Trouble Don't Last

by Shelley Pearsall

  “You go on and hide yourself right here,” Harrison whispered, shaking out a pile of old tow sacks. Shriveled-up brown apples rolled everywhere. “I'm gonna hide myself under that pile of hay.” He leaned closer. “Anything happens, if we git stopped along the way, you just stay covered up right where you is, and you don't breathe a word. You let Harrison do whatever needs done, you understand?”

  The Widow Taylor came over to the side of the wagon.

  “I'm ready to leave,” she said loudly. “It's getting late.”

  “All right, yes'm, I'm hurryin,” Harrison said. “Go on, git underneath these feed sacks, Samuel.” He lifted the sacks and gave me a hard stare, and there wasn't a thing I could do but crawl under the scratchy pile that smelled of earth and rotted apples.

  “The ladies have a prayer meeting and hymn-sing every Thursday evening at Reverend Pry's church,” the widow lady told Harrison. “Last week Jacob rode in the wagon and watched over Jupe until we had finished our meeting. He told me everything sounded so sweet and nice.”

  A shiver went through me, hearing the way the Widow Taylor kept talking so real about her dead husband.

  “Did you see Jacob while you were down in the cellar last night?” she asked Harrison. “Did he talk to you?”

  “Well, now,” Harrison said, coughing, “we didn't, no, but we been sleepin pretty sound.”

  “I talked to Jacob last night, and he said he was going to have a look at you. I said you were an old colored man with a young boy. Are you certain that you didn't speak to him?”

  I recollected how she had cried and sobbed the night before, and there weren't any other voices, not Jacob's or any others.

  “Could be that we did,” Harrison answered uneasily.

  “My husband is a good man, isn't he?”

  “Yes'm,” came Harrison's muffled reply. “That's the truth.”

  “Now, once we get to Reverend Pry's church, all you will need to do is climb out of the wagon after our hymn singing starts and go around to the side door of the church, the one next to the big currant bush. Do you know what currants are?”

  “Yes'm,” Harrison answered again, and I thought about the big currant bush that grew in the back of Lilly's cabin, full of sour red-black berries. “Ain't that the picture of life?” Lilly used to chuckle every time we walked by it. “Good-looking berries that be sour and stuck with thorns.”

  Miz Taylor kept rattling on. “Well, you and the boy will have to sneak through the church door by those currant bushes, and after that, Reverend Pry will find you and he'll take good care of you. He's saved dozens of coloreds.” There was a pause, and the wagon creaked as if the widow lady was climbing up to her seat. I heard the sound of the reins being loosened and untangled. “Ready, then?” she asked Harrison.

  I didn't hear Harrison's answer, but the wagon jolted forward after that, and we were on our way. I curled my fingers around my momma's gray yarn in my pocket.

  Strange to say, I had never seen a real church before.

  Our Poor Colored Brethren

  The Widow Taylor talked up a storm of nonsense to her dead husband, all the way to the church. Even hidden underneath the feed sacks, I could hear her talking.

  “Jacob,” she said, stopping the wagon suddenly. “Climb down and see if that is a snake curled up in the road, would you please.” And another time, when the wagon wheel stuck fast in a rut, she said, “Jacob, would you be so kind as to put a rail under that left wheel.” But I heard her heave a sigh, climb down from the wagon seat, and put a plank under that wheel herself.

  With all the stopping and starting and getting stuck, it seemed like the road we took was more than a week long. Underneath the feed sacks, my skin itched, and I could hardly breathe from the smell of those spoiled apples. When we stopped for the last time, it was nearly dark outside. Harrison crawled over and lifted up the feed sacks. “Git a-movin, Samuel,” he whispered.

  In front of the wagon, I saw a good-sized building made of white bricks. Looked just like little blocks of salt, set one on top of the other, right to the night sky. Three skinny-long windows faced out into the dusk, and there were candles flickering on the panes. From one open window, the sound of thin, unsteady singing drifted out.

  “Hurry, Samuel,” Harrison said sharply. “That widow lady's already gone inside.”

