Chaneysville Incident (58 page)

“That summer, instead of going south, he had gone to Philadelphia. When he came back he was a different man. The diary was different. He was…frank. Almost as if he were writing things that he might want somebody to read someday. His prose was straightforward and clear, but it wasn’t flat and factual. It was, for him, tremendously emotional. And so I think the decision he had reached was emotional, rather than political….”

“
What
decision?” she said.

“He had decided to retire. Give up, maybe, if you want to be hard about it. I would say he was probably harder on himself about it than anybody else could be. It wasn’t so much a decision as a realization; he realized he was tired. He had been politically active for a quarter of a century. He had moved from being wholly anonymous to being famous—or infamous, if you happened to hold slaves. He had, through direct action, deprived the Southern economy of two million dollars’ worth of slaves—more, if you considered labor potential and the potential of offspring locked up in the loins of the females he had taken. His example had probably inspired the escape of several millions of dollars’ worth more. He had probably cost the South two million dollars’ worth of man-hours in trying to track him down. Call it all ten million dollars’ worth of damage; he had been a success. But now he was getting old. Each morning was a little harder for him, each night spent in the open a little more of a trial. He wasn’t showing any particular strain as yet, but he felt the strain. And he longed for some ease. He was absolutely honest about that; he wrote: ‘My life is not easy, I long to make it so. I have learned that there is no weakness in softness, no evil in taking rest.’ I don’t know precisely what made him decide that, but I think it had to do with Bijou, and probably with the child. At any rate, he wrote that that winter would be his ‘final sojourn in the cold,’ and that in the spring he would go to Philadelphia and take the woman and the child and leave for either Liberia or Haiti or the British West Indies, where slavery was a thing of the past.

“I don’t know why he wrote all that down. I have it in my mind that he was trying to convince himself. That he felt some kind of guilt about turning away, and that he wanted his thoughts out there in black and white so that he couldn’t just pretend he had never thought them. But that’s just guessing; I know him well enough to guess, not enough to be sure. But I am sure that he didn’t act like a man who had decided to give up; he was even more active locally than he had been the year before. He developed a new technique; he would slip down into Maryland and pick up handbills advertising for runaways, and then he would try to pick up their trails near the border and steer them to Underground Railroad stations where someone could help them on. He must have steered forty or fifty people away from the route up through Cumberland Valley, because it was long and dangerous and there were no stations on it. He didn’t intervene directly, though; I think he realized that was too dangerous, and that he could be of even more help giving runaways directions and telling them where the danger spots were. And he actually helped more people that way, it seems. Because the forty or fifty all came in a space of two months, while he was involved with taking his corn and setting up to brew, so he was only working at it part time. There’s no telling how much good he could have done when he was finished making whiskey.”

I stopped, sipped my toddy.

“
John
,” she said.

“That’s it,” I said. “The journal ends there: December 23, 1859.”

“That’s
all
?”

“That’s all.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. Something. Nobody ever heard of him again.”

She looked at me. “You bastard,” she said. “After all that, you’re just going to let it fall like that?”

“There’s nothing else to do,” I said. “That’s all I know, all I can figure out. There’s no more record, and there’s nothing in code, just December 23, a routine notation about the whiskey, a brief comment about the weather: the first snowstorm of the year was brewing, and he decided to go into town for supplies before it broke, and, if he had time, hunt. That’s the end of it; a period at the end of the sentence. That’s the way history is sometimes. Sometimes you don’t even get periods.”

I leaned forward and began to mix a toddy. The logs had burned low, but the wind was letting up, it seemed. I decided to wait to build up the fire.

“All right,” she said. “So you don’t know what happened to him. So now you can tell me how you got the journal.”

“That’s another story,” I said. “And it’s not a very long one, either, because nobody kept any journals on it. Just brief notes, names, addresses. So all I’ve got is what I can figure out. It takes place in Philadelphia, and it starts on September 20, 1890, when a son was born to Lamen Washington, a fairly prominent black mortician, prominent enough to have the event written up in the local black newspaper, and his wife, Cora Alice Washington, née O’Reilly—”

“O’Reilly?”

“Her father was an Irishman, fresh off the boat, and he married her mother. Such things were happening in 1865 or so, when she was born. But anyway, the event of the birth was not as joyful as it might have been, because Mrs. Washington died in childbirth. Lamen Washington took care of his wife’s body—”

“You mean he did it himself?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “The note on that is quite specific.”

“Who made these notes?…I know, you’ll get to it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Lamen Washington buried his wife and then got about the business of naming his son, and he did it by sticking his finger into the Bible. The kid was lucky; Lamen’s finger could have landed in the ‘begats,’ and he would have ended up with a name like Abinadab, or Bezalel, or Segub, but it landed in the second chapter of Exodus, and the child was called Moses.”

“Your father,” she said.

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. “I don’t know much about Moses Washington’s childhood. Lamen evidently did not remarry, so I expect that someone was hired to look after him. His upbringing probably was as normal as it could be under the circumstances, although there is some evidence that he was not particularly fond of his father, perhaps because his father did not seem to be particularly fond of him. He was probably well cared for, well fed, all that, because Lamen would have been an important man in the black community, and a fairly wealthy one. Moses was well educated; he went to the Friends School, and he probably did well there, because he had a passion for books. He read everything he could get his hands on and took copious notes on all of it.

“I really don’t know much more about him until he was fifteen, and for some reason he became interested in the history of Negroes, particularly in Philadelphia, and he somehow got a copy of the
Sketches
….”

“C.K.’s book.”

