The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

  “It is painful for the fledgling to be chased from the nest, but don’t think the mother bird’s task easy,” she said, and pulled the door closed.

  Mary stumbled backward, nearly falling down. She had imagined an afternoon spent with a kind old friend, discussing a way forward for her, but now she found herself alone and rejected in this place she had imagined as some kind of sanctuary. She took a moment to gather herself before walking out of the building into the daylight.

  Clouds had moved in, the iron sky to the west promising rain.

  She walked the wooden sidewalks of the little town, hoping to see a familiar face. At the St. Agnes Tea Room, two girls had taken her favorite table and tittered into their white gloves about some boy. Even when she went into Saxon Street Booksellers she found that she could not focus on the titles before her. When the clerk offered to help her find something, she couldn’t remember the names of any of the books she wanted to read.

  As the sky dimmed, she stopped at the train station. She thought of the money she had brought with her and scanned the schedule and maps posted on the wall, wondering how far away she could go.

  She imagined herself climbing off the train in Manhattan, checking into a clean little room near a park, and taking a position writing about the evils of slavery and other great wrongs in the world. Or she could ride west into the territories, getting off someplace where the money in her little bank account in Buffalo could buy her her own life. She would claim a plot and make it her own. It would be a place where the people around her were kind and thoughtful, and all she’d need would be a little garden for vegetables and a couple chickens.

  But of course, only men could stake a claim in the territories.

  Lost was the excitement from earlier in the day. The prospect of a night on the campus now made her feel lonely and she found herself considering an early train home, but she pictured the look on her father’s face as she returned from her failed venture toward independence, and she knew that it would be a defeat from which she would never recover.

  She walked back onto campus for dinner and sat by herself, a stranger to the girls around her, eavesdropping on their talk of romance and classes.

  Mrs. Adams intercepted her as she left for the alumni house.

  “Don’t worry, the fledgling will vacate the nest at dawn,” Mary said, but Mrs. Adams shook her head.

  “Mary, we find ourselves with some, ah, surprise visitors at the guesthouse this evening,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s no longer room for you there. You’ll have to spend the night with me in my room.”

  “What do you mean?” Mary snapped. “I arranged for this stay weeks ago, paid in advance. I dropped my things there this morning.”

  She started again for the guesthouse, her posture stiff, her stride quick.

  “Please, my dear,” Mrs. Adams said, struggling to keep pace as they crossed the quad. “I’ve moved your bag already. Just come with me, and we’ll have a nice tea by the fire.”

  “Who is so important they preempt my arrangements? Some rich patron no doubt, too important to respect others’ arrangements,” Mary said, climbing the steps and opening the alumni house’s front door. “I’ll not surrender my place so easily. Didn’t you just tell me that I should fight for what is right?”

  “This is not what I meant, my dear,” the matron said, biting her lip. Mary rapped sharply on the door to her rented room and took the key from her bag. Mrs. Adams put her hand on Mary’s.

  “Please, you mustn’t,” she said, but Mary pushed the key into the door and opened it into blackness.

  There were no candles and the curtains were drawn to the night. She smelled the stink of the unwashed occupants, felt their fear and breathlessness, and heard the movements of a small space overcrowded with too many bodies. As her eyes adjusted, she made out two men sitting on the bed, the fear-limned whites of eyes offset by faces made a uniform black by the darkness. In the corner, a woman sat in a chair and tried to nurse an infant now fussing with the intrusion.

  Mary’s face flushed crimson and she backed out of the room, pulling the door closed.

  “Pardon,” she stuttered to the closed door and turned away, leaving the key dangling in the lock.

  “I did not want you to see them,” her teacher said, retrieving the key and taking her by the elbow. “It makes you vulnerable.”

  Mary looked at her, blinking.

  “Legally, I mean,” Mrs. Adams said. “If you see them and don’t report them, it makes you an accessory.”

  She led Mary out of the building and into the night. They were halfway across the quad when Mary stopped in her tracks.

  “Who are they?” she asked. “How did they get here?”

  “Sophie is the mother,” Mrs. Adams said. “Palmer is her husband, and Malcolm is his brother. There were two others when they set out, but they’ve been lost.”

  She paused, her eyes darting around past Mary at two students walking in the night.

  “A hunter was spotted in town this afternoon. If they’re caught here, the scandal will be the school’s undoing, and all that we’ve worked to build will be gone. I know I should send them away, but I cannot bring myself to. I cannot imagine what fate awaits them when their master gets them back.”

  “You’ve done this before?” Mary asked.

  Mrs. Adams barely nodded.

  Mary looked at the blackness of the clouded sky for a long moment.

  “Can they be ready to travel quickly?” she asked. “There’s a train leaving for Buffalo in two hours.”

  * * *

  When they got to the station, Mary bought two tickets in third class, and two in first. The conductor balked when she insisted that Sophie and her infant ride with her, but Mary looked down her nose and attempted a Southern drawl. “I may need my girl during the trip. And even with a child in her arms, she does me better than the servants you have on these horrid Yankee trains.”

