Soon Be Free (10 page)

The fire crackled and sent sparks into the black night, and James fell into the rhythm of Solomon's story, so like Miz Lizbet's.

“Two men, their names were Abram Galloway and Richard Eden, they thought they'd outsmart those boat patrols. They made themselves hoods, or maybe gunnysacks, big enough to slip over their heads and shoulders, tying at the waist with a drawstring. They had them some gourds of water and towels. When the boat patrols were ready to smoke out the ship, Abram and Richard would press those wet towels to their noses and mouths so as not to burn out their lungs.”

“They survived the smoke?” asked Will.

“Didn't have to. It turned out the boat never did get smoked out.”

“Good,” James said.

“What happened was worse. Richard and Abram, they stowed away in the cargo deck with barrels of turpentine. Ever breathe turpentine?”

“Sure, plenty, when my pa and I clean our guns,” Will said.

“Out in the fresh air, you can breathe. Where these men were, it was close, hardly any air, and with every breath, they pulled in those turpentine fumes. It all but sucked the blood right out of them.”

“But they made it, right?” Will asked impatiently.

“Well, sure they did. You think I'm going to tell you about the failures, Mr. Will? Soon as they swallowed some fresh Northern air, they were okay. Went on to Canada. Amen.”

James chuckled. “You've been around Miz Lizbet Charles too long.”

“Not long enough,” Solomon said sadly.

They listened to the fire and the crickets awhile, until Solomon began again. “And talking about breathing, three other men, they tried their luck on a steamer. A black steward gave those men a hand. He was a slave himself, hired out to the steamship company by the owner. He hid the three in the boiler room. They had to lie down on the hot floor. There was barely room to move, no light, stingy bit of air, and blazing heat. They couldn't turn this way or that, for fear of frying their skin on the boilers that burned coal and wood to fuel the ship night and day. The whole trip they breathed nothing but coal dust, until
their lungs rattled like they had gravel inside them.”

Will asked, “You telling us they survived, too?”

“They did. Came out of that place in Philadelphia covered with coal dust. Only thing is,” Solomon said, laughing, “it was raining hard that day, and the dust turned to a mud plaster on their faces and bodies. Just imagine how they must have looked.”

“Bet they wanted a bath first thing,” James said.

“Hunh-uh. Water, first thing, then some bread, and
then
a bath. Even an ox has got to eat and drink,” Solomon said.

“You got any more stories?” asked Will.

“Hundreds. Miz Lizbet told 'em to me by the hour while we took each other through the fever. I heard a lot more on the
Francie Mulryan.
There's Miz Margaret Garner. She ran off from a plantation in Covington, Kentucky. Swore to kill all four of her children before she'd let them be taken back into slavery. She went to trial for one of the murders.” Solomon stopped, and James knew he'd not tell another word of the story.

“So? Tell us what happened,” Will urged.

“No, sir, I changed my mind, because it didn't have a happy ending for Miz Margaret Garner. Not everybody gets free and clear.”

Raymond Berk was still tapping the walls of the closet, but Mattie had me on the floor, up against the bathroom door, with her beefy leg flung over me and both my arms in her grip. Her thick strawberry perfume nearly made me heave.

I sucked the pillowcase in and out until it was soggy, but I couldn't expel the washcloth they'd jammed into my mouth. And then I heard,
“Squawk! Squawk! Brrrook!”
That was Firebird's protest when Dad threw the sheet over his cage each night. They were home!

I began thrashing around, throwing my head against the bathroom door, and Mattie didn't have enough hands to hold me still.

“Dana?” It was Dad's voice coming up the stairs.

Mattie froze and whispered, “Raymond, get out of the closet,” but she didn't loosen her grip on me. I strained to hear Dad in the hall.

“What's going on in there, Dana? Sounds like you're trapping a wild animal.”

“Mmmmn, mmmmn,” I yelled from deep within my throat.

I heard Raymond back out of the closet and thrust the window sash up.

“What about me?” Mattie protested. “Leave me here holding the bag?”

Raymond must have had one leg over the windowsill when Dad rattled the doorknob. “Dana? You okay?”

