Rainsburg was asleep, the few houses and the store dark, but the road as bright as daylight in the unearthly glow of the vapor lamps. I turned right and moved slowly south, towards the bulk of the mountain. At the lower end of town, where the road turned east and began to climb, I let the car come to a stop and killed the engine. I felt for my gloves and hat, found them, and then found the flask. I took a good pull this time, and capped it, and then started to pull on the gloves.
“Are we there?” she said.
“Not yet,” I said. “Stay here.” I took the keys and got out, closing the door reluctantly, huddling for a minute beside the car. Then I straightened up, expecting to take the wind full on my face. But there was no wind. The air was calm and still. But cold.
I went around and opened the trunk. I unearthed the jack, and the chains. I worked quickly, jacking the car and slipping the chains on without trouble. I put the jack in the trunk and got back in the car. My hands were shaking, and I had trouble getting the key into the ignition. When I had the engine running I took out the flask again. I needed a toddy, but cold whiskey was better than nothing.
“I want to know where we’re going,” she said.
“Maybe no place,” I said. “It depends on what the wind has done to the road up here. It won’t be plowed, but we ought to do all right with the chains, providing the snow hasn’t drifted. And once we get to the top we should be able to get down into the cove on the other side.”
“What’s there?”
“Chaneysville,” I said.
“John, what’s in Chaneysville?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I put the car in gear and took us out of Rainsburg, working the speed up as high as I dared, looking for the place where the surface changed from macadam to gravel. It was about there that they would probably have stopped the plow, there that the hard going would begin. But I never saw the surface change, because they had stopped plowing before then, and the road had vanished into just a swath of white. Then I felt the increase in traction as the chains started to bite through snow into loose stone, digging deep, and I shifted down into second and settled back for the climb.
The first mile or so was easy; the mountain had killed the force of the wind. But then we came around the shoulder of the hill and the drifts were there. Light at first, and at an angle to the road—I had enough speed to slide through them—but they would get worse. I started to speak to Judith; then I realized that the slow speed had lulled her—she was asleep. It was just as well. The mountain was looming on our right side, and to the left the land fell away in a sheer drop of about fifty feet into a creekbed lined with rocks and fallen trees, and hitting one good drift at the wrong angle would have us over there, and if we went it would be better if she was relaxed. That wasn’t likely—the chains were biting well—and I began to think we were going to make it without any problem. But then there was a turn and I had to let the speed drop off, and then there was a hill and I went into the climb with too little speed. I didn’t dare give it gas; that would break the rear wheels loose. All I could do was keep one eye on the steadily falling speedometer and watch the road, hoping that the grade would lessen. It didn’t. It got steeper. The speed fell off. A quarter mile into it, with no end in sight, I knew I wasn’t going to make it anyway, and the speed was so low it hardly mattered, and I risked giving it gas, slowly, just a little. The speedometer leaped to the left as the wheels spun, and I was about to ease off, but the chains dug through to gravel and got an instant’s traction, and then we were skidding, the rear end going off to the left, swinging towards the drop. It happened quickly, but it went almost in slow motion, and I eased the wheel around and killed the skid in what seemed to me to be no time. But when I looked in the side mirror I saw the tail end hanging over nothing. It took all the will power I had not to spin the wheel to the right, but I held it and got lined up and fed in the gas, and the car straightened out, still moving at maybe ten miles an hour. But little by little the speed dropped off, and there wasn’t enough traction to get it up again, and then the road disappeared. I could see where it had to be, because there was mountain on one side and drop on the other and the trees formed an avenue, but I couldn’t see road, or hint of road. There was nothing but snow. I stopped the car, killed the engine and the headlights, and sat there, looking out at the snow and listening to the wind howling and the faint ticking of the engine as it cooled. Judith stirred beside me, twisting into a more comfortable position. I got out the flask and sipped at it while I looked out at the snow and thought about what to do. The situation didn’t really merit much consideration, but I made the thinking last as long as possible, and then, when I had reasoned everything through far more than was reasonable, I put my hat and gloves on and got out to go and make camp.
