Trouble Don't Last

by Shelley Pearsall

  I felt bad seeing how Harrison had made Mr. Keepheart, who seemed like a good-natured fellow, turn red as beets. Lilly always said that no matter what whitefolks did to me, I was to talk polite. So I told Mr. Keepheart that I wanted to hear what he had written down on his paper.

  But Harrison was stubborn as an old stump.

  “Don't need to hear what Mr. Keepheart wrote,” he said sharply. “I knows what I look like, I knows where I come from, and I knows what I been through. I got it all in my head, and I don't need no whitefolks to tell me what they got written down in words I can't read atall. You just leave it be, Samuel. He ain't writin no more about us.”

  Harrison cast his eyes around the room. “Where's me and Samuel s'posed to sleep ‘round here?” he asked Mr. Keepheart.

  “Of course,” Mr. Keepheart said, standing up so quickly he had to catch hold of his chair. “It's getting late. I'll show you.”

  I could hardly believe my eyes when he took us through the door into the whitefolks’ church room itself. It was as big as Master Hackler's barn inside. Mr. Keepheart lifted up the oil lamp so we could admire all the white-painted benches for the congregation and the fancy red-green-and-yellow-striped carpets.

  “Look up,” Mr. Keepheart said, pointing.

  Above our heads, a big iron lamp hung from the ceiling. Made me think of a black spider turned over on its back, holding white candles with each of its legs.

  “Under that chandelier,” Mr. Keepheart said in a solemn voice, “is where one poor, little runaway child was laid to rest.”

  I felt my heart leap into my throat.

  “She came to Reverend Pry in the arms of her mother. Poor soul. She was only a baby and already too near death to be saved. So Reverend Pry saw to it that the little colored child was given a proper burial. She was buried here.” Mr. Keepheart tapped on the floor with his foot. “Right where you are standing. Below the church, but in its care forever.”

  Me and Harrison were silent as stones, just staring down at our feet.

  Lord, I said in my mind, it's awful nice to be inside this fancy whitefolks’ church room, but I don't want to be in its care forever.

  Mr. Keepheart gave a nervous kind of cough.

  “Well, now,” he said, “I didn't mean for that to worry you. I just thought, well, you might want to know, well, about other colored breth …” His freckled face reddened again. “Let me get a few blankets.”

  Taking the lamp, he hurried back to Reverend Pry's room and returned with an armful of old quilts and a half-eaten loaf of bread.

  “You can sleep here.” Mr. Keepheart piled the quilts on one of the church benches. “And I brought some leftover bread if you are feeling hungry. And here,” he said, pressing a piece of barley candy into my hand. “A little something for you, Samuel. I thought perhaps you might like that.”

  Harrison sat down and heaved a loud sigh. “Good. You can leave us be for the night, Mr. Keepheart.”

  “Yes, all right, sleep well, both of you, God bless you,” Mr. Keepheart stuttered and turned to leave. But at the door of the church, he turned back, lifted up the flickering lamp, and gave us a wide grin. “And don't worry, Reverend Pry won't be preaching here until Sunday,” he said. “Although I have heard some folks say they sleep better when he's preaching than at most other times.”

  Chuckling to himself, Mr. Keepheart closed the door.

  It was a strange feeling to be left in the middle of a dark and silent whitefolks’ church. I heard Harrison get up from where he was sitting. He started to shuffle down the rows, between the benches.

  “Where you goin to?” I spoke up.

  “Gone to look at something.”

  “What?”

  “You just go to sleep, Samuel.” Harrison's voice was cross-sounding. “Just go to sleep and leave me be, you hear?”

  But I didn't like being in that silent church room by myself, not with that iron spider hanging over my head and the baby buried in the floor. So I crept after Harrison. An oil lamp still flickered in Reverend Pry's small room. Harrison stood by the table, gathering up scraps of paper.

  “You lookin for something, Harrison? Maybe I can find it,” I said, sliding myself real easy into the room.

  Harrison heaved a sigh. “Why you always after me, Samuel? Lordy you don't ever leave me alone.” He looked up and glared at me. “You want to know what I'm doin?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you better keep yo’ mouth shut,” he said, shaking his finger at me. “And don't you say one word about it.” He waved the scraps of paper in his hand. They had all the spiderweb words that Mr. Keepheart and Reverend Pry had been writing down. “I'm takin them. They ain't nothin but trouble.”

