Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “I know.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I talked to Sarah today, when you were down at the quarry. She told me when she was little James used to let her help him comb the horses, and if she was feeling bad about anything, he told her she could talk to her favorite horse, a small chestnut named Beulah that wouldn’t let no one ride her but Sarah. When Sarah got sick Beulah got sick, and when Sarah got better Beulah got better. Once when Beulah had a rheumy chest, James made her some medicine, but she wouldn’t take it unless Sarah did, so he mixed up some watermelon water the same color as the horse tonic and Sarah drank that and Beulah drank her medicine. She told me some other things about James that she remembered.” They listened to the frogs for a moment. “Sarah don’t usually talk to me so sweetly,” she said.

  “She don’t talk to me at all,” he said.

  “I think she was trying to tell me that James ain’t coming,” Tamsey said. “I think Leason knows something about James he not telling me.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I thought maybe you could. He might talk to you.”

  “Me?” he said, and almost, almost, added, He’s your son. “All right,” he said. “I’ll talk to him tonight.”

  10.

  Later that night, Moody found what he wanted in a paper by Georges Cuvier. Granville was right, it was a giant salamander. The first specimen had been dug up a hundred years before, in Germany, by a Swiss naturalist named Scheuchzer, who’d thought it was the skeleton of a child who had drowned in the Great Flood. The drawing showed a flat head and a spine no more than three feet long. No tail or legs, which made another Swiss scientist, Johannes Gessner, think it was a giant catfish. Finally, in 1822, Cuvier got hold of it, cleared more stone from around the specimen, discovered it had forelimbs with four toes, and identified it as a salamander. Good for Georges. And good for Granville. The fossil was still called Andrias scheuchzeri, though; Andrias meaning “in the image of Man.” Moody sat back in his chair and scratched his head. How could salamanders have been made in the image of Man if Man was made last? It must have been Adam who was made in the image of a salamander. Rachel would have liked that.

  He heard Granville moving about on the parlor deck and went out to join him, taking the book with Cuvier’s article. He found Granville looking at a jar of tadpoles he’d collected for fish bait. Moody showed him Cuvier’s drawing.

  “Don’t look like no child to me,” Granville said.

  “They thought he was flattened by the weight of all that water.”

  “I thought only sinners got drowned in the Flood,” Granville said.

  “Sinners,” said Moody, “and the innocent children of sinners.”

  Moody picked up one of the lanterns. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to the quarry and take a look.”

  The skull now sticking out of the cliff matched Cuvier’s drawing, the same holes in the snout for the nostrils, two bigger eye sockets near the top. Moody explained as best he could that what they had wasn’t a hellbender but the many-times-great-granddaddy of a salamander, that with each generation there had been a tiny change that eventually turned this creature into a salamander.

  “Why’d it get smaller?” Granville asked.

  “Everything got smaller,” Moody said.

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t get enough to eat.”

  “Why’d it lose its teeth, then?”

  “Maybe when it got smaller it ate smaller things and didn’t need teeth anymore. I knew a man in Texas who lost his baby teeth and never grew new ones. Never ate anything harder than bread and potatoes after that. Maybe the same thing happened to Andrias scheuchzeri. Maybe coming to America from Europe it found softer food and didn’t need teeth, so just stopped growing them.”

  “You going to get a lot of money for this thing when you take it to the museum?” Granville asked.

  “Not a lot, no, but some. And maybe some scientist will study it one day and write a paper about it, and name it after you. Andrias granvillii.”

  “Me? Why me? You the one found it.”

  “Yes, but you figured out what it was. That’s the way it works.”

  Granville looked at Moody and grinned.

  “You and Sabetha went to school in New Harmony?” Moody asked.

  “We did,” Granville said.

  “What did you study?”

  “Biology, geography, and literature.”

  “Did you like school?”

  “Yep. After you spent three years in school, you helped out in the communes and the gardens. And then you had to learn something useful, like carpentry or mechanics.”

  “How long were you in New Harmony?”

  “I don’t know how long. Maybe three, four years.”

  “How many people lived there?”

  “All told?” Granville said. “A lot. Hundreds.”

  “All runaways?”

  “Most of them. Some freed, I guess. Like Mam and Leason.”

  “Did you ever come across a fellow named Lucas?”

  “Lucas?” Granville said. “Maybe. Why?”

  “I knew a man in Texas named Lucas. I’ve been looking for him so I can help him. He’d be about Leason’s age.”

  “A man named Lucas came last summer. I didn’t know him very well. He had a woman with him.”

  “Benah?”

  “Maybe. They were in the North Star commune.”

  Moody sat down beside the skull. He thought Granville hadn’t heard him right. “Are you sure?” he said, keeping his voice steady. How far was it to New Harmony? Five days? A week?

  Granville nodded. “He worked in the hat factory,” he said. “He made Leason’s hat. I think Benah worked in the nursery, but I ain’t sure. We were in the Morning Star, and then it was winter, so we didn’t see them much.”

