Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  February 2, 1860

  Miss Emily Pern

  Queens Dispensary

  Bath, England

  Dear Emily:

  Well, I am at last in Staunton, after a harrowing week’s journey, during which I almost lost my horses, my chest, and my life; delivered a child (dead); was delivered by another; and gained an assistant and lost him again.

  I suspect that even if you have written I will be late in getting your letters; so in the meantime, exiled in my own home as I am, let me share with you the scenes of terror and hope that have engulfed your country since you left. Every year in the South there is a Little Spring, late in January. This year it released me from my long wait. I left Philadelphia Thurs last and crossed the Mason-Dixon line into Maryland Friday, A.M., already west of the mountains. From Hagerstown on into Virginia, the highway was a scene of fantastic confusion and fear, though the terror really only began after Lee’s defeat at Signal Knob. The road was filled with refugees, deserters, bandits, looters, the wounded, the abandoned, the quick and the dead—all heading North. There were few others heading south; we were often forced to the fields as the crowded road would simply not admit traffic in a southerly direction. I say We, for just south of Martinsburg, at a miniature Noah’s flood called Antietam Creek, I was attached to by a slave boy of about fifteen, named Ayrab (I spell it as he pronounced it), who had been hired out to help drive cattle to Hagerstown and was now on his way back to Roanoke to rejoin his mother and master (he said). He had lost his traveling letters (he said) and was afraid of red-lighters and worse, and so attached himself to me, after helping with my Morgans. I felt the sting of delivering a slave back to his master, but hid my true feelings, since the boy helped me complete my own cover, and we agreed he would pass as my personal servant.

  Ayrab had his race’s knack with horses and more as well: for he helped me deliver a baby, or rather the mother, for the baby was beyond our Deliverance; and he later saved my life (as I will tell). The mother was a young Negress who had been cruelly left in a brush arbor behind a church just a half day south of Winchester; we heard her pitiable cries from the highway. Her child was born dead, the boy assisting me with a natural touch, for he had fear of neither suffering nor blood (essential in a doctor’s helper); yet after the birth I saw he was not so stoic as I had imagined; for when I handed him the baby to put aside (I had given up on it) and help me clean up the girl, he wouldn’t put it down, but cradling the dead infant in his arms, he burst into tears as if it had been his own. Nor would he leave without burying it, even though it was about to grow dark and the colored family who had agreed to take the girl North with them warned us of bandits, and not to remain in the shadows near the church. He buried the child African-style with a willow shoot on the grave. They often use a tree as a living headstone. He lay in the back of the wagon and cried himself to sleep as I drove south; I covered him with a blanket and drove on, and after a while he grew quiet.

  It was only two hours later, after dark, ten miles up the pike, that he saved my life. We were far enough up in the valley now to see the famous fires—one on the Blue Ridge, one on Signal Knob, and two on the Cumberlands to the west. Emily, though they had altered my very life, I had never before seen them. Beautiful they were, like stars, and indeed they had drawn me here like the Christ star; and others from around the world, as well. I was musing on how very far they were visible (poetically), all the way from England, Italy, Greece, even Africa. We were heading across a muddy field of corn stubble, the road being clotted with northbound carts and horses, the winter being the wettest in many years, when a detachment of men hailed us. There were six of them, carrying pitch pine torches, mounted very well but poorly armed with government muskets, and the leader with a shotgun. The leader asked my destination, and I told him, Staunton. He was wearing a Lee cap, and I guessed that they were deserters. He asked my name and I told him, but the name Hunter seemed to inspire envy and hostility rather than respect.

  He said: —Well, Mr. Hunter, we’re looking for Yanks, abs, and deserters— —And stolen goods— he added, nodding toward my traps.

  I knew then that their intention was to steal my new Townerley and everything in it. I hoped that they wouldn’t see the young Negro covered with a blanket in the back, since they would probably take him for a runaway; but he had the presence of mind to stay covered. I regretted my folly in not being armed. I had only the two Longmann duelling pistols under my seat, and they were untouched since the infamous duel: still charged only with powder but no shot.

  I said: —Carry on then, but you have no business with me— Meanwhile I reached under the seat, as if for my whip, edging toward the pistol case, figuring an unloaded weapon better than none, since they would at least make a flash and roar.

  I clucked up the horses, but the man in the Lee cap impudently took my lead horse’s bit and stepped into our path, the others by his side.

  —Your papers, sir! — he said.

