A Reckoning Read online

  When the door opened for Ross, Martin heard the low hum of voices inside the house and he could see a group of men crowded in there, all standing up for lack of any place to sit. He saw Bry and Reuben leaning together. They were the oldest. They had been on the farm forever except for when Bry ran away and got captured. Martin recognized the voice of Nick asking something and then there was quiet. A smell of roasted corn filled the air. A few whispers lingering. Nervous laughter. Martin’s teeth chattering. He pinched his arm to calm himself down and, when the door closed, he went closer, putting his ear up against the logs. He could hear breath hissing out of throats. How many in there? He turned his head to listen with the other ear. The birdman was going to tell a story. That’s what he announced in a loud whisper so that everyone got very quiet. But what a thing to do, after he’d said he was going off to find an owl! The birdman was a liar and Martin felt tricked even though the lie had been told to his father. A long time ago a baby got carried up north from down here near this farm, he heard the liar say. I know that because her mother’s certificate of marriage lists Jonesville as the wedding place and I came here to tell you about a slave woman who carried that baby to Canada and then found her own freedom there. Because Canada is another country, where slavery is against the law! She was helping the baby’s mother but she got herself free! And so can you.

  Mister? Somebody was interrupting.

  There’s catchers the whole way up to there.

  Bring you back. Make it worse on you.

  Renau from the Morgans got took back.

  We down the bottom of this Commonwealth, mister.

  Renau got branded.

  Burned his face.

  Bry got worst!

  A bevy of voices and Martin pressed against the logs trying to make them out, but the birdman was quiet for a long minute on the other side of the wall. Then he said: I myself will travel around the Commonwealth this summer, which is a risk to me, but I heard the story of the slave getting herself up to Canada, just a woman, and how she made herself free being brave and I wanted you to get up there to where she can help you find a good life. The birdman’s voice took on a cadence now and Martin knew in his bones that no one should trust a cadence. He had heard that same tone too often from the pulpit and he also had proof that the birdman was a liar because of the owl. Ross was shaping his words, telling about the glories of a country owned by England where no fugitive slave law grabs you and sends you back down to bondage. And if anyone here is willing to risk that long journey, he said, I shall provide a compass and a knife and a map and you will be safe on the other side.

  What of?

  Martin could have answered that. He knew geography. How could a person cross such water, even finding the narrowest place? The Ohio was nothing but a river, but the lake up there was more than a man could cross without a ticket on a steamboat and it was unfair to tempt anyone who couldn’t buy such a thing! Angry now, Martin started to cuss under his breath. Hell! Piss! He began to hear panting too because the men had to breathe as one creature in a house without windows and a door closed tight and he thought he heard the leather bag get opened and then get shut with a snap. Here rises the sun in the morning and here is the way you walk at night. Hiding. Always hiding. For if you are picked up, you will be beaten, sold, brought back to this place in chains. Just as you said.

  No sir. I ain’t tryin.

  Martin had fallen against the wall in such a trembling state he could hardly move. Those men listening would be found out and punished. Emly would be punished and even Franklin, all of them. Martin had seen Sutter and Billy whipped, which was way worse than a beating, clothes off and skin torn and Uncle Benjamin used to make his sons watch every time he did it. You know the North Star? The birdman was challenging. That is your guide. You take dry bread for the journey, which will be many long days of hiding and long nights of walking where you can barely see your own feet in the dark. And you rush. You hurry on. Carry no light. You are listening, looking at the sky. There will be signs that are secret. You know about them?

  Sure we know.

  So! Read every sign. Quilts with a blue border mean that house is safe, from what I heard. Be careful though. You are risking your life because in Canada you will have no master. You will have Freedom. And Mama Bett can find you work in the city of York and you will earn money and…

  Now Martin made himself stand up straight, not to run away but in order to concentrate. In the morning he’d better talk to Bry, who could read and write and help the others understand that this was a terrible idea. Yes. They would talk man to man. There was more and more talking in low, anxious voices and the chimney was growing cold by then but heat of another kind had boiled up inside the house, so many men in there with women in the neighboring houses or quarters. There were children. There were issues of one kind and obstacles of another. When the door finally opened, there was no light from the house, not so much as a candle, and at the side Martin stood stock-still watching Emly hold the hand of a man with a doubled-up fist. He was saying: I got a mama up there and how could I ever know it? Maybe I got a child.

  Martin closed his eyes and said a prayer because it was the old one called Bry and tears were running down his face as if every lie he’d heard in Emly’s house could be true.

  And the next morning, he was gone.

  9

  Bry’s first escape had taken place on the night of Eva Nell’s birth, when Mama Bett carried her away from the house before Rafe Fox could lay his eyes on her dusky skin. This happened while Jemima’s dead body was taken off in a wagon: it happened when Bett grabbed the baby out of Bry’s arms and he ran away, hiding in caves and eating dead things and maybe Mister Rafe never knew the part Bry played in begetting the baby who carried his name but he hunted the slave boy down anyhow with the hounds he had raised. He hunted him also with legal notices and bribes: runaway boy in my yellow shoes I never gave to him; and a few days later, Rafe had him brought back tied over a mule and he did the punishment himself, using a gelding hook on a boy who was just fifteen.

