by Lois Ruby
“If you’re thinking about leaving me behind, think on it again, boy,” Miz Pru said.
“No, ma’am. But once we get deeper into the trees, we’ve got to spread out. You’ll come with Sabetha and me. One of us is going to hold on to that rope hanging from your waist every minute, ma’am, so you can give it a tug or we can, to make sure we’re safe on both ends. Does that sit with you all right, Miz Pru?”
“Time bein’,” she conceded.
“Callie, you go with the boys, because the three of you have a better chance of outrunning those wretches they’ll send after us.”
Homer said, “I know where I be.”
“Behind us all,” Solomon confirmed.
“Yes, suh!”
While waiting all winter for Miz Lizbet to come back for them all, Miz Pru had fixed it so that Homer could take care of the Bullocks’ bloodhounds. He had a way with dogs, and she had a way with the Bullocks. She explained that she was what they called a conjurer. She could do magic: make flowers grow, make fevers break. She knew herbs and roots and secret spells. More than once the Bullocks had called on her when one of the house Negroes had fainting spells or bothersome rashes, and she had nursed Mr. Bullock through a bout of food poisoning that had nearly sent him into the sweet hereafter.
So when she’d prevailed on Mr. Bullock to let her poor feeble son, Homer, tend the dogs, he had agreed. The hounds got so used to Homer’s scent and him feeding and watering them that they would never betray him.
“When they send the bloodhounds sniffing after us,” Miz Pru had explained, “my Homer, here, he gonna put them off our scent, you watch and see if it ain’t so.”
James prayed it was so, because he remembered Miz Lizbet telling him how those bloodhounds were bred to rip runaways to shreds on scent alone and didn’t stop to wonder if the victim had black skin or white.
Now Sabetha drew her shawl around her shoulders and said, “You be careful, Homer, hear?”
“You betcha, Honey Sabetha. Those pups, they’s mush in my hands. I ain’t lettin’ them near you or Mama Pru or Callie Girl.”
Sabetha rose on tiptoes to kiss Homer’s cheek, then hurried to catch up with Solomon and Miz Pru.
The night grew colder. James was grateful for his warm coat and boots, but Callie went barefooted.
Will asked, “How far you reckon you’re going to get without shoes?”
She retorted, “How far you reckon you’re going to get on one foot?”
“All the way,” Will said.
“Same as you.”
They trudged through fall leaves turned musky and soft in the spring rains, over thorny twigs and stones and rooted hillocks. Callie never complained; her feet were like tanned leather.
Something howled—a coyote? a wolf?—and James’s heart catapulted into his throat. Stars appeared and disappeared through the trees. In each clearing they searched for their reassuring marker in the sky, the North Star. If they kept in mind where they were in relation to the North Star, they’d be going the right way.
If the bloodhounds and slave catchers and bounty hunters and thin ice and bolts of lightning and wolf traps and hungry wolves didn’t get them first.
• • •
They heard the crunch of footsteps ahead of them, although James could no longer see Solomon and the two women. They also heard Homer’s plodding steps behind them as he hummed the same tune over and over.
James asked Callie, “Is Homer thy father?”
“Him? Nah. He’s not even my mother’s sweetheart. We just look after him because he’s Miz Pru’s boy. Well, I s’pose he’s a grown man. Anyway, my mama owes Miz Pru because she’s teaching me the art.”
“What art’s that?” asked Will, who was using his crutch to part overhanging branches.
“Conjurer’s art. She says it’s a gift you gotta be born having. I say, chicken livers, you can learn it just like white men learn their doctoring. Why you think I wear this snakeskin around my neck, hmn? Because it’s magic.” Whipping around to show James and Will her snakeskin in a spot of moonlight, she tripped and tumbled over a felled log.
“That was pure magic,” Will said.
Callie got up and brushed twigs and bugs off her cotton shift. Her legs were bare, caked and milky with traveling dirt. She waved each hand and foot in the air. “I didn’t break anything. That’s the magic part.”
