The Underground Railroad (14 page)

A careful pattern of colored stones decorated the station beneath Lumbly’s farm, and wooden slabs covered the walls of Sam’s station. The builders of this stop had hacked and blasted it from the unforgiving earth and made no attempt at adornment, to showcase the difficulty of their feat. Stripes of white, orange, and rust-colored veins swam through the jags, pits, and knobs. Cora stood in the
guts of a mountain.

The engineer lit one of the torches on the wall. The laborers hadn’t cleaned up when they finished. Crates of gear and mining equipment crowded the platform, making it a workshop. Passengers chose their seating from empty cases of explosive powder. Cora tested the water in one of the barrels. It tasted fresh. Her mouth was an old dustpan after the rain of flying grit in the
tunnel. She drank from the dipper for a long time as the engineer watched her, fidgeting. “Where is this place?” she asked.

“North Carolina,” the boy replied. “This used to be a popular stop, from what I’m told. Not anymore.”

“The station agent?” Cora asked.

“I’ve never met him, but I’m sure he’s a fine fellow.”

He required fine character and a tolerance for gloom to operate in this pit. After
her days beneath Sam’s cottage, Cora declined the challenge. “I’m going with you,” Cora said. “What’s the next station?”

“That’s what I was trying to say before, miss. I’m in maintenance.” Because of his age, he told her, he was entrusted with the engine but not its human freight. After the Georgia station shut down—he didn’t know the details, but gossip held it had been discovered—they were
testing all the lines in order to reroute traffic. The train she had been waiting for was canceled, and he didn’t know when another one would be through. His instructions were to make a report on conditions and then head back to the junction.

“Can’t you take me to the next stop?”

He motioned her to the edge of the platform and extended his lantern. The tunnel terminated fifty feet ahead in a
ragged point.

“We passed a branch back there, heads south,” he said. “I’ve got just enough coal to check it out and make it back to the depot.”

“I can’t go south,” Cora said.

“The station agent will be along. I’m sure of it.”

She missed him when he was gone, in all of his foolishness.

Cora had light, and another thing she did not have in South Carolina—sound. Dark water pooled between the
rails, fed in steady drips from the station ceiling. The stone vault above was white with splashes of red, like blood from a whipping that soaked a shirt. The noise cheered her, though. As did the plentiful drinking water, the torches, and the distance she had traveled from the slave catchers. North Carolina was an improvement, beneath the surface.

She explored. The station abutted a rough-hewn
tunnel. Support struts shored up the wooden ceiling and stones embedded in the dirt floor made her stumble. She chose to go left first, stepping over spill that had come loose from the walls. Rusting tools littered the path. Chisels, sledges, and picks—weaponry for battling mountains. The air was damp. When she ran her hand along the wall it came back coated in cool white dust. At the end of the
corridor, the ladder bolted into the stone led up into a snug passage. She lifted the torch. There was no telling how far the rungs extended. She braved the climb only after discovering that the other end of the corridor narrowed into a glum dead end.

A few feet into the level above, she saw why the equipment had been abandoned by the work gangs. A sloping mound of rocks and dirt, floor to ceiling,
cut off the tunnel. Opposite the cave-in, the tunnel terminated after a hundred feet, confirming her fear. She was trapped once more.

Cora collapsed on the rocks and wept until sleep overtook her.

The station agent woke her. “Oh!” the man said. His round red face poked through the space he’d made at the top of the rubble. “Oh, dear,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m a passenger, sir.”

“Don’t you know this station is closed?”

She coughed and rose, straightening her filthy dress.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” he said.

His name was Martin Wells. Together they widened the hole in the wall of stone and she squeezed through to the other side. The man helped her clamber down to level ground as if helping a lady from the finest carriage. After several turns, the mouth of the tunnel extended
a dim invitation. A breeze tickled her skin. She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the stars made succulent and ripe after her time below.

The station agent was a barrel-shaped man deep in his middle age, pasty-complected and soft. For an agent of the underground railroad, presumably no stranger to peril and risk, he evinced a nervous personality. “You’re
not supposed to be here,” he said, repeating the engineer’s assessment. “This is a very regrettable turn.”

