Angels Make Their Hope Here (15 page)

Careful Jackson spoke as plainly as his snaggleteeth allowed. “Ma’am. Ma’am. Tell Mr. Ernst they tooked her,” he said. “Tell Mr. Ernst that they takin’ his gal back to slavery. They got her in the jail.” Dossie looked at the youngster with her eyebrows disappearing into the top of her head. He was smaller than her, but upon close observation he appeared to be an old man. Dossie heard his words. But why was he talking to her? Why tell her Mr. Ernst’s business?

“Please, ma’am, take word to Mr. Ernst Wilhelm that a sheriff come and give money to Miz Philomena and tooked Arminty. She gone down in the jail. Tell him ’cause she his tuck-up,” the boy insisted. “She his girl.” Careful Jackson squeezed Dossie’s hand to press her to action and released it when she nodded.

“I give him this word soon’s I can,” she promised.

Philomena Johnson had no compunction about taking money from the bounty hunters. In her view the girl was neglected. During Pet’s convalescence Ernst Wilhelm was inattentive, and Arminty had had to make do with her little savings and was teased by the other girls who said her fat old bastard had dumped her. After the ruckus with Pet, he’d stopped coming with regularity. And then her stomach began.

Sheriff Emil Branch was too lazy to pursue thwarting the bounty hunters, but he offered them no real help either.

“Now, Mr. Wilhelm,” he said when confronted by Ernst
Wilhelm at the jail. “Just because you want your comfort here don’t mean you can take some other man’s legal rights away.” Branch’s own feelings about white men who consorted with the colored were complex.

“That paper don’t mean anything!” Wilhelm growled back at the men. “That gal don’t belong to no man in Tennessee!” he shouted.

“Now you don’t know that, Mr. Wilhelm. This paper says she’s the property of Mr. Sanford Crawford of Tennessee,” Branch answered.

“Legally the coming child’s his, too,” one of the men said with a cracker sneer. “By the look of her we’uns’ll be back home just before it come—back to Mr. Crawford. He’ll thank you for the boon, sir.”

The nasty, unnecessary words made Ernst Wilhelm grunt. He was stunned. He hadn’t laid eyes on the girl in a month. Surely it was only one month. Had it been longer? Perhaps it had been longer and he’d forgotten. He had neglected her. How long had she been in the jail?

When he was allowed to see her, Arminty begged him to kill her himself so that she would not be taken back south. She pleaded for him to use his hands to strangle her. Ernst Wilhelm’s complete panic caused bile to rise into his mouth. He left the jail with one hand over his mouth and one on his gut.

Ernst Wilhelm put it together in his own mind while he chucked up his last meal that he would shoot the man who had spoken in the sheriff’s office—if he did not gut him with a knife. His own guts calmed when he thought of buttermilk and fixing a plan with Duncan and the boys.

“Counter them. Use the paper, man. Now is the time. Show them that paper and say she is your slave,” Hat said, entering
her kitchen, seeing Wilhelm and Pet hunched over, whispering. She knew about the scene in the sheriff’s office because Mattie Ricks had hired a dogcart and a boy and had come quickly and stealthily to bring her the news for a bonus fee.

“Hattie,” Ernst Wilhelm sputtered. “How…? Is Pet been tellin’ on me?”

“Hush, man. Pet don’t tattle. I know what you do. You the kind of man a wife has to keep her eye on. Take the paper and make the case. You may get her away without having to shoot anybody.”

“No, Hattie.”

“Take the paper, Wilhelm. I give you your freedom and you give me mine. It’s a bargain.” Hat handed him the bill of sale.

“Mama… what?” Pet began.

Hat raised her hand and stopped him from speaking. It was only since she’d nursed Pet back from the brink that she felt like she was in the right place with him. Before they seemed to her to be children both together—Mr. Wilhelm’s children. She’d always felt like Mr. Wilhelm’s child wife instead of a grown-up woman because he’d always had the power to make her small and tearful. She felt a break and realized she wanted him to go and had a way to be rid of him.

“Listen, boy, but don’t interfere. This is between your father and me,” Hat said.

I know about it all,
Pet wanted to say to keep her from confessing more. Hat looked at him and quieted him with her placid demeanor.

“Ernst, I’ve honored you as my husband because you kept me from a worse situation. I thank you for helping me and bringing me back to my home. And I thank you for my son. We are both free of our bond.”