  “What?”

  “Don't want no whitefolks reading ‘bout me and you. I been thinkin. Say Mas'er Hackler or Miz Catherine reads it. Say one of them white patrollers reads it. They gonna be circling us like buzzards, sure enough.”

  None of this had crossed my mind.

  “And know what my first master did ‘fore he sold me years and years ago? I remember it plain as yesterday—” Harrison kept on. “He took out his fancy quill pen and wrote something down on a piece of paper. And Old Mas Hackler did the same when he bought me later on …know what I'm sayin, Samuel? I don't like writing atall, nothin good comes outta putting down words.” Harrison snuffed out the lamp and took the papers back into the church room.

  “You keepin them?” I asked.

  “Course not,” he snorted.

  And he walked to a half-open window, tore the paper to pieces, and flung the writing out into the darkness. Stunned, I watched the scraps of paper flutter away. My whole story, the first story anyone had ever written down about me, was gone on the night wind.

  Carryin On

  I couldn't find a way to fall asleep that night. Even with the pile of blankets, the benches were hard as river rocks. And I didn't like sleeping in the big church room with all of the glass windows looking in on us. I thought about Master Hackler and Cassius searching for us somewhere in the darkness and putting up notices about us on trees and barns. Maybe they were circling closer and closer, creeping up to the church to catch us—

  Heaving a sigh, I pulled all of the blankets onto the floor.

  “That you, Samuel?” I heard Harrison mumble. “Settle down. Just git to sleep and settle down, child. I can't take no more of you.”

  Smoothing my tangle of blankets on the floor, I crawled under them and tried to keep my eyes from opening every half minute to check those dark windows. But then my mind started thinking about the baby in Mr. Keepheart's story, and I fell into a terrible-real dream about somebody else being buried under the whitefolks’ church floor.

  The church was dark as pitch, but the Reverend and Mr. Keep heart were shaking me awake. “Get up, Samuel,” they were saying, with strange looks on their faces. “Wake up, so we can get underneath the floor.”

  I kept on asking them what had gone wrong, but they just shook their heads and began rolling up the striped carpet until they had cleared a space the size of a man. Then Reverend Pry and Mr. Keepheart began to cut a large square out of the church floor. Cutting through the wood, their saw blades made a sound so sharp and terrible, I had to cover my ears.

  When the hole was finished, they lifted up the wood planks, set them away, and called me to look inside. Leaning over the edge, I saw nothing at first. And then I began to notice what looked like stars and wisps of clouds, and the moon—as if they had cut a hole that opened not to the earth, but to the night sky.

  “Move away, Samuel,” the Reverend said quietly. “We need to place this poor soul inside. “

  I looked up to see them holding what seemed to be a large person, wrapped in a gray blanket. Mr. Keepheart held the place where the head seemed to be, and the Reverend held the feet. Their backs bent under the weight.

  “Has someone died?” I asked, a terrible fear rising.

  The Reverend gave me a sad look. Mr. Keepheart l
ooked away.

  “Who's that who died?” I said louder. “Tell me who's died. “

  “Your friend, the old man,” the Reverend said softly. “I'm so sorry…”

  And then they lowered the gray bundle into the dark hole and let it go. The bundle floated away, getting smaller and smaller, spinning and turning, as they held on to me, and I screamed and cried for Harrison.

  ‐ ‐ ‐

  “Why you lyin on that floor, hollerin like the Devil got hold of you?” Harrison's hand wrapped around my arm, and he gave me a hard shake. “Stop your carryin on, Samuel! Nothin's gonna hurt you. You just dreaming. Wake up now.” Harrison shook me again. “Wake up!”

  My heart pounded, and my eyelids felt heavy as two bricks trying to open.

  “We still in the church?” I whispered.

  Harrison gave a long sigh. “Far as I know. But I ain't sleepin none. That's fo’ sure.”

  I opened my eyes to see him giving me a mean stare that said I was being more trouble than I was worth again.

