The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

  Echols’s face clouded. He stood, waved his hand in dismissal at the preacher, and picked his way through the crowded room to the door.

  Zubrich waited for him to leave.

  “Honest Abe says to those people, ‘No, you cannot go,’” he continued. “Then he comes and asks for your sons to fight to keep these states under his power. Most say no, but some say yes. Where’s Olaf Simke? Olaf?”

  Simke stepped forward from the back wall. He was sweating in the warmth, and had his coat over his one arm and an empty whiskey glass in his hand.

  “Olaf, where’s your beautiful son, Christian? Where is Christian Simke?”

  “Er ist tot. Dead.”

  “I’m so sorry,” the preacher said, his voice all compassion. “Let us have a moment of prayer for Christian Simke.”

  He hung his head, and the farmers followed suit.

  “And where? Wo?”

  “Virginia. Bull Run.”

  “Bull Run!” Zubrich exploded. “A thousand miles away. They marched Christian Simke a thousand miles away to die! Did you see the pictures of this battle in the papers this summer? I could not believe it. Here they are—look at them.”

  He took up a ragged copy of Harper’s magazine and held it aloft.

  “Rich people from Washington City had picnics,” he said. “They brought their families and had fried chicken and Riesling in fancy glasses and watched this battle, watched and drank wine while Christian Simke died.”

  He handed the magazine to a man in the front row.

  “See for yourself,” he grumbled.

  Harry watched as the men looked at the magazine and passed it, each one getting angrier than the last at the months-old engravings.

  “And now Vaness and Lafayette and Sylvester,” he said, then paused, choking on his words.

  “And now, Hans,” he said, his voice cracking. “My dear boy, gone to God’s glory.”

  Compson moved to support the preacher, but Zubrich pushed him away. Instead, he hung his head and prayed again.

  “Through his life here in Town Line, Hans had only one friend he could count on. One boy who was always a good friend. Harry, come up here,” he said, and motioned for Harry to join him.

  Harry looked around, uncomfortable at being called to the front. The farmers all watched him and their eyes were filled with sadness.

  Zubrich put his arm around him.

  “Harry, here. He is a good boy. He lost all his friends, but when the news came, who is it that took care of me and my poor wife? Every day it is Harry taking care of us. A good boy.”

  The farmers nodded.

  “Everybody knows, Hans and Harry never went anywhere without each other, at least not until this war. To this, Hans has to go. I told him no, but he has to go. And you, Harry, you told him not to go, yes?”

  “Long before things started, I always said only a fool would go,” Harry said. “But he didn’t pay no attention to me.”

  “He didn’t listen to his father or his best friend. But who did he listen to? Who convinced him to go off to this war? Who is responsible for getting him killed?”

  Zubrich scanned the crowd, as if he expected someone to answer. Finally, Harry spoke up.

  “Leander Willis went through town and got all the boys to sign up.”

  The farmers rumbled their disapproval.

  “And where is Leander Willis today?” the preacher asked.

  “I hear he went to New York, though he don’t dare write to me,” Harry said. “Last I heard he was living it up in the big city with a fancy girl.”

  The murmur turned to anger as Harry left the lectern and sat down behind the preacher.

  “Leander Willis sat in my parlor and told my boy they would fight together, him and all the others,” Zubrich bellowed. “But they are all dead now while Leander Willis, the son of the rich man, he gets richer every day, and he eats steak every night. Does that remind you of anything?”

  The men stirred.

  “Is like Berlin in ’48, no? The dukes and kings? Don’t you think?”

  Olaf Simke waved his hand in dismissal.

  “Olaf, you say, ‘No, Nathan Willis is a good man, Nathan Willis helped me when I come here,’” Zubrich said, his voice reasonable. “But when was the last time any of you saw Nathan Willis? A long time ago, no? He is a sick man. His mind is not right.”

  Zubrich pantomimed an old man, bent with age, his mouth open and slack-jawed.

  “Many of you here have worked for Nathan Willis, no?” the preacher asked. “Olaf, you worked for Nathan Willis, didn’t you?”

  “Ja,” the farmer said.

  “Did he pay you fair wages?”

  “Ja, good pay,” Simke said.

  “Who is in charge now at the big farm, eh? Who?”

  “Es ist seine Tochter.”

  “Yes, the daughter. She is quite the lady, no?”

  The preacher scrunched his face and waved his finger at each of the men, like a schoolmarm scolding her students.

  “All thorn, no rose,” he said to the farmers’ laughter.

  “What is this world coming to? A good man like Nathan Willis lets his daughter run wild like that, to go off to her fancy school. She is so smart, no? The Bible tells us that women should honor their fathers, listen to their men. But that one! No. Not her! She is too smart for that. Too modern. She comes back here, all this talk of freeing the negroes, like that is any business of hers. What did Paul say to the Corinthians? ‘Man is the head of a woman.’ But not that one. She comes down from her mountain, and she tells us there should be no slaves and that the women, they should not have to listen to their men.”

  He slammed his fist on the desk again.

  “She is godless!” he shouted and his knuckles whitened as they gripped the desk. “She will not hire good, hardworking Germans. No, this lady brings the niggers from the South to take that work away from good German boys.”