  But it was a strange feeling to climb out of the wagon and creep up to that fancy whitefolks’ church. Me and Harrison moved along the side of Miz Taylor's wagon and horse, then along the side of another wagon, keeping low. The horses tied in the yard moved and nickered uneasily. Wagon trace chains jangled in the darkness, and I had the suspicion that when we got to the door of the church a whole group of white patrollers would jump out of the shadows, and the church building would crumble to nothing more than a pile of salt at our feet.

  But the only thing that happened was that Harrison couldn't get the side door open. It was stuck closed.

  “Well, now—” Harrison looked up at the night sky and then out at the yard full of wagons and horses. “That mean go in or stay out?” He shook his head. “Lord ain't sayin much this evenin, is he, Samuel?”

  Putting his shoulder against the door, Harrison gave it one last shove. But this time, it swung open so suddenly, it nearly sent both of us sprawling.

  We were in a small room. By the looks of it, the room belonged to a rich white fellow because it was full of fancy things. On a shiny wood table nearby, I could see books, quills, and papers scattered in the light of two oil lamps. Me and Harrison ducked down quick behind that table, fearing we had made enough noise to awaken the dead.

  But the room stayed empty. No one came barreling in after us.

  Harrison straightened up slowly and shook his head. “Lordy Lordy” he sighed.

  On the table, something caught my eye.

  A powerful-big book sat in the middle like a split-open piece of a tree trunk. I leaned over to look at it. Words filled one whole side of the page, thick as weeds, and on the other side was an ink drawing so real it seemed as if it would come alive. The drawing showed two whitefolks with wings flying over an old man with a long beard. His eyes stared up at them in a frightened way, and the flying whitefolks reached out of the sky toward him. Their hands looked like such soft human hands that I had to touch the page to make sure they weren't.

  “Never seen a book the size of that before,” Harrison whispered, coming over. “Looks like something sent straight from the Lord himself.”

  “That a whitefolks’ Bible?” I asked Harrison.

  “Could be. Looks that way.”

  I trailed my fingers down the page of words.

  “Nothin like Lilly's Bible,” I said.

  “Course not,” Harrison snorted. “Whitefolks, they got their fancy big Bible. We got ours.”

  On the other side of the wall, the ladies’ thin voices kept on singing. Harrison grinned. “Sound like a fiddle on its last string. And even that little string ain't in tune, sho’ enough it ain't.” He slapped his leg and shook his head back and forth in silent laughter.

  The poor singing trailed off after that, and there was the sound of the church ladies making their way out of the church. Me and Harrison hunched down behind the table and listened to all the footsteps. Quick footsteps. Shuffling footsteps. Starting and stopping footsteps. After the footsteps died away, the door of our room swung open.

  “Blessed are those who fear the Lord,” a loud voice said, and when I raised my eyes above the table, I half-expected to see the Lord himself standing there with robes and wings just like that Bible picture. But what I saw instead was a short, white-haired man standing in the doorway with an odd-looking younger fellow.

  “I'm Reverend Pry,” the old man said, moving toward us with quick, cricket steps. “Welcome, my poor colored brethren.”

  The Reverend pointed to the other fellow. “And this is my student, Mr. Keepheart. Don't be timid about this, Mr. Keepheart. Come forward.”

  Mr. Keepheart
was as skinny as a broomstraw, with buck-teeth the size of Seth's dominoes. But it seemed to me that the teeth smiled in a friendly way at us.

  The Reverend peered at me over his spectacles. “I imagine that you must be Samuel, the Negro boy who ran away from your owner in Blue Ash, Kentucky, last Saturday evening.”

  The skin on my neck prickled. How did he know my name and where we had run off from?

  “And,” he turned to Harrison, “you must be Old Harrison, about seventy years of age, and very lame and slow, his master says—”

  The Reverend's sharp black eyes stared at us, unblinking. “Is that who you both are? Am I correct?”

  Harrison didn't say a word.

  My heart hammered in my ears.

  “I expect honesty in all things. There is no room for the dishonest man in the Lord's house.” The Reverend rapped his knuckles on the table. “Speak up.”

