Stand the Storm (7 page)

Daniel carried the thin girl across his back easily. He slipped off the ship and down into an alley on Water Street. A gush of sweat and the hackling nerves along his spine alerted Daniel to their pursuers. A pair of slave catchers had caught sight of them leaving the wharf. Daniel slipped into a doorway ahead of them and waited in silence. The girl made no sound and Daniel Joshua’s guts settled down a bit to let him ponder. The best strategy for their survival would be to split up. He thought to separate from the woman and lead the pair of slave pinchers away up and down and through the labyrinth of gutters, cellars, and alleys that he knew like the back of his hand. He rubbed his palm along cobblestones covered with slime until he identified a loosened brick. This loose brick in this doorway on this block was the spot to turn sharply and duck behind a blind he’d made of planks. These planks created a slim place to stand and hide.

Daniel stood in the blind regularizing his breathing and trying to figure where to go next. The gal in the sack was naked and he could not take her far in that way. He stripped off his shirt to make a cover-up for her and he ripped and tied the burlap to make a skirt. Daniel hoisted the girl again and made for his next place to duck. When he climbed upwards to Bridge Street in early morning he put his eyes upon Annie.

Six

A
MARKET BASKET
holding three turnips was propped against the back door when Annie went out the first of the morning. She noticed it and turned her head around to catch sight of who had left it. But she knew she wouldn’t likely see him ’cause the basket was doing the talking. She recognized this as her own misplaced basket and could see that whoever had had it hadn’t eaten her turnips. And he was wanting a word with her.

Annie finished her duties in the yard and returned to the kitchen. She set about her usual morning preparations. From a barrel in the yard, Annie dipped up a pail of sweet water—her water that had stood still in a covered cask with peppermint leaves floating on its surface. She used this freshest water to boil for their morning tonics. Gabriel favored a cup of strong coffee to set him to his work. Annie brewed herself a bracing cup of tea. Aaron Ridley had become fond of a hot cup of coffee to sear his tongue and banish the taste of liquor from his palate when he entered the shop in the morning. Annie thus charmed him and became certain of him.

A day and a half it had been since the girl in the cellar was left leaning on Annie. How come she was here? How had the mysterious man gotten ahold of her? Annie sniffed the air and was sure that she wouldn’t wait long to know what this situation was. There was a whiff of nutmeg or some such scent on the air when she stood at the back door and took in the springtime. She reckoned that this could hardly be the breath of the man who had left the girl. For only God’s breath could be so pervasive as this fragrance was.

After she got a good fire going in the kitchen stove and the coffee was well on its way to done, Annie went to the yard to fill two pails with water to start her washes.

Daniel Joshua had stood behind a tree waiting for Annie to come for her water. If he knew anything, he knew she would come here and fill some pails to wash the dirty clothes he had seen her carrying.

Daniel Joshua dared not chance speaking to Annie in the open. He cracked a twig with his foot near where she came for water. He knew that she heard. He stepped from cover for a moment and let her look full upon him. Neither of them spoke. Annie nodded her head and Daniel slipped back in among the trees.

After Aaron Ridley left for the alehouse and they’d waited a bit longer, Annie rose to get her talking quilt from a place beneath the floorboards. She folded the quilt just so and set it over the sill of the window facing out back of the shop. It was the Log Cabin pattern with black in the middle. He would know the signal. If he had run and if he had helped others, he would know what the quilt meant to say. He would approach.

“You are welcome to share a turnip, sir,” Annie said, to show their visitor that there was laughter in this house. Gabriel, who had risen when the man entered, extended his hand and said, “Come in, sir.”

“God bless you, ma’am,” the stranger said. “God bless you, sir.” Daniel Joshua hesitated to sit down. He felt he ought to introduce himself before warming up their stool. “I call myself Daniel Joshua.”

“You are welcome here. We are bondpersons—hired out. I’m known as Gabriel and my mother is Annie.” The way Gabriel engaged the man as grown and equal surprised his mother some little bit.

Annie felt that this Daniel Joshua was like a small bear come in the room.

“Ma’am, I thank you for coming to my aid. I had took that girl off a boat and the pinchers was after her and me. I thank you.”

