Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  The museum director was a short, fair-haired, balding man whose enthusiasm did not appear to have been dampened by the evidence of life’s treacherousness by which he was surrounded. His name, Lester P. Underhill, was engraved on a lump of coal set on the edge of his desk. He gave Tim’n’Tom ten dollars for the whooping crane skin, and told them he was happy to have it, but next time could they get him a great auk or a penguin? He was, he said, pretty well fixed for ducks and geese. “What I don’t have,” he said, “are critters we don’t see in these parts. This whooper’s a migrant; we see ’em from time to time, a few days each year, but there ain’t always time to shoot one.”

  Moody asked him where he had gotten the mastodon femur that he was passing off as a giant’s leg bone.

  “Big Bone Lick,” said Underhill, making a face and eyeing Moody speculatively. “I seen a whole set of them in old Bill Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, but I ain’t never had but the one bone here. How’d you know what it was?”

  “I used to have one myself,” Moody said.

  “Where is it?”

  “I lost it.”

  “How in hell do you lose a four-foot, hundred-pound thigh bone?”

  “I just did. I heard Peale’s came from somewhere along the Ohio River.”

  “That’s Big Bone Lick, but his came from the Hudson Valley, up to New York. The Ohio bones were dug up by a bunch of damn Frenchmen a hundred years ago, and the bastards sent them to France. I’ve written to the president to tell him he should demand their return. Those bones belong right here in this museum. Or in the museum in Louisville at the very least, seeing as they came from Kentucky. You been to Big Bone Lick?”

  “No.”

  “It’s in a loop of the Ohio, just south of Cincinnati. Captain William Clark was there in 18-ought-7, that’s where he got the mastodon skeleton he gave to Thomas Jefferson. Big Bone Lick got more bones in it than a catfish. Mastodons and giant sloths and cave bears must’ve went there to get a lick of salt and fell in. We got our own salt lick down to Malden, but nobody’s found any bones in it yet that I know of. You got any training in geology?”

  “Took a course in it one time, at Franklin College, in Athens, Georgia.” This was more recklessness. His roommate at Franklin, a young hellion named Keith Barrett, had taken courses in natural science, and Moody had glanced from time to time at his textbooks and been fascinated by drawings of coiled shells, stone shrimps, petrified snakes. He hadn’t needed giant leg bones to convince him of nature’s strangeness. “That was a long time ago.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Underhill said. “Them bones was a long time ago. Big Bone Lick is old hat, got too many amateurs digging it up and bringing me their junk, knucklebones and such, never a skull. Tell you what, you find me some fossils that ain’t from Big Bone Lick, and draw me a map of where you found ’em, I’d be happy to put them in the museum. Especially a skull. Bring me a whole skeleton that don’t come from Big Bone Lick, gentlemen, and it’ll make your fortunes.”

  34.

  “You can’t find bones without a boat,” Tim’n’Tom said to Moody as they strolled in contemplative silence down the dusty, board-walkless street from the museum to the river. The fur auction was two days off and they would sleep aboard the Pelican, with the stove going to forestall the chill winter weather. At night the temperature dropped below freezing. “We can show you where some more bones are, and where Big Bone Lick is, but you’ll need a boat to get to ’em, and you don’t have a boat. You need a boat.”

  “What about you?” Moody asked them. “Aren’t you interested in finding him a mastodon skeleton?”

  “Nope.”

  “We like the way we live now.”

  “We like the outsides of animals better ‘n the insides.”

  “You need a boat.”

  “Where can I get a boat?” Moody asked.

  “And a shed to put it in,” they said.

  “And a dock to tie it to.”

  “Are you selling the Pelican?” he asked.

  “We been thinking of it.”

  “We ain’t as young as you.”

  “You need a boat to find Lucas.”

  “All right,” he said. It would cost him the rest of Robert’s gold, but he could earn money with the boat, hauling cargo. And when he found Lucas and Benah, he could take them the rest of the way to Canada.

  35.

