by Lois Ruby
“No sir, for the free man who’s been helping us out while my wife’s been gone to Boston. Say, it’s nice and warm inside there, gentlemen. Pity thee can’t come in and have some hot spiced cider beside the fire.”
James saw the two men stir and exchange longing glances.
“But the marshal wouldn’t like it now, would he?”
• • •
They put the second cot beside Miz Lizbet’s, upstairs in the little room. She tossed about, and that rudely crafted cot clunked against the floor as it rose and fell with her restlessness. Solomon filled bladders with boiling water to warm her bed. He ran up and down the stairs with panfuls of heated rocks for a cairn. The stones sizzled when he tossed water on them to make steam for Miz Lizbet’s comfort. He sat in the rocker beside her bed, wrapped in blankets and skins, and they said little.
James came upstairs every so often with fresh rocks, or a bit of soup for Miz Lizbet. He overheard her say, “They’ll be waiting for you over in Kentucky, just after the first thaw. They’re ready to make free, Solomon, and I won’t be able to go after them.”
“Hush, Lizbet. In the spring we’ll go after them together.”
“In the spring, I’ll be in the dirt.”
“In the spring, you’ll be my wife. We’re gonna have beautiful, smart children, free children.”
James’s face was hot with shame for overhearing their private cooings. He turned around and went back downstairs.
Later that day, when James came up to check on Miz Lizbet, she said, “Solomon, you go get some rest, and let me talk to Mr. James Weaver a minute, hear?”
Solomon reluctantly backed out of the little room, stooping to clear the doorway.
“James Weaver, listen fast, because I haven’t got much gumption.”
James pulled the rocking chair up close.
“Your mother’s a saint, but the rest of you aren’t so bad, come to find out.”
“Thee’s given us fits, Miz Lizbet.”
She nodded, with great effort. “Meant to. Now, run your hand under this bed and see if you can find something.”
James slapped around on the floorboards until he found a small black book. “Is this what thee means?”
Miz Lizbet nodded wearily. “Your mother’s. She taught me to read, but I never learned to read well enough to get through this. You take it.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why are you always so contrary, Mr. James Weaver?”
“Miz Lizbet, I know my ma about as well as anybody does. If she gave this to thee, she meant for thee to have it.” He slipped it into Miz Lizbet’s hands.
Her eyes fluttered closed. He expected to hear “Amen,” but she was too weak to say the word.
• • •
They sent for Dr. Olney, telling the guards outside that James had broken his arm. Then he had to walk around with it in a sling all the time because those evil men were forever peering in the windows, trying to entrap them—or maybe just soaking up some warmth with their eyes.
On the fifth night, when Miz Lizbet’s fever still hadn’t broken, James and Pa had a heart-to-heart about their choices.
“What happens if they get us, Pa?”
“Well, most likely they’ll haul me off to jail. I don’t think they’d touch thee, thee being but a child.”
“Jail. Oh Pa. And there’s not another lawyer around to defend thee.”
“I’d live through it. That’s not what worries me, son. It’s them.” He raised his eyebrows, motioning to the people upstairs. “Solomon would probably be safe, since he’s got legal papers, if that marshal’s got a shred of honor and respect for the law.”
“And Miz Lizbet?”
“No telling. They’re probably looking for her, son, since she’s helped so many shed the chains of bondage.”
“You mean, sick as she is, they might still drag her down to where she came from and try to sell her back?”
“They’d do worse, son.”
“And if she dies?”
“Dead, she’s worth even more to them.”
“We don’t have any choices, then.”
“Best thy mother doesn’t come back to this mess,” Pa said sadly.
“What do we do, Pa?” His pa gave him a good, steady look. Maybe he saw that James wasn’t such a boy anymore, that his shoulders were broadening and his flanks were thinning out.
“All through thy life, son, I’ve made decisions for thee. Thee hasn’t liked them all.”
“No sir.” James smiled.
Pa went over to the fireplace and stabbed at a log. Red jewels sprang forth. “Thee must make this choice, son.”
“Me?” Choose to send Pa to jail, or Miz Lizbet to death, or worse?
“The Lord gives thee free will.”
Free will. He would run down to Macons’, bring back a revolver, yes! When those men were frozen to distraction, looking covetously at the smoke rising from the chimney, James could steal up behind them, shoot ’em in cold blood. It’s what Will Bowers would do, heck, what Will was probably doing this very minute.
Then Solomon could take Miz Lizbet somewhere safe, maybe to the Olneys’, until she got well. And Pa would be safe, and Ma, and Rebecca. He’d get caught, of course, but wasn’t it a sacrifice any man would make for those he loved?
“Has thee chosen, son?”
James pictured the dead men, the snow colored with their blood, pink as strawberry ice. He could bury them under a drift; no one would find them until the spring thaw. By then all the Weavers could be safely back in Boston. So reasonable. So easy.
“Son?”
“We stay right here and outwait ’em. We’re a peaceable people, Pa.”
“Yes, son.”
