by BJ Hoff
“Through the years routes to the North have become well-traveled. Safe places—‘stations’—where good folks—‘stationmasters’—are willing to provide shelter and provisions to the runaways dot the route. Others like myself—I’m called a ‘conductor’—make it their business to transport them and give them what protection they can. I suppose it was only natural that the name ‘Underground Railroad’ and other railroad words sprang up because at the same time the Underground Railroad was being established, the actual railroads were being built across the country—and because of the secrecy of the operations the name ‘underground’ and ‘railroad’ and other railroad words came about.
“Lately there’s been concern that some of those railroad terms are being bandied about too freely, that there’s too much talk now about how things work, that some folks involved might be speaking out too much about the Railroad and their part in it. That not only endangers them and the slaves being transported to the North, but it also threatens the slaves still in bondage. Their owners have heard about all the successful escapes, and so they’re becoming more careful and taking extra steps to stop those escapes.”
He glanced at Gideon. “The more active the Railroad becomes, the more the need for secrecy increases, not only for the protection of the folks involved in the Railroad itself, but also for the slaves waiting for their chance to run. That’s why Captain Gant is so strict about us keeping our silence.”
Again he scanned both sides of the road and strained a little to look ahead.
“Where does the money come from for all this, Asa?” Gideon asked. “Sounds like an awful big operation.”
“It’s big all right and getting bigger,” Asa replied. “And though it’s always in a state of change, it’s not without some organization. The funding may seem haphazard, but so far it’s been enough. Lots of people donate to the cause. You’d be surprised at the sacrifices some folks are willing to make to help. Stationmasters are used to providing food and clothing with little or no warning, and I’ve seen good Christian women take blankets off their own beds and clothes out of their closets to keep some runaways warm in the winter.”
When he turned to Gideon this time, Asa’s dark eyes glowed with a compelling light. “God uses people who are willing to be used, young Gideon. We don’t have to be saints or without fault. We just have to be available.” He stopped. “Like yourself. You made yourself available to be used for God’s work—and here you are.”
Gideon hadn’t thought about it that way. Truth be known, he hadn’t thought about it much one way or the other. He did detest the idea of slavery, and he did want to do something that had purpose—something with meaning. But he sure hadn’t thought about being used by God.
He decided maybe he should think about it.
They had no more than another hour or so until dawn. Although some days they traveled short distances after daylight, Asa had warned that wouldn’t be the case this morning. They were nearing a stretch of road near Canton, which was notorious for slave catchers, and so they would need to hide in a heavily wooded area until nightfall.
Gideon was driving, and Asa seemed to be dozing when something suddenly spooked the horses. Mac had been asleep in the trough behind the driver’s bench but now came alert and started a low growl that threatened to grow louder until Gideon shushed him. Asa jerked wide awake and shot upright when one of the horses whinnied and pulled left. In the back of the canvas-covered wagon, a child whimpered and a man coughed.
Without warning a bearded man dressed in a hat and fine clothes stepped out of the trees and onto the road just ahead. Gideon hauled on the reins to bring the horses to a stop.
Mac again gave a threatening growl, and again Gideon silenced him. “Who’s this?” he said under his breath to Asa, who shook his head.
“No idea.”
The man raised a hand. “I’m a friend,” he said, his voice so low Gideon could barely make out his words. “You’re in danger! There’s no time to explain. Pull your wagon over here, into the woods.” He gestured toward the dense trees that flanked the road on the right.
“Go deep. Get completely out of sight! I’ll show you where. Slave hunters are swarming all over the place! Get your people out of the wagon as quickly as possible,” he urged, sounding slightly out of breath. “One of you take some of them with you. The other take the rest. Hide yourselves in separate places, not all together. I’ll take care of your wagon. When it’s safe, I’ll come back for you. Don’t move. Don’t leave your hiding place until I come back. Go now—you must hurry!”
With that he climbed onto the sideboard of the wagon and rode with them, the wagon clattering and bumping treacherously over uneven ground and stones, stopping only when they reached a place so thick and dark with tree cover, it was almost like entering a cave.
Gideon handed over the reins then and leaped from the wagon, stopping only a moment to ask, “Your name, sir?” But the man shook his head and again raised a hand, saying, “I’m a friend.”
Gideon hurried around to the back of the wagon. Mac watched as he and Asa hushed the runaways into silence and helped them to the ground. One woman with a little tyke clinging to her skirts looked so thin and sickly Gideon thought she’d pass out at any moment, so he grabbed the child, hoisted him to his shoulder, and continued to herd the others toward an even deeper section of woods.
There they parted company, with Asa’s group going to the left, while Gideon took his folks farther into the trees at his right. When they finally stopped, the young runaway named Micah, who had been surly and disagreeable ever since they’d left Riverhaven, walked up to Gideon, splayed his hands on his hips, and said, “So what do we do now?”