  I tried to remember what Lilly always said about bad dreams. Was it bad luck to tell them out loud, or bad luck to keep them quiet?

  “Everything looked real as life,” I told Harrison.

  He shook his head tiredly “Huh, sho’ it did.”

  “I saw them cut a hole in the floor and bury somebody below the church, same as they did to that baby Mr. Keepheart tol’ us about. They cut a big hole in the floor and set a person inside, and I tried to stop them. I hollered and kicked and screamed, and they wouldn't pay no attention…”

  Only thing I didn't say was that the person they had been burying was Harrison.

  Harrison pressed his lips into one tight line. “You need to grow up from believing in bad dreams, if you ask me. You is old enough now, Samuel, to grow up a little.” He leaned back against the church bench and closed his eyes. “Shoulda known that story would make its way into your head. Shoulda known.”

  I felt ashamed for the way my mind was always making up things. Seemed like it sprouted weeds worse than a garden.

  “ ‘Nough that,” Harrison said, rubbing his eyes. “No more dreamin, you hear? We need to be getting some sleep now.” He stood up and shuffled back to his own bench. “You better not wake me again,” he called out in the darkness.

  I put Mr. Keepheart's piece of barley candy in my mouth, and I didn't dream, or even stir from the floor, until a hand rocked me awake in the morning. The strange thing was, the hand that shook my shoulder was brown-skinned and a woman's.

  Ham, Eggs, and Miz Kettle

  “Wake up, child. Time's a-wasting,” a voice said.

  At first, I thought it was Lilly's voice, thought she was getting me up to milk the cows or split kindling or carry out the ash bucket. But a big colored woman with a red headwrap stared down at me, hands on her hips.

  “Mornin,” the woman said, leaning closer, and I saw how her eyes didn't look in the same place. One eye seemed to be looking at my face and the other, at the top of my head. “They tol’ me you is called Samuel. That your name?”

  “Yes,” I said quiet.

  “What'd you say? I didn't hear nothin but air talkin.”

  “YES,” I said louder.

  “Huh, that's better.” The cross-eyed woman nodded and folded her big arms. “I got a name, too, but you don't call me that, you just call me Miz Kettle. MIZ KETTLE. That's my made-up name,” she repeated. “And my husband, he got a name too, but you call him Ham, and my dog, he called Eggs.”

  None of this made any sense to me. Where had Reverend Pry and Mr. Keepheart gone to? Who was the cross-eyed woman? Why did she call herself Miz Kettle? And why was she hiding in the church with me and Harrison?

  Harrison.

  My heart thumped as I sat up and looked over at the white bench where Harrison had been sleeping. Even in the gray morning light, I could see that the bench was empty.

  A terrible fear seized me. I turned and stared at the other benches. All empty. The striped carpet stretched into the shadows like straight paths leading away.

  Reverend Pry and Mr. Keepheart had buried Harrison below the church.

  “Where's Harrison?” I said, my voice rising. “He was sleepin on that bench. Where'd he go to?” I jumped up and called out his name.

  “Harrison!” It echoed loud in the empty church.

  Miz Kettle grabbed hold of my arm. “Stop that, child,” she said, one eye staring mean, the other looking off mean. “That old man ain't gone nowhere at all. Gone there.” She waved her hand at the door to Reverend Pry's small room. “He'll be coming back in one-half minute. You just sit here and be good ‘til he does, you listenin to me?”

  She let go of my arm then and started picking up my blankets.

  “Where's Mr. Keepheart?” I asked.

  “Don't know no Mr. Keepheart,” Miz Kettle said, holding a blanket under her round chin and bringing in the corners to fold it.

  “Reverend Pry?”

  She pressed her lips together. “No.”

  “The Widow Taylor bring you here?”

  Miz Kettle's big shoulders heaved up and down. “Me and Ham and Eggs don't know NOBODY,” she said, giving me a hard look. “That's the way it is. We just the movers who take you from here to there. Nobody knows us and we don't know nobody, see?”

  Then the door of the Reverend's room opened, and out came Harrison looking like someone else. My mouth fell open.

  All Harrison's white hair, even his ragged beard, had turned black. A low-crowned straw hat rested on his head. He wore overall pants and a worn, checked shirt I'd never seen before.

