by Wayne Grady
“They think running away is a disease that slaves get,” he said. “A kind of rabies.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“I know it is, but it’s what they think. They’ll kill him so he doesn’t infect the others.”
“I want you to go find the horses,” she said. “We’ll save the girl. And our souls.”
Dante and Beatrice were standing head to rump in a clump of alders near the creek, and Satan was at the water’s edge, about twenty feet downstream, keeping her nose close to the water, where the smell of smoke wasn’t so strong. Moody scouted around briefly for the Judds. It was dark but there were signs they’d been there, a shoe scrape in the mud, a cigar end. Not properly dealing with the Judds was a mistake. The Judds were Millican with backbone.
The horses let him lead them until they realized where he was taking them, then they balked and would be led no farther. He didn’t flail at them, they were already scared enough and would probably try to kill him. He tied them to the fence and dragged the wagon to them, thankful he’d had the sense to throw the harness into it. He hitched up Dante and Beatrice and tied Satan to the tailboard because he didn’t have a saddle for her. By the time he headed back to the house, the sun was beginning to outline the eastern end of the ridge, and he thought about the stars Rachel and Robert had watched falling from the sky, portending the end of the world. There was violence all around, he would tell her, murderousness in everyone. The meek shall not inherit the earth: the meek are swept away while the mighty head for higher ground.
Rachel had readied the girl and a few other things. She’d been busy. Clothes in a bundle, the books in a crate beside the door.
“You’re leaving for good?” he said, astonished. “I thought we were just taking the girl to a doctor.”
“I’m taking some things with us,” she said, “because I don’t know when I’ll be back and I don’t want to leave them here in case the Judds come and burn the house down. Besides, we now have no hay for the winter.”
She had Moody carry the mattress from her bed out to the wagon. When he got back, he saw she had also removed a floorboard from the middle of the kitchen, and placed a tin canister on the table.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Robert’s gold,” she said. She took the lid off and stepped back to let him see inside. “He kept going down to the sluice every once in a while, and this is what he got.” It looked like ordinary river sand to Moody, but it glinted dully in the morning light, and he took her word for it that it was gold. He’d never seen raw gold before. Some of the pieces were as big as grains of rice, and when he hefted the tin it felt heavier than he expected.
He gathered his own gear, what there was of it: his satchel, the Cuvier paper, some clothes of Robert’s that Rachel had given him. Everywhere he looked he saw the shattered past. Annie drowned, Lucas lost, Robert dead, the barn smoldering as after a battle, the dying girl. What could he do that would not just add to it?
15.
Rachel tried not to look back, and succeeded until they reached the curve in the road, then she asked Moody to stop. They both turned. Smoke rose lazily from the barn, broken, charred timbers pointing like black fingers at the sky, but the house looked peaceful, as though they were still in it, still lying in bed thinking of breakfast and the day’s chores. Any minute now he would get up and light the stove, then crawl back into bed to hold her while the room warmed up. The girl lying on the mattress moaned. He slapped the reins and they began the ride to Huntsville.
“Maybe it was a mistake for Robert and me to come here,” Rachel said after a while. “We thought we could help end some of the violence, at least the violence of slavery. We did help a few.”
“How many?”
“Maybe twelve or fifteen.”
“That’s something,” he said.
“I can’t have violence around me, Mr. Moody,” she said suddenly. “I won’t. It frightens me. That was why my mother left Mobile, why I left Huntsville, with its hellish mills squeezing the lives out of those poor people. Violence, anger, hatred, intolerance, cursing, drinking, fighting. What’s wrong with people, Mr. Moody, that they choose those things over happiness and friendship and community? We are told that poverty leads to despair, but I believe it is the other way around. Poor people don’t have to hate or curse or beat up people who are poorer than they. It’s poverty of the spirit that leads to poverty of the body. Out here on the farm we rarely had two pennies together, but it was peaceful and quiet and we could believe that that was how things were meant to be. As in Eden. We worked the fields, we tended the animals, we went months without seeing another soul. Robert built the house and the barn and once in a while we’d put fugitives up and take them to Dr. Carson, in Huntsville, and he would pass them on to another Friend along the way.”