  Mary tried to focus on a book of poems as rain pounded on the train’s metal roof. She eyed the other riders on the half-empty train, knowing that she risked everything if she were found out. For the first time since she graduated, she felt as if she were part of something bigger than her.

  She wanted to ask questions of the fugitive woman, of life on the plantation and of her escape, but the ruse allowed no such thing. Mary bought something each time the food vendor passed, then made a show of trying a small morsel before voicing her disgust and passing the remainder to the gaunt-looking woman beside her.

  When the train arrived in Buffalo, they had to wait for an old gentleman with a cane to disembark before exiting onto the platform. Sophie pointed to where Palmer and Malcolm stood together as a fat man with a star on his coat waddled toward them.

  “Quick,” Mary whispered to Sophie, motioning for her to follow.

  She stepped in front of the marshal before plying her poor imitation of a Southern accent in front of the frightened black faces.

  “What are you two waiting for? Palmer, get my luggage. And Malcolm, find us a cab. Don’t you dare look at me like that, it’s just rain. Lord knows the two of you could use a bath. Get out there. Your laziness is breathtaking, I swear. After all these weeks on these wretched trains, you still have to be told what to do? I should sell the pair of you down the river.”

  She clapped her hands together.

  “And Sophie, shut that brat up. It has squalled at me the whole trip.”

  The three of them shuffled to their duties.

  The lawman stood over her, smelling of whiskey and looking like he had not had a change of clothes in weeks. “Are these yours?”

  “Why? Do you want them?” she asked. “I’ll give you a good price.”

  “Dwight Kidder,” he introduced himself. “Federal marshal. Where are their papers?”

  “They are somewhere in one of my bags, and I’ll not pull out all my private things just for your benefit,” she said, indignant. “Go harangue one of these scofflaw Yankees. Just thi
s afternoon I saw some urchin picking pockets in broad daylight. Go hang that wretch instead of wasting my time.”

  She turned sharply and headed into the rain.

  “I’ll never understand why my sister would choose to live up here among you heathens,” she said loudly.

  The cold wind off the lake hit her and her feet splashed in the mud as she left the station, but she felt nothing other than the racing of her heart. The marshal called out for her to stop, but she did not slow, did not acknowledge the voice behind her.

  She had never been more afraid.

  Or alive.

  Palmer hailed a cab and helped her in before Sophie and Malcolm came on board. Mary gave the driver the address Mrs. Adams had made her memorize.

  They rode to a little brick church on Michigan Street and a tiny black priest came out and ushered the fugitives into the church basement with nothing more than a nod to Mary.

  She wrote Mrs. Adams the next day, telling her of the successful trip and offering herself to the cause.

  The next runaway arrived at the house a month later, tapping at the window as Mary sat darning socks by candlelight. She fed him leftover cornbread and hid him in the hayloft. The next morning, she drove him down to the same church, hidden under a tarp in the back of the wagon.

  The cotton-haired priest motioned her down when she pulled the wagon into the lot behind the church and introduced himself as Father Thomas.

  “You should be more careful when you come here,” he said. “This church was built by freedmen, and there are many that are looking for any chance to tear it down. This is the first place the marshal and the hunters look when they come looking for our friends.”

  She looked up at the redbrick building with worry in her eyes, and he took her hand and smiled.

  “Don’t you fret,” he said. “It’s my job to keep them guessing. Just you be careful. I’ll have this one over the river and free by morning.”

  She knew better than to ask how.

  The next time she went down to the church, she timed the trip so she’d arrive just as the winter night was setting in, pulling in under the cover of darkness.

  “It’ll be a cold ride home for you,” Father Thomas said. “Spend the night.”

  “No, I have my blankets,” she said.

  “They’ll be over the river and free by morning,” he said again, as he would each time she made the trip.

  Although her father was most certainly aware of the fugitives that continued to arrive over that winter and into the spring, he managed to avoid acknowledging them until the hunter arrived.

  Smelling of stale sweat, his beard slimed with tobacco juice, he tore through the barn, knocking over barrels of seed corn in search of a couple that Mary had delivered to the church days before.

  “That’s not a badge,” her father said, using the tip of his hoe to prod the copperhead penny the hunter had pinned to his filthy coat. “You need a warrant to be here.”

  The hunter sneered and threatened him with a cocked pistol.

  “Let’s have a look in your barn,” he said.

  While he was poking a pitchfork through the hayloft, Mary slipped away and rang the big brass farm bell, a signal for the field hands to come in. Scythes on their shoulders, six strong boys arrived to block the hunter’s way to the house.

  He promised to return with the marshal the next day, but was never heard from again.

  At the dinner table that night, her father said, “There are pistols made for ladies to handle.”

  “I know nothing of guns,” she said.

  “You’re a smart girl,” he replied, “make a study of it.”

  The idea intrigued her. For months, whenever Leander’s friends came to visit, she asked their opinions on which guns were best. They laughed when she asked to test their weapons. Eventually she ordered one of the new Colt revolvers from Snyder’s General Store, cementing her reputation as some kind of dangerous, lunatic shrew.

