by Wayne Grady
25.
As a young man, Moody had gone to Franklin College, in Athens, Georgia, where he’d taken courses in biology, engineering and law. After, he’d gone to New Orleans. He’d read books from the college library, novels and poetry and some philosophy, but it had been the law courses that had most stimulated his imagination. Biology had interested him for what it taught about how the world worked, but after a while a frog splayed out on a dissecting table looked too much like a human body, an unborn baby’s, for example, for him to feel entirely comfortable cutting it open to see what was inside. But when he’d found the mastodon bone, he wished he’d paid more attention to biology. At least he had learned enough to know how to learn more.
The law, he found when he first moved to New Orleans in 1830, had fired his imagination because it was open to so many idiosyncratic and perverse interpretations. The law was not an ass, it was a Hydra. Cut off one spurious argument and two more sprouted to take its place. Spend hours following a line of inquiry only to find that it led to two other lines. The law, he realized, had prepared him for this search for Lucas.
26.
Later that afternoon, as he stood by the fireplace in the hotel lobby trying to decide whether to have a drink or ask someone other than Heiskell about Lucas, the desk clerk appeared and said there was someone outside who wanted to speak with him.
“Is it Brown?”
Heiskell, born Presbyterian, had become a Quaker when he married Eliza, Brown’s sister, who was a stout member of the Society of Friends. Brown was a lifelong Quaker, and preferred lunching here at the hotel, where the food was plainer and there were no portraits of hypocritical heroines of the War of Independence on display.
“He didn’t give a name, sir,” replied the clerk. “He’s waiting outside.”
“Outside?” Then it wasn’t Brown. “Well, show him in, man, show him in.”
The clerk looked embarrassed. “He’s a negro, sir.”
Moody stared at him. “You don’t say,” he said. “I’ll see him outside.”
He hurried out onto the street, expecting to see Lucas standing by the entrance. He had been right to put the advertisement in the Register, and to wait for Lucas to see it. He looked up and down the street. There were the usual shoppers and saunterers, but no Lucas. He was about to set off toward the river, thinking Lucas had changed his mind and run off again, when a dark figure emerged from the narrow confine between the hotel and the adjacent building. A tall, well-dressed man with a cane, a dove-colored jacket and a plain, rounded hat. Moody hoped his disappointment was not overly evident on his face.
“Henry!” Moody said, and the Mary White’s steward held out a gloved hand, which Moody warmly shook. “It’s good to see you.”
“A great pleasure, Mr. Moody,” Henry said, removing his hat.
“What favorable wind has blown you to me?”
“I saw in the paper you was here at the hotel,” Henry said, gesturing toward the door.
“Well, I’m glad you saw it. It doesn’t seem to have come to Lucas’s attention, though. You’re back in Knoxville already? You left only on Friday.”
“The Mary White broke a rudder shaft just past Chattanooga,” said Henry. “Hit a rock. The water sure is low. There wasn’t no rock there the last time we went by. We comed back for another one.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to continue downstream to Huntsville?”
“Captain wife live in Knoxville,” Henry said, laughing. “There sure are some irated passengers on that boat. Now we have to wait for a new rudder shaft.”
“How long will that take?”
“A week or two, maybe more. They have to send a long way for it, maybe to Charleston or Pittsburgh. And me all that time with no pay.”
“That’s a shame, Henry. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t think so this time, boss. Unless you need a body servant for a couple of weeks?”
Henry flicked an invisible flake of ash off Moody’s shoulder and eyed the hotel’s facade as though considering its suitability as a temporary abode. Moody thought about being his father again, this time for two weeks.
“I’m not stopping,” he said. “I’m going on to Philadelphia.”
“Philadelphia? What’s in Philadelphia?”
“I’m convinced that Lucas must have gone that way without coming into Knoxville.”
Henry pursed his lips. “You don’t think he might have gone more north, into Kentucky? Lexington almost due north of here, closer than Philly.”
“You think he went to Lexington?”
