Stand the Storm (15 page)

“See the difference, sir,” Pearl would say, draping a cloth over his wrist and comparing his own garment to the better wool. And so Gabriel developed a facade of quiet pleasantness to assure his clients of efficiency and competence. His quiet manner gave the proper odor of self-effacement and was well used.

It pleased Annie to make a fuss over her son and she was fortunate that his nature was without arrogance, for her attentions might have swollen his head. Mary thought that Gabriel would find it difficult to acquire a wife as solicitous as his mother. Only occasionally was his embarrassment at Annie’s attention apparent.

Fourteen

D
ELIA SAT AT
her mother’s feet and mostly stared about the room at the adults. After a short time of trading glances, Mary urged the baby to toddle toward her. “We two babes in the woods. But we can learn, can’t we?” she singsonged to the child under the notice of the other women. Mary grasped Delia’s chin and cupped it in her hand, showed the babe a needle and illustrated her newly found technique at threading. Mary caught Ellen’s eye. Sometimes dour when she worked, Ellen shared an open smile with Mary over the babe’s head. Ellen’s only vanity had become this tawny child and she was pleased that Mary cared for her.

The bright jot of the last several rainy days was that Annie’s rain barrels would flow over. Because she was a superstitious one she’d stationed these two large barrels on the west side of the building. For she would not have the overhang of a willow tree above this captured water. It was well known that rain rinsed off a weeper would be nothing but hexing water and a certain danger. The patter onto the porch roof and the plopping into the barrels had become an annoying hum in these recent wet days.

Ellen, typically hard at a specific project requiring fierce skill and stamina, spoke little in the kitchen precinct, for she gave way to her mother and brother. As there was but one spinning wheel, Annie and Ellen alternated this duty to spell each other from weaving and knitting. At other times, Ellen placed herself next to Mary with Delia at her feet.

As sewing on buttons was easily mastered, Mary was seated next to Gabriel in the early part of the evening and assigned to attaching buttons to newly completed suits and shirts. Gabriel enjoyed this closeness to Mary. For him, the room was humming in contentment.

“If you would hold the button thusly, the work will go faster, Mary,” Gabriel said, noticing her hesitation and the bobble of her hands. He leaned toward her and pulled on a button she struggled with. He controlled the temptation to pluck at her fingers as Abraham Pearl had done to correct him. It was often plucking that educated the fingers.

Annie coughed and shot a glance at Gabriel. Puzzled, he said no more to Mary. What had he done that was wrong?

When Mary rose to fetch water and finish nursing the evening meal, Gabriel regretted that these tasks took her from his side. Her face was pleasant and sympathetic in the low light. The outward signs of her ordeal were fading and her face seemed relaxed now. She did not yet smile at Gabriel. He felt that she was simply nervous about the propriety of it. And she had gotten away from the habit of pleasantries throughout her travail. But the relaxation and the bright sparkling of her steady eyes signaled him her interest and affection when she turned her face toward him.

Mary’s obligations to prepare the meal dissolved into Annie’s authority to serve it—to give it to her chickens. Annie did keep the duty and privilege of filling their plates and circulating the room to fill their cups with coffee.

“Nanny, come and sit and eat your supper. We need your salt,” Gabriel cajoled her.

“Brother Gabriel, don’t add to my weariness.” She brushed him aside and did as she pleased about the room.

At conclusion of the evening repast, Mary cleared the dishes and lit lamps for the night work. It would be fine to see her as captain of her own, Gabriel thought.

Preparation for the night work was undertaken quietly—surreptitiously, as notice had to be taken of the comings and goings of Aaron Ridley. The group paused intermittently in their industry and listened for sounds of his leave-taking. Happily, Aaron Ridley’s yearnings hurried him out of the shop. As soon as he departed all fell to the night work.

This night Daniel Joshua arrived shaking water from his clothes at the threshold. His face was not the usual cheerful moon. His forehead was knotted and his eyes dark and humorless. The dreary downpour outside the door drew the companions closer together. Mary pulled her stool close up to the table, hunched her shoulders, and drew her shawl tighter about. Her knees brushed Ellen’s under the table and Ellen’s skirt warmed Mary’s and vice versa. The fire popped and sizzled as droplets hit it from leaks in the ceiling, for the several days’ rain made the house soggy—pots and pans were distributed throughout to catch drips.

