Soon Be Free

by Lois Ruby

  Mattie let go of me, and I heard her clunk into the bathtub, cussing. Maybe she was on her way out the window when we both heard Raymond thud to the ground two stories below. A guttural growl told me he’d broken something in the fall.

  “Oh, my God,” Mom cried as she spotted the chaos in the bathroom. She ran to the phone in the hall while Dad untied the pillowcase around my head.

  Air!

  And there was Mattie Berk, trapped in the bathtub.

  • • •

  A policeman nabbed Raymond in his hound dog pajamas outside, where he was trying to camouflage himself in the bushes. The other officer, Detective Oberman, unwedged Mattie from the tub.

  “This woman is a guest of yours, Dr. and Mrs. Shannon?”

  “Not a friend guest, a paying guest. Our first,” Mom replied. “Jeffrey, maybe we’re not cut out for the bed-and-breakfast business.”

  Detective Oberman handcuffed Mattie and flipped open a little black notebook. “Name?”

  “Mattie Berk,” she said sourly.

  The detective pulled a laminated card out of the back of the notebook and read in a monotone, “You have the right to remain silent …”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I watch TV,” Mattie growled.

  Detective Oberman read the rest of the card, anyway, then said, “As you can imagine, Ms. Mattie Berk, you have a warm invitation to join us down at the station to stick your thumbs in some black ink and have your pictures made. Then we have a few dozen questions for you.” She gave Mattie a shove out into the hall, hinting that the invitation wasn’t optional.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  March 1857

  PROMISED LAND

  The first night out, Will and Solomon and James camped at the head of Buck Creek in Livingston County. Solomon rigged up a fishing line and stuck a wriggler on the end of it, hoping one of those rainbow-coated trout would take the bait instead of just staring up at them with his sassy eye.

  “Can’t wait for trout,” Will told them, balancing on his one leg. He had the empty leg of his trousers pinned up to his shirt to keep it out of the water. “You gotta go noodling.” He crawled out of the creek and flattened himself on the bank. Creeping along on his elbows, he got right up close to the water and froze for such a long time that James considered feeling for a pulse. But he was alive, all right, scaring all of Solomon’s trout away by staring back at them.

  “What’s ‘noodling’?” James finally asked.

  “Shh. Watch.” There was the slightest movement under a branch sticking out over the water. Will inched forward, reached out in slow motion, and grabbed a big old snapping turtle, must have been three pounds. He held it up, with its legs flailing, and brought it to his face. “Howdy, Barleycorn!” The turtle pulled its head in, no more wanting to kiss Will than James did.

  “Two more of these, and we’ve got a feast. My pa says these critters have got five flavors to them. Chicken, fish, pork, beef, and plain old turtle. You’re in for a treat.”

  He plopped Barleycorn into the kettle, where the poor turtle clicked around until he decided to give up the fight.

  • • •

  They made Madisonville, the Hopkins County seat, the second night, and came upon a general store at the edge of town, where they bought a bottle of milk and two big pieces of gingerbread to split three ways. They slept under trees just bursting with new spring growth until sunrise, when the birds went crazy and the farmers came to town.

  One of the farmers, noticing Will’s one leg and crutch, said he’d be glad to take them as far as Nebo. The farmer gave Solomon a puzzled look, but he didn’t ask any questions. Solomon wisely took a place in the back of the wagon without a fuss. The farmer gabbed the whole six miles and finally said, “This here’s Nebo. Named for that mountain Moses stood on looking down into the promised land he didn’t never get to.”

  That was one of the things in the Bible that made James mad, though he didn’t dare tell Ma. It sure wasn’t fair that Moses spent forty years wandering with those stubborn, stiff-necked people who doubted him at every turn, and when the reward came at the end, Moses didn’t get any of it. Of course, Ma would say Moses got his reward in the next world, but James wasn’t sure Moses felt that way, watching those Israelites cross over the river Jordan, and him alone on the mountain.

  “You ast me, Nebo’s the promised land, right and true,” the farmer was saying. “A real green land of Canaan here in the middle of the Western coalfields. Yessir, it’s where I’m gonna be buried, and you can put money in the bank on that fact.” He let them off and handed them each an ear of corn for the rest of their journey.

