When Mary rose to fetch water and finish nursing the evening meal, Gabriel regretted that these tasks took her from his side. Her face was pleasant and sympathetic in the low light. The outward signs of her ordeal were fading and her face seemed relaxed now. She did not yet smile at Gabriel. He felt that she was simply nervous about the propriety of it. And she had gotten away from the habit of pleasantries throughout her travail. But the relaxation and the bright sparkling of her steady eyes signaled him her interest and affection when she turned her face toward him.
Mary’s obligations to prepare the meal dissolved into Annie’s authority to serve it—to give it to her chickens. Annie did keep the duty and privilege of filling their plates and circulating the room to fill their cups with coffee.
“Nanny, come and sit and eat your supper. We need your salt,” Gabriel cajoled her.
“Brother Gabriel, don’t add to my weariness.” She brushed him aside and did as she pleased about the room.
At conclusion of the evening repast, Mary cleared the dishes and lit lamps for the night work. It would be fine to see her as captain of her own, Gabriel thought.
Preparation for the night work was undertaken quietly—surreptitiously, as notice had to be taken of the comings and goings of Aaron Ridley. The group paused intermittently in their industry and listened for sounds of his leave-taking. Happily, Aaron Ridley’s yearnings hurried him out of the shop. As soon as he departed all fell to the night work.
This night Daniel Joshua arrived shaking water from his clothes at the threshold. His face was not the usual cheerful moon. His forehead was knotted and his eyes dark and humorless. The dreary downpour outside the door drew the companions closer together. Mary pulled her stool close up to the table, hunched her shoulders, and drew her shawl tighter about. Her knees brushed Ellen’s under the table and Ellen’s skirt warmed Mary’s and vice versa. The fire popped and sizzled as droplets hit it from leaks in the ceiling, for the several days’ rain made the house soggy—pots and pans were distributed throughout to catch drips.
“Has come a cry to help a group from across the river. On a night like this!” Daniel fumed about the urgent message that had come to him.
“They are holed up in a pocket on the Virginia side,” he explained. “They waitin’ on a boat and boatman to give them a crossing.”
His thoughts were plagued with worry regarding the group waiting on the Virginia bank of the Potomac. He’d been told that an indomitable woman had left a failing plantation with ten youngsters shortly after their master and his sons had fallen beneath a bout of croup. She’d heard the mistress talk of selling off the hands—children included—to a dealer. Then Mistress planned to move to be near her sister. The bondwoman had baked corn cakes, wrapped up the gang of youngsters, and taken off. Word came that the group was stranded at the river’s edge—unable to light a fire and three of them with rasping lungs. They would need to move tonight, and Daniel was bound to row across and bring them to the Washington shore.
More than nuisance, it was going to be dangerous to get them to the shore in Georgetown this night. The water was choppy, the air chilly, and there was still driving rain. There wasn’t a strong hand amongst them—them being a woman and some babes—to help with rowing and navigating. The woman had brought the children so many miles, but Daniel couldn’t be sure she had much strength left to her. And could be she’d lost her wits. Worse come to it, could any of these travelers swim the river? Daniel doubted it. Daniel Joshua said out plainly that he needed a body to hoist a lantern on signal.
Mary bolted up from her seat at the table, tossing a lapful of buttons to the floor and striking her elbow in the bargain. “Mercy,” she cried out. She scrambled to retrieve the buttons. Surprising the others, Mary presented herself and agreed to help without hesitation. She so wanted to be put to service helping other folks to get free. It was the opportunity she was looking for. Daniel Joshua accepted her and said she was to wait on the shore and raise a lantern upon his signal to guide the wayfarers crossing the Potomac River.
It did swell Mary some to be thought dependable enough for the task. Gabriel was surprised at her eagerness to sign on to this extravagant plan of Daniel Joshua’s. He would have preferred a bit more reticence on Mary’s part. But, he reflected, it was no concern of his what this girl did.
