But on my way back to the Floating Theatre, I saw Leo kneeling down at the edge of the dock fishing something out of the water with a net. At first I thought it might be the catfish he’d been chasing all summer, but it was too large for that. As I got closer I could see dirty wet fur. The body was still partially submerged, but when its head bobbed forward I saw that it was one of the yellow hound dogs that had been teased in front of the cave we passed early that morning.
Its eyes were open and streams of muddy weeds were entangled in its fur and lashed its mouth. As Leo pulled it closer the body tilted to reveal a great welt on its belly. It was too recently dead to smell of anything other than mud, but that stench was terrible enough. Leo told me to go on back, he would handle this, but I found I had tears in my eyes and could not leave. Something made me look down the dock; sure enough, there was the old man in his ragged coat, standing there watching us. The other dog sat erectly by his side.
I was suddenly angry. “This is your dog,” I called out to him. Leo struggled to bring the net with the dog in it up out of the water.
“No it ain’t,” the old man called back. His voice sounded like he had a handful of river gravel in his mouth, and I could see the neck of a bottle sticking out of his coat pocket.
“We need to bury it ’fore the crows get at it,” Leo said to me, getting the body settled and then working to free the net from underneath it. His trousers were soaking wet, and he bent to untangle one of the dog’s ears from the net’s web.
“You need to bury your dog!” I shouted to the old man.
“Even if it was my dog, which as I tell you it ain’t, I’d say the bitch just got too close to the river edge.”
“That was your fault!” I shouted. “You teased her into it!”
In lieu of answering, the old man spat in my direction. I started to walk over to him but Leo put a hand on my arm.
“But you saw him, didn’t you?” I asked. “At the cave?”
“No good will come from messing with a mean old nut, Miss May. I can bury the poor creature.”
The mean old nut, as Leo called him, was now rubbing his hands as though they were cold, displaying no remorse at all. The hem of his coat had fallen on one side and I noticed that he wore two different boots. He was old and poor and a drunk, but that didn’t excuse him. He turned on his heel and whistled to the one hound he had left.
I was still hot with anger. “You killed your own dog!” I shouted after him. “Your own dog!” But the man made no gesture that he heard me. He hobbled down the wharf in his mismatched boots while the second hound, all ribs and matted fur, trotted briskly behind him. I found myself wondering how a creature could stick to a master so clearly bent on its very destruction.
“That’s all right, Miss May,” Leo said. “Poor thing’s out of misery now.”
• • •
I was not superstitious, not like actors, but I could not help but feel as though omen after omen was piling up. That evening a sweet, rich scent of jasmine floated over on the wind and the sun set in a spectacular show that seemed to glow green and blue and gold and red all at once. Everyone remarked on it: “The end of a glorious summer evening” or “The most beautiful sunset I’ve seen in all my life.” Even Thaddeus, when we were alone late that night in the rowboat, kept remarking on what a perfect day it had been, both for its beauty and its temperature, and for the excellence of the picnic supper that Cook had laid out for us on the bank with chicken and hard-boiled eggs and pie and a bucket of cold lemonade. I was the only one who noticed that we ate our food among sneezeweed and scrub, and who felt the day’s beauty to be false.
If I were anyone else, I would have accused me of too much imagination. But the dead dog in particular kept floating up in my mind. Added to that, Dr. Early did not come to the performance that night as expected. Nor did he come afterwards when the players were sitting around the dining room, eating leftover chicken and talking, and he did not send along a note to explain his whereabouts.
It was nothing to worry about, Liddy told us. He may have been called on to attend a person taken ill. “As soon as a place learns you’re a doctor . . .” she said, and shrugged, twisting her engagement ring around on her finger.
But I could not help thinking that it was too much of a coincidence that he had been called away on the same night I was summoned to help carry a slave baby across the river.
That night Thaddeus rowed the boat slowly, taking his time, while I listened hard for any noises above the soft plash of our oars in the water. Every now and again I looked up at the dense array of stars overhead. Thaddeus wanted to talk, but in my anxiety I kept hushing him until finally he gave up.
“No one can hear us out here,” he grumbled.
“Someone could be in a cove or along the shore. Sound carries over water, you know that.”
He blew air from his lips as if blowing my hogwash away, but settled into rowing the rest of the way without comment.
At last we made our signal with the lantern, and almost immediately a signal was given in return. There was really no reason for my stomach to tighten. Dr. Early had seen the show now at least three times already; why should he attend every performance? And there was certainly no evidence that he was out hunting runaway slaves and anyone who helped them. Besides, if he had somehow caught the man carrying away the baby, why would he lie in wait to catch us? I told myself he was probably in the next town already, preparing the residents there to part with their dimes and nickels in exchange for two hours of an entertaining play.