  • • •

  At Livermore, the Rough River and the Green poured together, and there was water as far as James could see, and platters of ice not yet thawed by the thin spring sun floating on the river.

  “How we going to get across that?” Solomon asked. He was tired and irritable from their four days on foot, and James was reminded that Solomon had twenty-five years on Will and him. Will seemed to be the only one who never got tired, even with that one leg doing double time.

  “Look.” Will spotted the barges first. “We got money, we can hire a barge.”

  The bargeman appeared out of nowhere, palm out. “You got papers for this Nigra?”

  Solomon stared at the ground as James answered, “Yes, sir, I do.” This deep into Kentucky was no time to talk about free black men, so James produced the paper swearing that he was the son of a man named Bufford Bullock, scion of Daviess County, and Solomon was their manservant.

  “Hemp, I reckon?”

  “Miles and miles of it,” Will said merrily.

  “Makes mighty good rope and canvas and such. You another son?”

  “Cousin, sir, from down in Looziana, Baton Rouge to be exact, on the Cranwoll side of the family.”

  James was afraid Will would get them into a knot they couldn’t untie, so he quickly jumped in. “We’ve been doctoring up in St. Louis.”

  The bargeman eyed Will carefully, and as luck would have it, Will had a sudden attack of Phantom Limb and winced convincingly with the pain.

  “Just healing, is it?”

  “Fresh as new-killed deer,” Will said, gasping.

  “Well, I reckon you boys need this man here to see you home proper. Give my regards to Mr. Bullock. Tell him Scamp over in Livermore says howdy.”

  Suddenly James felt hot all over. “Thee knows … you know my pa?”

  The bargeman grinned. “Not yet, I don’t, but I’m not through living yet, either.”

  Sighing in relief, James and Will and Solomon settled onto the barge and within minutes were on the far bank of the Green River, with only a day’s walk left into Owensboro.

  Just outside of Panther, they saw a broadside nailed to an oak tree. In giant black letters, it advertised, NEGRO DOGS. Curious, James studied it more closely.

  SPLENDID LOT OF WELL-BROKE NEGRO DOGS. WILL ATTEND ANY REASONABLE DISTANCE, TO THE CATCHING OF RUNAWAYS, AT THE LOWEST POSSIBLE RATES. ALL THOSE HAVING SLAVES IN THE WOODS WILL DO WELL TO ADDRESS W. D. GILBERT, OF FRANKLIN, SIMPSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY.

  Solomon covered his eyes and walked away. Will said, “That’s what we’re up against, James. It ain’t going to be easy.”

  After that, James got edgy and nearly fell in a creek when a measly squirrel scuttled across his path.

  Will said, “You’re as skittish as my ma when a mouse run over her foot.”

  “It’s just that we’re almost there, and we don’t exactly have a plan,” James said in self-defense.

  “We do have a plan, Mr. James,” Solomon said. “A piece of a plan, that is. Well, it’s more like a sliver of a piece of a plan. Thing is, we don’t know what’s ahead. We don’t even know how many people Miz Lizbet promised.”

  “Solomon’s right, James. If we get tied down to a big, complicated plan, and we run into trouble, we’re sunk. See that house over there with its porch leaning into the dirt? That’s how sunk we’ll b
e. Sunker.”

  Solomon patted James’s back. “We’ll be all right, Mr. James,” he said, but he sounded like he needed convincing himself. He began singing one of the songs Miz Lizbet used to sing, about stealing away home to Jesus, and the song seemed to buck him up. Even his pace quickened.

  “Flexibility, that’s the ticket,” Will shot back over his shoulder. “If there’s one thing I learned riding with John Brown, it’s keep your guard up, keep yourself loose, and be ready for battle any hour, day or night.”

