by Derek Miller
The Attic Diary
By
Derek Miller
Copyright © 2012 Derek Miller
All rights reserved.
Published by L. J. Emory Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1477654002
DEDICATION
“To my favorite (and only) daughter who sticks by her daddy while he tries to make the world a better place.”
CONTENTS
1
The Diary
Pg 1
2
The Beginning
Pg 7
3
Welcomed Guests
Pg 14
4
The First Run
Pg 17
5
Helping Hands
Pg 23
6
Breakfast
Pg 27
7
Death
Pg 31
8
Caught
Pg 38
9
Satan Walks Among Us
Pg 44
10
The Tunnel
Pg 48
11
Murder
Pg 52
12
No Choice
Pg 54
13
Discovery
Pg 59
14
Coming Clean
Pg 62
15
Revelation
Pg 67
Epilogue
Pg 69
Chapter One
The Diary
My left hand gripped her mouth. My right hand covered her eyes. I knew that if I released her, she would scream bloody murder.
I told her as softly as I could, “be ill I will no hur you.”
Helping the innocent escape the slave hunters has taught me a few things-- like whenever you are hiding from the enemy and want to speak without your voice carrying—don’t use the sounds of S or T. Those sounds travel the farthest, especially over water.
It is also wise to wear anything that might possibly help you blend in with the natural things of the river.
Like mud.
As a schoolteacher, I have always tried to keep myself clean and neat. It is one of the many ways I have tried to be a good example to my students. Now I am choosing to be a different kind of example—a man who would risk his life helping his fellow human beings escape a life of slavery-- even if it meant half-burying myself in Ohio River muck to keep from being detected.
So—now, there was just me and this poor escaped woman slave sitting in the shallow water, hiding among the rocks and weeds. I knew she was terrified—and I also knew that she would be caught, beaten and taken back south if she made one sound. I’d seen her from my cabin as she had cowered there among the cattails. Skinny, hungry, frightened. I was half afraid she’d give herself up if I didn’t do something, and fast.
I had slathered as much mud on my white skin as I possibly could, hoping to blend in.
The drunken speech and the oil lights of the slavers boat passed by painfully slow. If we were caught, I would be killed and the woman would be taken south again. I gave an involuntary shiver—whether from fear or cold, I don’t know, but this I knew for sure--we were far from safe.
If only we could make it another fifty yards to the tunnel entrance that would take us to safety………..
“Hannah?” Mom’s voice yelled up the stairs. “You doing okay up there?”
Fifteen-year-old Hannah slammed the diary shut. She had never been scuba diving in her life but right now, as she struggled upward from the depths of being absorbed in this ancient diary—she thought she had a better understanding of how “the bends” would feel if she were diving and came up from the ocean depths too fast.
She’d just found this old book, and had opened it in the middle, at random, surprised that it was written in longhand. The first paragraph her eyes lit upon grabbed her instantly and she was absorbed in the story before she hardly knew what was happening.
She glanced around surprised to find that she was no longer on the Ohio River banks, at night, with bad guys trying to capture her and the people she was trying to save. She had heard of the Underground Railroad in history class, but it had always seemed far away and long ago. A fairy tale. It had never felt real until now.
The old leather-bound diary she had discovered behind a loose board in the upstairs attic had changed everything. It held an unbelievable story—a family treasure!
It was almost too much of a treasure. She was reluctant to tell anyone about it. Most of her relatives were here right now, helping clear out her great grandma’s house. Grandma’s death had been no surprise. Her last birthday had been her 83rd. Now it was time for her and all the relatives to clear out Grandma’s house before they all left for their respective homes scattered all over the the country. If her bratty cousin, thirteen-year-old Mary Jane Robinson, found out about the diary she would snatch it right out of her hands.
That would never do. Mary Jane was rough on things and the pages of this diary were as dry and thin as the brittle autumn oak leaves lying scattered about on Grandma’s porch. She was half-afraid to turn the pages herself. Under no circumstances did she want a tug-of-war with Mary Jane. In fact, she had already torn one page ever-so-slightly, herself—and she was being careful!
If her mom found out, she’d make her share it with the entire family. Mom was fair like that.
Hannah did not want to share. Not this. Not something as precious as this amazing story. Her mother had promised her before they came here that she could choose one thing to take back to California with her.
“Me?” she had said at the time. “Thanks, but no thanks.” And she had gone back to texting her boyfriend, Joey. Angry to no avail she had been forced to leave home and travel clear across the United States with her annoying little brother, Johnathan, just to attend her great grandmother’s funeral. The funeral was bad enough, but to have to help clean out her grandmother’s dusty old house also was just too much!
This was not the summer Hannah had planned. Her best friend, Madison, was sixteen and had her driver’s license. They lived within driving distance of the beach, where they planned to “live” this summer.
