Chapter five, continued

Strength is a family heritage; my grandfather was a noted amateur wrestler, and I have always been active. Even when I was studying with Mr. Harding, I took the time to ride, to hunt, and to take long walks. So I was surprised when I could hardly get out of bed the next morning. In lifting rocks onto a stone boat, I had been twisting into awkward positions. It had strained a whole different set of muscles than I was used to using.

The morning’s work was agony, but I wouldn’t let Ben Sayer see that. By afternoon I had everything stretched out again. The next day was better, and by the fourth day, I was feeling normal again. Of course, that was the day we finished carrying rocks.

Aunt Rachel and Ben Sayer had similar ideas about barn building. Their theory was that anything worth building was worth building right. Ben Sayer said that he wanted any building he had a hand in to last at least a hundred years.

To Ben it meant that, except for the siding, there should be no nails. Everything was to go together in the old timber frame style, with properly cut joints in the beams. Here, finally, the skills I had picked up in the shipyard would become useful.

In the old days, each beam would have been shaped from trees cut locally and squared with broad axes. That alone would have taken months, but Aunt Rachel and Ben decided to accept modern times and get the timbers from a sawmill. They were delivered by wagon on Saturday the seventeenth, half-way through November, in the first snow storm of the year. Mr. Dreyfus was driving one of the teams, and complaining all the way about people who don’t know enough to settle in for the winter. Ben replied that a man couldn’t do proper work during hot weather.

Ben was not satisfied to leave the timbers where the teamsters had dropped them, so we spent the afternoon with a pair of peavies and a drug, restacking them so that they would dry without warping. By that evening, I had discovered still another set of unused muscles.

*****

The next morning, I hitched the team and drove Aunt Rachel to a nearby farmhouse where the Society of Friends was holding their meeting that week, then took Sarah on into Gettysburg to the Presbyterian church. Aunt Rachel had invited us to join her, but I was not ready to become a Quaker.

Reverend Cummings was a preacher in the old style; his sermon went on, point by point in learned argument, for the better part of two hours. There is a certain pleasure in following a closely reasoned sermon, but it was lost on me that day. I sat, eyes wide open, apparently attentive, but my mind was elsewhere.

I had been in Pennsylvania for about a week. Except for the letter explaining to Aunt Rachel why we were coming – which came two days after we did – I had heard nothing from Father. I actually enjoyed working on Aunt Rachel’s barn, but it was not my life’s work. I kept thinking of the appointment I had to enter Annapolis. I was scheduled to arrive there on January first. I wanted a miracle to happen; I wanted a terrible disease to strike Lincoln down before he could take office. I wanted war and rumors of war to just go away and let me get on with my life.

I knew that none of those things were going to happen.

*****

Here is an example of a historical novelist ignoring history. I doubt that Annapolis classes begin January first, but I needed them to, so that is the way I wrote it. A later run through after the rough draft is finished will give me the chance to change my mind on this kind of minor point.

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.