Except that it was a concern for them. The situation for freed people was precarious. And the race’s women were judged immoral if they walked abroad at night. Gabriel preferred that a woman seen coming and going with his mother and sister be circumspect. His fervent hope was that Mary would continue to come and go with the Coats family.
Daniel Joshua’s body was tense and active. He would not even sit to a cup of coffee. The usually talkative man only stared into a cup held in his hand as he paced about.
As surely as Mary felt Daniel Joshua’s confidence in her she could feel Gabriel’s fearful concern. She knew he wasn’t afraid of doing the task himself, but was frightened for her to do it. Gabriel wasn’t a soft man in case a person thought it because he sat down at his work. In fact, she had learned there was a lack of softness in him toward folks that was disturbing.
The women roused up. Annie began assembling blankets and thrust a folded stack at Daniel. Mary hoisted a pile of blankets given her by Annie for the comfort of the wet and chilled wayfarers. She stacked these and carried them upon the top of her head.
Annie turned to rummaging her larder for substance for a pot of soup to feed the travelers. Ellen, too, put away her lap work, set her tot to bed on a pallet near the stove, and helped her mother prepare to feed the hungry.
“Go on and fill up my bucket, Brother Gabriel,” Annie commanded. It hardly matters how grown you get do your mam take you down a couple of pegs. Gabriel put away his lap work for the night and covered his head to go out for the water.
The dark, wet night was cruel and unforgiving. The Lord who controls the wind and the waves and the drops of rain that fall, does, on such nights, seem to forget the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and the poor travelers stranded in bondage on the far riverbank. Gabriel was annoyed more than angry. The rain, the hardheaded women, and Daniel Joshua—who was certainly on the way to putting a noose around all of their necks—had spoiled his ease.
When Gabriel returned to the kitchen, his mother had already killed one of the rabbits she fatted for the pot and was skinning it and cutting it. The small hare would soon be lost amongst onions and vegetables. Ellen was hacking at carrots and turnips, and the sight of her ungraceful chopping and rough cutting made you wonder at the fineness of her needlework and fear for her fingers.
Mary ran to keep up with Daniel. He walked swiftly and dodged and darted in his customary surreptitious way as she labored behind.
Daniel turned down Water Street and disappeared momentarily into a doorway. Mary kept her head and proceeded in the direction she’d been led. As she passed close to a shed, Daniel reached out and touched her sleeve. She started but did not squeal. He fell in with her, holding a long-handled and bladed tool for chopping at underbrush. He also had a lantern that was not lit. Daniel again went ahead, and as they approached the river’s edge at the end of the cobblestone pathways, he started to chop a path out of the tangled growth.
Mary grabbed at tangles in Daniel’s wake and tried to yank them out of their beds.
“Save your spit for dying of thirst, girl. You’ll need your strength to hoist the lantern. Follow in my stepping,” Daniel said. He’d begun to doubt that he had the right helpmeet. Maybe this gal wouldn’t be strong enough to raise the signal. But it was too late to change the plan now. He wished he had a cracker or some such now that they had walked so far and fast. He hadn’t studied his stomach because of all the excitement. Now his belly was acting up.
“Here you are,” Mary said to him, offering a piece of Annie Coats’s hard tack. Daniel figured the girl had heard his stomach. He had better eat something or the patrollers would hear it, too.
From out of a bed of fallen branches and leaves some yards farther along the path, Daniel brought out his small boat. He couldn’t tell until he saw the folks how many trips it would take to bring the whole group to the shore in Georgetown.
When Daniel reached the Virginia shore, the woman who had brought the gang off the place stood at the river’s edge. Her hands were entwined and resting upon the top of her head. She appeared peculiar. A body would think she had need to entangle herself to keep control of her arms. Perhaps the children were an unruly bunch. Daniel looked beyond the woman and saw that the children were huddled together and were as still as a mound.
