Chapter Five

I had expected to find Sarah in a bad mood, but she was beaming. She caught me by the hand before I even had time to wash up and led me into the kitchen. “Look!” she all but shouted, pointing at an apple pie. “I baked it.”

I sniffed it and broke off a kernel of crust. She slapped my hand as I tasted it. It was good, and I said so. Remembering Sarah’s burned bacon just yesterday, I was sure that Aunt Rachel had supervised this pie very closely.

Supper was a festive meal and we sat long over pie and coffee, trading family stories. Afterward, Sarah led me upstairs. She had put knick-knacks and gee-gaws on every available surface, but everything was neat and there was no clothing in sight. I asked where it had all gone, and she said that Aunt Rachel had stored half of her trunks, unopened, in the spare bedroom.

Early to bed and early to rise is the rule on the farm, and I was ready. Every muscle in my body ached from lifting rocks, so I went straight across the hall from Sarah’s bedroom to mine and straight to bed.

It seemed like minutes later that I heard a soft knocking at my door. I sat up with a groan and pushed the window curtain aside, expecting to see a stain of pre-dawn light. The moon was still high. I pushed my legs into trousers and fumbled for the pocket watch Father gave me two years ago. It was just midnight.

////rewrite this as dialog////

Sarah was at the door, looking terrified.  I sat her on the bed and asked what the matter was.  She had heard voices.  She couldn’t say what kind of voices, or where, or what they were trying to say to her, but she was sure that she had heard them.  I told her she had just been dreaming, but she would not be satisfied with that.  Very carefully, so as not to waken Aunt Rachel, I lit a candle and went downstairs with her.  We made a circuit of the first floor before she was satisfied that she had only dreamed the voices, and would go back to bed.

*****

This is a very important and tricky passage. Sarah has heard the sound of slaves who are hidden in the cellar, trapped by the fact that their conductor has been shot, and growing desperate after several days without moving further north. In these last days before the Civil War, due to the Dred Scott decision, reaching to the North no longer means safety. Safety now lies in Canada. They arrived at Aunt Rachel’s house the night Matt and Sarah were sleeping off their train ride. They are the slaves whom Meeker and Bellows are seeking. Of course, Matt know nothing of this – yet.

This passage needs a touch of “ghost story” as a red herring before Matt discovers the truth.

The note-to-self to rewrite as dialog is something I do fairly often. I knew as I was writing that I wasn’t up to making things come out right just then, and I was anxious to continue exploring Matt’s relationship with Ben Sayre, so I made a notation and moved on, with intention of returning later.

Chapter four, continued

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

“How do I know that?”

I was getting pretty irritated by their high handed manner. I said, “I’ll vouch for him, or you can ask Rachel Pike in that house up there. She knows him well enough to hire him to build a barn for her.”

Sheepskin Jacket scowled and said, “That lying abolitionist! I wouldn’t believe a word she said.”

I took a sharp step forward and reached up for the reins of his horse with my right hand, moving up close on the side where his revolver was holstered. “I don’t know who you think you are,” I snapped, “but if you want to keep all your teeth in your mouth, you will think twice before you call a lady a liar.”

That made him hot and I watched him like a snake, ready to pull him down off his horse if he made a move toward that gun. True, I was shy of sixteen, (or maybe just shy of seventeen, I haven’t decided yet) but I was man-tall and there are some things you just don’t let anyone say about you or your family. Besides, Sheepskin Jacket didn’t look that much older than me.

Behind me, I heard the other rider say, “Meek, you are about to get us in trouble over nothing. Let it go.”

Meek looked down at me with anger, but he only said, “Let go of the reins.” When I did, he jerked his horse around and kicked it into a gallop from a standing start.

I turned to the second man and said, “Who are you and what is all this about, anyway?”

This man was older than Meek and more heavily built; he looked slow and friendly, but I wouldn’t have wanted to fight him. I had a feeling he had more staying power than his younger companion. He said, “I’m Joe Bellows and that there was Tom Meeker. We got us a job of returning runaway slaves, and we just got word of a bunch of them moving north in this area. Two men and one woman, all in their twenties, one old woman in her fifties or thereabouts, and a baby. If you see them, send word down to Brannigan’s in Gettysburg and he’ll contact us. We’ll see you get part of the reward.”

I didn’t say yes or no. I just nodded and he took off after Meeker. It might seem odd, but even slave owners didn’t have much use for auctioneers, overseers, or slave catchers.

Ben Sayer looked pale, which was quite a trick because he was one of the blackest black men I had ever seen. He shook his head and said, “You don’t know how close you come to dying right there.”

I said, “Don’t be silly.”

“If I had said what you said, they’d have shot me down where I stood.”

I realized that he was probably right. Being a free black, even in a northern state, was not the same as being really free. I shrugged.

Slowly a grin crept across Ben Sayer’s face. “You still don’t get it, do you? You still thinking like southern gentleman.” There was sarcasm in his voice. “Look at yourself, there in raggedy clothes that don’t fit. You look like white trash. If you had told them you were Representative Thomas Williams boy, they would have laughed at you.”

He was right. I had never thought about what I must look like.

Ben said, “If you want to come on high and mighty with your fine southern pride, you better get your dress clothes back on and carry a gun. Nigras and raggedy whites can’t afford no pride.”