Martin huffed through his explanation, washing his sweaty gray hair from his face as he spoke. The night riders were on patrol, he explained, casting agent and passenger into dangerous waters. The old mica mine was remote, to be sure, exhausted long ago by Indians and forgotten by most,
but the regulators routinely checked the caves and mines, anyplace a fugitive might seek refuge from their justice.

The cave-in that had so distressed Cora was a ruse to camouflage the operation below. Despite its success, the new laws in North Carolina had rendered the station inoperable—he was visiting the mine merely to leave a message for the underground railroad that he could accept no more
passengers. When it came to harboring Cora, or any other runaway, Martin was unprepared in every way. “Especially given the present circumstances,” he whispered, as if the patrollers waited at the top of the gully.

Martin told her he needed to fetch a wagon and Cora wasn’t convinced he was coming back. He insisted he wouldn’t be long—dawn was approaching and after that it would be impossible
to move her. She was so grateful to be outside in the living world that she decided to believe him, and almost threw her arms around him when he reappeared, driving a weather-beaten wagon pulled by two bony draft horses. They repositioned the sacks of grain and seed to make a slim pocket. The last time Cora needed to hide in this manner, they required room for two. Martin draped a tarpaulin over his
cargo and they rumbled out of the cut, the station agent grumbling profane commentary until they gained the road.

They had not traveled long when Martin stopped the horses. He removed the tarpaulin. “It will be sunrise soon, but I wanted you to see this,” the station agent said.

Cora did not immediately know what he meant. The country road was quiet, crowded on both sides by the forest canopy.
She saw one shape, then another. Cora got out of the wagon.

The corpses hung from trees as rotting ornaments. Some of them were naked, others partially clothed, the trousers black where their bowels emptied when their necks snapped. Gross wounds and injuries marked the flesh of those closest to her, the two caught by the station agent’s lantern. One had been castrated, an ugly mouth gaping where
his manhood had been. The other was a woman. Her belly curved. Cora had never been good at knowing if a body was with a child. Their bulging eyes seemed to rebuke her stares, but what were the attentions of one girl, disturbing their rest, compared to how the world had scourged them since the day they were brought into it?

“They call this road the Freedom Trail now,” Martin said as he covered
the wagon again. “The bodies go all the way to town.”

In what sort of hell had the train let her off?

When she next emerged from the wagon, Cora sneaked around the side of Martin’s yellow house. The sky was growing light. Martin had brought the wagon as far back into his property as he dared. The homes on either side of his were quite close—anyone awakened by the horses’ noise could see her.
Toward the front of the house, Cora saw the street, and beyond that, a grass field. Martin urged her on and she crept onto the back porch and then inside. A tall white woman in her nightclothes leaned against the wainscoting in the kitchen. She sipped a glass of lemonade and did not look at Cora as she said, “You’re going to get us murdered.”

This was Ethel. She and Martin had been married for
thirty-five years. The couple did not speak as he washed his trembling hands in the basin. They had quarreled over her while she waited at the mine, Cora knew, and would resume that argument once they dealt with the matter before them.

Ethel led Cora upstairs while Martin returned the wagon to his store. Cora got a brief look at the parlor, which was modestly furnished; after Martin’s warnings,
the morning light through the window quickened her step. Ethel’s long gray hair extended halfway down her back. The woman’s manner of walking unnerved Cora—she seemed to float, aloft on her fury. At the top of the stairs, Ethel stopped and pointed to the washroom. “You smell,” she said. “Be quick about it.”

When Cora stepped into the hallway again, the woman summoned her up the stairs to the
attic. Cora’s head almost brushed the ceiling of the small, hot room. Between the sloping walls of the peaked roof, the attic was crammed with years of castoffs. Two broken washboards, piles of moth-eaten quilts, chairs with split seats. A rocking horse, covered in matted hide, sat in the corner under a curl of peeling yellow wallpaper.