“Where she going to?” Annie asked him after a long moment of silence.

“I can’t say, ma’am. I discovered her ’board a ship and some men was using her. I beg your pardon, but I think you ought to know it in case she is run out of her mind because of it. I do not know where she has been or where she was going.” Daniel Joshua dropped his eyes to the table.

Annie rose to the stove and poured him off a steaming cup of coffee. She returned to the stove and poured a cup for Gabriel.

“We will look after her in the cellar for as long as we are able and she has a need,” Gabriel stated clearly and unequivocally. He had briefly considered what had been done to the girl. She hadn’t said a word to him or to his mother about her travail.

Sewing Annie presented full bowls of stew with turnips swimming in them to the men. She placed a bowl with mounds of fried cornmeal bread at the center of the table. When she had served, she returned to the table with a bowl of stew for herself. Gabriel knew by the stiff way she held her jaw that his mother was amused and further pleased and on the point of laughing out. Daniel Joshua, though truly hungry, waited for Annie to come to the table.

“Eat up,” she said when she did sit down. She burst to tittering then, for every soul born in the last long while knew that the bread she had fried was called “turn up” bread. This is what folks did to it in the pan to cook it. And everybody appreciates a clever cook’s humor.

“Turnip, turnip. Live long enough and everything turn up!” was what the sage folks said.

“Evenin’,” the girl said when she rose up from her seat at the table. She dipped her knees in a child’s curtsy toward Gabriel as he entered the room. He pulled up short—startled. He said nothing to her, only walked to stand next to his accustomed chair. He stood beside his place at the table and did not raise his eyes from the floor until she resumed her seat. Then he seated himself and took up his sewing. She was freshly swathed and nearly swallowed up in the clothes. She was slight and hollow-eyed still.

The guest had emerged from her hiding in the cellar when dusk came on and Aaron Ridley was gone to supper.

“You are welcome to your vittles,” Annie said with due politeness.

“Thank you, ma’am,” the girl replied. Gabriel took no turn to speak, for he was flummoxed.

The hiding girl sat across from Gabriel and peeped at him in furtive fascination. She had seen oyster shuckers with practiced fingers fly through that work as if they could take to wing. But Gabriel’s speed and precision at sewing was a marvel. She tried to follow his movements with her eyes and could not.

“Sir, you stir the air up with your sewing,” she cried out.

Gabriel looked up from his hands in alarm, looked to his mother, looked at the speaker, and then looked back at his hands. He did not speak.

Annie answered with pride, “He was born to this work and he is the better of most at it.”

Gabriel’s hands did falter at so much scrutiny, but the women could not detect the bobbling. He broke to have his supper dish filled by his mother. When he was done with it there was some competition between the women to take up the empty bowl. Confused by the atmosphere in his workroom, Gabriel expressed his pique by sucking his teeth and exiting. He went to the backyard for his constitutional.

“I been put to bad use, ma’am. But I come up a good girl,” she said bluntly, for she feared Annie would think of present circumstance and judge her harshly. “Yonder the folk called me Carrie.”

In the short time with them, she had caught a whiff of the relation between Sewing Annie and her son. The woman was deferential, solicitous, and worshipful of Gabriel, the tailor. She doted upon him and he was equally deferential to her.

Annie clapped her cup down on the kitchen table. She rose, turned her back, and poured off a bit of the evening’s hot brew into the cup, then resumed her seat and her knitting. She took up her click-clacking work, brought her hands to rest in her lap. Then she started to click-clacking again—quietly, oh so quietly, but insistently click-clacking the needles. “Commence calling yourself Mary then. It will make a change,” Annie suggested.

When Gabriel returned he picked up his needles and accompanied his mother. The consideration that he was unlikely to see this young woman again caused him to be melancholy. “She cannot tarry. She must not!” he repeated to himself. The melancholia came as a surprise to him. He had no truck to have feelings grow for this girl, but the feelings presented themselves.

“What is your business to be ruminating about her?” Gabriel asked himself.

