The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

  He’d been kneeling in the sun, focusing his father’s magnifying glass on an ant when she called him to follow her into the paneled study. She went and sat in her chair in the corner while he stood in front of his father’s carved desk, and listened as his father berated him for something.

  When his father finally fell silent, he was sure he could hear her giggling behind him. He spun around, but her face was buried in a book.

  He could not stand the idea of her laughing, though, and he flew across the room and knocked her to the floor.

  He slapped her only once before his father pulled him off. Then it was his turn to be hit, and not just once, and not simply a slap.

  “Never touch her,” his father screamed over and over.

  When the beating finally stopped, Yates rolled over. Behind his father, he could see those different-colored eyes staring down at him. She had covered her mouth with her hands, but he was sure she was laughing behind them.

  And he felt like she had been laughing at him ever since. He was sure that whenever he needed to whip a lesson into someone, that Alaura would go tell that darkie afterward of how she saw him beaten, and how she got to laugh at him. And whichever one got whipped, he would laugh at Yates, too.

  He sucked cold Virginia air into his lungs. Whatever his father wanted, he was sure it wouldn’t be a pleasant conversation. It had always been this way with his father.

  He felt his stomach churning like a little boy’s as he trod the long Oriental carpet of the hallway that led to the paneled office. Nothing Yates had ever done was good enough for the old man, and his father had ceased trying to hide his disappointment long ago.

  For years, Yates had used the sprawl of the plantation to avoid his father, hiking and riding for days on end, camping in long-forgotten forests, often going weeks without encountering him. And if he rode far enough into the woods, he could forget that both his father and the niggers were nearby.

  He’d visited his mother in Ireland only once since she’d left, spending weeks with her in the fallen-down remnants of her family’s ancestral manor. The windows rattled in the cold wind and sheep wandered unbidden into the stone kitchen. He could never get her to even mention her husband’s name, much less explain the schism that ran through their family. He tried to convince her to come home, but she seemed content to sit by the peat fire and drink her tea with her feet swaddled in wool blankets, tended by a single housemaid. She had one luxury, an elaborate telescope she used to stare out into the dark, finding and naming stars late into the night.

  He was able to glean that her paltry upkeep was paid by his father, and that he controlled her as much as he could with the threat of further pauperization.

  Another thing he shared with her.

  The only part of the trip that brought him any solace was the crossing. He fell in love with the water then, and had decided when Walnut Grove was finally his, he would buy a boat on the Chesapeake where he could sail out of the harbor every fine day, leaving the niggers and cotton behind.

  His father was sitting behind his carved desk. He was a slight man, and Yates, at six foot two, felt like he was nearly double his in size. Nonetheless, his father ruled him still in a way that could not be explained by money or size.

  The desk’s broad top was piled high with books and papers, but the blotter in front of him was empty but for a folded newspaper and a stack of yellow envelopes from the telegraph office.

  “What’s this?” his father muttered, pushing the paper across the desktop.

  “CONFEDERATES FORM PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT.” Yates read the headline out loud, then blinked at his father, mystified.

  “Not the story,” his father said. “The advertisements, on the back.”

  Yates turned the paper in his hands, and there was the reward notice he’d posted days after Joe had attacked him and taken off. He’d even paid the extra dollar for the cartoon of a runaway with his swag on a stick over his shoulder.

  “Who told you to do that?” his father asked.

  Yates furrowed his brow.

  “I just figured,” Yates said. “How else are you going to catch him?”

  “Where’s this thousand-dollar reward coming from?” his father asked. “You don’t have it, I’m certain of that. Whatever I give you, you spend on whores and liquor.”

  His father stared at him as if he was expecting a denial, but Yates had been caught so off-guard by the reprisal that he didn’t see any point in denying what was true.

  “I’m sure as hell not paying,” his father growled.

  “You’re just going to let him get away?” Yates asked.

  “He wouldn’t have run if you hadn’t stolen his money,” his father hissed.

  “The nigger could have killed me,” Yates said, his fingers finding the scab again. “We’ve got to whip that son of a bitch until he’s nothing but a stain on the ground. You’ve got to show the others, or they’ll get ideas.”

  “You’re right about him being able to kill you.” His father sneered. “Did you ever even think about that? Him, standing there with that rock in his hand. You laid out on the ground. What’s going on in his head right then? He has to know he’s as good as dead anyway, right? No slave ever did anything like that and lived. So what’s he got to lose?”

  Yates’s father paused, waiting for a response, but Yates had nothing to say.

  “He could have mashed your skull to jelly, but he didn’t. That’s what you call mercy.”

  “You always have taken his side,” Yates said. “His sister’s, too. Now he’s nearly killed your own son, and you blame me for it. What the hell was he doing with that five hundred dollars anyway? Where’d he get that kind of money? If you were half as soft on me as you are on him, I wouldn’t have needed to steal from him.”

  “I wasn’t half as soft on him as I should have been,” his father said, grimacing as he bit his lower lip. “He’s the best sawyer in Virginia. When he wasn’t running our mill, there were a half-dozen others lined up to pay me for his services. He made me a lot of money. I paid him because you can’t whip someone and expect him to do that kind of work.”

