by Wayne Grady
A team and wagon stopped in front of what appeared to be a church or a meeting hall, a young man about Lucas’s age holding the reins. Was that Benah sitting up beside him, carrying a doll or a child? No, she was lighter, and the young man wasn’t Lucas. He was seeing Lucas everywhere. The day before, he had followed a man for five minutes down Huckabee Street, something about the man’s shoulders, his gait, but when he turned he didn’t look anything like Lucas. This couple in the wagon looked at him nervously as he approached, aware of his scrutiny.
“ ‘Morning,” he said to the man, taking off his hat. “Fine day.”
The man and woman stared down at him as if from a scaffold. Neither seemed inclined to return his greeting.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine, name of Lucas, and his wife, Benah. Have either of you come across him in your journeys?”
He received the usual blank stares. They didn’t even look at each other. He knew that if he offered money he’d be taken for a catcher, if he wasn’t already.
“I ain’t out to harm them,” he said. “I want to help them across. Tell them that. I want to help. I knew his mamma.”
The man looked down at the reins he was holding, as if he would haw the horses into motion if he could get his hands to work, and the woman continued to stare at Moody as though waiting for him to take something from her. The wagon, her husband, her child. There was something so elemental in her stare, it contained none of the sentiments of normal discourse, no curiosity, no fear, no pleasure, no alarm. He hated to think what had reduced this woman to this state.
He put his hat on and backed away. “Tell them if you see them,” he said. He’d remember the church and come again when it was quieter. A church that helped runaways might have helped Lucas.
29.
In the dining room of the Hart House Hotel, he read the notices in the Louisville Bulletin as he ate his breakfast:
$75 REWARD
Ran away from the Subscriber in South Carolina on the night of Oct 11, a negro man named SILAS, about 30 years of age, 5 feet 6 or 7 inches high; of dark color; heavy in the chest; several of his big jaw teeth out; upon his body several marks of the whip, one of them straight up the back and curving over the left shoulder. No other identifying marks. Took with him a quantity of clothing, mostly white cotton, and several hats. A Reward of $75 will be paid for his apprehension and security, if taken out of the State of Kentucky; $50 if taken in any county bordering on the Ohio River; $25 if taken in any of the interior counties. John Hitchcraft.
Catchers were paid better, he noticed, if they let runaways cross the Ohio River into Ohio or Indiana before catching them. This improved Lucas’s chances of reaching the river. There were a dozen such dispatches every day, men run from plantations or roadwork or even from households, women gone with their children, children just gone. Moody read them as he drank his coffee, notices from hard-done-by plantation owners in the Carolinas, angry shopkeepers in Georgia or Mississippi: “absconded wearing linen pantaloons,” “accompanied by his wife BETTE,” “of a pleasant disposition when spoken to.” He wondered if he should post a notice for Lucas in the Bulletin as he had in the Register. Inquire at the Hart House Hotel, 23 Wooler. Would Lucas suspect a trick? He was a fugitive, after all. But what else could Moody do, other than roam the city like a wraith? He didn’t know any Quakers in Louisville, but they wouldn’t be hard to find. He should have asked Heiskell for a letter of introduction. He continued to surveil the dockyards, walk out onto the ferry dock, stare across the Ohio at the Indiana shoreline as if expecting Lucas and Benah to step out of the trees, wave at him to come join them. He would row across the Falls of the Ohio. But no one emerged from the Indiana forest. He walked back through the shantytown and sat in workingmen’s saloons drinking poor beer and returning their vacant stares. Once he knocked on the door of the church where he had seen the couple in the wagon, but no one answered. No one in this part of town was going to open their door to a white man, no matter how often he said he wanted to help.