“Dr. Carson is a Quaker?”
“Yes. He may know something of the son you are seeking.”
Moody unconsciously slapped the reins.
“Sometimes they’d help us on the farm for a few days,” Rachel said, “if it was planting or harvest. Two young men helped Robert shingle the barn roof. We had a girl once who taught me how to make proper pastry. We thought we’d found a new way to live. We put high sides on the wagon and filled it with corn or potatoes, things we’d grown from the earth with our own hands and our own love, and we hid the runaways in it and delivered them to the doctor. It was like we were setting them free, like they were birds and we were letting them out of their cages, and then we’d go home and resume our peaceful lives. There was no violence in our lives, or so we thought. But it was like playing a game, wasn’t it, Mr. Moody? That’s what you’re thinking, I know, that’s what you have been trying to show me. We were like children playing a game with the Devil and thinking we were winning.”
“That isn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking that you are actually helping the people you want to help, whereas every time I try to do the right thing it turns out to be exactly the wrong thing.”
“You are feeling sorry for thyself?”
That stunned him. He was sorry for Annie, he was sorry for Lucas, and for Rachel, but was he also sorry for himself? What if he was? He was still going to find Lucas.
“Even if we went back to the farm,” she went on, “and you ‘took care’ of the Judds, as you put it, it wouldn’t be the same. It would be peace paid for with violence.”
“As after a war,” he said, agreeing with her.
“And more Judds would come, and more. I would always be aware of living in the eye of a storm, which is perhaps how I have been living all these years without knowing it. You taught me that, Mr. Moody. I could have withstood Robert’s death if it hadn’t been for thee. I was withstanding it. At night, when the work was done and I was sitting alone in the house with a candle lit and a book in my lap, the grief would hit me with such sudden force it would knock me to the floor, and I would lie there throbbing with the sheer physicality of it. But after a time I would get up again and resume my reading, and gradually my hands would stop shaking and my breathing would return to normal, and I would be able to sleep in the same bed in which Robert and I had slept together.”
“But not now?” Moody said.
She was quiet for a moment, her breath coming in gusts as she stopped to compose herself. The road took a dip, and holding the horses back made him think of the trip from Boonville with Annie. That had been a kind of farewell, too.
“It has been pleasant these last few nights,” she said.
“But?”
“But I would not keep thee from thy search for Lucas.”
16.
Huntsville was a sizable town, surprising given its remoteness. Thirty years ago there had been nothing there but rocks and trees, not even a trading post. It was Creek land, and the Creeks had sided with the Cherokee against whites expanding into their territory. Unsuccessfully, it turned out. The Creeks and the Cherokees had been evacuated, replaced by cotton mills. Moody drove slowly do
wn the main street, the girl covered with a blanket, past hotels, a couple of saloons, and a number of smaller establishments, gun shops, haberdashers, all closed and dark at that time of night except for the saloons. Rachel directed him to Dr. Carson’s, in a section of town maintaining a semblance of gentility by keeping its curtains drawn and its gates closed. The large clapboard houses had been built by mill owners who had since moved to the more salubrious air up on Green Mountain, and had turned their former residences into repositories for their white workers. The colored workers lived in the lower part of town, closer to the mills and the dockyards and the truculent Tennessee River.
Dr. Carson was a small, bespectacled, energetic man, brisk and businesslike in his movements and careful in his speech. He wore a gray tailcoat and small, tight-fitting boots. Moody could easily imagine him risking his practice for the Quaker cause, and was reminded of Stephen Austin, who had set aside his law degree to settle Texas. The doctor took in runaways and passed them on to other Quakers farther north, either through the Appalachians into Tennessee or else down the Tennessee River into Kentucky. Moody guessed that the mill owners did not send their daughters to him.
Once they settled the girl in a room behind the clinic, the doctor examined Moody’s hip. “You won’t be able to ride for a while,” he said, “but the wound should heal without permanent damage. You may have a slight limp. Rachel did a fine job keeping it clean.”
