Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  “I read some of them,” Harriet said. “They’re neat. But when does this Doctor Hunter meet granddaddy?”

  “Keep reading, you’ll see. Tomorrow morning I’d like you both to meet the woman who loaned the letters to the museum. I promised her I would bring you by.”

  “Tomorrow morning? But we have to be back in Staunton.”

  “It’s the Mars landing,” Harriet said. “We’re going to watch it with Granny. Know why?”

  “Of course he knows why,” Yasmin broke in.

  “I know who your father was,” said Grissom. “And I know you’re proud of him. Well, let me at least show you Charles Town while you’re here.”

  Yasmin had been born and raised in Nova Africa, near Savannah. Like most n’African families, hers had its roots in the South but some of its branches north of the border, in the U.S.S.A. Most black people had moved south to the new nation after Independence in 1865; but many, like Leon’s ancestors, had not. Yasmin had been to Virginia many times, but usually as Leon’s wife (and then as his widow), always at the other end of the Valley near Staunton. She had never really known the Shenandoah, flowing northward like the Nile, where her own great-granddad had been born. He had left as a boy and she had no relatives living here now, as far as she knew.

  Once, after her father had died, her mother had driven her through this part of the country, but that was twenty-five years ago, before the Revolution in the U.S., and Yasmin remembered only the filthy bathrooms and twisted faces of a country at war with itself.

  It seemed more peaceful now, but still not prosperous. Maybe Africa had spoiled her. Even Nova Africa had seemed provincial and a little shabby after the grand plains, sweeping highways, and soaring cities of Zimbabwe and Azania.

  Charles Town was a disappointment. Livery stables are as transient as clouds in the storm of history, and there was no sign of the one where Yasmin’s great-grandfather had spent his boyhood. Yasmin had hoped Grissom would show them something more interesting than just the courthouse they had driven by the day before, but there was little to see. If Harper’s Ferry had been left behind by history, Charles Town had been worked over: everything in the town looked new.

  Socialist reconstruction, having patched up the ruined cities of the U.S.S.A., was finally coming to the little county seats.

  From Charles Town they drove back west, but cut south before Harper’s Ferry on a road alongside the Shenandoah. The west or Valley side of the river was gentle, golden, with wheat fields leading almost down to the water; but the east, the mountain side, was steep and wild. The river itself seemed wilder and rockier there, under the looming laurel thickets and jutting cliffs. Harriet looked up, trying to imagine what it was like for a band of men to make their way up, loaded with rifles and supplies and even wounded.

  Ten klicks south of Harper’s Ferry, Grissom seemed to find what he was looking for. He turned onto a growstone bridge near a small riverside compound consisting of three trailers and a broken-down welding shop and garage. He surprised Yasmin by stopping the car in the middle of the bridge and shutting off the engine.

  “This is,” he said, “or once was—Iron Bridge.”

  August 10, 1859

  Miss Laura Sue Hunter

  Miss Colby’s School

  Richmond

  Dear Laura Sue:

  I was very sorry to get the word about John. He was Dear to us all but dearest and closest to you, and my Heart is with you at this time. I hear from Uncle Reuben he is to be buried in Baltimore, by Aunt Clare. I will be there when they bring him from the train. War is cruelest to the Innocent. Do not fill your Heart with hatred against those who mistakenly, but irrevocably, took his Life.

  Your loving and sorrowing brother,

  Thomas

  Philadelphia

  Yasmin got out of the car while Grissom began telling the story of the Iron Bridge Massacre to Harriet, who had of course heard it in school. “Served them right,” she said. Yasmin agreed, she guessed.

  Still . . .