By now I understood how much these river people craved variety and entertainment, and how happy they were to do their part as an audience. Even tonight’s performance could be considered a success, although there were fifteen men to every woman and a more uncouth audience could not be imagined. They spat and smelled up the room and kept their hats on their heads for the full two hours. They hadn’t bothered to wash their faces and they shouted out jests to the actors on the stage. But, for all that, they laughed at the right places, and clapped their hands and stamped their feet at the end of each act. They particularly liked Oliver in his little ruffle, and shouted for him to dance again and again until Hugo came out with his arms spread, pleading with them that the dog needed more sleep than the actors, being the star of the show. This made everyone laugh harder, but they got to their feet and found their lanterns and made their jostling way off the boat. When they left, the smell of whiskey stayed in the theater, and I realized that many of the men had been drinking from flasks the whole time. My one consolation was that the old man with his hound dog did not attend. He probably didn’t have twenty cents to spare.
Guided by the moonlight, Thaddeus got to a few yards of the shoreline and dropped anchor. The water lapped languidly against the boat, a peaceful noise, as though demonstrating that all my misgivings could only be flights of fancy: nothing bad could happen on so calm and gentle an evening. The moon was up, pale yellow and slightly misshapen, like one of my father’s wheels of cheese after a buyer cut a sliver to taste it, and the water was as smooth as I had ever seen it.
Thaddeus stretched out his legs and waited for me to do the work of getting wet and retrieving the baby. I still could see no one onshore—whoever we were meeting had doused the lantern again quickly—but I heard a cry quickly stifled, which sounded like an infant. My stomach was still pitted up as I held my skirt and waded up the bank. As I climbed onto dry land, though, I slipped and scraped the palm of my hand against a rock. It burned without actually bleeding, and I couldn’t make a fist for the rest of the night.
A cough. I turned in that direction. Now I could see a figure a few yards away under some trees. But when I saw another figure standing alongside him, my heart went into my throat and I stopped cold. Two men were standing there instead of just one.
“Heyya,” one of them said, and began walking toward me.
Now I fully expected to see the white hat of Dr. Early and his smilingly invective face as h
e held out manacles to chain me up. But the man’s hat was brown. It wasn’t Dr. Early. The other man, who also wasn’t Dr. Early, stayed behind the first man, carrying the basket with the infant. The infant gave another short chuff like a cough and the man carrying the basket shushed it. A long filmy cloud drifted over the moon, hiding their particulars, but their gait—especially the first man’s—revealed a fair amount of agitation.
I wish I could tell you what I felt as I stood there watching them advance, one behind the other. But I don’t remember. Caught, I guess. Even though it wasn’t Dr. Early catching me, I knew I was caught; I had walked right into the trap I suspected all day was coming for me. I waited for one of the men to pull out a pistol, although in truth no pistol was needed: I was prepared to go willingly. I had broken the law, and punishment was the answer to that. The one thing I wasn’t sure about was whether I should shout out a warning to Thaddeus or if they thought I was the only one and a warning shout would do nothing but alert the slave catchers to the truth.
What would they do to me? They were brutal to the runaways: once the slaves were returned and the reward collected, the hapless men and women would be flogged, or possibly lynched as a warning to others. To me, the law might be merciful: a hefty fine and six months in jail. But that was only if I was lucky and they arrested me. If they didn’t arrest me, I could be hanged by a crowd, my clothes stripped off me, my skin burned with torches first for good measure. If they didn’t arrest me, it was because they wanted Old Judge Lynch to sit upon the bench. I understood that now.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked the first man as he came up to me.
Clouds moved over the moon. I could hear the river lap at the gravelly shore behind me like the repeated flap of a handkerchief.
“Not yet,” he said. “But like as not they’ll be looking for us by now, and here’s me in the woods without reason. If they find me they’ll suspect me for sure . . . ah—” Here he swore.
“Who will?” I asked. “I don’t understand you.”
“Wouldn’t leave it, wouldn’t let me leave. I hardly thought I’d get here in time for all the fussing . . .”
“What do you mean?”
“The girl. She wouldn’t leave it.”
“What girl?”
That was when I realized that the short man standing behind him was not a man at all but a girl. A Negro girl. Holding the basket, hushing the baby.
When she stepped out from behind the farmhand, I stared at her, trying to make out some features. She was short for a man but tall for a girl. And in the dim moonlight I could see now that she was wearing a dress. In fact, she seemed to be wearing several dresses. She was staring at me, too, and then she put down the basket. When she straightened up, I saw that the front of her dress was wet under her breasts.
“You’re the mother,” I said. She looked all of fourteen.
“Wouldn’t leave the baby,” the farmhand repeated. “Wouldn’t let me go. Her fault if I get caught. If we all do.” He swore again, not exactly at the girl but close enough.
The girl said nothing.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Lula,” the farmhand told me.
“Can’t she talk?”
“She can talk a hog into going into the smokehouse on its own cloven feet. Wouldn’t leave the baby, she told me, and wouldn’t stay behind. On and on like that. Talked a mile a minute till I was just wore out with the noise of it all. But I guess that’s your problem now.” He looked back into the trees. “Good luck to you.”
“Wait—you want me to take her with me?”
“I told her, I said to her, we have to make our plans first. You need to wait for someone to make you a plan, I said. But did she listen?”