  I found the pistol case with my fingertips, and answered him: —Papers? — (I said) —Gentlemen, it’ll be a sorry day when a free-born Virginian shows papers to white trash that can’t even read. Now you will either stand aside or regret it in Hell! —

  —G-d damn you for a dog! — he bellowed and reached for the horses, just as I opened the case— and found it empty! My God, I am lost, I thought, falling back just as there was a blast in my ear and the Morgans reared in their traces.

  I thought I had been shot, but it was our bandit who clutched his face as the Lee cap flew off his head; he fell and his shotgun went off, and I heard the load rip by me in the air, the second time I have heard that dreadful noise. Meanwhile (all this happening in the same instant), the Morgans bolted, throwing me down; and I looked behind me and I saw the Negro boy standing robed in the blanket like Hamlet’s ghost, with my two pistols! The Morgans were running and the boy was thrown against the tailgate, my other gun in his hand discharging with a prodigious flash and roar. Behind us I saw the bandit’s horse dragging him through a fence while the others tried to catch it.

  There were more shots, but whether at us or the bandit’s horse I could not tell, for we had regained the road and were careering like the wind. The boy joined me on the seat, a smoking pistol in each hand, still wrapped in my red blanket like a red Indian. I took back my guns and loaded them, this time properly with shot, while he drove. I couldn’t determine how he had prevailed with unloaded weapons. Perhaps the powder blast and wad alone had scorched the bandit’s face. At any rate, we reached Strasburg by midnight, beasts lathered, but safe. I was surprised to find blood had spoiled the shoulder of my coat; a shotgun pellet had torn my ear, but that was all.

  Thus, my formal Introduction to war! It’s too soon to write what Staunton is like; I have only been here a day. I am anxious to hear of yourself and Lev. Are his wounds healed? Are you able to visit him in Prison, and will he be brought to trial? Tell me, do you ever think of your old friends here? Write me freely at the old address in Phila. I have made arrangements to secure my mail.

  Yr. Brother in Sentiment and Determination,

  Thom

  Here, on a ledge overlooking the valley, a great ring of stones were piled, still blackened by smoke after a hundred years. There was no plaque, no railing, no displays, no brochures, no guards or attendants; if you climbed the mountain and followed the ridge-top, you found it just as Brown and his men had left it one hundred years before, minus the roaring flames.

  False Fire.

  There was no plaque because everyone knew the story. Two men kept the great fire burning while Tubman and Brown moved their few precious soldiers south: not through Key’s Gap, where Lee’s pickets were expecting them, but down the steep hollows into the Valley, across the Shenandoah in ones and twos and fours and tens, then south to Signal Knob: the whites disguised as preachers, newspapermen; the blacks as corn pickers, slaves on hire slouching from farm to farm through the long rows. Once twelve men together were disguised as two slave b
rokers with a coffle of ten ‘bucks’ for the Georgia turpentine plantations. They had left behind only two to tend the fire; and of these one managed to escape and rejoin them, because he was white, passing himself off as a major’s aide who had followed the troops up the mountain out of curiosity; the other was shot and then suffocated in the tunnel he had designed for escape.

  “Two men,” Yasmin said. “And Lee sent a thousand.”

  She stood beside her daughter on the still-blackened stones and watched the valley drying in the sun a thousand feet below. Here, out of the trees at last, there was a feeling of height. Harriet loved it: just to stand there was to soar. Yasmin didn’t like it. She had never shared Leon’s love for emptiness. She sat down, weak in the knees. They could see up the valley to Harper’s Ferry, and west to Charles Town. To the east, across the low top of the mountain, they could see Hilisborough and Mechanicsville in the Loudon Valley. Far to the south an airship was motoring easily northward in the lee of the mountain.

  Yasmin could almost hear the high singing in her bones. “Now don’t be jumping around here,” she said. The sun was dropping through the clouds over the Cumberlands, and Grissom was waiting for them in her car at the Gap, but Yasmin didn’t want to go. Let him wait. This was the first time she had felt at peace with her daughter in a year.

  Getting up her courage, she leaned out a little and looked down. It wasn’t a straight drop, just a long rocky slope. She threw a stick and listened to hear it hit . . .

  “I shouldn’t have waited three days to tell you. With all the Mars stuff, I guess I was thinking about your father and all. I mean, he probably would think . . . ”

  “Mother, he’s dead.”

  “Well.”

  “No, I mean really. Actually dead. He’s not up there wondering what you’re doing. Honestly, sometimes you sound like Grandma.”

