“Come in,” I said.
He laid his pelt before the fire. Under that he wore another jacket.
I indicated my rocking chair, and he climbed up in it. His short legs stuck out like a child’s toward the fire. He briskly rubbed his knees and shins with his hands. “This feels good.”
Without asking, I took the kettle from the hob and poured him a cup of tea. Wolf or man, he was my first guest in many days. I unwrapped the jam cake and cut a fine wedge for him. I had no idea what to say to him. I listened to the slight rocking of the chair, curved wood stroking boards. Finally, he broke the quiet.
“You lost your baby?”
I was shocked by his directness, but the cabin had but one room, and it was clear we were alone. I nodded.
“And your mama?”
“The buggy turned over. Probably the mare was too difficult. My mother was killed.” I had mentioned to the bounty hunters that my mother was away to fetch the doctor.
“You’re pretty snug here, all the same.”
“Yes.” I felt an odd shyness with this man. He had led the pack out of the house. He had seemed to restrain their brutality. He and the Scotsman.
“I done put my donkey in your barn.”
“A donkey?” I sat down in the ladder-back chair to listen.
“I bought myself a donkey with the bounty money. My legs are too short to walk all the way home. I didn’t want no animal too large to handle.”
“The bounty money?” I felt afraid. “But you didn’t—”
“Una—” he said. He knew my name. “I did and I didn’t.”
He reached in his pocket and drew out a silver thimble. The yarn in the tip was gone.
“The others gave up. I had give up, too. I saw her entirely by accident. She was crossing a snowfield in Ohio, an old cornfield at the base of a hump of a hill. When you see a lone black woman like that—surely lost, traveling light—you wonder. And so I began to track her. I never knew it was Susan.”
“Susan!”
“I sure to God hoped she would not climb that there hill. The snow was deep on the windward side, and it was purgatory to me to have to mount that hill. But she sees me out in the field. She knows I’m after her. Though my legs are short, hers were tired. I knew she saw that I would overtake her, and there was no place to hide. The hill was just a snow-covered hump. A nuisance in the landscape. But she struggled on. I saw she wanted to gain the top before I caught her. That was what she was trying for, only that.”
“No,” I murmured. “No.”
“She actually waits for me at the top. Then she says, ‘Little white man, let me buy my freedom.’ I asked, ‘How much do you got?’ She opened a little bag on a string around her neck. ‘I’ve never counted money,’ she said.
“But I saw it was enough. ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘what else you got in your pocket?’ She answered, ‘My pockets be empty,’ and she turns them wrong side out. At first glance, them pockets did seem empty, but being short, my eyes were close to the pockets, and I saw one has this odd little bulge. We took my jackknife and opened the seam.
“ ‘Una done hid her thimble with me,’ she said. ‘I never knew.’ For some reason, I believed her. I could have cut her throat—my knife was already out—and taken her gold money and the silver thimble. Or I could have taken her money and still turned her in.”
“Where is she?”
He smacked his lips on my jam cake. “I let her go.”
“Did you?” I said. “Did you! That was so good of you.” I jumped up. I wanted to hug him. “I’m so glad,” I exclaimed. “Let me cook for you. I have beans and ham.”
He smiled at me. “I’m hungry,” he said.
“I thank you.” I flung my hands open in gratitude. “I thank you for letting Susan go.”
“I’m glad I did it,” he said. “She was just a tiny little thing. She reminded me of myself.”
“You know I did hide her,” I said. “She was between the mattresses, but I didn’t know it. She had slipped in. Then she took care of me.”
“But your baby died.”
I nodded.
“And you’re here alone till spring.”
“Yes,” I said, because it was true. But I felt a little afraid. Though he was short, the power in his body was evident, like that of a compressed spring.
He watched me make the preparations for supper. I did not know what to say. After a bit he asked me if I was nervous. Again, I felt unbalanced by his directness.
“A little,” I said.
“Perhaps I ought to tell you the rest of the story.”
I only looked at him.
“I took Susan back to the road, and I pointed out a house I knew to belong to abolitionists. Big white square house. I told her they would help her, but they knew me, as I knew them, and I couldn’t go to the door.”
“How do I know that you’re telling the truth?” The question blurted from me.
“Susan thanked me. She said to tell you, if I saw you, for I gained her trust, anyway, this string of words: snake, tub, snake again, prayer, and fence. What does it mean?”
Gladness flooded my being. “It is her name,” I said. “It describes the printed capital letters in her name.” I took up pen and paper and drew the letters, naming them as I drew.
“I see.”
When my visitor got up to step outside, I could scarcely believe how small he was. How did such a man come to be a bounty hunter? I did not know, yet I knew there was goodness in him. When he returned, he sniffed deeply, enjoying the aroma of the ham and beans, as any person might. I wished that he had not taken Susan’s money and thimble, yet he had let her go. It was more than many would have done. He did not need to be perfect to be good.
