The House of Dies Drear (2 page)

“But you say it’s by a town,” said Thomas.

“Yes,” Mr. Small said.

“And you say it sits alone.”

“Absolutely alone,” Mr. Small answered. “There’s no way to describe the feel of it or its relation to the town. You have to see it and know about it that way.”

“I wish we’d hurry and get there,” Thomas said. “It feels like we’ve been riding forever.”

They lapsed into silence. Thomas could think of no better birthday present than to have the new house suit him. He wanted to like it in the same way he liked the masses of clouds in front of a storm or the dark wood of the pine forest back home.

His father had given him a book for his birthday. It was a volume, bound in real leather, about the Civil War, the Underground Railroad and slaves. Thomas loved the smell of real leather, and he rubbed the book lightly back and forth beneath his nose. Then he leaned back, flipping idly through the pages. In a moment his brothers were nestled against him, but Thomas did not even notice.

He had come across a curious piece of information earlier. Of the one hundred thousand slaves who fled from the South to Canada between 1810 and 1850, forty thousand of them had passed through Ohio. Thomas didn’t know why this fact surprised him, yet it did. He knew a lot about slaves. His father had taught Civil War history in North Carolina. He would be teaching it in Ohio in the very town in which they were going to live. He had taught Thomas even more history than Thomas cared to know. Thomas knew that Elijah Anderson had been the “superintendent” of the Underground Railroad in Ohio and that he had finally died in prison in Kentucky. He knew that in the space of seven years, one thousand slaves had died in Kentucky. But the fact that forty thousand escaping slaves had fled through Ohio started him thinking.

Ohio will be my new home, he thought. A lot of those slaves must have stayed in Ohio because Canada was farther than they could have believed. Or they had liked Elijah Anderson so much, they’d just stayed with him. Or maybe once they saw the Ohio River, they thought it was the Jordan and that the Promised Land lay on the other side.

The idea of exhausted slaves finding the Promised Land on the banks of the Ohio River pleased Thomas. He’d never seen the Ohio River, but he could clearly imagine freed slaves riding horses up and down its slopes. He pictured the slaves living in great communities as had the Iroquois, and they had brave leaders like old Elijah Anderson.

“Papa …” Thomas said.

“Yes, Thomas,” said Mr. Small.

“Do you ever wonder if any runaway slaves from North Carolina went to Ohio?”

Mr. Small was startled by the question. He laughed and said, “You’ve been reading the book I gave you. I’m glad, it’s a good book. I’m sure some slaves fled from North Carolina. They escaped from all over the South, and it’s likely that half of them passed through Ohio on their way to Canada.”

Thomas sank back into his seat, arranging his sprawling brothers against him. He smoothed his hand over the book and had half a mind to read it from cover to cover. He would wake the twins and read it all to them. They loved for him to read aloud, even though they couldn’t understand very much.

No, thought Thomas. They are tired from being up late last night. They will only cry.

Thomas’ brothers were named Billy and Buster and they knew all sorts of things. Once Thomas had taken up a cotton ball just to show them about it. They understood right away what it was. They had turned toward Great-grandmother Jeffers’ house. She had a patch of cotton in her garden, and they must have seen her chopping it.

They loved pine, as Thomas did, although they couldn’t whittle it. Thomas’ papa said the boys probably never would be as good at whittling as he was. Thomas had a talent for wood sculpture, so his father said. There were always folks coming from distances offering Thomas money for what he had carved. But Thomas kept most of his carvings for himself. He had a whole box of figures tied up in the trailer attached to the car. He intended placing them on counters and mantles all over the new house.

Thomas could sit in front of his brothers, carving an image out of pine, and they would jump and roll all around him. When the carving was finished, the twin for whom it was made would grab it and crawl off with it. Thomas never need say, and never once were the twins wrong in knowing what carving was for which boy.

They were fine brothers, Thomas knew.

If the new house is haunted, he thought, the twins will tell me!

