by Wayne Grady
Annie and Lucas went back to the others for a conference. There was a lively discussion. Lucas wanted to go north, to Canada. The younger woman, the one who looked white, who maybe was Benah, said something sharp and Lucas stopped. Annie said a few low words, then came back to the jetty and said they’d go with him if he’d take them. They didn’t mind waiting until he was ready. But when might that be?
“Maybe a week,” he said. “Depends on how hard the rock is.”
Although that must have sounded like a riddle to her, she took it in stride.
“What your name?” she asked him.
“Moody,” he said. “Virgil.”
“I’m Tamsey,” she said. “Tamsey Lewis. This here my son Leason, and his wife, Sarah, and these are Granville and Sabetha, my other two. My husband, James, be along shortly.”
“Pleased to meet you all,” Moody said, turning to watch a line of crows skipping along the treetops across the river. Annie had a husband. “I got me a frog to dig up, anyway.”
Granville couldn’t let that go. “You going to dig up a frog?” he said.
“Well, it looks like a frog,” Moody said. “It’s all bone now. I’ll show it to you.”
“I’ll get our things,” Leason said.
He went back into the trees and Moody watched the forest edge where he vanished, until he returned with two saddles and a saddlebag.
Moody limped toward a chair on the Pelican’s foredeck. “Come aboard, if you like,” he said. “I made coffee.”
“Somethin’ wrong with your leg?” Tamsey asked.
5.
Whenever he knew he was going to be in one place for more than a day or two, Moody set up the Pelican’s foredeck as a place to sit: he set out an easy chair for reading, and a table and a second chair for working and eating, two coal-oil lamps on the table, he even threw a small rug on the deck, beside the hatch cover, mostly to hide the bloodstain. The woodstove was already on the deck, tied down and sitting on a pallet of sand. When it rained, he’d thrown a tarpaulin over the stove and moved everything else into the cabin, but now he had it all in place again. He called it his parlor.
He set out extra chairs and helped Leason and Granville pitch the tarpaulin as a tent on the ground beside the jetty. He lent them some blankets to wrap themselves in while their clothes dried by the stove. When they were ready they came up into the parlor. He poured coffee and they talked as though the Pelican were the Mary White and they were about to embark on a pleasure cruise. Tamsey offered to make soda biscuits, and he went into the cabin to fetch flour, baking powder, butter and salt.
“Back in Texas,” he told her when he came out again, “it got so hot you could bake biscuits on a flat rock in the sun.”
“Hmm,” she said. “What you grow down there?”
“Cotton.”
“It ain’t too hot for cotton?”
“Mexican cotton.”
She frowned. Her features were similar to Annie’s, and he wondered if her people were from Angola. She was talkative, as Annie had been at first. Toward the end, though, Annie would go days without saying two words together, at least to him. With Tamsey, everything was a story. The sun on her face reminded her of South Carolina. They’d had a stove like his in Kentucky. Making soda biscuits brought to mind the time she baked soda biscuits for Massa Somebody-or-other and the missus complained because she hadn’t put enough sugar in them, and she’d replied that where she came from soda biscuits with sugar was shortbread, and Massa asked for soda biscuits, not shortbread, so she made soda biscuits. She never got on with the missus after that, she said, stirring, and did Moody have any milk? She could make soda biscuits with water but milk made a better biscuit, and was there any salt in the butter? If there was she’d put less in the dough, because too much salt made the biscuits hard as rocks and taste like seaweed. So she was a cook, he asked her? She was cook and housekeeper and upstairs maid and anything else the missus wanted her to be, except dead. She’d learned to make better biscuits in New Harmony, where they lived after leaving Kentucky. She was freed, all of them were free, the whole family, she could show him their free papers. In New Harmony, she’d used buckwheat flour and sweet butter. What kind of wood was Moody burning? It smelled like slippery elm, which was too bad because elm burned cold. Where was he from? Georgia? Didn’t he say he was from Texas? Georgia then Texas? She was from South Carolina then Kentucky. “I surely do miss honeysuckle and smoke pipes when the weather turn warm like this,” she said, “and pecans on the roadsides and laurel along the creek beds. I’ll miss them even more when we get to Canada.”