  Leander was happy to take her out to the woods and show her how to use the pistol, laughing at her the first time she fired it and was knocked to the ground. She climbed to her feet, looked at him sideways, and fired off the remaining five bullets rapidly.

  She was surprised by how much she enjoyed shooting, and that summer she spent hours deep in the forest firing into the trunk of a dead oak at ever-increasing distances. After each practice, she carefully cleaned and reloaded the pistol and hung it on a peg next to the front door, a display her father complained was in direct contradiction to the reputation of hospitality he had spent years cultivating.

  The summer and fall passed without incident, but when a December blizzard left her housebound, she took a pickax to the cellar wall, hollowing out a hiding hole.

  After spending the week snowed in at the American Hotel in Buffalo, her father arrived home to find her hauling a tin bucket of dirt up the back stairs.

  “No more!” he said. “You are not preparing for an armed siege. What do other ladies do when they are snowed in?”

  “Every godforsaken bounty hunter in this county drinks at Wilhelm’s Corner House, less than half a mile down the road,” she said. “You are the one that told me I should have a plan.”

  “Enough,” he said.

  He grabbed the loop handle, but she held the tin pail of dirt as if it were a lifeline in a stormy sea.

  “No more digging,” he growled. “I’ve not stopped you from helping the occasional wretched soul, but there are limits. The barn, not the house. And for only one night. No more.”

  She nodded, but did not release the bucket.

  “I’ll finish cleaning up, then set myself to stitching a sampler,” she said.

  He glared at her, but released the handle.

  She finished spreading the dirt and clay in the tomato patch, then returned to the cellar to push her mother’s old broken wardrobe in front of the hole.

  Charlie Webster came to their door soon afterward, his face a crush of pain, to tell that Verona had passed. And Mary suddenly found herself struggling to keep him from fading into nothingness.

  Mrs. Adams continued to send a fugitive her way every month or so.

  There was no more mention of the hole, but she felt connected to the dank little space somehow. Once, when the house was empty, she pushed the wardrobe aside and crawled into the space, just sitting on the cool earth, her hands outstretched to the rough clay walls.

  Leander considered the fugitives another of his sister’s oddities, like her bookishness and impatience with all the local boys.

  Although Mary did her best to keep what she was doing hidden from the farmworkers, it did not take long before Katia found one of the runaways in the barn and raised a ruckus in the house. Nathan explained that it was not so long ago that he had taken her in from a passing orphan train, and that extending such charity again was only right. Nathan elicited a solemn pledge from her that she would not tell anyone of the runaways. She said nothing to him about the matter again, though she was happy to make her displeasure clear to Mary whenever the opportunity arose.

  As Mary had settled into her secret efforts, she’d become more amenable to the work the farm required, but Leander had become even less involved. Finally, their father had announced that it was time for a change, and that Leander was to move downtown to take on the business side of the family’s dealings. He’d arranged for some of his friends there to watch over him, and had found a good room in a boardinghouse from where he could sell the farm’s goods and the lumber coming out of the mill. He hoped that separating him from his friends would help him focus on the work he needed to do.

  With each fugitive she carried downtown, Mary felt as if she were sending something of herself into the world. She understood that there were dozens of others like her in the chain of barns and chicken shacks where each fugitive had sheltered, and in that, she felt some kinship, some belonging. She wished there was some way she could send word back to each hand that had helped and let them know that they had
been delivered, that their risks had not been in vain.

  But she could not, of course. She could know the previous stop, and the next, but nothing more.

  The fugitives themselves were almost too much for her. They were suspicious of everything and everyone. The fear of their master back home and the pursuing hunters ran so deep in them that she struggled to fathom where they mustered the strength to run at all.

  Whenever she asked them about their trip, they would say as little as they could, instinctively protecting their protectors. As the same caution worked in her favor, she knew she should be grateful, but she longed to know more.

  She could not deny that she enjoyed the secrecy of it all, though. She found herself making excuses to go to the crossroads just so she could smirk at the farmers that glared back at her. Part of her wished that she could tell them what she had been doing, though she knew she never could.

  She was thinking about walking into town for the mail when she found the body sprawled on the dirt floor of the barn. She put down the milking pails and rolled the body onto its back. The man grunted and she thought, Doctor, not gravedigger.

  The man’s skin, the color of squall clouds, hung loose on him, and the stubble of beard was matted with flecks of leaf mold. She covered him with a horse blanket and went back to the house.

  Leander’s room was still cold from the night, and he groaned when Mary pulled the blankets off his bed.

  “What did I ever do to you to deserve such abuse?” he moaned.

  “I need you to take the buggy to Alden and get Doc Pride,” Mary said.

  He looked at her with a bloodshot eye, and turned his head toward the wall.

  “Have something to eat,” he mumbled. “You’ll feel better by the afternoon.”

  “There’s a runaway in the barn, nearly dead,” she said.

  He pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his face with his hands.

  “You want Doc Pride to know about your business?”

  She pursed her lips.

  “He’s going to die without help.”

  Leander stood and reached for the clothes he’d thrown to the floor the night before.