Fire on the Mountain (4 page)

The airship looked like an ice cream sandwich, with the iceblue superconductor honeycomb, trailing mist, sandwiched between the dark cargo hull below and the excursion decks above. While Harriet watched, the honeycomb blinked rapidly: the ship was making a course correction, and it existed and didn’t almost simultaneously for a few seconds. Then all was steady again. Weighing slightly less than nothing, and with slightly more than infinite mass, it sailed northward as unperturbed as a planet in its orbit.

Harriet waved two fingers enviously as the ship glided away. From up there the world was beautiful. There was nothing to see from the ground but catfish ponds and wheat fields and country towns, one after another, as interesting as fence posts.

She punched on the radio, double-clicking on the news, then double-clicking again on Mars. Until her mother gave her that look.

“It’s not that I’m not interested, honey,” Yasmin said. “We’ll be back at your grandmother’s to watch the landing. I don’t want her watching it alone. I just don’t want to exactly hear the play-by-play until then, you understand?”

“Sure.”

Two hours later, they were in Charles Town. Yasmin turned east at the courthouse toward Harper’s Ferry. The road ran straight between well-kept farms, some still private. The wheat was still waiting for the international combine teams, working their way north from Nova Africa; but a few local hydrogen-powered corn pickers were out, their unmuffled internal-combustion engines rattling and snorting. Yasmin saw a green-gabled house at least a hundred years old and started to point it out to Harriet, thinking it was the very one in the story in the doctor’s bag in the backseat, Green Gables. But no, hadn’t that one burned? Besides, Harriet was asleep.

The shoes did look plain. There was something you were supposed to do with living shoes, to train them, but Yasmin couldn’t remember what it was. She sighed. Her reunion with her daughter was not off to a very good start. Oh well, things could only get better. Ahead, the Blue Ridge, blue only from the east, was red and gold. Neatly tucked under it at the gap was Harper’s Ferry, where the Independence War began.

By noon I had unloaded the fence posts while Deihl dickered and spat in Low German with the owner, and we started back with the new horse tied to the wagon; he was indeed a skittery character. His name was Caesar, which I spelled in my mind, “Sees Her,” for I had not yet formed that acquaintance with the classics which was to enrich my later years, and will I hope yours as well, great grandson. The owner, a breakaway Amish, said he had bought the horse lamed from two Tidewater gentlemen passing through; it made a Southern horse nervous, he joked, to live so close to the Mason-Dixon line, which ran, he said, at the very bottom of the field in which we stood. He pointed out the fence row. Sees Her munched hay out of the wagon bed as we headed back South, and Deihl unwrapped the sausage biscuits Mama had sent with us. Deihl was stingy with words, but he shared a pull of cider from the jug he kept under the seat; he was no respecter of youth in the matter of drink, but who was in those days? I lay out in the back of the wagon with my head under the seat out of the sun and went to sleep. Deihl went to sleep driving, and unless I miss my guess Kate went to sleep pulling, which mules can do. I was dreaming of soldiers, perhaps influenced by the little band I’d seen before dawn; or perhaps my second wife was right when she said I had the second sight; or perhaps the Amish was right and Sees Her smelled abolition; certainly he was to live the rest of his life surrounded by the smell: the horse woke me up whickering nervously. I sat up and heard popping that I thought at first was Fourth of July firecrackers. We were on the Maryland side of the Potomac, near Sandy Hook. The railroad bridge to the west was burning, or at least smoking mightily. A train was stopped on the Virginia side, leaking steam, and men with rifles were swarming all over it. Every once in a while one of them let off a shot toward the sky. A soldier watching from the riverbank rode into town with us. Deihl didn’t waste words asking what had happened because he knew we’d be told with no prompting. The town had been attacked by an army of a hundred abolitionists, the soldier said. He’d been sent with a detachment from Charles Town to guard the railroad bridge, but too late. The mayor, who was pretty universally liked, was dead, and so was a free black man named Hayward, who worked for the railroad. The soldier thought it was a great irony that a free “nigger” had been shot, since the attackers were “abs.” The papers were to make much of this also: but since almost half the population of the Ferry was n’African, and almost half of that free, or what passed for free in those days, I don’t know how it could have been otherwise. George Washington’s grandson and a score of other Virginians had been killed, the soldier said. He had a chaw the size of a goiter and spat into the wagon straw, and I kept expecting Deihl to straighten him out, but he didn’t. Coming past the end of the railroad bridge, we saw that the tracks had been spiked and two of the bridge pilings knocked over by a blast. The railroad workers were standing around looking either puzzled or disgusted, and one of them joined us for a ride across the wagon bridge into the town. He’d been drinking freely. He spat into the hay too, and still Deihl said nothing. I remember watching him spit uncorrected and thinking: what’s this world coming to? Sees Her was tossing his head and whickering, but Kate was steady. In the town the hotel and several other buildings were still smoldering. There was a wild, scary smoke smell: the smell all of us in Virginia were to come in the next few years to recognize as the smell of war. There was no fighting, but armed men were all over the streets looking fierce, bored, and uneasy at the same time. I felt my black face shining provocatively and would have not hidden it, but damped its blackness down if I could. The railroad men and the soldier both said “Kansas Brown” was behind the raid, as if this name had deep significance. White folks made much of Brown, though I had never heard his name, nor had any of the slaves until that day, when he became more famous among us than Moses at one stroke, and not as “Kansas” or “Osawatomie” Brown but as Shenandoah Brown. The railroad man told how the hotel had been torched and in the confusion Brown and his men had retreated across the Shenandoah into the Loudon Heights, which is what we called the Blue Ridge there. They had fast-firing breech-loading Sharps rifles. Once in the laurel thickets, who would follow them? “Not the Virginny milisshy,” the soldier said, laughing. “They’re at the tavern a-soaking their wounds in gov’mint whiskey.” I will attempt no more dialect. The railroad man seemed to take the soldier’s words for an insult and sulked and spat, wordless from there on. The soldier’s cut was not altogether true, anyway, I found out later: four of the “Virginias” had been killed in the fighting before falling back, all upon one another. I felt a deep, harmonious excitement stealing over me, though I did not at that time truly understand the events or what they meant. Who did, Merican or n’African?

