by Daren Wang
“This is none of your business. Get in the house and get yourself cleaned up so we can leave before Father sees you and all this starts again,” Mary said, jutting her chin in defiance.
“It is my business,” Leander said. “If I am supposed to rot away on this farm, I at least get to say what goes on here. This is my farm.”
“How dare you?” Mary snapped. “You’ve done nothing to deserve this place and last night you made it clear that it means nothing to you.”
“Exactly.” Leander spat. “But I guess I have to be here anyway.”
Charles stepped between the two of them.
“Enough,” he said. “Let’s just get Joe downtown safe and sound, and then we can work this out.”
“Don’t get in the middle of family business, Charlie,” Leander said. He stood to the side and took another long draft from the bottle. “Let’s go before my father gets back from his walk. The last thing I need this morning is to listen to him.”
Mary climbed back onto the wagon.
“Don’t worry about any of this,” she said, looking down at Joe. She offered him her hand and he held it for a moment before she and Charles stretched a stained canvas tarp over the barrels, hiding him from the world.
Mary drove the wagon out of the barn and Charles closed the barn door and climbed onto the bench next to her. Leander climbed onto one of the barrels, sulking.
They got as far as the top of the drive when Harry Strauss, Dwight Kidder, and Karl Wilhelm trotted over from across the highway and forced Mary to brake the wagon hard. Kidder held the reins of a fourth horse, saddled but without a rider. Wilhelm’s hand rested across his pommel, gripping a cocked pistol. The riders closed around the wagon. Kidder sidled his horse up next to Mary, and Strauss trotted Pastor Zubrich’s old swayback over to sit next to Charles. Wilhelm stayed back, cutting off their exit.
“Me and Hans had us a time last night at the Corner House. Where the hell were you?” Leander asked Harry, then turned to Wilhelm. “And what the hell is your wife putting in that rotgut? She nearly killed me with that shit last night.”
“This ain’t a joke,” Wilhelm said, glaring at him.
Harry shook his head, a grim look on his face.
“Who’s that?” Leander asked, nodding toward Kidder. His face froze when he saw the badge pinned on his coat.
“You bought a marshal out here?” he asked his friend. “What the hell?”
“Enough is enough,” Kidder said. “Hand the fugitive over. I’m not leaving without him.”
“Again?” Mary cried. “This is absurd. I will file a complaint. Who is your superior? I am on my way downtown right now and I will pay him a visit. You can’t continue to rampage through this farm whenever you feel the urge.”
“You’re not going anywhere today unless it’s in chains,” Kidder wheezed, shifting on the draft horse. “I’ll not be made a fool of again, as you did when you trotted me through the house, or on that day many years ago, playing the Southern belle down at the train station.”
She twisted the reins in her fists until the leather carved white furrows in her hands.
“You thought I wouldn’t remember?” he asked. “But it all comes back, sooner or later. Bring me the fugitive now, and I might go easy on you and not haul you off to jail.”
“Oh, you’ll take her in,” Wilhelm said. “Or you won’t see a penny of the bounty.”
“Where is he?” the marshal asked.
“You’ve been through this farm top to bottom,” Mary said, her chin up. “There’s no fugitive here.”
“I seen him here yesterday,” Strauss said. “You with that nigger back at the sugaring fire, laughing and carrying on like a couple of sweethearts.”
“Harry, what the hell are you doing?” Leander asked.
“He’s the same one killed my dog, and near killed old Wilhelm here. And them two just carrying on.” Harry spat. “If I had a gun with me, I’da just kilt him right then and there and hauled the body in for my reward.”
“That wouldn’t have been any fun,” Wilhelm said.
“Leander, why don’t you say where he’s at?” Strauss asked. “You ain’t mixed up in all this.”
“You brought a marshal out here?” Leander repeated.
“Shut up, Leander,” Mary said. “You’re still drunk.”
She turned to Kidder.
“He’s not here.”