“I know a man in Indianapolis,” Moody said, “who can get you to Canada.”
“You mean put us on the Underground Railroad?”
“You’re on it now.”
She looked at him. “How I know you ain’t a catcher?”
“You know,” he said.
“Indianapolis then Canada?”
Moody nodded. “A few stops along the way. You were in New Harmony?”
He’d heard of New Harmony, a Utopian community in the southwest corner of the state, one of many that had sprung up and then gone back to forest. Fred Heiskell had written about them in the Register, because most were against enslavement. New Harmony, he recalled, had been started by an Englishman named Owen maybe twenty years back, who thought if society had a new beginning we might get it right this time. But that was all Moody knew about it, except that it had been abandoned after a year or two, as had most of the rest. All fails, and all fails equally.
“We live there for a time,” Tamsey said, putting the biscuits in the oven. “My husband still there, but he’ll join us presently. We don’t mind the wait. James won’t think to look for us in Indianapolis, he’ll cross the river and go on up to Canada.”
“Which,” said Leason, “if we had any sense we would do, too.”
“Canada be there in the morning,” she said.
“And catchers be here tonight.”
“You don’t need to worry about catchers on my boat,” Moody said. “I’ve carried a good few fugitives to Indianapolis and I ain’t lost one yet.”
“We ain’t fugitives,” said Leason.
“How long ago did you leave New Harmony?”
Tamsey looked at Leason and shrugged.
“Not long,” she said. “We traveled about a week, then waited for three days at the top of the track for James. Leason scouted on ahead and came back saying they a lake close by and the track end at it, and a meadow with a fire pit where Rappites used to smoke fish.”
“I know that lake,” said Moody. “Didn’t know Rappites used it, though.”
“Rappites built New Harmony before the Owenites took it over,” she said. “I told Leason I didn’t know what the hurry was. Once we lost the track James couldn’t follow us. We didn’t know where we was. I said to him, take the others and push on. I’ll stay here and wait for James. Leason said he’d go to the lake and wait three days, then I had to come. I couldn’t think of James being taken back into slavery. If I went on without him, it like I sending him downriver myself. I can’t do that. Every step I take into these woods without him be like death to me. All my life I be thinking of him back there somewhere looking for me.”
“Why did you leave New Harmony?” Moody asked.
“That what I telling you,” she said, “but I have to go on before I go back.”
“All right.”
“This my story,” she said. “Let it come, let it go.”
“All right.”
“I told Leason go on up to the lake and figure out how to get around it, I be along. Granville wanted to stay with me, bless the child, but I sent him, too, saying Brer Moses need him, that was Leason, and Sarah and Sabetha went and I was alone. I had some squirrel meat and a saddle blanket and Jezzy, my horse that didn’t like getting on the barge. There were blackberries down by the riverbank, and fresh water. I wished I had a pot to boil water in, I was tired of roasted punk roots, but I di
dn’t even have a knife, we left so fast. Maybe James would have one, and some corn meal. And a roast of beef. And a kettle and some tea.”
She paused. Moody didn’t want to interrupt her, but he thought maybe she was saying she didn’t like coffee. “Would you rather have tea?” he asked.
“No, thank you, this coffee fine. And our feather tick, James might bring that. I would make him a proper supper, and we would lie down on the feather tick and he would tell me how good life was, and then we would join Leason and the others at the lake, and go on to Canada. I walked up and down that track. I sat by the river and watched it go by, but it was too loud and I couldn’t hear anything behind me, so I run back, but there wasn’t never anything behind me. It like I sitting in the Garden of Eden and God hain’t made Adam yet.”
She paused again, this time to check the oven.
