Fire on the Mountain (23 page)

July 10, 1862
Dr. Emily Levasseur
Queens Dispensary
Bath, England

Dear Dr. Levasseur:

You don’t know me, I am the sister of the Late Dr. Thomas Hunter, Esq., of Mint Springs, Staunton. I know of you because he confided once to me of his great Admiration for you and that you were friends. I am writing this to let you know, unfortunately, that Thomas is dead: a Rebel, as you know, he was killed at the Second Battle of Roanoke, where they say he had stayed behind to help the Wounded and is buried in our family graveyard, G.R.H.S., with his Father and our cousin Johnny, also killed in the War. Even though he had left the Bosom of his Family, he is Missed by all those who knew and loved him; it is truly His most pure whom God calls Home.

Sincerely, in Sorrow
but Trust for God’s Grace,
Laura Sue Hunter Bewley

“There was only one place to go,” Grissom said. “South. Follow the ridgetops. Later they slipped east, across the valleys, as well. By the spring of ‘60, the fires appeared on other mountaintops, to the west, to the east, so that no one was quite sure where the Army of the North Star was hiding. But at first it was just a few men, and just one fire, right here.”

“But how could they move a whole army without people knowing?” Harriet asked.

“There weren’t as many of them at first as people thought. At most fifty. Usually less.”

“So how could they beat Lee?”

“They couldn’t,” Grissom said. “That’s why they were so careful never to fight him. Small groups they could beat, even when they were outnumbered.”

“They knew the land better . . .”

“No, not really,” Grissom said. “That’s another myth. Remember, these were abolitionists from the North, a few n’Africans but mostly whites, and runaway slaves who had never had the mobility to know the country well. No, at first their enemy knew it better: the local whites, the hillbillies. They knew it well enough to know that once up on the mountain, Brown’s men would be hell to get off. No, they were hard to fight because they had better weapons. Higher ground. And less to lose.”

“And more to win,” Yasmin added.

It was dark. She stirred the fire Harriet had built, and she could almost imagine that the sparks that flew upward were what was filling the rapidly darkening sky with stars.

“The Mericans wipe out the buffalo, string the country together with railroads and barbwire; annihilate, not just defeat, the Sioux, the Crow, the Cheyenne, the Apache, one after the other. Genocide is celebrated by adding stars to the flag. The Cherokee and the Creek languish in Oklahoma, stripped of their land. Settlers run the Mexicans out of California and Texas, or turn them into serfs, and move north to Alaska and south into the Caribbean, eventually seizing the entire continent . . . ”

“Gross,” said Harriet.

“Ridiculous!” said Yasmin. “The author would have all of history hanging on one strand of rope with poor old Captain Brown.”

“Oh, I agree,” Grissom said. “It’s a white nationalist fantasy, and somewhat overdone. But you must admit,
John
Brown’s Body
gives food for thought. What if the war had been started not by the abolitionists but by the slave owners? The political balance of forces was pretty precarious in the 1850s. What if the war had been fought to hold this nation together, instead of to free yours?”

“But the whole continent? That’s ridiculous,” Yasmin said. “The rest of the world, especially the League, wouldn’t let that happen.”

“There’s no League in the book. In
John Brown’s Body
there’s no socialist Africa—it’s all broken up into colonies of Europe.”

“No Paris Commune? No English Civil War? No Russian, no Egyptian revolution?”

“I’m telling you. Socialism exists, but only as a threat. The world is basically ruled by the same people who built the railroads and the textile mills—British and then Merican capital. For a hundred years. And on into the future, until the end.”

Harriet shivered and threw another stick onto the fire. “That’s why I don’t like science fiction. It’s always junk like that. I’ll take the real world, thanks.”

“The funny thing is, it doesn’t make them happy,” Grissom said. “The Mericans, I mean. Having taken over the world, they turn on each other. They gorge on fat. They eat their own children. For a white supremacist fantasy the book has a certain grim honesty. It ends in this hideous...”

“Please,” Yasmin said. “I think I’ll pass. John Brown the traitor, huh?”

“Worse; a madman. A murderous fanatic. Lincoln, on the other hand, is a hero. The great emancipator.”

“Who does he emancipate?”

“Me,” Grissom laughed. “He emancipates the whites from having to give up any of the land they stole. From having to join the human race.”

“And Lee?”

“He survives the war, and loses it. But he sits a horse well. Speaking of which—I notice your daughter’s living shoes finally came around to looking good. What was it, the rain?”