  Moody got to his feet and walked away from the quarry. He had a sudden urge to see the river. Granville followed him. The moonlight made the water look like liquid silver. The river was still high, but there would be rocks in the shallow places, and any one of them would rip the bottom out of the Pelican if they hit it. It would be lunacy to take the boat downriver in the dark, but that’s what he was considering. He knew the White, the Wabash not so well. With lights on the bow, lookouts, poles, luck, he could beat the Devil.

  “Are they still in New Harmony, do you think?” he said to Granville.

  Granville looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone there anymore.”

  “Why not?” Moody turned to look at him. “Did the catchers take them?”

  “Maybe ask Leason. He stayed longer.”

  “Let’s go back to the boat.”

  Tamsey was sitting at the table on the parlor deck. Moody took a chair beside her.

  “Granville tells me there was a couple in the North Star commune named Lucas and Benah,” he said. “Did you know them?”

  “I knew of them.”

  “Did you see them anywhere after the raid?”

  “The woods was full of people running,” she said. “They might have been there, they might not. It was dark. I wasn’t looking for them. Why?”

  “Lucas is why I left Texas. I’ve been looking for him all this time.”

  “What for?”

  “I lived with his mother,” he said. Tamsey started to say something, then stopped. “He was like a son to me. Did you see if they escaped or not?”

  “They wasn’t catchers in the woods when we ran, I know that. Me and Granville went back to the horse barn, but we didn’t see Leason or James, and I thought they went a different way, maybe through the North Star’s cornfield. The barnyard was full of catchers with torches. I thought they was going to set the barn afire, but I guess they wanted us alive. We watched from the edge of the woods, and then we turned and run up the track to find Sabetha and Sarah.”

  “So you don’t know what happened to Lucas,” Moody said.

  “I
don’t know if the catchers raided every commune or just ours. I didn’t hear shooting at the other communes but there was a lot of noise at ours. And Brer Joshua didn’t come, Leason told me that much. Granville couldn’t find him in the town.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely catchers would attack just one commune, does it?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing seems likely to me now.”

  “Do you think James is alive?” he asked.

  Tamsey turned to look downriver. “I knew a woman in New Harmony was brung over on a slave ship,” she said, “and the ship sank and she and her husband clung to each other in the water, keeping themselves up, and they clung like that for two days until another ship come and pick them out the water, and she saw her husband been dead the whole time. She was saved by his gassy body. I think I like that woman, keeping James alive in my head when he just a memory of James.”

  “I need to go there,” he said. “I need to see where Lucas was with my own eyes.” He put his hands in his jacket pockets and took a deep breath. “His mother lived with me in New Orleans, then in Texas. Then she died and he ran off before I could explain things to him.”

  “What things?”

  “How it was between me and his mother. Between me and him.”

  “How was it?”

  “Good, I thought.”

  “He your boy?”

  “No, but we raised him together.”

  “You own him?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “His mother die by your hand?”

  “Good Lord, no,” he said, glad to be able to give a clear answer. “Her own.”

  Tamsey looked at him with such sadness it was as if his own guilt were staring back at him. No, not guilt, because there was no judgment in her eyes. His guilt was still safely inside him.

  “You ain’t much good at telling stories, are you?” she said.

  “I don’t have your knack for it, no.”

  Granville came up on deck with an armload of firewood. “Where you want this?” he asked. “There’s more coming.”

  “Just put it by the cabin,” Moody said. “I’ll move it to the hold before we go.”

  “We’re leaving? When?”

  “First thing in the morning.”

  “What about the giant salamander?”

  “We’ll get him on the way back. I’m still taking you to Indianapolis. But first we’re going back to New Harmony.”

  11.

  The threatened rain hadn’t materialized by morning, which Moody took as a good omen. Tamsey said she didn’t like omens. “What come, come,” she said. She placed one of the parlor chairs at the prow of the boat and sat staring downriver, oblivious to the rocking waves. Moody would have moved her, but he thought she knew her own mind. Sarah retreated to the cabin, pleading seasickness, where she lay on Moody’s cot beside Sabetha, who was reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which Moody thought was a good choice under the circumstances. “The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared, / Merrily did we drop.” Leason and Granville posted themselves on the foredeck with their poles, and Moody stood on the cabin roof, holding the tiller tightly against his good hip. The current was strong, the main channel squirming under the river like a dark snake. He swung the Pelican sharply back and forth to stay in deep water. He watched Tamsey’s back, unmoving as a bowsprit, and wondered what she was thinking. Did she expect James at every bend, as he did Lucas? Her questions of the night before came back to him. Had Lucas been free in Texas? Moody would have said he was, for a while, when Texas had been part of Mexico, but he knew now that that was an excuse. Lucas hadn’t been free, which meant he was a slave. That was how she meant it, and how Lucas must have seen it. There was no middle ground, and Moody desperately wanted to let him know that now he understood that. The woods were alive again with the possibility of Lucas. Moody kept his eyes on the towpath whenever he was able to wrest them from Tamsey’s back.

