by Daren Wang
“Here’s to you, Commander,” he said, holding the full glass aloft. He spat on the polished wood of the desk before taking a big swallow. The liquor spilled as the boat hit another rock.
He could feel the Abigail picking up speed. He tried to guess how much time he had, how long the Niagara River really was.
He thought of the bed linens he’d slept on that first night, and ran through the staterooms and tore them off the beds and stuffed them into their pillowcases and tossed them on deck.
Then he remembered Compson’s desk drawer of money, and pried open the locked drawers with his knife, tearing through the fine wood. He found a canvas bag and stuffed it full of Confederate script, worth even less now than when he’d fallen for it, and he tossed the full bag up on deck. In the top left drawer he found a little velvet pull-string bag filled with gold coins. He shoved that in his coat pocket.
He opened drawers and cabinets, pulling filigreed shotguns and pistols from display cases, and tossed them clattering onto the deck. He found a cabinet with flags—the stars and bars, the Union Jack, a Confederate battle flag. Giggling between big gulps of bourbon, he stomped back up on deck and hung the American flag on the pole at the fore, and tied the Confederate on the aft railing.
He dove back into the cabin, rifling through Compson’s closet, running his hands over the velvet collars and the silk undergarments before he threw it all out onto the deck.
All the time, the boat was alternately spiraling and righting itself into speed. Harry kept falling as the boat shifted, cracking his knee on the deck, and still laughing. On deck, he watched as the black trees of the shore slipped past as if he was on an express train. The shore suddenly looked far away.
He climbed up to the pilothouse, looking at the wheel and the brass controls, but he wasn’t sure how they worked. He pushed something forward, and the engine coughed a bit, but it didn’t sound right.
The boat jerked again, and he heard a tearing sound unlike any of the others. The yacht started to list.
He looked downriver into the night, but couldn’t make anything out. He heard a rushing sound, that same pounding he loved to feel when he Katia brought the babies to the falls. It was distant, but he was sure it was there.
When he went below again, cold water pooled around his feet. He went to the desk for his tumbler of bourbon, but it had fallen to the floor at the last impact and the broken crystal lay at his feet. He opened the cabinet and found another bottle of something, clear and nearly tasteless, but with a kick like a mule. He took it up onto the deck and poured it over the remains of Compson’s command. He checked one more time to make sure the skiff was still at the stern, struck a match, and dropped it onto the mound. The whole deck was aflame by the time he untied the skiff.
He knew enough to aim upstream, though it only slowed his speed by a fraction. He rowed frantically, heading toward the Canadian shore. The whole river was lit by the Abigail. Bullets popped on board, then something bigger exploded, its boom echoing over the rushing river.
Harry ducked as he rowed. The pounding and hissing was louder now, and he set everything he had to the oars. His hands blistered and the muscles of his arms burned, but he did not stop. As he got closer to the shore, the current slackened and he made out lanterns on the shoreline, the faces of people that had heard the explosions and come to see the burning yacht. They were shouting at him, but he could not hear what they said for the fury of the rapids.
Harry turned back to see the Abigail, its flames as tall as the tree line, suddenly blink out of sight as it went over the lip and into the gorge. He laughed again, loudly, joyously, as he put his back into the oars, and he was still laughing when the nose of the skiff jammed up onto the loamy shore.
He climbed out of the boat, knee-deep in frigid water, and the lights of lanterns rushed down the embankment to him.
A gray-haired man with spectacles and a stocking cap held the light up to Harry’s face.
“You alright, young feller?” he asked.
“Do you have a wagon and a mule?” Harry asked.
“Sure.”
Harry fished into his pocket and pulled out the velvet bag.
“I’ll pay you this to haul me and my skiff back up to my place. It’s down on Lake Erie.”
The old man emptied the bag onto his palm and used his thumb to count through the glittering coins.
“That’s got to be about a hundred dollars,” he said.
“Well then, today’s your lucky day,” Harry said, still laughing.
