Chapter four, continued

Sayer had built a stone boat, a stout wooden sled that the mule would pull. He hitched the beast and we set out across the stubble of the wheat field, picking up all the stones from the size of a grapefruit to twice the size of my head. Those bigger or smaller we left behind. After three loads, Sayer sent me on my own while he stayed behind to build another section of the foundation using the stones we had gathered.

I was glad to be alone. Ben Sayer was about fifty, but he had done heavy work all his life and he was as fit as the mule was. He hardly talked at all. I was trying to keep up with him, and trying to keep him from seeing how hard it was. The double burden was killing me.

When noon came, I was glad to knock off. Sayer had built a quick fire out of chips from the timbers he had squared earlier, and was heating coffee in a tin can. It went down well with cold ham and corn bread. While I was eating, I looked at the job Sayer was doing. He seemed to be a first rate mason as well as a carpenter.

It was a long afternoon. Ben Sayer stayed at the site, building up the foundation while I brought him stones.

I was tired from travel and tired from my labors. More than that, I was feeling lost. I had been ripped out of my carefully planned life, to find myself working like a field hand under a negro who would have been a slave if he had been at Waterside. Logically, I could plot every step of the change; but emotionally, it made no sense to me. I was disoriented and angry, and there was no one at whom I could aim my anger.

That was about to change.

When I returned with my last load of stones, Sayer said, “It’s getting too cold for the mortar to set right. Let’s unload and call it a day.” It had been clear and cold, but now clouds had gathered and November was really showing its teeth.

We started up the road toward Aunt Rachel’s house, with Sayer leading his mule. Off to our right I could see a substantial house and barn that Sayer said belonged to a family named Trostle. Aunt Rachel’s barn site was at the edge of the timber, but here the road passed between open fields. Two horsemen were coming from the Trostle house across those fields, riding at a proud trot to cut us off. The lead rider jumped the shallow ditch at the side of the road and stopped in the road in front of us; his companion came up behind us. They were both dressed in rough clothing; the one in front had a sheepskin jacket, standing open, with a revolver in a holster belted high up on his side. The one behind us had a carbine in a saddle sheath.

The man in the sheepskin jacket said to me, “We’re looking for some escaped slaves. You seen ’em?”

I shook my head. “We’ve been working on that foundation back there all day, and haven’t seen anybody until you came along.”

He turned to Sayer next and said, “How about you, Boy?”

“No, sir. Just been working all day. Didn’t see nobody.”

“You got papers?”

“Don’t need papers, Mister,” Ben Sayer replied. “This is a free state and I’m a freeborn man.”

“How do I know that?”

Chapter four, continued

Father put me to work in our shipyard for a couple of months one time. I wasn’t there long enough to become very skillful, but I swung axe and adz long enough to develop some callouses.”

Aunt Rachel smiled and said, “I have been wondering how to let you earn your keep. There aren’t enough chores around here to keep you busy this time of the year, and I am sure that Sarah is all the help I will need in the house. How would you like to help Mr. Sayer build that barn for me?”

Sarah didn’t look like she relished the idea of being left alone with Aunt Rachel to work all day, and I didn’t much like being paired off with Sayer. Since he wasn’t a slave, I really wouldn’t know how to treat him. I said, “I’m not sure I know enough about building a barn to take one on by myself.”

Aunt Rachel’s eyes were dancing with mischief. She said, “Oh, no, you wouldn’t be. Mr. Sayer is a master carpenter. He will teach you everything you need to know.”

*****

The son of a true southern gentleman would have been so insulted that he would have stalked out of the house. The trouble was, Father was not a true Southern gentleman. For three generations – I would have made it four generations – the men of my family had gone to sea, and the sea widens a man’s horizons. The local customs which seemed like God’s word to our neighbors, were less holy to us.

The upshot of it was that I couldn’t think of anything to say. Saying nothing let Aunt Rachel have her way, and an hour later I was walking along the road, dressed in work clothes two sizes too big for me that had been Uncle Alan’s before he died, on my way to build a barn with a negro as my boss.

(No reader would buy this if groundwork had not been laid.)

I wondered what Father would have said.