  The extent of the damage would take years to acknowledge. No growth, no knitting of bones, no advance into manhood for body or voice; gelded a boy and made him a mare. Bry’s legs often ached and his knees never quite unbent. What use is there for a capon man? After the punishment, Rafe gave the boy to Benjamin in payment of a gambling debt and all these years later Alexander Ross had given Bry the one incentive that could make him want to run again. Then, within hours, Bry became an inspiration. Rafe lost four men, and some of the neighbors lost two or more. Benjamin lost three more—Billy, Josiah, and Sutter—and everyone turned on Preacher John because he’d sheltered the man who tempted their workers to flight. It was said like this: A man might go out to relieve his bowels or his bladder in some stand of bush or tree, but what is inconceivable is that he does not return to his pallet, which is a place among his own kind, unlike the road or the woods, where beasts and unwelcome others lurk. What is inconceivable is that a man so well-fed and housed would risk his life to run away into nothing but starvation and eventual capture because, by the time the defections were counted up, Benjamin and his neighbors had created a posse of men and dogs. Notices were posted. Rewards were offered. In the North, the fugitive slave law would bring them back.

  Some ten or twelve miles from Benjamin’s farm, Bry had built a feeble shelter in which he slept exhausted for two long days and two chilly nights, not being strong enough in body or young enough in years to move fast. He had eaten a mere hatful of berries and he was too tired to forage so he lay in his shelter curled around himself and chewing at a sapling stick and trying to remember the details the birdman had spoken about where his Mama Bett was living and he believed the name was Cork. He rubbed at his knees and worried about the others and wondered if they would follow his lead and maybe get caught and that would put him to blame. He thought about the girl named Rakel, who had been confounded by a tragedy some years before when Benjamin purchased Josia
h, who loved her and married her. It was a blessed event, or so it had seemed, and for some days after, they waited, foreseeing the time when they would find an hour to spend alone. It would not happen in the dismal cellar but out somewhere in the forest beyond the field on a Sunday when there was time to give to each other. Bry could so easily remember the rush brought about by that hammering kind of love and he had jealously watched Josiah go off alone in order to meet his bride in the privacy of leaves. He had remembered the portion given to Adam and the portion taken by Eve and he had let himself fret but he could not even imagine that what happened to Josiah was poor Rakel’s fault. He imagined them as they must have fastened themselves to each other giving no thought to the rags they were wearing on tired bodies. Time being short they had never unclothed or stepped out of their boots and a week would pass before such an hour would come again and they determined to stay separate until they could disentangle their swollen hearts and relieve their great hunger to be known to each other. And so it was that Rakel on that second Sabbath had fashioned a bower out of branches and they lay against the receiving ground and examined arms and legs and bellies and then Rakel pushed her lover with a firm hand and rolled him over in order to breathe her breath on his back and she saw a long scar that matched the gash she remembered on her little son some years before when he had been whipped by an overseer on a different farm where she had lived and given birth at the age of thirteen. Josiah was her husband. Josiah was her son.

  They were punished for coming back late but their pain was something else entire. Josiah explained it while beating his head with his fists and Rakel went to the corner of the cellar so that she would not look on Josiah’s anguish. A parent and child should never be separated to the point of unknowing, Bry thought now. Sold apart and something bad could happen. What if he met his daughter and loved her as a man to a woman except that he couldn’t. He had no heart between his legs, and he huddled alone in the shelter he’d made, thinking these thoughts and was therefore surprised by the sound of grief coming out of his mouth. Maybe Josiah would take Rakel with him if he left and they would all meet again. But Josiah couldn’t swim and he wasn’t careful of himself. Can’t swim any more than me, Bry thought. He could hear the trickle of water as he lay there trying to bring back his earlier boyhood escape. Saleem, Mama Bett had called those yellow shoes Jemima gave to him, and it was nothing but a word made up because she liked to make up a word for the two of them so that Mother Mary would not be in on it. Mother Mary was the owner of Mama Bett, and those two women, white and black, had raised him until he was taken away by Mister Rafe. And now. Will this bird fly into another net? The land was some cover and there were caves known from the past. Huts and houses, barns and fences all to avoid, grown out of the forest as all things are. First the forest with its perfect order and then the rest of us come and chop it down and build up towns with the wood of the murdered trees. Out here, sweet birch to suck, the markel good in spring. What will heal and what will feed and what will cause a dream. Onions in the open. Ramps in the dark. And water. Stay close to it. Moon a hook like the castrating knife and he walks all night and his stomach growls and the wind blows through him so a hound couldn’t smell him passing by. Gutted by terror. Great swell of heart. Someone had thrown out bones. I’ll snatch them up. I’ll walk under the gourd and away from the knife and be smarter than the boy I was when I got caught. Bry reached down to his separate thing, its duty nothing more than watering, and had himself a freedom piss.

