Chapter five, continued

“As soon as Amanda was able, she left home. She took a flatboat down the Susquehanna River from our family farm near Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, and ended up in Baltimore. She worked as a housekeeper there for a year, then moved on to Washington City. She told me in her letters that she was tired of farm life and looking for excitement. She took a job as a cook in a boarding house. That is where she met your father; he moved into that boarding house when he was first elected to Congress.”

This was all new to me. I had heard that Father and Mother met in Washington City, but that was all I knew of their courtship.

Aunt Rachel continued, “They fell in love and decided to marry. Your father made a trip up to Wrightsville to ask your grandfather’s permission. Your grandfather threw your father out of the house. He said he wasn’t going to have any daughter of his marrying a slave owner. So naturally, your mother married your father anyway.

“Through all this, I was the only one your mother kept in touch with. Your mother moved to Waterside and you were born. She was living with a husband she loved, and she had a child she loved. She thought she would be happy, but she wasn’t. Once she was actually in the South, seeing human beings enslaved, mistreated and given no freedom, she found that she was an abolitionist after all. That is when the fights with your father began.”

I said, “I never knew.”

“Amanda hoped that you would not. She tried to keep the fighting from you, but she was never sure. From her arrival at Waterside until her death, your mother was a tortured woman. She loved her husband and her children and could not abandon them, but she could not abide slavery.”

We talked for a few more minutes, then Aunt Rachel left me alone to think about what she had said. She had given me a whole new picture of my mother, and it would take a long time to decide what it would mean to my life.

*****

This is where the fragment ends. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. At this point in the story, the background has been established and the main events are about to begin. They will occur in two strands.

(The fragment was written in the late eighties. The outline that follows has been in my mind since then, but has not been written down until now.)

In Aunt Rachel’s house, probably on this same Sunday night, Sarah will come to Matt’s room again because she is hearing voices. Actually, he discovers, she has been hearing them for days but, not really knowing Matt or her Aunt well enough to trust them, she has remained silent. Now she is deeply frightened. Matt goes to her room with her to sit with her until she goes back to sleep, but instead he also hears the sounds she has heard. He is not sure that they are voices, but he thinks they are coming from the cellar. To silence Sarah’s fears he takes her quietly down, carrying a lantern. There is nothing in the cellar, and no noises, but there is a strange, unpleasant smell and a discolored segment of the dirt floor. Matt digs there and unearths a human hand and, tugging on it, realizes that it is attached to a freshly buried corpse.

Needless to say, Sarah is terrified, but Matt suspects that he knows the reason. The walls of the cellar are stone, but built against one wall is a cupboard filled with this season’s pumpkins and squash. The dirt in front of the cupboard appears to have been  disturbed, then brushed out. Matt takes the cupboard in hand and pulls. With a mighty squeal it moves away from the wall and behind, shining in the lantern light, are bright eyes in black faces.

Aunt Rachel’s cellar is a station on the underground railroad.     the outline continues tomorrow

Chapter five, continued

She sat beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what is troubling you?”

“Lots of things.”

“Such as?”

I couldn’t look at her. She went on, “Have I done something wrong?”

“No. Not at all. It’s just that you look and sound so much like Mother that sometimes it makes me feel strange.”

She smiled a gentle smile – like the gentle smile Mother had – and said, “There isn’t much I can do about that. What else is bothering you?”

I told her about my dreams of a naval career. She said, “I am sorry for your disappointment, but I can’t have too much sympathy for the thing you have lost. A naval officer’s job is making war, and I can’t condone that.”

“That is because you are Quaker.”

“We don’t care for that name. It was given to our faith years ago by men who used it to belittle us. We are the Society of Friends.”

“Mother was a Qua . . .  a Friend. She opposed war and slavery, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Yet she married Father. I don’t understand.”

Aunt Rachel laughed. “Matt, there are mysteries none of us will ever comprehend, and love between a man and a woman is the greatest of them. Why did she marry? She married because she loved Thomas Williams more than mother and father and sister and home. That is why women have always married. And she still loved him until the day she died, despite all the terrible arguments they had. I know; she told me so in a letter she wrote from her sickbed just a week before the end.”