  At some point before dawn on the morning they were to leave Wheeling, Moody was awakened by a commotion on the foredeck. Not a commotion, he realized when he was fully awake, more like a suppressed disturbance, something furtive. He looked through one of the cabin’s forward windows and saw dark figures moving in the moonlight; they appeared to be huddled against the wind, smoking cigarettes, he thought at first, but then saw their breath condensing in the cold air. There came the dull thunder of the hatch cover being rolled aside. He dressed quickly, jammed his pistol under his belt, pulled on his coat and went out to investigate.

  He saw Tim’n’Tom talking to three figures, two men and a woman, obviously fugitives; black, even in the darkness he could see they were dressed in rags, coughing. The woman was older than the men.

  “They heard we’s goin’ to Lo’ville,” Tim’n’Tom said to him.

  “Want us to take ’em.”

  “So we’re takin’ ’em.”

  “There’s catchers behind ’em.”

  “Guns.”

  “We’ll hide ’em under the salt.”

  Their names were Jonah and Sully, the woman was Mary. Sully said they’d been working in a coal depot, shoveling coal off steamboats, and heard they were being sent to work in one of the salt furnaces in Malden; they knew that would kill them, so Mary had brought them here. Mary was their landlady, a free woman.

  “All right,” Moody said, peering at the two fugitives. Neither of them was Lucas. “Let’s get them below, and we can close the hatch and light a lantern.”

  “That’s what we was thinkin’.”

  “We gotta shove off at first light.”

  Moody climbed down into the hold with the two fugitives and one of the Tim’n’Toms. The other closed the hatch and began untying the Pelican. Moody lit a lamp in the hold, then the four of them arranged the sacks of salt into rows forming a trench down the center. Tim’n’Tom laid boards across the trench and they piled more sacks on top of the boards to form a kind of cavern, and the two fugitives crawled into it. Tim’n’Tom placed more sacks across the opening. No one spoke much. Tim’n’Tom seemed to know exactly what to do.

  “You done this before,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “You knew they were coming.”

  “Happens.”

  “That’s why we stopped for salt,” Moody said, “so the bags would be here.”

  He felt the Pelican rock as it slipped away from the dock. Fifty sacks of salt gave enough weight that the rocking and drifting were slow. Moody heard shouts coming from above and blew out the lantern. He and Tim’n’Tom scrambled up the ladder and opened the hatch a crack. It was still dark. The opening was filled with stars. Tim’n’Tom paced along on the deck, poling the Pelican away from the dock, and two men on the dock were yelling at him.

  “Stop, goddamn it! Stop or we’ll fill yer boat so full of holes she’ll sink and, and you and yer goddamn niggers with her!”

  Tim’n’Tom continued poling. Moody pushed the hatch cover the rest of the way open and he and Tim’n’Tom climbed out on deck. The boat wasn’t more than twenty yards from the dock, but once out into the current it would be easier going. Moody grabbed a second pole and pushed. One of the Tim’n’Toms ran into the cabin and came out with a rifle, and Moody felt that now the whole thing was coming undone. Guns in the dark: no one could see anything, no one thought they could hit anything, and so everyone felt justified in firing at anything that moved.

  “I’ll shoot the first one of you sons of bitches fires at this boat,” the Tim’n’Tom with the rifle shouted. It was the longest sentence Mo
ody had heard from him. Then, from the dock, he heard the crack of a rifle. Moody jumped and Tim’n’Tom dropped backward through the open hatch into the cargo hold. There were more rifle shots. Moody brought out his pistol and fired blindly in the direction of the dock while the Tim’n’Tom who was poling ran to the far side of the boat, putting the cabin between himself and the catchers. Moody fired two more shots. The boat was far enough out now that the dock blended into the darkness. A final rifle shot came their way but hit nothing. Moody climbed down into the hold.

  When he lit the lantern, he saw Tim’n’Tom lying on his back on the sacks of salt. His eyes were open and there was a hole the size of a ten-cent piece in the middle of his forehead.