“You want to come inside and get warm before we go?” the man asked.
“No, thank you, though I’ll take a blanket if you have it,” Harry said. “I want to get back. My wife is waiting.”
1865
WINTERTIDE
Mary washed the dishes while Nathan and Joe sat at the kitchen table with a skillet of cornbread, a crock of butter, and a pitcher of milk in front of them, haggling over price.
“A quarter acre,” Nathan said. “The lawyer will charge more for filing the deed than the property is worth. Let me just give it to you.”
“Look here,” Joe said, pointing to an ad he’d clipped from the Courier. “Lancaster, ten acres, two hundred dollars. This has a pond on it. It’s at least forty dollars.”
“Pfff,” Nathan said. “That ad is for cleared land, with a barn and a house. You’re taking about an uncleared plot with no road access. It’s a different measure.”
“Yes, but this had a house as well.”
“Not much of one, and you built it.” Nathan laughed. “I shouldn’t get paid for that.”
Joe kept to his number, while Nathan cited farm sales from as far as Darien to explain why the number was wrong. Mary could tell by the way her father worked around the price that he was enjoying the negotiation. By the time they finally agreed she was sitting at the table, smiling as she picked at a piece of the bread. Joe, beaming, counted the bills from the worn envelope he used to save his wages, and pushed them across the table.
“It’s mine through and through,” he said. “Even Mr. Thoreau couldn’t say that.”
Nathan straightened the bills by tapping them on the oaken tabletop.
“No, he couldn’t,” he said. “I bet old Henry would be proud to know you.”
At Snyder’s General Store the next morning, Joe piled a coffeepot, a grinder, and a red wool blanket onto the glass-topped counter. The woman at the till held each bill up to the light and eyed him, but she eventually relented and wrapped the items in brown paper and handed them to him wordlessly.
Mary went to him nearly every day. If it wasn’t too cold, they’d walk down to the creek or through the woods. If the wind was blowing they would sit in the tight little cabin, a pot of tea and books shared between them.
Nathan visited sometimes, too. Joe would ask him about the things they sometimes found in the forest, arrowheads and potsherds and adzes, and Nathan told him of the Haudenosaunee and showed him a clearing where a longhouse had once sat.
Malcolm had gotten work downtown as a hack-driver, and on Saturdays, Joe walked to the station where he would ride the local downtown and spend the night in the two-room apartment on Michigan Street where he and Alaura lived. In the morning, they’d go to the little church with the rest of the farm’s crew. Sunday-night dinner would be back in Town Line with Nathan and Mary, and then back to the pond that night.
Sometimes, after her father had gone to bed, Mary would gather a few things and follow him through the snow-hushed woods to the little cabin.
When sugaring time came, the two of them worked together, going from tree to tree, the only sound the pounding of taps into trunks, the clang of the sap buckets, and Timber’s occasional snort.
When Mary deemed the buckets finally full enough to collect, they rode out for the boil.
It was nearly noon before they’d gathered the sap, stoked the fire, and settled onto their stools to watch the wind push the smoke and the steam south over the tops of the
trees toward the creek. They sat close and talked of the spring planting as they passed a jar of liquor and warmed their hands by the fire.
She’d felt ill that morning, and she blamed the distraction of her sour stomach when she let a ladleful drip back into the cauldron and found the liquid too viscous and dark to sell for top grade.
“Damn,” she said. “It’s close to ruined.”
“We’ll start over,” Joe said. “I’ll get more wood to stoke the fire.”
“I can’t bear to just pour it out,” Mary said to herself as he headed for the woodpile behind the shack. She was lifting an empty cask from the back of the wagon when Timber whinnied.
“What is it, boy?” she asked. He hoofed the snow and showed her the white of his eye, and she felt a chill colder than she’d expect for the sunny afternoon.
She looked to where she’d left her pistol, but the seat cushion lay in the snow and the bench was empty.
When she felt something stab hard into her lower back, she knew it was the muzzle of her own gun. An arm wrapped around her throat and jerked hard. She stumbled backward, slamming into the body behind her, struggling to gain her feet as the arm choked her and held her up.
