The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  She wouldn’t say where she went. “Next stop” is all she told me. “Only Donaldson knows where that is, and I don’t ask him. They had to leave while it was still dark.”

  “Can I send her a letter?” I was thinking someone could read it to her.

  “Only if you want her to get caught.”

  “Is she with her baby, at least?”

  “We’re not told the details, May. Safer that way. She is free, I can tell you that, thanks to you. And her baby is, too. You were a good soldier back there.”

  “You should be proud,” Comfort added.

  They were not good soldiers, Comfort and Mrs. Howard. When she learned about Lula from Donaldson, Mrs. Howard contacted a farmer who owned a dray wagon with a false bottom—the farm dray I had seen from the railing of the Floating Theatre—which was often used for ferrying fugitives. But the farmer had been at his brother’s house for a few days, hence the delay. He returned in time to hitch the wagon near the Paducah pier during the show, where he waited for someone to bring him Lula. Why he wasn’t sitting up in his dray when I looked, I do not know. Maybe he’d gotten impatient, since I was so late, and went out to see what he could see. Mrs. Howard herself panicked and left with Comfort when the justice of the peace got involved. She assured me that she and Comfort had looked for us—they went up to the town, thinking we would remove ourselves more from the crowd—but later Comfort admitted that they did not look for us long. Mrs. Howard was nervous. She was a known abolitionist, and she did not want to get drawn into the chase. She could not afford to be in jail, Comfort explained to me. There were too many people she needed to help.

  I still have the blue jay feather. I wish I had been able to say good-bye.

  Mrs. Howard gave me Comfort’s old room with the furry ceiling full of pig hair, since she and Comfort now shared two rooms down the hall. For two nights I slept so heavily I did not even dream, but still I could not shake my exhaustion, which felt like a thick woolen shawl across my shoulders and over my head. I was happy that Lula had gotten away—exultant, even. We had prevailed against all odds. And yet at the very same time there was a pocket of darkness in me, a great chasm of regret, when I thought of that night. The Floating Theatre was gone. I had taken Hugo’s livelihood and the livelihood of seven other people. Eight, if you counted young Celia.

  “Now, May,” Mrs. Howard said at breakfast a few days later, “you have to stop dwelling upon that boat. That’s over and done with. It’s a pity, to be sure. A great pity. But it wasn’t your fault. You did not set the fire. You got Lena out and you got her to safety; you should be proud of this. Dwell on that if you must dwell on anything. Our cause is a just cause, you know.”

  She said more in this vein—much more—and when she stopped to sip her tea, by now almost certainly cold, I said, “Lula, not Lena.”

  “Of course,” she replied smoothly. “Lula.”

  I wished I could explain to her how I felt inside, like fabric that’s been torn into strips. But, “It’s not your fault,” Mrs. Howard kept saying, even when we found the small inch of print in the Gazette later that day with the report of the fire and the deaths. I left the next morning, and although Mrs. Howard tried to stop me—“You have an obligation to the cause now; you can do important work right here”—I would not be persuaded. She gave me twenty dollars and a canal boat ticket for Cleveland, and this time I actually bought and used the ticket.

  • • •

  Three days to get to Cincinnati, five days to get to Cleveland, fifteen days to find work; but after that, for me, time seemed to stretch out meaninglessly. I went to plays at night and rose each day to the same humid morning that eventually gave way to rain or a humid afternoon. The wind coming off the lake blew at me like a series of loose slaps, wriggling my hat away from my hatpins, so that I walked to work like every other man or woman on the street with one hand on my head.

  One afternoon at the end of August, Bella and I sat sewing in the hotel’s little back room with a great swath of light-blue silk between us; we were both hemming the same skirt, which needed to be done in a quarter of an hour so that the lady who owned it could dress for dinner. We had our heads down and were working as fast as we could, but Bella still kept up a conversation the whole while, describing the outing she’d taken that Sunday with her two brothers and four sisters to hear the new Cleveland City Band play at Public Square.

  “Eighteen men,” she told me. “My brother Petey counted.”

  I liked to have hard work in front of me that needed to be done quickly, and listening to Bella was also a welcome distraction from my thoughts. She didn’t speak about slavery or runaways or the emancipation question—at least, not to me—but of everyday life. And although I felt very far from everyday life—a life that I believed should include family or at least neighbors who know your real name—I enjoyed hearing about her Sunday excursions and her romances, even what she had eaten for dinner the night before and how she and her mother prepared it. Once the idle talk would have irritated me, back when I was a person with no bitter regrets. Now I simply listened and imagined her life as she told it to me, my fingers working furiously over the silk.

  “Afterwards we had ice cream, but Petey had two because he dropped his first one, and Momma favors him,” Bella said.

  Mr. Loran, the sprightly, no-nonsense manager of the hotel, poked his head into the room. “How’s it coming along, girls?” he asked. “Alice is ready to take it upstairs when you’re done. She’s in the kitchen.”

