Cloudsplitter (30 page)

I stood and walked away from him without saying anything more and returned to my place in the room.

Of the young man, James Cannon, I asked, “Do you have family in Canada who will help you settle there?”

He did not look at me when he spoke, but kept his large, wet eyes fixed before him, as if contemplating something that he could not share with me, a memory, a childhood fear or sorrow. “Family? No, not exactly, Mister Brown. But I ’spect folks will be there to help settle us. Leastways, so I hear. Mister Douglass done made the arrangements.”

“Everything will be different now, won’t it? Escaping from slavery is like a resurrection, isn’t it? A new life.”

Slowly, he turned his head and gazed wide-eyed at me, as if puzzled by my words. “More like birth, I’d say, Mister Brown. Resurrection is where you gets to be born again.”

“What is the name of the man who was your master?”

“His name? Name Samuel;’ he said. “Mister Samuel Cannon.”

“The same as yours.”

“Yes, Mister Brown, same as mine. Same as his father, too. Same as my mother.”

“So you were born a slave to Mister Samuel Cannon, and your mother was born his father’s slave?”

“Yes, Mister Brown. She surely wasn’t Mas’ Cannon’s wife.”

“Who was your father, then? What happened to him?”

He looked away from me again. “Don’t know. Long gone.”

Lyman watched me from a few feet away, listening. Mr. Fleete was asleep; across the room, still seated by the door with his rifle across his knees, Father lightly dozed. The woman, Emma Cannon, lay on her side next to her husband, with her back to us, and I could not see if she was asleep.

“Forgive me forasking,”I said in a low voice. “But your wife, Emma. Was her name also Cannon? I mean, before you married her?”

He was a young man, several years younger than I, but at that moment, when he turned his large, dark face towards me and for a few seconds studied my face, he appeared decades, epochs, whole long eons, older than I, and weary, endlessly weary, of my innocence. And when I saw his expression, it was as if in a single stroke I’d finally lost that punishing innocence, and I felt ashamed of my inquiry. I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked into your personal affairs. Forgive me, please.”

He must have despised me that afternoon, despised all us whites, the Wilkinsons and even Father and every one of the other, more or less well-intentioned, white conductors and stationmasters whose extended hands he and his wife had been obliged to grasp—hating us not in spite of our helping them to escape from slavery but because of it. In ways that were not true for Mr. Fleete and Lyman, we were unworthy of helping him and his young wife. And the terrible irony which trapped us all was that our very unworthiness was precisely the thing that obliged us to help them in the first place.

At nightfall, Mrs. Wilkinson brought food to us a second time, potatoes and a substantial leg of mutton, and when we had eaten, Mr. Wilkinson came and cheerfully bade us farewell and let us out of the barn by a back door, into the dark, adjacent woods. Making our way down towards the valley below the house, we kept to the birch trees, as Mr. Wilkinson had urged, so as not to be seen by the men returning to their hovels from the mines. For both good and bad reasons, although he did not detail them to us, Mr. Wilkinson did not want his Irish workers to know of his involvement with the Underground Railroad.

Hidden by the darkness, as we passed among the thick white trunks of the birch trees, we saw the miners. They were illuminated by the flickering light of the whale oil lanterns they carried—shadowy, slumped figures moving silently uphill. It was like a march of dead souls that we observed, and the image troubled me, and I found myself lingering behind the others, hanging back, fighting a strange impulse to leave the darkness and join them, to fall into line with the returning miners and merge my life with theirs.

Father grabbed at my sleeve. “Come, Owen,” he said. “I know what you feel, son. Come away. We cannot help them,” he said, and I turned reluctantly from them and followed my father and the four Negroes into the forest.