  “That’s three things,” James said, trying to sound brave, but in his heart he worried that he’d be ready, all right, ready to run at the first sign of trouble.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE FIRE-EATER

  Dad made hot cocoa, and Mom hiked herself up on the kitchen counter by the fridge. “Well,” she said, “our first bed-and-breakfast guests have come and gone, one of them out the window, I might add. It went well, don’t you think, Jeffrey? They’ve destroyed our bathroom, terrorized our daughter, trampled our jonquils, gone to jail, and I’ve wasted two entire sour cream coffee cakes on them. This is not good for business, you understand.”

  Dad handed me a mug foaming with melted marshmallows. “What were they looking for, Dana?”

  “James Weaver’s drawings, I guess.” I didn’t believe my own words. The Berks were obviously after something much more valuable, something that mixed up James Weaver and the Delaware Indians. I had to find whatever it was they were looking for, but I didn’t dare tell my parents yet. Parents get hysterical over the least little thing and start coming down on you with restrictions and warnings and groundings and other unreasonable responses.

  Take the Renaissance Festival, for example. Last fall we were reading Julius Caesar in English and Mrs. Flanaghan was making us do incredibly complex Shakespeare projects, and she made it clear that our going to the Renaissance Festival would put her in a better mood when she graded our projects.

  So, one Saturday last fall, Mike’s brother Howie drove a bunch of us to the festival. The way my parents carried on, you’d have thought we were going to Katmandu, instead of Bonner Springs, thirty miles away. Were there seat belts for everyone? Did we have rain gear? Hiking boots? Up-to-date maps? Water? Food and blankets in case the car broke down? A car phone? And don’t eat the roasted pig—trichinosis, you know. And watch out for overzealous strangers. And did we know that pickpockets run rampant in a casual crowd like that? By the time they were done briefing and provisioning us, we were ready for a hike across the Himalayas.

  The festival was amazing: Elizabethan dances and songs and foods and crafts; jousting knights and jugglers; men rattling around in chain mail; and women in dresses that made their chests come up to their chins. And there was a fire-eater.

  Awed, I watched him put a flaming stick into his mouth, hold it there about ten seconds, and when he pulled it out, it was still on fire. Also, he still had a tongue. It didn’t look that hard; Mind over matter, I thought. So when we finished our kebabs of beef and potatoes roasted over an open fire, that empty stick just called out to me.

  Mike dared me: “Go ahead, Dana, do it.”

  Sally said, “Don’t be stupid!”

  “My uncle Pham eats fire,” Ahn said. “But he has a tongue like a rope.”

  “Aw, she’s too chicken to do it,” Jeep taunted, waving the empty stick over the fire. It caught, like a match, like a piece of eager kindling, and I just popped that glowing sucker into my mouth.

  “Ouch!!!” The fire went right out, but not before it fried the inside of my cheeks into cooked flaps of skin and wiped out a couple thousand taste buds. Even now, months later, I can’t tell salty from sweet, but my tongue’s coming back.

  Sally whisked me right over to first aid, where they scolded me for about twenty minutes while I sucked on chipped ice. An hour later I could hardly talk, and Jeep felt so guilty that he bought a drink and gave me all the ice cubes, which left his Sprite as warm as bathwater.

  Of course, my parents found out, mostly because I talked like a person with a mouthful of cotton when I got home, and they totally overreacted. If they’d had a tower, they’d have locked me in it, and since my curly hair bushes out instead of responding to gravity like Rapunzel’s, I’d never have grown it long enough to make my escape.

  So, obviously, only a few months after the Fire-Eating Caper, I wasn’t about to tell my parents how close I was to finding whatever it was Mattie and Raymond were so eager to tap our walls for. I’d have to wait for the right opportunity to finish their work, when my parents were both out.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  March 1857

  ONE GOES, WE ALL GO

  Miz Lizbet had told Solomon that the safest time for strangers to appear on the plantation was Saturday night, when the work week was done and the field workers were dancing and cooking outside and carrying on like they were free as robins and Monday sunup seemed a long time off. Besides that, the overseers would be heady with their own merrymaking away from the slaves’ quarters.

  “That’s the only time my mother, Pru, will be in a fit mood,” Miz Lizbet had said. “You don’t want to cross Miz Pru Biggers at her cranky time, amen.”

