James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

I was close enough to hear as I come now. The Rail Man kept coming at Oliver, and I heard him shout out, “Who goes there?”

“Stay where you are,” Oliver said.

The Rail Man kept coming, said it again, “Who goes there?”

“Stay there!” Oliver snapped.

I hollered out, “Jesus is walkin’!” but I weren’t close enough, and neither of them heard me. Oliver didn’t turn his back this time, for the Rail Man was on him, not five feet off, still holding that lamp at his side. And he was a big man, and I reckon on account of his size and him coming toward Oliver in that fashion, not being afraid, well, Oliver shouldered his rifle. Oliver was young, only twenty, but he was a Brown, and once them Browns moved on intent, there weren’t no stopping. I screamed, “Oliver!”

He turned again. And this time seen me coming at him. “Onion?” he said.

It was dark and I don’t know if he seen me clear or not. But the Rail Man did not see me at all. He weren’t more than five feet from Oliver, still holding that lamp, and he said to Oliver again, “Who goes there!” impatient this time, and a little nervous. He was trying to give him the word, you see, waiting for it.

Oliver spun back toward him with the rifle on his shoulder now and hissed, “Don’t take another step!”

I don’t know if the Rail Man got Oliver’s intent wrong or not, but he showed his back to Oliver. Just spun around and walked away from him, brisk-like. Oliver still had his gun trained on him, and I reckon Oliver would have let him walk back onto the train if the Rail Man had gone on and done that. But instead, the Rail Man did an odd thing. He stopped and blowed out that lantern, then, instead of walking back onto the train, turned to walk toward the railroad office, which was just a few yards off the track there. Didn’t head toward the train. Went toward the rail office. That killed him right there.

“Halt!” Oliver called out. He called it twice, and the second time he called it, the Rail Man dropped the lamp and stepped up toward the office. Double-stepped now.

God knows it, he never did wave that lantern. Or maybe he was disgusted that we wasn’t smart enough to know the password, or he just weren’t sure what was happening, but when he dropped that lantern and made toward the office, Oliver must’a figured he was going for help, so he let that Sharps speak to him. He cut loose on him once.

That Sharps rifle, them old ones during that time, they barked so loud it was a pity. That thing choked out some fire and offered up a bang so big you could hear it echoing all along the sides of both rivers; it bounced off them mountains like a calling from on high, the sound of that boom traveling across the river and bouncing down the Appalachian valley and up the Potomac like a bowling ball. Sounded big as God’s thunder, it did, just made a terrible noise, and it busted a ball straight into the Rail Man’s back.

The Rail Man was a big man, over six hands tall. But that ball got his attention. It stood him up. He stood still a few seconds, then moved again like he wasn’t hit, kept going toward the railroad office, staggering a bit, stepping over the tracks as he done so, then collapsed at the front door of the railroad station on his face. He flopped down like a bunch of rags, his feet flopping into the air.

Two white men flung open the door and drug him in just as I reached Oliver. He turned to me and said, “Onion! What you doing here?”

“He was with us!” I gasped. “He was flocking the colored!”

“He should’a said it. You seen it. I told him to halt! He didn’t say a blamed word!”

There weren’t no use in tellin’ him now. It was my mistake and I planned to keep it. The Rail Man was dead anyway. He was the first man killed at Harpers Ferry. A colored.

The white folks runned with that later on. They laughed ’bout it. Said, “Oh, John Brown’s first shot to free the niggers at Harpers Ferry killed a nigger.” But the fact is, the Rail Man didn’t die right off. He lived for twenty-four hours more. Lived longer than Oliver did, it turns out. He had a whole day to tell his story after he was shot, for he bled to death and was conscious before he died, and his wife and children and even his friend the mayor called on him, and he spoke to them all, but he never did tell a soul what he done or who he really was.

I later heard tell that his real name was Haywood Shepherd. The white folks at Harpers Ferry gived him a military funeral when the whole thing was done. They buried him like a hero, for he was one of their niggers. He died with thirty-five hundred dollars in the bank. They never did figure out how he got that much money, being a baggage handler, and what he planned to use it for. But I knowed.

If the Old Man hadn’t changed dates on him, making it so the Rail Man gived his password to the wrong person, he’d’a lived another day to spend all that money he saved on freeing his kin. But he brung his words to the wrong man, and the wrong movement.

It was an honest mistake, made in the heat of that moment. And I don’t beat myself over the head with it. Fact is, it weren’t me who blowed out the Rail Man’s lantern and dropped it that night. It was the Rail Man himself that done it. Had he calmed down and waited another second he would’a seen me and waved that thing up and down. But it was hard buying that whole bit deep inside, truth be to tell it, for a lot was wasted.

I told Oliver standing there, “It’s my fault.”

“There’ll be time enough to count lost chickens later,” he said. “We got to move.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Understand later, Onion. We got to roll!”

But I couldn’t move, for a sight over Oliver’s shoulder froze me in my tracks. I was standing before him, looking down the track behind him, and what I seen made my two little walnuts, packed inside my dress, shrivel up in panic.

In the dim light of the tavern that lit the track, dozens of coloreds, maybe sixty or seventy, poured out of two baggage cars. It was Monday morning in the wee hours, and some was still dressed in Sunday church clothes, for I reckon they’d gone to church the day before. Men in white shirts, and women in dresses. Men, women, children, some in their Sunday best, and others with no shoes, some holding sticks and pikes and even an old rifle or two. They jumped out of them baggage cars like they was on fire, the whole herd of ’em, turning and running off on foot, making tracks back toward Baltimore and Washington, D.C., as fast as their feet could go. They was waiting on the Rail Man to wave that lamp. And when he didn’t, they took the tall timber and went home. It didn’t take much for a colored to think he’d been tricked by anyone, white or colored, in them days.

Oliver turned and looked back there just as the last of them leaped out the baggage car and hit the tracks running, then turned back to me, puzzled, and said, “What’s going on?”

I watched the last of them disappear, dodging in and out of the trees, jumping into the thickets, a few sprinting down the tracks, and said, “We is doomed.”

Islunk behind Oliver and Taylor as they left the bridge in a hurry with the engineer and coal slinger as prisoners. They marched the two them past the Gault House on Shenandoah Street and straight into the gates of the armory inside the ferry gate, which was unguarded. On the way there, Oliver explained that the cat was out the bag. Cook and Tidd had already cut the town’s telegraph wires, his older brother Watson, another one of the Captain’s sons, and one of the Thompson boys was guarding the Shenandoah Bridge. The rest had overcome the two watchmen, stolen into the armory buildings, and seized them. Two fellers took up in the arsenal, where the guns was guarded. The train was held up. Kagi and John Copeland, the colored soldier, had the rifle works—that’s where the guns was made. The rest of the Old Man’s army of seventeen men was scattered ’bout in various buildings across the grounds.