  Yasmin stared over the rail into the fast, unblinking, cold little eye of the river. She had always found the story fascinatingly cruel, almost like a fairy tale, even though it was true. At Iron Bridge the first effort to go after Brown and Tubman had met with a spectacular and horrifying defeat. A volunteer squad of Shenandoah Military Institute cadets, enthusiastic and foolish, swelled up with the arrogance of slave Virginia, had started up the mountain, led by one of their teachers with a special commission from Governor Wise (which he later tried to deny and hide). Not one had survived. They had been killed and laid out on the new iron bridge with their throats cut as a warning. That act of terror, Grissom explained to Harriet, had established in the mind of the South the seriousness of the revolt. It had given Brown and Tubman breathing space; it had discouraged volunteers. Yasmin had seen the old drawings from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, more precise and horrifying than any holo or photo could be, of the boys all arranged face up along the boards of the bridge. Throat up. The youngest of them hardly more than Harriet’s age. Her horror and pity was not only for the boys, but for those to whom was given the work of slicing their pink, new necks, one after the other, fourteen in all. She looked down at the road and expected to still see the blood splashed around, beading up the dust.

  Crueler still, they had let the teacher live.

  “Cruel?” Grissom had sensed her mood. “Don’t forget that these cadets were the scions of the old Virginia and Caroline slave-owning families,” he said. “Black women wiped their noses all their lives. Black men saddled their horses and shined their boots at SMI. Maybe they didn’t look so sweet and innocent to slaves.”

  “Brown and Tubman’s men were mostly whites and free blacks then,” Yasmin objected. “Slaves didn’t join until later in the summer, up the Valley, nearer Roanoke.”

  “Still, the army had the political viewpoint of the slave,” Grissom said enthusiastically.

  It seemed an odd argument for a white Merican to be having with a black n’African, and Yasmin let it drop. She didn’t exactly disagree. Anyway, it was part of building socialism; the Mericans were trying to rectify their view of history. There were still plenty of whites who in their heart of hearts (and some not so secretly) thought Brown was the Devil incarnate. As a historian and a revolutionary, straightening out the story was Grissom’s job. And he was right: the killings struck a blow straight into the heart of old Virginia, wounding the myth of white invulnerability, the arrogance that would send armed boys after rebel slaves.

  Still.

  Did they cry for their mothers? Yasmin wondered, to herself. How did the knife feel in the hand? Heavy. Light. Like thunder and lightning together.

  It alarmed and fascinated her that somehow her hand knew.

  August 12, 1859

  Miss Emily Pern

  11 Commerce St.

  New York

  Dear Emily:

  Thank you for your letter. My friend Levasseur is also encouraging me to go and hear Frederick Douglas when he comes to Bethel Church next week, but it conflicts with a tragic and not unrelated event, a family funeral. I can no longer pretend to be personally unaffected by recent Events. I lost a young first cousin in the Massacre at Iron Bridge, near Harper’s Ferry, who though misled and foolish, was much beloved by his Family. His name was John, my Uncle Reuben’s eldest son. He was a student at Shenandoah M.I. He was exactly my sister’s age, fifteen.

  I must be in Baltimore when my uncle brings his remains Home.

  I have heard so much that is noble about Douglas that even in my sorrow I am sorry to miss his appearance. I heard about it even before you wrote. Some say he was behind Brown on the raid, and others say he was against it. From what I have heard of his judgment and intelligence, I favor the latter. They say that Blood is thicker than water, yet I feel, truthfully, no vengefulness at my cousin’s death, only sadness at the crimes that now stain the cause of Abolition. Revenge was never my strong suit, making me, I fear, a poor Vir
ginian.

  Meanwhile, here, the Copperheads are getting bolder. A colored man was beaten and killed two nights ago, and a church was torched, in retribution, no doubt, for Iron Bridge; which is precisely what I feared, the more dangerous elements inspired and unleashed. Violence has been sowed and will be reaped.

  Douglas will be well guarded, I think. My friend Lev is urging me to plead exams and come to Bethel Church, but I would be far more than remiss to do so; Lev does not understand, I fear, the Southern family. My uncle and I are not close: he is my father’s younger brother, and having moved North to enter law, he religiously sends his children South to be indoctrinated as Virginians. Thus the ironies of slavery: for I, the eldest of an eldest son, will inherit Mint Springs and its human chattel, which fate denied to him, a rabid enemy of Abolition. Meanwhile my father, in his illness, borrows regularly from his younger brother, who makes money hand over fist having been (to his profit) forced off the land into a profession. And I wonder will there be any slaves left to manumit when I come to my inheritance.

  So I must to Baltimore. There were ten years between us and I knew John only as a child, which was, in truth, in understanding, all he ever attained. G.R.H.S.

