Soon Be Free (11 page)

Dad made hot cocoa, and Mom hiked herself up on the kitchen counter by the fridge. “Well,” she said, “our first bed-and-breakfast guests have come and gone, one of them out the window, I might add. It went well, don't you think, Jeffrey? They've destroyed our bathroom, terrorized our daughter, trampled our jonquils, gone to jail, and I've wasted two entire sour cream coffee cakes on them. This is
not
good for business, you understand.”

Dad handed me a mug foaming with melted marshmallows. “What were they looking for, Dana?”

“James Weaver's drawings, I guess.” I didn't believe my own words. The Berks were obviously after something much more valuable, something that mixed up James Weaver and the Delaware Indians. I
had
to find whatever it was they were looking for, but I didn't dare tell my parents yet. Parents get hysterical over the least little thing and start coming down on you with restrictions and warnings and groundings and other unreasonable responses.

Take the Renaissance Festival, for example. Last
fall we were reading
Julius Caesar
in English and Mrs. Flanaghan was making us do incredibly complex Shakespeare projects, and she made it clear that our going to the Renaissance Festival would put her in a better mood when she graded our projects.

So, one Saturday last fall, Mike's brother Howie drove a bunch of us to the festival. The way my parents carried on, you'd have thought we were going to Katmandu, instead of Bonner Springs, thirty miles away. Were there seat belts for everyone? Did we have rain gear? Hiking boots? Up-to-date maps? Water? Food and blankets in case the car broke down? A car phone? And don't eat the roasted pig—trichinosis, you know. And watch out for overzealous strangers. And did we know that pickpockets run rampant in a casual crowd like that? By the time they were done briefing and provisioning us, we were ready for a hike across the Himalayas.

The festival was amazing: Elizabethan dances and songs and foods and crafts; jousting knights and jugglers; men rattling around in chain mail; and women in dresses that made their chests come up to their chins. And there was a fire-eater.

Awed, I watched him put a flaming stick into his mouth, hold it there about ten seconds, and when he pulled it out, it was still on fire. Also, he still had a tongue. It didn't look that hard;
Mind over matter,
I thought. So when we finished our kebabs of beef
and potatoes roasted over an open fire, that empty stick just called out to me.

Mike dared me: “Go ahead, Dana, do it.”

Sally said, “Don't be stupid!”

“My uncle Pham eats fire,” Ahn said. “But he has a tongue like a rope.”

“Aw, she's too chicken to do it,” Jeep taunted, waving the empty stick over the fire. It caught, like a match, like a piece of eager kindling, and I just popped that glowing sucker into my mouth.

“Ouch!!!” The fire went right out, but not before it fried the inside of my cheeks into cooked flaps of skin and wiped out a couple thousand taste buds. Even now, months later, I can't tell salty from sweet, but my tongue's coming back.

Sally whisked me right over to first aid, where they scolded me for about twenty minutes while I sucked on chipped ice. An hour later I could hardly talk, and Jeep felt so guilty that he bought a drink and gave me all the ice cubes, which left his Sprite as warm as bathwater.

Of course, my parents found out, mostly because I talked like a person with a mouthful of cotton when I got home, and they totally overreacted. If they'd had a tower, they'd have locked me in it, and since my curly hair bushes
out
instead of responding to gravity like Rapunzel's, I'd never have grown it long enough to make my escape.

So, obviously, only a few months after the
Fire-Eating Caper, I wasn't about to tell my parents how close I was to finding whatever it was Mattie and Raymond were so eager to tap our walls for. I'd have to wait for the right opportunity to finish their work, when my parents were both out.

Miz Lizbet had told Solomon that the safest time for strangers to appear on the plantation was Saturday night, when the work week was done and the field workers were dancing and cooking outside and carrying on like they were free as robins and Monday sunup seemed a long time off. Besides that, the overseers would be heady with their own merrymaking away from the slaves' quarters.

“That's the only time my mother, Pru, will be in a fit mood,” Miz Lizbet had said. “You don't want to cross Miz Pru Biggers at her cranky time, amen.”

