by Wayne Grady
Early in the winter of ’49, he took on Otway Tull, a former cotton slave from the Green Mountain plantation in Virginia who had stowed away on a Mississippi steamboat and jumped ship in Cairo, a mosquito-infested town at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Moody was delivering a load of salt when Tull approached him and offered to help unload, saying he wanted to go to Indianapolis. He was so scarred over Moody couldn’t say how old he was, or whether he was handsome or plain. His left arm was crooked and he walked with a limp. He said yes to Tull, he said yes to everyone, but when they set off upriver first thing the next morning, he found Tull so defeated and bitter he was sorry to have him on board. When he asked Tull about Lucas, Tull spit over the side of the boat and shook his head.
“Fugitives crazy to come this way,” he said. “They gwan down to Mexico, or San Domingo. Some are took by abolitionists, who juss want us gone, and sent back to Africa. Others go to secret colonies deep in de Carolina swamps or de Florida Everglades, where dey mix with Seminoles and others who hiding there, and live by piracy and cunning, waiting for Armageddon dat dey think will come to end our bondage and set us free.”
“You came this way,” Moody argued. “Lots of people come this way.”
“Dat don’t figure. Some of us is like sticks floatin’ in de water. Us wash up here and come to groun dere. Dis Lucas, he from Texas, nuh? Why come all de way up here, den da? Dis de longest way to freedom dere be. He wun’t be here.”
“I heard he was in Paducah.”
“Paducah, nuh.”
“They said he crossed the Nuther River. What river’s that?”
“De Nuther Ribber,” Tull said, spitting over the rail again. “Who tol’ you about dat? Dat just a song our mammies sung us at night when our heads achin’ and de stripes on our backs keepin’ us awake.” He cleared his throat and sang a wavering, tuneless song:
“When de sun come back
An’ de first quail call
Den de time be come
Foller de Drinking Gourd.
De ribber’s bank am a very good road
De dead trees show the way
Lef’ foot, peg foot, goin’ on,
Foller de Drinking Gourd.
De ribber ends atween two hills
Foller de Drinking Gourd.
Nuther ribber on de other side
Foller de Drinking Gourd.”
“Dat how yuh get to Paducah,” Tull said when he was finished. “But dey ain’t no ‘nuther ribber.’ Or dey always a ‘nuther ribber,’ take yuh pick.”
“The Ohio’s another river.”
“An’ where does crossin’ dat get you?” Tull said. “Cross de Ohio from Paducah an’ you in Illinois. From dere yuh gets to Indiana. Den dere’s de Wabash. Den de White. Cross dat an’ you still in Indiana.” He spat. “Ain’t no Paradise fo’ black folk.”
“Then why are you going to Indianapolis?”
“ ’Cause it a longer way from Virginia.”
Moody put him ashore in Indianapolis and felt like scouring the Pelican when he was off it. He wished Tull hadn’t been his last passenger before winter lockup. Rachel’s gold was gone, he’d lost Millican’s money; he had nothing to give Lucas, except the Pelican. As full winter set in, he retreated to his cabin in the village of Freedom, near Spencer, where he played cribbage with his neighbor, a freedman named Randolph Stokes. Ice locked the Pelican to its dock and frosted the cabin’s windows and door latches. He wouldn’t hear if Lucas came through Indianapolis now. Maybe Tull had been right. Wrapped in blankets, playing cards, reading his geology books and staring into the fire at night, Moody thought a fugitive would be crazy to come this way in winter. And anyone trying to find him here would be crazier still.
PART THREE
MARCH–MAY 1850
The River ends atween two hills,
Follow the Drinking Gourd;
Nuther river on the other side,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
1.