The smell of sweat and whiskey filled her nostrils as she tried to break free, but the man had her firm.
Joe came from behind the shack and the sling full of split wood slipped from his hands and tumbled into the snow.
“It’s you,” the man behind her said. “I finally found you.”
She could see terror in Joe’s eyes.
“She doesn’t mean anything to you, Yates,” he said. “Let her go.”
“Master,” Yates hissed. “You call me Master.”
“Never again,” Joe said. “I’m a free man.”
“You’re mine,” the man said. “I don’t care what any man in Washington says. You’re mine.”
Anger and despair played across Joe’s face.
“Don’t do this,” Joe said. “The war is over.”
“It’s not over,” Yates said. “Not as long as there’s niggers roaming free.”
Mary pulled at the arm around her neck, but it held fast. Yates extended his other arm, and she could see her pistol in his hand, aimed at Joe.
“Settle down, missy,” he said. He thumbed back the hammer and swiveled around, putting the weapon out of her reach.
“Just go home,” Joe said, stretching his hands out in a plea.
“Four goddamned years I been tracking you,” Yates said. “The last three months hiding out in every goddamned root cellar and cave between here and Ohio. Go home? I’m here to kill you.”
“Then take me,” Joe said. “Let her go.”
Mary plunged her hands into her apron pockets, and gripped the slaughtering knife.
“You can’t have it,” Yates said. “It’s not yours.”
“Have what?” Joe asked.
“Walnut Grove,” Yates said. “You can’t have it.”
Joe looked confused. The smell of the burning syrup filled the air.
“It’s not yours,” Yates said, and Mary realized the man was crying. “It’s mine. It’s mine.”
“Why would it be mine?” Joe asked.
“They say it’s yours,” he cried. “They say you’re my…”
Bell gasped, choking on his words.
“They say you’re my…” he repeated, and he began to sob. His body shook, and each tremor ran through his body and into Mary’s. She tried to push herself free, but he ratcheted his arm tighter and slammed her back against his chest. She pulled the knife out of her apron and plunged it into the arm at her throat. It jerked away and she fell forward into the snow.
“Mary!” Joe screamed and ran toward them.
Yates dropped to his knees, raised the pistol with both hands, and pulled the trigger.
Joe fell to his knees, teetering there for a moment before he collapsed forward, his arms outstretched, reaching for her across the snow.
The air rushed from Mary’s lungs, her throat constricted, and her mouth opened in a rictus of pain, but her voice was gone.
She lifted the bloody knife from where it had fallen in the snow, jumped to her feet, and turned to attack the Confederate.
Yates Bell stood in front of the sugar fire, rags hanging loose on his emaciated body. His gray face and stringy hair framed dark, sunken eyes and his hand shook as it held her pistol under his chin.
His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment.
“… my brother,” he finally managed to say, and pulled the trigger.
Instinct held the body upright for a long moment, anguish chiseled on its bloody face, then finally it fell backward into the sugar fire. The tripod collapsed, and scalded syrup poured onto the jerking body, and where it touched the embers, it burst into flame.
Mary scrambled to where Joe lay, and cradled his head in her lap, but by then, he was gone.
INTERREGNUM
She found her father on a Sunday morning, his body cooling but not yet cold under the featherbed. His face was at ease, the bed orderly and neat with no signs of torment or seizures, and she took comfort that his last night had been peaceful.
The hard cold had come again and the ground was too hard for a grave to be dug. Packed in lime and held in a coffin stretched on a pair of sawhorses in the stall next to Timber, Nathan waited for the thaw.
Just the week before, Malcolm and Palmer had pickaxed their way through six feet of frozen ground and they had buried Joe by the pond.
While they had worked, Mary brought Alaura to Joe’s cabin, sat her on the steps of the porch, and pushed a wooden box the size of an apple crate across the boards to her.
“Please,” she whispered. “Take this from me.”