“We’re going to have to cover that now,” Ethel said, referring
to the window. She moved a crate from the wall, stood on it, and nudged the hatch in the ceiling. “Come, come,” she said. Her face set in a grimace. She still had not looked at the fugitive.

Cora pulled herself up above the false ceiling, into the cramped nook. It came to a point three feet from the floor and ran fifteen feet in length. She moved the stacks of musty gazettes and books to make
more room. Cora heard Ethel descend the stairs, and when her host returned she handed Cora food, a jug of water, and a chamber pot.

Ethel looked at Cora for the first time, her drawn face framed by the hatch. “The girl is coming by and by,” she said. “If she hears you, she’ll turn us in and they will kill us all. Our daughter and her family arrive this afternoon. They cannot know you are here.
Do you understand?”

“How long will it be?”

“You stupid thing. Not a sound. Not a single sound. If anyone hears you, we are lost.” She pulled the hatch shut.

The only source of light and air was a hole in the wall that faced the street. Cora crawled to it, stooping beneath the rafters. The jagged hole had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant who’d taken issue with the
state of the lodgings. She wondered where the person was now.

That first day, Cora acquainted herself with the life of the park, the patch of green she’d seen across the street from the house. She pressed her eye to the spy hole, shifting around to capture the entire view. Two- and three-story wood-frame houses bordered the park on all sides, identical in construction, distinguished by paint
color and the type of furniture on their long porches. Neat brick walkways crisscrossed the grass, snaking in and out of the shadows of the tall trees and their luxurious branches. A fountain warbled near the main entrance, surrounded by low stone benches that were occupied soon after sunup and remained popular well into the night.

Elderly men with handkerchiefs full of crusts for the birds,
children with their kites and balls, and young couples under the spell of romance took their shifts. A brown mutt owned the place, known to all, yipping and scampering. Across the afternoon, children chased it through the grass and onto the sturdy white bandstand at the edge of the park. The mutt dozed in the shade of the benches and the gigantic oak that dominated the green with majestic ease. It
was well-fed, Cora observed, gobbling down the treats and bones offered by the citizens. Her stomach never failed to rumble at the sight. She named him Mayor.

As the sun approached its zenith, and the park bustled with midday traffic, the heat transformed the hidey-hole into a wretched furnace. Crawling to different sections of the attic nook, searching for imaginary oases of cool, became her
principal activity after her vigil over the park. She learned that her hosts would not visit her during the day, when their girl Fiona was working. Martin tended to his store, Ethel came and went on her social rounds, but Fiona was always downstairs. She was young, with a prominent Irish accent. Cora heard her going about her duties, sighing to herself and muttering invectives toward her absent employers.
Fiona did not enter the attic that first day, but the sound of her steps turned Cora as stiff as her old sailing mate Skipper John. Ethel’s warnings the first morning made their intended impression.

On her arrival day there were additional visitors—Martin and Ethel’s daughter, Jane, and her family. From the daughter’s bright and pleasant manner, Cora decided she took after her father, and filled
in her broad face using Martin as a template. The son-in-law and the two granddaughters were an unceasing commotion, thundering through the house. At one point the girls started for the attic but reconsidered after a discussion about the habits and customs of ghosts. There was indeed a ghost in the house, but she was done with chains, rattling or no.

In the evening the park remained busy. The
main street must be nearby, Cora thought, funneling the town. Some older women in blue gingham dresses nailed white-and-blue bunting to the bandstand. Garlands of orange leaves added a flourish. Families staked out spots before the stage, unrolling blankets and removing supper from baskets. Those who lived next to the park gathered on their porches with jugs and glasses.

Preoccupied by her uncomfortable
refuge and the parade of misfortunes since the slave catchers found them out, Cora did not immediately notice an important feature of the park: Everyone was white. She had never left the plantation before she and Caesar ran away, so South Carolina gave Cora her first glimpse of the mingling of races in towns and cities. On Main Street, in stores, in factories and offices, in every sector,
black and white mixed all day as a matter of course. Human commerce withered without it. In liberty or bondage, the African could not be separated from the American.