by Wayne Grady
“Let’s look for Lucas,” he said.
They set off along the pines and turned to cross the plowed field to the North Star. A short way from the house, Tamsey stopped to examine the spot where she’d seen James fall, set her hand on the soil, lifted it and looked at her palm, wiped it on her skirt and moved on without looking at Moody. He saw something metallic sticking out from under a pile of dead branches and bent to pick it up. A musket.
Tamsey turned. “Old Kentucky,” she said. He kept it, and they walked on.
The North Star was as still and empty as the Morning Star had been. They looked in a few houses, but there was little to be learned. In some there was still food on the table, coats and hats on hooks behind the doors, boots beside the cold kitchen stoves. Flies buzzed everywhere. In one sitting room, a chair was overturned and a Quaker Bible lay open on the floor.
“Which one was Lucas and Benah’s?” Moody asked, and she led him to a small house at the end of the row, facing north, away from the plowed field. It was much like the others they’d searched, littered with signs of a hasty departure. In the bedroom, Moody picked up a pair of braces Lucas had had in Texas. The room, with its double bed and a woman’s shawl hanging on a hook, belonged to a Lucas whose life he didn’t know, but the braces on the floor were pure Lucas. On the dresser was a reticule that must have belonged to Benah. Inside it was a folded piece of newsprint—the drawing of the mastodon skeleton from the Peale Museum that he had given Lucas when they found the bone. Annie must have brought it to him at Millican’s, which meant Lucas must have asked her for it. He put the clipping back in the reticule and the reticule in his pocket. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the house Lucas might come back for, and he went outside to join Tamsey.
“I want to go back to the Pelican now,” she said. “I want you to take us away from here,” and he nodded. If he was still a gambling man, he would bet that Lucas and Benah were at that moment running north, the way their house faced, the way Tamsey and her family had fled, and that his best chance to find them was to take Tamsey to Indianapolis. Why would anyone run south from here, back into the slave states, unless it was dark and they were panicked and confused? But he was no longer a gambling man. He’d lost confidence in his ability to play the right card, and when you started second-guessing your bets, it was time to walk away from the table.
14.
“The closer we get to Indianapolis,” Tamsey told Moody one night, “the less I want to get there.”
The boat was tied to the branches of a huge, dead oak that had fallen almost into the river, its giant trunk stretched along the graveled beach like Goliath after his encounter with David. Woodpeckers had been at its bark, and someone had started cutting it up for firewood. Which meant there were people living nearby.
“If you want to go north,” Moody said, “you have to go through Indianapolis. Kästchen will put you on the Railroad.”
“I know, but I feel safer on the river,” she said, looking into the woods. “The river wider now, and a catcher have to ride right out into it to get at us, and if that happen I got Old Kentucky to hand. And you,” she added after a pause.
“Kästchen and his wife will keep you safe in Indianapolis,” he said, “for the short time you’ll be there.”
Leason and Sarah had gone off into the woods to look for something, kindling or drinking water, they said, and Moody and Tamsey were sitting on the parlor deck, talking end-of-the-day talk. How far they’d come. How far they had to go. She talked about James and he talked about Lucas, both surprised at how free they had become with each other. Moody would see Annie and Lucas standing in the trees. Sometimes he saw Rachel, which solaced both him and Tamsey, since as far as he knew Rachel wasn’t dead and so they weren’t just being haunted by dead people. Tamsey talked about New Harmony, nothing specific; it felt to him more like seeing shadows moving behind a drawn curtain. They were patient. He agreed there were more boats on the river than he remembered from the last time he was this way.
“What you say if someone ask about us?” she asked. “Would you tell them we your slaves?”
“I don’t need to tell them anything,” Moody said. “No one owns the water.”
“Which don’t answer the question.”
“I know,” he said.
“So, what you say?”
“I’d say you’re my crew. You work for me.”
She didn’t say anything to that. He still hadn’t answered her question.
15.
The answer came the next day. Two men hailed them from a bare spit of land that jutted out into the river from the south shore. Moody stepped into the cabin and came out with his pistol under his belt, then he and Leason poled until they were nearly at the spit.
“What is it?” Moody asked the men.
They wore cotton shirts of an unknown color, leather braces such as bricklayers wore under brown wool vests. One had a red bandana and the other a dirty white cloth wrapped around his neck like a bandage, like they’d both escaped hanging and were hiding the burn. Tamsey was at the stove on the parlor deck with the poker in her hand, and Sabetha and Granville and Sarah were in the cabin.
“We need some help,” one of the men said.
“What kind of help?” asked Moody.
“We got a wagon wheel come off back there on the road. Wagon’s too heavy to lift by ourselves.”
“You take everything off of it?” Moody asked.
“Yeah, we done that. Still too heavy.”
“Use a long pole for a lever.”
The man lifted his chin toward Leason. “He got a pole right there in his hands.”
Moody looked through the trees without seeing a wagon. He didn’t think there was a road there, either. “We can’t help you.”
“Lend us your boy for a minute,” the second one said.
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll pay him.”