  “I’m your own son. What do I have to do for five hundred dollars?” Yates muttered.

  “Can you run a sawmill?” his father asked, his eyes looking over his glasses. “Because I suddenly find myself with an opening.”

  “That’s nigger work,” Yates said.

  “And drinking and whoring is a white man’s?”

  Yates sat silently, his hands clenching into fists behind the chair’s back. He imagined ways to make his father suffer for the things he was saying.

  “So you are just letting him go?”

  “You said it yourself,” his father said. “He could have just about bought his own papers with the money he had. You stole it from him. The only right thing to do is let him go. By my figuring, I should be asking you to pay me for my lost sawyer.”

  “Even Mother hated him,” Yates hissed, gnawing at his fingernail.

  His father’s face flushed, and the muscles in his jaw writhed as he clenched his teeth.

  “Yes, she did, and she had her reasons,” his father muttered. “But she didn’t raise you to steal, not from a white man or a slave. You take his money, then you run this ad with the name of my plantation on it, obliging me to pay this bounty. I know you are waiting for the day they put me in the ground and you can do what you will with this place, but in the meantime, Walnut Grove is mine, this money is mine. It is not yours to spend.”

  Yates tried to muster all his hatred into the glare he sent his father’s way.

  His father looked back, a sadness taking over from the anger of a moment before.

  “These niggers as you call them, like everything else on Walnut Grove, they are my responsibility,” he said. “Like the house, the tools, the land, I must treat them well if I want them to work properly. I’ve seen you come back from a quail hunt and spend two hours cleaning your shotgun. We owe at least that kind o
f care to the slaves in the field.”

  “Is that what you’re doing with Alaura? Or are you taking care of her in some other way?”

  His father’s eyes blazed.

  “She’s my secretary,” his father said.

  “I’ll bet,” Yates said.

  “You’re not too old for me to beat,” his father snarled.

  Yates smiled, wishing the frail old man would try such a thing.

  “It seems that Joe’s been caught nine times in the last week,” his father said, pushing the pile of telegraphs across the desk. “Marion, Ohio. Springfield, Massachusetts. Even a place called Horseheads, New York. A thousand dollars is a lot of money, and there’s more than a few men that’ll produce something that looks like a runaway given that kind of incentive.”

  Yates stared at the stack of envelopes.

  “If one of these bounty hunters capture him,” his father said. “I’m going to send Joe his papers. Make him a free man.”

  “Damned if you will!” Yates yelped, jumping to his feet.

  His father stared at him until Yates slumped back into his chair.

  “He doesn’t deserve to be dragged back here in chains. And he sure as hell doesn’t deserve to die under your whip. In the meantime, I’ll have to honor the ad you placed. I’ll dock your allowance until I’ve recovered the thousand I’ll have to pay. You’ve shamed yourself in this, and you’ve shamed me. And if you interfere in any of it, any of my trying to make it right, you’ll never see another red cent of my money. And neither will your mother.”

  “Don’t you bring her into this,” Yates said, his hands gripping the arms of his chair.

  His father looked at him over his glasses.

  “What am I supposed to do for money?” Yates asked, his voice dripping with hatred.

  “Whatever grown men do,” his father replied. “Work. Sweat. Make a man of yourself.”

  Yates glared at him a long time before standing and leaving the room.

  He took dinner in his room that night, reading the last letter his mother had sent, now a month old.

  After the house girl had come for the tray, he wrote her back, the first time he’d done so in nearly a year. He apologized for not having gone to see her again, for leaving her alone in that cold place. He wrote many pages of the daily goings-on around the plantation, and how he’d wished his father had not driven her away. He wrote that he loved her, something he could not remember ever saying, though he was sure he had.

  By the time he finished, the winter night had fallen, and he sat at his desk listening to the big plantation house—the familiar sounds of the kitchen girls talking as they washed up, the houseboys clanging the brass ash buckets as they cleaned out the fireplaces, Old Walter going from window to window, closing the shutters against the cold of the night. One by one, he listened as the slaves left for their little shacks out past the barn. Then it was just the creak of the old building.

  It had always been his home, and he loved it. But he could not stay.

  In the quiet, he rose and packed a bag, then crept down the stairs, avoiding the creaking spots he knew so well. He went to his father’s office, opened the safe and took the purse of gold coins his father kept there, then took the stack of telegrams from his father’s desk.

  While the other slaves slept in run-down shanties downwind from the privies, Alaura had been gifted a pantry that had been converted into a tiny sleeping room so that she could be safe and warm in the house.

  Yates stood for a long time outside her door, remembering the layout of the tiny room, where the bed was, where her head would be. Finally, he drew out his knife and shouldered the door until the little hook that held it in place gave way. He fell into the room in a rush, landing on the bed. In an instant, he had his hand over her mouth and the knife at her throat.

  “Quiet,” he whispered.

  Even in the dark he could make out the fine bones of her face, the point of her delicate chin, and those eyes.

