A Dream of Daring

by Gen LaGreca

“Live by myself, and no one’s been a-visitin’. Nobody ever’s a-visitin’ here,” he complained. “My sister, she ’casionally comes from New Orleans and tidies up the place, but she ain’t been here since Christmas.”

  “When I came over the hill, I saw a man in the field near the cabins. I couldn’t make out his face or clothing, but he was bending down and seemed to be digging into the soil. Would you know who that was?”

  “No, but it don’t surprise me none. Slaves’re always up to mischief at night, moseyin’ ’round, stealin’ an’ hidin’ things. They sell their pilfered stuff to the boatmen to git money for drink, or perfume and the like for their women, or just for runnin’ away. Can’t never trust a slave to be honest!” he said indignantly. “They got no respect for people’s property. No, sir!”

  Tom eyed Markham’s whip and gun.

  The overseer, in return, eyed his unarmed questioner. “Say, you talk like a Yankee.”

  Markham paused for a reply, but Tom offered none.

  “Maybe you don’t know this area, mister, but it’s right foolish prancin’ ’round unarmed these days.” Markham glanced suspiciously at the slave quarters.

  The first rays of daybreak lit the path that the two men took over the hill. Tom searched the sky. The distant clouds he had seen earlier were now larger and closer, shrouding the dawn in a dark gray that seemed to match the somber mood at the big house when he and Markham arrived. They found a group of the plantation’s slaves—house servants, groundkeepers, stableboys, and others—waiting to be questioned, standing stiffly in the early morning chill.

  With shoulders straight and eyes alert, Sheriff Duran showed little sign of exhaustion from the sleepless night. The focus on his work seemed so intense that it forced his body to comply. Tom brought Markham to him, and the questioning began.

  “Did you know about an invention in the old carriage house?” asked the sheriff.

  Markham shook his head. “No.”

  “Did you see anyone lingering around the big house?”

  “Just folks payin’ respects at the funeral.”

  “Did you talk to any of them?”

  “No.” The overseer frowned. “They don’t mix with me,” he added resentfully.

  “Did you see anything or anyone unusual here during the day or night?”

  “Nope.”

  “I saw something curious, Sheriff,” Tom added. “As I was going to Mr. Markham’s cottage, I spotted a man. I couldn’t see his face, but he seemed to have a shiny object with him, like a piece of jewelry, a stone with a blue tinge that reflected in the moonlight. He seemed to be digging it up, or else maybe burying it, when he spotted me approaching and ran away.”

  “Oh?”

  “I checked the area where he was, but I couldn’t find anything except stirred-up dirt.”

  “Was he a slave?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I saw him just in shadow, with the moonlight catching the shiny object.”

  The sheriff turned to Markham. “What do you think?”

  “Like I told the Yankee,” he said, pointing to Tom, “I didn’t see nobody. ’Twas prob’ly a slave with stuff he pilfered. It happens, ’specially here where the dis’pline ain’t no good.”

  The sheriff continued his questioning, but Markham had nothing of substance to offer. Tom observed that the slaves who lived in cabins around the big house also had nothing unusual to report. When it seemed there wasn’t anything more to learn, he summoned a servant to bring him a horse. He mounted the animal, his head low, his mood solemn. He would not be embarking on the exciting adventure he had planned but instead would be performing the most painful task of his life.

  In the overcast dawn, he headed for Ruby Manor, the senator’s plantation, to break the news to Rachel and her mother.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tom began his ride to Ruby Manor vowing with renewed vigor to develop his tractor. Now he had to fulfill that goal not merely for himself but also for the man who had lost his life trying to protect the device. He owed it to the senator and his family to recover the invention and continue his work. He could not bring Wiley Barnwell back, but he could vindicate the senator’s death by achieving his own life’s dream.

