Jacob's Ladder (11 page)

A RUNAWAY SLAVE

N
EAR
S
UN
R
ISE
, V
IRGINIA
M
ARCH
18, 1861

HORSES' HOOVES THUDDED
in the snow and the iron shackles clinked over the withers of Jack the Driver's mule. Late-winter stars whirled overhead, and Samuel Gatewood thought he could pick out the curve of Orion. The moon was making its last stand over the mountain. Things didn't always turn out the way they should. A man can do what is honorable and things get worse instead of better.

The slave hunter's voice rambled among the patrollers like poison ivy through a thicket. “Ohio,” he said. “That's prime. They get across that Ohio River and they sing their hosannas and they're thinkin' that's the end of it. Why, they got no more caution to them than guinea hens in a tree. Any man can walk through an Ohio darktown knockin' runaways on the head. Me and Nate—Nate partners me some—we plucked fourteen of those birds in one week, drug 'em down to our bateau, and except for one what jumped into the river and drowned himself, we brought each and every one of 'em back to his rightful master. Niggers got no sense.”

Catesby Byrd rode at Samuel Gatewood's side. An hour ago, both men had been awakened by a hullabaloo outside Stratford's front door. Hullabaloos were no longer rare in Virginia. Even before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated President, rumors and portents troubled the night air, sharp and angular as bats. Last month while the Confederate states were holding their first convention, Catesby heard unexcitable men swear—on a Bible—they'd heard cannonfire somewhere deep in the mountains.

Would Lincoln try to relieve Fort Sumter? Would the South Carolina firebrands dare to attack a federal fort?

Samuel Gatewood was the best-regarded citizen in the upper Jackson River Valley. His essays on deep plowing and improved negro hygiene had been published in the
Southern Planter.
Surely, Byrd thought, Virginians like Gatewood would find solutions to Virginia's dilemma. Secession or subservience: surely there was some other way!

At two in the morning, Byrd and Gatewood had been awakened and admitted three men to Stratford's front hall: two patrollers known to them and a slave hunter with a distressing tale.

Samuel Gatewood's lips had narrowed to white lines. “Are you entirely satisfied that the Kirkpatricks—Sallie and her husband—are harboring my runaway servant?”

The slave hunter just grinned like the devil.

Jack the Driver had begged to be excused from the hunt. “This's white man's work, Master.” But when Gatewood placed a hand on Jack's shoulder, the black man went to saddle his mule.

Soft snow over frozen dirt. The road curved along the Jackson River running dark between snowcapped boulders.

“Cap'n, this sure is fine country you got.” Pierce—the slave hunter's name was Pierce. “Looks like good oat ground. You grow oats?”

Samuel Gatewood wished he'd thought to wear his overcoat. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been out so late. Snowy Mountain loomed over them like some bulky, primitive god. He'd cut timber off that mountain for thirty years and his father before him and the trees still darkened the coves and you'd never know men had ever tried to civilize it.

The patrollers, Billy Stuart and Amos Hansel, rode to the rear, keeping a gap, as if they weren't really part of this and left to their own devices might have done things differently.

“How long you been seekin' this boy, Cap'n?”

“Jesse ran the day after Christmas,” Samuel Gatewood thought, but didn't say. His stomach lurched unpleasantly and he didn't trust himself to open his mouth. He kneed his roan and showed Pierce his horse's tail.

Like ravens' cawing you can hear for miles, the man's voice was unaffected by distance. “I'm born on the Tidewater. Buxtons of Boxwood Plantation, they're cousins of mine, though they don't claim kin. I was raised amongst some of the finest gentry in the Commonwealth. Oh, them boys could chase the fox all day and dance all the night. Wasn't nobody get one up on the Buxtons.

“Ever time I get toward Ohio, I got to pass through these damn mountains, in and out, up and down, and don't look down into the gorge lest you'll want to puke. Not here, Cap'n. I mean this is good crop ground. Can grow anything in ground like this—oats, anything.

