“You can’t do this!”
Just watch me.
Nolan had lost count of the number of times he’d taken this tour with out-of-town guests. He could give it in a pinch. The tour began in an equipment shed original to the silver mine’s later years in the 1880s, and inside the door would be a rack of hard hats. Much of the opening explanation and safety warnings happened there before a tour group moved into the mine’s main tunnel—meaning Meri couldn’t be too far ahead of Nolan.
One lone red hard hat hung on a hook. Nolan grabbed it, moved through the shed and out the other end. The last of the tour group was disappearing into the mine’s part of the tunnel that had been made safe for modern tour groups with various points of commentary about old equipment and methods. A safety sentry fastened a gate closed.
“I have to get in.” Nolan knew this young man. He would give the policy line that it was for everyone’s safety that no one could enter late, but Nolan was going into that tunnel. “Where’s Tony?”
“Mr. Rizzo?” the young man said.
“Yep.”
“I haven’t seen him today.”
Nolan pulled a business card from his wallet. “If he gives you trouble about letting me in late, you have him call me.”
The employee’s eyes widened. “A lawyer?”
“That’s right. I’m in a hurry, please.”
“I don’t think I should do this.”
“It’s imperative that I speak to someone in the tour. I guarantee you won’t be in trouble.”
“That’s not what Mr. Rizzo says.”
“I’m not so old and feeble that I can’t climb over that gate,” Nolan said, “and I will.”
The gate swung open.
The tour guide’s voice echoed through the tunnel, and Nolan moved swiftly toward it. Twenty people huddled while the guide, a geology graduate from a nearby university dressed in period mining costume, pointed to what had once been an active vein in the rock wall while explaining the first step of breaking into rock with drill bits and hammers and filling them with TNT.
“They’d light the fuses, yell, ‘Fire in the hole,’ and run,” the guide said.
One figure slipped away.
Past the group.
Past an old rusting yellow ore car sitting on the track beneath the modern light that made the mine safe for a tour.
“Excuse me,” Nolan whispered several times, threading along the edge of the group.
The tour guide talked about the mucking crew that came in next.
“They said to stay with the group,” someone told Nolan.
“Excuse me,” Nolan said.
“I’m trying to listen.” An older man planted his feet.
“They loaded sixteen tons of ore in a shift,” Nolan said, “and hauled it six stories up the shaft in an elevator like that one over there. Excuse me, please.”
“Shh,” someone else said.
Nolan ignored them. Apparently they hadn’t seen Meri slip away—not even the guide. His eyes were on her, moving deeper into the mine. Perhaps she’d been here before, but how much could she remember from when she was eleven?
“Meri,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.
She burrowed into the tunnel, past the large blue sign with the signal codes that would save lives if men were six levels beneath the earth. Past the old trammer, the iron donkey engine that eventually replaced live donkeys that went blind working in the darkness hauling ore cars. Past the display of hand tools and headlights the miners wore.
“Meri.” He spoke louder, and his voice bounced around the cavern enough to make her turn her head.
“Nolan, what are you doing here?”
“Did you really think I wouldn’t come?”
She kept walking, ignoring the group behind them. Eventually, an eight-foot gate would limit her progress, closing off the unsafe areas of the old mine, and only the tour guide would be able to unlock a gate to take the group down a side passage and out the other side of the hill. Apparently she didn’t remember that. Nolan slowed his steps and followed until Meri realized no exit was available to her on her own. When she removed her glasses and pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes, he approached.
Meri heaved out a grief-laden breath. “Well, now you’ve seen it all. The Davies in all their horror.”
“They’re a tough crowd. I won’t disagree with you there.”
“I’ll bet they’re nothing like your brothers.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Meri looked at him. “Don’t you get along with your brothers?”
“It’s a work in progress,” Nolan said. “Today let’s focus on your family.”
“I’m not going to Tennessee with them.”
“I didn’t expect you would. That doesn’t remotely resemble what you and I have talked about.”
Meri put her glasses back on her face. “Did they leave?”
“I hope not. I asked them not to.”
“Nolan, please, it’s impossible. Just let them go. I’ll deal with it from a distance after all.”
The tour group was gaining on them, pausing now for an explanation of the ore cars on display and the underground transport system involved in removing unmilled ore from the mine to the surface. Then they would take a few minutes to look at the old photos from the mine’s heyday hung on the rock wall. The guide would nudge them along in about five minutes.
“You asked me a few days ago if I believed in calling,” Nolan said.
“I remember.”
“Choosing your path because God puts it before you so plainly you can’t walk any other way. That’s the way you described it.”
Meri nodded.
“That’s about the best description of calling I’ve ever heard. Running toward something. Just what you said to your brother. Your family needs to hear that from you when tempers are not flaring.”
“Are you planning to stick a sock in Canny’s mouth?”
Nolan laughed softly. “I hope it won’t come to that. I did give them all a bit of a scolding.”
“Really?” She looked up and angled her gaze toward him for the first time.
“Really.”
“They’re still at the house?”
Nolan nodded.