  Though I shan’t hear Douglas, I expect to know of his words in detail, for if there’s one thing I have gotten out of my almost four years of Medical school it’s a plethora of friends with the ability to take sure Notes.

  Any news of your plan? I hope you will continue to accept me as a true friend of abolition, of Hippocrates, and not incidentally, my dear Miss Pern, of Yourself.

  Your Faithful, &c.,

  Thomas Hunter, Esq, M.D. (ad imminen)

  It was in the little things, like using a twelve-year-old to pick up dead fifteen-year-olds, that the South, even its less harsh masters like Deihl, showed its unthinking, casual inhumanity: the fact that we were not in their eyes human. It took three wagons to “gather the children home,” (as the preacher put it, weeping) from Iron Bridge, and two of the wagons were Deihl’s. I drove Kate. It’s a rare horse and a common mule that can carry the dead without spooking. I have never forgotten the sight of those fourteen boys all in a row like ducks whose mama was the Gray Lady herself, their gray wool S.M.I. uniforms ruined with blood, being lifted one after another into the back of the wagon. No matter how gently they laid them down, the rusty springs shrieked each time. They didn’t get to me, though, not like the youth I saw with John Brown on the morning road to Frederick. These were not boys like me: already dead, these were things. Plus, I knew they were not friends. Folks lined the streets of Charles Town when we brought them in. This was in the first shock, and nobody seemed mad. It was as if lightning had struck the town. Everybody seemed dazed. The men who unloaded the boys into the church kitchen, and the women who cleaned them up were mostly black, though the militia that stood over them at honor guard for two days while their families arrived was all white. Charles Town had never seen such fine families before, I guarantee. They came not only from Richmond and the Tidewater, but the Carolines, Charleston, and Savannah; as far north as Baltimore and as far west as the bluegrass of Kentucky. We didn’t see them, of course, at Mama’s; they were not your cornbread-and-beans type; but we kept their horses and traps at the stable and we fed their slaves in the yard, where Mama had fixed up a special ‘colored’ kitchen. These slaves were first shocked and amazed at what had happened, and then curious and interested, all the time putting on a mighty show of grieving for the boys they had swaddled and raised. We slaves were the masters of grief’s appearances, weeping for every tragedy but our own. It was the end of the week before I got a chance to slip out to Green Gables. I left Sees Her tied up behind the big house and found Cricket down at the slough. Cricket seemed not to like this new horse of mine; I do believe he was jealous, great-grandson. The trotlines were slow. Cricket was trading catfish to Mama and the cook at the Shenandoah as well. While we ran the lines, I described the line of bodies all with their throats opened like mouths, the howling of the wagon springs as they were laid in like cordwood, the buzzing of the flies. Cricket had to hear every detail. It was hours before we were done with the lines, and I wondered why we were going so slow. It was because Cricket had something to show me, and he was waiting for the moon to rise. Right after the moon came over the mountain, he took me out to a certain canebrake, to a certain little high piece of ground near the Shenandoah, and showed me four graves with four white crosses: each one decorated neatly with flowers and bottle glass and white conch shells, each with a new little pine tree planted on it, African-style. Here was the resting place of Brown’s men. After Iron Bridge, it was like seeing the pretty side of death, the human side: for is burial not the most uniquely human of all our enterprises? Ants make cities and deer make roads, but only we of all creatures, in a tenderness and trustingness that would shame God if there were one, make graves. Cricket made me swear never to tell where it was. I went back looking for the spot years later, in 1895, thinking it should be made a shrine to the common humanity of all who died young so that Nova Africa might live; but it had all been swept away by the floods.

  Like all kids, Harriet loved to peel growstone: softer than balsa wood but stronger than concrete, it flaked off satisfyingly in thumbnail-shaped moons. She amused herself with the bridge rail (which would, of course, grow back smooth again) while the grown-ups argued; then she asked the question she already knew the answer to.

  From here the road led across the top of the mountain, through Bear Pond Gap, Grissom told her. “Should we drive up there and have a look? Like your father,” he said, “you’re drawn to the high places.”