Shortly before dawn, we emerged from the deep pine woods on the road just below our farm, where Mr. Fleete parted from us to return to his cabin in Timbuctoo. He would not be joining us for the next stage of our journey, from North Elba to Port Kent, nor would Lyman, for our route would carry us through several villages and a generally more settled region than the wilderness of the pass between North Elba and Tahawus, and we did not want to attract undue attention to our wagon, as would surely occur if we were in the company of even one of “Gerrit Smith’s North Elba niggers,’ as the settlers of Timbuctoo were called by the local whites. While there were indeed a number of white abolitionists residing in the region, the Thompson family foremost among them, also the Nashes, the Edmondses, and some others, anti-Negro feeling was starting to run high here, amongst the small farmers in particular, who believed that, thanks to Mr. Smith’s land grants and now Father’s survey, the Negroes had obtained unfair access to the better part of the tablelands. This resentment fed on the usual racial prejudices of poor and ignorant white farmers and was fattened by the oily words of land speculators and politicians working to please the money-lenders. Father’s association with the Negroes was, of course, well known, and the several Sunday sermons that he had given at the invitation of Mr. Everett Thompson, who was a much-respected deacon in the North Elba Presbyterian Church, had enflamed many of the local people against us, and consequently we had begun appearing in public with Negroes whenever possible. “We must not act in the presence of our neighbors as men who are ashamed of doing the Lord’s work,” the Old Man had insisted, when I counseled caution. “We must force them to confront us, and from that they will in time confront their own consciences, so that when the spirit of the Lord enters them, they will know what is right and will act accordingly.”

But Father was no fool, and he knew that it would be dangerous all around to invite any such confrontation while transporting escaped slaves in our wagon, and thus he was obliged to dissuade both Mr. Fleete and Lyman from traveling on with us. Mr. Fleete seemed almost grateful to be let off from it, but Lyman was not. “You might wish I was along, Mister Brown, if some slave-catcher come upon you,” he said, as we walked along the road to our farm. The sun was rising full in our face, cracking the horizon just south of the notch. Father and Lyman marched in front, and Mr. and Mrs. Cannon and I came wearily along behind. The long hike through Indian Pass from Tahawus had taken several hours longer than the walk over the night before, as the fugitives were not shod as well as we and, despite the rigors of their flight, were not used to tramping at such length through rough terrain.

“You may be sure that Owen and I can ably defend our cargo, if need be,” Father said to Lyman. I myself was not so sure. At that time I had not yet fired my gun at another human being, and to my knowledge the Old Man hadn’t, either.

As we rounded the bend before our house, Father suddenly halted and drew back and hurried us all into the chokecherry bushes by the side of the road. He bade us get down out of sight and silenced us with the flat of his hand. “We have visitors,’ he whispered. “Two horses at the front of the house.”

There was a narrow gully that ran back from the road into a dense thicket of silver birch, and Father instructed the fugitives to hide there. “Do not move until one of us comes for you,” he instructed them, and at once the man and woman slipped away from us into the gully and out of sight. Then he, Lyman, and I approached the house.

There were two men lounging at the door, one of them known to us—Caleb Partridge from Keene. The other was a long, leathery fellow with a patchwork gray and black beard on his face and the squint and facial color of a man who spent most of his time outdoors, although the clothes he wore belied that—a brown suit and waistcoat and a tall black felt hat. He wore strapped to his waist, in stark contrast to his clothing, a holstered Colt Paterson, a five-shot revolver, the sort of sidearm one usually associated with a police officer or Pinkerton agent. He was a manhunter. The other fellow, Partridge, although unarmed, looked to be his assistant today, or perhaps his guide.

As we approached them, Partridge smiled. Watson and Salmon were just setting out the cattle and sheep to graze in the near meadow, and I saw Oliver in the distance behind the barn, carrying water and grain to the pigs and feed to the fowl. Annie and Sarah were at play with their husk dolls on a stump in the yard beside the house. Ruth and Mary and Lyman’s wife, Susan, were nowhere to be seen, probably inside preparing breakfast.

Father stopped a few feet before the visitors, who had gotten slowly to their feet. He cradled his old Pennsylvania rifle, the one with the maplewood stock, loosely in his arm and said, “Mister Partridge.”

“Good morning, Mister Brown. How d’ ye do? You’ve been off in Tahawus, your wife tells us.”

“Yes, we have. You will introduce your companion to me.”

“Been hunting, Mister Brown?” the man said. His teeth were rotted and stained with tobacco. “Looks like you come up empty.”

“I do not know you, sir,” Father said. At the sound of his voice, Ruth and Mary had come to the window and peered out at us. The boys had stopped their work and were watching us from a distance. Only the little girls went on as before, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary happening.

“Billingsly,” the man said. “Abraham Billingsly. Of Albany.”

“I take you to be a bounty-hunter, Mister Billingsly. A slave-catcher.”