“With Jillian?”
He nodded again.
“That hardly seems fair to her.”
He laughed again. “Come back to the table, Meri. Let’s hear what Jillian has to say about your family’s history. And then I promise to make space for your family to hear what you have to say.”
Meri fingered the car keys dangling from a belt loop. Nolan couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure she wouldn’t leave the mine, get in her own car, and drive toward the Wyoming border.
“Five percent still fighting hard?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Memphis, August 27, 1909
Eliza’s hip hadn’t been the same for years. Decades. When one lived to be past seventy, one could not rely on joints gliding as smoothly as they had at forty. She’d never fallen. Nothing had fractured. She had not woken one day of a mind that this was the day that her step was slowing or that it took her ten minutes longer now to walk to church or the shops than it used to. It came an ache here and there, a limp that was slight at first and then undeniable, and then she was alone in the old family home. No one day stuck out in her memory as the day she decided she ought to give up ambulating any distance, yet she had.
Eliza’s mother had never quite adjusted to her daughter’s habit of driving a carriage, but once Eliza had taken it up during the 1878 epidemic she couldn’t go back. She drove only for her own convenience on short errands—not enough to displace the employment of a deserving driver who needed honest work for which her father could well afford to pay. Visiting Canfield Asylum, for instance, was not worth tying up a driver. The dozens of orphans stranded there after the outbreak needed homes, and Eliza would not abandon them, nor the couple who ran the orphanage, simply because t
he outbreak subsided.
She lost valuable time when she fell ill with the fever. Mrs. Haskins recruited a neighbor who had already survived it to look after Eliza in those days. Later they told her they feared she would not make it, but she had made the turn in the middle of the night and did not relapse into a second, worse, round as so many did.
Dear Mrs. Haskins. Gone more than twenty years ago.
At St. Mary’s, Sister Hughetta was the only sister to survive, and a few years later she moved away to start another school in another parish. As far as Eliza knew, the teaching sister had never again been called on for nursing duties.
Eliza adjusted her left hip—the more bothersome one—on the wicker chair on the front porch of her family home. Most of the children at Canfield found homes. With enough patience, which involved a great deal of correspondence and investigation into scant records, she and the others working to place the children found relatives for some of them. News that these relatives would take the orphaned second cousins or children of estranged half-siblings brought rejoicing. If this was not the outcome, they looked for unrelated generous hearts. In the process, a few children grew too old for adoption and had to make their way in the world at tender ages. Others outgrew the adorable younger ages and took longer to place.
Like Sammy. They could find no relatives. His parents’ generation had all been born in slavery, and tracing where they had been before the war was nigh impossible, never mind where freedom took them afterward. Eliza had been tempted to keep him. So very tempted. He came willingly to her during her visits to Canfield, tagged along after her as she worked among the children, sat in her lap when she took a moment’s respite. She was forty years old then. Even if she met a kind-hearted man she could love at that stage of her life, she would likely never have a child. Perhaps God meant for her to have this one. Even now, sitting on her front porch, she could close her eyes and feel the slight weight of him leaning against her.
A letter came from a northern colored family inquiring about adopting one of the children orphaned by the yellow jack. They would like a boy, if one was available, because they had two girls, and a school-age child would fit in well with their household.
Eliza could muster no substantive argument against the placement.
He’s mine.
The placement was right for Sammy. A good home. With his own people. In a community that knew and celebrated the traditions his parents would have known. In her neighborhood, a boy with a black face would always be mistaken for and treated like a house servant who had strayed from where he belonged.
He’s mine.
But he wasn’t hers. He belonged to himself, and to God.
So she hugged him tight and put him on the train going north when he was just past six years old and had already learned to read. Sammy would get a good education in the North. He would be somebody his parents and aunt would have been proud of.
Canfield closed a few years later, after twenty years of serving colored children. Other orphanages did that now. Eliza still made donations when she could.
The first frost came the same day Eliza succumbed, and the epidemic stopped spreading. But it was not as if Memphis snapped back to the city it had been. In fact, it lost its city charter. The shrunken population. The decimated economy. The climate of fear that it could all happen again. It was years of hard-fought strategy to bring it back to an attractive place to live—this time with better sanitation. Not everyone was persuaded of Dr. Walter Reed’s theory that mosquitos carried the disease and it was not contact with the sick, after all, that spread the virus, but Eliza thought the notion had merit. He seemed to have gone to a great deal of effort to prove his experiments.
The shaded front porch was Eliza’s favorite part of the house now. Every few weeks she toyed with selling and moving to a tidy new bungalow. Someone would have to deal with the house once she was gone anyway. Most of the interior rooms were closed off already. When her hips reached a point of protest about the stairs, though it was not yet severe, she moved downstairs into the room that had once been her father’s study. Some days she could still get a whiff of his pipe tobacco, though the walls had been papered over and the furniture exchanged for a bed and sitting area. Eliza lived simply with the help of a companion, Annette, who stayed in the old maid’s room because it was the only other room on the ground floor suitable for personal use, and a second woman who came in to do the heavier cleaning once a week. The horses and carriage were gone. If she needed transportation, she or Annette hailed a cab and tried to stay out of the way of those newfangled automobiles whose drivers seemed to believe all former modes of transportation were no longer entitled to occupy space on the roads.