Randolph Stokes showed Moody the first returning robin on March 15, but there was still snow on the ground, and it was another three weeks before the wind shifted from north to east, and another week after that before the ice receded from the Pelican’s dock, although not far enough to allow him to get the boat out into the river. He checked the hull for damage and found none, and brought his mattress and chairs down from the cabin. During his long period of hibernation, he’d thought about Otway Tull and the song of the Drinking Gourd. Would Lucas have known it? He’d often heard Annie singing quietly to him, but had she been singing that song? Had she been teaching him to run away even then? It was possible that Benah knew the song, or that Lucas heard it from someone after running off, but it seemed a fragile thread to plan an escape with. Judging from the number of fugitives turning up in Paducah and crossing the Ohio, however, the song seemed to be working. He and Stokes talked about it over cards while he waited for the ice to leave. Stokes said he’d followed the song and it had led him here to Freedom.
“The Drinking Gourd,” Stokes said, “that’s what we call the Big Dipper, and it always point you north. You follow that long enough, you end up in Canada.”
“I know that much,” Moody said. “But what’s the rest of the song mean?”
Stokes thought for a moment, to bring the song back to mind.
“ ‘When the sun come back,’ that the spring, the best time to go because you want to get to Canada before wintertime. The ‘river’ is the Tennessee, and you follow it downstream to Paducah. ‘Dead trees show the way, left foot, peg foot goin’ on’ mean when you see a foot carved in a dead tree, you turn left, and when you see a round mark on a tree, like it made by a peg, you turn right. ‘The river ends atween two hills’—that’s where the Tombigbee empties into Mobile Bay, near Woodall Mountain, where you can see it has two peaks. It ain’t hard to figure out. Lucas have no trouble with any of that.”
“If he knew the song.”
“I expect he did. I expect his mam sang it to him when he was a baby.” Stokes paused his dealing and looked at him. “It wasn’t meant for white folk to hear,” he said. “What you think? We gonna say, ‘If I ever run away from you, here’s the route I’m gonna take’?”
Is that what he’d been to Annie and Lucas? White folk? Someone to run away from?
2.
When the ice released its choke hold on the river and he was almost out of firewood, he closed the cabin, said a temporary farewell to Stokes, and moved the Pelican a few days downstream, to a jetty he’d built the previous summer not far from where the White River joined the Wabash. From there he could sail north on the Wabash, east on the White, south on the Mississippi, and even, after a day on the Mississippi, sail east on the Ohio to Louisville or even Philadelphia. He felt like a spider at the center of his web, ready to pounce as soon as Lucas touched however distant a thread. As a bonus, he’d found a fossil near the jetty, a curious kind of skull, which he had started to take out last summer, and now wanted to finish, so he’d have another crate full of rocks to add to the pile in the Pelican’s hold he already didn’t know what to do with. He thought of taking it all to the museum in Wheeling, but he was unlikely ever to be back there.
The day after tying up, a cold, steady drizzle set in, pewtering the river and keeping him from working on the skull. His leg stiffened from lack of use. The wound had healed well, but the damp made his hip bones ache and he had trouble lifting his foot when he walked. He drank endless cups of tea, to save coffee, and played solitaire in the Pelican’s cabin, keeping the coal-oil lamp going all day. By evening the score was Moody, sixteen; the Devil, ninety-two; and he could hardly walk without bending over like a crab. He was thankful he hadn’t brought a case of whiskey, because he would have drunk it. Bored with cards, he read. He had his geology texts with him, but decided to give Walter Scott another try. He had Old Mortality, but couldn’t stick with it, it reminded him too much of the South. When he was growing up, the Waverley novels had been much ad
mired and emulated in Georgia. There were plantations with names like Claverhouse and Midlothian, and families who named their sons Dugald and Evan and Guy, and their daughters Lucy or Meg, after Scott’s characters, not all of them worthy of emulation. The South venerated old families, engaged in decades-long clan wars, worshipped pride and honor above reason or even common sense.