  The rain crept up on them from behind. “And now the storm-blast came, and he / Was tyrannous and strong.” First the sky turned pewter, then purple, the temperature dropped, the wind pressed Moody’s wet shirt to his back. He didn’t feel the rain until he noticed it pebbling the surface of the water. At about the same time, Granville turned as if to say something and there was a flash of lightning, and before the light was gone thunder cracked over their heads and the Pelican was caught in a deluge of cold, hard rain. Granville slid his pole onto its rack, grabbed Tamsey and her chair and pulled them both toward the cabin, staggering against the weight and the wind. Leason remained at the bow, gripping his pole. Rainwater streamed off their hats and shoulders, the roar around them was deafening. The river swelled and the Pelican picked up speed. This wasn’t so bad, Moody thought, but when they slipped the channel and swooped down the center of the river, narrowly missing rocks he didn’t see until they were behind them, he changed his mind. This was bad. He looked for a cove or a tributary to pull into, but there was no slowing down or turning into quieter waters. Leason held on to one of the stove’s guy ropes as the boat bucked, its hull alternately leaping into the air and scraping the riverbed. Through the rain and the tossing waves, Moody managed to keep the boat pointed more or less downriver. Leason looked up at him for a moment and their eyes met. Leason laughed, and Moody grinned. “The ship drove fast, loud roar’d the blast, / And southward aye we fled.”

  12.

  The noise abated and they slowed down, but the river continued rough until evening, when under a clear, studded sky they reached the mouth of the White. Moody considered it wise to tie up before making the turn into the Wabash. By lantern light, Tamsey made them a quick supper of fish and bread and tea, and rather than pitch a tent on land, everyone except Moody crowded into the cabin. He brought out the parlor furnishings and a blanket, saying that with the rain finished he would sleep under the stars. Tamsey came out and sat with him. His arm ached from holding the tiller; Tamsey rubbed his shoulder and talked about the virtues of horse liniment. He was content with their progress. The Wabash was deeper and slower than the White, and from then on they wouldn’t travel as fast, but they wouldn’t have to worry about rocks, either. He listened to the woods, but if there was an army of catchers in it, they weren’t making any noise. An owl called.

  “We might get there tomorrow,” he said. “More likely the day after.”

  “If there be anything left to get to,” she said.

  13.

  They tied the Pelican upstream from New Harmony, nudged into a marshy stretch and hidden from ascending or descending vessels. Moody put his revolver in his belt—“I told you,” he heard Rachel say—and he and Tamsey stepped ashore. It took them half an hour to walk to New Harmony, along a footpath that followed the river but was out of sight of it. “This the track we came up on,” Tamsey said, but otherwise they barely spoke, each wrapped in private forebodings. Moody tried to prepare himself for what they might soon see: smoke rising from the remains of barns, the smell of burned horseflesh or pig fat or worse, fieldstone chimneys left standing in the charred remains of houses. A group of solemn men with shovels in their hands, hats and coats on the ground, burying their dead. They wouldn’t welcome a white man.

  From a knoll at the edge of the woods they saw a line of intact houses across a plowed field that was beginning to show green. No smoke from the houses, barns intact, no sound anywhere except the wind in the trees behind them. The path they’d been following continued along a low pine windbreak that led up to the closest houses.

  “That the Morning Star,” Tamsey said.

  “Where’s the North Star?”

  “Across that field,” she said, pointing to their right. “You can’t see it from here.”

  Moody wanted to hurry but, remembering his militia training, forced himself to stay alert. They turned toward the Morning Star, Tamsey peering between the pines.

  “Which was your house?” he asked when they were closer to the commune.

  She pointed to a row of six hous
es aligned along a smaller track that branched to the left from the lane. “That first one,” she said. It was two floors, unpainted and rough, four windows per side, bigger than the Creole house he and Annie and Lucas had had in New Orleans. No porch, no gingerbread, no orange trees in the yard. This was Tamsey’s home, he thought. If she found James alive she would stay here with him, since the danger appeared to be over, at least for the time being. She would fetch the children from the Pelican and start planting corn. He’d be left to fight his way upriver by himself, unless he found Lucas and Benah and they went with him, which seemed improbable. Improbable that he would find them, even more improbable that they would leave with him, or want him to stay. His knees began to give him trouble.

  All the buildings were deserted. No horses in the paddocks, and the front door of Tamsey’s house hung open.

  “You going in?” he asked her. “I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind.”

  They went up to the open front door and stepped cautiously through it. There was an air of haste and confusion in the rooms, but none of the signs of fighting he had seen in Mexico. In the kitchen, Tamsey straightened a chair at the table and picked up a cloth that had been left on the counter, after which they went from room to room, looking for something to tell them what had happened in them. There was nothing. The rooms were as they had been left—beds unmade, a few personal items lying on dresser tops or hanging in tallboys: Granville’s geography book, Sabetha’s rag doll, Sarah’s comb, James’s neckerchief. Tamsey put all these in a sack and they went back outside by the rear door, then through the gate leading to the barn and stables.

  “This was the horse commune?” Moody asked.

  “Catchers must’ve took them, too.”

  He pictured the drive south. A hundred men, women and children on foot, bound at the wrists and neck, catchers riding, some herding the captives, others herding the horses. There’d have been boats waiting at Mount Vernon, down on the Ohio, ready to take them on to the Mississippi, where they’d be transferred into river scows. They’d be in New Orleans by now. Those who’d survived.