Though she had packed some supplies to carry the group forward, they were at the end of these stores. The children were bitten by all manner of insect and by the rats that inhabited the low areas near the river’s edge. The salve they had brought was all used up and the wounds had gone to fester.
Daniel feared they all would be discovered. The coughing could be heard a distance. Their intermittent rasps had guided him to them. As the two smallest children had succumbed to their fevers and their stomachs, there were eight children and the woman remaining.
“The babes lay unburied, sir,” the woman said of the two small figures lying on a shelf of rock.
“Eh ah,” Daniel said with a long sigh. “God rest their souls and let us go forth, ma’am.” He put four of the smallest children in the boat and piled several blankets over them. One boy standing in the shadow of the woman looked big enough and able enough to row in a pinch or bail water. Daniel called him forth to come along and the boy hesitated as if reluctant to leave the woman’s side. “I need his body to balance the skiff. I’ll come back for the rest of you all,” Daniel explained to the woman, who clutched the boy. She squeezed his arms and pushed him toward the boat.
“Make that he come back for us, you hear,” she said to the boy.
The boy stepped into the boat. Daniel took his place and pushed the boat away from shore with an oar. The boy sat looking fearfully at the woman on the bank. They had been close to separation so many times since they’d left the plantation and even before—it was the fear of separating from this particular young one after so many had been lost to her that had prompted the woman to run off. She had taken all of the other children because without her there was no help for them. Throughout it all, her boy clung so to her that this small separation now felt horribly cruel.
The boy stayed upright and held bravely to the sides of the boat. The small babes lying along the bottom did not stir much. They quietly rolled side to side with the movement of the boat. The bigger boy’s eyes were fearful milk-white saucers with tiny raisins at the center. But in the rocking back and forth he also made no noise. Daniel rowed until they reached a spot that was more than halfway to the Georgetown shore. At this point, Daniel Joshua blew upon a horn that was the signal to Mary to raise her lantern.
In response Mary removed the cover from her lantern and hoisted it. The comforting beacon shone out from the shore. It oriented Daniel in the dark blackness and he rowed toward it.
Daniel pulled his oars from the water, climbed over the side of the craft, and waded with it into shore. Mary greeted the travelers at the water’s edge while keeping her lamplight low.
The nervous boy jumped from the boat and helped to get the young ones ashore. All the while, his attention was focused on the far shore from where they’d crossed. Daniel Joshua stood looking back across the water also, mentally putting himself through the paces of the next trip across. His arms and shoulders were weary from rowing. But he intended to cross again before resting them finally. Any rest would make his complaining arms believe they were finished for the night.
As Daniel Joshua waded out with the craft, the boy looked as if he would go back with him. Daniel stopped him. “I’ma fetch your mama and the young’uns. Better not weigh down the boat.” He climbed back aboard and rowed away from shore.
Daniel got the remaining children and the woman into the small craft with some difficulty. The woman didn’t want to leave the two dead children without burial. Her superstitions plagued her suddenly and she begged him to lay the bodies low. Daniel pleaded there was no time and nothing to accomplish the task. He had not brought a shovel and to dig them down and row the wayfarers across was asking too much.
The second crossing was unremarkable except that it was punctuated by a great many exclamations of “Lord!” “Oh, Lord!” and “Lord, have mercy!” The woman looked back to the shore she was leaving and moaned a great deal.
Daniel once again got out of the boat to guide it into the narrow pocket where Mary signaled and where she and the other children waited. Mary gently restrained the boy from wading out to his mother, and Daniel cautioned the woman not to jump into the water and soak her skirts in her eagerness to reach the boy. “Ma’am, you do well to keep dry and keep these other children dry.”
She acquiesced and held back until reunited on land. After she had covered the boy with kisses she started to moan about the bodies of the two dead babes being left upon the spit of rocks. She agitated about auguries and kept up her talk even after they had reached where Gabriel, Ellen, and Annie waited with broth and blankets.