“Has come a cry to help a group from across the river. On a night like this!” Daniel fumed about the urgent message that had come to him.

“They are holed up in a pocket on the Virginia side,” he explained. “They waitin’ on a boat and boatman to give them a crossing.”

His thoughts were plagued with worry regarding the group waiting on the Virginia bank of the Potomac. He’d been told that an indomitable woman had left a failing plantation with ten youngsters shortly after their master and his sons had fallen beneath a bout of croup. She’d heard the mistress talk of selling off the hands—children included—to a dealer. Then Mistress planned to move to be near her sister. The bondwoman had baked corn cakes, wrapped up the gang of youngsters, and taken off. Word came that the group was stranded at the river’s edge—unable to light a fire and three of them with rasping lungs. They would need to move tonight, and Daniel was bound to row across and bring them to the Washington shore.

More than nuisance, it was going to be dangerous to get them to the shore in Georgetown this night. The water was choppy, the air chilly, and there was still driving rain. There wasn’t a strong hand amongst them—them being a woman and some babes—to help with rowing and navigating. The woman had brought the children so many miles, but Daniel couldn’t be sure she had much strength left to her. And could be she’d lost her wits. Worse come to it, could any of these travelers swim the river? Daniel doubted it. Daniel Joshua said out plainly that he needed a body to hoist a lantern on signal.

Mary bolted up from her seat at the table, tossing a lapful of buttons to the floor and striking her elbow in the bargain. “Mercy,” she cried out. She scrambled to retrieve the buttons. Surprising the others, Mary presented herself and agreed to help without hesitation. She so wanted to be put to service helping other folks to get free. It was the opportunity she was looking for. Daniel Joshua accepted her and said she was to wait on the shore and raise a lantern upon his signal to guide the wayfarers crossing the Potomac River.

It did swell Mary some to be thought dependable enough for the task. Gabriel was surprised at her eagerness to sign on to this extravagant plan of Daniel Joshua’s. He would have preferred a bit more reticence on Mary’s part. But, he reflected, it was no concern of his what this girl did.

Except that it was a concern for them. The situation for freed people was precarious. And the race’s women were judged immoral if they walked abroad at night. Gabriel preferred that a woman seen coming and going with his mother and sister be circumspect. His fervent hope was that Mary would continue to come and go with the Coats family.

Daniel Joshua’s body was tense and active. He would not even sit to a cup of coffee. The usually talkative man only stared into a cup held in his hand as he paced about.

As surely as Mary felt Daniel Joshua’s confidence in her she could feel Gabriel’s fearful concern. She knew he wasn’t afraid of doing the task himself, but was frightened for her to do it. Gabriel wasn’t a soft man in case a person thought it because he sat down at his work. In fact, she had learned there was a lack of softness in him toward folks that was disturbing.

The women roused up. Annie began assembling blankets and thrust a folded stack at Daniel. Mary hoisted a pile of blankets given her by Annie for the comfort of the wet and chilled wayfarers. She stacked these and carried them upon the top of her head.

Annie turned to rummaging her larder for substance for a pot of soup to feed the travelers. Ellen, too, put away her lap work, set her tot to bed on a pallet near the stove, and helped her mother prepare to feed the hungry.

“Go on and fill up my bucket, Brother Gabriel,” Annie commanded. It hardly matters how grown you get do your mam take you down a couple of pegs. Gabriel put away his lap work for the night and covered his head to go out for the water.

The dark, wet night was cruel and unforgiving. The Lord who controls the wind and the waves and the drops of rain that fall, does, on such nights, seem to forget the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and the poor travelers stranded in bondage on the far riverbank. Gabriel was annoyed more than angry. The rain, the hardheaded women, and Daniel Joshua—who was certainly on the way to putting a noose around all of their necks—had spoiled his ease.

When Gabriel returned to the kitchen, his mother had already killed one of the rabbits she fatted for the pot and was skinning it and cutting it. The small hare would soon be lost amongst onions and vegetables. Ellen was hacking at carrots and turnips, and the sight of her ungraceful chopping and rough cutting made you wonder at the fineness of her needlework and fear for her fingers.