  I bit off the thread and knotted it. Then Bella gave the silk another turn with the iron while I cut some tissue paper to wrap it in. I found Alice sitting in the kitchen with her legs straight out in front of her, her maid’s cap in her lap. “Oogh, it’s hot,” she said. Then, standing and refitting the cap on her hair: “There’s a guest askin’ for a bit of help. A lost button, I think. Room four sixteen.” Her fingers darted here and there, tucking in strands of her hair without the aid of a mirror.

  “Bella, can you get the button jar?” I asked.

  Alice shook her skirt out and then took the dress from me. “Wanted you by name. Said, ‘Is the lady Mrs. Jasper Sinclair here today?’ ”

  I felt the blood come to my face. No one had ever asked for me by name. No one except Bella and Mr. Loran and a couple of the hotel maids even knew me. Was it the law at last? I wanted to ask but I didn’t know how to without sounding guilty. I considered getting Bella to go up instead of me in spite of the guest’s request, but after the first rush of fear I felt another emotion take over, as though I had been waiting all these weeks for the consequences of my actions, and now here they were.

  Room four sixteen, Alice repeated after me.

  As I made my way through the kitchens and the dining room and then across the reception hall and up the wide polished stairs, it seemed like everyone else in the hotel was going in the opposite direction. If it was the law, I reasoned, they would have just come to the back room where I worked and arrested me. But I could not completely convince myself. By the time I knocked on the door, my chest felt like it held two hearts, each one pumping out an alternate rhythm.

  “Seamstress,” I called out.

  After a long moment the door opened.

  Donaldson stood on the carpet, the light behind him. He didn’t smile, but he nodded to me and opened the door all the way to let me inside. To say that I was surprised to see him does not adequately describe my confusion and the sudden tingling I felt along my arms, as though my skin had a sudden need to make sure of its place in the world. I stepped into the room. It had thick cream carpet with a rose design along its edges, and the heavy furniture seemed to sink into it as if it were milk foam. I was still turning my head, expecting to find Mrs. Howard in a corner with her tiny tea set, when the door to an adjoining room opened and Hugo walked out.

  His hair was longer, and he was dressed somberly in a plain brown suit. It was strange not to see him in his boatman’s coat or the old trousers he worke
d in, and of course he was not wearing a costume, either. He looked almost like someone else entirely, but as he walked across the carpet something escaped me, a sound or a puff of air, something in between recognition and relief. Hugo took the button jar from me and put it down on a little side table. I could not seem to move a muscle.

  He took my two hands. He said my name. I saw that his eyes were kind, and Donaldson was looking at me, too.

  A sob came from my mouth as I let Hugo embrace me. But after a second I stepped back. I knew he was here to give me bad news: one of the company was dead. Still, I was just so glad it wasn’t him. I wanted to know everything but first I couldn’t help asking, “How did you find me? Was it Mrs. Howard?”

  Hugo raised his eyebrows. “Mrs. Howard? No, no, she couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. Gave me my tea in the hallway.”

  I felt myself smile. “She does that.”

  “Lucky for me, Mr. Donaldson here stopped me as I was leaving. Man can write bloody fast,” he said, and at that Donaldson’s face changed. It didn’t look like a smile, but it might have been a smile. When I thanked him, he put his hand out and I took it.

  “He arranged for some business with a Mr. Loran and drove me up here with him.”

  “The hotel manager?” I looked at Donaldson with astonishment. “You know him?”

  Again Donaldson didn’t seem to move a muscle, but something in his face confirmed this.

  “Did you get me this job?”

  He took out a pad of paper from his pocket and a short pencil, and I saw that Hugo was right: he wrote bloody fast.

  We thought you might want to continue to work for our cause.

  “ ‘We’?”

  I’ll arrange a visit when the girl isn’t working.

  “You mean Bella?”

  He took up his hat and made a little bow to me before leaving. When the door closed behind him, Hugo said, “I shouldn’t wonder if he isn’t the brains behind the whole operation.”

  We were still standing on the thick carpet in the middle of the room. The light outside, a harsh metallic gray, sliced in through the half-curtained windows. Hugo looked tired and almost ordinary in his brown suit. “Hugo, what happened that night?” I asked.

  He pursed his lips and went over to close the window. The sounds from the street, which I’d hardly noticed—the rattle of a horse harness and a couple of men speaking loudly to each other—shut off like a spigot. Hugo turned back to me and lifted his arms in a gesture I couldn’t interpret. As he began to talk, I watched his face, looking for—what? Some judgment or anger, I suppose. There was emotion there, but I couldn’t tell what it was. He told me that when Lula and I had left, he stayed in the green room, trying to make it look as though Lula had died trying to escape. He put her boots in the trunk and tangled up the bootlaces in the hinges so they wouldn’t float away.

  “Then I tried to push the trunk out the window,” he told me, “but the window wouldn’t open far enough, so I carried the trunk out to the dock and pushed it into the river. I watched it for a few minutes to make sure it would float. When I turned around. . .” He looked away from me. “I found out later that one of the theater drapes had caught fire. Everything went up very quickly after that.”

