فصل 13

The North RAN AWAY

from her legal but not rightful master fifteen months past, a slave girl called CORA; of ordinary height and dark brown complexion; has a star-shape mark on her temple from an injury; possessed of a spirited nature and devious method. Possibly answering to the name BESSIE.

Last seen in Indiana among the outlaws of John Valentine Farm.

She has stopped running.

Reward remains unclaimed.

SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY.

DECEMBER 23 HER point of departure that final voyage on the underground railroad was a tiny station beneath an abandoned house. The ghost station.

Cora led them there after her capture. The posse of bloodthirsty whites still rampaged across the Valentine farm when they left. The gunfire and screams came from farther away, deeper in the property. The newer cabins, the mill. Perhaps as far as the Livingston spread, the mayhem encompassing the neighboring farms. The whites meant to rout the entirety of colored settlers.

Cora fought and kicked as Ridgeway carried her to the wagon. The burning library and farmhouse illuminated the grounds. After a barrage to his face, Homer finally gathered her feet together and they got her inside, chaining her wrists to her old ring in the wagon floor. One of the young white men watching the horses cheered and asked for a turn when they were done. Ridgeway clopped him in the face.

She relinquished the location to the house in the woods when the slave catcher put his pistol to her eye. Cora lay down on the bench, seized by one of her headaches. How to snuff her thoughts like a candle? Royal and Lander dead. The others who were cut down.

“One of the deputies said it reminded him of the old days of proper Indian raids,” Ridgeway said. “Bitter Creek and Blue Falls. I think he was too young to remember that. Maybe his daddy.” He sat in the back with her on the bench opposite, his outfit reduced to the wagon and the two skinny horses that pulled it. The fire danced outside, showing the holes and long tears in the canvas.

Ridgeway coughed. He had been diminished since Tennessee. The slave catcher was completely gray, unkempt, skin gone sallow. His speech was different, less commanding. Dentures replaced the teeth Cora ruined in their last encounter. “They buried Boseman in one of the plague cemeteries,” he said. “He would have been appalled, but he didn’t have much of a say. The one bleeding on the floor—that was the uppity bastard who ambushed us, yes? I recognized his spectacles.”

Why had she put Royal off for so long? She thought they had time enough. Another thing that might have been, snipped at the roots as if by one of Dr. Stevens’s surgical blades. She let the farm convince her the world is other than what it will always be. He must have known she loved him even if she hadn’t told him. He had to.

Night birds screeched. After a time Ridgeway told her to keep a lookout for the path. Homer slowed the horses. She missed it twice, the fork in the road signaling they’d gone too far. Ridgeway slapped her across the face and told her to mind him. “It took me awhile to find my footing after Tennessee,” he said. “You and your friends did me a bad turn. But that’s done. You’re going home, Cora. At last. Once I get a look-see at the famous underground railroad.” He slapped her again. On the next circuit she found the cottonwoods that marked the turn.

Homer lit a lantern and they entered the mournful old house. He had changed out of his costume and back into his black suit and stovepipe hat. “Below the cellar,” Cora said. Ridgeway was wary. He pulled up the door and jumped back, as if a host of black outlaws waited in a trap. The slave catcher handed her a candle and told her to go down first.

“Most people think it’s a figure of speech,” he said. “The underground. I always knew better. The secret beneath us, the entire time. We’ll uncover them all after tonight. Every line, every one.”

Whatever animals lived in the cellar were quiet this night. Homer checked the corners of the cellar. The boy came up with the spade and gave it to Cora.

She held out her chains. Ridgeway nodded. “Otherwise we’ll be here all night.” Homer undid the shackles. The white man was giddy, his former authority easing into his voice. In North Carolina, Martin had thought he was onto his father’s buried treasure in the mine and discovered a tunnel instead. For the slave catcher the tunnel was all the gold in the world.

“Your master is dead,” Ridgeway said as Cora dug. “I wasn’t surprised to hear the news—he had a degenerate nature. I don’t know if the current master of Randall will pay your reward. I don’t rightly care.” He was surprised at his words. “It wasn’t going to be easy, I should have seen that. You’re your mother’s daughter through and through.”

The spade struck the trapdoor. She cleared out a square. Cora had stopped listening to him, to Homer’s unwholesome snickering. She and Royal and Red may have diminished the slave catcher when they last met, but it was Mabel who first laid him low. It flowed from her mother, his mania over their family. If not for her, the slave catcher wouldn’t have obsessed so over Cora’s capture. The one who escaped. After all it cost her, Cora didn’t know if it made her proud or more spiteful toward the woman.

This time Homer lifted the trapdoor. The moldy smell gusted up.

“This is it?” Ridgeway asked.

“Yes, sir,” Homer said.

Ridgeway waved Cora on with his pistol.

He would not be the first white man to see the underground railroad, but the first enemy. After all that had befallen her, the shame of betraying those who made possible her escape. She hesitated on the top step. On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song. She waited until the slave catcher was on the third step. She spun and locked her arms around him like a chain of iron. The candle dropped. He attempted to keep his footing with her weight on him, reaching out for leverage against the wall, but she held him close like a lover and the pair tumbled down the stone steps into the darkness.

They fought and grappled in the violence of their fall. In the jumble of collisions, Cora’s head knocked across the stone. Her leg was ripped one way, and her arm twisted under her at the bottom of the steps. Ridgeway took the brunt. Homer yelped at the sounds his employer made as he fell. The boy descended slowly, the lantern light shakily drawing the station from shadow. Cora untwined herself from Ridgeway and crawled toward the handcar, left leg in agony. The slave catcher didn’t make a sound. She looked for a weapon and came up empty.