He considered going back to Twin Forks and holing up for the winter, but discovered he didn’t need to, because Twin Forks came to him. On one of his daily meandering waterfront checks he saw Tim’n’Tom driving a trace-galled horse and a loaded wagon along Ohio Street, past the exits to the docks, past Webber’s Livery Stable and Matsen’s Coal Yard, heading east toward a section of the riverfront reserved for private wharves and warehouses. He called to them, but there was too much clattering and whinnying, and so he walked briskly in the wake of their wagon, unable to run because of his hip. They moved at a decent pace, as though eager to put the city’s dust behind them, and eventually turned down a disused, rutted track leading through some scraggly trees to the water’s edge. Moody caught up with them as they were untying the tarpaulin that covered their load. They looked up and waved as though they’d known he was behind them all along.
“Pelts,” said one.
And the other nodded and said, “Furs.”
“Auction house in Wheeling.”
“Beaver and muskrat.”
“Mink, otter, ermine.”
“Couple of lynx.”
“Whooping crane.”
“Whooping crane?” asked Moody. “A bird?”
“Yep, big whooper.”
“Museum buys ’em.”
“Sold ’em a brown pelican last year.”
“Named our boat after it.”
“The Pelican.”
One side of the dock was a long, shed-roofed structure perched, like the dock itself, on stilts. Two side doors opened into it. Tim’n’Tom slid one aside and they stepped through it onto the deck of a keelboat. There wasn’t much light, but Moody could see the boat was about fifty or fifty-five feet long, with a large cabin aft. He could also see that the vessel was well made, the joins tight and the deck pumiced smooth as a Savannah dance floor.
“Did you make this?” he asked, running his hands along the cedar-sided hull. The boat stirred gently in the water, nodding against the dock.
“Built the boat,” Tim’n’Tom said.
“Built the shed.”
“Built the dock.”
“Built the wagon.”
There was a brief pause.
“Bought the horse.”
Moody helped them unload the bales of furs through a hatch into the keelboat’s hold.
“We’ll advertise for help,” said Tim’n’Tom. “Hard poling in places, going upriver, especially with the water low like this.”
“Wind helps.”
“Sometimes.”
All during dinner, which they ate aboard the Pelican, at a table and chairs set up on the boat’s ample foredeck, Moody considered signing on with Tim’n’Tom. He was still thinking about it as they sat outside on the dock, hands wrapped around warm tea mugs, and watched the sun go down over the city. His high estimation of Louisville as the place where he would find Lucas was also setting. Lucas wasn’t anywhere near Louisville. Why would he be? The Ohio was a long river and there were safer places to cross it, where Lucas would be less scrutinized than he would have been in Louisville. He’d been wasting his time, first in Knoxville and now here. Weeks had been lost.
“What’s Wheeling?” he asked, and they told him it was a town in northern Virginia, on the edge of the East. From there you could get upriver to Pittsburgh and even Philadelphia by train. Although it was Virginia, they said, slavery wasn’t as deeply entrenched as it was in the eastern half of the state. If Lucas was hiding out somewhere along the Ohio between Louisville and Wheeling, looking for a way to get across, then sailing up the river on a slow-moving, fifty-five-foot keelboat wouldn’t be a bad way of finding him.
“Do you ever see runaways on your trips to Wheeling?” he asked them.
“Lots of them,” said one.
“Working in Wheeling, mostly,” said the other. “And Malden.”
“What’s in Malden?” Moody asked.
“Salt mines.”
“Salt
furnaces.”
“Supply all the meat packers from Louisville to Pittsburgh.”
“Huge operations.”
“Hot work.”
“Slave work.”
“Most runaways get themselves caught crossing the Ohio end up in Malden.”
“If they ain’t sent back South.”
“Or killed.”
“We stop there on our way to Wheeling, to pick up salt.”
“I’ll come with you,” Moody said.
“Thought you would.”
“Needle won’t come out of the haystack by itself.”
He returned to the hotel, paid his bill, sold his horse to the livery yard, and took a cab back to Tim’n’Tom’s dock, his optimism renewed. He felt as though he were running away to sea.
30.