• • •
The next time James went upstairs with heated rocks, Solomon didn’t even turn around. He swayed in the rocker, his back to James, and said, “She’s passed.”
“Pa! Come quick.” What were they to do now?
But Pa had it all thought out. “There’s a cache of lumber down in the cellar, left when Mr. Madison rebuilt our house. Bring it here, nails, too.”
Trip after trip, James hauled the lumber upstairs with one arm in a sling, while Solomon washed Miz Lizbet once more, for her final journey home.
The three of them stood around her bed, and Pa read from Psalms, from Lamentations, from Genesis: “ ‘Wherefore didst thou flee away secretly, and steal away from me; and didst not tell me, that I might have sent thee away with mirth… .’ ”
James thought of Henry Box Brown, and Miz Ellen Craft dressed up like a gentleman planter, and Uncle Mose riding off triumphantly, and all the other Negroes who’d made it to freedom. And of Matthew Luke Charles, who didn’t. Then he thought about the fish fry outside, and the smelly poultice of prairie clover and the wild indigo tea, and Miz Lizbet struggling to write her Gs at Ma’s table.
Dimly, he heard Pa’s voice. “Lord, we entrust Miss Elizabeth Charles into Thy hands and pray that Thou grantest her the eternal rest she’s earned.”
Pa took the rocking chair and the cairn out of the room. Solomon pulled a thin sheet up over Miz Lizbet’s head, and they set to building the wall.
CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE
Written in Stone
The governor and a few other dignitaries had chairs reserved inside the tent, but most of the six hundred people on the grounds of Wolcott Castle had paid from $100 to $1,000 to broil in the July Fourth sun.
Dana and Ahn and Jeep got into the party free, because they’d licked about four thousand envelopes and stamps.
Ahn surveyed the enormous stone front. “It looks better from the outside, and not so scary in the daylight.”
Dana said, “It seems more like James Weaver from the outside.”
“The old James Weaver,” Ahn said.
“Well, he was only thirty-three when he built it.”
“Yes,” said Ahn, “but somehow I thought he’d always be our age.”
A young coupl
e walked by them, holding hands. The guy, who must have been sweltering in a suit and tie, said, “I’d sure like to see the inside.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Jeep muttered under his breath.
The woman replied dreamily, “Let’s have balconies like those when we build our house. They’re so romantic, aren’t they, honey?”
“Try hanging from one, lady,” Jeep whispered.
Dana laughed and sipped a frosty glass of iced tea, as her father’s voice bombarded the crowd, thanks to the free services of Sensory Sound of Lawrence.
“Ladies and gentlemen, in a minute we’ll hear from the honorable Jacqueline Marx, governor of the state of Kansas. But first, I’d like to welcome …”
“Whew, it’s hot,” Jeep said. “Let’s sit under this tree here that looks like somebody could climb it and swing onto the house from it, if somebody was a maniac lunatic crazy person.” He plunked himself down under the giant elm, expecting the soft earth to yield to him. Instead, he got a jolt up his spine. “What’s this?” Jeep clawed away the tall grass, and underneath, embedded in the earth, was a granite plaque, like a flat gravestone.
“Somebody is buried here?” Ahn asked.
“I dunno, I can’t read it.” Jeep continued to clear the grass away.
Dana slid closer, just as the crowd was welcoming Governor Marx. The words on the marker were impossible to read, because layers of dirt clogged the carved letters, and half the marker was still buried under tree roots and grass. Dana poured her iced tea over the stone and wiped away rivulets of dirt with a napkin, while Jeep yanked at the exposed roots.
They could make out the first few words now: “Buildings crumble.”
“Get some more tea,” Dana whispered.
The governor’s musical voice went up and down the scale: “Today the good people of Lawrence, Kansas, have pledged to restore this monument to their proud history… .”
Jeep and Ahn came back, each with two full glasses of iced tea and a pile of napkins. They doused the stone, washing away the dirt until at last everything was clear.
Buildings crumble, but leaves and grass are eternal.
I plant this tree in memory of MATTHEW LUKE CHARLES and ELIZABETH CHARLES
April 20, 1877
J. B. W./amen
Here’s the opening chapter to the sequel to Louis Ruby’s Steal Away Home called Soon Be Free.
Chapter One
FIREBIRD HOUSE
I ask you, why do weird things always happen to me? Mike says it’s because blazing redheads are an anomaly of nature, so we’re natural magnets for weirdness. He’s got a point. Like, not long ago, when we were renovating Firebird House into a bed-and-breakfast, I found a skeleton hidden in a little room upstairs. I followed those bones back into die past and found out that this drafty, creaky old house was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Not only that, but a runaway slave, Miz Lizbet Charles, had died more than 140 years ago, right here, probably right where I’m sitting this minute.
Mystery solved, right? Hah! Next thing I knew, on a night when there was barely a laser beam of moonlight, a man was snooping around with a flashlight and a shovel in my backyard. It had rained a lot, the yard was a swamp, and the man’s boots were ankle-deep in loamy mud.