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.

Chapter three, continued

Aunt Rachel put the coffee pot on the table and set out two cups. She settled in across from me and said, “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what is going on.”

I told her of being called back from Baltimore and of Father’s fears. “He believes that if it comes to war, a lot of the fighting will be in Virginia, and that Washington City itself will be in great danger. There would be no safety there for Sarah, so he asked me to bring her here.”

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Matthew . . .”

“Aunt Rachel, people call me Matt.”

“All right, Matt. Don’t think you aren’t welcome here, but why didn’t Thomas send Sarah to live with his own sister. You must know that he and I don’t get along.”

“He said the North would be safer.”

“No, I don’t believe that. Southern Pennsylvania is right on the border between slave states and free ones.  We are more likely to have fighting here than in South Carolina where your Aunt Mary lives. There has to be another reason.”

I liked the way she went right to he heart of the problem, and I liked the way her face looked. She was alive to reality and ready to embrace the world as it really was. Aunt Mary, on the other hand, was the kind of woman Mrs. Davison would have been if she could have managed it.

I said, “I think Father considers my Aunt Mary rather empty-headed.”

She smiled briefly at some private memory, and said, “I haven’t met your Aunt Mary. What do you think of her?”

I thought back to when I had last seen her, three years ago during one of the times we were staying at Waterside. I remembered her grating voice and her endless conversations about nothing at all. I said, “I agree with Father.”

“Then perhaps she would not be the one to go to for safety.”

We drank our coffee in silence while Aunt Rachel thought it over. 

I get along well with people, mostly because Father trained me early how to put people at ease and give no offense. But that was just a thing I had learned to do. It was rare for me to feel truly at ease, but Aunt Rachel made me feel as if I had known her for years.

Out of the blue, she said, “You look like your father, but you remind me more of my sister – your mother. You have her calm. Your father was always restless; full of some kind of nervous energy. I teased him about it once. I told him he sat still at a full gallop. He didn’t like that very much.”

Aunt Rachel looked so much like my mother that everything she said took me back to childhood. I thought about how others treated Father and said, “I never knew anyone to tease Father.”

“I’m sure he would not allow it. He had too much pride for that.”

“Why don’t the two of you get along?”

She smiled sadly. “Personality and politics. We were both born stubborn, and we disagreed about slavery. My family has been of the Society of Friends since Pennsylvania was a colony, and we have always opposed slavery. You father was a slave owner. When I was younger, I thought all slave owners were sub-human beasts.”

That was hitting pretty close to home. “I hope you don’t still feel that way,” I said stiffly.

“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.”

Chapter Three

After Sarah had chosen a small trunk and Aunt Rachel had hustled it and Sarah upstairs, I rolled the cart into a barn and returned to the house.

The kitchen made up one back quarter of the lower floor.  Most of one wall was taken up by a huge fieldstone fireplace.  Aunt Rachel had an new iron wood-burning cook stove, but she had put it to one side of the fireplace so that a friendly fire could still be built on cold winter days. The sideboards and bin tables were scrubbed and fresh. Feed sack towels hung on the stove drying, but they were neatly hemmed, and had been patched where they had worn through. Even over Sarah’s burnt bacon, I could smell the faint odor of spices.

I had just decided to go and fetch an armload of wood to make myself useful, when she returned. She asked if I drank coffee and I said that I did. She asked me if I wanted to rest, but I had no intention of taking an afternoon nap, no matter how little sleep I had gotten.

While she talked, she worked around the kitchen, making up a fresh pot of coffee and putting right the damage Sarah’s cooking had done. As I studied her, it stirred up memories that I had thought were lost. Rachel Darby Pike. My mother had been Amanda Darby Williams.  Aunt Rachel was the younger sister, and she looked much as I remembered my mother.

I wondered why I had not seen her for all these years. I knew that she and Father did not get along, but now that I had met her, I couldn’t imagine why not. 

Thinking back, I could remember a great deal about Mother, although some of the memories were probably not my own. During those times we spent at Waterside, Father would have sudden spells of eloquence when he would talk for hours about her. He called it keeping her memory alive for me, but I am sure that he was keeping it alive for himself as well.

Mother had been a plain woman like Aunt Rachel. She was a Pennsylvania Quaker whose family had opposed slavery for over a hundred years. How she had come to marry a southern plantation owner was something even Father had never explained. Mother had not fitted in at Waterside. None of the neighbors would associate with her. It was not that she pushed her views on them; rather, her whole quiet way of living was an affront to southern society.

I suppose that I owe much of what I am to her. When I helped Mr. Dreyfus load his wagon, and called him Mr. Dreyfus, it was what Mother would have done if she had been in my place.

Aunt Rachel put the coffee pot on the table and set out two cups. She settled in across from me and said, “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what is going on.”

*****

Since I have set Matt up for major changes in outlook, it should be apparent that this bit about his mother is a beginning of the process of making those changes believable. To change the son of a fire-breathing, slave whipping plantation owner into someone modern readers could accept would be too much of a stretch. Matt’s father is a southerner and slave owner by accident of birth, and a moderate by the standards of his day. Matt has to face major changes, but not such major changes that the reader is likely to doubt that they could happen.