  “Yes,” Harrison answered low and mumbling. “Me and Samuel, that's us.”

  “The Lord rewards the honest man and strikes down all others,” the Reverend said, sitting down at the table and picking up a quill. “Remember that.”

  The room was quiet. Standing there, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to think about strangers who knew things about us that we hadn't even said. Had we been caught?

  Harrison cleared his throat. “How come you know our names? Someone been going round asking for us?”

  Reverend Pry sharpened the end of his quill with a penknife. “There were three Kentucky folks in town yesterday afternoon, on the trail of their runaway slaves,” he said, without looking up. “Mr. Keepheart talked to an older, dark-haired gentleman with two sons. One was a strapping, big fellow, and the other one was redhaired and young—”

  My throat tightened. Cassius and Seth.

  “They were placing notices about the escape of their old man and boy in the newspaper and such.” The Reverend held his quill to the light. “Their name was Hackler, Mr. Keepheart heard them say.”

  Harrison jumped in. “They still here?” He looked, wild-eyed, around the room. “You seen them today?”

  Mr. Keepheart shook his head no, and Reverend Pry sniffed and peered at Harrison over the top of his spectacles. “There is nothing to fear in the Lord's house,” he said. “The Lord always shields the persecuted.”

  But the Reverend didn't know Master Hackler. He was something to fear, persecuted or not. He and Cassius both. When one of the hunting dogs had run off, he had tracked it all the way to the next town. He was the kind who would turn over every rock until he found what he was looking for.

  “Come closer, Samuel.” The Reverend turned up his lamp until the flame flickered out of the top. “Tell me your age.”

  Harrison reached out and wrapped his hand tight around my arm. “Samuel's eleven years. Come spring, he's gonna be twelve.”

  “Samuel. Eleven years of age,” the Reverend repeated. With his quill pen, he made marks on a piece of paper. Looked just like a long line of spiderwebs.

  “Does he have a mother?” the Reverend asked Harrison, as if I didn't have any voice left to talk.

  Harrison shook his head. “Sold off.”

  The Reverend clicked his tongue and gave Mr. Keepheart a look. “Poor young fellow,” he said, and his pen scratched across the paper. Then he told me to step closer, and he gave me a long, silent stare.

  I was afraid he could see every thought in my head …how he had the skinniest white nose I had ever seen …how his bristly eyebrows looked like two rolls of cotton stuck above his eyes …how I didn't like being in the strange whitefolks’ church at all…how I wanted him and Mr. Keepheart to go on and leave us be …

  The Reverend leaned over his paper, and his ink pen scratched words all over. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Sounded like hens in a chicken yard. I was sure he was writing down all my bad thoughts, one after the other, and I couldn't keep still any longer.

  “What you writin down on that paper?” I said.q

  Setting the pen in the inkwell, the Reverend said, “I'm just putting down a little story for my congregation.”

  And then he picked up the paper and read, clear as anything.

  “Our forty-fifth visitor was a boy named Samuel, eleven years of age. Light chestnut-colored skin, features good, wideawake, well made, but he speaks little, the way children in bondage are apt to do. Samuel ran away from a Kentucky master who caused him to suffer severely by selling off the boy's own mother when he was only a small child. He appears of good moral character and traveled north with an aged slave named Harrison …”

  It felt awful strange listening to the Reverend tell a story about me as if I wasn't even standing there, saying “Samuel this and Samuel that …” as if he had raised me the same as Harrison and Lilly had done.

  Truth is, no one had ever written one word in ink about me before. Whitefolks did their writing about whitefolks, and black-folks didn't have any use for writing. So I didn't see why a reverend would bother to write a straw about me. All the same, it made me feel like I had turned into a whitefolk and grown about two feet, to hear him go on and on like that.

  But Harrison's hand pulled me back, hard, out of the Reverend's lamplight. “Why you writing that about Samuel? We don't read none at all,” he said, cutting his eyes at the Reverend and Mr. Keepheart.

  The Reverend straightened his spectacles and tugged on the black cravat around his neck, as if it had grown too tight. “As I told the boy, I write the stories for my congregation.”