• • •
The tops of the trees were tinted in the lavender light of dawn. James said, “I guess thee noticed, Callie, Will doesn’t ever get tired, but I’m ready to drop. I say we stop here for a couple of hours.” In fact, it had been twenty-four hours since he’d slept, and his head felt like Ma’s butter churn—round and hollow, with something pounding away in it. Sleep, that’s all he wanted. And some food. A big slab of roasted beef sure would taste good, or some of Ma’s bread hot from the oven, the kind that soaked up butter until it was limp in the middle and crunchy at the edges.
“This spot’s okay,” Will allowed. They were beside a stream swollen with spring rain, and they gobbled the clear, cold water by the handful. James splashed more of it on his face, to wake himself up. Callie took out a gingham napkin full of oatmeal bread, which wasn’t exactly one of Ma’s light-as-a-cloud loaves, but it felt good going down into the empty well of James’s stomach. They each ate a tart green apple, and James was reaching for another one when Will said, “What little bit of food we could carry has got to last us a few more days until we get across the Ohio. Over in Indiana we’ll probably find a safe house to spend a day in, and if we’re lucky, we’ll have us a proper hot meal.”
Callie grudgingly retied the remaining food. Suddenly they heard Homer’s mournful lowing, like an owl’s hoot, meaning that the bloodhounds had found him.
“Oh, Law,” Callie said. “You hear that?” The hounds were yipping and growling like somebody was beating them with a stick, but when the noise simmered down, what they heard was Homer lullabying the dogs.
They listened, barely breathing. “Whoa, Hannibal, you jes’ hol’ yo’ fire. Down Mac, good dawg, good dawg. Pfft, pfft, here Daisy, tha’s my girl, tha’s my Daisy girl. Y’all jes’ turn aroun’ an’ go back, like I done taught you. I ain’t stupid, no, suh!”
If all went right, Homer would scramble up a high tree, and the dogs would turn back with their tails between their legs before the men caught up.
But that’s not what happened. Homer and the hounds were cooing back and forth when suddenly Homer hooted again: The dogs had decided to push forward! James saw the first one loping through the trees. He was a yellow brown, lean hound with sleek legs and his nose to the ground, all business. James nudged Will, who stood frozen for just a second, until Callie pushed both the boys into the frigid water and jumped in herself, holding on to Will’s crutch to keep herself afloat.
They scampered to the shore on the other side of the stream. In their sodden clothes, they rolled on the prickly ground behind some bushes. Teeth chattering, they watched the hounds anxiously trotting this way and that in frustration, on the bank across the stream.
Will grabbed his crutch away from Callie. “Why’d you do that? You lost us all our food.” And my sketchbook, James thought mournfully.
“Oh, hush. It was the only way to wash off our scent so the dogs would lose us. Look, they’ve turned tail.”
When the dogs’ rear ends were just brown circles in the distance, Callie said, “What’re those poor hounds gonna tell their sweethearts tonight standing around the supper bowl? That they were outfoxed by three chicken-livered young ’uns and an old half-wit?” Then she suddenly turned serious. “What do you s’pose happened to Homer?”
James imagined the worst, and even worse, having to tell Miz Pru when they caught up with her, but then Homer appeared on the opposite side of the stream, and Callie just about burst with joy. “Psst, over here,” she hissed.
Homer didn’t think to walk on the logs that bridged the stream. He just stuck his rubber ball between his teeth
, jumped right in, and dog-paddled toward Callie’s smiley voice.
Chapter Thirty-One
FLAT AS A COCKROACH
“At least we know the Berks won’t be home,” Jeep said as Howie pulled up to their house, “since they’re taking room and board at the Douglas County Jail.”
Howie snarled his warning: “If there’s any trouble here, you’ll pay. I’m talking police, the media, irate neighbors, rabid dogs, or anything else that falls into the category of unusual. Anything happens, and you all owe me half of your allowance for the next six weeks. I’ll be in the car.” I swear, if it had a toilet, Howie could live in that car around the clock. His girlfriend, Franny, probably cooks him meals on a hot plate plugged into the cigarette lighter.