  Tom took the back roads to the plantation, hoping to find a clue to the invention’s whereabouts. At the time of the crime, the ground had been hard and dry, making it difficult to detect the perpetrator’s tracks. Now, a morning rainstorm intensified the problem, washing away any tracks that might have been discernible. Staring at the tangle of trees, shrubs, and rocks alongside his path, he wondered how many potential hiding places there were in the radius of the carriage house reachable by Cooper in the time he had to conceal the invention. Countless, Tom feared.

  Soaked and chilled, he traveled along the lonely road. The saturated tree branches above his path seemed to arch lower and lower in the rain, closing in on him, shrinking his world to a raw contest with nature.

  He plodded past the grounds of the Crossroads onto a ridge midway up a hillside. The old road there spanned from town to the plantations north of it like Ruby Manor. On one side of him was a sharp drop to Cutter’s Creek, its stream racing in the storm to Bayou Redbird. On the other side was a steep climb to the hilltop, its runoff forming puddles under the horse’s hooves and mud splatters on his pants. Could the invention be hidden around here? Tom wondered.

  There were no roads going up the hill, with its thickets of foliage and wavy bands of clover, and it was too steep for a single horse to haul the engine up the slope, so he dismissed that notion. He glanced downhill by the creek, but that was where the abandoned factory lay. Surely Cooper would not have hidden the engine around there, after he had explicitly mentioned the old cotton mill when questioned at the carriage house. Yet that plant was the closest building to Polly Barnwell’s land and a good place to keep the tractor protected. As he rode along, Tom wondered if he should search it, but nature intervened to decide the matter for him.

  The downpour was turning into one of Louisiana’s late-winter storms, with lightning and thunder forcing him to seek cover. Through the stinging rain pellets, Tom spotted the turnoff to the switchback road down to Cutter’s Creek. As he descended the deserted path, he imagined what it was like when draft animals hauled supplies and goods between the factory and the road on the ridge to town, bringing action and purpose to the sleepy hillside.

  He reached the dormant plant by the creek that had given it power. The building stood desolate, not as an inanimate object that had never sparked with life but as a corpse that had lost it. The factory’s prior human activities seemed to haunt the place, Tom thought, as he looked around. A giant waterwheel at the building’s creek side was now raised above the stream’s surface and immobilized, its power no longer needed. The factory’s boat dock was vacant. Flatboats still used the creek to float crops and people downstream to the steamships at Bayou Redbird, but no one had reason to stop at this landing anymore.

  Tom had explored the place once before, wondering if it could be reopened to manufacture his engine. It had disturbed him then to see an industrial building vacant, with rotting wood, shattered windows, and unhinged doors—a failed factory swallowed by the wilderness. Now, after hearing Cooper’s story of how the company had been driven out, the old place disturbed him even more.

  He tied his horse close to the building, underneath the roof’s overhang and out of the rain. A twenty-five-year-old sign painted on a wood board was still nailed to the front door. He read the message despite the chipped letters: “Closed June 1834 by order of the town of Greenbriar for failure to pay taxes and fees.”

  When he entered through the creaky door, the field mice making their home on the floor scattered in the dust. He walked around the entry room, seeing nothing of note. There were fish scales, animal bones, and cooking implements in a fireplace, signs of hunters or runaway slaves taking shelter there.

  On the factory floor, he saw remnants of the old machines, tools, and work bays, but no trac
e of his invention.

  He could imagine the dozens of human voices and bustling activity that had once filled the place. He could visualize the workers cutting the cotton bales, straightening and aligning the fibers through carding machines, then spinning the lint into yarn. He could almost hear the gears humming and the hundreds of bobbins spinning—all to transform the balls of fluff on a small plant into thread for fabrics sought throughout the world.

  He checked the warehouse but found nothing related to his device in the cold, hollow space.

  He examined what had been the office, a room off the factory floor with a plain wood desk and other furniture apparently not worth salvaging when the place closed. A bookcase held musty volumes on mechanics and manufacturing, their titles faded by the years. On a table he found a stack of diagrams and manuals of the machines. He dusted them off and glanced through the stiff, yellowing papers, fascinated with how factories like this harnessed the principles of mechanics and energy to mass-produce yarn. He saw plans to add a weaving wing to the building and diagrams of powered looms that the owner had apparently planned to purchase, thereby expanding his operation to produce not only yarn but finished fabrics as well. Like a vibrant young man who dies suddenly, the factory seemed to have closed just when it was coming into its prime.

