the citizens. There was a church converted to a hospital on the square, but Brown was not kept there; the men knew he was badly wounded, but still, Kagi and especially Tubman wanted no one to see him in his humiliation. I was his orderly and the only one not turned away. It was the Doc and not I who mixed his powders that day. I had been working with Doctor Hunter for two years now (the same who had saved my life three years before), but he looked like an old man now, even though he was not yet thirty. Like Brown (like myself) he had lost his family in the war. He certainly looked like an old man after the work of that day, after he entered the house and came out and nodded to the others. Tubman looked fiercely around at the hills. Kagi wept, one of two times I ever saw him weep, the other being the day we buried Green. Doc looked just tired and worn. I was honored that he came and stood beside me, of everyone there: not as if I were his apprentice but as if I were, even at fifteen, his colleague. He didn’t weep and neither did I, for we were medical men. But I weep now, unashamed, an old man, almost fifty years later, not for Brown—God knows the Captain lived to see more of his dreams come true than most of us—I weep with some kind of joy remembering the square silently filling up with soldiers as twilight fell, mostly n’African but some foreign, some Merican, even the silk-bloused Mexican Garibaldini, (many of them black recruits by now) speaking that wild lingo I thought was Italian until I went to Italy. Nobody had to tell the men that Shenandoah Brown was dead. There was a drum roll, the longest I have ever heard. Tubman gave a nod, and the red, black, and green flag that I had first seen on the lawn at Green Gables, with Cricket’s arm around my shoulders—that mighty flag dipped three times and swung up high again. A thousand rifles fired into the air in a great rippling wave of sound; one shot each, or Captain Brown would, I think, even then have had their hides. And on the mountains that surrounded Roanoke on every side, a fire sprang to life—two, four, six of them, lighted on the top of each of the brooding peaks that had nurtured our rebellion and birthed our independence.

  Then we all went back to war.

  Harriet loved the singing.

  From the rear observation platform of the southbound John Brown, she could feel the hum of the plasma motors in her bones rather than her ears, like a hymn. The ship was quiet. A lot of people slept on airships even in the daytime, and soon it would be midnight. Her mother was asleep with her head on her daughter’s lap. Harriet was glad the car hadn’t gotten fixed: she loved to fly. The car was in the cargo hold, c
ourtesy of the Harper’s Ferry Museum. Even old Cardwell didn’t seem to mind. “Half of success is failing,” he had said. “Now I know what won’t work.”

  Moving carefully so she wouldn’t wake her mother, Harriet touched the ivory, folded-over tops of her shoes; they dropped to the floor, where they nestled together so they wouldn’t get separated.

  The ship was so steady on its microwave beam that it seemed it was the long dark spine of the Blue Ridge that was moving, gliding past, like a cloud or a hundred-mile-long air creature.

  It was midnight. It was good to have her mother back. Her father in many ways she felt had never left: every time Harriet looked up at the night sky, she saw him there. But it seemed to satisfy her mother to have watched them place the little plaque on the red stone on the faraway planet he had dreamed of and loved and orbited, but never touched. Mama and Grandmother had of course cried, along with Katie Dee, and sixty people cried with them, some in the front yard. Half of Staunton wanted to share the moment with the Lion’s mother; and Harriet, her mother, and Grissom, six hours late, had barely been able to squeeze into the little house. So much for worrying that Pearl would be watching it all alone.

  Grissom had brought them in his little hummer, and even stayed for a piece of chess pie. He was an expert at relating to old people.

  The world below was as dark as the night at the end of the first day. Lights were scattered up and down the valley, showing mankind’s work: still so meager compared to the stars.

  12:45. According to the slowly moving line on the liquid-crystal display in the lounge, they had just crossed into Nova Africa. Harriet looked down for a sign of the border, but it was just one dark, sleeping world from up here.

  A few night people were in the far corner of the lounge watching vid: life discovered on mars! Her Dad would have liked that. Harriet would have gotten up to watch, but she didn’t want to wake her mother. Besides, she was tired too. She was glad to be going home. She had a year of school to look forward to, and though she hadn’t yet dared mention it to her mother, her first actual flight training.