  “Probably you’re right. Anyway, I didn’t even think of getting married when I met Ntoli,” Yasmin said. “He’s not like your father, he’s a wanderer. He can’t stay in any one place.”

  Who could be more of a wanderer than my father? Harriet thought. But she knew enough about her mother not to interrupt. So she sat down and laid her head on her lap, gradually, gingerly: while Yasmin told Harriet the story of how they’d met in Dar while she had been cataloguing the Olduvai Project. Ntoli was the brother of one of the other women on the project; he was an agronomist home from a project in Holland, on his way to a conference at U.N. headquarters in Jerusalem. A world traveler. A sweet man with doe eyes who spoke four languages, none of them English. And almost ten years younger. “My Xhosa and Arabic are both so bad,” Yasmin said, “that we laughed a lot and hardly ever argued. I didn’t intend to get pregnant. But when I did, I was glad.” She looked down at her daughter on her lap. “It seemed to make sense.”

  “What did he think?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t tell him.”

  “Mother!”

  Yasmin grinned wickedly. “I will. After. Maybe. Of course. But first I had to talk with you. Not to mention your grandmother. Not to mention our collective back in Charleston. You see, child, Ntoli is a very lovely man, but I have no intention of marrying, least of all a man that much younger. Anyway, it was all an accident and he was already on his way to Palestine when I found out . . . ”

  Harriet heard a high, joyful singing in her head; she looked over without sitting up and saw the blue and silver Tom Paine passing just a few hundred feet away. There was silence like the eye of a storm as the ship passed, the plasma motors sounding farther away the closer they were.

  Harriet loved airships, and seeing the ship pass so closely, actually looking slightly down on it, made her feel lucky, like walking up on a deer. Watching from her mother’s lap, she felt lucky twice. Without sitting up, she waved at a small face on the glassed-in rear deck, going away: a little girl, alone, looking back as little girls do. She wouldn’t mind having a baby brother. She was just glad to have her mother back. She laid her head back down on her mother’s lap and looked up.

  “I bet you’re scared about telling Grandma.”

  “Of course not. Well, sort of. But mainly, I wanted to tell you first.”

  “Really?” Yasmin smiled to watch Harriet wiggle with delight. “Still, she’ll be shocked! When you going to tell her, Mama?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  “We’ll be at her house to watch the Mars landing. I’ll tell her then; then it’s back to Nova Africa for us.”

  “I bet she’ll think you should get married.”

  “And move to Africa? Or Palestine? I think not. She wouldn’t want that any more than you. Or me. Besides, she’s religious and old-fashioned, it’s true, but she’s not really so narrow-minded as you think. Leon could talk her into anything. Even into me.”

  “What do you mean, Daddy could? Tell me.”

  Yasmin laughed. “You should have seen the first time he brought me home to Staunton. I was definitely what you might call a radical, at least for Virginia.”

  “What do you mean? Tell me.”

  “I mean, there I was coming from a big university in Nova Africa. A genuine communist. I had long dreads and big-city shoes. I was vice president of the Pan African Friendship League—that’s how I met your dad. (We worked with all the cute foreign students!) But seriously, Pearl thought all that was the Devil’s work. Remember, this was 1943, ‘44. Before the Revolution here, and a lot of the black folks in the U.S. — especially in the country, like your grandmother—were pretty old-fashioned. The younger folks like your father were looking south of the border; that’s why he went to school in Nova Africa in the first place instead of the U.S. So anyway, there we were home for his Christmas vacation. I was in the U.S. illegally, and—”

  “So what did she say? What did she do?”

  “Your grandma? She cut me some pie. I think it was chess pie. I think she thought that would straighten me out.”

  “What did Daddy do? What did he tell her?”

  “Oh, him! He didn’t have to say anything. He got what he wanted with that damn lopsided grin of his. Nothing was too good for her boy. He was an only child.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like you.”

  “Not anymore. I’m going to have a baby brother, remember?”

  “Quit saying that, Harriet. How do you know it’s going to be a boy. That might be bad luck.”

  “I just have a feeling.” Harriet laughed, looking up. Her mother’s face loomed close, like a dark, warm moon. “Do you ever have conjure dreams?”

  Harriet felt her mother stiffen, and for a moment she thought maybe she had said the wrong thing.

  “Hello!”

  Harriet sat up.

  Three figures were stepping out of the trees into the fading sunlight: three Mericans, two of them with big packs and rain hats that looked, for only a heartbeat, like space suits.