Moody asked him if he’d ever sheltered a fugitive named Lucas.
“What is your interest in him?” Carson asked.
“I have news of his mother,” he said. “I want to find him and deliver that news.”
Carson frowned. “Nothing more than that? Has he run away from you?”
“No, from a neighbor of mine. You may be assured I have no intention of bringing him back. If anything, I want to help him get farther away.”
“Can we believe him?” the doctor said to Rachel.
Rachel looked at Moody. “Yes,” she said. “I think so. He’s not a bad man.”
Carson removed a ledger from a lower drawer in his desk.
“I don’t know what last name he would have given,” said Moody. “Maybe Casgrain.”
“We don’t ask for last names,” said Carson, taking a sheet of prescription paper from his desk. He dipped his pen and wrote on it, and handed the paper to Moody.
“It’s an address in Knoxville,” he said. “Lucas stayed here for three nights while I arranged transportation for him. Normally I would have sent him east, up the Tennessee River to Paducah, but boats aren’t getting past Muscle Shoals these days, the water being so low, so instead I sent him upriver, to Knoxville.”
“How long ago?”
“A month.”
“Did he have a woman with him, named Benah?”
“No. He asked if I’d seen a young woman of that name, and I told him I hadn’t.”
“A month,” Moody said. “Would he be in Knoxville now?”
“I have no idea,” Carson said. “We don’t communicate such things. The hill country between here and there isn’t entirely friendly, with bands of Cherokee and Creek still trying to evade removal. But they are hostile mainly to whites. We’ve put what we call way stations in the caves above the river, caches of food and water, some warm clothing, where a runaway can hide for a day or two. If you take a steamboat up the Tennessee to Knoxville, Mr. Moody, and keep your eyes open along the way, you might catch up with him.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“I advised Lucas to avoid Chattanooga, which is about halfway between here and Knoxville.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s the old staging area for the Cherokee Removal of 1838. Most of the Cherokee are long gone, sadly, but some evaded capture and others are sneaking back, and the army maintains a camp there to protect the town. The place is swarming with soldiers with nothing much to do. I found Lucas work on a flatboat, but warned him to get off before Chattanooga and take to the hills, then pick up the flatboat again farther upriver.”
“Why?”
“The army is dragooning what they like to call ‘personnel’ to work at the camp. They take negroes off any boat that passes through. He’ll be safe enough if he takes to the trails, but you never know. Some people don’t like to take advice.”
Moody smiled grimly. “That sounds like Lucas,” he said. “But he’s no fool.”
17.
Rachel offered him Satan, but though he liked the mare for her wild looks and gentle ways, he didn’t accept the gift. He wouldn’t be able to take her on the steamboat, and if there were card games on board, which he had no doubt there would be, he would be able to buy a horse and saddle in Knoxville. And a gun, he thought, a revolver, a Collier, like the one he’d lost, or maybe one of the new Colt Patersons. He would find Lucas and together they would ride north to Ohio, or even up to Canada. Maybe they would find Benah first. They would set out as master and servants, in case anyone asked, and arrive as father and son and daughter-in-law. In her mother’s boardinghouse, he lay in bed beside Rachel, who was sleeping, and thought about the cabin Lucas and Benah would make, the crops they would sow. The children they would have. He thought about bringing them back to Rachel’s farm, but then he’d have to “deal with” the Judds, or else pretend that Lucas and Benah were their slaves. He couldn’t do that, nor would Rachel let him. He rose early without having slept, left the house without waking Rachel, and walked through the dark to the dockyard. A layer of heavy, white dew furred the trees and settled onto the grass and the boardwalks and the roofs of the houses, lightening the morning but chilling the air. When he reached into the pocket of Robert’s coat for his gloves, he found a small leather pouch, a heavy packet of Robert’s gold. Rachel must have put it there the night before. She had foreseen everything.
18.
