by Daren Wang
“Just leave,” he muttered. “Take Wilhelm’s horse. Go.”
Leander scanned the faces around him, and Harry nodded at him to go.
“I’m going to make this right,” Leander said as he mounted the stallion.
“I killed a man,” Charlie said as Leander turned the horse toward Alden. “Nothing’s going to be right again.”
“Get the nigger on that horse,” Kidder said.
“No,” Webster said. “Joe’s going free.”
Harry Strauss spat at Webster’s feet.
“Fuck! He’s the one that caused all of this,” he said. “He killed old Jep. I’ll beat him to death right here before I see him go free.”
Webster waved the pistol at him.
“You might’ve done in Wilhelm, and I’m the first to say he had it coming,” Harry said. “But I’ve known you all my life, and you ain’t no killer. You’re not gonna shoot me.”
Webster cocked the pistol, but he couldn’t raise his eyes to meet Harry’s.
“No more blood,” Joe croaked. “No more. I’ll go.”
Charles looked at him with something like gratitude and helped him to his feet.
Joe grasped at the saddle, but the manacles bit into his wrists and weighed his arms down, and he slipped off as he tried to swing his peg leg over the animal. Charles caught him before he hit the ground and helped him up.
He nodded up at Joe after he mounted then he turned back to the marshal.
“You give her any trouble and I’ll hunt you down,” Charlie said. “She’s got the weight of the world on her already.”
“You should be more worried about yourself,” Kidder said. “I’m going to see you hang.”
“Then I’ve got nothing to lose,” Webster said. “You just stay away from her. I grew up in these woods and that’s where I’m heading. You won’t see me coming, but I’ll be there.”
“Big talk,” the marshal said.
“Charlie Webster’s never been a boastful man,” Harry said. “If I were you, Marshal, I’d stay out of Town Line the rest of my days.”
Kidder tied a lead to Joe’s horse.
“I got everything I could possibly want from this shithole,” he said, and turned the horses west toward Buffalo.
The iron manacles hung heavy on Joe’s arms. He tried resting them on the saddle, but it made no difference.
“What the hell am I going to do with you?” the marshal muttered as they rode.
Joe stared down at his shackled hands, saying nothing, the sound of the gunshots and Mary’s screams still ringing in his ears.
He closed his eyes, listening to the clop of the hooves on the mud.
“Is there anyone stupid enough to offer a reward for a one-legged nigger?” the marshal asked. “You always been one-legged? I guess not, if you were running all over the woods like that. There’s probably someone offering money for you. I’ll have me a look through the papers and the notices when we get back downtown.”
Closer to the city, the streets were flooded with people, some waving flags, others firing their guns in the air. The marshal continued to talk to himself for the rest of the trip, tallying expenses, spending money he didn’t have, ignoring the questions children asked as they pointed to the one-legged negro in chains.
At the jail, Kidder yanked him out of the saddle and let him slam onto the ground.
“Don’t you get any ideas about taking matters into your own hands. I doubt I can get two bits for a dead one-legged nigger, no matter what you did when you was whole.”
* * *
Mary’s father made a croaking noise that sounded like her name, and she scrambled up from the slipper chair where she drowsed. She went to him, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead, relieved at its coolness.
“Frances?” he asked, saying her mother’s name.
“We’re at Pride’s,” she offered. He murmured something in a tongue she could not understand and drifted off again. He hadn’t opened his eyes or recognized her voice in the day and the night they’d been there.
She wiped his slack face with a damp cloth, relieved to see it had lost the clenched tightness of the long night. She sat back in the chair, and drowsed in the warmth of the potbellied stove.
She woke to see Pride standing over her father, checking the dressing.
Nathan shouted something in the same strange language.
“Haudenosaunee,” Pride said to her. “He’s talking with our old friend Jo-no-es-sto-wa. He’s been gone nearly forty years.”
“Get me my horse,” Nathan demanded in English.
“Hasn’t lost any of his piss and vinegar,” Mary said. “Is he in pain?”
Pride frowned, but shook his head.
“Go home,” Pride said. “He needs the quiet and the dark, and having a visitor will only work him up, arouse him when he should rest.”
“Visitors?” Nathan echoed. “There are scores coming, Frances. Those red-coated bastards have burned Black Rock to the ground. Buffalo is nearly gone. Anyone left alive is heading this way. We’ll have a barn full and more. They’ll eat us out of everything we’ve stored up.”
He fell quiet.
“Is his mind gone?” she asked, her voice quivering.
“Mount a guard on the highway, Jack,” he said, his voice rising to a shout. “Chief Parker is watching the creek. The goddamned redcoats can’t be far now. I’ll die before I see them on this farm.”
“Father,” Mary said. “It’s 1861. We beat the British fifty years ago.”
“Of course we beat them, Frances,” Nathan grumbled.
Nathan’s eyes opened, and she was grateful to see that they could at least focus on her. She tried to smile for him.
“You do more harm than good here,” Pride whispered to her.
“I won’t leave him,” she said, laying her head on his chest. She closed her eyes and felt the doctor’s hand on her back.
“He must rest,” Pride said. “You should say your good-byes.”