I asked him to tell me of his travels and his family. He said he was from Virginia, and there he had a wife, a son, and a daughter. His wife was only a bit taller than he was, but his children were full-sized, by which he meant normal. “My boy is six,” he said, “and already as tall as me.” He told me they sat on small boxes, he and his wife, and when he got home, he would buy normal furniture for his growing children. “No need they be cramped up by what fits me.”
But I did not tell him my secrets. I told him only that I lived in Nantucket and would return when the river was navigable again.
“Do you want to go sooner?” he asked.
“I would if I could.”
“I could take you out. You could sit the donkey, and I would lead. I would do it for a fee. You’d be safe.”
“I think we should wait till the melt.”
“Let part of my pay be a place to sleep and food, till the thaw.”
“I must ask you,” I said. “Will you deal with me honorably?”
“You’d be safe. I’d take you as far as you needed to go. To Cincinnati, I think. You can take a coach from there.”
“I would like to see the donkey. Tomorrow. Tonight you can sleep in the bunk in the corner, but you must not cross to my side of the cabin till I am up.”
“Done!”
I felt happier. I did not want to stay in this cabin where I had had so much sorrow. The food supplies would run low before the steamboats came. Living in a corner with some other frontier family seemed unbearable. In Nantucket, I had an ample home, if I could but get to it.
As we chatted on into the evening, I felt that I was right to trust the dwarf. Nevertheless, that first night, I slept dressed and with a butcher knife under my pillow. As I lay in bed, I swallowed my tears for my child and my mother, lest the dwarf hear me and come to comfort me.
I HOPED Susan had found shelter in a stable or house. I could not know her story, but she had one, as surely as I did. Perhaps some omniscience, with stars for eyes, saw her walking, knew her mind. My life and that of Susan, though I could not tell her story, were surely a parallel that made loneliness in the universe impossible.
“Merry Christmas,” I called out to the dwarf, as I sat up on my elbow to blow out my candle. In the dark, in a
nice, male voice, he called back the same to me.
CHAPTER 95: Getting Started
FOR THE NEXT few days, the weather seemed too cold for me to inspect the donkey. During this time, I took woolen blankets and sewed them together, shaping shoulders for a smooth fit, for a long cloak. So that I could wrap it over my knees when I sat sidesaddle on the donkey, I made the cloak quite full. I joined a hood at the top, and then I stitched myself a muff as well, since the dwarf would lead the donkey for me and my hands might as well be warmly lodged. I sewed rapidly and almost carelessly, for I wanted to be ready to leave at the first possible moment. I felt like a hare pursued by the hounds of grief. Faster, faster, I urged the needle. February, I promised myself. We’ll leave by February.
Of course we could not take the sea chest with us, but I made a roll of a few clothes to carry behind my saddle. I could make new clothes in Nantucket. In the center of the roll, I placed the spring dress my mother had made for me. I left Liberty’s little clothes in the sea chest.
When it was warm enough to walk to the barn, I visited the donkey, who was white and named Milk. She was as docile and willing a little beast as though created just for me. She had large soft eyes, and long ears like a rabbit’s. She was so small I almost hesitated to sit upon her, but the dwarf, whose name was David Poland, reassured me her back was strong, and I weighed less than a hundred pounds.
Once a day, after picking our way across the yard around melting clumps of snow, David saddled Milk, and I sat upon her inside the barn. He led us for turns for half an hour or so, so that we might all be accustomed to each other. This is the barn where my father hanged himself, I could have told David, but chose not to. Instead I listened to the soft placement of the little donkey hoofs on the dirt floor. The bad weather lingered into March. When my neighbor Roger Pack checked on me, he was relieved to find David with me and trusted him at once. At night we played cards, or I read to him. I taught him chess.
I did not understand David, but I grew to like and trust him more every day, as we waited for the final thaw. What I did not understand about him was his readiness to do hideous work, such as bounty hunting, or any other job—guiding me to Cincinnati—if there seemed to be a profit in it. I asked him once, and he said, “Like any man, I must support my family. I am an opportunist. I look for opportunity, for I am quick-witted, and I make more money that way than I would in any steady employment.”
“But you are far from your family.”
“So is your sea captain, Una, far from you.”
As David led Milk and me about in the barn, I asked him if he thought a woman could be a sea captain, and he replied, “Why, I don’t know. I don’t know nothing about the work.” But he had not laughed, and I liked him for that.
After discussing it with David, I decided that on our way out, I would stop at my neighbors’, where we had had the cider-pressing and dancing, and where they had kept my mother’s body in a shed, and leave Roger Pack a paper authorizing him to sell my farm. He would send the money, through banks, to Nantucket. And the sea chest.
When the day came that the snow was gone and the ground drained enough of runoff for David and me to commence our journey, I let the hearth fire sink to ashes, and I pulled out the latchstring. I put a small sign on the door welcoming any who needed shelter and giving the name of my neighbor, should anyone wish to buy the property. Then I climbed up on Milk, and with David leading us, we started our journey through the wilderness.
We had gone only a mile when we met my very neighbors coming to call. Cecilia sat on their mule, with one child fore and two aft, and Roger had packsaddles full of food draped over his gelding. It was a pleasant meeting on the road.