Then her 83 year old great-grandmother died. Now she was stuck helping her mother and aunts clean out her grandmother’s closets and attic. For a teenage girl the only way to describe this situation was: “This sucks.”
Her mother had recently informed her that they were staying two more weeks. That would make a whole month out of her summer.
“It isn’t fair for me to dump this job on my sisters,” her mother had said when she protested. “I need to help…and so do you.”
There had been a lot of conversation about what to do with the house in southern Ohio where her mother and her sisters had been raised. The house was actually a cabin erected by French settlers somewhere between 1820 and 1830. Beneath the white clapboards were huge white oak logs hewn to interlock at the corners and chinked to keep the bugs, the wind and the rain out. It had been in their family for nearly two-hundred years. Hannah could have cared less.
To a girl from California--this totally had to be the most boring summer of her life. She had pools to swim in, boys to flirt with, and movies to watch and back-to-school clothes to shop for.
Besides that, Hannah had worries.
Her best friend, Madison—the one with her driver’s license-- appeared to be spending an awful lot of time with Hannah’s boyfriend, Joey, ever since Hannah left. Joey was the coolest guy in high school, and Hannah had worked hard to get him to notice her. Now all her hard work was going straight down the drain. The longer she stayed in Ohio, the cozier Madison and Joey seemed to be getting. She was already getting tex
ts from other friends commenting on it and warning her that Madison was moving into her territory. The problem was, no matter how well-meaning her friends were--there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Her mom was digging in her heels about staying here to help, and at fifteen, she couldn’t exactly drive herself to the nearest airport—a full two hours away!
Who ever heard of having to drive two whole hours just to get to the nearest airport! Her grandma had SO lived in the boonies. There wasn’t even a MacDonald’s in the nearest little town—five miles away.
It was peaceful here—that’s one thing she had to admit. And it had been a little bit cool to get to know her aunts better—but it would have been nice to have had a boyfriend who would be true to her back home instead of getting interested in someone else the minute her back was turned. Maybe that was too much to expect. She didn’t know what she was supposed to expect. She was fifteen years old and she liked Joey and she wanted him to be her boyfriend, and she wanted to be pretty, and talk her mom into letting her get her hair highlighted and get a babysitting job so she’d have money and buy lots of nice clothes. That was about the extent of her dreams right now and none of that was happening as she sat here in this dusty old upstairs bedroom.
The only good thing that had happened was finding this old diary, and she didn’t want her mom discovering it and telling everyone downstairs. At least not until Hannah could read the whole thing. She wanted to keep this secret to herself—at least for now.
“I’m fine, Mom,” she called. “Just looking through some old papers.”
That was true enough. The diary was made of paper. And it was old.
“I’ve made sandwiches for supper,” her mom yelled up the stairs. “And your Aunt Phyllis brought over her potato salad that you like so much. Take a break and come on down and eat with us, sweetheart.”
Hannah was so involved in the diary she had just found, that she was tempted to skip lunch—but she was getting hungry, and that potato salad did sound tasty. Carefully, she slipped the diary back behind the loose board and positioned a cardboard box in front of it. With any luck, it would wait until she’d had dinner.
Chapter Two
The Beginning
Her great grandmother had a big storage area in the far end of one of the two upstairs rooms. Grandma was not dirty or cluttered but she definitely had lots of stuff packed away.
“Why did she keep all this stuff,” Hannah had said the first time she’d seen the sagging shelves full of keepsakes.
Her mom said, “If you had lived through the Depression you would understand why she kept so much. It might seem useless to you, but it was precious to her.”
So, for the first week, while her mother dealt with dressers and drawers downstairs, Hannah battled dust, spider webs that collected in her hair and those stupid wasps that kept buzzing her all through the day. For her mom’s sake—who was grieving the loss of her grandmother-- she tried to grin and bear it. Besides, the faster she worked, she reasoned—the sooner they could get out of there and she could find out if something had actually developed between Madison and Joey, or if her other friends were just being gossipy.
Her job was especially slow going because every time she carried a box downstairs, her aunts would go through it and tell a boring story about every last item. An old box of vinyl records forced Hannah into hearing the whole history of Lawrence Welk.
After several hours of dragging cardboard boxes and old suitcases downstairs, Hannah had crawled over three stacks of old Readers Digest to the very back of the storage area just to see how bad it was and how much work was still to be done.
Strangely enough, it had felt nice back there. It was quiet, and no one could see her. She felt like a little girl again, hiding behind the big couch in the den, pretending that she was in a magic cave that made her invisible.
Out of sight out of mind. She smiled to herself as she listened to her aunts ordering her younger brother around, telling him where to carry stuff. She had been sitting with her back against the far wall looking at a truck load of boxes of Grandma’s stuff that she would have to carry and help go through, when something had caught her eye—part of a board on her right had come loose, and it appeared that something was behind it.