Alaura took off the lid and lifted a scuffed book from the top of bundled papers.
“Thoreau,” Mary said. “It was his. You’ll find the deed for this place inside. He built it for you. It’s yours now.”
Alaura flipped through the pages and found the folded document. She ran her finger over the signature at the bottom and nodded, then reached into the box again, bringing out one of the many sheaves of letters. Slowly, she pulled one from its silk-ribboned bundle and opened it to read, but folded it again and offered it to Mary.
“This is addressed to you,” she said. “It’s yours.”
Mary shook her head.
“Take it,” she said, her eyes staring at the horizon of snow-laden trees. “Take them all. If I read them again, they will break me forever.”
The rest of the winter passed unnoticed. She spent most of her days stitching useless aphorisms into stretched linen and staring into the distance.
The workers insisted they would be back in the early spring, but the time seemed too far away to matter.
When the cold broke, it did so with a torrential downpour. The fields flooded and the last of the mill washed down the creek toward Lake Erie.
Then the letter came. As she often did, she discussed the day’s matters with her father as she tended to the animals in the barn.
“Your lawyer, Mr. Ewell, has sent me an offer for the farm. It’s a fair one, perhaps more than fair.”
She shoveled Timber’s stall clean as she talked about the buyer, a captain in the 115th. Then she pulled a stool next to the coffin and sat, her legs splayed out in front of her under the heavy winter skirts. She leaned her head against the polished wood of the coffin.
“You used to get so upset when I talked of leaving,” she said, “But I don’t know whether it was you or the farm you didn’t want me to leave. What would you have me to do now? Should I stay here telling the men how to plow the fields and grit my teeth at the jokes the town will tell behind my back?”
When she felt a welling of tears, she stood quickly, knocking her shoulder on the coffin. The pain focused her on the day’s work. She lifted the milk can with her chapped, red hands and left her father alone with the animals.
February had been flooded with different ty
pes of letters and telegrams and visitors, men and families with stories of some kindness her father had done them decades earlier that had made all the difference in their lives.
Millard Fillmore sent a basket of Hawaiian fruits unlike anything Mary had ever seen—each the size of a kitten, greenish brown and prickly. She thought of sending them back, but knew her father would be angry at such a mean-spirited gesture. Instead, she gave the whole basket to Doc Pride, who reported they were yellow on the inside, and sweeter than anything he’d ever tasted.
When she heard the first robin of spring, she settled on a day for the funeral, knowing the ground would be soft enough then. She did not make the date public.
The mid-April day broke clear, and she knew her father would have been upset by the waste of a fine spring day on such nonsense. It was a small procession that rode through the crossroads to the cemetery. Malcolm and Alaura brought a wagon full of workers, ready to move back in for the season. Doc Pride tried to guide Mary into his buggy, but she climbed onto Timber and rode through the clear morning to the shady grove of cedars, then stood stone-faced as the casket was lowered. She threw her handful of dirt onto the coffin wordlessly, and everybody hushed, expecting to hear her say her farewells, but she’d been talking with the dead for months and had no interest in doing so for spectators.
Doc Pride stepped forward into the silence.
“You beat me there, old friend,” he said. “But I’ll join you soon.”
And at last Nathan Willis, pioneer, was buried between his long-dead wife and the fresh grave of his son.
The procession went back to the farm, but she broke from it, staying on the old horse and riding through the light of the late afternoon. She wanted to track the old property lines, the ones he’d claimed fifty years earlier. She trailed along the swollen creek, surveying the high-water mark of the March floods, the flotsam scattered on the bank like matches dropped on the kitchen floor.
She passed the foundation of the mill, and ducked under the dislodged bridge at Town Line Road, its supports wrapped with the detritus of the flood. Turning north, she rode along the western line of the barley field, fallow the year before, now silt-covered and ready for wheat. She skirted the crossroads as the sun dropped, and rode up the small embankment of the rail line, a hundred yards from the train station where she could hear a noisy gathering.