She breathed deep, still able to smell the soap on him. Finally, she stood.
“Good-byes?” Mary asked looking at her father.
“The worst is still ahead,” Pride said.
Mary nodded.
“Come back to me,” she said, and bent to kiss her father’s forehead.
“Watch for the scouts,” he shouted, twisting in the bed. “I already got a lobsterback down by the mill this morning.”
She nodded silently, pursed her lips, and slipped out the door.
The mule had been hauled to the knacker’s overnight, and Charles had seen to having the wagon taken back to the farm.
A crowd had gathered in the center of Alden and Mary could see Lafayette Glass standing on the bandstand, proclaiming his intention to enlist. The widow Slade passed her on the sidewalk, running her eyes up and down Mary’s clothes and shaking her head. Mary realized she was still covered in dirt and blood, and turned off the road to walk the rail line instead. At the farm, she went through the barn to check on the animals. Katia trailed her, pointing out the chores she had been forced to do while everyone was gone.
“I made the cabin ready for the new hands,” she said. “Mr. Nathan said they would come soon. It is good they come. Soon Mr. Nathan will come home and everything will be proper again. This black man. So much trouble. So much trouble.”
Mary gritted her teeth.
The thought of the work of the planting overwhelmed her. Even with her father’s authority to back her, it had been a struggle to get the previous year’s itinerants to mind her. She doubted she had it in her to fight that battle again.
“Everything will be good again now that the black man is gone,” Katia said.
Mary wanted to cuff her across the face.
“I’m going to take the syrup downtown,” she said, looking for any reason to be away from the girl. “There won’t be time once the workers get here.”
She changed her clothes, and drove over the bloody patches in the yard, esc
aping onto the highway heading west.
In contrast to the crowds of Alden, the Town Line crossroads sat gray and silent, the houses plain and shut to the street.
“Kratzbürste!” A thick-accented old lady shouted from her doorway. It was an old German insult she’d heard muttered more than once before behind her back. “You dare show your face? You sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. This is your fault.”
A rock banged off the side of the wagon.
She did not disagree with the old woman’s condemnation.
She pushed the old draft horse to an awkward canter for the short length of the little hamlet, watching the Zubrich house, hoping to see Hans’s kind face, fearing the pastor would come out and make a scene.
The door stayed shut.
The next town was Lancaster and its opinions were less monochromatic. The declaration of war had brought everybody out, and the street was clogged with boys and men streaming toward the city, some on foot, some in wagons. American flags hung from many of the porches, but copperheads stood on the corners and heckled passersby. “We have no right to make war on these, our brothers,” one man shouted from a wheelchair on his porch, shaking his fist at the passing wagons. “Death to the tyrant.”
She was grateful to be unknown there. Just days before she would have turned and shouted at the man, welcoming a foil for her argued cause.
She had dreamt for so long of a righteous war to free the enslaved, but now that it was here, the realness of it made her sick. Visions of her father flailing in the doctor’s bed came to her and she couldn’t help but think of him as the first casualty of the war, and she thought of the pain that would come to so many more. She had been prepared to spend herself completely in this cause, but had never thought that it would be those around her that would suffer the most. She was ashamed that she hadn’t considered the real cost.
Closer to the city, there were fewer copperheads, and the Unionists dominated the streets. She found herself a glum addition to an ad hoc parade of flag-waving wagons and carriages filled with men singing “John Brown’s Body” or “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ladies in red and blue scarves cheered them on from the plank sidewalk.
A pretty little negro girl in a white dress with a white hat stood alone on a corner, smiling and waving. Mary smiled back, but looked twice when she counted six fingers on each of the waving hands. She wondered if her exhaustion had ruined her eyes.
In Cheektowaga a cluster of abolitionist matrons uniformed in black dresses and gray hair buns handed out flags to people at the toll gate. She knew a few of their faces from meetings but kept her eyes down and passed without a word.
Farther along, the rumble of nearby trains became constant and coal dust filmed everything in sight. She passed a cluster of four-story buildings and the train yard expanded before her, locomotives and cars spread across the horizon. Clouds of smoke and steam hung low in the hazy sky.
After Depew, wagons clogged the road, slowing progress and the trip stretched longer than Mary had expected. In the city, she had to stop often as thickets of people spilled off the sidewalk and into the streets. The shadows grew long.
A crowd of boys with turkey muskets attempting a soldierly formation brought her to a stop at Genesee Street as they shouted threats to the lives of Jefferson Davis and his kin. She turned to her left to see the redbrick jail and stared at its black windows a long time, imagining Joe locked somewhere in its labyrinth. The driver behind her shouted her out of her reverie and she flicked the whip, moving old Timber forward.
It was nearing dark when she pulled into the market warehouse by the canal.
“Miss Willis,” an old man in a vest and spectacles greeted her. “I’m surprised to see you on a such a day.”
“The world goes on,” she said.
He climbed onto the wagon, unstoppered one of the barrels, and filled a glass tube. He held it up to a lamp, then downed the little vial of syrup.
“A good amber,” he said. “As always.”