Both the woman and her son looked like hoot owls in the church basement with their heavily ringed eyes and vigilant stares. The wayfarers were to be secreted in the church’s cellar until they could rest and be taken farther on toward north. Ellen and Annie fed victuals and ministered to the needs of the coughing children. Ellen took each babe in turn, wiped their faces, and rubbed them with oleo.
Callie of Greenbough Plantation is how the woman was called. She came into the basement at Holy Trinity Church and rocked and moaned about the two babes left behind. The children who had been rescued lay about the floor swathed in blankets and nearly as still as corpses. Only Callie and her watchful son remained awake after the first few moments of stew and warm shelter. Greenbough Callie, shocked to be alive after what she had come through, shivered, as did the boy, though they were covered with many blankets.
Gabriel’s decision to row out in the darkness with resolve to recover the bodies of the dead babies surprised Annie, Ellen, and Mary. He sat with his head lowered nearly to his knees and fiddled with the contents of his pockets as he listened to Callie. His attention was hard on the woman’s tale and her moaning. Suddenly he rose and prepared clothing to go out into the still constant rain.
“Brother Daniel, take me to the boat and I will row across for these babes,” he said. He said as well that it would be best not to leave evidence that runaways had perched there. The bones the carrion birds leave would tell a tale.
“Will you raise the lantern for me, Mary?”
“I will take you to the boat. Brother Daniel can warm his feet,” Mary replied boldly. She was surprised at Gabriel. She’d not known this man to plunge into action. But she had not known him long.
“Take care not to be seen and taken in, good Gabriel,” Daniel called after them.
“If they take me, you will know where to come to get me, good friend Daniel,” Gabriel replied.
Gabriel rowed out across the river to the place where the group had waited. The rain had abated and the sky was moving toward light. The bodies were easily found. The two small corpses looked like stone statues reclining. They were cold and the flesh was stiffly unyielding. Gabriel covered the small cold bodies with the quilt Sewing Annie had given him for the purpose. It was funerary—being dark-colored and containing a patch of the cloth of a dress belonging to old Knitting Annie. This patch was one that turned up in several of the quilts in the family’s accumulation. It had the power
of repetition and was the most they could do for these dead children. He rowed back with the tiny bodies wrapped in one package.
Guided by Mary’s lamp, Gabriel came near the shore, waded in the shallows, and dragged the boat in.
“The dead must be buried, Mary. ’Tis just one of the things that must be done. We cannot leave the little babes to make food for carrion. We people got to cling together like it matters that we do. It’s the only way we make it,” he said. The intensity of the look in his eye commanded her.
As everyone knows it is unlucky for a childless woman to dress a body, Gabriel did not pass the bundle to Mary.
“Mary, go and tell Nanny that I’ll bury the babies in the plot that some of our women have secured. It will suit them,” he said, and walked away.
Gabriel returned home and stood in the yard, washing himself before entering. He removed his shirt to lave his arms and chest despite the cold air and the chilled water in the bucket.
Mary stood at the back door. She had waited. For the first time the sunrise would catch her here in the Coats house.
Mary looked at Gabriel’s clothes and saw evidence of his digging the graves for the two babies. She considered the wisdom of digging the ground in the wet like this night. All this he had done in the dark and suspicious time—at great risk to himself. He was a puzzling man, she thought, and enjoyed watching him wash.
On the day that followed the daring boat rescue of the woman and her chickens, Daniel Joshua’s chest filled with rasping noises and his body shook with chill. Once again Annie shuffled pallets and put Daniel Joshua to sick bed in her own sleeping place. For three days the man was laid low and fed broth to restore his energy. Aromatic clouds were circulated about his head and he was urged to breathe deeply.
Fifteen
“THERE COMES A time when a man wants to take comfort, Brother,” Annie said, standing next to the outhouse. Between them existed no shame so that she spoke frankly to her son, who was taking his constitutional behind the door. Annie had followed Gabriel because she had not been able to cadge a private word with him in some days. She’d maneuvered to trap him in the toilet.
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