He tried Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, and made it through two of the tales, “The Gray Champion” and “Sunday at Home,” before putting the book down without marking his page. These Yankees, he thought, but it wasn’t Hawthorne or even Scott, it was him. He couldn’t concentrate. After a winter of enforced idleness, he felt, like Hawthorne’s Mr. Ellenwood, “a shy but not quite secluded man, selfish, like all men who brood over their own hearts, yet manifesting, on rare occasions, a vein of generous sentiment.” The rain and the pain in his hip were making him too introspective; he was no longer a spider at the center of his web, but a mole trapped beneath a flooded field. He brooded over his own heart. He was only generous when it suited him. He transported fugitives only because he thought they might help him find Lucas. And he didn’t even want to find Lucas for Lucas’s sake, but for his own. For forgiveness.
What if he gave up the search for Lucas, where would he go? He was forty-four (Mr. Ellenwood was sixty-two, and brooded still). How much longer could he push this boat around, heavy as it often was with rocks and salt and fugitives? How many more families could he transport upriver? He thought, more often than was his custom, about New Orleans, where he and Annie had been happy, where Lucas had been a joy that, like the sun in Texas, he wished now he’d appreciated more at the time. He could go anywhere. He could, simply by untying the Pelican, drift downriver, to wash up like a stick, like the odious Otway Tull, wherever spite and the current took him.
He dealt out another tableau of solitaire, to let the cards decide. The Devil won handily. As usual when his luck was down, the cards refused to cooperate.
3.
The rain stopped on the fifth day—he would later remember it was April 10, his mother’s birthday. He’d been to the quarry, and now stood on the Pelican’s foredeck drinking coffee, to save tea, and timing a flotilla of early-migrating Bonaparte’s gulls as they bobbed past him on the river. About five knots, he reckoned, a good pace: the river was high with spring runoff, the rocks not so threatening to his hull. He could be in New Orleans in May. He’d finish taking out the goddamn fossil, then throw his tools in the hold and cut the Pelican loose. He didn’t know what kind of animal the skull belonged to, but he knew it was odd, something he’d never seen before, either in the ground or in a museum. It was big, about the size and shape of a dinner plate, flattened and rounded, like a giant frog. Why not? Mr. Darwin had found a giant sloth in Argentina and not thought it unlikely that the Earth had once been inhabited by giants. He considered the mastodon. He noted the flooding of the White River, which reminded him of the flooding of the Rio Brazos that had taken his dock. Then he tried to think of something else. This morning the skull had been delicate and the claystone around it soft and wet from the rain and snowmelt, which had meant slow work. He’d tried using an awl, but his hands shook and the point kept puncturing the bone, especially around the eye sockets. Each time it happened he’d jumped back as though stung. He didn’t know how much damage he was doing to the braincase, so he’d come back to the boat to see what else he had that he could use, and ended up making lunch and a pot of coffee and thinking about giving up on Lucas. And just, well, giving up.
As he turned away from the river, he felt himself being watched. It was a sense he’d developed during the Mexican War: not a prickling, exactly, the hair on the back of his neck didn’t stand on end, it was subtler than that, more like an instinct to duck and look hard at the line of trees on the other side of the jetty. A red squirrel scolded, and a jay gave its alarm call.
He knew who it was. An hour earlier he’d heard a commotion on the towpath downstream and had gone to investigate. There were five of them, three women and two men, with two horses. They were trying to get the horses onto a flatbed barge so they could pole them across the river, he’d guessed, but they weren’t having much luck. The older woman and the older of the two men were standing in the water, pulling on the first horse’s halter, urging it to step onto the barge, but the horse had locked his forelegs and wasn’t budging. The two youngsters, a boy and a girl, were watching, and a third woman stood with her back to them and her arms crossed, like she didn’t want to be taken for someone belonging to the party. She was the first to see him. She jumped. She was so light skinned he thought at first she was white.
“You need a blindfold,” he said, to no one in particular.
They stopped and turned to look at him. No weapons.
“If it were me,” he said, “I’d swim them across.”
They continued to stare at him, the way deer stare before bolting. He was still holding his coffee cup. He took a sip.
“This here your barge?” asked the older woman, who was wading ashore.
