by Oak, B. B.
“Did you fix up the man?” she asked me, putting on a serious demeanor.
I told her I’d done the best I could and would come back to change his dressing tomorrow. I prescribed a light diet of easily digestible food for him and plenty of fresh water to drink. She assured me she would see to it.
I’d never had occasion to be in the upstairs quarters of the Sun Tavern before and hadn’t realized how extensive the guest accommodations were. Now I saw that there were narrow halls running hither and thither that connected the original structure to the many additions that had been tacked onto it over its many years of existence. Like most of the houses and shops that surrounded the Green, the tavern had been built well before the War for Independence. The date etched in a stone of the taproom fireplace is 1710.
I proceeded to the taproom to find Mr. Ruggles. He took ownership of the Sun when I was a boy, and I cannot imagine any but him as its proprietor. Indeed, he looks the very image of the Old Sol face painted on the ancient signboard hanging in front of the tavern, for he too has heavy brows, wide-set eyes, full cheeks, a flat nose, and a wide, benevolent smile. Ruggles pours drinks with a generous hand and allows a great deal of raillery and revelry to take place in his taproom, but he has never let the horseplay get too much out of hand. It is his duty to keep his business reputable, else the Plumford Selectmen would advise the county authorities to revoke his license. If there is one thing a Massachusetts taverner must be, it is respectable. And Samuel Ruggles is certainly that.
One thing the men in town most liked about Ruggles was that he had done very little in the way of sprucing up the Sun during his two decades as taverner. So when he came back from Boston with a Dutch bride two months ago, we felt a high degree of trepidation. But things have turned out pretty well for all concerned. Especially for Ruggles. He looks a good twenty years younger and radiates happiness.
Mrs. Ruggles has made the Sun glow too. Every piece of copper and pewter on the bar shines from her vigorous polishing, and she and her little army of hired girls have cleaned all of the inn’s hundreds of crown glass window panes to let in the light. Even the chestnut beams overhead, long blackened with the smoke and dust of years, have been wire-brushed clean so their wooden pegs and adze marks are visible. And all the whale lamps burn clean and bright at night, without a trace of smoke, with their reflectors as bright as mirrors. As far as I’m concerned, the Sun has been enhanced by this industrious woman’s loving touch and attention to detail, and I wager eight out of ten patrons of the place would say the same.
I found Ruggles behind the taproom bar eating pancakes. The shelves in back of him held an array of gleaming decanters and tumblers, along with flasks, jugs, demijohns, and bottles of various spirits. His regular customers would be coming in for their daily drammings soon enough, but at present the dark, cool room was empty of customers. I came in and stood up to the bar.
“How’s Friend Haven?” Ruggles asked me.
“Is that his name?”
“Yep. He signed the registry book Jerome Haven.”
“He has a bad cut and infection, and he’ll be laid up for at least a few days.”
“Well, I hope the folks waiting on him in Amesbury don’t get to worrying too much,” Ruggles said.
“He told you that’s where he was headed?”
“Yep. To a Friends community there, he said. That’s all I got out of him. Poor man looked mighty exhausted. And no wonder. He’d been riding all night. Pounded on my door at dawn on Wednesday. He was limping, but I never guessed he would get so sick on me. Guess I’m stuck with a teetotaling Quaker now. Not much profit in that.”
“I think he should stay put as long as possible, Sam.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t rush him on his way. I am a great admirer of Quakers for their brave stand against slavery.” Ruggles’s round face became grim. “And now Plumford has its own martyr to the Cause, shot dead whilst transporting a slave. It was the talk of the tavern last night.”
“No doubt Constable Beers was the one doing most of the talking,” I said.
“Well, the more rum he swigs, the more his tongue wags,” Ruggles allowed. “And he was kept well supplied with free drinks by his curious audience. None of us had any notion that Ezra Tripp was a Conductor in the Underground Railroad. To be honest, I never thought he had much gumption. Now I regret never offering him a drink on the house. I did let him drink on credit, though. I don’t suppose Tripp’s widow will appreciate settling his sizeable booze bill.”