I had slept. I had slept and while I had slept the wind had died and the moon had gone down, leaving the woods black and still.
The fire was glowing happily now, the wood hissing gently, the coals throwing out good heat, enough, almost, to warm me. I checked the kettle; the snow had melted, making enough water for maybe two toddies, and it was hot. The coffeepot had more water in it; I had kept adding snow as what was there had melted. I rummaged around in the pack and found the coffee and dumped some in the pot and set it back over the fire.
It had been a long time since I had made a winter camp; fifteen years, at least. It felt good to do it again. I thought about plans. My watch read 4 A.M.; daylight in three hours. No new snow had fallen; we should be able to get across the rest of the mountain on foot in an hour, and then another hour in the valley. We would be there by nine o’clock.
For the moment I was content to lie there, wrapped in blankets, by the fire, with Judith beside me; for a while I was relaxed and happy. But my mind does not turn off; it never has. Bit by bit the thoughts came slipping in, the facts and the calculations, the dates and the suspicions. There was no pattern to them, nothing I could grab on to; it was just random cerebration; a mind chuckling to itself. But it brought me out of my stupor, made me feel uneasy, made me remember where I was and where I was going. The wind kicked up then, chilling me. I straightened up and reached for the bottle. Judith stirred.
“John?”
“Here.”
“Whereat?”
“Right here.”
“No, wherewe?”
“The same place we were when you went to sleep: halfway up the side of a mountain.”
“Coffee?”
The pot was humming gently and the smell of the coffee was on the air, but she liked it strong. “Be ready in a minute,” I said.
She hauled herself ungracefully into a sitting position and rubbed her eyes. A gust of wind came whipping over the top of the windbreak and chilled us to the bone. “Jesus,” she said.
“He had enough sense to get born in a warm climate,” I said.
She stretched her arms out wide, then leaned over and wrapped them around me and hugged me. “This is fun,” she said.
“Some fun,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “Fun isn’t the right word. I was so tired last night I thought I was going to die, and then I thought I wasn’t going to have the chance because from what I could see we’re so stuck we’ll probably die up here, but what matters to me is that you brought me. I don’t know if that means anything, but it means something to me, and I don’t care if we do die of starvation—”
“Exposure, maybe,” I said, “but not starvation. Remember the Donner Party?”
She didn’t say anything.
“The coffee should be ready now,” I said.
“You can ruin anything, you know that?” she said.
“You haven’t even tasted it yet. Maybe it’s not as good as your coffee….”
She pulled her head away from me and looked at me, then she put her head back on my chest and hugged me again. I maneuvered my cup past her head and took a sip.
“Don’t you want your coffee?”
�
��Yes.”
I poured a cup for her. She took it, sipped. I settled back and she leaned back beside me, her right hand holding the cup, while her left sneaked out and searched for mine. I shifted my cup and took her hand. I felt the calm come back over me, her hand in mine, the warm whiskey sliding down my throat. I gazed into the red heart of the fire. I squeezed her hand.
“John?” she said.
“What?”
“Will you tell me now?”
“Tell you what?”
“Where we’re going. Not why; just where.”
“I told you where.”
“You told me the names of places; they don’t mean anything to me. You know they don’t.”
I shrugged my shoulders, settling deeper in the blankets to avoid a tendril of wind that had somehow crept over the windbreak. I took a sip of the toddy. “We’re going to see the place where Moses Washington blew his brains out.”
“Do you think that will help?” she said.
“I’ve done everything else,” I said. I felt suddenly colder, and I pulled the blanket closer around me. I sipped at the toddy and stared at the fire, at the flames dancing around in the wood.
“It’s another long story,” I said. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you.”
“I want to know,” she said. “You know I want to know.”