The paper Hat handed Ernst Wilhelm was more a receipt
than a bill. It was a very small piece of paper to have had such moment. All those years ago he had laid it on the table carelessly. She looked at it. He’d not known then that she could read. Naturally he had assumed that she could not. Anna Beth could not. But Harriet Smoot could read. She read the state of herself as represented on the paper. It said that he, Mr. Ernst Wilhelm of Bergen County, New Jersey, had the authority to take her up and keep her unfree. Whether the market had been legal or not, Hat had been bought.

“Hattie. What are you saying?” The shock of it all was just hitting him. To rescue Arminty would mean that he’d lose his home and Hattie and Petrus and Russell’s Knob whether he used the paper or not. He would have to take Arminty away. He’d have to see her to safety. A wave of indignation washed over him. Hattie was forcing him out! In all his gallant plans for the girl’s rescue he hadn’t thought about what would come after. Now he stood to lose all.

“Did you think you’d be able to have your cake and eat it?” In the circumstance, there was little satisfaction in seeing Ernst squirm. Hat felt a real sympathy for the girl caught up in jail. “I s’pose it’s why I kept it. It is proof that I had no choice. It always pissed me and besmirched my feelings for you. It is at least an insult to be sold and bought. It leaves a bad taste. Gwan an’ take the paper. It may free her.”

“Hattie,” Ernst Wilhelm managed to say. He reached for her hand, but she retreated from him.

Ernst Wilhelm might have let the man ride off. But when he saw the way Arminty was shackled and the state of her nakedness, he shot the man in the back of his head, kicked his body
over, and took the keys from his belt. When he imagined what humiliation the bastard had served up to Arminty in the jail, he wished he’d beaten him to death.

The others were surprised and dropped open their mouths. Pet gasped, “Papa!”

“I had to do it. Look at her!”

“You’ve lef’ us some trouble, Wilhelm,” Duncan declared.

“Shut up!” Ernst Wilhelm exploded. He took off the shackles that bound the insensible woman. Arminty did not speak, did not scream or cry. She did not make any sound. Lost in a laudanum faint, she lay nakedly exposed to the air on a bed of feed sacks in the hunter’s rig.

Wilhelm covered her, and Duncan tied his own horse to the wagon, got in it, and drove to Noelle’s home as smoothly as possible.

Noelle felt Arminty’s stomach and said her baby was safe for the time being. Noelle said the girl needed a good, long rest in the bed to build her up. She said they’d given her laudanum to keep her quiet and to keep her from crying herself into ill health. Noelle rubbed Arminty all over with her fingers and bathed her head.

“Hat, Hattie, Hat, Hattie,” Ernst Wilhelm said again and again—calling her and hoping that some words would follow. Was there even a way to explain himself? He had great difficulty actually saying anything to Hat. How to say in words what he felt—what he felt he was obliged to do? Finally Hat herself restated the case and drew out a plan. Ernst Wilhelm would take the girl who was bearing his child to safety in Canada.
There was nothing else to do. He ought stay with them and care for them because he was, all would acknowledge, completely responsible for them. He was an outlaw himself now. He must sign over his business interests in this country to Petrus. This she said coolly, and Ernst paused to consider it. All of his property in this country would come to his first son. He would take the cash money that was on hand with him, and Petrus would send more when he could safely do so.

Hat’s lack of passion alarmed Ernst somewhat. She was a Smoot. She was cunning.

“I worry that I am leaving so much responsibility on Petrus’s shoulders,” Ernst said with some attempt to soften the parting.

“Ah, he can do anything you can and he is younger and stronger, and he will have me to help him,” Hat said with a harsh self-assertion that stung Ernst Wilhelm.

“Yes, you are right. He can take the reins,” Ernst conceded. “I will worry about him though… and about you.”

“Save your worry for yourself,” Hat said sincerely. “We will cover it for you. We won’t put a lawman on your tail.”

Harriet Smoot was certain that hers was the only heart that had never been softened to love and entanglement as women’s hearts were expected to be. Her first and only love had been her brother. He’d been a merry, playful boy once. She hadn’t known the man who took her off in marriage. Some contract had been made with her papa. And though Ernst Wilhelm rescued her from a horrible circumstance farther south, she had never known a choice in the matter. It was Wilhelm and his money that had chosen her. And none of the subsequent days spent as husband and wife and as parents had changed the ugliness of their beginning. He had been voracious in wanting her, and she never
had wanted him. And everyone—including Duncan—had colluded in her acceptance of this as marriage. He had her blessing to go.