“From the look of it she hasn’t a penny to spare, Sam.”
“Guess I’ll tear up Tripp’s tab then. It’s the least I can do for such a hero. It’s a damn terrible thing what happened. Last night Edda and I got down on our knees and prayed that the poor runaway got away safe and sound.”
“If we don’t find her body in Phantom Bog, there’s a good chance she did,” I said. “Henry Thoreau and I have organized a search party today. I’ve enlisted hands from Tuttle Farm, and he’s bringing volunteers from Concord.”
“Well, on such a warm day like this you boys are apt to get mighty hot in that bog, so I’ll drive over with a keg of cold cider. I’m too heavy to take part in the search myself. Good chance I’d sink right through the mire. I weighed myself on the platform balance at Daggett’s store the other day and found out that I’d gained fifteen pounds in less than three months. That’s what I get for marrying such a good cook, I reckon. There’s nothing pleases Edda more than cooking. Except cleaning, I suppose. And canoodling with me. But I guess I shouldn’t say more about that.” His big, satisfied smile said it all.
“Guess you weren’t such a confirmed bachelor after all, Sam.”
“Oh, I always intended to marry. I just hadn’t found me a suitable mate until Edda come along. The minute I set eyes on her in Boston, I knew she was the gal for me, so I wasted no time hitching up with her. I thank my stars I met her fresh off the boat from Holland, before she was grabbed up by some other fellow. She is one handsome woman, is she not?”
“Indeed she is,” I readily agreed. If Ruggles thought Edda handsome, then so she was. In his eyes, anyway.
“I have a notion to get her likeness done on canvas by that limner cousin of yours, Adam. I heard she painted Mrs. Easterbrook, and if she is good enough to paint the deacon’s wife, I reckon she is good enough to paint mine.”
“Good enough?” I said indignantly. “Why, Julia could well be one of the finest portraitists in the country, Sam. She was trained by her father, Ellery Bell, who has painted royals and grandees all over Europe, and Julia equals if not surpasses him in talent. It’s just a fluke that Plumford has such a fine artist in residence at present, and anyone who sits for her should feel very fortunate indeed.”
“Well, that settles it,” Ruggles said, slamming his palm on the bar. “Edda must sit for her, as you put it, as soon as possible. When might she be free to paint my darling wife, Adam?”
“That is not for me to say.”
“I reckon she is in great demand.”
“To be sure,” I said. “But you may be able to catch her between commissions.”
“I’ll go see her as soon as I can, and bring Edda along with me. How could any artist resist the opportunity to paint such a beautiful subject?”
Fortunately, no reply was required of me, for at that moment Edda’s parrot swooped into the taproom like a flaming comet. Ruggles made a cooing sound, and the parrot flew over to him and perched on his bald head. Ruggles did not seem to mind this at all. “Does Roos want a special tidbit?” he said. The parrot replied in a stream of gibberish, or so it sounded to me. “Roos only speaks Dutch,” Ruggles told me. “But I’m teaching her English.” He rolled his eyes upward. “Does Roos want a tidbit?” he repeated. “Say ‘tidbit,’ Roos.”
And strike me down if she didn’t! The word came out of her black beak quite clearly, albeit in a shrewish tone. Ruggles chuckled and extracted a bouquet of dandelions from his apron pocket. Roos flew off his
head and settled on the bar to delicately nibble on the buds as Ruggles held each stem out to her betwixt his forefinger and thumb. Edda came into the taproom and beamed at the sight of them together.
“Roos just said ‘tidbit,’” Ruggles informed her.
Edda caught her breath, clapped her hands together, and opened wide her pale eyes and small mouth. “I cannot this believe!”
Ruggles tried to get Roos to squawk out ‘tidbit’ again for Edda. Ruggles kept repeating the word in the most coaxing of tones, but the parrot remained stubbornly silent. My own fascination with its talking skills had reached its limit, and I bid Sam and Edda farewell. They hardly noted my departure, so engrossed were they in their beloved pet.