Kidder’s fat hand darted out and snatched Mary’s wrist. She yelped and tried to pull back, but his grip held. He pulled a pair of shackles from a saddlebag and slipped one onto her forearm.
“Stop this!” Charles protested, lunging across Mary’s lap, grappling to free her from the metal.
“Charlie, sit your farmer ass down,” Wilhelm shouted.
Webster turned to see the pistol aimed between his eyes, and Wilhelm’s scarred face grinning at him over the barrel.
In all the years she’d known him, Mary had never seen Charlie angry, but as he sat back onto the wagon bench streaks of white struck along the lines of his reddening face and his eyes bulged. With her free hand, she reached for his but found an unrelenting, balled fist.
“I’m taking someone downtown today,” Kidder said evenly. “The slave or the runner. You can decide on which.”
“I’ve done this to myself, Charles,” Mary whispered to him. “Just stay calm and don’t get yourself mixed up in it.”
There was no change in the rictus of anger as his glared shifted from Wilhelm to Harry and back.
“You’re coming with me,” Kidder said, pulling on the shackle. “I’ve wasted enough time. I’ve got a witness, and that’ll be enough to get you locked up.”
The shackle had been sized for a man and Mary wondered if she could slip out of it, but knew the attempt would be pointless. She felt like she might be sick.
“Mount up,” he snarled, jerking her toward the riderless paint horse. “Cooperate and I’ll take this chain off you and you won’t have to ride the whole way like a criminal. If you give me trouble, I’ll put it right back.”
Her mind raced as she climbed down from the wagon. She looked for a way to signal Charles to get Joe to the church after the marshal had taken her away. Without the fugitive, the marshal would have nothing more than Harry’s testimony to convict her, and surely between her brother and her father, they could convince him to back off. Kidder jerked the cuff again.
“Move,” he growled.
“What the hell, Harry?” Leander slurred. “Look at all this shit. You didn’t need a damned marshal. I was down at Wilhelm’s all night. You should have just come to me. I could have fixed this.”
“Shut your mouth,” Mary snapped at her brother.
“My goddamned head is pounding like the inside of Urshel’s blacksmith shop,” Leander said. “If you don’t cooperate, they’ll send you to jail. Just get this over with. Just give them the damned slave.”
“There is no slave,” Mary said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, just get this over with,” Leander said, then turned to the marshal. “If I give you the runaway, everyone else goes free? That’s the deal?”
“That’s the deal.” Kidder nodded.
“Leander…” Mary growled, but Kidder yanked hard on the shackle and the iron bit into the meat of her twisted hand, drawing blood.
His hands trembling from the effects of the brain tonic and his eyes glazed with the pain of the night’s whiskey, Leander climbed from his perch and steadied himself with a hand on the wagon. Mary could see a trace of vomit still on the stubble of his chin.
“He was under your nose the whole time,” Leander said as he untied the tarp. When he came around to loosen the bindings near her, Mary kicked his shin hard and he fell to his knees. The riders laughed as her brother scowled at her.
“Judas.” She spat as he climbed to his feet, his trousers dripping with mud.
He pulled the tarp off the line of barrels, and there was a long pause before Joe raised himself up to stand ab
ove them on the bed of the wagon, his face pained in the morning light as he stared down at them wordlessly.
Kidder dug another pair of manacles from his saddlebag and tossed them on the ground.
“Now get down from there, boy, and put those on,” he said.
Joe didn’t move.
Kidder yanked on Mary’s shackle again and she winced.
“I’ll make it harder on her if you give me trouble,” he said.
Joe said nothing, but climbed down from the wagon and picked up the manacles from the mud. Mary sobbed as he slipped them onto his wrists.
“Now let her go,” Leander said to the marshal.
Kidder grinned, but held the loop of manacle tight.
“What kind of peace officer would I be if I ignored this scofflaw’s flagrant disregard of the Fugitive Slave Act?” he asked. “It is my duty to bring both of them downtown. And if you don’t behave, I’ll take you, too.”
“Time to haul off all them Willises,” Wilhelm cackled.
