Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  I raced outside to snatch the Birds in the Air quilt from the line. I returned inside, thoroughly drenched, and hurried upstairs, where I wrung out the quilt in my washbasin and hid it beneath my bed. I had barely enough time to change into dry clothes and return to the kitchen before the men returned.

  My own stomach was in knots, so that I hardly dared speak to them as I served their supper, lest they detect my turmoil. Anneke busied herself with the baby, as if too distracted by him to notice the men. To my relief, they conversed with Hans as if they did not notice anything out of the ordinary; or perhaps they noticed but had grown accustomed to odd behavior from the Bergstrom family, as we were never at ease when they were around. I prayed they would soon depart, but as the hour grew late with no abating of the storm, we had no choice but to invite them to spend the night.

  They bedded down beside the fireplace, and as I climbed the stairs, I thought of Joanna crouching in darkness almost directly above her enemies. Upstairs, I paused outside the hidden alcove long enough to murmur a warning to Joanna, then crept off to my own room, where I lay in bed, too tense to sleep. If Joanna should cry out as she slumbered—if slumber was possible in such close quarters—or if she did not hold perfectly still and silent, the men below might hear her. We might be able to convince them that Anneke or I had made the sound, but what if—and this was my greatest fear—what if Joanna’s child should decide to enter the world that very night?

  Eventually snores drifted up the stairs, telling me the slave catchers were resting peacefully, but they were the only ones in the household to do so. Even the baby, who woke twice to nurse, did not rouse them with his cries. I heard Hans and Anneke whispering, but from the sewing room, there was not even the smallest noise. For my part, I held perfectly still in bed, clenching my quilt in my fists, praying that we would somehow manage to avoid detection a second time.

  When finally the morning sun began to pink the sky, I dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, making no attempt to work quietly and allow our unwelcome guests to sleep any longer than absolutely necessary. I heard them stirring in the other room, speaking in low voices, then one or both left the house briefly and returned. By the time I summoned everyone to the breakfast table, I had regained my confidence. The men had not demanded to search the house, and perhaps our hospitality would once and for all convince them we had nothing to hide.

  We Bergstroms all but wolfed down our food in our eagerness to bring a swift end to the meal, and we could barely contain our relief when the first of the two remarked that they would need to set off immediately, to make up for time lost. Then he looked directly at me and said, “Miss Bergstrom, I don’t wish to trouble you none, but if you could spare some of that bread, we’d be mighty grateful for it on the road.” He smiled. “We never know when we’ll come across a home as welcoming as this one.”

  “Of course.” I hastened to the kitchen and packed a bundle as quickly as I could, and spinning around to return to the dining room, I ran right into the slave catcher. I gasped, startled, and stepped back. “Excuse me,” said I, and tried to laugh. “I did not realized you followed me.”

  He stepped toward me. “Why so nervous, Miss Bergstrom?”

  “I’m not nervous, not at all.” I thrust the bundle at his chest, shoving him backward. “Here. Enjoy the bread.”

  He caught my arm. “Yesterday, when we arrived, you wore a blue dress,” said he, stroking the fabric of my sleeve with his other hand. “When we returned from the barn, you were dressed in brown.”

  “You are mistaken,” said I, and pulled myself free. “You have confused me and Anneke. I was dressed in brown. She wore blue.”

  “Miss Bergstrom, are you accustomed to hanging your laundry out to dry in the middle of a rainstorm?” He fixed his gaze on mine. “Or is that how you Dutch wash your bedclothes?”

  I feigned embarrassment. “Oh, I fear you have discovered me. And I had so hoped no one had noticed. Please don’t tell Anneke I forgot the baby’s quilt outside. She’ll be so upset.”

  He scowled, but before he could speak again, Hans entered and offered to help the two men with their horses. The slave catcher nodded, his gaze still upon me, but suddenly he turned and addressed my brother. “What are your plans for L.’s cabin?”

  Hans shrugged. “I haven’t yet made any plans for it.”

