by Kate Walbert
And did I know that the soldier was a champion tennis player?
I did not.
Or was I aware that Bolivar was in love with a woman from Connecticut? That letters were exchanged? That there was talk of her following him, though she died as she had lived, a librarian in love with a revolutionary?
I had no idea.
Strange, now, remembering. The place so clearly contained him, though there was no Randall’s room nor windows with what’s left to learn, the dusty mullions dividing lines among those long lists illuminated by the setting suns, one every day to remind him, he would say, though at sunset he rarely felt in the mood.
Had I ever heard the word corpuscular?
I had not.
No dining room where we would sit, side by side, hands freshly washed and waiting to be excused. No parlor to race through, no wing chairs to maneuver in the living room, its smell of wet fires still strong, the cooling ash thick in the belly grate of the andirons, their heavy prongs twisting into worn lions’ heads, the crest of some Elizabethan lord. We’d pat their heads for good luck as the Medicis patted the snout of the great bronze boar in the Florence market, Randall said, wanting to impress the commoners for reasons I was still too young to understand.
And did I know that the king’s fingers were on display in Rome, hacked off by the commoners and laid out like ten white pencils on a black velvet cushion?
I did not.
No Sterling’s study in which to hunt for clues, his heavy books lining the walls, the volumes smelling of pipe tobacco, his Bible there on the highest shelf, where Randall would reach to find the tiny key hidden on its ribbon in the back fold. He’d climb back down and dangle it in front of him, in front of me. “The key to his heart,” he’d say, rolling his eyes.
It unlocked the tobacco box on the secretary where he’d found the letters we read so many times, stacked and tied exactly as we’d left them: the cheerful few sent from Virginia during Ruby’s sabbatical, the best from Paris: it Randall’s favorite, of course, the one he’d save for last. He said he liked the sound of it in a girl’s voice and I was the only girl around. I’d read about the geraniums, the business of the poor little lamb, the bolt of fabric with the hand-painted roses, the something she had to tell him. Afterward, Randall kissed the colored wax that sealed the flap. “How very, very,” he said, fanning himself with the envelope before locking the tobacco box and returning the key to the Bible.
And did he show me The Gardens of Kyoto? Did he tell me she smelled of snow and perfume?
He did.
• • •
The heat had reached its noon peak, triggering the cicadas.
“Don’t look so low-down, please,” Sterling said. “It’s a business concern. They wanted the land.”
He limped ahead of me and we walked through what remained of the foundation, stepping over rubble to reach the Gallery of Maps wall, which I recognized now as Asia Minor. The next panel would be Africa, I knew, wondering whether the ghosts of the slaves might still appear here from time to time, clustered in what had once been the kitchen. “The reason this did not topple,” Sterling said, “is because someone long ago reinforced it with a cement base.”
He looked at me but I must have stared back blankly.
“Randall was correct,” he said. “The station masters always gave one wall extra weight so that when you knocked upon it, it would make a louder sound. Here,” he said, “where the slaves hid.” He tapped the wall. “Think of it as a telephone.” He tapped, again. “Of course you need to be on the other side to hear. There were codes and the like.” I thought of the secret room, the slaves huddled there listening to the knocks on the cemented wall, each number corresponding to a different letter, the clusters of numbers we had seen written across the walls actually words spoken between those on the side of freedom and those still running for their lives.
“But that’s not the end of it,” Sterling said. He turned and limped out of the foundation, swinging his bad leg forward then steadying it on the rubble. I followed him, past long, neatly stacked rows of tree trunks with sheared limbs. The land, as well as the house, desecrated, shorn bald. I couldn’t think of what Randall would have said, seeing it this way. I know he hated change, things rearranged. Even the dust that covered the desk in his room seemed an indispensable part of the whole.
“It’s a shame your cousin never liked the out-of-doors,” he was saying. “He might have discovered this for himself. They found it when they cleared the land.”
Sterling had stopped, though nothing seemed particular about the spot. He tilted his head slightly, as if listening for horse hooves, then smoothed his hands over his trouser legs and leaned with some effort into what appeared to be another mass of bramble, removing the crisscrossing branches and dead sticks that I now saw had been placed this way to hide something quite large: what looked, at first, like an elaborate trellis on which thick vines had been trained to grow, though slowly emerged into the form of a cage too big for any commonly hunted animal, its bars the same black iron as that used to shoe horses. Rusted shackles hung from the top rungs, and a strange studded paddle Sterling later told me was used for flogging served as a kind of lock on the door, or what had once been the door. When Sterling pulled the lock free it fell off its rusted hinges.
“The bounty hunters used them to transport the fugitives back to where they had run off from, Virginia, most likely, or even Kings County,” Sterling said. He struggled to lift the door back into place and though I offered to help he waved me away, jamming down the flogging lock to hold it, his breath short. “They must have known the house was a depot. Kept watch.”
“They must have,” I said; I was thinking of the ghost family: the way Randall said they always stood so close together, huddled, the man’s arms straight down at his sides, the woman with a scar as thick as a finger around her neck—he thought it a scar, though the family faded so quickly it was difficult to know for sure: it might have been a rope; it might have been a necklace.