“Uhhhhh!”

“Hold on, baby. I'll get the key.”

The key box opened with such force that keys flew off their hooks and clattered against the wall.

Then I heard my mother bounding up the stairs. “Jeffrey? What's going on?”

“Dana's got trouble.” A skeleton key clicked in the lock. Mattie's grip tightened around me as she thrust our combined weight against the door. But Dad and Mom had panic and adrenaline on their side, and they forced the door open.

Mattie let go of me, and I heard her clunk into the bathtub, cussing. Maybe she was on her way out the window when we both heard Raymond thud to the ground two stories below. A guttural growl told me he'd broken something in the fall.

“Oh, my God,” Mom cried as she spotted the chaos in the bathroom. She ran to the phone in the hall while Dad untied the pillowcase around my head.

Air!

And there was Mattie Berk, trapped in the bathtub.

• • •

A policeman nabbed Raymond in his hound dog pajamas outside, where he was trying to camouflage himself in the bushes. The other officer, Detective Oberman, unwedged Mattie from the tub.

“This woman is a guest of yours, Dr. and Mrs. Shannon?”

“Not a friend guest, a paying guest. Our first,” Mom replied. “Jeffrey, maybe we're not cut out for the bed-and-breakfast business.”

Detective Oberman handcuffed Mattie and flipped open a little black notebook. “Name?”

“Mattie Berk,” she said sourly.

The detective pulled a laminated card out of the back of the notebook and read in a monotone, “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I watch TV,” Mattie growled.

Detective Oberman read the rest of the card, anyway, then said, “As you can imagine, Ms. Mattie Berk, you have a warm invitation to join us down at the station to stick your thumbs in some black ink and have your pictures made. Then we have a few dozen questions for you.” She gave Mattie a shove out into the hall, hinting that the invitation wasn't optional.

The first night out, Will and Solomon and James camped at the head of Buck Creek in Livingston County. Solomon rigged up a fishing line and stuck a wriggler on the end of it, hoping one of those rainbow-coated trout would take the bait instead of just staring up at them with his sassy eye.

“Can't wait for trout,” Will told them, balancing on his one leg. He had the empty leg of his trousers pinned up to his shirt to keep it out of the water. “You gotta go noodling.” He crawled out of the creek and flattened himself on the bank. Creeping along on his elbows, he got right up close to the water and froze for such a long time that James considered feeling for a pulse. But he was alive, all right, scaring all of Solomon's trout away by staring back at them.

“What's ‘noodling'?” James finally asked.

“Shh. Watch.” There was the slightest movement under a branch sticking out over the water. Will inched forward, reached out in slow motion, and grabbed a big old snapping turtle, must have
been three pounds. He held it up, with its legs flailing, and brought it to his face. “Howdy, Barleycorn!” The turtle pulled its head in, no more wanting to kiss Will than James did.

“Two more of these, and we've got a feast. My pa says these critters have got five flavors to them. Chicken, fish, pork, beef, and plain old turtle. You're in for a treat.”

He plopped Barleycorn into the kettle, where the poor turtle clicked around until he decided to give up the fight.

• • •

They made Madisonville, the Hopkins County seat, the second night, and came upon a general store at the edge of town, where they bought a bottle of milk and two big pieces of gingerbread to split three ways. They slept under trees just bursting with new spring growth until sunrise, when the birds went crazy and the farmers came to town.

One of the farmers, noticing Will's one leg and crutch, said he'd be glad to take them as far as Nebo. The farmer gave Solomon a puzzled look, but he didn't ask any questions. Solomon wisely took a place in the back of the wagon without a fuss. The farmer gabbed the whole six miles and finally said, “This here's Nebo. Named for that mountain Moses stood on looking down into the promised land he didn't never get to.”

That was one of the things in the Bible that
made James mad, though he didn't dare tell Ma. It sure wasn't fair that Moses spent forty years wandering with those stubborn, stiff-necked people who doubted him at every turn, and when the reward came at the end, Moses didn't get any of it. Of course, Ma would say Moses got his reward in the next world, but James wasn't sure Moses felt that way, watching those Israelites cross over the river Jordan, and him alone on the mountain.