  “You make any noise,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “I’ll kill you and drain you like a stuck pig.”

  The dress she had worn earlier hung on a peg over the foot of her bed, and he pulled it down and shoved it at her.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Put this on,” he said. “Move.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then got to her feet and took the dress from him.

  “Will massuh turn his back?” she asked, sounding the slave for the first time in her life.

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  She cast her eyes down to the floor and pulled her sleeping shift over her head.

  The starlight that filtered through the tiny window was dim, but his breath came quicker as he took in the curve of her breasts. He held the knife tight, stopping himself from reaching out to touch her skin.

  She pulled the dress on quickly. Even as she glared at him, he felt pride in his restraint.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pointing the knife. “You remember, you ain’t so special. I can come back for another.”

  The hollowness of the lie sounded false even to him.

  At the stable he shoved her onto a stool.

  “It’s not too late,” she said calmly as he saddled his horse and loaded the saddlebags. “The old master doesn’t need to know about this. Just stop, and everything will go back the way it was.”

  “Shut your mouth,” he said. “I ain’t above gagging you.”

  He mounted, then pulled her up behind him, and rode out the stable doors, pausing to stare at the house before riding down the long drive to the road, turning west.

  “Harpers Ferry is to the east,” she said. “Where you taking me?”

  “There’s no fun in Harpers Ferry,” he said.

  It was less than three miles to Charles Town, but the night was cold and he could feel the tremble of her shivering hands on the cantle behind him. Her silence made him nervous, so he talked.

  “Harpers Ferry used to be a little fun, but ever since the zealot attacked two years ago, it’s like a convent over there. Watchmen on every corner, the taverns all closed.”

  “The zealot?” she asked.

  Yates spat.

  “Surely with all your book learning, you saw in the paper about John Brown and his raiders,” he said, contempt in his voice.

  “I’m not supposed to read the papers,” she said.

  Yates had seen her and her brother stealing papers out of the trash heap more than once, but was happy to continue.

  “He came down here, him and his band of Yankees,” he said. “He was sure he was going to be greeted as the savior by all the niggers. Brought a whole bunch of weapons, thinking you all were going to rise up and join him in a glorious fight. But he didn’t understand you all don’t have it in you to fight, that God intended the darkies to be slaves, and that’s the natural order of things. None of you rose up for him, but me and my friends, we sure did. Hundreds of us, we all rode into town and surrounded that son of a bitch where he was holed up in the armory. We waited him out for a couple days, let him stew in his juice a little bit. Then we all charged in. Those cowards, they folded like nothing, less than it takes to tell the story. I was hoping to kill the zealot myself, but I didn’t get the chance.

  “I was there when they hung him, though,” he said. “We all were. We’d been training the whole time the trial was going on, and we had uniforms and all by then, and they lined us all up pretty just in case some Yankees decided to try something.

  “They say you can’t hear the neck snap when you hang a man, but I swear I heard his. I surely did.”

  He turned in the saddle, and tried to smile back at her.

  “The thing I figured that day, they were only the first. There’s more coming. And now, this Lincoln character, he thinks he’s going to end the way we do things down here, but there’s always been slavery, and there always will. It’s God’s way, says so in the Bible. And no Illinois bumpkin is going to change that. Since you
don’t read the papers, you probably don’t know that we’ve already started our own country. Secession, all throughout the South. We’ll not have to answer to that fool, and if he tries to stop us, we’ll be ready the next time they come.”

  They were on the outskirts of the town, and music filtered through the cold night air.

  “That’s where they hung him,” he said, nodding. “John Brown, him and what was left of his followers.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  He raised his hand to point at the lawn of a grand house, but as he did Alaura moved quickly, her hands going from the cantle up to his throat. He caught sight of fabric in her hands, the white of her sleeping shift, and then suddenly it was wrapped around his neck.

  He tried to pull free, but she’d swung her feet up onto his back so that she was riding him as he rode the horse, the full weight of her pulling at his throat.

  “I read it was the Marines that went in,” she shouted, yanking harder. “That you cowards all held back, too afraid of that preacher man to go in yourself.”

  His head swam and he tore at the cloth but could not get his gloved fingers underneath. The horse whinnied under him, and he instinctively fought to stay in the saddle. Finally, the stallion kicked, throwing the two of them. Alaura pushed off him in midair, landing a few feet away from Yates. She climbed to her bare feet and started running. Yates, gasping for air, took after her.

  “Bitch,” he shouted, jumping her as she slipped in the light snow of the furrowed fields. His gloved hand took in a large swath of her kinky hair. “You’re nothing. If I killed you right here, no one would know or care.”

  She spat in his face and he yanked her hair so hard that she screamed.

  He raised his other hand to cuff her, but stopped his hand inches from her face.

  “Don’t make me damage the goods,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

  He dragged her through the field, reached into the saddlebag, and pulled out his pistol before yanking her to her feet. He grabbed the horse’s reins and shoved the gun in her back.

  “Walk,” he said. “Up front, where I can see you.”

  She stumbled, and he pulled back the hammer. She straightened up and moved forward.