After making a few patient calls, I drove my gig to Phantom Bog. My Tuttle Farm volunteers had gathered there already with apple-picking poles, and soon Henry and his Concord men came along, equipped with long ice-cutting pikes. With the methodical care of the surveyor, Henry explained to us how we were to line ourselves up at the edge of the bog, fifteen feet between each man, and slowly proceed across the sphagnum looking for rents in the moss through which the fugitive could have fallen. Upon finding a rent, we were to carefully plunge our poles into the tea-colored water and poke about the soft muddy bottom.
“In this orderly fashion we will find her body if it is there to be found,” Henry concluded grimly. “Let us begin.”
We had to get through a thick border of blueberry bushes and maple saplings to reach the bog, and, as we slowly made our way into this snarly, boot-catching tangle, we roused up battalions of mosquitoes and green-headed flies. Slaps and curses were heard up and down the line as thousands of humming and buzzing vampyres feasted upon us, but we did not break formation. And I wager not a man amongst us thought once of turning back.
Onto the quaking sphagnum we marched, far enough apart from each other to prevent our combined body weight from sinking it. Even so, there was always the fear that one’s foot would plunge through the mat of vegetation, resulting in a bodily plummet into the icy bog water beneath. If a man slid under the mat he could quickly drown. So as we walked we kept an eye on each other, left and right. This was no easy matter, as there were spruce and tamarack and laurels growing out of the sphagnum, reaching heights up to six feet and restricting our vision. And we kept tripping on cranberry and leatherleaf stems, so that more than a few of us pitched forward on our faces and got a cold soaking, myself included.
As we probed the rents in the sphagnum with our poles, Phantom Bog began to give up her morbid secrets. Up came so many skunk, possum, raccoon, and rabbit carcasses that we ceased to comment on the discoveries and just returned the pale, slimy flesh and white skeletons to the tannic brew that had claimed their lives.
On we trudged in silence. I looked up into the gnarled, dead branches of a spruce tree and met the unblinking, yellow-eyed stare of a roosting great horned owl. It might have been the very devil himself observing us, so malevolent did the creature’s gaze seem to be. But I am a man of science, not superstition, and did not allow myself to think the owl a bad omen. Even so, when it dropped from its perch in eerie silence, slowly flapped its three-foot-long wings, and then glided like a flitting shadow into the distant trees, I was relieved to see it go. In the next instant there came a shout from a fellow up the line who was working his ice pole in a hole several feet across. “I’ve found a body, I fear,” he said, hauling up on his pole.
We gasped as we glimpsed a backbone and a clump of flesh come out of the churned water. But then we saw antlers and realized it was the hairless carcass of a buck. We shouted relief and then gaped at the antlers—a six-pointer, one of the men said in amazement. None of us had ever seen a deer in the area. They’d been hunted out over sixty years ago.
“Let it sink back to its watery grave intact,” Henry said. And his order was followed without protest, although I am sure a few of the men coveted those antlers.
On we wobbled and labored until the sky suddenly went from bright sun to a foreboding, angry, roiling black. We stared up at a thunderhead that rose straight above us for thousands of feet as a hard, cold wind chilled us to the bone.
“Crouch down!” Henry shouted.
Every man squatted on his haunches and made himself small whilst the thunderstorm unleashed a torrent of water down upon us. All the hair on my body began to tingle, and an instant later a bolt of lightning hit right into the bog, striking a tree less than fifty yards away with an earsplitting crack. The tree burst into flame, and through the mist I saw the shapely, swirling figure of a young woman with long, flowing hair suspended just above it. I wasn’t the only one who saw her.
“The phantom!” one man after another cried out.
We none of us dared stand to get a better look, for the thunder was rolling above us like logs rumbling down a mountain and the singed air smelled of the blacksmith shop. Sure enough, another bolt of blue-white lightning struck the bog, blinding us all. As soon as my eyes cleared I looked back toward the tree. The driving rain hissed and sputtered as it pelted the scorched trunk and began to douse the flames. The figure was gone.
The storm retreated as quickly as it had attacked, and the sun emerged once again. Henry was the first to speak. “Let us resume our search,” he said softly.
