Rob put away his gun and walked over toward me. I was looking at him with wide eyes of amazement. He was so cool and collected . . . and he’d just shot somebody!
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said. “My goodness!” was all I could say.
The people were scurrying around, still wondering what was going on while the men tied up the three kidnappers and everyone who had been hiding wandered in from the woods.
Gradually everyone calmed down as they realized they’d been rescued. The children were wide awake by now and chattering away and asking questions. Some of the people were asking Mr. Davidson and his men if they were from the railroad. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep! I was so tired. But I wasn’t going to have a chance to do that for a while!
When they had the men tied up and the people calmed down, Rob and Mr. Davidson and Mr. Brannon had to decide what to do with all the people who had been kidnapped by the three men.
They asked the kidnappers when the ship was coming, but they were surly and belligerent and wouldn’t tell them anything and insisted they didn’t know anything about a ship.
It was an hour or two, maybe three, before daybreak. There wasn’t much that could be done while it was dark.
Mr. Davidson talked to the people and told them who he was and what had happened. Most of them now remembered me and came up and talked to me like I was a hero for rescuing them, even though I hadn’t really done much.
Then he told them that we would have to stay there till morning anyway, so they might as well try to get some more sleep, which sounded good to me! I talked to the old lady, who was quickly becoming my friend, for a little while, but it didn’t take long for all the excitement to make me sleepier than ever. I lay down near the fire and wrapped the blanket tight around me. People were still murmuring in little groups and the men were talking about what to do. But my eyes were heavy and it wasn’t long before I was sound asleep.
WAITING
36
I don’t know how long I slept, but it was light when I woke up. People were milling around and talking—mostly about how hungry they were!
One of the men was on a bluff overlooking the ocean watching for the ship. We weren’t far from the mouth of the river at the cove where they had brought the people ashore.
I got up and looked around for Rob. They told me he had ridden down the coast to find Sheriff Heyes to see if he had made contact with the men from the government.
By the time Rob and Sheriff Heyes got back an hour and a half or so later, the sun was up. Four men from the government had the kidnappers in custody. Everyone was talking at once trying to tell them about what had happened. The government men were waiting and hoping to be able to arrest the captain of the ship too, though now they thought that it probably wouldn’t come until the next night. A couple of Mr. Davidson’s men were just getting back from the nearby town of Yorktown with food for the people, who were starving for something more than bread to eat. And besides that, the bread had run out the day before.
“Well, Mayme,” said Rob, walking over to me, “with everything happening so fast, I haven’t had a chance to talk much with you. How are you? Are you feeling all right?”
“I was really tired,” I said. “But I think I slept several hours. I’m feeling better now.”
“Katie was very anxious about you.”
“How is she?”
“Fine. Just worried about you.”
He sat down and told me about his brief visit.
“She’s quite a special young lady,” he said at last.
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know where I’d be without her. I don’t even think it’s too much to say that I owe my life to her.”
“She feels the same way about you. And now that I’ve found you, we’ve got to get you back to her.”
“What will happen to all these people?” I asked.
“Mr. Davidson made arrangements in Yorktown for transportation to the station in Richmond so they can continue on their way wherever they were going before this happened. He’s spoken with someone from the B&O, and they’ve agreed to transport them without additional charge to their destination. By the way, who is Mr. Davidson anyway? He seems a most extraordinary man. How did you meet up with him?”
I told him how I had escaped and a little bit about Josepha and her story and about the horse weather vane.
“Everybody has an interesting story to tell, don’t they?” he said. “How fascinating that Josepha’s story would give you the idea how to get away and help these people.”
“Katie tells me you have quite a story too,” I said. “She said I could read the letter you wrote to her if I wanted to.”
Rob smiled almost sadly, then nodded. “Of course,” he said, “you may certainly read it if you like. My story is for anyone it can help.”
He paused a moment.
“All our stories ought to be that way,” he added, “—to help people learn more about themselves and grow.”
“I never thought of that,” I said. “That makes every person’s life really special and unique, doesn’t it—if something in it can help another person grow.”
“I believe that with all my heart, Mayme. I suppose that’s what intrigues me about Mr. Davidson. I have the sense that he’s a man with a story too, one that might change me in good ways if I knew it.”
“Maybe you will find out about it someday.”
“I hope so.”
“He was a neighbor to the farmhouse where I went. The two men used to be involved in the Underground Railroad together. They hid runaway slaves at their two plantations and in caves and in the woods in between.”
“Well, he’s quite a man. I would like to know more about him.”
Almost as if he knew we were talking about him, Mr. Davidson now approached us.
“Well, young lady,” he said, “it looks like these people have you to thank for their freedom.”
“And you too,” I said. “All I did was slip into the woods and run away. You and your men, and you, Rob, actually rescued them. Though I have the feeling that before they would have let themselves be put on a modern-day slave ship, some of those men would have done something, but I don’t know what. I’m sure they would rather have died than go back into slavery. I think the men were planning something right when we came along.”
