James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

To have the Captain’s blood on my hands on account of something I was supposed to do, it was just too much. I couldn’t stand it.

The plank she was setting on was propped on two boards. With both hands I pushed it a foot or so forward and burst out the hay and sat up.

“I got to go,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell Salmon to stop.”

“We can’t. We in slave country. Get back in that hay!”

“I won’t.”

Before she could move to it, I slid out from under the plank, pulled the bonnet off my head, and ripped the dress down to my waist. Her mouth opened in shock.

“I love you, Annie. I won’t ever see you again.”

With one swift motion, I grabbed my gunnysack and leaped out the back of the wagon, rolling on the road, her shocked cry echoing into the woods and trees around me. Salmon harred up the wagon and yelled back for me, but he might as well been hollering down an empty hole. I was up the road and gone.

Irunned down the road like the wind, and caught a ride with an old colored man from Frederick, Maryland, who was driving his master’s wagon to the Ferry to pick up a shipment of lumber. It took us a full day to roll back for he was sharp, and had to roll past slave patrollers while stating his marse’s business. He dropped me off a few miles from the Ferry on the Maryland side and I done the rest on foot. I made it to the farmhouse late, several hours after dark.

The house was dark as I approached and I couldn’t see no candlelight. It was drizzling and there was no moon. I had no timepiece, but I guessed it was close to midnight.

I burst in the door and they were gone. I turned toward the door, and a figure blocked it and a rifle barrel met me right in the face. A light was throwed on me, and behind it stood three of the Old Man’s army: Barclay Coppoc, one of the shooting Quakers, Owen, and Francis Merriam, a one-eyed batty feller, crazy as a weasel, who had joined up late in the doings. All three was holding rifles and armed to the teeth with sidearms and broadswords.

“What you doing here?” Owen asked.

“I forgot to give your Pa the password for the Rail Man.”

“Father didn’t have a password for him.”

“That’s just it. The Rail Man had one for me to give him.”

“It’s too late. They left four hours ago.”

“I got to tell him.”

“Sit tight.”

“For what?”

“They’ll figure it out. We could use you here. We is guarding the arms and waiting for the colored to hive,” Owen said.

“Well, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life, Owen. Can’t you wake up to it?”

I looked at Owen, I swear ’fore God he tried to keep a straight face on it. “I’m dead set against slavery, and anyone who ain’t is a fool,” he said. “They’ll come. And I will set here and wait till then,” he said. I guess this was his way of showing his faith in his Pa, and also getting out the deal. The farm was five miles from the Ferry, and I reckon the Old Man left him ’cause Owen had seen enough of his crazy Pa’s doings. He’d been all through the Kansas Wars and seen the worst of it. Those other two up there, the Old Man probably left them there to relieve them from the action, for Coppoc weren’t but twenty, and Merriam was thick as mud in his mind.

“Did the B&O come yet?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Haven’t heard it.”

“What time is it?”

“One ten in the a.m.”

“It don’t come till one twenty-five. I got to warn him,” I said. I moved toward the door.

“Wait,” Owen said. “I’m done pulling you out the fire, Onion. Set here.” But I was out the door and gone.

It was a five-mile run down to the Ferry, pitch-black with a drizzling rain. Had I stayed on the old colored man’s wagon and not got off at the Kennedy farm, I could’a ridden right into town and made it in better time, I reckon. But that old man was long gone. I had my satchel throwed around my back with everything I owned, including a change of boy clothes. I was planning on lighting out when it was done. The Rail Man would give me a ride. He weren’t staying, he said as much. Had I any sense I would’a throwed a revolver in my sack. There was a dozen of ’em laying in the farmhouse, two setting on the windowsill when I walked in there, likely loaded and primed. But I didn’t think of it.

I came hard down that hill, and didn’t hear a bit of firing as I came down it, so no shooting had started. But when I hit the bottom and runned along the Potomac, I heard a train whistling and saw a dim light on the other side, ’bout a mile off to the east, curving ’round the edge of the mountain. That was the B&O, not wasting no time, coming out of Baltimore.

I throwed myself down the road fast as my legs could go, running toward the bridge that crossed the Potomac River.

The train got to the other side just before I did. I heard the hissing of the brakes as it stopped short, just as I put my foot on the far side of the bridge coming over. I seen it halted there, setting, hissing, through the bridge span trestles as I ran. The train had stopped ’bout a few yards shy of the station, just as the Rail Man said it would. Normally it stopped at the station, discharged passengers, then moved up a few yards to the water tower to take on water, then headed over the Shenandoah Bridge, where it headed down to Wheeling, Virginia. That weren’t normal, for the train to stop there, which meant the Old Man’s army had already started their war.

The Shenandoah was a covered bridge, with a wagon road running on one side of it and the train tracks on the other. From my side atop the B&O Bridge, I seen two fellers with rifles approaching the train from the Shenandoah Bridge side where it was stalled, ’bout a quarter mile off from me. I was still making it, running across the B&O Bridge, the train stopped dead, setting there, hissing steam, the lantern at the front of it dangling over the cowcatcher.

From the bridge as I got closer, I recognized the two figures as Oliver and Stewart Taylor, walking along the sides of the train, holding rifles to the engine master and coal slinger as they climbed down the train. They climbed down right into Oliver’s hands, they did. He and Taylor moved them along toward the back of the train, but what with the hissing and clanking of the engine, and being where I was, running hard, I couldn’t hear what was said. But I was busting it, running hard, almost there, and as I got closer, I could hear their voices talking a little bit.

I was just ’bout across the bridge when I saw the wide, tall silhouette of the Rail Man emerge from a side door of a passenger compartment and climb down the steps. He come down the steps slowly, carefully, reached up, shut the train door behind him, and set off down the tracks on foot. He come right at Oliver, holding a lantern at his side. He didn’t wave it. Just held the lantern steady at his side, walking toward Oliver and Taylor, who was walking away from him toward the Ferry with their prisoners. Oliver looked over his shoulder and saw the Rail Man, and he motioned Taylor to keep going with the two prisoners while he broke off and turned back toward the Rail Man, his rifle at his hip. He didn’t raise it, but he held it steady there as he came toward the Rail Man.

I runned hard to get there, giving it every string I had. I humped off the bridge on the Ferry side and turned and followed the tracks toward them and hollered as I come. They weren’t but two hundred yards off or so, but that train was clanking and banging, and I was in the dark, running down the tracks, and when I seen Oliver close in on the Rail Man, I hollered out, “Oliver! Oliver! Hold it!”

Oliver didn’t hear me. He glanced over his shoulder for just a second, then turned back to the Rail Man.