“Well, I brung you some news,” Henry said. “I heard something at Chattanooga, when the Mary White stop to take on new crew. I talk to a man said he talk to a man the week before asking about a woman name Benah. He say he remember particularly because Benah such a nice name he like to meet her himself.”
“Did he say what the man looked like?”
“He said this man didn’t have no nicks in his ears or his nostrils, and he had all his fingers and toes. That a rare condition for a runaway, you remember something like that. He said this man was at the dock waiting on a white man was going to hire him to take a wagon up to Louisville.”
“Louisville?” Moody said. “From Chattanooga? Would he have to come through Knoxville?”
“No, he couldn’t,” said Henry. “There ain’t no good road from here to Louisville. But from Chattanooga he could cut up through the hills to Lexington and be in Louisville in a few weeks.”
“Did he say who this man was who was sending him to Louisville?”
“No. He only say he driving a team of horses for this man, and that he was going up to Louisville because he heard this Benah going there.”
“Thank you, Henry. I don’t suppose you’d like to come with me?”
Henry looked down at his immaculate coat and trousers, the spats on his shoes, and smiled. “No, sir. I be all right on the Mary White, though I do wish she had a different name.”
“Stay away from soldiers.”
“You, too.”
“And speculators.”
“Thing is,” Henry said, leaning toward him, “there’s lots of men out there that promise to help runaways. They get what work they want from them, then sell them to a speculator. Louisville ain’t exactly a safe place for a black man.”
He would go to Louisville. He would leave that very day, after saying goodbye to Heiskell and Brown. The livery stable behind the hotel would sell him a horse and saddle, and if he rode hard he might even intercept Lucas before he reached the Ohio River.
27.
The trail through the hills above the Tennessee River was far from inviting. Bands of Cherokee were rumored to have secretly returned from the Indian Territory to hide out in the Smokies, waiting for the collapse of the Union to reclaim their traditional lands. Maybe the Union was falling apart. The more he thought about it, the more his horse skidded on the hard-rock hills, as though his own concentration and the horse’s were the same, the more he was tempted to turn back. The wind threatened to blow him out of the saddle, and his hip ached from the bouncing and the cold. He couldn’t manage much more than a trot. He began to doubt Henry and his tale of a stranger helping Lucas get to Louisville by giving him a wagon and a team of horses. Henry’s own final words proved that he wasn’t sanguine about the arrangement, either. Why would Lucas trust anyone? This benefactor sounded like a character in a story the Register might have published, a warning about the kind of smooth-talking speculator a runaway might run into on the long road to freedom. Moody thought Lucas was too smart to fall for such tricks, but he also thought Lucas might think he could outsmart a crooked teamster. And so he wavered. He should turn back. He would press on.
Eventually the hills gave way to flatland, reminding him of parts of Texas, except here there were trees he didn’t know, grasses he’d never seen before. He recognized most of the birds in the trees and on the rivers; he stopped to water his horse and watched a gr
eat blue heron staring so intently into the water he thought it must have been frozen, until the bird took a slow, cautious step toward something and stopped again. In a small blue lake, a family of green-winged teals dabbled for whatever bottom dwellers they had up here. Would Lucas take the wagon all the way up to Louisville, or would he take it as far as he dared, or until he caught up with Benah, and then ditch it, or else turn off the main road to head for somewhere else, Cincinnati, maybe, which was closer than Louisville? No, Lucas would do what he said he would do. Moody had raised him to keep his word. If Lucas said he would take the wagon to Louisville, he would take it to Louisville. If he heard Benah was in Cincinnati, he would take the wagon to Louisville and then head for Cincinnati. Moody thought he could take a lesson from the heron: patience, focus, faith.