  Waiting for the storm to pass, Tom sat at the desk and looked through the drawers. He found what was apparently the last item placed in the desk twenty-five years earlier, a local newspaper with a front-page article about the factory’s closing. According to the report, much of the plant’s land was purchased by Henry Barnwell. With the help of his bride, Polly, the new owner was going to tear down the cabins and shops that had comprised the workers’ village, so that he could cultivate cotton.

  The reporter had asked the factory’s owner for a comment on why his company failed. The owner was described as looking despondent. “You can’t change the soul of the South,” he had said. “Anyone who tries is doomed.”

  The comment disturbed Tom. A budding industry, a workers’ town, a burgeoning business, and a new age had been suffocated. That was twenty-five years ago. The soul of the South had remained unchanged. But the factory hadn’t been killed completely, he thought, as he read the last paragraph of the story. The reporter mentioned that Henry Barnwell was naming his new plantation Barnwell Oaks. Reading this twenty-five years later, Tom realized that Barnwell Oaks was a name that somehow had never caught on with the townspeople. The owner of the factory, Tom thought, had seen the new age coming, because the name he had given his factory had attached itself to Henry Barnwell’s plantation and endured through the years. The plantation, like the factory preceding it, was called the Crossroads.

  When the rain stopped, Tom was as eager to leave the place as one might be to end a visit to a cemetery.

  The storm had left its mark, he noticed, as he continued on the back roads to Ruby Manor. His path took him through a live oak forest, where the lightning and winds had wounded the great octopus-evergreens that seemed invulnerable. Among their sprawling trunks and tentacle branches, Tom saw trees split like barrels and branches broken like matchsticks.

  He thought of another towering figure that had fallen, Wiley Barnwell, and how the women he left behind would need help managing their own plantation and selling the Crossroads. Tom would, of course, assist Charlotte and Rachel with their business and financial needs. But what about their grief at a loved one suddenly being ripped from their lives? He was helpless to fill that crater. For the first time, he felt responsible for the unhappiness of others. He could feel the women’s sorrow and hear their anguish. Their cries were loud . . . vivid . . . frightful— He suddenly realized that the cries he heard were real. They were coming not from his imagination but from the woods ahead. He took off on his horse to investigate.

  He soon discovered that the cries were the frantic whinnying of a horse in distress. A fallen tree lay across the midsection of the creature, a formidable black trunk slicing a roan body, the animal’s limbs dangling helplessly in the air, its head bobbing up and down, its deep-throated wails reverberating through the quiet forest. A young mulatto woman was trying to free the beast. Her face looked as panicked as the animal’s, but she was conspicuously silent and, Tom suspected, wouldn’t dare cry for help because she appeared to be a slave caught in a runaway attempt.

  She had devised a method for freeing the horse, using what seemed to be the only tool she had: a long rope. Tom visually traced the path of the rope from its one end tied to a tree trunk, then swung over a thick, low-hanging branch of a giant oak on one side of the animal, then curled around the trunk pinning the horse, then brought up around another low branch on the other side of the animal, and then brought down to its other end in her hand. The slim figure had tied a stick to the end she was holding in order to form a handle perpendicular to the rope for better leverage. She was pulling feverishly on it.

  Tom looked in amazement at the makeshift pulley system that she had devised to reduce the weight she’d have to lift to free the hapless horse. He noted her intelligent effort as he watched her pulling on the rope. With the limited strength she had because of her small size, she could lift the trunk from the horse only slightly, insufficient to free the animal. She pulled again, adjusting her angle, trying to improve her leverage, but to no avail. She looked up from her rigors to see that the rope section around one of the branches was fraying and about to break. She gasped in horror.