“Three months—that's a good while to be a maroon in the wintertime. 'Course, the other niggers feed 'em. Maroons sneak into the Quarters after dark. They slip past the patrollers. Maroons got too many places to hide. This country'd be considerable improved if you was to cut those damn trees.”

“Didn't slip by us,” Amos Hansel said in his deep voice. “That boy crept onto that mountain and denned up.”

“Oh, they sneaky, Mister. If they wasn't supposed to slip around in the night, why you think God made 'em black, ha-ha?”

“It's winter,” Amos said. Amos was the bigger patroller and the younger. He had a reputation among the colored. Sometimes a young buck slipping around when he shouldn't, if it was to visit his gal, why then Master Amos sometimes he understood that. “Snow leaves tracks,” Amos said, settling himself deeper in his saddle.

The patrollers rode solid horses, beasts that wouldn't shy or balk, but wouldn't win races either. Every night the patrollers went out, dollar a night, dangling their lanterns in the faces of colored women and boys. (“Passes, let's see your passes!”) Didn't need a fast horse for that work, needed a comfortable one. Under his oilskin slicker, Amos wore a jacket, woolen vest, woolen socks—two pair. Riding all night, that's where the cold bit. Feet didn't get a chance to wiggle around and warm up, so Amos Hansel wore two pair of socks.

“Tracks,” Amos's partner, Billy Stuart, added. “Runaway slippin' around the plantation in wintertime, a blind man can see where he's been.”

Jack the Driver had fed Jesse Burns three times from the porch of his own cabin, last time a slab of hogmeat and a cornmeal pone, but Jack wasn't the man to correct a patroller.

Jack was driver over twenty-eight men. Jack got logs to the mill at the right time and carted sleepers to the railhead before they turned blue in the stacks, and timed sawing so it didn't interfere with grinding cornmeal in November, or milling the wheat. He drove all types of men: young men, crazy as buck lambs; fulltask hands; old men who couldn't hit a lick anymore, but needed to make a show.

Jack was thinking that hunting a man was simpler than his usual work, that hunting a man was no harder than hunting a possum.

“How much farther?” Pierce asked.

“We ain't left Stratford Plantation yet,” Jack said. He shouldn't talk to this man, but words escaped his mouth.

The slave hunter slowed so Jack just naturally had to come up beside him. “You the driver, boy?”

Jack's mind went blank. “Yes, Master,” he said.

“You the boy supposed to know everything what's goin' on? Tell me somethin'. How come I can come here, a stranger, and set 'round SunRise store for a couple hours, just chewin' the fat, and somebody says there's this Jesse who has run from the biggest plantation in the valley, and I ride around one afternoon, and directly I learn where he is, this boy who's been runnin' since Christmas?”

“It ain't our line of work, Master.”

“Pierce!” Samuel Gatewood turned in his saddle. “I'd thank you to not interfere with my servants.”

“Just talkin', Cap'n. Just tryin' to get the lay of the land. These fields yours too, Cap'n? Was they mine, I'd plant buckwheat in these fields. Hell, I was just wonderin' how come nobody in these parts knew where that nigger was hidin', and me, I come in here, no kin to nobody, it takes me but two days to find him. I could understand were this some no-account nigger, old or sick, but this supposed to be a prime buck, fetch eighteen hundred at Wayne Tavern's auction block, any Tuesday you bring him there. They say this buck reads and writes. Cap'n, how come a nigger can read when many a good white man can't?”

“He belonged to a schoolmaster.” Catesby Byrd spoke for the first time.

“Agin' the law, teach a nigger to read.”

“My wife and brother-in-law did their sums under that schoolmaster's guidance.”

“Man taught niggers and whites?” Pierce shook his head, disbelieving.

Catesby Byrd had two healthy children, a frame house in the county seat, and a pretty wife he adored. Excepting only his cardplaying, Catesby was a fully domesticated man. Tonight, plucked from his warm bed, riding a frozen, moonlit road, Catesby was surprised how natural it felt. In these times, nothing was more natural than what was unnatural.

