Thoreau in Phantom Bog

by Oak, B. B.

  As our train clattered along we both got lost in our own contemplations concerning what we had heard. We were both pretty down.

  “Tell me more about that Quaker imposter,” Henry finally said.

  “You think Haven is not what he claims to be?”

  “Since when does a Quaker drink liquor and amuse himself with gambling cards?”

  “Haven readily admitted to me that he could not follow the tenets of his faith because he has an unmanageable weakness for drink,” I said.

  “Is Haven his first or last name?”

  “His last. He never actually introduced himself to me, but according to Sam Ruggles, the name he signed in the registry book was Jerome Haven.”

  “Do you know when he arrived at the tavern?”

  “Before dawn Wednesday morning.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “In simple Quaker attire, a black coat and trousers, along with the traditional Wideawake Hat.”

  “It is easy enough to steal a hat from a Quaker,” Henry said.

  “Haven may indeed be trying to deceive with such a disguise,” I allowed. “Beneath his somber outer attire he was wearing red stockings. He surely didn’t steal those from a Quaker.”

  “Vogel’s killer was also dressed all in black and wearing a wide-brimmed hat,” Henry said. “Now tell me about Haven’s leg injury.”

  I described the wound and how Haven claimed he had acquired it.

  “Would it not be more likely to sustain such an injury jumping from a second-story window and tumbling into the woods than by falling off a horse?” Henry said.

  “Far more likely,” I said.

  “Did Haven give a reason for traveling in the night?”

  “He told Ruggles he was on his way to a Quaker community in Amesbury.”

  “I wager no one at that community has ever heard of Jerome Haven,” Henry said. “I’ll write a letter of inquiry to the pastor as soon as I get settled at the Sun tonight.”

  “You intend to stay at the tavern?”

  “I intend to keep a close eye on this Haven, and the best way to do that is to accept Ruggles’s request to construct a dumbwaiter for him.” Henry smiled at me. “Why do you look so surprised, my friend? I could possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the barroom, if my business called me thither.”

  “No doubt you could,” I said. “But I am sure you will be missed in Concord.”

  Henry’s smile disappeared. “Lidian left Concord with her children today to stay with friends in Plymouth, so I will not be missed at all.”

  JULIA

  Friday, May 19

  When I parted with Lidian and the Thoreau ladies after our repast at the Sun, I went to my studio and tried my hand at drawing Edda Ruggles’s parrot. I could not concentrate. My thoughts kept going back to the red neckerchief I’d seen in Granny Tuttle’s root cellar yesterday. I’d assumed Harriet had dropped it. But if it were the neckerchief Mrs. Tripp had knitted, it would most likely have been dropped by the runaway slave. Hoping it remained on the cellar shelf where I’d left it, I set off for Tuttle Farm.

  All the way there I kept my eyes peeled for signs of the runaway. If she were hiding in the vicinity of the farm, that would explain the disarray in the root cellar and the stolen eggs from Granny’s henhouse. I decided not to apprise Granny or Harriet of my suspicions, however. Why concern them unnecessarily if I were wrong? For this reason I took a roundabout route to reach the root cellar so as not to be seen from the farmhouse.

  When I threw open the cellar door, I must admit my heart picked up a beat in anticipation of finding the runaway inside. But of course she was not there. It had been naïve for me to think she might be. Most probably she foraged for food at night, when there were no field hands about and no expectation of being discovered by the women of the house coming into the cellar for provisions. I did find the neckerchief, however. It was just where I’d left it. I brought it out into the daylight and examined it. Same leaf pattern as Mrs. Tripp’s shawl!