“There was a deal,” Leander said, looking like he’d been punched. “We had a deal.”
“You made a fool of me twice,” the marshal said to Mary, yanking on the shackle again. “Now it’s my turn.”
“You son of a bitch,” Mary shouted as she beat her free fist against the marshal’s fat thigh.
“Stop,” Joe shouted. She looked up to see him staring at her.
His lips pulled into something like a resigned smile even as his eyes welled.
“Just let me go,” he said, shaking his head.
He turned to mount the horse, but fell in the mud as his peg slipped out from under him.
“Oh my.” Wilhelm laughed.
“Help him up,” the marshal said to Strauss.
“No you don’t,” Wilhelm said, waving the pistol loosely with one hand as he made a show of wiping a tear from his eye. “I’m enjoying this.”
“Enough.” Nathan’s voice boomed as he walked slowly up the driveway, his shotgun level at his waist.
“Take the fugitive if you must,” he said. “We’ll deal with that in the courts.”
He thumbed back the hammer on the weapon.
“But you’ll not have my daughter,” he hissed.
He stopped short of the wagon, his feet rooted in the spring mud as he pointed the shotgun at the marshal.
“Leander, help that man,” he said, nodding toward Joe.
Before Leander could move toward the kneeling fugitive, a shot rent the morning, sending a flock of ravens screeching from the high branches of the poplars.
Nathan swayed, redness erupting at his right temple. Paralysis overtook Mary, even as she felt the world shifting under her feet. Only the shaking of the ground as he toppled, as if a tree had been felled, released her to move. Screams filled her ears and it was long seconds before she realized they were hers.
Another sound echoed into the morning, this time the familiar pop of her own pistol. She jerked around to see Karl Wilhelm with a ruby bloom at his chest and followed his glare to the wagon bench, where Charles sat, her pistol still leveled. Wilhelm tried to raise his own gun, but Charles fired again, and a rough black hole appeared in the innkeeper’s right cheek.
He slumped and fell from his horse, his boot and spur twisting in the stirrup. The horse whinnied and jolted forward at the strange motion, dragging the fallen, facedown body through the mud.
She nearly wrenched her arm from its socket pulling her right hand free from the oversized shackle, and in his surprise, the marshal let go of it altogether. She rushed to her father, knelt over him, and rolled him onto his back. He blinked at her, one eye rolling crazily, the other focused on her face. His lips moved, but no sound came. She cradled his bleeding head in her lap.
“He’s still alive,” she cried. “Help me, he’s still alive.”
Charles, holding the pistol on Kidder, climbed down from the wagon. Harry Strauss held his hands over his head in surrender, but no one paid him any mind.
Paralyzed in horror, Leander stood next to where Joe knelt in the mud, his face buried in his shackled hands.
“Leander! Get him in the wagon, get him to Pride’s,” Charles ordered.
Leander jerked forward and knelt down to take his father by the legs while Mary raised him by the arms. They struggled to raise him over the sugar barrels and lower him into the hollow where Joe had hidden just minutes before.
“Get these barrels off, they’ll slow it down,” Leander said, but Mary ignored him and climbed onto the bench and took up the reins. He started to pull himself onto the wagon next to his sister.
She snapped the buggy whip across his knuckles and he pulled his hands back.
“I’ll kill you if you come near him again,” she screeched then whipped the mule into motion. “I’ll kill you.”
Strauss moved the horse and corpse out of the way and Mary pulled the wagon onto the highway.
Her father moaned in pain behind her, giving her hope as she lashed at the laboring mule.
The ride to Alden took a lifetime. A crowd of people gathered on Main Street and she drove into their midst shouting, the rattling wheels spattering mud onto their finery. Mothers shooed their children onto the wood plank sidewalks and men shouted at her to slow down, but she continued to flay the animal, its flanks a map of striae bleeding red through white lather.
Mary called out the doctor’s name as the mule collapsed onto its knees in his yard. Pride rushed from his office, pulling the hooks of his spectacles around his ears and shouting questions at her. He climbed over the barrels and onto the wagon, gasping as he knelt over his now-unconscious friend.