He woke slowly and opened his eyes, lying still for several long moments trying to place the room. Low, paneled ceiling. Wide, four-poster bed, uncurtained but the rods were there. No one beside him. Against the opposite wall, a low washstand with a white-and-blue basin, and a matching pitcher strapped to the wall beneath a framed mirror. A door on his right, another on his left, with light coming in through the louvers. How long had it been since he had left the Rio Brazos? And he had yet to wake up in a room he recognized.
A steady pounding coming up through the floor reminded him that he was on a steamer. Ah. He’d boarded the SS Mary White in Huntsville after saying goodbye, or not saying goodbye, to Rachel. To his right, a door opened onto the great interior lounge, where he remembered there had been tables and a bar and a card game. He looked frantically around for his coat and satchel, found them on the floor and dumped their contents on the bed. The pouch with Robert’s gold was still there, along with a handful of coins—dollars and eagles—and in the satchel a rat’s nest of paper money drawn on Huntsville and Knoxville banks he’d never heard of. He must have drunk a considerable amount of whiskey. He didn’t remember playing cards, and had no recollection of coming into this stateroom and falling fully clothed onto the bed.
He was on his way to Knoxville, to find Lucas. So much of his life had been spent on or near water: the inland passages between the Sea Islands and Georgia’s mainland, where in the heat of August he had lowered fishing lines from summer docks and caught fathead sculpins, a fish so ugly and full of bones that Sikey refused to cook them; Lake Pontchartrain, where, when he had money, he had taken Annie and Lucas sailing, letting Lucas hold the tiller while he opened the wine and Annie unpacked the fried chicken and okra salad; Blue Creek, the trickle of water that ran past Rachel’s farm and had yielded up Robert’s gold; the Rio Brazos.
He put the banknotes in his pocket, returned the rest of his few belongings to the satchel, stowed the satchel under the bed, and stepped outside to the gallery, to see what fresh air would do to his head.
The Mary White was a stern-wheeler, a hundred and fifty feet from paddle to bowsprit, and the deck he was on was ten f
eet above the waterline. Below his deck was the open engine deck, where all the thumping was coming from, and below that the ship’s hull, which, like everything else on board, was painted gleaming white. He’d been on bigger boats on the Mississippi, but this one had a light draft that was right for the river. He studied the trees along the shoreline, calculating the ship’s progress against the strong current: about two knots. Sixty hours from Huntsville to Chattanooga, sixty more to Knoxville. How many of them already passed? Say twelve. Five days to go.
He filled his lungs and set off around the gallery. Scenes from the previous evening came back to him. His card-playing skills had returned; he patted his pocket, wondering whom he had to avoid, and squinted at a gull flying level with the deck rail, twenty feet to starboard, its gray head dipping back and forth, its yellow eye studying the water below. He imagined himself in Knoxville, handing the pouch of gold to Lucas. Here, he would say, find Benah, buy some land, build a house, start a new life. Lucas would look at him with astonishment and forgiveness and, yes, love. Not since Lucas had been eight or nine, not since they left New Orleans, had Moody held him in his arms, but he would hold him then, pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. They wouldn’t speak for a moment, a bond stronger than words having formed between them. On the riverbank, smoke curled up from the chimneys of log cabins centered in clearings hewn out of the dense forest. A house like that, he would say to Lucas, but not here, not in the South. Get as far from here as you can.
He made his way forward along the deserted gallery, looking through open stateroom doors to where colored servants were making beds and picking up clothes and emptying washbasins and chamber pots into slop buckets. In one room he saw a young woman dressing a white child. She could have been Benah. The previous evening, he remembered now, he had asked several white women in the ladies’ lounge if they knew a servant girl named Benah. They told him what they knew of servant girls. They had no morals. They would rob you, but only of trivial things: a comb, a cheap brooch, a silk handkerchief. The women allowed their servants to bring their tea, but not to pour it. Why should Annie not be on the Mary White, fetching a white woman’s tea, dressing a white woman’s child? But of course she wasn’t. He tipped his hat to the servant in the stateroom and strode on.