Daniel Joshua culled an advertisement with a general description of one like Mary from a discarded broadsheet found in an alley on his circuit of town. He’d been looking to see whether the girl was advertised, and in the past few days of hauling dung about he had noticed several posts that could have described her. They were general and numerous and their generality could be dangerous. Others had been nabbed and sold south who had been many years free but resembled someone advertised. When these unfortunate were taken away, neither their word nor their free papers were accepted. Public life continued perilous for free people in this district, as well as for bondpersons. Being elusive is what Daniel had found to be the best protection.

Daniel Joshua was fast becoming a warm seat and regular in front of the fire in the back room of the tailor shop. Gabriel thought him tough as nails—reassuringly so. He was full of blustery, important talk and was very humorous. He did more laughing than Annie and Gabriel were accustomed to hear from the mouth of a Black man. The people they were most familiar with on the Ridley place did their laughing behind their hands and did not guffaw as a rule. Once or twice Annie was anxious that Daniel Joshua’s laughter be heard in the workroom. But the sound of it was a comfortable joy to them.

From being companionable and boisterous around a warm fire, Daniel Joshua was mysterious otherwise. This was the first thing Annie and Gabriel learned about him. He came to sit awhile in the kitchen, then left the room like a wisp of smoke. He was abrupt in taking his leave, generally saying only, “Evenin’, ma’am,” and slapping his hat. He did not reveal to them the place where he rested his head. Nor did he let their eyes follow him as he slipped down the street.

And this is what he counseled Mary on the very evening he came to the back door of the kitchen with a notice specific to her. It was certain now that she couldn’t stay in the root cellar.

Cold fear set in on the girl when she heard Daniel read out the description and the reward offered.

Phillip Ruane had been successful at his gambling and returned to Rogers Spit well flush. He had flown into a rage upon learning of the sale and subsequent escape of Carrie. Stung by his wife’s actions, he endeavored to get his slave returned, though the expense was steep.

High upon her left flank is a brand—a wreath. It is a swollen crude wound—a raised design that does mark her as belonging to Mr. Phillip Ruane of Rogers Spit, VA. There is a $500 reward for recapture, for this is a prime hand.

Five hundred dollars was above Ruane’s idea of the value of this slave to himself. To this must be added the fees for her recapture. But he spent the money mostly to discipline his impudent wife and reduce her allowance.

“You go hand to hand like many another has gone,” Daniel Joshua counseled Mary. He said known folk could deliver her, in company of others, from place to place until she had gained Ohio—Cincinnati, Cleveland, or as far as Sandusky. From these northern outreaches, she could go for Canada and the free air.

“You must be stalwart, girl. It’s a per’lous journey. But it is been done.”

The other side of Mary’s ice-cold fear of Phillip Ruane was the shame—the return to shameful feelings that the description caused. Master Ruane telling it about her—under her clothes. Her heart became so fluttery at Daniel Joshua’s reading that she would have commanded or begged him to stop except that she could not summon the words to speak out. She had feelings that were so warm for Annie and Gabriel now, and nested belowground in their cellar she’d begun to build upon pleasant thoughts. This reminder was a cruelty to her budding feelings for Gabriel.

It was raised and ugly and, in her imagination, prone to spread out and consume all of her skin. He had put this on her. He had taken a brass stamp with a raised crest from his writing desk and heated it and laid it on her. His causing her pain had fazed him little and he was often gentle upon her. She learned quickly, though, that Phillip Ruane was gentle only to titillate himself and would quickly revert to his brutal congress.

The group that had reached a cozy friendship wanted to resist Daniel’s advice, but dared not. Phillip Ruane’s conceit had spoiled their circle. She must now leave—to let her master have her back or scrabble toward the free north. She couldn’t continue in the warmth of Gabriel, the colored tailor, and his mother and their back room. Phillip Ruane’s advert changed that.

Mary slid from her chair, pulled her shawl to cover her head and shoulders, then pulled it close all around to obscure her tearful cheeks. She walked out of the back door as small and slick as a mouse.

To let the girl suffer alone did not suit Sewing Annie. Gabriel sat coolly. Butter would not melt in his mouth from the look of his face. Annie mused that she’d misunderstood him. She thought he had a hanker for the girl. But now he made no move or comment. After a few moments, she followed Mary.