  Tom ran behind her, seized the rope, and gave one fierce tug. His superior strength proved decisive. He was able to raise the fallen tree high enough to extricate the animal.

  “Grab the horse!” he directed.

  The girl rushed to the frightened creature while Tom held up the tree trunk. She grabbed the reins and guided the animal to its feet, freeing it just before the frayed rope broke and the trunk came crashing down.

  Tom was about to lend her a hand when he realized she was quite able to control the animal herself. She held the horse firmly by the reins, patting and soothing the barebacked creature until it settled down. Aside from copious bits of tree bark lodged in its coat, the horse appeared to be uninjured.

  When she finished tending to the animal, the young woman turned to face her rescuer. She stood with her head high, staring at Tom distrustfully. He stared back, taking in the many contrasting qualities striking him at once. Her face displayed the glistening dark eyes and high cheekbones of one race in an arresting harmony with the tapered nose and delicate lips of another. Her skin was neither ebony nor fair but a golden-bronze mix of the two. Her hair was long and lustrous, a tangled mane tumbling down her back, tightly curled by the grace of one race and lightened to a reddish-brown by another. It was as if nature, in a moment of artistic inspiration, had blended on her great palette the fine features of two races to produce a stunning beauty.

  He estimated her age at between eighteen and twenty, making her a cross between a girl and a woman. The wild hair and the penetrating eyes, the mud-splattered face and the proud posture, the hardness she showed him and the softness she showed the horse, the slave’s frock and the runaway’s spirit, the raw beauty and the keen intelligence—it all blended into a fireball presence.

  He walked toward her, wanting to help. He was carrying a substantial amount of cash for his now-aborted voyage and was about to give her money. Had he paused to predict her reaction, he might have expected to be viewed cautiously or perhaps even feared. But he didn’t expect to be punched in the face, then pushed in the chest and knocked down.

  Before he could stand up and recover from his assault, she had jumped on her horse and was fleeing furiously, a vibrant creature riding bareback, strong-willed—and desperate.

  He rubbed his chin, which smarted from her fist, and then he rose. As he dusted himself off, he watched her fading in the distance. Another bizarre event to perplex him, he thought. First his invention was stolen and an honorable man killed. Then he discovered that a factory bringing jobs, wealth, an
d the growth of a village had been driven out. Now a woman with a savage fear was running for her life. A common thread seemed to be tying these things together in his mind.

  He remembered reading the factory owner’s words: You can’t change the soul of the South. Anyone who tries is doomed. Was the runaway doomed? He thought of the slave catchers who scoured the area, tracking the desperate, chaining them, returning them to their masters for untold punishment. Will the patrols get her? His eyes closed painfully in quiet protest at the thought.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sun appeared that afternoon, drying the ground after the storm. But when Tom turned onto the path up the hill to Ruby Manor, a procession of oaks brought back the shade. He caught sight of the Barnwell home from spots where the branches thinned along the winding road, with each glimpse a reminder of the grim task ahead.

  As he reached the top of the hill, the Greek Revival mansion came into full view. It was an imposing structure with massive columns supporting the first- and second-floor galleries in the front and back of the house. On more than one occasion Tom had heard the story of Greenbriar’s most majestic plantation home. Early in their marriage, Wiley Barnwell had begun construction of a new house for his beautiful wife, and the couple and their one-year-old daughter, Rachel, had moved in twenty years ago.

  Ruby Manor was named for the hundreds of rosebushes planted along the perimeter, surrounding its mistress with her favorite flower. Through the years, the hardy little plantings survived floods, droughts, frosts, and heat waves to mature into dense, fragrant bushes that created a spectacular sight—an alabaster-white Greek mansion inside a red picture frame of roses. Wiley Barnwell became known as Greenbriar’s most romantic husband, and his gift of Ruby Manor to his wife was the envy of the townswomen. The celebrated story of Wiley and Charlotte weighed heavily on Tom as he approached the house that was a temple to a couple’s love.