The place where Aunt Rachel had chosen to build was on the edge of a wheat field about a half mile east of the main house. I could see the rocky prominence of Little Round Top across Plum Run Creek. 

Ben Sayer had already done a good deal of work. He had dug a trench for the field stone foundation, and had completed more than half of it.

*****

I grew up on a farm, where you built anything you couldn’t afford to buy. It might not be professional; it might not even be that good, but if it didn’t fall over, it was good enough.

I took shop class in high school and eventually became a pretty good self-taught woodworker. I’ve lost track of how many bookcases I’ve built. I’ve never had the opportunity to build a house, but my wife and I rebuilt a shed into the heated and insulated building I’m sitting in as I write this post.

Decades ago, I discovered the Woodwright’s Shop on PBS and spent a lot of time studying old fashioned building techniques, including timber framing.

My point? Nothing is ever wasted to a writer. If you haven’t written about it yet, you will eventually.

Chapter Four

I woke to the smell of coffee. The room was cold; the chimney to the kitchen fireplace passed up my wall on its way to the open air, but no one made a fire in it any more. The water in the basin by my bed was like ice. I splashed my face and dressed hurriedly in the darkness, determined to be up and about. I did not intend my Aunt to think I lay in bed all day.

When I got downstairs, she was nowhere in sight, but I could hear her speaking softly to her chickens outside. I joined her; she was feeding them by the light of a coal oil lamp. The sun was just beginning to stain the eastern sky with faint pink. We spoke softly in the pre-dawn darkness and our breaths boiled like smoke in the chilly air. When she moved to the barn, I offered to milk her cow, but she said the old girl would give more milk to a familiar pair of hands.

Sarah was sitting at the table when we came back in, but I couldn’t really say she was awake. She was staring at the wall with her chin in her cupped palms. Aunt Rachel put her to frying bacon, and this time she watched over her shoulder and caught her before she burned it.

Breakfast was a quiet meal. Sarah was in a bad mood. Aunt Rachel’s thoughts were far away, and I felt like an intruder in her home.

We were clearing the table when I heard the sound of slow hooves outside the kitchen window. It was a negro leading a mule. Aunt Rachel went to the back door and invited him in. He paused in the doorway when he saw Sarah and me, and Aunt Rachel told him who we were, then said, “This is Benjamin Sayer. He lives down the road south of here.”

She told him to have a seat and set a cup of coffee in front of him. It gave me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. For the first time since I had met Aunt Rachel, the North seemed like a foreign country to me. I knew that there were free blacks in the North – in fact, there were a lot of free blacks in the South as well – but to see one sitting down at the table like this, and to see Aunt Rachel serving him coffee just like he was white . . .; well, it just did not seem natural.

Since I was a guest in Aunt Rachel’s house, I tried to hide my feelings. The negro seemed pretty uncomfortable himself.

Aunt Rachel fell into a conversation with Sayer about a barn he was building for her on an outlying piece of property. She noticed that I had taken an interest in what they were saying, and asked, “How much do you know about building barns?”

“Father had me spend a week with the overseer one summer watching one go up. I know how it is done.”

“But you couldn’t swing an axe or adz yourself?”

“I didn’t say that. Father put me to work in our shipyard for a couple of months one time. He said I needed to know ships from the keel up. I wasn’t there long enough to become very skillful, but I swung axe and adz long enough to develop some callouses.”

*****

And so we begin Matt’s education into new ways of thinking.

Chapter three, continued

I held in my hands a piece of family history. My great grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War on board a privateer out of Charleston, and his part of the prize money had made him wealthy. Afterward, he had never quite trusted the ability of the new American government to keep order, so he had had this pistol made by a Williamsburg gunsmith as a wedding present for his bride. It was .36 caliber, small for the day, and he had required that it be compact enough for a lady to conceal in a purse or in the folds of her skirts. It had been built as a flintlock, with twin, side-by-side barrels.

When their son, my grandfather, entered the Navy, Great-grandmother Williams gave it to him to carry. It was two carefully aimed shots from this pistol that had stopped a charge by Tripolian pirates during a small boat action off North Africa, saving my grandfather’s life and the lives of his crew.