On the upriver trip he scanned the trees and beaches for signs of runaways. He would set his pole on the bottom, feel it nestle into sand or jam between rocks, fix his end of it against his shoulder, then look up to see if anyone was watching from shore as he pushed. There must have been hundreds of fugitives lurking in those bushes, eyeing the Pelican as it passed, calculating the risks of hailing it, but he saw no trace; no marks in the sand, no broken branches, no small fires or stacks of blackened driftwood, no smoke sifting through the leaves. He supposed that by the time fugitives reached the Ohio they had learned how to be invisible. A runaway who had made it this far was a smart runaway. Moody poled on the starboard, or shore, side of the boat, so that Lucas, if he was out there, would see him and come out. But would he come out? Would he trust Moody, or would he think Moody had come to take him back into slavery like any other catcher? The thought pained him, but as he inched the Pelican against the current he had to admit Lucas had little reason to trust him. Moody had let him go to Millican’s, which had caused Millican to sell Benah, and perhaps by now Lucas even knew what had happened to Annie, and held Moody responsible for his mother’s death. Moody had to find Lucas and prove to him that he’d changed. To acknowledge to him that he, Moody, had made terrible mistakes in his life, but that essentially he was a good man, that he hadn’t known they were mistakes until after he’d made them. Not that that made it all right, but it might make it easier for Lucas to forgive him.
Some things are forgotten, but nothing is ever forgiven.
He felt an overwhelming need to be forgiven. Annie and Rachel were behind him, only Lucas could forgive him now. He would keep on.
31.
The Kanawha River drained into the Ohio a day’s poling west of Wheeling, and they turned into it. At Kanawha Salines, a settlement a few miles upriver, Tim’n’Tom stopped to take on sixty fifty-pound bags of salt.
“Why not pick them up on the way back from Wheeling?” Moody asked.
“Auction’s Wednesday.”
“This is Monday.”
“Save a day on the way back.”
While the brothers loaded, Moody walked about, looking for Lucas among the furnace workers. There were fifty-two salt operations, fifty-two mine heads housing steam-driven contraptions that pumped river water down to the salt beds four hundred feet below the surface, and pumped the liquid brine up into heated evaporation pans that had to be constantly stirred and raked by slaves, male and female, children and uncles. Smoke from fifty-two coal-burning furnaces choked the entire valley. Moody started coughing the minute they tied up. Louisville had been dingy from coal burning, but nothing he’d seen there matched this. Coal smoke blackened the trees and the roofs of the houses, the tops of the fenceposts, the washing on the clotheslines, the surfaces of the water in the horse troughs and drinking barrels, the flanks of the horses, the faces of the men who drove them, even the bread they put in their mouths. The very ground seemed to be made of coal dust and cinders. It was hard to see how anything as white as salt could come from it.
More than five hundred slaves worked in the Kanawha Salines. Moody spent the day searching among them, and in the evening walked through Malden’s shantytown, without learning anything. No one had heard of Lucas. It had been months, but he felt he’d been looking for Lucas forever, since the day Lucas was born, even before that, when Annie was still carrying him. She never said how Lucas had been started, neither at the time nor that day coming back from Boonville. When Lucas was born with such light skin and it was clear that his father had been white, Moody settled on Casgrain. The overseer was unmarried, lived year around on Plantagenet and devoted himself to siring slaves as if it were part of his job. Fat, leering, stupid Casgrain. Moody had hoped he’d got Annie away in time, but Casgrain never missed a trick. It explained his swagger, the way Moody’s father deferred to him in all matters concerning slaves, and why Moody’s mother treated Casgrain as though he were a plague imposed on her by her husband. The thought of Casgrain had infused an awkwardness between himself and Lucas that Moody had never been able to breach. He thought about that as he walked through Malden, looking into the workingmen’s blackened faces. Would he recognize Lucas beneath the grit? Would Lucas reveal himself if he didn’t? He was almost relieved when it was time to go back to the Pelican and set off up to Wheeling.
32.