  10

  In the reading room of a Cleveland hotel, Alexander Ross picked up a Richmond paper that contained a lengthy account of a slave escape near the small town of Jonesville. “THIRTEEN NEGROES FLED,” the headline read. The article noted that an organized band of abolitionists had invaded the town, supplying slaves with directions and illegal means of escape such as knives to be used on their masters’ throats. Authorities were urged to offer a reward for the apprehension of the cursed Northern thieves and Ross put his feet up on a cushion, drank a glass of water, and laughed. He would clip the article and share his success with Eva Nell to soften the things he had learned about her past in his short morning meeting with Mister Rafe Fox on the day the bear was shot.

  11

  Crouched in the stall with Cuff, Martin did not hear his father enter the barn. He heard a soft call, nothing like the voice of a father. It said: Are you here? and Martin thought it was meant for him and that he would stay as quiet as possible so he would not have to help his father with the mare, who was mean as gravel and sometimes kicked. Martin shushed his bear. He took her paw. He stroked her head.

  Then he heard Emly’s whisper: I’m here.

  There was nothing to do but listen. He gathered Cuff in his arms and let her suck his ear. The mare was stamping her hooves, as if to answer the footsteps she knew so well but when Preacher John coughed and cleared his throat, Martin covered his ears. He felt a sharp curiosity and a strange sense of shame. When he at last took his hands away from his head, he heard Emly saying: With a child to come. I am…

  And Martin’s father said: Is it mine?

  12

  Four men unaccounted for! Benjamin was shouting. It was June and he had found his brother in the confines of their father’s sunstruck cabin. The river’s running high and no one holds out the slightest hope of them! How do you plan to make it up to me, Brother John?

  John looked down at his account book.

  If I catch that sly nigger who started them off, I’ll beat him to death.

  You’ll feed him and mend him as you did when he was a boy. Come harvest, we can hire…

  Harvest? A hired boy costs forty dollars because prices went up to the roof when the men ran off. Harvest? Benjamin ran a hand through his hair, gray at the edges, his face also gray. God damn you, he said. If He placed you on my land by divine decree, I do not thank him for fouling my nest.

  Not until that hour had John considered his complete dependence on this half-brother, half human being. If Benjamin’s fortunes failed to revive…The thought made him cold and he said meekly: We’ll have brandy to sell when the pears come ripe. He tried to meet his half-brother’s eyes.

  Pears!

  Wind was bringing down branches. There was rain like wrath.

  John made an entry in his account book: hands replanting potatoes, which under the Season rotted in the ground and we have only slips. These days, his entries were more like bad dreams than balance sheets.

  And Emly’s body swelled with life. He wanted to say: Does he use you? But he could not make the word leave his mouth. What was use and what was need? What was lust and what was love? John loved Lavina and yet it was as if the clocks of the world stopped when he lay between Emly’s legs. Circe, he called her and he resigned himself to the logic of minutes piling up somewhere to be spent at another time. Better to need than to use, he decided, and Emly put his hand on her belly while inside lived a tucked and restless child. She rolled toward him so they lay face to face. She put her hand on his brow. Stormy, she said.

  13

  Bear learns the varied smells of leaves and nuts, learns everything by sniffing. Bear must practice – to forage, to taste, to climb, to fight. Bear is a million years innate. As the wet summer advanced, she sniffed at trees and logs and the sniffing was loud, like a horn in reverse. She favored poplar leaves and liked to hold them in her mouth. Then she would spit them out, bluntly, in some distress, making a rude pffpht sound. When she charged at Martin, it was all bluff. She never trailed far behind him or ventured far ahead and sometimes she wrapped a forepaw around his thin boy leg to hobble him and make him fall down. Then she would suck on his neck or ear. One day she went up a tree. Instead of resting at the first branch, she went higher, then even higher. The old pine bark crumbled under her claws and Martin, frightened almost to pain, opened his arms and Cuff fell into them. For a few moments, she was all grace, but the memory of another bear was there in the boy and he thought he must teach Cuff to climb. Her safe
ty depended on him.

  As she grew past twenty pounds, she stopped more often at one place or another, smelled and tasted more plants, mouthing them as if some part of her palate could decide what was right for her. Martin loved to think over her every move. Why did she eat soil? Why did she eat deer droppings? When offered a little frog, Cuff politely spat it out, but she had begun to dig for ant eggs and wood beetles and ate them like treats. The boy spent more and more time with the growing bear.

  Meanwhile, Martin’s father was preoccupied every minute of the day. He was taken up with his circuit – riding through wind and rain or plain summer heat – or with worries about Benjamin, who was spending his nights at the Comfort House. It was not lost on anyone, this state of affairs. Benjamin was beleaguered. Everyone watched as he quietly fell apart. Patton bought a horse and charged around the neighborhood in search of distraction. Lavina’s attention was carefully kept on Gina, who had a cough that kept her in bed. Electa was weaving, sewing, helping Lavina in the house, and Martin, with all his chores, found more and more time to spend with Cuff. He memorized her different huffs, different growls, and her small but dramatic moans. There were her various ways of walking, sometimes bowling along in a rush and sometimes walking stiff-legged to hide in the trees when she felt threatened. School was closed for the season and Martin could take up the challenge the birdman had given him. To train a bear. He would do it gently, not like Preacher John. He wanted a happy pupil. He would teach Cuff to dance. He would create a livelihood for the two of them.