Mary winced as the doctor prodded the wound with his fingers. Her father did not react.
“I have to trepan,” he said, his voice quivering.
They carried the limp body into the office and lay him on a long wooden table.
She could see the tremor in the doctor’s hand as he gave her a dropper bottle and an oddly shaped glass, something like a misshapen open-ended hourglass with a cotton rag filling one cup.
“Ether,” he said. “If he stirs, you’ll have to sedate him. Just a few drops at a time.”
Pride said little as the procedure went along, nudging her to apply the liquid to the mask or asking for help holding her father’s head still.
He cut into Nathan’s skull with a cylindrical saw the size of a pocket knife. Each twist sent a vibration through the bone and into her hands, rattling the shackle.
Mary had taken the slaughtering knife to every kind of animal to be found in those parts without flinching, but the room shifted and spun as she watched Pride work. She caught whiffs of the drug and lost track of time, and had to brace herself against the table to stay upright.
Sometimes the circular blade would jerk and Pride would swear under his breath. He paused a few times to examine his progress and to brush bits from the blade with a stiff-haired brush. He exhaled raggedly when he plucked the dull gray lump from her father’s brain and dropped it into the spittoon at his feet.
He paused a long moment, trying to still his trembling hands before proceeding.
He left the hole in the skull open, but sewed the flaps before laying a bandage lightly over the hole and putting the needle down.
“I’ll have to drain the suppuration over the next few days,” he said. “If all goes well, we can close it then. In the meantime, we pray.”
He stood still for a moment, his hands on the table on either side of Nathan’s head and his eyes closed. Mary lay her head on her father’s chest, taking comfort in the sound of his heart.
“You can come in now,” Pride said, opening his eyes and pitching his voice toward the door. Mary had not realized there was anyone there, but Charles Webster, his face a skein of worry, came in and went straight to Mary, enfolding her in his arms.
“The ball had not gone very deep and that is good news indeed,” Pride said. “He’s a strong old man, but we have to watch for swelling.”
Mary buried her face in Charles’s chest, and he held her tight. The doctor turned and started to wipe his instruments with a rag.
Charles took a key from his pocket and released her left hand from the shackle.
“I have to go away,” he whispered.
She looked at him, trying to understand what he was saying. Everything outside the room had fallen from her thoughts, but now came back to her in a rush. She kissed his cheek, and fought her tears. After a moment, she stepped back and straightened her blood-smeared coat with a tug.
“Kidder took Joe,” Charles said, and she nodded. “I don’t think he has much heart to bother you.”
He moved to the table where Nathan lay and took his limp hand and held it silently.
Pride cleared his throat.
“It’s a barbarous day, but I fear there is more to come,” he said.
“More? What more could there be?” she snapped at him.
He looked at her, confused.
“You don’t know?” He ran his hands through his hair. “Of course, how could you?”
“What else is there?” she demanded, tearing up from exhaustion and worry. “What else?”
He lay a hand on her shoulder, but she couldn’t tell if it was in sympathy or to steady himself.
“Sumter has fallen,” he whispered. “We are at war.”
BELLUM
Joe knelt in the slush and mud, flinching with each snap of the whip, listening to the wagon roll away. He had not looked up at Mary as she had passed. He couldn’t bear to see the pain in her face, knowing he was the cause of it.
Only after the wagon’s rattle faded did he raise his eyes to see Kidder, Strauss, and Webster still staring east. Leander stared down at the bloody patch of mud where his father had fallen.
Charles Webster stepped between Harry and Wilhelm’s body and dug Wilhelm’s pistol out of the mud and shoved it into his coat pocket.
“You better get,” he said to Leander. “There’s no telling what she’ll do if you are here when she comes back.”
“I need to fix this,” Leander said, his eyes a glaze of stunned dismay. “I can help make this right.”
Charles stared down at Wilhelm’s corpse.
