by Daren Wang
The frost was thick when he rose the next morning and rode on.
The next day, he heard a din in the distance and rode toward it in the dimming light. He was leading the horse through a thicket in the darkening woods when he found himself on the top of a ridge overlooking a broad plain.
White canvas tents stretched as far as the eye could see. Campfires punctuated the night, and countless men in blue uniforms surrounded them, laughing and playing music.
He led the horse away, deep into the woods and slept that night without a fire.
The next day he was into the territory of Kanawha, or West Virginia, or whatever they were calling it in Washington. It had broken off from Virginia the year before by a vote that included none of its citizens, and was putting itself through the machinations to become part of a union it hated to the core. The forest blazed in fall colors, the hills rolled into the horizon and somehow, he felt he was home.
He came into Harpers Ferry the next morning. The streets were abandoned, and he passed three burned-out ruins on his way to the office of his father’s lawyer on Washington Street.
He was quickly ushered into Mr. Philips’s office.
“Yates?” Philips said, a look of shock on his face. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see about my father’s will.”
“Of course, of course, have a seat,” the lawyer said, motioning to a chair. “It’s just that … the army has asked me for your whereabouts several times. You’ve been drafted, as nearly everyone else has been, and they’ve been looking for you.”
“I’ve been in Montreal,” Yates said.
“Looking for Joe?”
Yates nodded. “I only learned last week of my father’s death. How did he die?”
The lawyer got up and walked around to lean on the front of his desk.
“The Yankees wanted Walnut Grove,” he said. “He made it hard for them, but they took it anyway. We’ve buried him out at Sandy Hook.”
Yates’s stomach twisted at the thought of his father fighting the Union Army on his own.
“I guess if he was going to die, that’s how he’d have it,” he said. “Fighting to save that place.”
“There’s the better part of a battalion camped in the west fields,” he said.
Yates blinked.
“The Yankees occupied my plantation?” he asked. “Are they paying for it?”
The lawyer cocked a bushy gray eyebrow at him.
“You’re not going to collect rent from the Yankees? Not much of a patriot, are you?”
“It’s mine. How do I get it back?” Yates asked.
Philips took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He went to a cart and poured a glass of bourbon and put it in front of Yates.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Complicated?”
“Your father changed his will after you left,” he said.
He went over to a cabinet and pulled out a file folder, sat behind the desk, and opened it in front of him.
“You see, his will frees Joe, accepts him as his lawful son, and splits the estate evenly between the two of you, with a generous stipend for Alaura.”
The tumbler of bourbon dropped from Yates’s hand and smashed on the floor. He ran his hands through his filthy hair. He gripped the arms of the chair to prevent himself from falling out.
“What?” he croaked
“Alaura and Joe are your half-siblings,” Philips said. “And your father has left half the estate to them.”
Yates’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the arms of the chair.
“He can’t do that,” he said.
“You’re right, he probably can’t,” Philips said. “There are remedies. No Southern court would allow it, that I’m certain of. But we’re in a territory occupied by a federal force, and the occupying government is trying to attain statehood. Nothing makes much sense here. The irony is that come January first, this damned Emancipation Proclamation is set to take effect. He won’t be a slave in the North. And he won’t be a slave in the Confederacy, but damned if he wouldn’t still be a slave here in the territory of West Virginia.”
He got up and poured himself a drink, and filled a second for Yates. He handed it to him, lingering overlong to make sure that Yates’s grip would hold.
“I’m not willing to hand the keys to one of the finest plantations in the South to a nigger,” Philips said. “I’ll fight this with you. I’ll argue that it should be invalidated based on insanity if you’ll permit me. I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Joe’s dead,” Yates said. “I tore through the better parts of two countries and didn’t find a sign of him. I’m sure of it.”
“That’s helpful,” Philips said. “That might help the court move the issue along, but we got another telegram after you left. It’ll need to be followed up on.”
Philips riffled through the file of papers and found a telegram.
“There’s a Marshal Kidder in Buffalo said he’s captured him in April of last year,” he said. “You been up there?”
“Not Buffalo, no.”
“Honestly, I’d hoped the Yankee prison would have ended the need for us to solve this problem. Maybe it has.”
“Marshall Kidder?” Yates asked.
“Don’t get any ideas,” the lawyer said. “You’ve been drafted. Report for duty. They’ve already shot a few deserters, and when the winter comes, it’s going to get much worse. At the very least, you’ll get no sympathy from the court if you are wanted as a deserter,” Philips said.
“I’ll need money.” Yates nodded. “I have to equip myself.”
Philips smiled. “Of course,” he said. “However much you want. You’re a Bell of Walnut Grove. I can give you a loan against your share of the property.”
He provisioned for a long ride at the general store and set out straight north that day.
A Confederate scout found him that night as he made camp south of the Pennsylvania border.
“Seen your fire,” he said from atop his horse. “Mind if I share?”
Yates gestured for him to sit, and the man climbed down from his horse.
“Nice animal,” Yates said.
“Trey Williams,” the scout said, taking off his glove and offering his hand. “Fifty-third.”
“Yates Bell. Bott’s Greys.”