Homer crouched next to his boss. His hand covered in blood from the back of Ridgeway’s head. The big bone in the man’s thigh stuck out of his trousers and his other leg bent in a gruesome arrangement. Homer leaned his face in and Ridgeway groaned.

“Are you there, my boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s good.” Ridgeway sat up and howled in anguish. He looked over the station’s gloom, recognizing nothing. His gaze passed over Cora without interest. “Where are we?”

“On the hunt,” Homer said.

“Always more niggers to hunt. Do you have your journal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have a thought.”

Homer removed his notes from the satchel and opened to a fresh page.

“The imperative is…no, no. That’s not it. The American imperative is a splendid thing…a beacon…a shining beacon.” He coughed and a spasm overtook his body. “Born of necessity and virtue, between the hammer…and the anvil…Are you there, Homer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me start again…”

Cora leaned into the pump of the handcar. It didn’t move, no matter how much weight she heaved on it. At her feet on the wooden platform was a small metal buckle. She snapped it and the pump squeaked. She tried the lever again and the handcar crawled forward. Cora looked back at Ridgeway and Homer. The slave catcher whispered his address and the black boy recorded his words. She pumped and pumped and rolled out of the light. Into the tunnel that no one had made, that led nowhere.

She discovered a rhythm, pumping her arms, throwing all of herself into movement. Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike. She never got Royal to tell her about the men and women who made the underground railroad. The ones who excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for the deliverance of slaves like her. Who stood with all those other souls who took runaways into their homes, fed them, carried them north on their backs, died for them. The station masters and conductors and sympathizers. Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. The secret triumph you keep in your heart.

She put miles behind her, put behind her the counterfeit sanctuaries and endless chains, the murder of Valentine farm. There was only the darkness of the tunnel, and somewhere ahead, an exit. Or a dead end, if that’s what fate decreed—nothing but a blank, pitiless wall. The last bitter joke. Finally spent, she curled on the handcar and dozed, aloft in the darkness as if nestled in the deepest recess of the night sky.

When she woke, she decided to go the rest of the way on foot—her arms were empty. Limping, tripping over crossties. Cora ran her hand along the wall of the tunnel, the ridges and pockets. Her fingers danced over valleys, rivers, the peaks of mountains, the contours of a new nation hidden beneath the old. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. She could not see it but she felt it, moved through its heart. She feared she’d gotten turned around in her sleep. Was she going deeper in or back from where she came? She trusted the slave’s choice to guide her—anywhere, anywhere but where you are escaping from. It had gotten her this far. She’d find the terminus or die on the tracks.

She slept twice more, dreaming of her and Royal in her cabin. She told him of her old life and he held her, then turned her around so they faced each other. He pulled her dress over her head and took off his trousers and shirt. Cora kissed him and ran her hands over the territory of his body. When he spread her legs she was wet and he slid inside her, saying her name as no one had ever said it and as no one ever would, sugary and tender. She awoke each time to the void of the tunnel and when she was done weeping over him she stood and walked.

The mouth of the tunnel started as a tiny hole in the dark. Her strides made it a circle, and then the mouth of a cave, hidden by brush and vines. She pushed aside the brambles and entered the air.

It was warm. Still that stingy winter light but warmer than Indiana, the sun almost overhead. The crevice burst open into a forest of scrub pine and fir. She didn’t know what Michigan or Illinois or Canada looked like. Perhaps she wasn’t in America anymore but had pushed beyond it. She kneeled to drink from the creek when she stumbled on it. Cool clear water. She washed the soot and grime from her arms and face. “From the mountains,” she said, after an article in one of the dusty almanacs. “Snowmelt.” Hunger made her head light. The sun told her which way was north.

It was getting dark when she came upon the trail, worthless and pocked rut that it was. She heard the wagons after she’d been sitting on the rock awhile. There were three of them, packed for a long journey, laden with gear, inventories lashed to the sides. They were headed west.

The first driver was a tall white man with a straw hat, gray-whiskered and as impassive as a wall of rock. His wife sat beside him on the driver’s box, pink face and neck poking out of a plaid blanket. They regarded her neutrally and passed on. Cora made no acknowledgment of their presence. A young man drove the second wagon, a redheaded fellow with Irish features. His blue eyes took her in. He stopped.

“You’re a sight,” he said. High in pitch, like a bird’s chirping. “You need something?”

Cora shook her head.

“I said, do you need anything?”

Cora shook her head again and rubbed her arms from the chill.

The third wagon was commanded by an older negro man. He was thickset and grizzled, dressed in a heavy rancher’s coat that had seen its share of labor. His eyes were kind, she decided. Familiar though she couldn’t place it. The smoke from his pipe smelled like potatoes and Cora’s stomach made a noise.

“You hungry?” the man asked. He was from the south, from his voice.

“I’m very hungry,” Cora said.

“Come up and take something for yourself,” he said.

Cora clambered to the driver’s box. He opened the basket. She tore off some bread and gobbled it down.

“There’s plenty,” he said. He had a horseshoe brand on his neck and pulled up his collar to hide it when Cora’s eyes lingered. “Shall we catch up?”

“That’s good,” she said.

He barked at the horses and they proceeded on the rut.

“Where you going?” Cora said.

“St. Louis. From there the trail to California. Us, and some people we going to meet in Missouri.” When she didn’t respond he said, “You come from down south?”

“I was in Georgia. I ran away.” She said her name was Cora. She unfolded the blanket at her feet and wrapped herself in it.

“I go by Ollie,” he said. The other two wagons came into view around the bend.

The blanket was stiff and raspy under her chin but she didn’t mind. She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.