“Arguments? They never fought.”

“They may not have fought where you could hear them, but they fought like cats and dogs, and it was always over slavery.”

“No!”

“Yes. Oh, yes. She wrote me long letters during the later years. She was troubled that God was punishing her for her lapse of conscience, but she never once considered abandoning your father. Through everything, she loved him.”

Aunt Rachel let me digest that for a bit, sitting silently nearby but not intruding on my thoughts. I had never known! I had always thought of Mother as a quiet person who gave over all the governing of the household to Father. If I thought of her background at all, I assumed that she laid her old religion and her Quaker conscience aside when she took her wedding vows.

Even more than I had realized, she must have been like Aunt Rachel.

“You have to understand something about your mother’s side of your family history, Matt,” Aunt Rachel went on. “This house is nearly a hundred years old, but when your great great grandfather built it, Darbys had been in America for decades. They came over with the original settlers who followed William Penn in 1683 to escape religious persecution in England.

“For nearly two hundred years, there have been Darbys in America, and for the most part, they have remained members of the Society of Friends and have opposed both war and slavery. But not every Darby has been strong in the faith, and some of them have lapsed and then come back.

“Your mother had a strong personality – your grandfather called it a rebellious nature. Your mother and your grandfather fought over everything. And, since he was such a strong abolitionist, it was only natural that she would not be. At least she wasn’t when she was a young woman.

“As soon as Amanda was able, she left home.    continued tomorrow

Chapter five, continued

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.

In that state of daydreaming, my mind slid from subject to subject, and landed on Ben Sayer. I liked him, but I was very uncomfortable around him. I couldn’t fit him into any familiar category. I knew how to be a master to slaves, and I knew how to treat Southern free blacks, but Ben Sayer had a dignity and reserve about him that I had never seen in a negro before. It kept me off balance, and he seemed equally uncomfortable around me.

We had trouble with names. If he had been a slave, I would have called him Ben, and if he had been white I would have called him Mr. Sayer. He was neither, so I didn’t know what to call him, even in my own mind. When we worked together, I would say “you” or point or gesture; I could never call him by either of his names. And he never used my name. Since he was thirty years older than me, he wouldn’t call me Mr. Williams, but he couldn’t call me Matt, or Boy, or Son without seeming too familiar.

Despite that, I liked him. He had easy, friendly ways and he was a master at his trade. He demanded excellence of me, but he was patient even when he was telling me I was doing something wrong.

What it all boiled down to was that I would have liked to have him for a friend, even though he was negro, and that scared me. If I could admit that, it shook the foundations of my whole life.

I shook hands with the Reverend at the door, hoping he would not question me sharply, for I had hardly heard a word he said. It was a good thing that the team knew the way home because my mind was miles away. Some neighbors had dropped Aunt Rachel off after their service, and she was already putting the finishing touches on dinner. It was a quiet meal; Sarah kept stealing looks at me, trying to figure out why I was so distant.

While Aunt Rachel and Sarah cleaned up afterwards, I went into the parlor to be alone. Like most country houses, the parlor was a rarely used room. I had not set foot in it during the week of our stay. The furniture was old, but there was no dust anywhere. I sat on a couch and idly sorted through the pile of newspapers in a rack. They were mostly back issues of a Philadelphia paper, but there were also three issues of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

Meeker had called Aunt Rachel an abolitionist; apparently he had been right. It was no surprise, but it brought back an old puzzle. If Mother had been the daughter of a Quaker, abolitionist family, why had she married Father, who was a plantation owner and slave holder?

Aunt Rachel came in alone. She said that Sarah had gone up to her room. In the dim light of the parlor, with the light behind her hiding her face in shadow, she looked so much like Mother that I could not speak. She opened the curtains and the spell was partially broken.

She sat beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what is troubling you?”

*****

I may amuse you to know that Matt’s difficulty with names shows up in the anthropological study of kinship terms. When there is a confusion in appropriate address, as when an uncle is younger than a speaker, people tend to avoid terms of address altogether. The technical term for this is “no-naming”     continued tomorrow

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.