We reformed our line and proceeded to examine the remainder of the bog. Finding nothing, we concluded that whatever else might have happened to the runaway, she did not drown in the bog.
When we returned to terra firma Sam Ruggles was waiting for us with a keg of cider as promised, and one of beer, even more appreciated. As we stood around his wagon quenching our thirst, we talked of the violent and sudden storm. But not one of us mentioned seeing the phantom. I reckon we were all waiting for someone else to risk making a laughingstock of himself first. It is one thing to tell stories about the phantom sightings of our superstitious ancestors, but quite another to claim a personal sighting. After all, we are modern men living in an age of scientific discovery and invention, an age of railways and steamships, of gas lighting and rubber vulcanization and anaesthesia. Phantoms have no place in such a world as this, and, as Henry and I drove away in my gig, I expressed this opinion to him.
“The world is but a canvas to our imagination, Adam,” he replied. “We all observed a meteorological phenomenon on the bog today, and we can make what we choose of it. If some think they saw the phantom, then that is what they saw.”
“Do you believe that’s what we saw, Henry? Or was it just a mirage?”
“I believe that Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we cannot limit our beliefs concerning her,” he replied.
We said no more about it as we continued on our way to Tuttle Farm.
JULIA
Thursday, May 18
I found Molly Munger in the dining room when I came downstairs after a few hours’ sleep. She was standing before an assemblage of brass candlesticks and oil lamps that she had collected from all round the house and arrayed on the table. The strong scent of rum emanated from her person. Although I have never known my hired girl to be a tippler, I sniffed ostentatiously and raised my eyebrows as I regarded the open liquor decanter on the sideboard.
Molly laughed and shook the flannel cloth she was holding at me. “I soaked it in spirits. Ma told me it’s the best way to clean brass.”
“As good a use as any for Grandfather’s blackstrap rum,” I said. “What a fine housekeeper you’ve become, Molly dear!”
“You sound mighty surprised.”
“I meant to sound mighty pleased,” I said, although in truth her diligence does surprise me. When Molly kept house for Grandfather, she’d been rather lackadaisical in her domestic duties, to put it kindly.
“You feeling all right?” she asked me. “You kept to bed much later than usual this morning.”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“You had over company, didn’t you?”
“What makes you suppose that, Molly
?”
“Well, considering that you eat like a bird, it would have taken more than you alone to gobble up all the bread and cheese that was in the pantry. And there were two plates on the kitchen table.” Molly gave me a sly sideways look. “I guess I know who came calling last night.”
“You shouldn’t guess about such things, Molly.”
“Don’t fret,” Molly said. “You and Doc Adam have always kept my secret, and I will keep yours.”
Rather than tell her the truth, I let her assume that it was Adam whom I’d entertained last night. As Henry has made clear to me, the fewer people who know about my involvement with the Underground Railroad, the better.
Unfortunately Constable Beers knew about it. He had no proof, but if he chose to make his suspicions public, my house would no longer be a safe Station. I would have to somehow bluff him into silence. I put on my best bonnet and freshest white gloves and went to his cottage shoe shop, my damaged boot in hand. I found him alone, and, when he looked up from his lapstone, he did not return my smile.
“Have you come to make amends, Mrs. Pelletier?”
“Actually, I hoped you would make some mends.” I waved my boot at him. “Will you be so kind as to repair this?”
“What is in need of repair is the law you have broken,” he replied without budging. “I will not allow you to continue harboring a fugitive slave, and I intend to search your house as soon as I obtain a warrant from Justice Phyfe. He is due back in Plumford this afternoon.”
“You need not wait for a warrant, Constable. I invite you to come to my house directly and look anywhere you please.”
“Do not play me for a fool, Mrs. Pelletier. Now that you are so willing to allow me entry, I wager that black thief you were hiding is long gone.”
“Then why bother getting a search warrant? Best we forget all about it.”
“You defied my authority last night, young lady. And I will not forget about it.” He pounded his hammer against the piece of leather on his lapstone a few times. “Oh, no. I will not forget.”