  That made Harriet grin and made Yasmin angry. She couldn’t tell if Grissom had said it to defy her silence about Mars, or to acknowledge it and make it seem more natural. Either way, his presumption angered her.

  “Harriet, quit picking at the bridge,” she said, and got into the driver’s seat. It was, after all, her car. Sort of.

  The top was a disappointment. The mountain was covered with white oak, maple, and hickory forest, turning beautiful in October colors; but there were few pines, no bare rocks, no feeling of height, even though they were at over a thousand feet. The mountain top was broad and flat where the road crossed and there was no view. Harriet got out of the car anyway, and stood on her tiptoes, as if maybe that last inch would reveal something.

  Yasmin was just getting out of the car when, suddenly, two people crashed out of the brush at the side of the road. It was a man and a woman carrying backpacks topped with tents and bedrolls. Yasmin jumped back. With a wave the two crossed the road and disappeared into the brush on the south side of the road. Yasmin leaned back against the car, alarmed at how her heart was pounding. For a second, with their giant backpacks and white hats, they had looked like P.A.S.A. cosmonauts.

  “There is a trail that runs along the top of the mountain, following the route of the Army of the North Star,” Grissom was explaining to Harriet. Then he noticed Yasmin looking as though she’d seen a ghost: “Are you okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Hundreds of people hike it every year,” Grissom went on. “Not just Mericans and n’Africans, but Canadians, Quebecois, Oka, Dineh, even Europeans. All the way from New England to Alabama. The section from Harper’s Ferry to here is especially pretty; it goes past False Fire, only a mile from here.”

  “Have you ever hiked it?” Harriet asked.

  Yasmin scowled at her daughter as she got back into the car. What a question to ask a one-legged man. But Grissom didn’t seem to mind.

  “All the way. As a boy scout from Chicago, forty years ago. Before the Revolution,” he said. “Since then, not so much.”

  “Why don’t you get a pseudo-leg?”

  “The hip’s all messed up, nothing to work it with.”

  “Can’t you hike on crutches?”

  “You probably could from here; you’re already on top of the mountain. The trail coming up from the river is rough, though. I’ll show
it to you; you can see the beginning of it from the museum. What’s that noise?”

  Yasmin pulled the starter again.

  Te-oonk te-oonk te-oonk

  “What is this?”

  Te-oonk te-oonk

  The engine fired, then there was a horrible clatter like dishes falling.

  “Shut it off!” Grissom yelled.

  Yasmin had already shut it off. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know. I think you lost your polarization.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Are we stuck?” Harriet asked.

  “It means we switch over to planetary drive,” Grissom said.

  “Planetary?” Yasmin said, moving over and letting him into the driver’s seat. “What’s that?”

  “Mother!” Harriet was already pushing, laughing. Yasmin got out and joined her.

  “Planetary drive. Gravitational. In layman’s words,” Grissom said, “we roll down the hill.” The car was rolling faster. “Luckily, the old guy in the house trailer by the bridge is an internal-combustion mechanic.” Yasmin quit pushing and jumped into the front seat and slammed the door. “I know because I interviewed him for a folklore project last summer.” Harriet jumped into the back seat and slammed the door. “Lewis, that was his name.” They whooshed silently around the long curves. “No, it was Leavis. No . . . ” The road looped through long halls of forest. “Angus. Elbow. Pelvis. Elvis. That’s it . . . ” At the bottom of the mountain, after a sharp turn, they fairly flew across the river on the bridge, toward the trailers in the sycamores.

  “Elvis Presley Cardwell.”

  August 16, 1859

  Miss Emily Pern

  11 Commerce St.

  New York

  Dear Emily:

  I am writing to tell you that my plans changed, I went to Bethel Church last night and saw the great Frederick Douglass. Instead of a funeral I attended a Birth. Instead of a rain of tears, the Thunder of righteousness. Even I, with my conservative (as you say!) Southern ways, was moved. How like a lion is Douglass, a statesman, a philosopher, and a fighter in one, and he has done more in these two days to alter my opinions on how to end Slavery (I had started to say On Slavery, but my opinions on that Evil institution were long ago fixed) than any other event or individual save, I must own, perhaps yourself.