In past years, she and the clerk had bargained over the price passionately, and there had been few things she enjoyed more than squeezing the last penny out of their dealings, but this time she accepted his insulting offer without comment. He seemed disappointed.
“I have neither the time nor the energy to drive back to the farm today,” she said. “Can you board my animal for the night?”
She took her money and went back out on the street.
There were crowds on every corner, and the noise frayed her nerves. She would spend the night at the American Hotel, but before she ran the inevitable gauntlet of her father’s friends in its lobby, she wanted nothing more than a place to sit and gather her thoughts. She thought of the little church where just the morning before she’d intended to deliver Joe for the last stage of his trip to freedom.
She moved through the crowds faster on foot, and made her way to Michigan Street just as the lamplighters were passing through.
Most of the modest little houses around the church were empty and dark, but color blazed from the stained-glass windows of the squat little church.
A handful of men standing outside the entrance stared at her as she pushed past them and into the crowded sanctuary.
A white-haired black man stood at the pulpit, his hand raised in the air, his voice filling the crowded room.
“This is not progress,” he shouted. “This is more of the same. We pay their taxes, yet we have no representation. Was that not their reason for their rebellion eighty-five years ago?”
A murmur rolled through the room.
“And now, we are deemed worthy of dying in their cane fields, but are unfit to bear arms on their battlefields. Yes, we know the South fights to preserve their ‘peculiar institution,’” he spat the words, “but what do our white friends here in the North fight for?”
Another murmur.
“They say it is to preserve the Union.” His voice rose. “But it is their Union, not ours. They are telling us we have no part to play. They tell us that we should leave, should go to Haiti or to Liberia, as if those places mean anything to us.”
She surveyed the room—the front pews were occupied by black men in fine suits and their families, the ladies perfectly coiffed and the children miniatures of their parents, but those in the rear pews looked as if they’d come from a day’s labor. Mary had been to many an abolition meeting, and had even seen Frederick Douglass once in Rochester, but she’d never been the only white face in a room of negroes.
Father Thomas, with his shock of white hair and his labor-warped back, greeted her.
“Miss Willis,” he said, surprise in his eyes. “What brings you down here tonight?”
“I needed a place to be alone,” she said.
“This is the wrong place for that.” He chuckled. “Some neighborhood leaders are using the church for a … uh … private meeting this evening.”
He cupped her elbow and led her down the stairs to a cluttered, tiny room with a crowded desk piled high with papers and books.
“This is my office. You can stay here as long as you’d like,” he said, lifting a worn Bible from a stack of books and placing it in front of her with a grin. “Here’s something to read.”
She smiled, and he started to leave.
“Do you think it will make a difference?” she asked.
“The war?” he asked, and she nodded.
“In some ways,” the priest said. “But even if the Union wins, defeat will only harden the hearts of the slavers. That is the real war, and this is only the beginning of it.”
“My father was shot yesterday,” she said. “He was delirious when the doctor sent me away this morning. It was a slave hunter that pulled the trigger, and that man is dead now. My friend killed him. There’s still blood in my barnyard.”
He sat and put his arm around her.
“You, like us, have been fighting this war for years,” he whispered.
“It is too much.” She swiped fiercely at
her tears. “I cannot bear the cost.”
“My poor dear,” he said.
She began to sob. She could feel the loss of everyone she loved coming down on her, feel it overwhelming her. The comfort of the priest had cracked something in her. Just as she felt her self-control slipping away, she straightened her back, pushed his hand away.
“No,” she said, twisting her face into an angry knot. “I will not allow myself to become some weeping, weakling of a lady.”
She stood.
“I will not.”
He looked up, confused.
“Father,” she said, “thank you for your kindness.”
She climbed the stairs, left the church, and started the long walk to the American Hotel. She could not remember when she had last eaten, or really slept. She shook herself, trying to clear her trance of grief, exhaustion, and hunger.
Booming gunfire, wisps of music, and shouting voices echoed off the buildings around her, blending with the remembered sounds of her father’s ranting. Men and boys jostled past her on the sidewalk. She came into Ellicott Square, expecting an empty plaza in dimming evening light, but instead there was a throng with torches and lanterns held high overhead.
Carpenters still banged on the supports of a stage even as a stout old man stomped its broad planks, exhorting the young men in the crowd to take up arms to save the Union. The structure wobbled under him. The count of stars on many of the flags waving in the crowd dated them to decades long past. Young men gripping hunting muskets formed ersatz companies around the edges of the square like seedpods clustering on a creek bank.
Mary pushed her way into the crowd, heading across the way to the hotel. Hawkers were everywhere, and the smell of the food made her stomach rumble. An Irishman in a greasy porkpie hat sold her fried perch and potatoes wrapped in a cone rolled from The Express.
Cannons had been dragged up from the waterfront, and after each speaker they were fired, echoing into the night as the smoky haze settled onto the crowd.
She felt as if the world around her was falling under a fever that had broken for her the moment her father crumpled to the ground.
Men crowded the platform behind the speaker, and she saw many that she recognized as friends of her father. She wanted to climb onto the stage and tell them that even now as they bravely called for others to march into harm’s way, he was raving at death’s door.