  I asked myself where I would hide if I were a frightened fugitive slave lost in a strange land. No answer came. I went back inside the dark cellar to breathe slowly and calmly and quietly await a message from my intuition. ’Twas a trick Henry had taught me. Eventually the image of a hut with gray-weathered shingles and a lichen-spotted roof sprang into my mind. The Tuttle sugarhouse! It offered protection from the elements and had a cot with a cornhusk mattress for use during the long nights spent there boiling syrup when the sap was running. The last of the syrup had been bottled a good two months ago, so no one had reason to visit the hut now. In truth, Adam and I had reason to visit it one blissful afternoon a week or so ago, and that’s why I recalled the hut’s amenities.

  It was located in the middle of the sugar bush on the north hill, and to reach it I had to cross a pasture that was being plowed by one of Granny’s farmhands. I slowed down my pace and gave him a wave as I ambled over the furrows, as if I had nothing better to do with my time. I had forgotten to take a parasol to shield myself from the sun’s rays, and it was a great relief to leave the open field and get under the shady canopy of the maple trees. The sugar bush was as quiet and cool as a cathedral. Adam once brought me here when we were children to show me a giant maple that his grandfather Tuttle had just felled. Embedded near its core were arrowheads shot several hundred years ago from an Indian bow. How I did marvel at that! And even more marvelous to me was the box Adam made for me from the bird’s eye timber of that tree. When Papa and I relocated to France the box went missing, and I wept for days over the loss.

  Nearing the sugarhouse, I approached with caution, for I did not want to frighten the runaway I supposed was hiding within. I slowly pushed open the door, and as it squealed on its hinges I heard scurrying movements.

  “I come as a friend,” I said and walked farther inside. “I brought the red neckerchief you left in the root cellar.”

  A young woman of solid build stood up from where she was hiding behind a woodpile and took a few steps toward me. I recognized her to be the slave Tansy from Prouty’s daguerreotype. She took the neckerchief and pressed it to her face. “I’m mighty glad to have it back. Lady who gave it to me said it would protect me from harm. And it has! I didn’t get shot, and I didn’t drown. Now I just need to figure out how to get to a safer place.”

  “I will help you,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t be so quick to offer if you knew what happened to the last person who tried to help me, ma’am.”

  “I do know. The man who was conducting you to Carlisle was gunned down. He died instantaneously.”

  Tansy began to cry. “It happened so quick he didn’t even have time to make peace with his Maker.”

  “Did you see who the shooter was?”

  “No. I was lying under a blanket in the back of the wagon when I heard the gun go off. I jumped out and ran, never once looking back. I ran all night until I found this shack.”

  “Could the shooter have been the man who claims ownership of you?”

  Tansy shook her head vehemently. “He would never shoot a man in cold blood.”

  “Who else could have been after you?”

  “A vicious slave hunter is my guess.”

  “Thank God you got away, Tansy,” I said.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes and narrowed them at me. “How do you know my real name? I’ve used a different one on the Railroad.”

  “Shiloh Prouty spoke your name when he showed me a daguerreotype of you.”

  Tansy’s eyes now widened. “Prouty is hereabouts? I thought I’d lost him for good back in Boston.”

  “He managed to track you to Plumford and is asking after you everywhere. Looking for you everywhere too. And sooner or later he will find you here if you stay. I found you easily enough, didn’t I?”

  “Why were you looking for me?”

  I explained that my house was a Station on the Railroad and that I had helped fugitives before. “Come home with me, Tansy. I
can help get you back on the track to Canada soon enough.”

  She stared at me intensely, sizing me up, as she considered my offer. “Where is this house of yours?” she finally asked me. “How far?”

  “Not far at all. Right in town.”

  “How we going to parade ourselves through town without Prouty or some slave hunter grabbing me?”

  “We’ll wait here until dark,” I said.

  Tansy nodded and gestured to the cot. “Why don’t you set yourself down, ma’am?”

  “Very well. And please call me Julia.”

  “Is that what they call you on the Railroad?”

  “No. But since I know your real name, you might as well know mine.”

  Tansy pulled a bench from the wall and sat across from me. “I never called a white woman by her first name afore.” She did not sound as if she liked the idea.

  “I would be pleased if you did me the honor,” I told her.