Nearly two weeks after leaving Lawrence, they were finally approaching the spot Miz Lizbet had marked on the map. Kentuckians called it Yellow Bank, two miles south and west of Owensboro. Dark had settled on the bushy hedgerow that made a fence around the quarters, and a half-moon painted the leaves silver. James heard mandolin strumming and hushed singing that grew bolder as the moon rose.

Solomon whispered, “Mr. James, Mr. Will, I've got to go in alone.”

“We didn't come this far to hide in the bushes,” Will argued.

“They see you two fine-looking white boys, even scruffed up as you are, and they're going to run indoors quick as mice running into holes.”

So James and Will crouched in the hedges and watched and listened.

By now a crowd had formed, and in the lantern light James saw men, women, and children dressed like they were going to a church supper, except they were all barefooted. The women had colorful striped kerchiefs wound around their heads, and the men wore red kerchiefs tied at their necks. What struck James most was the ringing laughter among the children, as if they were telling stories not meant for adults' ears. Everyone seemed to be in motion to the music. But when Solomon approached with his hat over his heart, all the music, singing, and dancing stopped at once, as if the conductor had snapped his baton down. Mothers pushed their little ones behind their skirts and hushed the bigger ones.

“Evening, folks. Name's Solomon Jefferson. I'm looking for Miz Pru Biggers.”

A tall man stepped forward, his white shirt gleaming in the moonlight. His legs bowed like he'd just come off a horse, and his voice was deep and sure and left no doubt that
this
was the man in charge. “Ain't nobody here go by that name.”

Solomon nodded knowingly. “Yes, sir, but somebody told me I could find her here.”

“Who told you that?”

James watched Solomon take a deep breath before he said her name: “Miz Lizbet Charles sent me. She said some of you folks are waiting for her.”

There was a stirring among the people, then a thin sapling of a woman elbowed her way out of the crowd. Her gray hair was wild and woolly, like a sheep needing shearing, and her bony finger pointed away from Solomon until someone gently turned her body toward him. “Why ain't she come herself?”

“Miz Pru?” Solomon stepped forward, and the old woman looked at him and around him at the same time.

“She's blind,” James whispered to Will.

“That's news. We're gonna cover half the country with an old blind woman?”

“Shh, listen.”

“Miz Pru, I bring you sad news. Miz Lizbet closed her eyes for the last time this past winter. The fever took her.”

Someone murmured, “She done gone home to Jesus.”

A couple of ladies stepped forward to support Miz Pru's elbows, but she shook them off. “Who're you?”

“Ma'am, I was fixing to marry your daughter, a fine woman.”

Miz Pru's hand reached up for Solomon's face. He had to bend so she could run her bony fingers over his eyes, his nose, his lips, his stubbly cheeks. “You ain't no Matthew Luke Charles,” she said, calling up the name of Miz Lizbet's dead husband.

“No, ma'am,” Solomon agreed. “But I ain't no toad, neither.” That brought soft chuckles from the crowd. “She sent me after you, Miz Pru.”

The old woman thrust her shoulders back and stood all of five feet high, with wattles of flesh hanging from her arms. “Well, what took you so long? Look up at the sky.” She tilted her head back as if she could see the points of light poking through the blackness. “You ought of come in the winter, like the song says. ‘When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd.' That's the winter, fool. That's when we s'pose to go, not after the spring done burst out and quail so thick, it's open season.”

One of the women beside her said, “Let's hear what the man has to say. Come, sit down, Miz Pru. You've had a shock to the heart.” She settled the old woman on a tree stump and came back to challenge Solomon. “I'm Sabetha. Say what you got to say, and say it quick.”

Solomon nodded, and then he told them about James and Will. He explained how James's mother was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and how Miz Lizbet had lived and died in James's
house, and that impressed them some, but not half as much as hearing that Will had been with John Brown's men and lost a leg fighting slave catchers. And he told them that they'd all three come to finish Miz Lizbet's work.

Wary, the people hung back when James and Will came out of the bushes. Solomon said, “You can trust these boys, I swear on Miz Lizbet's soul.”

