Fire on the Mountain (17 page)

October 22, 1859
Miss Emily Pern
Queens Dispensary
Bath, England

Dear Emily:

Well, yesterday I fought my first and hopefully final, Duel. I aimed to miss, but my opponent didn’t; but he is a poor shot, which was gratifying, as we used his weapons from the toss instead of mine, which are falsely loaded with powder but no shot. We shook hands and though the incident is not forgotten, the episode is ended. Meanwhile he is off to join Lee’s Army! Perhaps he will miss Brown. I felt the shot go by, which is like someone tearing up a letter close by your ear. A letter from Death you will have to read sooner or later. Speaking of letters, have you heard yet from our friend Levasseur, now in London I think, who has sworn to write me of England and of you? Tell him to write me if you do. In short, I live, and hope to hear from you.

Your faithful &c.
Thomas

Harriet stepped up her pace, hoping to reach the top of the mountain before it got too wet. She wished she had brought a raincoat or something to eat. The first part of the walk had been neat, through the laurel-covered ledges, but now it was just a trudge. She couldn’t find the right pace between fast and slow. The shoes looked better, though. They had acquired a sort of blue glow. Last night she’d had what her father and granny called a ‘conjure dream’: a dream where nobody in the dream knew it was a dream but you. She was running down a dirt road; the grown-ups were in front of her, walking fast, talking among themselves and ignoring the kids, as grownups do. The kids were behind her, going slow, pitching rocks, swatting weeds with sticks. She was in the middle, alone, not sure whether she wanted to catch up with the grown-ups or fall back with the kids.

Then there was another kid with her in the middle, a boy she didn’t know. Even in the dream she knew it was her new brother. Mama, she cried out, she wanted to show her mother, but her mother was walking across the field away from the road in her high blue Africa shoes, walking fast.

Now it was really starting to rain. What happened to living shoes if you got them wet?

Maybe they turned into blue fish.

There was a hole in the rock, a dry ledge with a dirt floor, like a little house, and Harriet climbed into it.

If Cricket hadn’t been so much bigger than me, I swear I would have hit him. I was frustrated and angry all week that I had been fooled. I didn’t want to stay in town. I wanted to join Brown and Tubman and be a soldier; I was almost thirteen. But he wouldn’t even talk about it. I know now all the arguments he could have made, but Cricket wasn’t the arguing kind. He just told me to shut up and do what I was told. On the appointed night of our next meeting, I went to bed early, then lay awake until I could hear Mama’s snore, and then Deihl’s, like an old gospel duet, only she was the bass and he was the tenor. He sometimes went to her bed but not exactly as master and slave; there was a rough equality of affection between them because he had bought her promising to set her free. They had become man and wife in their way, but I was not included in the family. My own father had escaped right after Mama was bought (from Green Gables, where she was raised) and before I was born; and though I often wondered about him, she let me know that I was never to ask. When I thought of him, it was not of a man but of a wild goose heading north against the sky. The moon was setting at midnight when I crept out the back door, and I was surprised to find Cricket waiting for me by the woodpile, not at the assigned place. I was beginning to see that surprise was central to his method. Motioning to me, he started toward the barn. Suddenly I was afraid. I thought he was going to steal the horses. Slitting throats I could handle: war, arson, revolution—even murder—were fine with me. But stealing horses was going too far. I froze in my tracks, terrified, a living illustration of Marx’s insight that our livelihood conditions our consciousness. Hissing like a snake, Cricket said
come on!
More afraid of him, I followed; but I needn’t have worried. After patting the horses on the rump to calm them, Cricket took the hurricane lamp from the wall, explaining later on the road that the one he had planned to bring from Green Gables had broken that day in a kitchen accident. My job was to keep my mouth shut and follow him like a shadow and do what he told me. Period. We stopped at a little church on Westallís Road, where Cricket pulled a gun wrapped in a rag out from under the side steps, and stuck it in his belt. This was no antique, but a sleek little LeFebre four-shot revolver. Then he pulled out two black cloths and tied one onto his face and one onto mine, like highwaymen. Then we were back on the road. We made for the fence row once when we heard horses: a team of six paddy rollers rode by, making enough noise for an army. Times being what they were, they were not wanting to take anybody by surprise. After an hour of walking, we got to Buford Hollow Church. Cricket cooed like a dove from the shadows, and we both stood hidden in the deep womanly darkness of a willow tree, shoulder to shoulder like babies in the womb. He cooed again. There was a coo back, and from behind the outhouse came a dark shape as black as the night that enfolded us, carrying a shotgun. “Liberty,” Cricket whispered, and only when the other croaked back, “Death,” did I realize it was a woman, not a man—an older woman about Mama’s age, forty-five. She looked hungry and worried. Cricket handed her the bread, and took her gun and handed it to me. She was reluctant to give it up. It was a beautifully tooled English shotgun, some slave-owning family’s heirloom. Even in the darkness the silver locks gleamed. Cricket told the woman to turn around and tied a mask across her face like ours. Then, while she waited, he filled his palm with small gravel and poured it down the barrel of the gun, then tamped it with a piece of biscuit using a willow wand as ramrod, and handed it back to me. “Insurance,” he told me later; and we were off. No talk, no names. My heart was pounding, but I said nothing, only played the shadow. I covered the silver lock of the gun with my hand because I felt it gleamed like a beacon. After another hour on the road, we reached a forest, and Cricket plunged into the pitch-black woods, the woman following Cricket; and me, her. We came out in an open space which, even in the darkness, I could sense was a quarry. We walked to the middle on a jumble of great rocks. There we sat until Cricket saw or heard some sign that I missed, and lighted the hurricane lamp, setting it at his feet turned very low. We sat longer until a light flashed in the woods; then at Cricket’s gesture I handed him the shotgun and he handed it to the woman, and we were gone without a word, taking the now-extinguished lamp and leaving her alone in the darkness. Now it was I who was sorry to give up the gun. On the road back we took off the masks. We got home right before dawn, and I replaced the lamp in the barn and slipped into my bed above the kitchen. Two hours later I was up doing my kitchen chores; then it was to the barn, where I did my stable chores; then to the house to help serve dinner. I wasn’t tired; I was in heaven. I kept playing it over and over in my mind: the darkness, the cool machinery of the heavy guns, the whispers and the cooing signals. The mysteriousness of war. We were the shadows the fire on the mountain cast. Shoulder to shoulder with Cricket in the dark, I had found what I was looking for. Thus ended my first trip. Alas, there was to be only one more.