  He drew out the syllables of “lady” into a mocking tone.

  “And what happens if King Lincoln wins his war and the slaves are free? What then?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders, scanning the crowd for an answer.

  “I’ll tell you what will happen. Those niggers will come here and take your jobs, take your farms,” he said, his voice menacing.

  “I got my gun,” Franz Simke muttered. “They won’t get mine.”

  “They’ll be sorry, won’t they?” Zubrich replied with a smile. “They won’t get you. Right?”

  He stared at Simke until he nodded.

  “But we know someone who tried to stop the niggers from coming already,” he said and gazed across the room, expectantly.

  “Our friend, Karl Wilhelm, God rest his soul.”

  The room went quiet.

  “And who is responsible?” Zubrich asked.

  A murmur of voices rumbled through the room.

  “A nigger!” he shouted. “A runaway slave that he tried to catch, because the government said he should. Where is the justice? Poor Karl is dead, his wife has left us. And who pays for that? No one, that is who!

  “What has happened to this country? What? I’ll tell you what. The tyrant Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln thinks he is king. Just like Frederick William. Louis Philippe. Just like Napoleon Bonaparte. You came to America to get away from men like these, and now this Lincoln is worse than all of them. He will use the blood of your children to free these niggers and he will give your farms to them. He will give your sons, your farm, your food, your wives. Your wives! Who will sit still for this?”

  The ones that were still sitting twisted in their seats, while those standing shuffled back and forth, their anger feeding off of each other.

  “Will you stand still for this?”

  Zubrich slammed the desk again. “Not one year ago, Emperor Lincoln came through here on his private train, but he was too mighty, too grand to stop for little people like you and me. He is afraid of people like us, people who work the ground, people who grow things, people who make things
. He wants to destroy you, just for his own glory. And how will he do that?”

  He paused, his eyes darting across the crowd.

  “The draft! The draft!” he shouted, his face crimson, his voice raw. “They will come to your door with guns and take your sons to die while they picnic. Just like they did in Frankfurt and in Baden and Bull Run. What say you? Shall we allow this?”

  Their liquor-infused fear and anger had transformed the farmers into a mob that shook the tiny building with its shouting voices and stomping feet.

  Harry looked over to see Compson smiling.

  Zubrich, his shirt sweated through, gestured with his hands for the few men still sitting to rise as he started a chant of “No!” The room pulsed in united denial and Compson’s smile broadened.

  “What do we say?” he repeatedly bellowed to the shouts of “No” and “Nein” again.

  The preacher led them in a chant of “Hell no,” pacing throughout the crowded room, his hands at each man’s shoulder or back as the farmers raised their fists and pumped them in rhythm to their shouts.

  He wandered slowly back to the front of the room.

  “How do we say ‘Hell No’ to King Abraham? The same way Jefferson Davis did. We leave the Union. Why not us? We leave. Town Line. No country! No king! No governor! No army! Just us, no taxes! No draft! Just us, making our own way. We tell King Abraham to just leave us alone to raise our families.”

  “We will keep them from our door. We will keep them from our sons, we will keep them from our wives,” Compson shouted, standing beside the preacher. “Who is with us?”

  The men pounded on the desks and stomped their booted feet.

  Compson reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a rolled piece of foolscap tied with a ribbon and handed it to the preacher.

  “I have here a decree of secession,” Zubrich shouted. “Who will sign with me? Who will tell King Lincoln to go to hell?”

  He held the document high over his head, and men rushed to the front of the room while a few of the more sober stood to the back, watching.

  1862

  LOST

  Dear Mary,

  I’m writing from a homestead in Iowa. They call this place the town of Amana, though for the life of me I don’t see any town. It’s flatter here than any place I ever seen, and there isn’t much in the way of trees to stop the eye, either.

  I hid out in a tree in your woods for a while. When the rain got too much, I crossed over the creek and the Ebenezers let me stay with them. They are a strange little clutch of people. Most of them don’t speak English, but when they found me laid up and sick one day, they put me in a room with their holy woman until I got better. They call her a werkzeug. She prayed over me in German for a long time, though I don’t know what she said.

  She speaks English sometimes, too, and told me that my heart was clouded and I needed to start new. She said I had too much sadness there and I should leave, so I hitched a ride with their next convoy out here. Now I’m here where even the dirt looks different. I should have probably just let the marshal hang me and get this over with, but I ran like a coward.

  I think of you often, and your father. I hope he’s doing better. I spied him once or twice before I left. I wish there was something I could do to ease your way. I thought long and hard about it when I was still there, and nothing came to mind. Another fugitive would just make your life harder.

  I feel like a weed that’s been pulled up and tossed in the barrow to be hauled away.

  I fear that the marshal has my name posted all over the country, so I’m telling everyone here my name is John Bissell. I’ll be moving on soon. Forgive me the evil I’ve done. I never thought to kill a man. He falls from that saddle every night in my dreams.

  It pains me that you see me that way.

  YOUR FRIEND,

  CHARLIE

  Mary stood in the hallway, steeling herself. She could hear Katia and her father inside her father’s room, chatting and laughing.