Chapter 2

THE SEDAN HEADED
through the Pisgah National Forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then out of North Carolina. Thomas had seen a sign and knew exactly when they entered Virginia.

“That’s done with,” he said to himself.

If Mr. Small noticed they had left their home state, he gave no hint. Mrs. Small slept or at least kept her eyes closed. The twins awoke, and Mr. Small told Thomas to give them their lunch. Soon the boys were subdued, staring out the windows and eating, looking far below at the bank upon bank of mist nestled in the deep valleys of the Blue Ridge.

Thomas was thinking about the new house in Ohio. The house was a relic with secret passages and rooms. In Civil War times it had been one of the houses on the Underground Railroad system, which was a resting and hiding place for slaves fleeing through the North to Canada. Such houses had been secretly called “stations.”

When Thomas’ father read about the station house for rent in Ohio, he had written to the foundation that owned it for a full report. For years he had hoped to explore and possibly live in a house on the Underground Railroad. Now was his chance. But not until he saw the report did he find out how important the Ohio station had been. Those who ran the house in Ohio had an even greater task than the care and concealment of running slaves. They actually encouraged the slaves to let themselves be caught and returned to slavery!

Thomas hadn’t believed slaves went willingly back into slavery until his father had explained it to him.

“If you’ll recall your history, Thomas, you’ll remember that the incredible history of the Underground Railroad actually began in Canada,” his father had told him. Slaves who had reached Canada in the very early 1800s and established settlements there returned by the thousands to this country in order to free others. They came back for their families; they became secret “conductors” on the Underground Railroad system. And they returned to bondage hoping to free masses of slaves.

“But slaves continued to flee by whatever means,” Mr. Small had said, “with or without help. Upon reaching the Railroad, they might hide in our house in Ohio, where they would rest for as little as a week. Some of them were given rather large sums of money and returned again to slavery.”

“What would slaves need with money?” Thomas had wanted to know.

“Even a fleeing slave needs maneuvering money,” his father had said. “He would need food and shelter and the best and safest way for him to get it was to buy it from freed Negroes.”

“But the slaves connected with the house in Ohio were going back
into
slavery,” Thomas had said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Small. “And after they were caught and went back, they passed the hidden money on to other slaves, who would attempt to escape.”

Still Thomas couldn’t believe slaves could successfully hide money on themselves without having it found.

Some slaves did have their money found and taken away, his father said. It was dangerous work they were involved in. But others managed to return to bondage with the money still in their possession.

“Remember,” his father had told him, “the slaves we’re talking about weren’t ordinary folks out for a peaceful stroll. Many had run for their lives for weeks from the Deep South. They had no idea how far they had to travel and they were armed with little more than the knowledge that moss grew only on the northern side of trees. Any who managed to get as far as Ohio and the Underground Railroad line had to be pretty brave and strong, and very clever. Most of them were young, with a wonderful, fierce desire to free themselves as well as others. It was the best of these who volunteered to return to slavery. They were hand-picked by Dies Drear himself, the abolitionist who built our house in Ohio. He alone conceived of the daring plan of returning numbers of slaves to the South with sizable amounts of money hidden on them.”

“He must have been something!” Thomas had said.

“He was a New Englander,” Mr. Small said, “so independent and eccentric, most Ohio abolitionists thought him crazy. He came from an enormously wealthy family of shipbuilders, and yet his house in Ohio was fairly modest. To give you an idea how odd he was,” said Mr. Small, “his house was overflowing with fine antiques, which he neither took any interest in nor sold for profit. All the furniture remained in great piles, with just enough space to get through from room to room, until the house was plundered and Drear was killed.

“But when his plan to send slaves back to slavery worked,” said Mr. Small, “there grew among freemen and slaves an enormous respect for him. You know, they never called him by his name, partly because they feared he might be caught, but also because they were in awe of him. They called him Selah. Selah, which is no more than a musical direction to raise the voice. And yet, Selah he was.
Selah
, a desperate, running slave might sigh, and the name—the man—gave him the strength to go on.”