Now, a normal person would have run for help, but not a blazing redhead. Besides, mud was squishing over my sneakers, so I couldn’t have run very fast, anyway. I slogged up behind the man and yelled, “My father’s a police captain, you know.” Actually, he’s a history professor, but this fact wouldn’t impress a serious intruder with a shovel and knee-high mud boots.
The man tumbled forward at the sound of my bellow, and the flashlight flew out of his hand and sank into the bog.
He scrambled to regain his balance. His shoulders were no broader than my friend Jeep’s, and he had a sort of caved-in look to him, as if he’d had some terrible disease as a child. “I lost my keys,” he said, scraping mud off his shirt and pants. They were the high-waisted, plaid kind of pants my uncle Tom used to wear, according to the faded Vietnam-era photos from the seventies.
This man’s clown pants were held up with suspenders as wide as chalkboard erasers. Tucked into them was a red flannel shirt buttoned to his chin. You’d think he was ambling in from hoeing the south forty.
“I’m supposed to believe you lost your keys in my yard?”
“Dog ran off with them in his mouth. It’s not your business, girl.”
“Yes it is, it’s my house.”
“Wasn’t always,” he muttered.
“Oh, this is about Miz Lizbet, isn’t it?” There’d been lots of publicity since I’d found that skeleton upstairs. All of Lawrence—probably all of Kansas—knew how the famous architect James Baylor Weaver had lived in this house when he was a boy, and how his family had harbored runaway slaves until Miz Lizbet died here. “You’re looking for something that belonged to her, like you’re from a museum or something?”
He took off his glasses and blew on them, polishing them on his shirt. “Now, why would I want some hairpin or button from an old slave, answer me that?”
“Lots of people do, people who are interested in the Underground Railroad.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Well, then, it’s got to be about James Baylor Weaver.”
“Never heard of him.”
Something in his tone made my blood pump faster, and without his granny glasses, his eyes were hard as bullets. “What are you looking for, mister?”
Instead of answering, he sloshed past me and started toward a black Ford parked in front of the house. At first he’d just seemed comical sinking in mud in that weird getup. But then he patted his pockets, and a chill rippled over me when I heard the jingle that told me he hadn’t been looking for his keys after all. What did he want in my yard? And had he found what he was looking for?
The old Ford sputtered and cranked, giving me plenty of time to memorize the Kansas license plate before the man sped away.
Spring rains in Kansas can be fierce. They send earthworms leaping to their death over the side of a culvert. So when I say puddles and mud, you get the picture. Diamonds of light filtered through a lattice wall around the back porch, showing me the man’s flashlight beached in the mud with its nose sticking out as if it were gasping for breath. I pulled at it against the resistance of the sludge and swiped the slimy flashlight down my flank. This tells you what an elegant wench I am. Wench. Mike’s word.
Polished up, the flashlight revealed a plastic stick-on label hanging by a glob of glue:
ERNIE’S BAIT SHOP
Beneath it was an address in Kansas City, Kansas, about forty miles away. Looked like I’d have to figure out a way to drag Mike to Kansas City. Who’s this Mike I’m always talking about? Well, he isn’t exactly my boyfriend, since he’s a full three months younger than I am, and besides, my parents would break out in festering, oozing hives if they thought I had a boyfriend at the tender age of thirteen. Mike’s an experiment in progress, still rough like a lump of coal that might just polish up into the Hope Diamond. I’m checking him out carefully as a potential love object when I get to be a freshman, but at this point I can tell you he’s no James Baylor Weaver. Sally and Ahn and I, we are all sort of in love with James-at-twelve, even though we know that he grew up and died eighty years before we were even born.
Come to think of it, Mike does have one distinct advantage over James: Mike’s still breathing.
LOIS RUBY
Steal Away Home began as the mental image of a skeleton, which haunted Lois Ruby for several months. Writing the book was a way of fleshing out the bones and giving them real life.
Once a young-adult librarian, Ms. Ruby now spends most of her time writing and teaching creative-writing workshops. She is the author of two short story collections for teenagers, as well as several novels for and about young people, including Skin Deep and Miriam’s Well (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults).
Ms. Ruby lives in Wichita, Ka
nsas, with her husband.
First Aladdin Paperbacks edition January 1999
Copyright © 1994 by Lois Ruby
Aladdin Paperbacks
An imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
The text for this book is set in 12-point Berkeley Oldstyle Book.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Ruby, Lois
Steal away home / by Lois Ruby.
p. cm.
Summary: In two parallel stories, a Quaker family in Kansas in the late 1850s operates a station on the Underground Railroad, while almost 150 years later, twelve-year-old Dana moves into the same house and finds the skeleton of a black woman who helped the Quakers.
ISBN 0-02-777883-5 (hc)
[1. Fugitive slaves—Fiction. 2. Slavery—Fiction. 3. Underground Railroad—Fiction. 4. Quakers—Fiction. 5. Kansas—Fiction.) I. Title.
PZ7.R8314St 1994
[Fic]—dc20 93-47300
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-82435-7 (ISBN-10: 0-689-82435-1) (Aladdin pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-481-42553-7 (eBook)