“You ast me, Nebo's the promised land, right and true,” the farmer was saying. “A real green land of Canaan here in the middle of the Western coalfields. Yessir, it's where I'm gonna be buried, and you can put money in the bank on that fact.” He let them off and handed them each an ear of corn for the rest of their journey.

• • •

At Livermore, the Rough River and the Green poured together, and there was water as far as James could see, and platters of ice not yet thawed by the thin spring sun floating on the river.

“How we going to get across that?” Solomon asked. He was tired and irritable from their four days on foot, and James was reminded that Solomon had twenty-five years on Will and him. Will seemed to be the only one who never got tired, even with that one leg doing double time.

“Look.” Will spotted the barges first. “We got money, we can hire a barge.”

The bargeman appeared out of nowhere, palm out. “You got papers for this Nigra?”

Solomon stared at the ground as James answered, “Yes, sir, I do.” This deep into Kentucky was no time to talk about free black men, so James produced the paper swearing that he was the son of a man named Bufford Bullock, scion of Daviess County, and Solomon was their manservant.

“Hemp, I reckon?”

“Miles and miles of it,” Will said merrily.

“Makes mighty good rope and canvas and such. You another son?”

“Cousin, sir, from down in Looziana, Baton Rouge to be exact, on the Cranwoll side of the family.”

James was afraid Will would get them into a knot they couldn't untie, so he quickly jumped in. “We've been doctoring up in St. Louis.”

The bargeman eyed Will carefully, and as luck would have it, Will had a sudden attack of Phantom Limb and winced convincingly with the pain.

“Just healing, is it?”

“Fresh as new-killed deer,” Will said, gasping.

“Well, I reckon you boys need this man here to see you home proper. Give my regards to Mr. Bullock. Tell him Scamp over in Livermore says howdy.”

Suddenly James felt hot all over. “Thee knows . . . you know my pa?”

The bargeman grinned. “Not yet, I don't, but I'm not through living yet, either.”

Sighing in relief, James and Will and Solomon settled onto the barge and within minutes were on the far bank of the Green River, with only a day's walk left into Owensboro.

Just outside of Panther, they saw a broadside nailed to an oak tree. In giant black letters, it advertised,
NEGRO DOGS
. Curious, James studied it more closely.

S
PLENDID LOT OF WELL-BROKE
NEGRO DOGS. W
ILL ATTEND ANY REASONABLE DISTANCE, TO THE CATCHING OF RUNAWAYS, AT THE LOWEST POSSIBLE RATES.
A
LL THOSE HAVING SLAVES IN THE WOODS WILL DO WELL TO ADDRESS
W. D. G
ILBERT, OF
F
RANKLIN
, S
IMPSON
C
OUNTY
, K
ENTUCKY.

Solomon covered his eyes and walked away. Will said, “That's what we're up against, James. It ain't going to be easy.”

After that, James got edgy and nearly fell in a creek when a measly squirrel scuttled across his path.

Will said, “You're as skittish as my ma when a mouse run over her foot.”

“It's just that we're almost there, and we don't exactly have a plan,” James said in self-defense.

“We do have a plan, Mr. James,” Solomon said. “A piece of a plan, that is. Well, it's more like a sliver
of a piece of a plan. Thing is, we don't know what's ahead. We don't even know how many people Miz Lizbet promised.”

“Solomon's right, James. If we get tied down to a big, complicated plan, and we run into trouble, we're sunk. See that house over there with its porch leaning into the dirt? That's how sunk we'll be. Sunker.”

Solomon patted James's back. “We'll be all right, Mr. James,” he said, but he sounded like he needed convincing himself. He began singing one of the songs Miz Lizbet used to sing, about stealing away home to Jesus, and the song seemed to buck him up. Even his pace quickened.

“Flexibility, that's the ticket,” Will shot back over his shoulder. “If there's one thing I learned riding with John Brown, it's keep your guard up, keep yourself loose, and be ready for battle any hour, day or night.”

“That's three things,” James said, trying to sound brave, but in his heart he worried that he'd be ready, all right, ready to run at the first sign of trouble.