October 18
Laura Sue Hunter
Mint Springs Farm
Staunton, Virginia

Dear Laura Sue:

I am glad to hear the news, but I ask you, what does it mean that your brother’s taking a shot at your beau is the occasion for your marrying him? How far we have come from the Southern Ideal, in which, I seem to recall, the women tearfully tried to restrain the men from their Duels, instead of rewarding them? Or perhaps I had it backward. Seriously, little sister, please accept my Congratulations, and my apologies for all that was said before. My compliments, also, to my future brother-in-law and former Adversary. With luck, I will be home by Thanks Giving. How is Father? I fear the worst.

Your Loving Brother,
Thomas
(Targetus)

Our second trip was a week later, and started like the first. I met Cricket at the firehouse at midnight, and we picked up the lantern, and two miles down the road, at the little whitewashed Westall’s Road church, crouching under the steps, the revolver. Cricket waited until then to put the mask on my face and warn me again to say absolutely nothing. This time our contact waited in the bushes near the ford of Greasy Creek, not waiting for the cooing dove but coming out of the bushes eagerly. “Liberty,” he said, getting (I think) the password backward; this time it was Cricket who answered, “Death.” He was a man of about thirty, a stooped, mournful slave disfigured from a whipping, whom I had seen around Charles Town on Sundays. “Hey, sport,” he said, reaching for the side of my head as if to scratch it, as men do to boys when no dogs are around; but Cricket slapped his hand. The slap was startlingly loud and must have stung. No words, Cricket said, with no words. The man had a gun that Cricket reached for and handed to me. This was no English fowling piece. It was a loose old trade musket, the stock split and held together with wire. But it had a cap fitted, so I guessed it was loaded. Again Cricket poured small stones down the barrel and tamped them with a biscuit before trusting me with it. Insurance again—not only that the gun was loaded, but that I couldn’t miss anything at close range. Things were a little grim after the slap, and we paraded through the night in single file, in perfect silence, Cricket in front, the man in the middle, and I at their back with the shotgun. The moon sank behind the Cumberlands far to the west, and the valley put on the darkness like its own black mask. We kept to the road with one eye on the fence rows. The only place we were in danger of getting caught out was at Iron Bridge, across the Shenandoah, where if the paddy rollers came we would have no place to hide: bad for both them and us, since I had resolved to kill at least one slaver before I traded this soldiering for death; but we were across and in the dark wood-shaded road on the other side in less than a minute. We were taking a different route to the same quarry, I guessed. At a steep cut, Cricket swung up off the road into the laurel on an invisible trail. Our ‘traveler’ hesitated; “Go on,” I said before remembering I wasn’t supposed to talk. The two of us were alone. The older man turned and looked at me, then grinned and followed Cricket. Unlike the woman the night before, he was careful not to snap the branches back in my face. I wished Cricket hadn’t been so hot-blooded and slapped him. We ended up in the same quarry, entering from a different side: I could tell, even though this time it was pitch black. We picked our way across and around huge boulders with square edges, white and ghostly; I could make out their shapes, even though we couldn’t see them; and sat down on a flat rock somewhere near the center of the space. I was all ears, curious to discover what signal Cricket was waiting for before lighting his light. We sat silently. Cricket broke a dry biscuit and handed us both a piece. The ‘traveler’ fumbled in his pocket and I smelled tobacco. He