  “Seems strange to leave it unused, a good, solid building like that,” said he. “Or maybe it doesn’t go unused. Maybe you don’t care if passersby sleep there, so long as they don’t bother you up at the big house.”

  “That cabin is on my land. Anyone entering it is trespassing, whether they’re sleeping or looking for someone who is.”

  “That’s good to know. You don’t want to encourage vagrants.” The slave catcher slung the bundle over his shoulder. “Of course, it could be people stay there without your knowing about it.”

  “I’d know.” Hans’s voice was like ice. “Now it’s time you were on your way.”

  The man had little choice but to challenge Hans or obey, so at last he and his companion departed, leaving me shaken and afraid. The more I tried to alleviate the slave catchers’ suspicions, the more I gave them reason to scrutinize us. They would not cease to observe us, I knew, whenever their searches took them near Creek’s Crossing.

  As soon as their horses disappeared into the forest, I hurried upstairs to free Joanna from the secret alcove. Faint and hungry, she asked me in a strained voice to help her to bed. I brought her water, which she drank thirstily, and something to eat, which she picked at but seemed unable to stomach. She kept touching her abdomen and wincing in pain, but when I asked her if she thought the baby was coming, she shook her head and told me the pains had been coming for days now, but they always faded when she rested.

  I assured her that now that the slave catchers had departed, she would most likely not need to stir from bed for a while. She nodded wearily, and I prayed that my assurances would not be proven false.

  Fortunately, as it happened, we had no visitors, friendly or otherwise, for three days and two nights. But on the third night, my slumber was interrupted as it had been a month before: not by a knock on the door, but by a woman’s cry of pain.

  Anneke heard it, too; she reached Joanna’s room at the same moment I did. We entered to find Joanna on her feet and drenched with perspiration, one hand at the small of her back, the other on the bureau, supporting her weight. “The baby be here soon,” gasped Joanna. “This been going on all night.”

  “You should have woken us earlier,” I scolded, and tried to assist her back into bed, but Joanna brushed me off and said she felt better on her feet. With Anneke on one side and myself on the other, we helped her walk about the room, pausing when Joanna wished, which was when the pain was greatest. She paused more and more frequently as one hour passed, and then two, but by then her legs trembled with fatigue so that she could scarcely stand.

  We helped her into bed and made ready to deliver the baby, and I said a silent prayer that my experience assisting Jonathan was fresh enough in my mind that Anneke and I would be able to manage without him. At first Joanna’s labor progressed as we had expected based upon Anneke’s experience, but just as Anneke assured Joanna she was nearly through the worst of it, Joanna screamed in pain. “It’s coming,” she gasped. “It’s coming now.”

  I glimpsed Anneke’s surprised expression, a mirror image of my own, before I examined Joanna. I discovered, to my horror, not the baby’s crown but a tiny foot, already entering the world.

  Again Joanna screamed, and Anneke, coming to see what I saw, drew a sharp breath. “Don’t push,” said I to Joanna. It was all I could think to say. We needed more time, time for me to figure out what to do.

  “We need Dr. Granger,” said Anneke in a low voice.

  “We can’t summon him,” said I. Joanna’s freedom, our own security, and the safety of future runaways seeking shelter with us depended upon our secrecy.

  �
��We must. And quickly.” Anneke left me to take Joanna’s hand and mop her brow. Joanna looked from her to me, and I knew she had detected our alarm. “What’s wrong?” she asked, then sucked in a breath and screamed in pain.

  I needed no further inducement. I ran for my brother, and within minutes he was on his way to summon Jonathan. “How will I explain Joanna?” asked Hans before he left. “What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him only that a woman is in labor and that she and the child are in distress,” said I. That was all Jonathan needed to know to help her. I would worry about the consequences of divulging our secret after she was safe.

  The wait seemed endless, but no more than an hour passed before Jonathan arrived. He attended at once to his patient, speaking to me and Anneke only to ask our assistance.