“It was a group effort, all the way around,” said Rob.
Mr. Davidson looked back and forth between us. “I am still a little uncertain how the two of you know each other,” he said.
Rob and I looked at each other.
“You might say we have a mutual friend,” said Rob. “Mayme and her friend were traveling on the train and Mayme was in the last car with these other people. When she didn’t arrive, her friend, who is named Katie, wired me and I came looking for her.”
I told him a little about me and Katie. Then he remembered reading about us in the newspaper back in 1867. Then he told us about his family and a little about their experience with the Underground Railroad.
“You remind me of my son,” Mr. Davidson said to Rob. “I wish you both could meet him and his wife.”
“What’s his name?” Rob asked.
“Seth.”
“A good biblical name,” Rob said, nodding.
Mr. Davidson looked at him with an expression that made me not quite able to tell what he was thinking. Slowly a faint smile came to his lips.
“If I understand where you have come from correctly,” said Rob, “perhaps we could meet him on our way back.”
“You are welcome, of course,” said Mr. Davidson. “But my son and his wife are away, in Kansas actually, purchasing several horses from an old friend of my son’s father-in-law for our breeding stock.”
“You have a horse ranch!” I said.
Mr. Davidson laughed. “That is almost exactly one of the first things my daughter-in-law said to me when she and I first met,” he replied. “But to answe
r your question . . . not exactly. We grow cotton and wheat and other crops. The horses are more of a sideline, but we enjoy them very much. I hope you would both consider it a permanent and standing invitation to come visit. You know where we are, Mayme, if I may now call you that. I would love to have you meet my son and his wife.”
“Of course,” I said. “I always feel a little funny when anyone but my papa calls me Mary Ann.”
He turned again to Rob.
“Our plantation is just outside the small town of Dove’s Landing,” said Mr. Davidson. “I do sincerely hope that we will see you again.”
“I hope that will be possible,” said Rob. “But before any of that, we have to get all these people on their way . . . and Mayme back to Katie!”
SUNRISE THOUGHTS
37
AN EARLY MAY SUN HAD JUST PEEPED OVER THE horizon, casting long morning shadows over the fields of the North Carolina plantation known as Rosewood. A faint fog layer of less than four feet hovered over the growing young stalks of cotton as a reminder of the night’s chill still hanging in the air. But both shadows and mist would soon be swallowed up in the burning heat of the strong sun rising to conquer the last remnants of night, as the sun of God’s light will one day wipe out death and sin and all their temporary hazes, shadows, and griefs.
A man was slowly walking through the fields, his shadow stretching almost all the way back to the plantation house from which he had come three-quarters of an hour earlier.
He was not by nature an early riser. When he was younger, the night and its fleeting attractions had lured him for many years and kept him from knowing the joys of life’s quieter and more solitary pleasures. But now, in this autumn season of his life, he was a man newly at peace. He had become a man of the soil, of the seasons, a man of family and friends and simple enjoyments. He had begun to see into things with true eyes, and thus had begun to be a true man himself.
Mornings like this often called him now. There was no time he enjoyed so much, walking throughout the plantation, watching its many-faceted life begin to stretch and breathe again after the refreshment of a night’s sleep. The chickens were always first, then the stirring of the birds and their many morning songs, the rustling about of the cows, the renewed squawks of crows overhead . . . the opening of leaves, the bending of stalks toward the sun, the gradual drying of ten million drops of dew on just as many blades of grass . . . and then the gradual warming of the earth beneath his feet as the day advanced . . . these and a dozen subtleties that remained undefined to his consciousness, but which nonetheless his heart felt as he made his way through the morning, all combined to make his soul one with nature in a way he had never known before coming to this place. The cycle of the earth and its wonders drew him and spoke to him as he could never have imagined them capable of doing.
On this particular morning, however, their hidden messages spoke in a strangely melancholy tone. He suspected part of the cause. But there was more to it than that. For he had begun to wonder about the future. And as is their custom, his musings had imperceptibly become anxieties. And as is their custom, they had slowly crowded out the peace he usually felt at such times.
He had been as far as the river, then circled back around the ten acres they had reclaimed last winter and newly planted this spring in the cotton that was their money crop, and that they needed now more than ever. It seemed to be growing well and to the same height on his dungarees as the stalks in the other fields.
He had been walking perhaps fifty minutes, and the shadow reduced by the sun’s rise to some six or eight feet in front of him, when another figure appeared from the direction of the barn. He stopped and waited.
“A fine morning, brother Ward,” he said.
“You look pensive, even from a distance,” his brother said as he approached. “Worried about the girls?”
“I do wonder why we haven’t heard from them—but not worried, really,” said Templeton. “Missing them, I suppose, though I know we have to realize that they have their own lives to live.”
He drew in a long breath of the still chilly morning air.
“It’s great to be alive, isn’t it,” he said with satisfaction, “and to have a place to call your own?”
“Who would have thought it—a couple drifters like us?”