Gideon regarded him warily. He would guess the fellow to be somewhere around sixteen or seventeen years, but he was big—bigger than Gideon or Asa—and seemingly all muscle. From the start of the trip, he had seemed to be itching for a confrontation of some sort.
Gideon had no inclination to oblige him. “We wait. And you need to keep your voice down. According to the man who warned us off the road, there are slave catchers everywhere around here. You could help keep the children quiet too.”
The youth uttered a sound in his throat much like a growl, and with that Mac pushed in between them and stood as if fixed in place. Micah shot the dog a look of disgust, but Gideon noted that he came no closer.
“Fine fix this is,” he spat out. “We all gonna be caught—you wait and see.”
Gideon set the toddler he had been carrying to the ground and sent him off to his mother.
“We won’t be caught if we stay here, stay quiet, and wait—like the man said.” Irked at the boy’s insolent glare, Gideon added, “You think you could help with the little ones instead of complaining for a change?”
Clad in a pair of worn homespun trousers and a pair of too-large boots, the boy postured like some kind of important man. “You think I’m stayin’ here to end up in some buckra’s shackles again? I already been caught once and taken back. This time nobody’s going to take me back alive! I’m gettin’ out of here soon as night come again.”
Studying him, Gideon tried to keep in mind the kind of life the youth had most likely led up till now. In spite of the boy’s defiance and churlishness, after what he’d learned from Asa about a slave’s existence, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
“You’d be foolish to take out on your own,” he said. “Your best chance is to stay with the rest of us.”
The boy twisted his mouth in a sneer. “Like you and that old man could be of any help.”
Gideon’s patience was beginning to wear thin now. He gave a shrug. “Suit yourself, then. But if it went hard on you before, maybe you ought to consider what getting caught will be like the second time. You’d best think about it before doing anything foolish.”
“I don’t answer to you,” the boy shot back and walked away.
Gideon watched him for a moment, then took Mac with him and went to try an
d reassure the little ones—and the grownups as well.
It was a long, stressful day. Gideon couldn’t count the number of times he had wished for Asa’s calming presence. The man had a way about him that most likely could convey peace in the middle of a raging battlefield. After spending an entire day in the woods in the midst of frightened runaways and hungry, fretful children, wondering how long this would go on and what might lie ahead, he was feeling a bit frazzled himself.
When the man who had first warned them off the road finally made his appearance around dusk, it was a huge relief. But some of that relief quickly fled as he heard what came next.
“There are too many of you to stay in one place, but I’ve found two stations in the vicinity where you can wait until the optimal time to get back on the road again.”
As he went on, Gideon noted that he spoke like a highly educated man and had the clean and well-kept hands of a gentleman. He couldn’t help but wonder who he was and why he was willing to risk his own safety by helping a group of fugitive slaves.
“Once we’re sure the slave hunters have left the area, we’ll see that you’re reunited and stock up your provisions so you can get on your way again. In the meantime I’m going to take you to where you’ll be staying tonight—and possibly several nights.”
A thought struck Gideon as he helped the people into the back of the wagon. He hoped this delay wasn’t going to prevent them from reaching their destination by too long a time. His mother was getting married in November, and as upset as she probably still was about his leaving Riverhaven to travel north with these folks, she was going to be a lot more aggravated if he didn’t make it home in time to see her married to Doc Sebastian.
He absolutely had to get back for Mamm’s wedding day!
28
NIGHT OF RAIN AND FEAR
I will fear no evil.
PSALM 23:4
Midnight had gathered in. The wind was up, driving a rainstorm, and in his house on the hill, a brooding Jeremiah Gant paced the floor.
He couldn’t be sure because he’d been only semiconscious and, according to Doc Sebastian, merely a few hours away from death, but he thought the night he arrived in Riverhaven nearly a year ago must have been very much a night like this.
He remembered nothing about that night, nothing at all, except that he must have opened his eyes long enough to see what appeared to be the face of an angel looking down on him with concern. He remembered that face and nothing more.
Rachel.
On nights like this, had he been a drinking man, he would have indulged himself by now. But the drink had never been his vice. He had seen it destroy too many of his people to follow that same pathway.
Not that he would admit his state of mind to a living soul, but this was a night when loneliness seemed to seize him by the throat and hold him captive. He found himself wishing his dog, Mac, was here. And Asa. Tonight he was missing them both in the worst way.
He had to smile, albeit grimly, at the irony. For years he had convinced himself that he was content to be a solitary man—that he needed no one, that indeed he was better off with no one. He prized his freedom, after all. Freedom was the very thing that had brought him to this country. Without ties to bind him, he could go where he chose, stay as long as he wanted, and not have the burden some men did of a family or loved ones awaiting his return.
He was not a man, he told himself, to be needed, not a man to be restricted by having others dependent on him. To the contrary he was a man who needed freedom to survive as other men needed food.
For years he had managed to believe that delusion, live comfortably with it, even relish it. If whispers of discontent occasionally circled round his mind like birds of prey seeking purchase, he ignored them. He had his boat, his work, and the river. He needed nothing else.