  Once before I had witnessed Jonathan save a life, but on that night I believe I watched him save two. The child entered the world feet first, entangled in the cord that had sustained him in the womb, and when he made no sound upon feeling the cold air upon his skin, I thought for certain he was dead. But Jonathan worked upon him and rested him upon his mother’s bosom, and as Joanna placed her arms around her son, I saw the little limbs move, the chest rise and fall. When at last he uttered an angry, indignant cry, tears of relief filled my eyes, and I whispered a prayer of thanksgiving.

  Jonathan glanced up at me from caring for Joanna. “Anneke can assist me with the rest,” said he quietly. “Hans might need you outside.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “The cabin is burning.”

  Only then did I detect the faint odor of woodsmoke upon Jonathan’s clothing. I stared at him, my mind in a whirl, then bolted downstairs and outside.

  The odor hit me full force the moment I left the house. Ashes drifted like snowflakes on the air, and through the trees on the other side of Elm Creek, something glowed a fierce red. I ran toward it, and before I even reached the bridge I saw the churning clouds of smoke and heard the roaring as the flames consumed our former home. My brother was silhouetted against the flickering light, motionless.

  I did not realize I was screaming as I ran until Hans spun around and seized me about the waist. “Gerda, stop. Stay back.”

  “Why don’t you fight it?” I shouted, but my voice was nearly lost in the din.

  “I tried.” His voice was low in my ear. “It was too far gone. All I can do is let it burn, and be sure it doesn’t spread to the barn or the house.”

  I watched as his gaze followed sparks rising from the fire, carried aloft to the treetops, brighter than the stars against the night sky. The fire cracked and popped, and a bright shower of sparks shot out, igniting a patch of grass several yards away. Immediately Hans was upon it, beating out the fresh flames with a gunny sack drenched in water.

  Then I noticed the buckets scattered on the ground, only one among them still upright and full of water, and the smoldering sacks among them. Without another word I took a sack in hand and joined Hans in his vigil. We kept watch all night and into the day, sometimes one on guard alone as the other ran to fill the water buckets in the creek, sometimes both of us racing from one place to the next as several fires erupted at once. By midmorning our former home was nothing more than a smoking ruin, but the barn and the new house were undamaged.

  Hans studied the ground encircling what remained of the cabin. A horse, perhaps two, had left deep impressions in the mud leading up to and surrounding the smoking timbers. “The slave catchers?” I asked him, examining the hoofprints.

  “Could be, but they didn’t make these prints the night they stayed with us. I watched them leave, and they didn’t pass this way. If they were up here before coming to the house, the prints would have been washed away in the storm.”

  He walked amid the ruins, kicking rubble aside with his heavy boots. Suddenly he bent down and examined a half-buried object. “Sister, would you know if we forgot a can of kerosene up here when we moved to the new house?”

  “I know very well that we did not.”

  “Someone else must have brought this one I see here, then.”

  Despite the heat radiating from the ruins, I shivered. “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I doubt any of the runaways left it.”

  “I’d bet my best horse they didn’t.” Hans stood and regarded me gravely. “You should know, the cabin wasn’t burning when I left to fetch Jonathan.”

  I nodded, absorbing the full meaning of his words. Not only had someone set fire to our cabin, but whoever had done so had arrived when Joanna was in the worst of her travail. At that distance, he—or they—might very well have heard her screams of pain. The slave catchers, Mr. Pearson and his cronies—anyone who might have wanted to frighten us because of our Abolitionist sympathies would have known Anneke had already had her baby, and that I was not with child.

  Soberly, we returned to the house. Anneke was in the kitchen, carrying her son in one arm and setting out breakfast with the other. Hans took the baby from her and stayed to explain what had happened with the fire, while I continued upstairs. I peered in the doorway of Joanna’s room to find Jonathan packing his instruments and Joanna reclining in bed, nursing her child, who was swaddled in the quilt she had made.

  Jonathan looked up and saw me but quickly looked away. “She has a fine, healthy son,” he told me.

  “And Joanna?”