We heard the drone of the pilot in his beautiful plane somewhere overhead: we would spend the night at the Dew Drop Inn; the pilot would return for us in the morning.
“I find it the greatest of ironies, as an Edwards scholar, that I lived in this house those years entirely unaware of its history, or even the suspicion of its history,” Sterling said, looking past me as if he were opening a lecture before a classroom and it were not simply I, there, in the razed wood alone with my great-uncle listening, but a collection of students already versed in great ironies. But the lecture ended almost as quickly as it began. Sterling steadied himself against the cage and turned toward the fields that could now be seen in all directions, the cage like some kind of iron haystack from a hideous fairy tale before the yellowing, soon-to-be harvested wheat.
“What I have always admired about Jonathan Edwards,” he said, “was his unwavering belief in the Almighty. He had no doubt,” he said. “Absolutely none.”
4
When they opened the box, Sterling read, the slave sang a Psalm. He had been sent up from Richmond, Virginia, packaged by the fellow members of the Mount Zion Church of which he had always been a faithful and sustaining member. The box was a crate built from wood bought with his savings. He had left a wife and three children and he had had a fourth child and his wife had gone dumb when the child went on the block and was sold before her eyes. That child had been born in the cotton season, and the other three in the soybean. When they opened the box he had one single five-cent piece in his pocket. The Psalm he sang was I waitedpatiently for the Lord, and He heard my prayer.
His name was Romulus Perkins. From then on they called him Romulus Box Perkins.
Sterling appeared to barely look at the page. His eyes, quite truthfully, might have been shut, or in the half-opened state of prayer. He seemed to have memorized the words he now read.
The wife of Romulus waited with his children for the conductor to return to Virginia. Romulus had taken he
r cape and told her that the conductor would show her the cape and that this would be the sign to trust him. Before she had gone dumb, when they would speak of freedom, she would say she dreamed of sitting under her own vine and fig tree in a place where none dared to molest her or to make her afraid.
He had traveled in his box on a schooner owned by a law-breaking captain who would carry any kind of freight for a price. He was addressed to James A. Smith, Sudlersville, Maryland, and though his fellow members of the Mount Zion Church had painted “This Side Up” on the box, the law-breaking captain couldn’t read a word and so Romulus Box Perkins stood on his head for the journey, nearly thirty-six hours.
His wife belonged to the late Littleton Reeves. Romulus Box Perkins had recently been sold to Joe E. Sadler Esq., a negro trader. The third time on the block, he had been greased and rubbed hard to look shining then lashed to a bench and held by four men while flogged with a broad leather strap. This to show his compliance. He could read and write. He was by all accounts a dark orange color, medium size.
Sterling shifted his gaze to me. It was all a matter of public record, he explained. Just took some digging and the clout he wielded as a judge. He told them he was engaged in a biography of Jonathan Edwards, which, of course, was true, though he spent most of his library time searching for information on Smith. “I don’t know why it would matter,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m afraid of.”
We sat in the dining room of the Dew Drop Inn. The notes he had taken were written in his cramped, angry hand in a black-spined notebook, the kind I have always associated with lawyers and judges, and though it was difficult for me to believe Sterling afraid of anything, I imagined him hunched at a long oak library table, one arm guarding the fingers that held the pen that copied the story of Romulus Box Perkins, recorded, apparently, by a freed slave, printed in a limited edition and distributed in Philadelphia. Several years later the edition was printed, again, in a bound collection by a press that brought out the works of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Baltimore public library, free to the white public, had one copy, though Sterling said he suspected he might have been the first to take it from the shelves, given the stiffness of its spine.
“The size of the box and how it was made to fit him most comfortably was of his own ordering. Two feet eight inches deep, two feet wide, and three feet long were the exact dimensions of the box, lined with baize,” Sterling continued. “His resources with regard to water and food consisted of the following: one bladder of water and a few small biscuits. His mechanical implement to meet the death-struggle for fresh air, all told, was one large gimlet. Satisfied that it would be far better to peril his life for freedom in this way than to remain under the galling yoke of Slavery, he entered his box, which was safely nailed up and hooped with five hickory hoops, and was then addressed to James A. Smith.”
Sterling shut the notebook and looked at me, his eyes watery.
“The previous owner of the house.”
“Your house?”
“Mine,” he said. “And Randall’s. Once. Apparently, Mr. Smith was a station master. That room you and Randall discovered must have been the temporary residence of our Romulus Box.”
“A box for Romulus Box,” I said. “And family.” I was thinking how Randall described the little ones, the girl who sometimes smiled, the one with the plaited hair, the look-alike boys.
“I doubt that,” Sterling said. “By all accounts, the law-breaking captain never managed to get back to Virginia; they were ambushed by bounty hunters in King of Prussia. Killed the whole parcel of them. I don’t believe she would have had any other means by which to join Romulus.”