“Biscuits ready,” she said. “You all want one?”
Moody handed around the plate of biscuits and some butter. Honey would have been good, but he didn’t have any.
“Where were you and James married?” he asked.
“In Louisville. Same time as Leason and Sarah.”
He sat up suddenly, as though looking for rocks on the river. Lucas had been in Louisville.
“We’re going to bed,” Leason said, and he and Sarah stepped off the boat and ducked under the tarpaulin. Granville and Sabetha took a last biscuit and followed them. Moody poured more coffee for himself and Tamsey.
“How many fugitives you carried up this river so far?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. Dozens.”
“What happen to them there?”
“I hand them over to Solomon Kästchen, and he sees they get to Canada.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’m not supposed to know.”
She nodded. “Where was I?” she said.
“Getting married in Louisville.”
“No, before that.”
“Alone in the Garden of Eden.”
She smiled at him. “You a good listener,” she said.
“I’m learning to be,” he said, startled.
But she was back in her story. “I waited until almost dark on the third day,” she said. “I knew he wasn’t coming. There was life in the garden, but he wan’t part of it. A deer come. A fox trot up the track. A dead leaf fall from the tree I sitting against and land beside my hand. I shivered under that tree, looking down that empty road. My blanket around my shoulders and I still couldn’t get warm. I always cold. James a forge beside me at night. Sometimes if I sit in a chair he left I feel the warmth of him in the wood. When it too dark to see, I climbed on Jezebel and let her take me to the lake.”
“You still think James is coming?”
“I hope he is.”
“Do you want to go back to look for him?”
She was quiet a moment. “No,” she said, “we can’t go back there.”
“Why not?”
“Let it come,” she said, “let it go.”
6.
After breakfast the next morning, Moody took them all to see the frog. The quarry was a half mile upriver and a short way in, at the rim of a clearing that had once been a swamp surrounded by a clay bluff and was now all roots and stone. He carried a bucket with an awl and a hammer, several paintbrushes, a pot of glue, a jar of shellac, a roll of burlap and a bag of plaster of Paris. At the edge of the clearing they pushed their way through dense mats of panic grass, marsh marigold and joe-pye weed to a spot where Moody set down the bucket and removed a tarpaulin from what looked like a broken tooth sticking out of the face of the cliff. They stood in a semicircle, looking down at his giant frog’s head.
“It’s pretty big,” Granville said.
“Pretty flat,” said Leason.
“Crushed by the weight of all that clay on top of it,” Moody said.
“How long you reckon it been there?”
“I don’t know,” Moody said. “Thousands of years, anyway. However long it takes for bone to turn into stone. Maybe there were giant frogs back then.”
“Were there people?” Granville asked.
“Not yet,” Moody said. “I’d wager ours are the first human eyes to see this thing.”
“Why you digging it up?” Tamsey wanted to know. Moody waited for her to warn him about disturbing the bones and bringing trouble into the world, but she didn’t.
“It’s history,” he said. “It tells us what happened.”
“How much longer you need to dig it?” she asked.
“The rock is pretty soft,” he said, “and I have to be careful. A week. Less, if Leason and Granville help.”
“I will,” said Leason.
“Me, too,” Granville said.
“Good,” said Moody. “Then we’ll be out of here in a few days.”
He showed them how to loosen rock from around the skull using hammers and cold chisels, without touching the bone. The rock broke away easily, which was dangerous because it drew them into working too fast. Moody examined the debris for bone, hoping the rest of the animal had been buried with the skull. After an hour, Moody took up an ice pick and began to flick away bits of stone from close around the bone.
Tamsey, Sarah and Sabetha stayed with them at the quarry, not wanting to return alone to the Pelican in case catchers showed up; they walked back to the towpath from time to time, though, in case it was James who came out of the woods.
A day or two later, Tamsey came to the quarry and up to Moody.