I took a deep breath. “All right,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
It took longer than a minute. I sat there, staring at the flames dancing, and tried to make my mind work, trying to forget everything, all the clashing facts on the red cards and the gold cards and the orange cards, trying to separate out the ones on the white, and trying to forget I didn’t know the why of any of it. It took more than a minute, but after a while the dates were in order, at least as far as they went.
“It starts in 1787,” I said, “on a plantation somewhere in northwest Georgia, when a slave woman, whose name I don’t know, gave birth to a son. Actually, the story must have started at least nine and a half months before, when she managed somehow to come in contact with a full-blooded Cherokee brave, whose name I also don’t know, who according to her was the baby’s father. The master, whose name I also don’t know, must not have been a man of much imagination; he named the child Zack. Or maybe I do him an injustice; maybe it was a large plantation, with lots of births, and he had used up all the fancy names. Or maybe he had gotten tired of having niggers named Hannibal and Caesar running around. Anyway, after a while Massa must have gotten tired of having Zack underfoot: in 1801 he sold him. Zack had been trained as a blacksmith, and he was worth a lot of money—probably a thousand dollars or more—to a man named Hammond Washington, who owned a large plantation near a place called Independence, in Louisiana. And now the story gets a little complicated, because there’s another point where it starts—on Hammond Washington’s plantation, in 1790, when a baby girl was born into bondage, the daughter of a house slave named Marie, who was probably an ex-French chattel; anyway, she was a quadroon. The child’s father, being an educated man, named her Hermia.” I looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. “Evidently, Hermia led a rather privileged existence, possibly due to her mother’s high status as a house slave and concubine, and partly due, of course, to her own relationship to Hammond Washington. She was from the beginning groomed for a position in the house. But somehow she managed to come into sufficient contact with the new blacksmith for a courtship to take place. On September 27, 1803, she was permitted to marry Zack. Although the ceremony had no legal standing, the union was legitimized to a higher degree than most slave marriages, because Hammond Washington, who was evidently a scrupulous and careful man, drew up a license for them. He also drew up a second document, which he gave Zack as a wedding gift, which enjoined the Washington family from disposing of them separately, or of disposing of them at all while Marie should remain alive. In addition to this, Zack was to be permitted, from the day of the marriage forward, to hire his own time and collect his own wages. The stipulations were: that Zack would be responsible for the upkeep of himself and his wife, even though she was to continue working as a servant in the Washington household; that he should pay to Hammond Washington a flat weekly rate of three dollars, and a third of anything he earned beyond what he required for that payment and the upkeep of himself and his wife; and that, should Hermia become pregnant, during the time that was spent in lying in and in nursing the child Zack should compensate Washington at the additional rate of two dollars per week, to be taken out of his profit. Whatever was left in profit could be applied by Zack against a price of two thousand dollars, which was Hammond Washington’s estimate of his value. When that sum was paid, Washington agreed to manumit Zack, at which time the three-dollar flat fee would no longer be payable, although the percentage rate would continue so long as Zack or any of his family would continue to be the property of Washington or his family. After Zack was free he could begin paying towards the value of Hermia, which Washington fixed at eight hundred and seventy-five dollars. There were additional clauses in the document concerning children, which gave Zack the right to pay towards their price, which was to be established by their worth on the open market, and the stipulation was that the children had to be purchased before Hermia could be. Zack obviously understood the implications of the document, even though he was forbidden by law to even try to read it; he knew time was against him. So he went to work, and in the next two years he paid his fee and percentage to Hammond Washington, and made regular payments of about twelve dollars a week towards his freedom, which Hammond Washington scrupulously credited to him in amendments to the document. In twenty months or so he had paid half the price. But time and nature caught up to him, and in the early part of June 1805, the payments dropped off by about three dollars a week, and on August 12, 1805, Hammond Washington amended the agreement to allow Zack to pay, after his own freedom was purchased, on the freedom of a male child who was five-sixteenths black, and a quarter Cherokee, and whom Hammond Washington, evidently an admirer of Jonathan Swift, named Brobdingnag.