And then he came to Riverhaven.
He stopped at the window, looked out but could see nothing. It was as if the entire night were veiled in a wind-blown curtain of black rain. He lifted his shoulders and stretched his neck, trying to ease the day-long tension that was quickly escalating to a thundering headache.
But it was the ache in his heart that threatened to undo him.
His smug enjoyment of the solitary life had been lost in the dust, dispelled by his love for a winsome, gentle woman with dark eyes and a breath-stealing smile. A woman who had taught him for the first time that love was about much more than desire or wanting, that it was far bigger and went much deeper than he could have ever dreamed, that perhaps it was as much about the things of heaven as earthbound feelings. A woman who made him want what was right and good for her, even if it meant an agony of loneliness for himself.
She was the woman he couldn’t have.
But the fact that she was forbidden to him didn’t mean she didn’t fill his thoughts and his prayers and his heart every hour of the day. Nor did it help to drive away his fear for her—the fear that something of the evil that had insinuated itself into the valley of Riverhaven would somehow touch her and wrap its deadly tentacles of malevolence and destruction around her.
There had been a time when he didn’t believe in evil, at least not in the literal sense that he’d eventually discovered in the Scriptures. He had first recognized the reality of evil when he encountered the institution of slavery and saw for himself the existence of something so corrupt, so wicked and immoral that he found it impossible to believe that anything less than evil could account for what men were capable of wreaking upon each other. Later, when his search for understanding—along with Asa’s subtle leading—had finally brought him to the Word of God, he began to grasp the many guises evil could take to deceive and destroy.
After another moment, he crossed to the walnut desk he had made for himself some months past and sat down. Resting his head in his hands, he tried to pray. Even now, after years of turning his life over to his Creator, he sometimes found it difficult to plumb the words from his heart that would convey his deepest longings, his fears, or his gratitude.
For too long a time he had prided himself on his independence, counting on no man nor means other than himself. Whether he succeeded or failed in any pursuit, he credited or blamed only himself.
Giving his life—everything he was—over to another, even to the God of the universe, at times had been excruciatingly difficult for him. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes a seemingly impossible turning of himself inside out, his submission had not come like a wave crashing onto land to be absorbed once and for all, but instead had come like a tide washing in and out upon a rocky shore, over and over again. Tonight, however, his fear for Rachel as well as for her family and the good Plain People who had befriended him—outsider though he was—overwhelmed his innate tendency toward self-reliance, and he found himself quick to confess his neediness and his weakness and ask for help.
Someone must find who and what was responsible for the violence being perpetrated upon the Amish. No hope existed for stopping this wave of ugliness and devastation until its origin could be found.
“Use me, Lord God, if You will. Use whatever strength is left to me to destroy this darkness that pursues the good people of Riverhaven. They won’t fight for themselves, they won’t go seeking their enemy to combat him, they won’t even defend their own lives. Show me the face this evil wears and give me the wits and the means to drive it from our midst.
“I expect I need to ask for patience, as well, Lord, for something tells me this will be no quick and easy offensive. And, please, while You’re working and while I’m watching and waiting and searching, surround Rachel and her loved ones, her neighbors and friends—surround all these good people with Your presence and Your protection and Your power…”
A gust of wind slammed against the outside walls just then, rattling the windows of the rambling old farmhouse and sending a chill cascading down his spine.
The house seemed to echo throughout with the wailing of the wind in a mocking reminder of just how alone he really was.
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br /> Rachel couldn’t sleep. She had tried for over two frustrating hours, but the wind was fierce, with the sky emptying its clouds in loud, crashing torrents.
Thunder and lightning didn’t bother her so much, but wind always made her restless. Nearly an hour ago, she had finally given up and gone to the kitchen. After lighting the kerosene lantern on the table, she fetched her Bible and sat down to read.
Tonight she was feeling the emptiness of the house. She had never been fearful about living alone, once she’d grown accustomed to Eli being gone. But over the past few months—and especially now after what had happened to poor Phoebe—she often felt jittery at night.
Of course, Fannie stayed over often, and she was always glad for her company, but she realized her sister couldn’t stay every night. Tonight, with the wind moaning and a furious rainstorm taking place, she found herself jumping at every little noise.
One of the things she missed most about being married was the companionship she and Eli had shared. Their times together were usually quiet and relaxed. They could spend many an hour without saying much—she would read while Eli worked at his whittling or studied the Scriptures. It had always seemed enough, just being together.
She sometimes wondered what it might have been like for her and Jeremiah, had they been allowed to marry.
Best not to let her thoughts drift down that road, hopeless as it was…
Yet her mind seemed intent on clinging to thoughts of him, perhaps because the night he had showed up here at her house last November had been so like this night. It had been stormy that night too, with a high wind and a driving rain. She doubted that she would ever forget the first time she had seen him, leaning heavily on Asa, bleeding badly, and looking more dead than alive, needing help in the worst way.