  Once a fire begins, it can spread as fast as your eyes can travel; I knew that from when my father purposely burned down one of his old, unused barns. I remembered how the flames started along the corners and then quickly found the windows and roof. There was a loud crackling sound as the wood split. Soon the dark gray plumes of smoke were thicker and larger than the building itself, and in a matter of minutes I could see the barn’s skeletal frame.

  My chest felt tight, as though my lungs were stiff copper pipes. “Liddy?” I asked Hugo. I had seen her leave with Celia, but I had to be sure. “And Celia?”

  “They’re fine. They’re all right,” Hugo told me. “Liddy has given up the business and gone back to her family in Akron. Pinky is thinking of following her there. I hope he does.”

  That meant that Pinky was all right, too. “Then who?” I managed.

  “Dr. Early didn’t make it out. He went to the green room is my guess, still looking for Lula.”

  “Who else?” I asked. “The newspaper said Dr. Early and one of the company. Who else?”

  Hugo hesitated. Then he said, “Leo.”

  “Leo?” I stared at him. “It can’t be Leo. He’s not an actor. He’s not one of the company. It said one of the company.”

  “It was Leo, May.”

  “No. It can’t be.” I think I closed my eyes, because all I could see was a sort of dark ashy wall. For a minute I could not even cry. Of all the people I had considered, I had never considered him. I had never worried it was him.

  Somehow I found myself sitting in one of the armchairs and Hugo was kneeling beside me. When I began to cry, he took hold of my left hand with both of his. A wave of dark shame and sadness and unbearable regret washed over me. Leo never caught his catfish. He only wanted to do his job and then sit fishing on the pier on the northern side of the river and be safe. But I had ruined all that. Tears streamed down my face. It felt like stone after heavy stone was being piled on my heart.

  “I know. I know,” Hugo said.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “I know.”

  He did not say that it was not my fault, as Mrs. Howard had said. But he was here, he had found me, and he was holding my hand. He told me that two men from town had found the trunk the next day with Lula’s boots in it, and, just as he’d hoped, they concluded that Lula had died—drowned was the verdict. The law wasn’t after me. Dr. Early, who knew about my role in all this, was dead, and Thaddeus had scampered off to Kentucky.

  “Given his own involvement, I doubt he’ll say anything,” Hugo said. “Probably found a new troupe already. Floating Theatre’s dust, of course.”

  A fresh wave of regret and shame hit me as I thought of the boat, and I put my handkerchief—Hugo’s handkerchief, which he’d put into my hand—up to my face. That boat was his child.

  “Do you want to stay here, May?” he asked me gently after a while. He was close enough for me to see the dark circles under his eyes, and where his sideburns needed trimming. “Do you want to keep working in this hotel?”

  “I want to be with you,” I said. That I knew.

  “That’s all right, then. We can build a new boat. Donaldson said he’d lend me the money. Course, we’ll have to wait until next year. Summer’s nearly over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “And we’ll make a proper hiding place this time. No more trunks.” He stood up and pulled the other armchair up to mine, so close that their edges were touching. When he sat down, our knees rubbed against each other. He took my hand again in his two. “But maybe you don’t want that.”

  Did I want that? I was elated that Lula had gotten away. She had gotten away, and she’d been helped by Liddy, and Hugo, and Leo, and Donaldson. But what if she had been caught? Then I would have counted it as my own failure and no one else’s. I hoped she was safe. I hoped she was far away and reunited with her baby, William. I remembered his short, curly eyelashes like her own. But the price had been so very high. Hugo did not speak of Leo again after that afternoon, but I know that he thought of him. My fault. My fault.

  Conflicted. That’s what the feeling of torn fabric inside of you is called.

  “Well, that, my love,” Hugo said when I told him, “is the human condition.”

  From outside the room I heard voices—a man’s and a woman’s—and the sound of a door closing with a scrape. I didn’t really expect to get away with everything, and I hadn’t. Hugo gave my hand a squeeze, bringing me back to the room with him.

  “What do you say? Are you ready to start all that up again?” he asked.

  He looked so ordinary in his brown suit.

  Alpha, beta, gamma, delta.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

 
The small towns along the Ohio River changed rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century, emerging and growing larger or disappearing altogether within decades. For this reason I have fictionalized most of the town names that are mentioned in the story, although I tried to remain true to the spirit of the area. There was a real steamboat called the Moselle, which sank near Cincinnati in 1838 after its boilers exploded. Of the 300 people on board, 117 survived.

  The events of the novel take place twenty years before the American Civil War began, when the Ohio River was the natural division between the North, or free states, and the South, or slave states. In 1838 the second Fugitive Slave Law had not yet been passed; however, slave catchers did watch the Ohio River for runaways and also ventured north to bring them back.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks go to Sue Armstrong, Lisa Bankoff, Heather Lazare, Kate Parkin, and Trish Todd for all their help and insight; to Alice K. Boatwright, a wonderful writer and friend; and most of all to Richard, John Henry, and Lily for their absolutely unwavering support.

  Touchstone Reading Group Guide