“The effect of the child on Zack’s economic circumstances was pretty damaging. It’s possible that Hermia had a difficult time, and wasn’t able to return to Hammond Washington’s house for some time. At any rate, in early September Hammond Washington began to debit the amount he had credited towards Zack’s freedom at the rate of three dollars a week. It was only a temporary setback, however, and the debits stopped in mid-October. But Zack paid no more towards his freedom until January of 1806, and from then on the sums only averaged about ten dollars. Still, he made good progress, and by March of 1807 he had managed to get the balance due to Hammond Washington down to only about four hundred dollars. He probably would have been able to purchase his freedom within twelve months, but sometime that year the Louisiana legislature passed a law limiting manumission to slaves over thirty, thus making the agreement between Zack and Hammond Washington not only technically illegal, which it had been from the beginning, but impossible to execute, even informally. I don’t know exactly when the act was passed, but on December 14, 1807, Hammond Washington amended the document, deferring the manumission of Zack, Hermia, and any children until such time as manumission should be legal under the laws of the state of Louisiana, but stipulating that as soon as the originally agreed upon amount of two thousand dollars should be paid, the flat fee would end, and any sums paid would be applied to the price of the freedom of Brobdingnag.”
“So nothing much changed,” she said.
“Everything changed,” I said. “For one thing, while Zack might have been freed by 1817, and Hermia by 1820, Brobdingnag wasn’t going to be free until 1835, assuming he survived that long, and even if he did, the odds that Zack was going to live to see it were pretty slim. For another, there was no guarantee that Hermia would have no more children; if she did, Zack was going to end up buying his children out of slavery until he died, and probably working himself to death trying. But the crucial factor was Hammond Washington, who fr
om all appearances was as fair as a slaveholder could be. Since he fathered children in 1790, he was probably born around 1775 or perhaps a year or two earlier; it wasn’t likely that he was going to live until 1835 to manumit Brobdingnag, even less until 1838 to manumit a second child even if Hermia had conceived right away. So it would be a question of whether his heirs would honor the agreement; the document, no matter how long it had been in force, had no legal standing at all. So what was basically a gentleman’s agreement, likely to be kept because the person charged with the keeping was the author of the agreement, became a highly unlikely promissory note drawn on somebody else. I don’t know any details about Hammond Washington’s family; it’s possible that he had children and Zack could see that they were unlikely to keep the bargain. Or it’s possible that he had none, and Zack didn’t know who might inherit. It’s impossible to tell what Zack thought, or exactly what he did, but I do know what he stopped doing: paying on his freedom. The amounts credited to him dropped off drastically. By mid-1808 he was making only occasional payments on his freedom, and on November 7, Hammond Washington began to debit the sum already paid at three dollars a week…”
“Hermia was having another child,” she said.
“No,” I said. “No, it just seems that Zack wasn’t able to pay the flat rate. It could have been that he wasn’t working very hard, but on April 27, 1809, Hammond Washington debited a large sum, five hundred and twenty-four dollars, and noted that it was for payment of debts in Zack’s behalf. Exactly what the debts were is hard to say, but since slaves couldn’t own anything or buy anything, Zack must have been involved with something shady, and since the amount was large and the indebtedness honored by Hammond Washington, it’s pretty clear that Zack had been gambling with white men. Anyway, the debits continued, and then, in late May, there is another large debit, two hundred and seven dollars, for payment of debts on Zack’s behalf. On June 4, 1809, Hammond Washington amended the document once again, this time suspending Zack’s right to hire his own time until such time as he should be able to do so ‘to the profit of himself and his master,’ taking over the responsibility of paying the upkeep for Zack, Hermia, and Brobdingnag, and placing what remained from Zack’s freedom payments, the sum of seven hundred and seventy-nine dollars, in trust at a rate of two percent simple interest.
Chaneysville Incident Page 41