“Get inside, son,” Moody said to Leason. He looked at Tamsey and she followed Leason into the cabin.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” Moody said to the men, trying with one pole to keep the boat from being carried too close to the spit, “but we can’t help you.”
“How many you got in there?” said the second man.
“They ain’t runaways,” Moody said. “They work for me.”
“Why you hidin’ ’em, then?”
“I ain’t hiding them, I’m protecting them.”
“We just want to borrow the buck. We’ll help you tie up.”
“Nope.”
He pushed the boat farther from the spit, remembering the scene at the dock in Wheeling, Tim’n’Tom falling into the hold. He couldn’t take the pistol out of his belt without letting go of the pole, and he couldn’t let go of the pole without being pushed onto the spit. Sending Leason inside might have been a mistake. If the men went for their guns he’d have to shoot them and let the boat go where the river would take it, which would be onto rocks. He was considering shooting them anyway, when he heard one of the windows open and saw the business end of Old Kentucky showing itself, aimed at the two men. The men saw it, too.
“You boys get back on your horses,” Moody said. “We ain’t doing any business here today.”
The one who had spoken first put his hat on his head and nodded to Moody. “You just bought yourself a whole lot of trouble, friend,” he said. “Helping fugitives is a federal offense. We could come back with a posse and impound your boat.”
“These people ain’t fugitives. I told you, they’re my crew.”
“All right, whatever you say. Tell your woman there she can put that old museum piece away.”
“Leason!” Moody called. “Come on out and take a pole. We’re leaving.”
Leason came out of the cabin, and Old Kentucky remained pointed at the two men. Moody and Leason poled the Pelican across to the north shore and they continued upriver. Once they were under way, Tamsey came out of the cabin.
“Would you have
shot those catchers?” he asked her, and she shrugged.
“I couldn’t find the powder,” she said. “Where you keep the powder at?”
He showed her.
16.
She felt better about Moody after that. Moody noted it, how she talked about things that didn’t directly concern their immediate survival. For instance, why the river they were on was called the White River. “It ain’t white, it brown as cane sugar. We don’t drink it, we don’t cook with it, we don’t wash clothes in it.” They had tied up on the north shore for the night, beside a sand beach where he had stopped a few times before and made a fire pit. They sat around the fire, letting it push the night back into the trees, the coffeepot resting on a flat stone surrounded by coals. He said it was called the White River because it was milky, and they argued gently about that for a while.
“I never see milk that color,” she said. “Milk supposed to be white.”
“Looks more like milk than water,” he said.
“Look more like mud than milk.”
He sighed. “Why do you have to be so cussed contrary?”
“I ain’t.”
“I say a thing is so and you say it ain’t without even thinking about it.”
“I been thinking about it all day. Why’s it called the White River?”
“Maybe because it has a lot of rapids in it,” he said.
“It for sure does that,” she said. “A lot of rapids and shoals and places hard to pole over. See, I ain’t being contrary.”
“Agreeing with me when I say you never agree with me is being contrary.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes, contemplating the way the setting sun turned the water into fish scales spread out on a wrinkled tablecloth.
“No, it ain’t,” she said.
“We’ll be in Freedom in a day or two,” he said. “Maybe we should stop there. I’d like to show you my cabin.”
“How a Southerner come to be in a place called Freedom?” she asked him.
“Long story,” he said.
“You goin’ somewhere?”
She was sounding more like Annie every day. He was drawn to her in a way he hoped wouldn’t frighten her off, as his talk of guns and war had frightened Rachel. After so many years with Annie, he’d forgotten how to be with a woman who wasn’t Annie. But Tamsey was becoming Annie.
“Like I said, my mother died when I was five,” he said, throwing a piece of driftwood on the fire and watching the sparks fly up into the night. “I don’t remember much about her except that she was too good to be married to my father. My oldest brother was an army engineer, he built things like bridges and redoubts, but he was killed in New Orleans in 1812. A powder magazine blew up when he was in it. I still had one brother left, so I still didn’t expect to inherit. When I was sixteen I went to the academy in Savannah and studied whatever interested me. Literature, geology, some law, a little of this, a little of that, I didn’t think at all about who was doing the work that was paying for it. I didn’t like my father much, but not because he owned slaves, it was because he treated them badly. In Georgia, slavery’s like bad air, you keep on breathing it and after a while you don’t notice the smell anymore.”
“If you white,” she said mildly.
“Yes, of course if you’re white. That’s what I meant, sorry.”
“Don’t stop.”
“When my oldest brother died, my father took me to New Orleans to collect the remains. All that was left of my brother fit into a boot box, and most of that probably wasn’t him, but it took us two weeks to get it, what with the war coming and army paperwork, and during that time I saw a lot of New Orleans. It made a powerful impression on me. Colored people playing music in the street, women dressed like Gypsies, blacks and whites mingling together—‘amalgamating,’ they called it. I liked the way everyone drank wine like we drank water, how they walked like they were dancing, like their feet weighed nothing at all, how the women laughed. And the sun going down over the Mississippi delta at low tide, the air smelling of swamp water and life. So when I finished at the academy in Savannah I told my father I wanted to study law in New Orleans. I bought a house in the Creole quarter and read books all day and played cards and drank all night, and I got by. I met a woman and we were together for a while, but she wasn’t impressed by my qualifications for a husband and married a major who went to Washington on the coattails of a congressman.”