One of them, a practical boxy variety, rather than the less appealing showy convertible models made for road racing, as Eliza understood it, rolled down the street in a manner suggesting caution although there was no other traffic at this sluggish hour of the afternoon. Eliza fanned herself with an old church bulletin from the side table and peered. The automobile inched forward until it was in front of her home, where it stopped.
Eliza scooted forward in her chair.
A young man emerged and glanced around.
Eliza vaguely remembered being that young. He could not yet be forty, and certainly younger than she was in the days of the yellow jack.
Despite the heat, he wore a gray pinstriped suit and a black hat, and he drove a car, so he was a man of some means though not extravagant. The neighborhood did not receive many colored visitors. Possibly he was a relative of someone who worked on the street in one of the homes that remained more fully staffed than hers. But why had he brought his automobile to rest in front of her house?
The man’s eyes settled on Eliza.
Eliza pulled herself upright to call through the screen door to her live-in companion. “Annette? Are you expecting someone?”
The man walked slowly toward the house.
Annette came to the door and looked out. “I don’t know him.”
“Miz Eliza?” His pitch rose with hope as if to say, Please be my Miz Eliza.
Eliza examined his face. She was not so old that her memory was gone, but she did not recall meeting this man.
“I’m Sam,” he said, removing his hat. “Sammy.”
Her heart rate nearly doubled in the course of the next ten seconds. Sammy. Yes, she could see it now. The wide dark eyes, crinkling in the corners of his narrow face. She extended her hands, and he came up onto the porch, where she could reach up and put a palm against his cheek.
“Why, you are nearly as old as I was the last time I saw you,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ma’am?” Annette still stood in the door.
Without taking her eyes off Sammy, Eliza said, “Annette, we’re going to need a pitcher of sweet tea and those apple turnovers you made this morning.”
“Be right back.” Annette withdrew into the house.
“Sit.” Eliza gestured. “August is still unbearably hot in Memphis. At least out here there is shade and a breeze.”
Sam took one of the wicker chairs, and Eliza angled another so she could see his face.
“How did you find me?” she said. “You were a child, and you were never at my home back then.”
“I couldn’t be sure, of course,” Sam said, “but I had your family name, and I had a feeling it was an old Memphis family.”
“Since 1841.”
“And if you didn’t leave during the epidemic, like so many, then maybe you never left. I made inquiries, and there you were, sitting on the porch like you were waiting for me.”
Perhaps she had been. “Here I am.”
Annette came with a tray that held a pitcher, two glasses, and four apple turnovers.
“Annette, this is one of my children,” Eliza said. She smiled and leaned forward to tap Sam’s knee. “My favorite, actually. The dearest one. You can bring another glass and stay to visit if you like.”
“I
’ll leave you to get reacquainted,” Annette said, “but you let me know if you need something.”
Eliza filled the glasses with sweet tea and handed one to Sam. Questions barraged her mind. She grappled for a starting point. “What I most want to know is whether you’ve had a happy life.”
He met her eyes. “I have. The family that adopted me was very kind and raised me in the fear and nurture of the Lord. They were frugal and hardworking, and I did not know want a day in my life.”
“But did they love you, Sammy?”
“Yes, deeply. They still do. I never had to doubt that.”
Eliza sat back in her chair and drew a long draft of tea. The child grew up loved and cared for.
“I went to college, Miz Eliza. My parents did what they could to help, and I worked my way through for the rest.”
“Sammy, you’re a college man! I’m so proud.”
“I’ll never forget you were the one who taught me to read.”
“You practically taught yourself.”
Sam turned his glass in his hand. “When I graduated from college, I talked with my parents about something I wanted to do. I didn’t want to hurt them, but it had been on my mind for years by then.”
“Goodness, what was that?”
“I wanted to take a surname that connected me to my past.”
“Dormer,” Eliza said. “We figured out that your family’s name was Dormer. I thought it was on the adoption paperwork.”
Sam nodded. “It was in the papers. But that wasn’t the name I had in mind. That was probably just somebody’s plantation master’s name, anyway.”
He was likely right. Tillie’s good man. “Then what?” Eliza said.
“Davies.”
Eliza gulped. “You wanted my name?”
“I do remember little bits about my family. The songs my sisters sang to me. The ironing my mother took in to do at night. But I was only three. It’s you I remember. Coming out to Canfield nearly every day in the same carriage you rescued me in. Always making time for me. Always making sure I had what I needed. Always patient when I wanted extra attention among the chaos of all those children who lost their families. Answering my questions about everything under the sun. Quelling my fears about going off to a new place with new folks and assuring me I was going to have a wonderful life in a real house with a real family. And it was you who taught me to read and set me on a life of learning that I have never taken for granted. I know not many colored children had the opportunities I had.”
The Inn at Hidden Run Page 24