  Nearly two weeks after leaving Lawrence, they were finally approaching the spot Miz Lizbet had marked on the map. Kentuckians called it Yellow Bank, two miles south and west of Owensboro. Dark had settled on the bushy hedgerow that made a fence around the quarters, and a half-moon painted the leaves silver. James heard mandolin strumming and hushed singing that grew bolder as the moon rose.

  Solomon whispered, “Mr. James, Mr. Will, I’ve got to go in alone.”

  “We didn’t come this far to hide in the bushes,” Will argued.

  “They see you two fine-looking white boys, even scruffed up as you are, and they’re going to run indoors quick as mice running into holes.”

  So James and Will crouched in the hedges and watched and listened.

  By now a crowd had formed, and in the lantern light James saw men, women, and children dressed like they were going to a church supper, except they were all barefooted. The women had colorful striped kerchiefs wound around their heads, and the men wore red kerchiefs tied at their necks. What struck James most was the ringing laughter among the children, as if they were telling stories not meant for adults’ ears. Everyone seemed to be in motion to the music. But when Solomon approached with his hat over his heart, all the music, singing, and dancing stopped at once, as if the conductor had snapped his baton down. Mothers pushed their little ones behind their skirts and hushed the bigger ones.

  “Evening, folks. Name’s Solomon Jefferson. I’m looking for Miz Pru Biggers.”

  A tall man stepped forward, his white shirt gleaming in the moonlight. His legs bowed like he’d just come off a horse, and his voice was deep and sure and left no doubt that this was the man in charge. “Ain’t nobody here go by that name.”

  Solomon nodded knowingly. “Yes, sir, but somebody told me I could find her here.”

  “Who told you that?”

  James watched Solomon take a deep breath before he said her name: “Miz Lizbet Charles sent me. She said some of you folks are waiting for her.”

  There was a stirring among the people, then a thin sapling of a woman elbowed her way out of the crowd. Her gray hair was wild and woolly, like a sheep needing shearing, and her bony finger pointed away from Solomon until someone gently turned her body toward him. “Why ain’t she come herself?”

  “Miz Pru?” Solomon stepped forward, and the old woman looked at him and around him at the same time.

  “She’s blind,” James whispered to Will.

  “That’s news. We’re gonna cover half the country with an old blind woman?”

  “Shh, listen.”

  “Miz Pru, I bring you sad news. Miz Lizbet closed her eyes for the last time this past winter. The fever took her.”

  Someone murmured, “She done gone home to Jesus.”

  A couple of la
dies stepped forward to support Miz Pru’s elbows, but she shook them off. “Who’re you?”

  “Ma’am, I was fixing to marry your daughter, a fine woman.”

  Miz Pru’s hand reached up for Solomon’s face. He had to bend so she could run her bony fingers over his eyes, his nose, his lips, his stubbly cheeks. “You ain’t no Matthew Luke Charles,” she said, calling up the name of Miz Lizbet’s dead husband.

  “No, ma’am,” Solomon agreed. “But I ain’t no toad, neither.” That brought soft chuckles from the crowd. “She sent me after you, Miz Pru.”

  The old woman thrust her shoulders back and stood all of five feet high, with wattles of flesh hanging from her arms. “Well, what took you so long? Look up at the sky.” She tilted her head back as if she could see the points of light poking through the blackness. “You ought of come in the winter, like the song says. ‘When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd.’ That’s the winter, fool. That’s when we s’pose to go, not after the spring done burst out and quail so thick, it’s open season.”

  One of the women beside her said, “Let’s hear what the man has to say. Come, sit down, Miz Pru. You’ve had a shock to the heart.” She settled the old woman on a tree stump and came back to challenge Solomon. “I’m Sabetha. Say what you got to say, and say it quick.”

  Solomon nodded, and then he told them about James and Will. He explained how James’s mother was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and how Miz Lizbet had lived and died in James’s house, and that impressed them some, but not half as much as hearing that Will had been with John Brown’s men and lost a leg fighting slave catchers. And he told them that they’d all three come to finish Miz Lizbet’s work.

  Wary, the people hung back when James and Will came out of the bushes. Solomon said, “You can trust these boys, I swear on Miz Lizbet’s soul.”