The problem was, it was a little dark back there, and she couldn’t see as well as she’d like. She certainly didn’t feel secure about sticking her hand inside the crevice where it looked as though something was lodged.
Fortunately, she had stuffed her headlamp—the one she used for reading at night so her mom wouldn’t know she was staying up late—inside the pocket of her jeans. She positioned it on her head, switched the small light beam on, and pulled at the board.
It was old and dry and dusty and it came loose with a “crack” and a cloud of dust. A first, all she could do was cough and hack.
“Are you okay up there?” her mother called. “What’s all that noise and coughing about?”
“Just a little dust, Mom!” she choked out.
Then she spied the rather large leather volume.
Probably nothing more than an old recipe book of Grandma’s, she thought. Probably something completely useless like how to cook squirrel or ground hog. Maybe some family history—which she was NOT interested in. From what she could tell from the stories her aunts told, about the only thing her family had ever done was go to church and farm. Boring. Just like the history classes she had endured in her freshman year of high school. Why anyone would want to know all that stuff, she had no idea. What good would it do?
Perhaps, if she was lucky, it would have something valuable in it like money or maybe some old stamps.
It was fun to hold onto the book and daydream, but she knew in her heart that there was nothing exciting inside of it. Nothing exciting ever happened to her family. Or to her. Just the same old boring stuff, day after day.
She had no idea how wrong she was. Now, with her stomach full of sandwiches and Aunt Phyllis’s potato salad and with the rest of her family involved in cleaning out the barn which was crowded with antique farm implements, she was ready to start at the beginning. She was good at reading. With any luck, she would read the whole thing before they called her down for supper!
Carefully, she opened to the first page.
“This book is private. I try to be a godly man and a humble one. I do not want these stories to come across bragging or an attempt to make myself out as more than I am--but I believe the stories inside should be passed down to my children’s children.
I believe that the heroic efforts of my friends, the intervention of unknown and unnamed angels, and the valiant spirit of the enslaved men and women who were delivered from the tyranny of their “owners” must be preserved.
Evil prevails when good men do nothing. By the grace of God, I pray that my family will never be the kind of people who would sit quietly in the presence of evil and “do nothing.”
Lyle Franklin, January 5, 1853
Hannah felt goose bumps on her arms and legs, and shivered when she read those words, penned in an even and flowing hand unlike any handwriting she had ever seen.
Her mother’s maiden name was Franklin. Was this her great-great-great grandfather’s diary? It had to be!
January 8, 1853
“It will probably seem funny to future generations who might someday read this, but it was a trip to the outhouse that changed my life, Milly and I had a wonderful meal shared with family and friends at church for Christmas Eve. I knew I had eaten too much but there was so much food-- it seemed like such a waste to leave any of it for the dogs or the pigs. Even though everything was delicious, evidently there was one dish that did not agree with me. At 3:30 in the morning I could not wait any longer and made a trip to the outhouse.
After I had gotten done with my business, I started walking back to the house but something made me stop. Something besides the cold was making the hair stand up on the back of my neck on this moonless night.
I decided to wal
k to the barn to check on our one milk cow. It was very cold and I wanted to make sure none of the doors had blown open. Holding my lantern high above my head, I saw that the doors were fine. I opened them, walked into the barn, and again something just didn’t seem right. “Betsy” the cow was pacing nervously and she was usually as placid as a…cow.
I had not heard any dogs or coyotes howling. Then something caught my eye, there was a little fabric sticking out from behind the corner. I held my lamp higher and saw one of the most pitiful sights I had ever seen. Huddled in the corner was a Negro man, woman, and child. I cannot describe the look of fear in their eyes. I guess with my wild hair, night shirt, boots and heavy coat, I was a scary sight as well. They were shaking from the cold and fear. There was a small pail of milk in the man’’s hands.
“Please, sir, we didn’t mean to disturb yo’ cow,” the man said, his teeth chattering. “I’ll work off the cost o’ the milk. We needed some powerful bad for the baby—and for us.”
It dawned on me they must be starving and the cow’s milk might be the only nourishing thing they’d had for a while. It is amazing the thoughts that go through your mind when you see a slave family sitting in your barn dressed in rags and half-starved to death.
My first reaction was that of fury. Not against these poor people, but against those who had enslaved them. I carefully modulated my voice, trying not to frighten them.
“Don’t be scared,” I said, afraid if I took one step toward them, they would flee into the bitter cold night. “Please come over here in the light so I can see you better.”
They struggled to their feet and moved slowly into the light, but their heads were down as though they expected to be chastised or beaten. The child, a small boy, could not have been more than a year old but had the most beautiful eyes. His face was the only one I could plainly see. He stared straight at me, fearlessly, as though taking my measure.