“Heard the nigger run when the cap'n sold his wench,” Pierce continued. “Anytime you split buck and wench or mama and pickaninny, you never, never let 'em see the speculator till it's too late, and soon as they're away, you jail the one that's left, a week, two weeks, and don't give 'em no meat ration neither. Feed 'em porridge and dry peas, corn mush. Couple weeks, they'll forget. No different than a cow what's had her calf weaned away. Did I hear talk about the cap'n's son?”

“Mr. Pierce,” Catesby said, “we are grateful for the information you have provided and you stand assured of that reward for which you bargained. We will do our duty by you, sir. Do you understand?”

Pierce muttered, “Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Gatewood's son, Duncan, is a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute. I pray the Commonwealth will not require his martial skills.”

“Think we'll go out, do ye?” Pierce sought safer ground.

“Most Virginians would rather stay in the Union,” Catesby said stiffly.

“Naw,” Pierce said. “We'll go out. You can bet on it.”

The road lay blank and white beside the lightly dusted fence rails. The field between road and river was smooth as an ironed shirt. The road climbed onto the mountain and paralleled a wide bend in the river.

“This begins Uther Botkin's land,” Samuel Gatewood said. “It was Kirkpatrick you said? Alexander Kirkpatrick?”

“Uh-huh. The nigger's sleepin' right in the house. Hell, everybody knows.” He spat.

The patrollers' faces were stone. “Never heard a word,” Amos mumbled.

“Let us be about our business,” Samuel said. The road zigged up a dry wash hummocked with old snow.

The cabin was set against a clay bank. The log-and-stone structure next to the cabin was the root cellar, and the kitchen garden lay uphill, between the cabin and the springhouse. Broken cornstalks crossed the top of the garden like a religious procession. Frozen britches and a quilt hung rigid from the clothesline.

“Leona told me Sallie lost her baby,” Catesby said.

“Yes, poor dear Sallie. Abigail said the poor child was crazed with grief.”

“Abigail saw no sign of Jesse?”

“None.”

“Nearly daylight, Cap'n.” Pierce found a pepperbox pistol in his saddlebag.

“Master,” Jack said. “Don't harm that boy. He big but he ain't got any meanness in him. I never seen Jesse lift his hand to any man.”

Most of the stars had been washed out by gray light on the horizon. Heat blurred the blackness above the cabin's chimney.

“Shot nigger aint' no good to anybody,” Pierce said. “What you think your master'd say was I to shoot you? Think he'd thank me? Pistol's just to affright him. Cap'n, I ain't tellin' you your business, but in my experience if you jump 'em when they're asleep, they don't act up.”

The cabin logs were new, the chinking smooth as pottery. Its single window faced the shallow front porch and boasted four panes of real glass. The door was rough-hewn oak.

“Amos. Billy. Do your duty,” Samuel Gatewood said.

The two patrollers dismounted, and Billy passed his horse's reins to Jack. “If she ain't tied to something,” Billy whispered apologetically, “she starts for home.”

Both patrollers held the short bullwhips that were their badges of authority, and Amos used the butt of his to bang on the door.

“Alexander Kirkpatrick! Patrollers to inspect your premises! Alexander Kirkpatrick!”

Pierce moseyed around the side. Most of these mountain cabins didn't have a back door, but you never could tell.

“Alexander Kirkpatrick!”

A thump in the cabin—in the loft maybe. Sounded like a cat jumped off a chair.

“Bust out the window,” Pierce shouted. “That'll fetch 'em.”

“We wait,” Gatewood said. “I have waited three months already and am no worse for it.”

Amos drummed on the door. “Mr. Kirkpatrick! If you don't answer, by God I'll bust your window!”

“What do you want of us?” A man's muffled voice behind the rough-hewn door.

“Kirkpatrick, this is Samuel Gatewood. We are searching for my servant, Jesse. For God's sake, sir, open the door and let us get this disagreeable business concluded.”