  “She needs rest, and something to eat.” He returned to the bedside and spoke briefly with her before picking up his bag and joining me in the hall. “She should not travel for at least a week. I would have her wait a month for the baby’s sake, if she can. If it is safe for her to do so.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll return tomorrow to check in on them, but be sure to summon me immediately if either encounters any difficulties.” Still he would not look at me. “You should have called for me earlier.”

  The rebuke, mild though it was, stung, perhaps because I had been chiding myself for the same lapse in judgment. “You know why I could not.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  We descended the stairs in silence, and I led him to the door. There I turned and regarded him defiantly. “Aren’t you going to ask me who she is and what she is doing here?”

  At last he met my gaze. “I have many questions. Someday, when it is not so unwise for you to answer, I will ask them.”

  We stood in the doorway, nearly touching, and for one frantic moment I thought he might kiss me, but then he tore his eyes from mine and bolted out the door. I shut it behind him, hard, and turned my back to it.

  Hans entered and lowered himself into a chair beside the hearth, exhausted. Anneke followed close behind; she handed her son to me and went to her husband to remove his boots and wipe the soot from his face with a wet cloth. I was conscious then of my own fatigue, and my disheveled appearance. I cannot explain it, but despite all the terrible events of the previous night, at that moment I could think of nothing but how I must have looked to Jonathan compared to the graceful loveliness of Mrs. Charlotte Claverton Granger, and I felt coarse and ashamed.

  But those thoughts lasted only a moment, for Anneke looked up at me, her mouth in a tight, angry line. “This time it was the cabin,” said she. “Next time it might be the house.”

  I tried to retort but coughed instead. My eyes stung from smoke; my lungs felt thick and rough, my throat raw. “No one would dare.”

  “How can you know that?” demanded Anneke. “Are these such compassionate, scrupulous men that they will merely terrorize us and not murder us as we sleep?”

  Wearily, Hans held up a hand. “Anneke, you are in no danger.”

  “Don’t speak to me as if I am a child.” Anneke rose, strode across the room, and snatched the sleeping baby from my arms. “I will not have it, from either of you. I will not be treated like a fool.”

  I was dumbstruck, but Hans said, “Very well. You’re right, Anneke. We are all in danger, every one of us, even the baby. Eve
ry day Joanna and her child remain beneath our roof we risk discovery and prosecution. Every day we hang that quilt upon the line we risk our freedom and our lives. Is that what you want to hear?”

  Anneke began to weep. “I cannot bear this anymore. I cannot endure this constant fear, this endless worrying. We have done our part to help. Now we have our son to think of.”

  “If we stop now,” said I, “how many fugitives will we condemn to death or recapture?”

  “If we do not stop, to what will we condemn my child?”

  “How can you think only of your own child, when Joanna is upstairs with a child of her own? Would you like to see her back in chains? Would you like to see that helpless infant torn from her, sold off like a pig or a horse to the highest bidder? How would you feel if you could never see your son again?”

  “Better her than us,” shrilled Anneke.

  My words choked in my throat, and I gaped at her, shocked into silence.

  Anneke glared at me, defiant. “If we are captured, we will be thrown into prison, and my son will be taken from me just as Joanna’s would have been taken from her had she remained a slave.”

  I found my voice. “You cannot truly believe that.”

  “Mr. Pearson assured me that is the law.”

  “Mr. Pearson,” said I, scornful. “What does he know of the law?”

  “Better yet,” said Hans, “what does he know of our activities?”

  His voice was hard, and Anneke blinked at him. “Nothing.”

  Hans regarded her, his gaze piercing. “You’re certain.”

  “As certain as I can be,” stammered Anneke. “Do you—do you think I would tell him we’re part of the Underground Railroad?”

  “Have you told him?”

  “Of course not.” Anneke’s face was scarlet. “How could you accuse me of betraying you? Have I ever lied to you? Have I ever deceived you?”

  “Anneke, my love.” Within an effort, Hans rose from his chair and put his arms around his wife. “I did not mean to suggest you would intentionally tell him, but perhaps in a moment of fear, you might have accidentally—”