  “Look like a fool in sheep's clothing,” he snorted. “Boot grease on my beard. Hat like whitefolks’. I ain't goin nowhere in these clothes you give me.”

  That made Miz Kettle mad. I could see her big shoulders go up like bread dough rising, and her face pinch together. “Me and Ham's the boss of here.” She put her hands on her hips and stared at Harrison. “And we does the leading and you does the following. You don't follow us, you get handed over to them crackers who's after you, you hear what I'm sayin, old man?”

  Harrison sat down on one of the white benches then and fixed his eyes on the wall. He didn't say a word, only pressed his lips together and shook his head back and forth.

  “Go on,” Miz Kettle said, giving me a push. “Go on. Get ready, Samuel. There's clothes in that little room for you. We already be late enough. Don't want no more trouble.”

  But when I got to the room, all I found was a faded sunbonnet and a cotton striped dress lying across the back of a chair. I went out in the church to tell Miz Kettle, and she stopped and looked at me like I had lost my last crumb of sense.

  “You think you just gonna walk around out there”—she waved her hand at the windows—”looking the same as you does now? You think your ol’ master is gonna let you slip by him wearing the same old clothes he give you?” She pointed her finger at the Reverend's room. “You go on in there and put on that dress and be purely glad you got me and Ham helping you run off.”

  Sitting in one of the Reverend's chairs, I stared at that cotton striped dress. It had stitch patches and yellow fire burns all along the bottom edge, so I knew a girl had worn it, one time or another. All of Lilly's dresses were burned from catching sparks.

  Last thing I wanted to do was wear some girl's dress.

  “You comin, Samuel?” Miz Kettle called from the church, sounding mad.

  I picked up the dress and shook it hard, as if it was crawling full of bedbugs. Then I peeled off my rain-stiff clothes and slid the dress over my head, quick as anything. I took my momma's gray yarn from my trousers and tied the yarn around my neck to keep it safe. Then I pulled on that sunbonnet. But I couldn't see anything except one small circle the size of a dinner plate in front of me. Almost walked into the doorjamb.

  “There now,” Miz Kettle said when I came into the church room. “Ain't that some kind of dis-guise. Can't even see his boy's face.”

  �
��Lord, have mercy,” I heard Harrison whisper.

  “All right, we's ready.” Miz Kettle smacked her brown hands together.

  “We ain't goin out in daylight looking like this.” Harrison's voice was loud. I turned my head to see him. “No, we ain't. Me and Samuel is stayin here ‘til it's night and dark.” He leaned back against the church bench and folded his arms across his chest.

  Miz Kettle walked over real slow. She was a big kind of woman. “Then you and the boy's gonna get caught by the night patrols,” she said, staring down at Harrison with her cross-eyes. “They gonna see two black fools sneakin down the road late at night and know you run off. Only things that go sneaking round Ripley O-hio, at night is horse thieves and runaways.” Her chest heaved in and out, in and out, breathing hard.

  “Me and Samuel's gonna take a wagon,” Harrison said. “And hide inside it.”

  “Don't see no wagon,” Miz Kettle said, looking around. “You see a wagon somewheres?”

  Harrison was quiet for a long while. Like he was thinking hard. Then he heaved a loud sigh and stood up. “Go on” was all he said, waving his arm, angry. “Go on.”

  “Lord-ee.” Miz Kettle pushed in front of us, her dress swaying back and forth like a blanket on a clothesline. “Follow me.”

  We went out of the church the same way we came in, through the Reverend's room. Outside, it was foggy and gray-looking. No morning sun at all. The yard was empty, only thing left was the mud tracks where all the wagons and carriages had been.

  Miz Kettle stood half-in and half-out of the door, talking to us. “You walk on past the church and down that church road, ‘til you sees a wood-plank bridge.” She pointed. “In front of that bridge is an ol’ tree stump, big as a tabletop. You set by that tree stump and wait till Ham and Eggs comes by and gets you.” One eye looked hard at me and the other at Harrison. “You understand what you s'posed to do?” It gave me a strange feeling, as if there were two people inside her head.

  “Yes'm.” Harrison said sharply. “We does.”