He stopped one night beside a river where two trappers had a cabin. The pain in his leg had become all but unbearable, and he half expected to see blood when he climbed down from the saddle. The trappers were twin brothers named Tim’n’Tom, which was to say one was named Tim and the other Tom, but since they were so identical that no one, not even the two of them, knew which was Tim and which was Tom, they both answered to Tim’n’Tom. They’d built the cabin at the fork of two rivers and called the place Twin Forks. They’d added a skinning shed some distance from the cabin, because of the smell, in which pelts stretched on loops of willow branches hung from the rafters: beaver, muskrat, a few minks and otters. Moody asked them if they’d seen a wagon train go by lately.
“Yep,” said one.
“Nope,” said the other.
“We seen plenty wagon trains go by,” said the first.
“But not lately,” said the second.
“Why d’ you ask?” said the first.
Moody told them about Lucas. They seemed to absorb the information without really understanding it. He suspected they were simple, that maybe, being identical twins, they were each born with half a brain. The Register had run an article about Chang and Eng Bunker, P. T. Barnum’s Siamese Twins, two brothers who’d been born joined at the waist, each of them sharing a single liver. Tim’n’Tom weren’t joined, but they seemed to share thoughts, as though each knew exactly what the other was thinking, or as though there was just the one thought and they were each having half of it at the same time.
“It’s a big country,” said one.
“Needle in a haystack,” said the other.
He slept on the cabin floor, which didn’t do his leg any good but at least he was warm, and when he woke in the morning Tim’n’Tom fried him a breakfast of some unidentifiable meat—beaver, said one, muskrat, according to the other. They told him that if it had been summer they’d have had mallard eggs. “Mallard’s good to eat,” they said. “Coot not so much.” He was eager to get back on the road, but allowed himself the pleasant confusion of conversing with his hosts as they ate. They told him he had crossed a divide—all the rivers now flowed north, into the Ohio. He was in Kentucky, but he was out of the South. Kentucky called itself neutral, although it was a slave state. Moody told them about the bone he’d found beside the Rio Brazos—not what had ultimately happened to it, but what it had meant to him before that. It seemed to have brought him to a new way of looking at the world. They told him they saw bones like that all the time, just sticking out of the riverbanks. Whale bones, they supposed they were, belonging to behemoths beached by ancient storms, buried by floods, bathed by more recent rains and bleached by the sun. Bible bones.
“During the Flood this whole area must have been underwater,” they said.
“Water was so deep it had whales in it.”
Moody packed his bedroll and satchel, bid goodbye to Tim’n’Tom and, once back on the road, cantered as fast as his horse and his leg would let him. The half-tamed land around him, still gently hilled, became flatter and dotted with farms and crossroad villages—two or three rough houses beside a tavern or a smithy—and then opened to plantations, with large, white, verandaed houses, smoke rising from stone chimneys, and slave quarters and barns tucked into the closest woods. He rode in his horse’s breath, stopping to rest and change mounts in Richmond, Lexington, Frankfort. Always asking the liverymen about Lucas, who might also have changed horses at those same stables.
“Tall man, lightish skin, no nicks or parts missing,” Moody would say, “likely driving a team and wagon with a load on it.”
A man in Lexington asked him, “Light skinned? Quadroon? Octoroon?” and Moody didn’t know what to say. Annie was light, but Moody had never seen her mother.
In any case, no one had seen a wagon go by, or a young man hightailing it to the border with or without a woman. Moody climbed back on his horse and resigned himself to the road. When he came to the Ohio River he followed it west, downstream, to Louisville.
28.