Deihl was in a hurry to get back to Charles Town, but he was a man of steady habits and so we had to stop at the Shenandoah Tavern, as usual. I stayed with the wagon. I usually took the chance when Deihl was in the tavern to poke around Harper’s Ferry, but this day I felt I should stay with the tack; I have noticed in my sixty some odd years that in times of civil unrest even the most timid acquire a sudden ability to steal. Sees Her was still prancy and whickery, smelling abolition or blood or smoke, or whatever it was that agitated him. The steep and usually sleepy streets of Harper’s Ferry were filled, and everybody seemed confused. Stranded train passengers were wandering around with slaves dragging their luggage behind them. I got off the wagon once, just to stretch, and a man with a Carolina accent tried to hand me his carpetbag to carry; after that I stayed glued to the wagon seat. Those Deep South types thought every black face belonged to them. Sitting alone in the wagon, I was the only African in sight that wasn’t hauling some white person’s luggage around and I felt several curious looks, as though I were to blame for all the smoke and ashes (I hadn’t yet seen any blood); perhaps it was my imagination, perhaps not. At first I shrank; then I sat up straight, experiencing fully for the first time that mingled sense of pride and terror that makes war such a favorite of men.

I saw an Irish boy I knew and hailed him, but he ran; I saw another boy I hardly knew and didn’t like, and he stopped; he was black like me. This was my second lesson about war. It trues up the lines. The boy stopped at the wagon and in a conspiratorial whisper told me that two hundred “abs” had tried to burn the town and had shot the mayor dead. He sounded simultaneously shocked, scared, and boastful. Four of the raiders were buried in a common grave down on the river, he said; he’d tried to go down and see the bodies, but the soldiers were “thicker than flies.” They weren’t really soldiers anyhow, just Virginias, he said, with leftover Hall’s pattern muskets from the Mexican War. The “abs” all had Kansas buffalo guns that would blow a man in half. Deihl came out and we headed home for Charles Town, six miles across the Valley. As usual when he had been at the tavern, Deihl was more talkative, which meant that he said about four words a mile. But I learned from him that rumors were flying: the “niggers” had all run away; the “niggers” had all joined Brown; the “niggers” were coming down from the mountain as soon as dark fell, with spears as tall as church steeples. In fact, later that week a wagonload of spears was found abandoned. Brown, or some of his backers, had obviously figured the slaves wouldn’t know how to use rifles. Aaron Stevens, a military man and one of Brown’s commanders (after Kagi and Green), and I met again thirty years later, in Ireland, in ‘89, when I was chief surgeon at the Medical Center in Dublin. Stevens was dying of cancer, for which there was then no cure. He yearned to talk of old times, as dying soldiers do. He told me, laughing, that it had taken the average black slave who joined them “a full thirty seconds” to become deadly with the Sharps. The fact was, hardly any slaves joined Brown at first anyway. Mostly we n’Africans were waiting to see, waiting to see. Even the few who had joined him in the excitement of the raid (he had passed out rifles, not spears) had stayed behind rather than follow across the river and up the mountain, perhaps mistaking his retreat for a defeat. Some pretended to have been kidnapped and told fantastic tales: which is probably the origin of the story that Lewis Washington, George Washington’s grandson, had been shot by Brown while quoting Patrick Henry. I knew the man, for Deihl had sold him a team of mules, which he abused so scandalously that I had to go fetch them back. He was no Patrick Henry quoter. The fact was, I found out later, Washington was killed by a stray bullet from the militia, and Brown never intended to kill him at all, which was a sore point between Brown and his soldiers, who wanted no hostages. As to the story about the spears, maybe Deihl believed it, or maybe it was Kate: anyway, we got to Charles Town in record time, long before darkness fell.

The Harper’s Ferry Museum was filled with dead things. Rifles that hadn’t been fired in a hundred years and would never be fired again; wool coats with bullet holes in them, one with blood splashed all over the collar. Swords, spears, pistols, knives. Harriet was sick of history. First a famous father, now a famous great-grandfather. Great-great. There was no room for real life. Her famous father crowded out the real father she loved remembering. Her mother spent her life digging up bones.

Scuffling along in her ploddy new shoes, she followed her mother through the dim, almost deserted museum, trying to keep her eyes from alighting on any of the exhibits, resisting their power with her own.

The Second International Mars Expedition was just making sub-Deimos orbital insertion as Yasmin entered the museum director’s office, according to the vid on the wall behind his desk. Grissom stood up and punched it off, coming around the corner of his desk to meet his guest. Yasmin had heard that he was in the war, but she hadn’t known he was missing a leg. She could see that standing up was his way of letting people know it, so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. A one-legged man was a shock, almost as old-fashioned as the artifacts out in the museum.