The Berks’ house looks just like all the others on the block: split-level, vintage 1950s, detached garage, chain-link fence—and a large, vicious-looking dog running loose in the yard, with a bark that sounded like he should be singing bass in the school chorus.
“That’s it, I’m out of here,” Mike said. “That’s the kind of dog that goes right for the crotch, and I’m planning to leave here with all the parts I came with.”
But Jeep had already sweet-talked the dog and was inside the gate scratching his ears. The water bowl was dry, so Jeep found a tap in the yard and refilled the water. The dog lapped it up eagerly while Mike and I slipped past him to the front door.
“We’re not breaking a lock or a window,” Mike reminded me.
“No, but it can’t hurt to see if they left something unlocked by accident. It’s not breaking and entering if you knock loud, and no one answers, and you turn a doorknob, and it just happens to be open, and you step inside to see if anybody’s home.”
“In the movies, this is about the time you walk in and find a dead body on the floor.”
“Don’t get hysterical, Mike.”
“I don’t know how I get myself into these messes. It’s you. You spread crisis wherever you go.”
“That’s what makes me an exciting woman.” I remembered my mother telling Warren, my big brother who lives in Memphis, “Don’t marry a boring woman. What could be worse than being bored to death?” Well, if her theory is accurate, with my track record I’ll have lots of marriage proposals to turn down, because I’m not planning to get married for at least twenty-five years. Marriage is for old people, like my parents.
We rattled every doorknob and window. Everything was locked tight, and every drape and curtain closed. I couldn’t even tell if the Berks had left a light on inside. “They sure are secretive people.”
“Or careful people. You don’t go out of town and leave your house open to the world.” Mike tugged at my arm. “Let’s go. There’s nothing to see here.”
“Wait, the garage.” But the garage door wouldn’t budge an inch.
“Satisfied?”
“No, I’m not. Jeep, over here.”
Jeep came up on the porch, with the dog brushing against his jeans as if they were old buddies.
“Everything’s closed up,” I pointed out. “What do we do now? You’re the expert. You’re the one who got us into Wolcott Castle when it was all locked up.”
“Yeah, and nearly killed myself falling through the balcony.”
“But I saved you,” I boasted. That would have to go on my marriage résumé, too.
Jeep asked, “Did you check the basement windows?”
“None of them open.”
“This is stupid,” Mike said. I was amazed at what a coward he was turning out to be. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait.” The Berks’ dog seemed to want to join in the search, and he began sniffing around as though he were on the tracks of some big game. So we followed him to the back of the house, where he showed us the flap door for a cat. I wondered if they’d had those in James Weaver’s day, if he’d put a cat door in Wolcott Castle or any of the other fancy homes he’d designed. “Mike?”
“Don’t look at me—I can’t flatten myself like a cockroach and crawl through that space,” Mike said.
“No, but Jeep could poke his head in, since he’s got no hair to get tangled in the hinges. Here, let me hold your glasses so they don’t fall off inside.”
“Then how would I see what’s in there?” Jeep stuck his head in the cat door.
“What do you see?” Mike asked.
“A green vinyl floor with a bunch of laundry all over it, and a cat dish, a litter box, and a broom and dustpan. Nothing special.” His voice came back faint and hollow, until he yelled, “No! My glasses fell off.” He pulled his head out of the door and stuck his arm in up to his shoulder, since his head and arm couldn’t both fit at once. Groping around blind for his glasses, he came up with a handful of Kitty Litter. He yanked his arm out. “Next time do this stuff without me, hear?” He had to go back in and retrieve his glasses, but this time Mike held the flap open and directed his robot arm.
The dog began barking some sort of warning signal, so we went around to the front of the house to see what had agitated him. A woman stood in the front yard in a flowing purple dress dotted with paint.
One look at us, and she grabbed the whistle hanging around her neck and blew a wail that would wake hibernating bears. Instinctively all three of us flattened ourselves on the ground as if bullets were flying.