  “Don't believe a word of that.” Harrison shook his head. “No, I don't. No whitefolks in their right minds want to hear the story of us poor colored folks, no, sir, they don't.”

  “But they do.”

  All of us turned to Mr. Keepheart, who had finally spoken a word.

  “The Reverend tells them about the trials and despair they are rescuing our poor colored brethren from, and the members of our congregation, even some who are the sons and daughters of slave-owning families in the South, are brought down to tears.”

  Harrison pressed his lips together. “Don't make one bit of sense to me.”

  “They see the humanity”—the Reverend waved his quill in the air, and drops of ink splattered on the table—”in poor colored brethren like yourselves. I tell my congregation that the Lord worketh his will in all things, and if we do such acts of benevolence to the poorest of us, we do them to the greatest…”

  I had never heard anyone rattle on the way Reverend Pry did. Made no sense at all the way he talked, using the strangest words I'd ever heard, while waving his arms around like those whitefolks flying away in his Bible. Still, I figured that whatever he was writing down on his paper wasn't meant to bring any trouble, because Mr. Keepheart kept smiling and nodding, even though Reverend Pry didn't let him get more than a word in.

  Harrison gave the Reverend a long look, like he was thinking things over, too. Then he pulled a chair close to the table and said, “Say you write something down on that paper”—he tapped the paper with his finger—“‘bout me.”

  But Reverend Pry pushed back his chair and stood up. “I am afraid that the hour is late and I have other matters to attend to. I will leave you in the capable care of Mr. Keepheart. He writes with a good hand and will see to your needs this evening.” And without another word, the Reverend put on his coat and skittered out the door.

  After the Reverend left, Mr. Keepheart sat down in front of us. I noticed he had bread crumbs stuck all to the front of his shirt, and the sleeves of his worn coat reached barely past his elbows.

  “Pleased to meet you.” He nodded and smiled his domino-tooth grin at Harrison. “Don't mind if I ask you a few questions—”

  But then he went and asked Harrison about a hundred and one things, it seemed like.

  How many masters did he have in his life? What were they like? Had his masters let him attend a church from time to time? Was he treated well or roughly? Was he fed proper meals and given good clothes and boots for winter? Did he
ever get beaten or cowhided?

  It seemed downright curious to me that Reverend Pry's congregation would be so interested in the life of blackfolks. Master Hackler and Miz Catherine would have fallen down in a fit if they knew Mr. Keepheart wrote down a whole page of words about Harrison. He even asked if he could have a look at the scars on his back.

  “They ain't some picture to look at,” Harrison said, pressing his lips together and giving Mr. Keepheart a stare. “But I could show you what they's like, I s'pose.” Standing up, he took off his coat and lifted up his shirt so Mr. Keepheart could see them. I kept my eyes fixed on the table and listened to the fellow whisper, “What a terrible, terrible sight—”

  But then I heard Harrison say, calm as anything, “Now, let me have a look at your back, Mr. Keepheart.”

  Laid to Rest

  Mr. Keepheart's back was plucked-chicken white, and you could count just about every one of his ribs. His face also turned red as beets.

  “There's nothing there,” Mr. Keepheart said as he slowly took off his old coat and lifted his shirt. “I've never been beaten like, like, like”—he reddened—”well, I'm sorry, like some of our, well, colored brethren are. It's a terrible thing what they do where you come from, yes, well, it is …” he stuttered and stumbled.

  “You never been beaten same as a cow or a horse or dog?” Harrison said, his eyes snapping like fire. “Never been cowhided for fishin at night ‘cause you was hungry? Or lashed thirty-nine times for runnin off from your master?”

  “No, well, no.” Mr. Keepheart sat down and stared at the table.

  “Well, then.” Harrison leaned forward and jabbed his finger at the paper. “Say you write on that fancy paper of yours how my back was all cut up by scars and say you tell your congregation people about them, they won't know what them lashes on my back feels like, ‘less they got them themselves, now will they?”

  Mr. Keepheart said he supposed that was true. He stuck his pen in the middle of the inkwell and said he wouldn't try to write anymore that night.