Selah. Freedom
.

Thomas sat so quietly in the car with his eyes closed, he appeared to be sleeping. But his mind was full of thoughts about what else his father had told him was in the report from the Ohio foundation. The report went on to say that three slaves whom Dies Drear had hidden for a time were caught in an attempt to reach Canada. In truth, they were headed south again, but because they were captured on the northern side of the Ohio River they were believed to be fleeing to Canada. Their hidden money was discovered. Two of the slaves were killed by the bounty hunters who caught them. That same week, Dies Drear was murdered.

There had been pages and pages of the report from the foundation. Thomas recalled his father poring over it until very late at night, often jumping up and stalking about the room with obvious excitement. Then his father had made a trip to Ohio. He was gone three weeks, nearly ten days longer than he had intended. While he was gone, Thomas found the report and read it.

Thomas smiled to himself, his eyes still closed. He had discovered something in the report that his father hadn’t mentioned. There was a legend that came with the house of Dies Drear. The report made light of the legend, but when Thomas read it he was at once frightened and pleased. The legend was that two slave ghosts and the ghost of Dies Drear haunted the house to this very day.

Right away Thomas had made up his mind that the two ghosts had to be the two slaves killed by bounty hunters. And the two ghosts had then killed Drear in revenge for their own deaths. But if all this were true, Thomas was faced with a problem.

Why would two slave ghosts haunt a house owned by the man they had murdered, who himself haunted the very same house?

Deep down, Thomas didn’t believe in ghosts. But when night fell, when he was alone in the dark, he feared he might see one. And if there were haunts in the new house, he wanted to be sure he had everything straight in his mind about them.

That way they won’t ever scare me, he thought, sitting in the car. That way I’ll know how not to get in their way.

When Mr. Small returned from his trip to Ohio, he wouldn’t talk to Thomas about the house.

“Is the house really haunted?” Thomas had asked. “Did you hear the noises and see the flashing lights?”

“I thought I told you to stay out of my study!” his father had fumed. “I didn’t give you permission to read that report. Besides, there are no such things as haunts.”

“But is it true no one has lived in the house for more than three months in the last hundred years?” Thomas had asked.

“It’s true,” his father had to admit. “The house hasn’t been lived in for very long at any time.”

“Well, if the house isn’t haunted,” Thomas said, “who or what was it caused people to run away? And why would two slave ghosts stay in that house with the ghost of the man they had murdered!”

Thomas’ father had become furious. His voice had been quiet, but filled with rage. “People are so full of superstition, they aren’t able to see the truth when it practically stares them in the face!” he had said. “Quit talking about ghosts. Don’t ask so many fool questions. All old houses have ghost legends, and they are all poppycock!” He had retreated to his study, slamming the door behind him.

Mr. Small made a second trip to Ohio, still not sure if he would rent the house of Dies Drear. This time he was gone five days. When he returned, he had the lease in his hand. He was in high spirits. He hoped someday to buy the house, he told Thomas and Mrs. Small. At last he made them a full account of his trip, the house and all its history.

“No,” whispered Thomas. No, his father hadn’t mentioned the legend.

Now why didn’t he tell the legend to Mama? he wondered. Or does she know about it, and he didn’t mention it in front of me, hoping I’d forget about it?

Thomas stared out at the steady rain and the mountains, which were no longer familiar. Again he smiled to himself. His father had to be hiding something.

There’s something in the legend I’ve missed, Thomas told himself. At least there’s something more to the story of the two slaves killed by bounty hunters, and Dies Drear’s murder. Papa meant to hide it from me by not letting me get at that report. But I know I remember most of what there was in it. It must be that whatever Papa means to hide from me isn’t written down. It’s something you would have to put together from what
is
written down. When he got mad at me and slammed the door, I must have been close to finding out. I just didn’t ask the right question.

“Papa,” Thomas said. “Papa.” He propped his brothers one against the other behind him as he once again leaned forward on the front seat. “Tell again about Mr. Pluto, Papa,” he said.