  She did not say if she would or she wouldn’t. “How’s he look?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Shiloh Prouty. Must be thin as a railbird without me around to feed him. The man can’t cook a lick. Don’t know how he survived afore he got me.”

  “He looked most gaunt,” I told her.

  “What about Belle?”

  “Who’s Belle?”

  “His quarter horse. Didn’t he make a point of introducing her to you? Why, Shiloh Prouty thinks more of his fine bay mare than he ever did of a woman.”

  “He was riding a gray nag just as skinny as he was,” I told Tansy.

  “What happened to Belle, I wonder.” She rose from the bench and paced the small room awhile. She sat down again and regarded me. “You married?”

  “Yes, I am legally bound to a man.”

  “You talk like you are his slave, not his wife.”

  “Sometimes there is little difference between the two.”

  “But there is all the difference in the world!” Tansy said. “Shiloh Prouty owns me like he owns an animal. He claims he treats me like a wife, but that is not the same as being one. A wife cannot be sold off on the auction block.”

  “No, but her husband owns her just the same. A married woman has no legal rights of her own.”

  “Then don’t you need your husband’s permission to take me in?”

  “I don’t live with him anymore. I left him back in France, and I will never return to him.”

  Tansy slowly smiled at me. Her teeth were as fine as any I have ever seen, as even and white as piano keys. “So we are both runaways.”

  I saw that she had decided to give me her complete trust. And because of that I would have to be completely honest with her. “You should know that my husband used to be a slave trader.”

  Her eyes once again became wary. “That’s like telling me you are Satan’s wife.”

  “Do not damn me for it! I didn’t know what manner of man Jacques Pelletier was when I married him. And learning the truth was the reason I left him.”

  “Most likely the reason you take in runaways, too.”

  Her insight impressed me. And the longer Tansy and I talked as we waited for nightfall, the more impressed I became. She was intelligent and well-read, or leastways as well-read as I was, and we shared a taste for the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the novels of Charles Dickens. She was also far better versed in the Bible than I was and could rattle off lines from Shakespeare’s plays like a thespian. It saddened me to learn that the woman who had given Tansy and her sister the precious gift of literacy had not seen fit to give them their freedom.

  We set off from the sugarhouse as soon as it was dark enough. Rather than take the public road to town, I led the way down to the river, and we took the overgrown fishermen’s walk that paralleled the water. It was slow going. I kept imagining footsteps behind us and turning to peer into the leafy gloom. Eventually, we came upon an old rowboat half-full of leaves and rain water that someone must have pulled up on shore a while ago and had no further use for. The oars were still in the locks!

  “We’re rowing the rest of the way to town,” I said. “It will be safer on the river. No one can come on us unawares.”

  Tansy nodded and with a heave flipped the boat over to clear it of water, righted it, and shoved it into the river.

  “I’ll do the rowing,” I said.

  Tansy gave me a dubious look. “You got the strength and know-how?”

  “Of course I do. Just because I’m a white female doesn’t mean I’m a weak imbecile.” Apparently it did to Tansy, for she did not look convinced. “And I know this river like the back of my hand,” I added.

  Without further protest, Tansy went and sat behind me. I took up the oars, and we set off. The full moon cast a strong light on the water, so I had no trouble rowing us to the center of the river, safely away from the shores, and keeping us there. Adam and I had often rowed and fished along the Assabet when we were children. Being a city girl, I’d lacked such skills when first I came to Plumford, but Adam had been happy to teach them to me. Despite being a most rambunctious boy, he’d had a great deal of patience with me in those days. And has so little patience with me now! I knew he would be most displeased with me when he learned that I had taken in the very runaway who might have been the cause of Mr. Tripp’s death. But if Tripp had been shot by a slave hunter in order to get the reward for Tansy’s capture, that was hardly the poor girl’s fault.

  The Assabet hereabouts flows quickly and smoothly, and as the boat glided us toward town I was enjoying the row until we saw torches moving on the water ahead.