We decided to go back to their place, and for a while we were a little caravan on the road, like Chaucer’s pilgrims. Each of us, too, I thought, had a tale, though for their children the stories lay mostly ahead. Short and bitter, unjust! had been the story of my Liberty’s life.
I tried, as we sat by their hearth, to be cheerful, but my tongue was slow to bend to sociable chatter. David seemed to sense my discomfort, and he told stories of horse races in Virginia. When he was a boy in his teens, he had been much in demand as a jockey, being so small and light. Sitting on the floor with his back to the fire, he scarcely rose above the height of the children who sat around him. Like an elf king speaking of a faraway land, he described the horses—colors, markings, dispositions—and their owners and jockeys with such language that we all had picked our favorites by the time the races began. My eye fell upon his small but chunky hands, and it was easy to imagine him guiding a racehorse. The children of the family adored David; indeed, they were enchanted by him and his stories and the curiosity of his own diminutive person. Sometimes as he spun his stories he called a child by name, as though the story were just for him or her.
Nonetheless, I was glad when it was time to set down the pallets, and I wrote the short legal document, witnessed by David, authorizing Roger Pack to sell my farm.
CHAPTER 96: Forest Murmurs
THE NEXT MORNING, David and I had gone but a mile when I felt the weather warming, and I pushed back my hood to free my head to the air. As each day passed, David leading Milk in a northeasterly course, I could feel spring creeping along behind us. She, too, needed a guide, I thought. Often I glanced back on the trail to see if greenery was in pursuit. After a week of progress—we had slept at a cabin with a family named Mackensie—when I came out the door, I saw that spring had caught up with us in the night, and her net of green was flung over the brown grasses and the bare twigs of the trees.
Along our way, people were surprised to see us—a young woman on a white donkey led by a dwarf—but they were unfailingly hospitable. One little girl asked me if I was a preacher lady. She was disappointed to learn that I was only a traveler. “Bet you could preach,” she said. I told her I was a seamstress, and I could show her how to make some fancy stitches if she liked. So I asked David to lend me the silver thimble he had got from Susan. I took out some bright floss and showed the child how to pull the six-ply apart into two-ply, and how to make cross-stitch, and feather stitch, and seed stitch, and French knots. She loved the French knots the most and laughed out loud when she saw them, like miniature popcorn. I, too, laughed aloud, for the first time since Liberty died.
I told Carol she might decorate her collars and cuffs with such stitchery, and while she stood there, still and solemn, I slowly circled her, embroidering a pretty scallop trim for her collar. Of course her mother had a needle, but I gave the sweet girl two twists of floss, spring green and daffodil yellow, to make things pretty with. As I was about to remount Milk, I noticed that Carol’s eye fell on my puffy muff, which dangled from the saddle horn. I gave it to her and told her she might embroider flowers on it so that whenever she looked down at her hands in winter, she would remember spring.
“Forest Murmurs”
David and I left the Falls of the Ohio–Lexington Road to cut north toward Cincinnati along the old Buffalo Trace. Once we passed a small band of Choctaw Indians. Four braves stood along the path, with their arms folded over their chests. I followed David’s example and did not look at them, except with the corner of my eye. They were immobile as tree trunks, and both we and they pretended the other did not exist.
Once we passed a family whose skins were gray. Gaunt and hungry looking, they sat beneath the long golden fronds of a willow tree. Their hair was dirty and matted, and they scratched as though they had lice. The gray hue to their skin was caused by a layer of dirt and grime long left undisturbed; it had spread out evenly over their faces and necks and hands, like a gray envelope. A little bright-eyed boy ran out from the group toward us and asked if we had any food. I placed a package of biscuits into his gray hand. When I looked back at them, the willow fronds curtained them off.
The greenery that had started out as mere dots and dashes, which at a distance looked like a hazy net hanging over the earth, now broadened into real leaves and blad
es of grass. These were not palms, of course, but there was jubilation in the spring that made me think of Palm Sunday.
I felt now at perfect ease with David and Milk. As the weather grew warmer, I preferred that we stop by ourselves, instead of buying a bed in a cabin. David would erect a little hut from saplings over which we flung a tarpaulin and before which we’d have a warming fire. With Milk tethered nearby, we boiled corn and threw in bits of the sacred ham. After supper, by the flickering flames, I sometimes read from my mother’s volumes of Keats or Words worth. I had brought along only two books, but I had placed the others in the sea chest, and asked Roger Pack to send the chest to me, when he could, by paddlewheeler. I thought that I would put the books from home in a special place in the Nantucket library, by themselves on the mantel.
David found the poetry almost as impenetrable to his understanding as if it were written in a foreign language. After each line, whose meaning had been clear to me since childhood, he would say, “Now what does that mean?” After my exegesis, he would ask that I read the line again, and even then, sometimes, the words did not fall into meaning for him. Occasionally I would turn the tables on him (as Margaret Fuller had done when introducing me to the German language) and ask him to guess the meaning. Such answers were often painfully askew, though we dealt only in English.
“I get part of it,” David said once, “but I need you for digging out the deeper meaning.”
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