Lula spoke for the first time. “I’m not gonna wait,” she said. “I’m all done with waiting.”
“But what will I do with her?” I asked the farmhand.
“Same as you did with the others. Same as I just did. Give her to the next one down the line.”
That was Donaldson. “What if he won’t take her?”
“He’ll take her. What else can he do?” He cursed some more. “Now let me be off.”
“You tried not to take her,” I pointed out.
A quick spasm ran down his shoulders and arms, either from impatience or fear. “All I know is it’s the end for me, so if you don’t take her, she’s on her own. I’ll be looked for shortly; I have to get back.” And with that, he left without so much as lifting his hat or nodding good-bye. He ran a little bowleggedly back into the trees and away for good. It was hard to imagine how he’d been recruited to do this work. Principles or pay?
Lula put the basket down and turned to face me squarely, as though her resolve that I would do the right thing would induce me to do the right thing. And why not? It had worked with the farmhand. But she wasn’t without nervousness, either, for when an owl or some other critter shifted its position on a creaky tree branch nearby, she visibly started.
“How we gettin’ across the river?” she whispered.
“I have a rowboat. There’s a man waiting. But I’m not sure I should take you.”
“You gotta take me! They find me, they’ll kill me.”
“Across the river’s not much better. They might send you back.”
“It’s the North, ain’t it?”
“Yes, but the people aren’t always . . .” I thought of the doctor’s wife who had shooed me off her land. “Some of them might as well live in the South.”
“What you gonna do, take my baby and leave me to be hung up and whupped and killed?”
The clouds had moved off and the dimpled moon lighted the river. I could see the top of Thaddeus’s hat just a little ways down the bank. He’d moved the rowboat into a shallow nook near some river boulders. I didn’t know what to do.
“What’s your baby’s name?” I asked, stalling.
“William.”
“What happened to the father?”
“He around.”
“Did he run away, too?”
“It were one of the sons. The middle one.” She uncovered the baby’s face. His large dark eyes stared up at me without blinking and he had curly, thick eyelashes. His skin was very light.
One of the sons. One of her owner’s sons, she meant.
“How old are you?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.”
She covered the baby back up and looked at me. She was waiting for me to say yes or no, but I didn’t know what to say. Like a child, I began to have the dread feeling that, since I had broken one rule, I was now condemned to break rules forever—that I had succumbed to my lower nature, which disregarded any law that interfered with my own desire. And my desire, at that moment, was to save her. But that was breaking the law. Of course, I had broken the law before ferrying those babies. And yet, this seemed worse.
I looked at her and at the basket at her feet. She was right: I found that I couldn’t just leave her.
“All right,” I said at last. “But it’s an unlucky day. You should know that.”
“All of them are,” she told me.
As we began to walk toward the rowboat, Lula, now holding the basket up against her chest, stumbled and lurched forward.
“Are you sick?” I asked.
“My feet are bleeding.”
Her boots were caked with mud. Even the laces looked as stiff as brown icing.
“I didn’t have no shoes, so the man gave me these. They too small for me.”
“Do you want to take them off?”
She looked down at them. “Might not be able to get them back on. My left foot’s not so bad. Must be smaller or something.”
“Here.” I took her arm. “That’s all right, just put your weight on me.”
Thaddeus had positioned the rowboat so we could step into it from the boulders without wading into the water. When we got up next to the boat, I took the baby basket from Lula and gave it to Thaddeus, who was staring at the
two of us. He quickly collected himself and helped Lula and then me into the boat, which rocked heavily as I sat down next to the girl. I realized my heart was still thumping hard and my balance was off.
“This is Lula,” I said in a low voice. “She’s coming with us.”
Lula, who had gotten the bottom of her dress wet getting into the boat, shifted her damp hem away from her legs and looked at Thaddeus cautiously. He touched his hat and then, perhaps for once in his life shocked into reticence, pushed us off without another word.
Although every splash of water made my heart jump, our crossing was as calm as the one coming over. Even so, by the end my eyes hurt from straining to see into the dark night. About midway on the river Lula stooped to bring her baby up to her breast to feed him, unbuttoning the front of her dress and then unbuttoning the dress underneath that one. She had but two dresses in the world, I guessed, and she didn’t want to leave one behind. I understood that. While she nursed her baby, Thaddeus kept rowing, but he turned his head away as if it was suddenly important to watch for something coming in from the east. I wondered what he thought about this new situation, but I was too afraid to speak in case the nervous farmhand was right: already Lula had been discovered missing, and people were up and down the river and maybe even on it looking for her. I did not dare to light the lantern to check our direction, and I worried over every sound not made by our own oars.
But we got to the other shore and tied up without incident. Although it was not much past midnight, it felt as if the deepest part of night was upon us already, the time when every creature on earth had settled into silence. Thaddeus arranged the rowboat so that it was exactly the same as Leo had left it: oars crossed at the bottom, bottle anchors under the aft. When I looked back, the river was just a long chasm of darkness.
“We in the North now,” Lula whispered. I wasn’t sure if she was asking me.
The Underground River Page 27