  Katia had made it clear that she blamed Nathan’s condition on Mary. In fact, she seemed to blame the entire war on her and the fugitives she’d helped. At the same time, she understood it was the girl’s constant attention that helped her father mend more than anything Mary had done.

  When they had first brought Nathan home, Mary had been convinced that the way to cure him was to break him of his delusions. Each morning she would tell him that his beloved wife, Frances, was long-dead, and each morning she had to comfort him as if the news was fresh. The house would shake with his rage and confusion as he demanded to know what evil trick she was playing since she was, in fact, Frances herself.

  It was Katia that convinced her to stop the hellish exercise. Mary relented, as much to relieve herself of the daily anguish as to help him. She felt as if she were giving up, but within days of the change, he stopped confusing her with her long-dead mother, instead calling her by her own name.

  Now he lived in a nether world populated by both the living and visions of the long dead. Much to Mary’s frustration, Katia took his chatter with the dead as proof of her long-standing claims of spirit visitation. Still, she could not deny that the hours in Katia’s care were his most peaceful, whereas Mary’s conversations left them both drained and brokenhearted.

  Mary closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened the door. Katia stopped her prattling in midsentence, put down her needlework, and left without even looking at Mary.

  Nathan was sitting in his armchair, staring out the window at the winter twilight. At first glance, he looked much like he always had, but the healthy cast of a man used to work had been supplanted by the sallow gray of someone who spent most of his time sitting. The spark of mischief that had always been in his eye had turned to a dimmed confusion. As she did each morning, Katia had trimmed his mustache, shaved his chin, and dressed him in a clean white shirt with a pressed collar. His white hair had grown back patchy, but Katia had combed it in a way to cover the scar.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s gone downtown for the day,” she said, her heart tightening with the lie.

  “Won’t be long until we can start planting,” he said, nodding out the window at the field. “Who do we have for a spring crew?”

  “Nobody,” Mary said. “We’ll find some men, though. I promise.”

  “Get Leander to help,” he said.

  “He’s not here, Father,” she said.

  “Where’s he off to?” he asked.

  “In the army, Father,” she replied.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said, absently. “I’m proud of him. He’s a good son.”

  Mary nodded. Even in the worst days, she’d hidden the things her brother had done.

  She shuffled her feet and bit her lip.

  “Father,” she asked, “do you have any money hidden around the house?”

  “What?” he asked, looking up at her. “What do you need money for?”

  “Timber needs shoeing, and I haven’t had a chance to get to the bank in a while,” she said, her hands fidgeting deep in her apron pockets.

  “I think there’s thirty dollars in the safe,” he said, confused.

  “Do you have any hidden anywhere else?” she asked.

  “Why would I hide money when I have a safe?”

  She bit her lip and tried to smile at him.

  “You’ll just have to go downtown and take some out,” he said.

  “Thanks, Father,” she said, and turned to leave.

  Out in the hall, she bit hard into her lip and wrapped her arms around herself. She rushed down the stairs, past where Katia was working in the kitchen, pulled on her coat and boots, headed out into the snow-covered barnyard, then kept moving, back, back into the woods, each step breaking through the foot-deep cover of snow.

  She gasped in the frigid air, taking in the cold, searing her lungs. She found herself at Leander’s ramshackle wreck of a hut on the shore of the pond, and she fell to her knees, screaming ou
t all the anger she’d held in for months.

  The money was gone. All gone.

  It had still been summer when Mary had gone to the downtown bank to draw cash for payroll, only to be told that Leander had cleared it out weeks before.

  Struck dumb, she stared at the clerk as he pointed out that their father had given him signing rights at the beginning of the year, and the money was thus legally his. When she asked through gritted teeth how she was to pay the farmworkers, he offered her a loan if she could produce a man as a signatory.

  She’d closed out her own little account, taking the meager cash that she’d saved from years of boiling sugar, and had doled it out to the useless workers for the rest of the season, hiding the shortage as best she could.

  She’d made it through fall, but there were late rains and the workers had shirked so much work that the harvest was barely enough to keep the farm running, leaving no surplus to sell.

  When the spring came, she’d need money to hire hands, but there was little left.

  All the time, the letters and telegrams for her father had been coming. The army, among others, offering exorbitant prices for Willis lumber.

  She’d even gone back to the mill herself, trying to understand how to jigger the sluice and blade to produce a straight board.

  In November, an officer had come to the door, a draft in hand, offering to buy a ten-acre parcel of virgin timber on Town Line Road, but she couldn’t bring herself to sell. She’d seen other plots harvested by the army, the trees clear-cut, their stumps left to rot in the ground. She couldn’t imagine what her father would say to such a thing.

  It was the hiding from him that hurt her the most. She couldn’t tell him about Leander’s betrayal, or that every penny he’d guarded so carefully all his life had been stolen in such an act of betrayal.

  She thought of his raging at the repeated news of her mother’s death and the confusion that followed for him, and she couldn’t help but think such a thing would be the end of him.

  There was so much that she had to keep hidden that she dreaded spending any time with him lest she let something slip.