“But she did,” I said. My certainty was uncharacteristic, though I somehow knew she would have tried alone if no one returned with her cape; she would have taken the children, knowing the address the members of the Mount Zion Church had painted on the box that contained her husband. They were eventually there, together; Randall had seen them: a family waiting for a family portrait. Perhaps James A. Smith had opened the door one night to find Eliza square in the doorway, her fingers and toes frostbitten. Perhaps she had tried to speak, her mouth grotesquely contorted, stretched wide as if words might finally come in freedom. She was Eliza, wife of Romulus, she might have said. She loved to sing. The children, behind her, were hungry, barely covered by a stolen horse blanket, chiggers crisscrossing their chests, burrowing beneath their skin in long, raised rows. Ringworms ringed the soles of their feet.
If Eliza could have spoken, she would have said, The Christian wolves pursue me. This is what Randall said. Randall said the ghosts of the family could no longer speak, but if they could have spoken they would have said, The Christian wolves pursue me. It was an expression of the time, he said.
And Randall had been right; the Christian wolves had lain in wait in those woods, the hinges and bolts on their cages oiled as slickly as they would oil the mouths of their fugitive slaves, claiming to have treated them well on the journey back, fed them fresh, greasy meat.
• • •
The dining room emptied just after dark, the few other guests farm salesmen who ate alone at the tables along the windows, their newspapers propped on sugar bowls. They seemed mildly curious at Sterling and me; we must have looked peculiar—grandfather and granddaughter they might have guessed; anything else I don’t want to imagine.
We ate, at first, in silence. I had washed my face and brushed my hair hard, shaking out the linen suit, changing only my blouse. I wore one, I remember, with a Peter Pan collar, just fashionable at the time, and I had recently had my hair bobbed in the way the girls did who worked on the assembly lines: Daddy called it the Rosie Riveter look, but I didn’t care. I felt newly grown-up in the single room Sterling had reserved for me, with a narrow bed covered by a satin spread. A wardrobe stood in one corner and I hung my nightgown on a cedar-smelling wooden hanger and lined my hairbrush and comb along its narrow shelf.
Sterling met me for dinner downstairs, carrying the blackspined notebook as carefully as a tome. But it wasn’t until the last salesman stood and stretched to yawn, folding his newspaper under his arm and winking at me as he left, that Sterling cleared his throat and began to read the details of the slaves that had sought refuge in James A. Smith’s home. Remember, this was Maryland, 1945. The eastern shore. No one liked to hear about colored people. It was as if everyone pretended they just didn’t exist, pretended they were in the midst of a flock of black ghosts, and if they just looked through them and set their expressions, they might wake some morning to find them gone, up and flown on in the middle of the night. Or this is the way your grandfather’s best friend, Tate Williams, Dr. Billy, used to put it. He said, that’s why they call us crow, you understand.
From Sudlersville, Sterling read, the slaves had gone to Philadelphia. From Philadelphia, Canada. Apparently many slaves had traveled this line of the Railroad, diverted up the eastern shore by the law-breaking captain, known in all records as D.
It was D who had had the change of heart, who had been persuaded by the fugitive hunters to turn in the station master, James A. Smith. The fugitive hunters ambushed him on a February evening. The details here get sketchy, Sterling said. He had found Smith’s obituary in an abolitionist newspaper published out of New York City. He showed me the paper, the sketch of Smith—a man who looked like he might have been a past president, his beard inked in soft lines. James A. Smith alias James Griffin, it read:
Of whom he harbored: Paul Washington alias Thomas Brown, a tiller of soil under the yoke of Joshua Hitch; Benjamin Ross alias Thomas Stewart, held to the service or labor by D. James Muse; Mary Ennis alias Licia Hemmin, the so-called property of John Ennis. And so on.
James A. Smith, it read, fell in defense of freedom, shot in the groin once and twice through the heart.
• • •
“Did they get away?” I asked.
We sat in a center table, away from the dark windows though our reflections were th
ere like silent twins, listening. They blocked the blue moon I had earlier seen from my window. The blue moon, the second moon Randall had taught me, happens one month out of every year. That month the moon rises twice, he said, once at the beginning, once at the end.
“Entirely unclear,” Sterling said. “That’s the damning thing: this is as far as I got.” He took the obituary back and folded it into his black-spined notebook. “You didn’t like your fish?” he said.
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“It’s one of the local ones. Shame to waste it.” Sterling dabbed his mouth with the linen napkin, looking away, toward the black windows, his face turned to his twin in the glass.
“No trace remains of our friend Mr. Perkins,” he said to it. “He may have reached Canada, he may have been killed alongside Mr. Smith. It seems even the abolitionist press didn’t see fit to mention one way or the other.”
“No, I guess they didn’t.”
“You guess correctly,” he said, turning back to me; it felt a reprimand, for what, I couldn’t tell, though it may have been for sitting here as me in my Peter Pan collar, with my bobbed hair. I imagine Randall would have had some better questions; or maybe Randall would have had the answers.
“He might have known.”
“Smith?”
“Randall.”
Sterling pushed his chair back then, put his napkin on his dinner plate. “We get an early start tomorrow morning,” he said.
“He was smart that way; he found clues,” I said.