  36.

  There’d been nothing dramatic about it, just men shouting at one another, some shots fired and a man killed. It was like the war.

  They lifted Tim’n’Tom out of the hold wrapped in a blanket and laid him on his cot in the Pelican’s cabin. His brother was taking him back to Twin Forks to be buried. He and Moody worked the poles, easier now they were going downriver but still necessary to keep off the rocks. At night, when they tied up to the shore, Jonah and Sully came up on deck to cook and to scrub Tim’n’Tom’s blood off the wooden planks. The result looked good at night, but in the morning the stain was still there beside the hatch cover. During the day they kept to the Ohio side, in case the catchers followed after them, or new catchers became interested. Tim’n’Tom kept his rifle handy, and sat beside the cot in the evenings, reading or staring off into the darkness above the candle. It rained most of the way, a cold, slanting drizzle that knocked the leaves off the trees and made the deck slippery under their boots. Moody rigged a tarpaulin over the foredeck, where the cookstove and some chairs were set up, and to give Tim’n’Tom some privacy he carried his cot down to the hold and slept there with the fugitives, leaving the hatch cover open for air. There was blood on some of the sacks, and they shifted those to the back and replaced them with clean burlap, on which Jonah and Sully slept.

  Neither of them knew anything of Lucas or Benah. They’d been caught by a posse coming up from Tennessee, but had never been near Chattanooga, didn’t know anyone who ran delivery wagons up to Louisville, had never been west of Nashville before. They were sorry, they would have liked to help, especially because they felt responsible for the death of his friend.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Moody said.

  Moody brought Tim’n’Tom food, but it was barely touched. He would sit with them for a while, then put a hand on Tim’n’Tom’s shoulder and leave to go sit out on the deck with his pistol on the table beside his chair.

  “The trouble,” said Tim’n’Tom one night as Moody was at the door, “is that I don’t know which one of us is dead.”

  37.

  By the time the Pelican nudged sluggishly against its home dock, the rain had become colder, bordering on sleet, and the river was a midnight blue stirred, at its shallower places, into whitecaps. They transferred Tim’n’Tom’s body to the wagon, and Tim’n’Tom drove it back to Twin Forks. Moody offered to go with them, but he had to deliver Jonah and Sully to a Quaker household in the west end. Tim’n’Tom gave him the address, and Moody watched him drive off.

  They waited in the boathouse until after dark, then made their way along darkened back streets, through the workers’ neighborhood, until they found the address. After delivering his charges, Moody told the man who took them that he would ferry fugitives across the Ohio River, or to whatever station was next on the Railroad line. They invited him in and gave him dinner. They talked guardedly about their activities, but assured him he and his boat would be welcome. “It gets harder from here on up,” they said. “More catchers, bigger fines. Jail sentences.” Moody said he’d be careful. Cincinnati, they told him, or, if he went the other way, downriver, then Paducah. Moody had the impression he was at the center of a large but nebulous network, each junction of the web knowing only the next junction, nothing beyond that. He inquired after Lucas, more out of habit than hope, and was told that the name didn’t ring any bells, and the family didn’t keep records. They seemed as frightened of being discovered as Jonah and Sully were. Remembering his experience with Rachel and the Judds, he didn’t press.

  From that night on, however, his boathouse was a gathering place for runaways. Charcoal or chalk markings appeared on the trees by the road, and often when he emerged from his cabin in the morning fugitives would slip out of the woods and come down to the dock; families, single men, single women, small groups of children who had been through more than they would ever recover from. Moody took them in, fed them, hid them in the Pelican, and took them across the river into Ohio or Indiana. For a while he imagined Lucas and Benah showing up at his dock, the surprise on their faces when they realized who their ferryman would be, their joyful reunion, his hallelujah day. But the fantasy faded as the winter went on and the hardship and the disappointment mounted. The river froze over in places, some mornings he had to chop his way out into the current. Still, he felt he was inching toward Lucas by helping his charges reach whatever degree of freedom might await them on the other side of the river.