Mary ran to keep up with Daniel. He walked swiftly and dodged and darted in his customary surreptitious way as she labored behind.

Daniel turned down Water Street and disappeared momentarily into a doorway. Mary kept her head and proceeded in the direction she’d been led. As she passed close to a shed, Daniel reached out and touched her sleeve. She started but did not squeal. He fell in with her, holding a long-handled and bladed tool for chopping at underbrush. He also had a lantern that was not lit. Daniel again went ahead, and as they approached the river’s edge at the end of the cobblestone pathways, he started to chop a path out of the tangled growth.

Mary grabbed at tangles in Daniel’s wake and tried to yank them out of their beds.

“Save your spit for dying of thirst, girl. You’ll need your strength to hoist the lantern. Follow in my stepping,” Daniel said. He’d begun to doubt that he had the right helpmeet. Maybe this gal wouldn’t be strong enough to raise the signal. But it was too late to change the plan now. He wished he had a cracker or some such now that they had walked so far and fast. He hadn’t studied his stomach because of all the excitement. Now his belly was acting up.

“Here you are,” Mary said to him, offering a piece of Annie Coats’s hard tack. Daniel figured the girl had heard his stomach. He had better eat something or the patrollers would hear it, too.

The two squatted at the riverbank and chewed quietly on their crackers. The sky was uniformly black and the river was dark black as well. Rain continued to pelt. Upon finishing his cracker, Daniel put together a bit of shelter from trash planks and instructed Mary on where, when, and how she must raise the lantern. He walked off and left her under her roof.

From out of a bed of fallen branches and leaves some yards farther along the path, Daniel brought out his small boat. He couldn’t tell until he saw the folks how many trips it would take to bring the whole group to the shore in Georgetown.

When Daniel reached the Virginia shore, the woman who had brought the gang off the place stood at the river’s edge. Her hands were entwined and resting upon the top of her head. She appeared peculiar. A body would think she had need to entangle herself to keep control of her arms. Perhaps the children were an unruly bunch. Daniel looked beyond the woman and saw that the children were huddled together and were as still as a mound.

Though she had packed some supplies to carry the group forward, they were at the end of these stores. The children were bitten by all manner of insect and by the rats that inhabited the low areas near the river’s edge. The salve they had brought was all used up and the wounds had gone to fester.

Daniel feared they all would be discovered. The coughing could be heard a distance. Their intermittent rasps had guided him to them. As the two smallest children had succumbed to their fevers and their stomachs, there were eight children and the woman remaining.

“The babes lay unburied, sir,” the woman said of the two small figures lying on a shelf of rock.

“Eh ah,” Daniel said with a long sigh. “God rest their souls and let us go forth, ma’am.” He put four of the smallest children in the boat and piled several blankets over them. One boy standing in the shadow of the woman looked big enough and able enough to row in a pinch or bail water. Daniel called him forth to come along and the boy hesitated as if reluctant to leave the woman’s side. “I need his body to balance the skiff. I’ll come back for the rest of you all,” Daniel explained to the woman, who clutched the boy. She squeezed his arms and pushed him toward the boat.

“Make that he come back for us, you hear,” she said to the boy.

The boy stepped into the boat. Daniel took his place and pushed the boat away from shore with an oar. The boy sat looking fearfully at the woman on the bank. They had been close to separation so many times since they’d left the plantation and even before—it was the fear of separating from this particular young one after so many had been lost to her that had prompted the woman to run off. She had taken all of the other children because without her there was no help for them. Throughout it all, her boy clung so to her that this small separation now felt horribly cruel.

The boy stayed upright and held bravely to the sides of the boat. The small babes lying along the bottom did not stir much. They quietly rolled side to side with the movement of the boat. The bigger boy’s eyes were fearful milk-white saucers with tiny raisins at the center. But in the rocking back and forth he also made no noise. Daniel rowed until they reached a spot that was more than halfway to the Georgetown shore. At this point, Daniel Joshua blew upon a horn that was the signal to Mary to raise her lantern.