Feb. 12, 1876
Mrs. Laura Sue Hunter Bewley
Mint Springs Road
Staunton, Virginia

Dear Mrs. Bewley:

Perhaps you will recall writing to my wife, Emily Pern Levasseur, some fourteen years ago on the occasion of the death of your brother, Dr. Thomas Hunter. I am returning your letter along with his correspondence with my late wife, who died last month after a long illness. These letters were among her most valued possessions, and I feel they should be in your family now, forming as they do a partial portrait of a brave and generous soul. Thomas Hunter was a friend of mine as well as hers, and even though events came between us, I am honored to have called him my comrade. Also, these letters reflect more on the destiny of your country (and its new neighbor, Nova Africa) than on this fog-shrouded Albion where I find my exile.

Sincerely,
R. Levasseur
Plymouth, England

“The Jacobin outlived most of his comrades,” Grissom said. “It’s not in the letters, but I researched it. He was wounded twice—first in England, as part of a group robbing a mail train to finance a ship for the Sea Islands. He must have made it because later, in the siege of Atlanta, he lost a leg. I don’t know which one. With legs it doesn’t much matter.”

“How’d he die then?” Yasmin leaned against Grissom’s shoulder, half listening. Behind them, Harriet was breaking sticks and fiddling with the fire, enjoying the comfortable feeling of grown-ups ignoring her.

“The Commune. Paris, 1879. After Emily died, he managed to get to Italy, then France. He was with the Internationals when they broke the encirclement. Even with one leg. Probably driving a wagon.”

It was growing cold. A thousand feet below, Yasmin could see the Valley looking cold and peaceful in the October moonlight.

Above it were the stars, which she hadn’t looked at in five years, since Leon hadn’t come back. Well, there they were. She looked straight back at them. They still looked like a graveyard, but that didn’t bother her so much now.

She came from a people who knew about graveyards. Yasmin thanked the old doctor, Abraham, for bringing her up here. She kept her eyes closed and imagined him walking with her between the graves in a dream—what had Harriet called it, a conjure dream? He was old and young at the same time. A kid with an old man’s knowing silence. They held hands, looking at the family graves, and it was as it should be. There was Cricket’s, decorated with half the pretty stones. There was his own. There was Leon’s with its black plastic plaque, and another little baby grave under a willow tree. They all three cried a little, looking down at that unknown one. Yasmin squeezed his hand in her waking dream and told him it was good to cry. I’m having another baby, Leon, she whispered out loud. The only one you and I had turned out pretty good. I miss you. Didn’t you know I would? Like a fool she was crying again.

“Mama.”

Yasmin looked up. Grissom’s hand felt old in her own. In the firelight across from her, Harriet looked like her great-great-grandfather’s oil portrait at Douglass Medical Center, lacking only the gray hair and the stiff blue suit. Allowing for her Daddy’s humorous oak-brown eyes.

“Mama.”

There was the little fire in her belly again.

“Mama, we want to go down,” Harriet said. She stood up with Grissom and brushed herself off by the fire. The two of them had cooked up a plan. Harriet wanted to see the fire from the valley, so she had piled up wood. The plan was to throw it all on the fire at once, then hurry down the mountain in time to look up and see it blazing.

“During the Centennial,” Grissom said, “you should have seen it then. We kept it burning every night for a week. We shouldn’t really be doing this now, with no one to watch it. But look how wet it is.”

“Let me give you two a head start,” Harriet said. “Then I’ll throw all the wood on and catch up.”

Yasmin held the flashlight for Grissom, who swung speedily along the path on his crutches. He moved pretty good for an old man, she thought. She could hear Harriet racing to catch up. They reached the car in record time, and Grissom got into the driver’s seat without being asked.

“Mama?”

Yasmin, getting into the car, turned and saw Harriet outlined in the dash light, still out of breath from the run through the woods.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be a boy, Mama. But if it is, let’s name him Cricket.”

Te-oonk

“Oh, no!” Grissom said. The starter motor made a dying sound. The engine rattled like broken crockery.

“Get in, Mother,” Harriet said. “You’re pregnant.”

There was no time to waste, if they wanted to see the fire; and there was no point in worrying about the car. Luckily, it was already turned around. Harriet got it rolling easily and then jumped in, out of breath and laughing. Grissom went easy on the brake, and when they hit the straight stretch leading to Iron Bridge they were doing over 100. As they raced across the bridge, Grissom took something off the dashboard and sailed it out the window, into the Shenandoah River.

“What was that?” Harriet asked.

“Was that what I thought it was?” Yasmin asked.

It was. Grissom grinned. The book was gone. “She should have known better than to leave it with me,” he said.

“Slow down!” Yasmin said. “You’re passing the shop.”