Chapter Thirty-Two
March 1857
THE OLD MAN IS A - WAITING
The surging Ohio River spread out before them, black and roaring and impossible to cross. Homer’s eyes were as wide as silver dollars. “You see ’em over there? See my mama and Solomon and Sabetha Girl?”
Callie stared off into the void. “They’re over there, all right.”
James squinted and pretended he could actually spot them clear across the river. “Might be them,” he assured Homer, but if they’d made it across, how in tarnation had they done it?
Or they could have been caught, tied up, hauled halfway back to Owensboro by now.
Or they could be dead. James’s stomach rolled up to his throat at that thought. “No. No!”
“No what?” Callie demanded, still gazing across the unforgiving river.
“No … time to worry about it. Let’s go,” James said. He whistled for Will, who hopped out from behind some bushes, hitching up his trousers.
A luxurious steamboat side-paddled its way through the center of the river, lights dancing on the water. James yearned to be on that boat just for one warm, dry, belly-filling night, but that wasn’t possible, not with two escaping Negroes.
They walked upriver until they found a narrow crossing place. James said, “Reckon we can ford the river here? We can wade out to those melting ice islands.” He remembered Miz Lizbet’s tales of runaways crossing the river by leaping from one ice pocket to the next as if they were cobblestones.
“I don’t know,” Will said. “If any one of those floes out in the middle won’t hold us, we’ll sure enough drown in the icy water.”
James reminded him that whatever ice wasn’t broken up and melted by the steamboat would certainly be solid enough to support them.
“That water look mighty col’,” Homer said, shaking his head. He tossed his rubber ball from hand to hand. “Freezin’ mighty col’.”
Callie was skeptical as well. “You expect me to jump from one piece of ice to another? Did you stop to think how my feet are going to freeze right onto that ice?”
But Homer had a solution. He pulled out of his shirt the gingham napkins that had once held his food, and he tied them around Callie’s feet with perky little knots poking over the top. “Now you got red-and-white shoes, yes, suh!”
Homer and James, wearing boots, had no trouble leaping across the first three chunks of ice, and Callie followed them, slipping dangerously, but she was agile.
However, it was impossible for Will’s crutch to gain purchase on the slick ice, and plumb hazardous for him to swing from one floe to another on his leg. And all this in the dark. “I can’t do it,�
�� Will said grimly. “Y’all will have to go on without me.”
James reached across and grabbed Homer’s arm just as he was ready to jump to the next platter of ice. “We have to go back, all of us.”
By the time they were back on the shore, Will had a better idea.
“In the first light we’ll build us a raft.”
James thought about the first runaway Ma had harbored at their house. He’d been a master with a hammer and nails; where was he now? Anyway, they had no tools to build a watertight raft that would carry them across this mean water.
Will had it all thought out, in spite of a cold rain that suddenly turned the morning into pure misery. He showed them how to build two makeshift rafts of logs and branches tied together with hickory withes. Then they had to wait the day out until it was safe to put their rafts into the chilly water.
Pelted with rain, they kept their eyes on the flickering lanterns dotting the other side of the river and tried poling themselves across. Homer hand-paddled until his arms hung limp as flags, and all they did in their hours of labor was go round and round in ever-widening circles to avoid those same ice floes that were meant to be their salvation.
“We’re through with this foolishness,” Will announced. “I say we take our chances finding the fishermen Solomon heard about. He believes they’re friendly, that they’ll ferry us across in a skiff like they do others.”
“But what if they’re not friendly?” Callie argued. Her voice from the other raft seemed to bubble up out of the black water, for James couldn’t see her at all. “They might just send us back to Bullocks’.”
“No, suh, I ain’t goin’ back,” Homer said, and he paddled even harder.
“Now’s a good time for some of your magic, Callie,” muttered Will. “Follow me, we’re going back to shore.”
They spread out on the shore. Tired as a racehorse, James gazed up at the heavens. The rain had let up a bit, and now he could see the North Star, taunting him, telling him that he and Callie and Will and Homer weren’t any closer to the safety of Lawrence, Kansas, than they were to the stars themselves.