struck a match and Cricket just as suddenly struck it out of his hand, whispering, “Fool.” In one of those inexplicable acts of prescience by which our individual destinies are shaped, I pulled back the lock of the gun. It was quiet again. I ate my biscuit. Then suddenly we were jumped from behind. I heard Cricket groan and go down hard. I twisted away from a claw that held my shoulder and smelled the sharp unwashed smell of white men as I rolled backward off the rock, my feet reaching for the sky. The gun went off, I don’t know how—I had neither the presence of mind nor the control to fire it—and there was a scream. There was another shot. My feet found dirt and I lit out running. Somehow I found the woods, or perhaps I should say they found me, taking me into their dark enfolding arms as a woman takes up a terrified child, while behind me a white man screamed, “My eye, my God, I’m shot, my eye, my God, my eye!” Another voice screamed, “Shut him up, by God!” All this screaming about God made me realize my own eyes were shut; I opened them, but I couldn’t see; yet I knew perfectly where to go. I slipped like a shadow between two rotten logs and lay breathing, listening desperately for Cricket’s footsteps behind me, in front of me, or at least his voice somewhere; but I heard nothing. I thought then they had cracked his skull. I heard our ‘traveler’ say: There was a little one, there was a little one! And I knew—I had already known it—that he had betrayed us. The white man was still screaming. “Shut him up,” another said. “Shoot him?” another asked. “No, God d— it, just shut him up.” I don’t know what they did, but there was silence. Then, startlingly, there was another shot and a voice yelled, “What? Are you shot? God d—, he shot the other ‘nigger’!” “I thought he was out.” “Don’t kill him, don’t kill him.” Chillingly, I heard Cricket groan again. Then the others talked more calmly, “Let me tie this ‘nigger’ up and get Will to the doctor.” . . . “Help me drag him.” . . . “Where’s Harrison with that God d— mule?” . . . “Help me tie this ‘nigger’ on that mule.” “Forget him, the back of his head is gone.” Gone. I knew then that they had killed Cricket, and while they were still making noise I slipped away, leaving the gun which I had no way to reload, to rot forever under the logs. It was six miles to Charles Town, and I was all the way in the fence rows. I arrived at dawn with my arms slashed and bleeding from the blackberry bushes. I was amazingly calm and clear-minded, as if I had just awakened from a dream. My mind was as empty as a turned-over washbasin; it rang like tin. I knew the betrayer had known me and would be coming to get me, but it never occurred to me to run, not with Cricket dead. All I could think of was to sell my life dear. I re-stole Deihl’s old horse pistol, primed it, cocked it, loaded it with ‘insurance,’ and climbed with it into the corner of the hayloft just as the sun was coming up. There I must have fallen asleep. I woke up hearing boys shouting in the street. It was afternoon. They were bringing Cricket into town on a wagon in chains, while boys raced after him, shouting he was going to hang, hang, hang. It wasn’t Cricket who was dead but our ‘traveler,’ our betrayer, whom he had shot. Thus he had saved my life. Luckily Deihl was down the Valley, and it was Mama who found me in the barn and put me behind the stove in the kitchen, where I slept all night, she said, tossing and muttering in what the old Africans call ‘conjure dreams,’ in which your dreaming self is awake. In the dreams Cricket was dead again, and John Brown was an old woman, like a granny woman, an African; and she carried him through the door of the house, over and over, as they do when a woman dies in childbirth, to free the baby’s spirit so she can’t keep him with her in death, for the dead are jealous. But Cricket wouldn’t wake up. Wouldn’t wake up. Wouldn’t wake up.