Hat assembled belongings for Wilhelm as if he were going on a trip and would return in a day or so. She collected his shaving cup, razor, stockings, and chemise for sleeping. She added a box of bayberry candles for the sake of sentiment and lay down, closed her eyes, and let sunrise come on as it would.

Petrus and his father sat together talking throughout the night after Ernst Wilhelm had signed papers and passed them to his son. Several times Petrus had wanted to lay his head on Papa’s knee and have his hair tousled. But they were no longer in this relation—father and child. The son was grown now and taking the reins from his papa.

They struck a bargain that made the young man fortunate. The last thought Pet had before he let himself slumber—head on the table—was that his papa was such an enviable adventurer. He would never have Papa’s boldness of character. He’d never have the gumption to leave a world across the ocean in Dresden and come here and live so long in these mountains and then go off again into a new country. Damn! Pet knew for certain that he’d never have that kind of spunk or wanderlust. He was his mother’s child.

When the sun came up, Ernst Wilhelm went to speak to Hat once more. She awoke, startled. Her hair was disheveled. He looked at her and thought that she was as pretty as a biscuit still—even with dried matter about her eyes. Had she cried because he was leaving?

“We must go, Hattie.”

“ ‘We,’ Ernst? You taking my son with you?”

“Petrus and Jan are riding with us to the border. They will
not cross. They’ll come back. It’s best if you go up to stay with Duncan and Dossie. Some lawmen may come looking for me and the boys.”

“Better change your name. Gwan. Send them boys back. Don’t let them cross the border. He’s my boy. He’s mine.”

“I won’t.”

“Good luck to you then.” She put her head on her pillow and turned her back to Ernst Wilhelm.

Pet and his father drove up to Duncan’s house in one of the larger beer wagons with two of Wilhelm’s sturdiest horses pulling it. Noelle and Dossie made a straw pallet in the back of this wagon. Noelle spoke to Jan and Pet in a husky voice. “Lash these goods up tight. She’s still weak. Don’t toss her roun’ too much, or the baby liable to come early. She’s not strong enough to bring it.”

Noelle reached and took Pet’s face between her hands and spoke to him. “You come back here in one good piece, boy. You b’long to us. Your papa has made his bed and can lie in it with his own conscience. You’re our baby. You’re our ol’ shoe. We want you. You come back here.” Noelle spoke to Pet as if she were calling down spirits to influence him. She grabbed his shoulders and squeezed.

“Yes, Imi,” he replied with the old childhood name him and Jan had used for Noelle. She placed her palm on Pet’s chest, then on Jan’s, and closed her eyes to murmur prayers that Grandmother would look after them on the road. She gave Grandmother no exhortation on behalf of Ernst Wilhelm or Arminty Brown, for these two were to be left to their own fates or someone else’s prayers. Noelle firmly believed that prayers, like butter, must not be spread too thinly. Her gods, she knew, were miserly in parceling out blessings.

Duncan could have cut the route to Canada without his eyes. He had traversed it many times leading others along routes through New York to the border crossing. But his role in this plan was to stay back and muddy the water.

Few but Noelle knew Duncan had been a conductor for years. Ever else he was or had been, he was a smuggler of people and goods.

Dossie packed up cooked eggs and some fatback and dried meat and many, many hoecakes. She added potatoes and apples as an afterthought. She envisioned them eating potatoes roasted over a fire that Jan had raised, Arminty’s strength building up because of the hot vittles.

At the dock on the border, the boys were falsely jocular so no one would weep.

“When he’s grown up, send your son back to learn the business, Papa,” Pet said shyly and slapped his father’s shoulder. Ernst Wilhelm pulled him and held him and kissed his lips and ruffled his hair as if he were a very small boy. Ernst had been far younger than Petrus when he had left Dresden so many years ago. How could he have known he’d have so beautiful a son as Petrus and leave him to take another child to another country?

“Yes, Uncle Ernst, send your son back to us when he is big,” Jan said and clapped Pet’s back. His uncle pulled him close and kissed him and bade him take care of Petrus and Hat and himself and all.

The cousins were raucous on the trip home. They were drunk when they left Rochester riding southward. They became drunker still, stopping at taverns in New York. When they got to Schoharie and smelled the fragrance of the hops barns, they sobered
some and got to longing for their home. Jan knew Pet was grieved at parting from his papa. He, too, was sorry to see the old bear depart for Canada.