“Ain't that stepping a little outta bounds?” The man who'd appointed himself leader stood nose-to-nose with Solomon, until Sabetha pushed him aside with the back of her hand and said, “This isn't your business, Jacob. Anybody ask you, you've seen and heard none of this. The rest of y'all best be blind, deaf, and dumb, too, hear?” She crooked her hand behind her, and a tall, lanky man with skin as dark as midnight stepped out of the crowd. His shoulders were rolled forward, and he carried a red rubber ball that he nervously passed, one hand on top of the other. Beside him was a girl who looked to be about ten.

Sabetha said, “This is Homer, and my girl, Callie. Me and Homer and Callie and Miz Pru are a family.” Then she muttered, “Not one of 'em's my kin, except the girl.” She stared defiantly at Solomon. “We're all set to go, four of us, just like Lizbet promised. One goes, we all go, hear?”

The three of us went to Kansas City—Jeep, Mike, and I. Mike's brother Howie drove like a maniac, and he definitely needed to change the prescription on his glasses.
If we die on the road, my parents will kill me,
I thought.

Was Howie reading my mind? Squinting in the rearview mirror, he said, “I'm surprised your parents let you out of your cell for this trip.”

“I didn't exactly tell them we were going all the way to Kansas City.” I had the map spread out across my knees and was trying to make sense of all these suburbs and exits.

“Just don't swallow fire, and we'll be okay,” Jeep warned me. “Hey, Howie, what did Mike have to pay you for this ride?” Howie
never
does anything for free. He's the kind of guy who'd charge an old lady for helping her across the street.

“You don't have to answer that,” Mike said. He was riding shotgun in Howie's rattletrap Toyota. Most of the stuffing is out of the seat, and the gutted radio hangs by wires. The carpeting in the backrest looks like it's been through a shredder.

“Nice car,” Jeep muttered.

Howie changed lanes for no apparent reason. “No, I'd like to answer it, Mike. It shows how desperate you are in front of your little buddies.” He beeped his clown-nose horn as he swerved around a motorcycle. “I'm getting half his allowance for the next six weeks.”

“You're tough,” said Jeep. His fingertips were six shades lighter than his fingers as he pressed his hand into the roof of the car to keep from being tossed around.

“I look at it this way.”
Beep-beep.
“In another eighteen months, Mike will have his learner's permit and he'll be unleashed on the public roads, so I've got to turn a profit while I can.”

“Our exit's coming up.”

“Which exit, Dana? I've got to cut in front of a truck, and those suckers don't stop on a dime.”

“Slow down. Slow down!” I yelled. “Oops, you missed the exit.”

Howie let loose of a few words that would cost me fifty cents each if they had escaped my lips in the presence of my parents. I was already three dollars in debt to them for similar blips.

At the next exit Howie spun a U-turn that reversed polarity, and we were heading back in the right direction. About ten minutes later we pulled up in front of a misshapen building that had curling shake shingles pocked with bird droppings. The
windows were crossed out by large wooden Xs nailed over them, and a faded sign hung lopsided over the barred door.

Ernie's Bait Shop sat right at the junction of the Kansas River and the Missouri River, but it looked as if it hadn't been open for business since the days of manual typewriters.

The big problem was, how were they going to get Callie out in the middle of the night? Even though Sabetha was a house servant, at nine o'clock she was sent down to the quarters, where she slept with Miz Pru. Homer, who was Miz Pru's son, was mentally slow and needed looking after, so he unfurled his bedroll each night in Miz Pru's cabin as well. But Callie slept in the big house, curled up at the foot of Miss Amelia Bullock's bed. Miss Amelia was seven years old and scared of every creak of the house and every cry of the wind. Bad dreams chased her through most nights, and when she stirred, Callie, like a vigilant watchdog, sat up and reassured her that everything was just the way it was supposed to be. Callie had told James, “I sure don't sleep long, but I sleep real often.”

So, how were they to get Callie out when they were ready to make their escape come Tuesday night when the moon was barely a slice in the night sky?