“That’s right. Although Moses didn’t know that. To him it was just a book. Until at some point Lamen found him reading it, and took it away from him and burned it. I doubt that helped father-son relations any. What it did do was to arouse Moses’ curiosity, and he got another copy of the book and spent weeks reading it and rereading it and taking notes and trying to figure out what it was that his father had objected to. He finally decided that it had to have something to do with the author, who was, of course, anonymous, but that didn’t stop him. He set about cataloging all the anonymous writing that had been done by Philadelphia blacks about that time, and he eventually came up with the book of poetry and the letter that had been published in
The Liberator
, and a lot of other things that probably didn’t belong to C.K., anyway. He was spending a lot of time and getting nowhere in particular because he really didn’t know what he was looking for; the identity of the author of the
Sketches
, but maybe that was only a first stage….”

“He was fifteen years old?”

“Sixteen, I figure, by this time. He didn’t do all this overnight.”

“How long did it take him to figure out who C.K. was?”

“He didn’t. He had practically driven himself into a collapse and his grandmother managed to figure out what he was doing.”

“Bijou,” she said.

“Bijou.”

“And she told him?”

“No,” I said. “No, she didn’t tell him. I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if it was the kind of thing C.K. would have talked to her about. I know she hadn’t read the diaries—”

“How do you know that?”

“She was an ex-slave; I don’t think she knew how to read.”

“She could have learned,” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“She probably did learn; she had his books, and she loved him, and she’d want to read them—”

“I don’t know that she loved him.”

“She kept the books, didn’t she? She kept the book of poems.”

“So?”

“So she kept a book of poems that her man had written for another woman. I’d say she loved him.”

“All right,” I said. “Maybe so.”

“And how did she get them? How did she get the books?”

“Maybe he left them with her.”

“And the journal? It went right up until the time he disappeared. How did she get that?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll tell you how,” she said. “That woman came up here looking for him, and she went to all the places she knew he might be, and she didn’t find him, but she found his books, and his writing, and she took it back with her, because that was the only thing she had of him besides his money and his son. That’s what happened.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It makes sense.” But I wasn’t really thinking about that. What I was thinking was that if it was true, whatever had happened to C.K. wasn’t a question of somebody finding him and killing him or taking him; they would not have left the diary undisturbed, probably. Whatever had happened to him had happened outside, in the woods. “Anyway,” I said, “he kept notes on the books as he read them, and used the journal to figure out which of the anonymous pieces he had found belonged to C.K. That took him a few months. The last entry in his notebooks is dated December 1907….”

“December twenty-third?”

“Thirty-first,” I said. “This is history, not a fairy tale; everything doesn’t work out that neatly. But you’ve got the right idea—”

“He came here and used C.K.’s notes and maps and set himself up in the whiskey business.”

“Methods too; he followed C.K.’s techniques pretty closely, right up to the point of selling to the powerful. He didn’t take his whiskey to Philadelphia—times had changed—but this area still had a fondness for untaxed whiskey, maybe just because it was untaxed, and he must have made out all right, and then came the Volstead Act and moonshine was the only shine, and he made a small fortune—”

“But that wasn’t what he was doing, was it?”

“No, not really.”

“He was trying to find out what had happened to C.K.”

“Yes.”

“Did he?”

I looked at the fire. The last log was starting to crumble, but the coals were red and alive. I looked up. The eastern sky was lightening; false dawn, but light—we would be able to move in an hour. There was no point in wasting wood. I settled back against the snow, feeling the chill of it against my back.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. No.”

It wasn’t easy going in the valley. The plows had been through, but that had been a long time ago—the afternoon before, maybe. The snow came to within a few inches of the top of my boots, and I knew it would be at the top of Judith’s.

We had been moving for two hours, since the first redness of dawn. We had made good time considering the snow, and covered six miles, maybe seven. I started looking for the signs. I tried not to think about anything, and it was not hard; the night had exhausted me. My throat was raw from wood smoke and talking, and the toddies and lack of sleep had put a dull ache in my head. I moved now only because not to move was to be cold.

I looked back and saw that Judith had fallen behind by about thirty yards. I stopped and waited for her, watching her come up to me. The steam cloud was large in front of her face and there was sweat on her brow. I had been pushing too hard. She stopped when she got to me and leaned against me, panting. I put my arm around her, trying to feel the shape of her shoulders through the bulkiness of the coat.

“How far do we have to go?” she said.

“It can’t be far now,” I said. I was lying, it was probably another two miles, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell her that. “Look for a concrete bridge on the left.”

“And that will be it?”

“The next turn to the left.” I didn’t say it was maybe a mile.

“A concrete bridge, and then we turn left?”

“That’s it.”

“Sounds simple.”

“It is simple,” I said. “Everything’s simple when you’ve got a nice road to follow.”

“It’s a damned sight simpler when you’ve got a nice car to follow it in,” she said.

“Ah,” I said, “your mother was so right about the gentle constitution of the Southern lady.”

Twenty minutes later, she spotted the bridge. I went back to work counting the paces, figuring fifteen hundred to the mile. The count was off. Sixteen hundred and seven paces later, I detected a wider than normal gap in the trees to the left and turned off the road.

“Where the hell are you going?” she said.

“This is it,” I said. “This road.”

“What road? I don’t see any road.”

There was a road there. It was hard to believe for the first hundred yards, but then the trees on either side thickened and there was more underbrush and the path through it was more distinct. The trees had kept the snow from drifting deep, and we made good time. Thirty yards farther on I caught the sound of a stream on the right, gurgling to itself down beneath the snow. I stopped and let her catch up.

“You want a drink?” I said.

“Where?”

“Listen,” I said.

We held still. There was no sound, none at all, except the whispering of a light breeze high in the trees and the dripping of water as some of the snow melted in the sunlight, and under it, the slow chuckling of the stream.

“I don’t hear anything,” she said.