Her dress was sodden and torn at the hem but of good quality. Was she wearing shoes? She was. A house servant, then, or else a free black. All three were well dressed. The older one’s hair was gray at the temples, like his, full but not wild like Annie’s, and she had tied it behind her neck to keep it out of her face. She was bigger than Annie, fuller in the bosom, but she looked at him with Annie’s intensity, as though she would know what he was thinking. He liked that. He missed it. He’d like to know what he was thinking, too.
“No,” he said. “Somebody left it here. You’re free to use it, I guess.”
“What’s on the other side?” the man asked, pointing across the river. He was maybe twenty, the same age as Lucas.
“Just more Indiana,” he said, thinking, reluctantly, of Otway Tull. “You’re a ways from Canada yet.”
“But Canada come after Indiana, ain’t that so?” said the woman.
“That’s so,” said Moody, “if you don’t count Michigan.”
They stood in silence then, contemplating the far shore as though the existence of Michigan were debatable. He’d left them and come back to the Pelican, but he could hear them still trying to load the horses onto the barge, still without success. There was a lot of splashing and neighing and yelling for a while, then silence, and he imagined them admitting defeat and moving through the trees in his direction. A horse won’t step onto an open barge in fast-moving water, Moody could hardly get one onto the Pelican in flat water with a plank and a sack over its head. He removed his gaze from the line of trees and refilled the kettle to make more coffee. He wondered if he would offer to take the horses, too. He hoped not.
4.
It was the woman who showed herself first. She’d straightened her bodice and he could see creases where she’d squeezed some of the water out of her skirts. Her caramel-colored skin and dark hair shone in the overhead sunlight. The others made themselves visible behind her.
“We ain’t runaways,” she said.
“I know that,” Moody said. “Runaways generally run away.”
She studied him. “You a bountyman?”
“No, ma’am, I’m a boatman.” He’d once asked Kästchen if there were a sign he could give to show runaways that he could be trusted, a flag hung a certain way or a word spoken, something like the five-link chain, and Kästchen had said no, because if there were, catchers would use it.
The woman looked the Pelican over. “It a fine boat,” she said. “We come down the Ohio on a boat like that, maybe a bit bigger. Where this river go?”
“Downriver,” Moody said, pointing, “it joins up with the Wabash and then on down to the Mississippi. Upriver it doesn’t go much past Indianapolis.”
“How far’s that?”
“A couple of weeks, maybe more with this fast spring current. There was a lot of snow this winter and the river’s full. Tough poling. Got to use the cordelles in places.” He was talking too much. He stopped.
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br /> “Horses could tow it,” she said. He nodded.
The man joined the woman, and he took in the two of them standing together. They reminded him so powerfully of Annie and Lucas he put his hands on the boat rail to stop them from trembling.
“Where you live?” the man asked him.
He was taller than his mother, and strongly built. He wore a black hat that Moody hadn’t seen on him earlier.
“Right here, at the moment,” Moody said, flustered. “I built this dock last summer. Good wood, it should last a few winters. And I got a place up in Freedom.”
“Freedom?” Annie said. “Freedom a place?”
“A settlement upriver,” he said. “Mostly me and old Randolph Stokes, who bought himself a few years ago and came north. We get along fine. My cabin’s beside his, but summers I live on the Pelican.”
“Why do you call it the Pelican?” piped up the younger one.
They had stepped out of the trees. The lighter-skinned woman still had her arms folded across her chest and was looking curiously at him, as if wondering when he was going to notice that she wasn’t dark. The others seemed both bold and afraid, except Annie, who looked at him and knew exactly who he was.
“That’s the name she came with,” Moody said.
“What you got in her?”
The woman turned to the younger one. “Granville,” she said.
“A pile of crates full of useless rocks,” Moody said. “There’s lots of room.”
“We’re going to Indianapolis,” Annie said.
“No, we ain’t, Mam,” Lucas said to her.
“Will you take us?” Annie said. “We can pay you.”
“I’ll take you, but not for a few days.”