“I been thinking of a thing my mam told me,” she said, and he thought this was when she was going to warn him about trouble. Once again, he was wrong. “She say Earth a big head, and when a person die and buried, that person become part of the Earth memory. All the buried men and women are the Earth thoughts, and if a person ain’t buried, he be forgotten. Maybe this frog you digging up is the memory the Earth have of it.”
“In that case,” Moody said, “the Earth has a long memory.”
“It does,” Tamsey said, and he was glad he had buried Annie.
7.
That night, on the parlor deck after the children had gone to bed, he asked her again why they had left New Harmony. She showed him her free paper and asked him to read it to her. Sarah had read it once or twice, she said, but she wanted him to read it. The pages were soft from being folded and unfolded so many times they had almost separated into small squares. Light from the lantern shone through the creases, which made him think of William’s letter from his daughter in Canada, the terminus of the voyage Tamsey’s free paper had been the start of.
“It says your name is Thomasina Lewis,” he said.
“Tamsey,” she said. “No one but my mam ever call me ‘Thomasina,’ and then only when she mad at me. ‘Thomasina,’ she say, ‘what I tell you about wash your hands befo’ touchin’ white folks’ clothes? Thomasina! Don’t you ever speak to Massa like that.’ ”
He laughed. “Your mam is buried in your head,” he said.
“She surely not forgotten.”
“What else did she tell you?”
Tamsey was quiet, sitting at the table with her hands folded on her lap, as though remembering her training. The lantern drew sulfur moths; she watched them fly their figure eights for a while.
“How many slaves you own, Mr. Moody?” she asked him.
“ ‘Virgil,’ ” he said. “Please call me ‘Virgil.’ ” If she could dissemble, so could he. “And I don’t own any slaves. Your paper says you and Leason were manumitted in the Commonwealth of Kentucky on the eleventh day of January, 1833.”
“Two years after he born, about. He a slave for that long.”
“Well,” said Moody, “he’s free now.”
“I show our papers to catchers, you think they leave us alone?” she asked.
“They have to,” Moody said. “But no, I don’t expect they would.”
“And Granville and Sabetha and Sarah are free born. They don’t have papers. How we prove to catchers
they ain’t runaways?”
“A catcher has to take you to a magistrate,” he said, “and then you show your papers to him. He’ll see that Granville and Sabetha were born after 1833.” Then he ventured, “Sarah might not even be asked.”
“She be if she with us.” Tamsey’s hands twisted on her lap. “How you get mix up with Quaker business?”
“I always had trouble with slavery,” he said, “ever since I was a child.”
“Me, too,” she said, and they both laughed.
“My father owned a plantation in Georgia,” Moody said. “Still does. Rice and Sea Island cotton and two hundred slaves. I hated it from the start. My mother hated it, too, but she died. I had two older brothers who I thought were going to inherit, so there wasn’t anything I could do but leave, so I left.”
“Rice comed from Africa,” she said. “It the hardest to work.”
“In Louisiana they say cane is the hardest.”
“Everything hard,” she said. “In Kentucky it tobacco. James worked in the kills. He say tobacco finish you before it grown. Make you crawl on your belly in the dirt.”
“What did you work on?”
“I worked on a stud farm in Kentucky. Before that I work for Massa Lewis in the Big House, and before that, in South Carolina, for Massa Lockhart..”
“Oh, yes, I remember. As cook, scullery, upstairs maid, parlor maid. You preferred that to working outside?”
“Preferred?” she said. “No one ask me what I preferred. Inside was cleaner, and I had help. But outside was safer.”
“Safer?” Annie hadn’t wanted to work in the house, either. Did she feel safe from Casgrain out in the rice fields? More men around to protect her? “Safer from what?”
Tamsey looked down at her hands. “I never talked to a white man before about slavery, except to agree that it a good thing, a necessary institution, how much more civilized we be here than in Africa, where we went naked all the time, with no true religion or morals. How better off we be as slaves, where we given houses and clothes and food and taught the Bible.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”