After Grandfather married and retired to Waterside, he gave the pistol to my grandmother. She had carried it with her whenever she went riding in the countryside, and when her son, my father, had gone out in the coasting schooner Eva, she had had it converted to percussion caps and had given it to him.

It had gone from husband to wife to son for three generations until my mother, with her Quaker repugnance for guns, had refused to take it from Father. He had taught me to shoot using this gun, and now he was passing it on to me for the protection of my sister. It was more than a weapon. It was a touch of my father’s hand across the miles, and a trust passed now into the fourth generation.

With reverence, I took the pistol out of its place in the box and examined it. As always, it was in perfect condition. I took the horn and filled the measuring cup with powder, poured it down the right barrel, then again down the left one. Two bullets wrapped in greased patches of cloth went into the barrels and were rammed carefully home. Two percussion caps went onto the nipples and I lowered the hammers carefully to half-cock.

I closed the case and put it into the bottom of my carpetbag, then hid the pistol at the back of a small drawer of my dresser, behind paper and pens where Aunt Rachel was unlikely to look.

I was asleep within thirty seconds of hitting the bed.

*****

My interest in all things maritime led me to read the Hornblower books when I was young. My interest was captured by the sailing of the ships, the strategies, and issues of leadership, but I also had to put up with sea battles and all the unpleasantness that makes up the reality of war at sea. I never cared for that part of the books, although if it had not been there, they would have sounded quite hollow.

In Lord Hornblower (as I remember; I don’t have a copy handy), Hornblower’s new wife gave him a pair of double barreled pistols fitted with then-new percussion caps. As he examined them in his cabin, he realized that that they might mean life itself in the coming conflict.

I was intrigued by the idea of the gift of a firearm as a gift of life. Later, when I was writing Voices, I dredged it up and placed in into this multigenerational context.

Chapter three, continued

“Oh,” she said, “you do have your Father’s temper after all! No, Matt, I don’t feel that way any more. I hate slavery as much as I ever did, but not slave owners.”

“Father has always been a moderate. He would see the slaves returned to Africa, if there were a way to do it. His attitude has almost cost him his seat in Congress several times.”

“I know that. I know and respect your father, but he still holds human beings in bondage and I don’t hesitate to tell him that he is wrong. So we fight, whenever we see each other. So we avoid seeing each other, because we don’t want to fight.”

Aunt Rachel broke off the conversation, and suggested that I look around a bit outside. I took the hint. Her home had been invaded almost without warning by two strangers, and she wanted to think things over in private.

I wandered around for a few minutes, peeking into the chicken coop, locating where she kept her tools, and finally paying a visit to the two horses she kept in a small corral beside the house. Then I returned to the barn, pulled the handcart up to the back stoop, and began the task of taking Sarah’s trunks up to her room. She lay under a quilt, snoring softly, and did not wake though I made four trips.

*****

Sarah was still sleeping at supper time. I had to shake her awake, and she went right back to bed after the meal. I think the tension of being moved to a new home once again, right after she had gotten used to Mrs. Davison’s school, had hit her as hard as the ride north.

The second story of Aunt Rachel’s house was split by a hallway, with two bedrooms on each side. Aunt Rachel slept at the front of the house and used the room opposite hers to store blankets and out-of-season clothing. The remaining two rooms were given to Sarah and me.

I stored my clothing in a battered chest-of-drawers and shoved my carpetbag under the bed. If I was going to stay here where I would have to do farm chores I would have to buy some rough clothing in Gettysburg. I had taken only a minimum of clothing to Mr. Harding’s house in Baltimore because I had expected to be in uniform within another month.

Finally I opened the paper wrapped package I had laid on the bed. Inside was a small mahogany box fastened with brass. I opened it and looked at the pistol in its velvet lined resting place.

I held in my hands a piece of family history.

*****

I have spent a lot of words describing Aunt Rachel’s farmhouse, many more than I normally would. The shape of the house and the placement of the rooms is of importance for events that will occur a few chapters from now, when Sarah hears voices in the night. They are the voices of escaping slaves, hidden in a secret room in the basement of the house, which is a station on the underground railroad.

Those voices are part of a double-barreled crisis that will catapult Matt into a new and massively changed life.