“I am an agent. I am an agent hired to return lost or stolen property to its legal and rightful owner. I have a contract,” he added, patting his breast pocket.

“I do not permit slave-catchers to stand on my land, sir. Nor do I permit those who associate with slave-catchers to stand on my land,” Father said to Partridge. “You will both have to vacate these premises. Immediately.”

The tall stranger took a step forward and smiled and stopped, as Lyman and I moved to either side of Father and let our muskets be seen. In a sleepy drawl, the slave-catcher said, “I merely wanted to make some inquiries of you, Mister Brown. That’s all. Your niggers is safe enough. I already seen the wench inside. Her and this one with you, neither of them is lost or stolen, leastways not so far as I know. Matter of fact, your good neighbor here, Mister Partridge, he vouched for them himself. I don’t give no trouble to what you call ‘free’ niggers.”

“I’m running you off my property, sir!” Father declared. “Leave now, or we will shoot you dead!”

“No need to get upset!” Partridge said. “This here fellow come by my house yesterday and requested me to take him over here to North Elba. That’s all! He’s after some nigger couple from Virginia that’s killed a man down there and took off for Canada, pretending they was escaped slaves. They got a arrest warrant out for them.”

“He has a contract, not a warrant,” Father said.

The slave-catcher said, “I heard there was escaped slaves passing through here, Mister Brown, and that you might have something to do with handing them along. You and your family are well-known, Mister Brown. And I heard there was a nigger couple staying in your house. Seemed unusual, so I thought I’d just have me a look at them. I see now that they ain’t but field-niggers, though. The ones I’m looking for is a little yellow gal and dark-skinned boy about twenty years old. House niggers, Brown. Not flatfoot darkies like yours.”

Father then moved in close to both men, who were considerably taller than he and younger but who backed off from him, for he bore forward with singular purpose and barely contained fury. “I do not want to kill you in front of my wife and children,” Father said. “But by God, I will! Leave here at once!”

Partridge stepped quickly away and made for his horse. The slave-catcher followed behind with as much leisure as he dared show, and the two mounted their horses and backed them off towards the road.

“Aim your muskets, boys,” the Old Man said, and we raised our guns. I looked down the barrel at the head of the slave-catcher. It felt wonderfully clarifying.

“We’re leaving, Brown!” Partridge cried, and he put his horse on the road and kicked it into a gallop and disappeared around the bend.

For a few seconds, the other man remained and stared hard at Father, as if memorizing his face. “Brown,” he said, “if you try to move the two niggers I’m looking for, I’ll have to take them from you.” Then he turned his horse’s head and rode it slowly from the yard and down the road towards North Elba, passing within twenty feet of the man and woman he wished to capture and return to slavery.

We lowered our guns, and the family, including Susan, came and surrounded us, fearful, but relieved, and also proud of us. My ears were buzzing, and my heart pounded heavily, and I barely knew where I was or who was with me. Mary was telling Father that the men had arrived the previous evening and had interrogated Susan and had poked through all the outbuildings and rooms of the house. Mary had expected them to leave then, which was her reason for allowing them to examine the place so thoroughly. She said, “I’d have turned them away at once, but they insisted on waiting for your return and asked to sleep in the barn. We felt like prisoners, but I couldn’t very well refuse them. I’d have sent one of the boys to warn you if we’d known where you were likeliest to come out of the forest to the road. I’m sure they believed you’d come walking in all unawares with the very couple they were seeking,” she said.

“And we would have,” said Father. “But for their horses, which I spotted in time.”

“That was my doing!” Watson piped. “They had their horses in the barn, so’s to hide them from you. But when we went out at sunup to put out the stock, we first brought their horses out, as if doing them a kindness, which they couldn’t very well object to.”

Father complimented Watson for his cleverness, and then he declared that we must give thanks to the Lord. Following his example, we all lowered our heads there in the bright, sun-filled yard before the open door of our house, and Father commenced to pray with more than his usual fervor. I felt a noticeable relief and, momentarily, a genuine uplifting of my spirit from the experience—not so much from Father’s address to the Lord, however, as from standing in the sunlight in a closed circle with my beloved family and our friends Lyman and Susan. There were yellow butterflies all around, a cloud of them in the sunlight, swirling in a spiral, like a beneficent whirlwind.