The city was bigger than he’d expected, it wouldn’t be easy to find Lucas in it. It was built beside the Falls of the Ohio, a ten-mile set of impassable rapids that had forced riverboats to stop, unload and go back to where they came from. The goods they unloaded had then been carted to the other end of the rapids and reloaded onto other boats and taken down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and on to St. Louis or New Orleans. But enough goods had stayed in Louisville to make it a well-supplied city with direct links upriver to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, even to Boston. The Ohio River joined the country east and west, and separated it north and south, with Louisville at the hub. Louisville men had their hair cut square across the backs of their necks, washed and shaved every morning, and wore boots that seldom stepped on anything but wooden or carpeted floors. They decried slavery, calling the men and women who worked for them for nothing servants. The women’s dresses were hemmed above the ground and unmuddied, their sleeves and necklines trimmed with lace, sewn on by their black housemaids. None wore bonnets, but pinned starched muslin caps with trailing ribbons to their hair. There was an opera house and a concert hall, and notices in the newspapers for chamber concerts and visiting poets. Along with the luxury goods that came downriver from Philadelphia came an attitude, a sense that it was the rest of the world, not Louisville, that had to justify its existence. That the goods arriving daily by steamship and keelboat were not trade goods, but tribute from a grateful nation. Louisville didn’t need the Falls of the Ohio; the Falls of the Ohio needed Louisville. Even now that the city had dug a canal around the Falls, boats still stopped, people continued to get off, the city would go on forever.
He kept his eyes open, convinced that he would find Lucas trying to cross the Ohio. Every day, his steps brought him to the dockyards, which were extensive and, seen from the road above them, chaotic. Barges, snaggers, dredgers, flatboats and keelboats jostled the shore for space between fancy riverboats and steam-driven freighters. Crews and stevedores, carters and draymen swarmed the docks. Huge Belgian workhorses maneuvered heavy wagons up and down the piers. Riverboat traffic was becoming increasingly heavy by the day, and most of the steamboats he saw were burning coal. As was the city in general. Wagon trains and coal barges arrived from Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and Moody watched their cargo of coal being dumped onto mountainous, flat-black, bituminous stockpiles beside the river. Bales of cotton and hemp were off-loaded at a different pier, away from the pervading coal dust.
Moody figured that Lucas would likely have been hauling cotton from the South, not coal or hemp, which were Northern products. He sat in an ordinary across Ohio Street from Pier 9, the cotton pier, making his breakfast last as long as he could, into the lunch hour if possible, and studying each face as it passed, and every wagon that turned down to the loading docks, all the time thinking Lucas could be over at Pier 2 shoveling coal, or delivering lumber to Pier 4, or bags of salt, or sugar, or grain, anywhere but at Pier 9. After a few days he began to be noticed in the eatery, a white man surreptitiously watching the docks. People started to avoid him. The waitresses became less friendly, the coffee older and colder, they’d run out of dessert, would that be all, sir? He sai
d he was looking for a job, which in a way was true. He couldn’t keep counting on winning at poker, because he was getting to be known in the saloons, too, and the desk clerk at the Hart House Hotel was snooty whenever he returned to his room at night smelling of cigar smoke and whiskey. He sensed he’d also begun to exude an air of disappointment, with maybe a dash of desperation, like a gambler down on his luck. He wasn’t drinking much, but he wasn’t abstaining, either, and he was aware of it when his tread on the stairs above the clerk’s desk sounded halt and unsteady. He paid his bill weekly, but his tips became less generous, his smoker’s squint more habitual and less discerning, his cuffs and collars more frayed. And still there was no sign of Lucas. He could have found Benah and been in Sierra Leone or Liberia or Nova Scotia by now. But Moody remained certain that they hadn’t crossed the Ohio River. He had to be certain about something, and he chose that.
One day, a week after his arrival in Lo’ville, as he was learning to call the city, he wandered into a section of it he’d been avoiding because of his skin. Shacks and doss houses made from discarded packing crates and heated with coal picked up on the roadways and in the railyards huddled along streets ripe with caked mud and horse droppings. Everything seemed temporary, everyone who lived there was waiting for the end of something. The fugitives looked hunted, defiant, achingly close to their goal but without the wherewithal to cross the last river. The free blacks ignored him, looked away as though his presence were an annoyance but not a concern. He felt the overhanging gloom, the sense that soon the camptown would be struck and they would be moved on. Fugitive or freed, they had only to survive until they could cross the Ohio. He calculated the odds of happening upon Lucas at around a million to one, about as likely as a mastodon dying and, a hundred thousand years later, its bones turning up at his doorstep.