“You learning to tell a good story,” she said. “But you forgot to say it maybe not all true.”
But she was teasing him. “It is all true,” he said.
“Then let it come,” she said.
“When I was at law school, I met Stephen Austin, a man my own age and of a similar bent. We eyed each other across various card tables, and we agreed on most things. He’d already run for Congress in Arkansas and lost, and then the government in Washington seized his property in Little Rock, and now he was losing what money he had left to me. He was broke and angry and thinking about moving to Texas, where his father had a sitio from the Mexican government to start a colony. He wanted me to go with him, but I said no, he wanted families and I didn’t have one. And I couldn’t see myself busting sod in some dreary corner of Mexico. Then I met Annie.”
“Annie,” Tamsey said.
“She was a slave on my father’s rice plantation,” he said after a pause. “She was smart and pretty and could have worked in the house in Savannah if she wanted, but she was like you.”
“How like me?”
“She preferred to work outside, for one thing, with her mother. She was at Plantagenet, that was the name of the rice plantation, and I was there for my second brother’s funeral—he died in the yellow fever epidemic, along with thousands of others, mostly slaves who worked in the paddies. I wanted to get Annie away from that, and also away from Casgrain, my father’s overseer, who was a hard man with the bullwhip and also had a reputation for interfering with the female slaves. Annie was a beauty, but she was spirited, and she wouldn’t have survived both Casgrain and the fever.”
“Then she not like me.”
Moody smiled. “No, maybe not. Or maybe I was wrong about her.”
“I know that fever,” Tamsey said. “We call it swamp fever. You fine one day, then you start to sweat and throw up your food, then suddenly you feel better. That when you got to worry, when you start to feel better, because inside a week you dead. There was a lot of it in Carolina, but I didn’t get it.”
“My brother did. The doctors scarified him and gave him quinine and calomel and some concoction made from tree bark, but none of it did any good. They wouldn’t have bothered at all with Annie. So, I took Annie with me back to New Orleans.”
“You buy her from your father?”
“No, I just took her. If he missed her at all, he probably assumed she died, too.”
“You ask her did she want to go?”
“She would have said no, unless I took her mamma, too.”
Moody watched the fire for a long time. He sensed her trying not to say something, but she never could stay quiet. “You knew she would say no, that why you didn’t ask.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t ask a slave what she prefer.”
After a while he looked at her. “But I saved her,” he said. “And Lucas.”
“Not her,” Tamsey said, keeping her voice soft. She moved to put her hand on his arm and he didn’t take it away. “She already lost when they took her mam from Gullah.”
“But we had a good life in New Orleans,” he said.
“And after that?”
“We should have stayed there. It was hot, but not hot the way it was in Georgia, even in the Sea Islands it never got so hot. In Georgia you bake, in New Orleans you boil. The heat seemed to come from under your skin, like it was part of you, and instead of fighting it or resenting it you just relaxed into it. In Georgia we had to destroy what was there in order to live, but in Louisiana we were creatures of the tide pools. Annie an
d I sat on our banquette at night, watching the fireflies and listening to the bamboulas. We should never have left.”
“Why did you?”
He shook his head. “Lucas was starting to ask questions, notice things, want to know why they were the way they were. And the city was changing. After the war, Northerners began moving down, people who wouldn’t just relax into things. The drinking and the gambling became more serious, almost vicious, it was a kind of desperation, and the Creoles started moving out. Suddenly all our neighbors spoke English and beat their servants. And looked at us like they wanted our house. Eight years seemed enough.”
“Eight years old a difficult time for a child.”
“I thought the move would be good for him. Stephen Austin kept talking to me about Texas, how there was no slavery in Mexico, and the land was free. When Lucas was old enough he could get his own farm. So I signed us up. It was 1838. We farmed for ten years, Annie and me and Lucas. After Texas became a republic, slavery was back, but it didn’t seem to matter.”
“How you mean? Slavery didn’t matter?”
“No, I mean between us. Nothing changed between us.”
“Muddy,” she said, “everything changed.”
She had taken to calling him “Muddy” after their talk about the White River. He didn’t know if it made her feel closer to him or more distant.
“We worked together,” he said. “We were a family. We worked in the sun, in the cold, in the rain and the lack of rain, insects and lack of insects, blight, rust, gall, root rot, canker, crumble, little things in the ground you never heard of before and can’t see, hurricanes, lightning bolts, flash floods, hail, snow. It wasn’t like farming in Georgia, where you sit on your porch and let your slaves do the work for you until your land turns to dust and blows away, like a judgment on laziness, and you pack up and move to another piece of land and do the same thing all over again, generation after generation, failure after failure. In Texas, it was our land, we needed each other to survive.”