“Fate does play its tricks—for good and bad. What’s that they say about God’s will? I remember Mama quoting it—something about everything working for good.”
Ward nodded.
It was quiet a minute as the two brothers began walking side by side toward one of the adjacent fields.
“How serious do you think this thing is with Herb?” asked Ward at length.
Templeton sighed. “I don’t know . . . I just don’t know,” he said. “We’ve got bills, we’ve got taxes coming due, we’ve got a fine crop coming on . . . yet one of our few friends around here, besides Thurston, of course, is getting pressure to steer clear of us. Yeah, I can’t say it doesn’t concern me. It does. But what can we do but wait?”
“Nothing, I suppose. Just wait to see how it plays out.”
“A little like holding two jacks when the pot is getting a bit too big for comfort,” said Templeton with a grin. But the smile quickly faded again. “Sometimes waiting’s the hardest thing of all to do.”
“Like waiting to hear from the girls.”
“Yep.”
They walked on and gradually circled back toward the house.
“I don’t know, Ward,” said Templeton at length. “Maybe it is the girls being gone, and growing up, and going to Nelda’s to look at that school . . . I don’t know, I’ve just been having a strange sense—I don’t even know what to call it—like I may not have many more opportunities to walk through these fields.”
“A premonition of death, younger brother? I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“No, I don’t think that’s it. It’s more a sense that a change is coming and that we need to enjoy what we’ve got while we’ve got it. I don’t know, what if the girls decide to go to that school and then they get married and stay up there? Jeremiah’s got a good job up there now. What if he and Mayme decide to stay in the North?”
“They wouldn’t . . . would they?”
“I don’t know. There’s going to be more opportunities for a kid like Jeremiah there, and less antagonism toward them because of their color. If I was black, that’s where I’d go. Why would they want to stay around here the way things are changing? And then there is Katie’s young man—he has a life and job up north.”
“You’ve got a point there. But this is their home.”
“Yeah, but home is where your people are. This hasn’t always been home. There was that homestead Grandpa used to talk about. That was his home for a while. Then Rosalind came down here to marry Richard. Nelda got married and moved into the city. This has been Katie’s home and a good home for the rest of us. I don’t know . . . maybe everything’s not meant to last forever. I just wonder what we’ll do if they both wind up leaving someday. We’re not spring chickens anymore.”
“Speak for yourself, brother!” laughed Ward.
“I’m serious, though—what would we do if they did? Would we want to stay here without them? They’re growing up, Ward. We’ve got to face it. Changes may be coming that we can’t stop.”
ROSEWOOD’S THREE MEN
38
WHATCHU LOOKIN’ AT?” ASKED JOSEPHA, WALKING to where Henry stood with his back turned looking out the window above the kitchen counter he had so painstakingly made for her the year before.
“Jes’ lookin’ at our two men walkin’ out dere—Mister Templeton an’ Mister Ward.”
Josepha came and stood beside him.
“Dey looks like dey’s in da middle er some parful serious talk, all right.”
“You notice how Mister Templeton always walks ’bout da place on mornin’s like dis?”
“I seen him, all right.”
“It puts me in da mi
nd er dat Scripture ’bout faithful men—Be diligent ter know da state ob dy flocks, an’ look well ter dy herds. Dey’s come da long way roun’, but dey’s a couple er men dat’s learned ter be diligent in what da good Lord’s given ’em ter be about. I got a heart full er respeck fo dose two.”
“Dey’s shure been good ter us, an’ dat’s a fact,” said Josepha.
Henry turned and slowly walked toward the door.
“Sumfin’ tells me I oughter go out ter join dem,” he said, “dat maybe dere’s things dey’s be needin’ ter talk ter me about. You wants ter come?”
“I’m thinkin’ dat whateber it is, it’s for Rosewood’s men ter be talkin’ ’bout. So I’s jes’ stay here an’ let dem do it.”
Henry nodded and left the house.
The brothers saw him coming and turned toward him.
“Morning, Henry!” Ward called.
“Mo’nin’ ter you, Mister Ward . . . Mister Templeton. I hope I ain’t intrudin’.”
“Not at all!” said Templeton. “We’re just enjoying the morning air and talking about what changes life might yet have in store for us.”
“What kind er changes, Mister Templeton?” asked Henry.
“Oh, I don’t know . . . getting older . . . what’s going to become of the girls, that kind of thing.”
Henry nodded.
“How old are you, Henry?” Templeton asked.
“Fifty-one.”
“And Josepha?”
“She jes’ turned fifty dis year.”
“Well, I’m fifty-four and my older brother here’s fifty-seven. That makes us all over fifty. Ward and I’ve been talking about the future and what’s to become of us. What do you think, Henry—do you think Jeremiah and Mayme might stay in the North?”
“Don’ know, Mister Templeton,” answered Henry. “Jeremiah neber said nuthin’ like dat before he lef’. It was jes’ ter make some money so he could feel like he could support a wife. But things ain’t too safe fo him here.”
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