  In February, a merchant offered him twenty dollars to deliver a hundred kegs of blasting powder to a coal mining company in Paducah. He was certain by then that he was not going to find Lucas in Louisville, or anywhere east of it. He couldn’t have said why, except that he hadn’t, he’d lost confidence in the eastern stretch of the river. West, however, was all new territory: the promoters were right. What if, after leaving Chattanooga, Lucas had decided to take Dr. Carson’s advice and go west, down the Tennessee instead of up? What if he’d gone to Paducah? He’d be long through by now if he had, but he might have left some hint of where he was going from there. Moody’s new Quaker contacts would tell him where the next station north was. Paducah seemed a better bet than Louisville. He made the five-day journey with a single passenger, an old man named William, a fugitive from Mississippi, who after a long separation was joining his daughter in Canada. He had a letter from her. Moody read it to him every night, after he’d tied up and William had climbed out of the hold for supper.

  “ ‘Well, Father,’ ” Moody read aloud:

  “I have found my Canaan at last, for here I am surely in the land of milk and honey. We arrived in the village of Amherstburg, across the Detroit River which here is called the Straits, without any thing, and went straight into the bush cutting wood, and in a short while earned enough to buy our land from the Children of Peace Society. The Society has seventeen hundred acres of good land that only refugees from the house of bondage can buy. They expect to have fifty thousand acres in a few years, and a town with a free-labor store and a school where we propose to send our children if we are blessed with any, and a Zionist church where we will hear the Gospel on Sundays.”

  Moody noticed William’s lips moving as he read. The old man had memorized the words. Moody marveled at the faith it must have taken for a daughter in Canada to send a letter to a Virginia slave who couldn’t read. And yet he had received it.

  “ ‘Slavery been abolished here a long time,’ ” he went on:

  “Whites up here be used to it by now. They don’t like us much, but they don’t like each other much either and they don’t abuse us any more than they abuse themselves. Last week a catcher come across the Strait in a boat and a group of whites gathered on the shore with firearms and would not let him arrive. Us they do not regard as Southerners, simply victims of the cursed Southern institution, and so they harbor us as refugees.”

  “That’s a nice letter,” Moody said, refolding the paper.

  William nodded. “That the Gospel truth,” he said.

  “Your daughter,” Moody said, “how did she get to Canada?”

  “She follered the Drinking Gourd.”

  “The Drinking Gourd? What’s that?”

  “In the sky.” William pointed up, and Moody looked.

  “The Dipper? You mea
n she followed the Big Dipper?”

  “It always point north.”

  “Toward Canada.”

  “Yes. The North Star shine over Canada like the Star of David shine over Bedlehem. It guide us the same, too.”

  “How did it get her there?”

  “I don’t know how, exactly. She wrote it took her up the river to Paducah, Kentucky, and then up another river to Indianapolis, and from there it took her straight up to Canada. I expect there was some difficulties, but that the way I been going. She foller the Drinking Gourd and I foller her.”

  If Lucas came this way, that’s the route he’d have taken, too. Indianapolis.

  “I’ll take you to Indianapolis,” he said. “Soon as we deliver this blasting powder.”

  38.

  “Construction fever has hit the North,” Moody wrote to Heiskell. “Louisville has a canal, Paducah has a rail yard, Cincinnati has a canal tunnel, and Indianapolis has dug a canal that carries boats from the west fork of the White River right into the heart of the city. The National Road is due to reach Indianapolis from Baltimore by 1850, and tracks are already being laid to bring the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad into town by the middle of next year.

  “But who builds these canals and railroads and highways? Not slaves, for our Northern states are proud of the fact that their constitutions do not allow slavery. No, the workers on these industrious projects are free blacks—a designation that usually signifies a man is free from slavery, but that here has come to mean also a man who works for free. Or for wages so low that he can’t afford to do anything about his situation.