Williams sat on the ground and offered Yates a filigreed flask. When Yates shook his head, he put it back in his coat without drinking.
“Bott’s? Out of Harpers?”
Yates nodded.
“I heard they sent you boys over Maryland way. What the hell you doing way up here?”
“I’ve got business.”
The scout waited for more, but Yates offered nothing.
“Is that cornbread?” he asked, pointing at the skillet in the fire.
“Just the way my dear mammy used to make,” Yates said, smiling and nodding.
He pulled a plate from his pack and handed it across the fire.
“I was hoping we’d have beaten them Yankees before the winter came down,” Williams said.
“We’re never going to beat them,” Yates said.
Trey looked up from the fire, surprise and anger in his eyes.
“Of course we are,” he said. “They’re cowards. Look at how we slaughtered them at Manassas. A couple more like that, and we’ll be rid of them. We just need to keep at it.”
Yates looked at Williams out of the corner of his eye and shook his head.
“I saw a Union encampment two days ago,” Yates said. “Probably wasn’t a million, but sure looked like it, lined up row to row to row. It was an entire city, just waiting to kill us all. I was in New York City a month ago, and the streets are full of men and boys like there was nothing going on down here.”
He poked at the fire.
“We can kill them all we want,” he said. “They’ll just keep coming. We have to make them pay some other way. That’s what I’m aiming for, just to make them pay.”
After they finished their mess, Yates stoked the fired against the cold night and lay out his bedroll while Trey wrote in a little brown notebook. When he was done, the scout climbed to his feet and went into the bushes. He was still buttoning his trousers when he came back into the fire’s circle to find Yates pointing a pistol at him.
“I’m not going back,” he said.
“I’ll not cotton to any deserter,” the scout said.
“The Yankees killed my daddy,” he said. “There’s an entire battalion of them living off my plantation. There’s this runaway up north. He’s ruined everything. He drove my mother away, and he split me and my father. He nearly killed me, and now I have to kill him. I’m suffering plenty for the cause.”
Trey shook his head. “My captain might understand and let you move on,” he said. “But it’s not for me to decide.”
“It’s not for him, either,” Yates said, and pulled the trigger.
He covered the body with the man’s bedroll, took a bottle of bourbon from his own pack, and sat down by the fire.
“I wish I hadn’t had to do that,” he said, looking down at the covered corpse. “I know now, there’s one thing God put me on this world to do, and I’ve let too many things get in my way. I won’t let anything else.”
In the morning, he went through the scout’s saddlebags for provisions and packed some jerky and ammunition. He put the Bible he found in Trey’s graying hands, and left his horse to stand guard against the circling vultures.
He rode north again, but midway through the day he heard gunfire in the distance, enough for him to guess there was a full-on skirmish. He headed away from the noise, west and south into the mountains.
It snowed during the night, and he sheltered under a tall cedar.
He headed farther up into the Alleghenies to avoid scouts from either side, but the winter found him in the high country. He holed up in a cave for three days with a fever and got snowed into an abandoned cabin in a high pass soon after that. He was there for three weeks and had to shoot the horse. His Christmas and New Year’s feasts were both horseflesh carved off the frozen corpse and boiled in melted snow.
After that, he struck straight north again, heading for the big lake. His beard grew thick and scraggly, and he stayed away from roads and little towns.
On the ferry across ice-chunked Erie, there were four other men as rough-looking as he, and they avoided each other’s eyes like the wanted men they all were.
The crossing took seven hours, and the rocking of the boat on the inland sea brought him back to an ocean crossing he’d made as a child. The waves and the smell of the air off the water had entranced him then, and did again now.
He stepped off the ferry in Nanticoke. He took a deep breath of the frigid Canadian air, and doubled over with a coughing spasm.
On his second day in Canada he came to a cluster of snow-covered ramshackle houses. Hoping to find a meal, he knocked on a door, only to have a runaway nigger woman open it.
He grabbed her around the throat, and pressed the muzzle of his pistol to her head.
“Where’s Joe Bell?” he hissed.
“Joe who?” she asked, terror in her voice.
He dragged her from hovel to hovel, kicking on the doors and threatening to kill her if they didn’t produce his slave. Each shack was tiny, with no place to hide, and he could see they held nothing but squalling brats and frightened women. In the last one, he found a haunch of venison spit over a fire and wrapped it in a greasy rag.
He cut pieces from it during the rest of the day’s hike and was gnawing the last of the meat from the bone as he came into Fort Erie.
At the waterfront, he could see the Yankee city of Buffalo across the wide river, and visions of it burning flashed before him.
He watched the gaslights go on as night fell, then found two men with a jon boat for hire to carry him over the wide river under the cover of darkness.
He scouted around the city during the night.
Parts of it made him remember the broad avenues of Washington. Well-dressed ladies and gentlemen rode in coaches under the streetlamps. A coughing spasm came over him and he sat on a wooden bench to catch his breath. A gray-whiskered man tossed a coin at his feet and told him to buy a meal.
Near the canal, though, it was Gomorrah.
Liquor was everywhere. Drunks tottered out from the gin mills, past the whores that called to every passing man.