Never had he seen such excitable people as there were in Wheeling, Virginia. Everyone was always worked up about something: dogs running after carts, children running after dogs, women running after children. Men starting up this, launching that, getting something else going, all moving in a direction they vaguely described as “ahead” but to Moody simply looked like “around.” Work had begun on a new suspension bridge connecting the city to Zane’s Island, in the Ohio, even though there was nothing on Zane’s Island except a few farms. Papers in Philadelphia were calling it “the bridge to nowhere,” but nowhere was being connected to somewhere, and that was deemed progress. Coal mines on the mainland supplied the salt furnaces, the salt furnaces supplied the meat packers, the meat packers supplied the bridge workers. Someone had discovered iron in the area, and that had set off a run of eager speculation: Wheeling could supply Pittsburgh with iron ore as well as coal for the smelters, and get back steel for the bridge. Maybe Wheeling could get the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to lay some tracks to haul the ore, coal, salt, and of course passengers possibly from Boston on their way to points west. New stores would be needed, hotels, eating houses, the land registry office would have to be expanded, they’d need a chamber of commerce, and someone would have to build a hotel on Zane’s Island. They should take a vote on paving the streets. So much delving and scheming. In the agrarian South, even in Louisville, resources tended to lie on the surface—cotton, tobacco, hemp, cane, rice—whereas here in the North everything seemed to be under the ground, and require a great effort of digging to get it up and greater efforts of planning to ship it off and sell it somewhere.
As Tim’n’Tom had said, the real work in Wheeling was done by slaves, even though the city was officially antislavery. They didn’t call it slavery, they called it free labor, but all the laboring was done by blacks. Colored men worked on the bridge and in the salt mines and the manufactories: “Far from lessening the intolerable burden of the black man,” he wrote to Fred Heiskell, “industry appears to have increased his suffering, for it is far uglier labor in a factory than on a cotton plantation, where at least he has the benefit of sun and air, if we could but banish the whip. The factories are dark, noisy, and dangerous—men are dwarfed by the size of the machinery, bludgeoned by the clamor of metal hammering metal and boiled alive like lobsters by steam. In the coal mines, men work underground from see to can’t, as they used to say in Texas, never seeing the light of day except on Sundays, when they are too tired, discouraged, and demoralized to worship the deity that has landed them in these deplorable circumstances.”
The blacks in Wheeling were runaways who’d been caught and put to work locally instead of being chain-ganged South. They had glimpsed freedom across the Ohio River before that Holy Grail was snatched away from them. Looking across the river, Moody saw a drift of ascending hills
covered by tall, leafless oaks and maples, latticed by rivers. Too far to swim, but close enough to be a torture as they loaded boats or dragged metal girders off the docks.
He helped Tim’n’Tom stack their pelts on a cart to be taken up to the auction barn, then stayed down at the water to ask after Lucas. He talked to men working in the coal yards first. Most were from Georgia or Mississippi; they were quiet when they heard his accent, but relaxed when he explained that he was trying to help a friend get to Canada. They had seen the Pelican come in. “You could take us across the Ohio in that,” they said. “Take us all the way to Canada in it.” They were right, he could have.
“If it was my boat, I would,” he said, recklessly. The men nodded and went silent for a moment, then turned back to work before the overseer came along and caught them talking to a white man about a boat.
33.
Tim’n’Tom returned from the auction barn to get the whooper skin and take it to the museum, and this time Moody went with them. The museum was housed in a small building attached to the side of the town hall: THE WHEELER MUSEUM OF NATURAL CURIOSITIES AND HISTORY, the sign above the door read. Inside, the emphasis seemed to be more on curiosities: among the shelves of the usual stuffed birds and bottled reptiles, Moody saw the skeleton of a two-headed calf; a large jar of yellow liquid in which floated the lightly haired fetus of a one-eyed horse; another jar, labeled “The Malden Mermaid,” contained an unborn human child whose legs were fused to form a single, fish-like appendage; a large ostrich egg on which a sailor had etched a whaling scene; and beside it, a bone, slightly smaller than the one Moody had found by the Rio Brazos, with a drawing of a giant wearing a panther skin and holding a wooden club the size of a tree trunk over his shoulder. An arrow pointed from the bone to the giant’s upper thigh. Nature, it turned out, was filled with such a variety of oddities that no accounting of it, no matter how far-fetched and outlandish, could be disbelieved. Giants once roamed the Earth, mermaids inhabited the oceans: here was the proof. Everything was possible.