  “Men out looking for me?” Tansy said.

  “Most likely men looking to spear fish,” I said. “They put a pitch-pine torch in a basket out over the bow, and when fish rise to the light they spear them, or try to. Mostly millworkers and farm boys out just having fun.”

  “What are they going to think when they see two women on the water at night?” Tansy said.

  “Maybe you should lie down so they can’t see you.”

  “It might seem even stranger to them to see a lone woman out rowing,” Tansy said. She threw the neckerchief over her head and tied it under her chin. “They can’t see my color unless they get close, so let me row and you sit back here and do the talking. We are just two friends coming back late to town.”

  I nodded at the good sense of what she said, and we changed places. I saw right away she could row with more power than I could muster and handled the oars with a practiced ease. We came round a curve and saw two rowboats in a quiet pool where the river spread out and flowed slower. There were two men in each boat, one rowing but turned to face forward in order to better steer and watch his partner standing up in the bow with a spear. The pitch-pine torches crackled and sparked and blazed out over the water, and the light cast huge shadows of the men against the dark trees along the banks.

  Each boat was patrolling the water along the opposite bank. Tansy kept our boat out in the middle and began to row hard to drive between the fishing boats and be away downstream as quick as we could.

  One of the rowers saw us and stopped rowing. “Hey, ladies,” he shouted in a drunken voice. “What you doing out so late? What’s the hurry? Come on over. We got pigs’ feet and bacon to chew on and something to wet your whistle.”

  “We are gettin’ mighty lonely out here!” a man from the other boat shouted as he turned and began to row across the river, intending to cut us off. “Lookin’ for a little adventure, are you, my girls? Why, that’s what we’ll give you for sure. Now, come on over here.”

  “No, thank you,” I said in as strong and severe a tone as I could muster. Tansy rowed harder. I could feel the boat surge forward with each pull of the two oars by her strong arms. “We are just headed back to town and are late getting back to our families.”

  “They can wait,” a man holding a spear said as his boat came toward us. The boat came on so fast that in but a moment the caged fire at the bow of their boat came driving toward the middle
of our boat. It was clear the men intended to stop us and did not care a whit for our safety.

  As the rowboat neared us Tansy jerked an oar from the lock and speared the wide end of the oar into the flaming pitch pine, showering blazing embers onto the chest and waist of the man balancing behind it, ready to grab at us. I saw his eyes go wide as he looked down at his shirt that went instantly ablaze. He flailed at his chest, cursed, and then dove into the water. Tansy pushed the bow of their boat away, slid the oar back into the lock, and then she pulled us away from the now shouting men. I felt a wave of relief, but then turned to see the boat from the opposite shore sliding across the current toward us. When it came alongside, the rower held up his oar and reached forward to grab our gunwale. “You think we gonna take that kind of treatment from mere women?” he said.

  As his oar came at me, I quickly grabbed hold of it, stood up, and with a great heave of my legs, flipped their narrow boat right over, dousing their fire and rolling both men underwater. Tansy rowed hard, and we got clear of both boats and away. Curses were shouted after us, but we were not pursued. Once we were clear round the next bend Tansy stopped to catch her breath.

  “Appears they lost the appetite for our company,” she said.

  A laugh of relief burst out of me. “I cannot imagine why!”

  Tansy grinned. “I don’t know how we could have done that better.”

  “I think it helped that they were liquored up to their noses,” I said.

  “You think they saw I was a Negro?”

  “No, too much happened too fast, and I don’t think they’ll want to talk about how they attacked two women and got beaten by them.”

  As we neared town I took the oars again, for I knew just where to pull the boat over before we got too close to the mill and the dam. I led Tansy up through the woods to the back of my house and inside. As we went we crouched and crept along in silence, and I was certain that no one caught sight of us.

  Once inside the house, we hugged each other, and then, because we are “mere” women, we shed a few tears of relief.