But not to him. He had not bathed since Harpers Ferry and the women that passed him on the street cowered like he was a wild animal. There were many black faces here and each one made his blood boil. The riches of the South, stolen and gone to seed. He scanned the passing faces for signs of Joe, though he doubted the serious boy would ever be in such a place.
He wanted to strike them all down. He fingered the pistol in his coat pocket and imagined himself barging into one of the taverns and taking as many down with him as he could. But like the Yankee tents arrayed in the Maryland field, there were too many.
Eventually, he found a thicket of woods to the north of the city and camped by the river.
He didn’t have to ask around much. It was midday when he found the marshal in a tavern, a plate of sausages and a mug of beer in front of him.
“Kidder?” Yates asked, standing above him at the table.
The fat man looked Yates up and down.
“Ten dollars if you want a warrant served,” the marshal said. “Another ten if I have to ride out of the city.”
“I’m here for my nigger.”
The marshal stared at him.
“Joe Bell.”
Kidder’s eyes narrowed.
“I was expecting a Southern gentleman…” he said, wiping grease from his face with his coat sleeve.
“There’s no place for a gentleman in this land,” Yates said.
“It’s close to two damned years since I sent that telegram,” the marshal said. “You can’t expect me to still have him.”
“I’ll pay you the thousand when you deliver.”
Yates flashed a roll of notes.
The marshal eyed the bundle.
“Let me go check at the jail to see if they still have him,” he said. “This might take a while.”
Yates told him where he’d camped.
“The river is cold, but it’s clean down there,” the marshal said. “You might spend a little of that on soap.”
Yates went back to his camp, and knelt, waiting silently for any movement around him. When a muskrat climbed out of the river, he shot it and lunged into the water to catch it before the current carried it toward the distant falls. He was kneeling in the water skinning it for his dinner when Kidder finally came around.
“They let them all go, all the runaways,” the marshal said. “Because of the war, no need to hold them.”
“Where’s Joe?” Yates asked, coming out of his crouch, knife still in hand.
“I don’t know,” the marshal said. “But I have some ideas. He was headed to Canada when I caught him. Maybe he had people up there? I can find him, but we’d have to negotiate a price.”
“Negotiate a price?”
“Well, there’s the thousand reward, then the board for him for the year we had him, then my time hunting him. I have expenses, you know.”
“You let my nigger go, and you want to negotiate a price?” Yates asked.
“I didn’t let anyone go,” the marshal said, backing away. “The judge did. I don’t run the operation.”
Yates jabbed the knife with a quick, smooth thrust, cutting through the marshal’s coat and piercing his chest. Kidder looked up, cupping the blood that poured from the wound at his heart. His knees buckled as Yates stepped forward and kicked him in the chest. He fell backward and splashed into the cold water. Screaming, he flailed his arms uselessly as the river pulled him away from shore and toward the cataract of Niagara Falls.
“Just another goddamned Yankee trying to bleed us dry.” Yates spat. “Shit, I wish
I could kill you twice.”
He cooked the muskrat over the fire, packed up his swag, then hiked to the suspension bridge over the river, where the guard welcomed him back to Canada.
1863
MANHATTAN
June 15, 1863, FROM HAVANA AND MEXICO. ARRIVAL OF THE STEAMSHIP EAGLE. The French Army Still Before Puebla. CAPTURE ON THE GUERRILLA, CAMACHO.
The steamship Eagle, Capt. Adams, from Havana, arrived at this port yesterday. The correspondent of the Associated Press furnishes the following interesting items of news:
The overwater days on the freighter were kept lively by the unexpected company of New Yorker Isabel Fitch and her entourage, absent these shores fourteen months. The ship carried several primitive sculptures she purchased in South America and that she expects to display in her home on Worth Square.
—NEW YORK CHRONICLE, JUNE 15, 1863
Leander slipped away from the hovel on Ann Street in the early morning, before the landlady came for the rent.
There wasn’t much in his swag, just a dull razor, a bar of soap, and his remaining suit—robin’s-egg blue. There’d been a cravat that matched the rust color of its pinstripe, but it had disappeared a long time ago. He couldn’t say when.
Once, he’d had six others, just as fine, but they were all gone now. The ones Isabel had given him back in Buffalo were much too backwoods for New York, and he had given them to the bellhop at the St. James. Image was everything for a trader, so he had invested in some new ones from a Fifth Avenue tailor.
The one he still had was his favorite, but there were moth holes in it now. It would surely get him laughed off the floor at the Gold Exchange even while it would get him knifed on Ann Street. But he hoped that it would at least get him through the front door of the Fitch mansion on Worth Square.
He walked the long blocks to Broadway where the morning’s delivery traffic was already rattling on the cobblestones. The predawn streets felt like another city, a different world altogether than the bright days and addled nights where he spent his time. Icemen, fishmongers, and newspaper boys scurried by, oblivious to the unkempt man with the mangy beard. Barnum’s American Museum sat on the corner, its garish colors a bizarre contrast to the nearby sternness of City Hall, its windows already lit by ambitious men setting to their work.
