Keeper of Dreams (86 page)

“Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, at your service, gentlemen,” he said.

“And I’m Cuz Johnston of Springfield,” said the other man.

“Cuz for ‘Cousin,’ ” said Abraham. “Everybody calls him that.”

“They do
now
,” said Cuz.

“
Whose
cousin?” asked Arthur Stuart.

“Not mine,” said Abraham. “But he looks like a cousin, don’t he? He’s the epitome of cousinhood, the quintessence of cousiniferosity. So when I started calling him Cuz, it was just stating the obvious.”

“Actually, I’m his father’s second wife’s son by her first husband,” said Cuz.

“Which makes us step-strangers,” said Abraham. “In-law.”

“I’m particularly grateful to you boys for pickin’ us up,” said Cuz, “on account of now old Abe here won’t have to finish the most obnoxious tall tale I ever heard.”

“It wasn’t no tall tale,” said old Abe. “I heard it from a man named Taleswapper. He had it in his book, and he didn’t never put anything in it lessen it was true.”

Old Abe—who couldn’t have been more than thirty—was quick of eye. He saw the glance that passed between Alvin and Arthur Stuart.

“So you know him?” asked Abe.

“A truthful man, he is indeed,” said Alvin. “What tale did he tell you?”

“Of a child born many years ago,” said Abe. “A tragic tale of a brother who got kilt by a treetrunk carried downstream by a flood, which hit him while he was a-saving his mother, who was in a wagon in the middle of the stream, giving birth. But doomed as he was, he stayed alive
long enough on that river that when the baby was born, it was the seventh son of a seventh son, and all the sons alive.”

“A noble tale,” said Alvin. “I’ve seen that one in his book my own self.”

“And you believe it?”

“I do,” said Alvin.

“I never said it wasn’t true,” said Cuz. “I just said it wasn’t the tale a man wants to hear when he’s spinning downstream on a flapdoodle flat-boat in the midst of the Mizzippy mist.”

Abe Lincoln ignored the near-poetic language of his companion. “So I was telling Cuz here that the river hadn’t treated us half bad, compared to what a much smaller stream done to the folks in that story. And now here
you
are, saving us—so the river’s been downright kind to a couple of second-rate raftmakers.”

“Made this one yourself, eh?” said Alvin.

“Tiller broke,” said Abe.

“Didn’t have no spare?” said Alvin.

“Didn’t know I’d need one. But if we ever once fetched up on shore, I could have made another.”

“Good with your hands?”

“Not really,” said Abe. “But I’m willing to do it over till it’s right.”

Alvin laughed. “Well, time to do this raft over.”

“I’d welcome it if you’d show me what we done wrong. I can’t see a blame thing here that isn’t good raftmaking.”

“It’s what’s under the raft that’s missing. Or rather, what ought to be there but ain’t. You need a drag at the stern, to keep the back in back. And on top of that you’ve got it heavy-loaded in front, so it’s bound to turn around any old way.”

“Well I’m blamed,” said Abe. “No doubt about it, I’m not cut out to be a boatman.”

“Most folks aren’t,” said Alvin. “Except my friend Mr. Bowie here. He’s just can’t keep away from a boat, when he gets a chance to row.”

Bowie gave a tight little smile and a nod to Abe and his companion. By now the raft was slogging along behind them in the water, and it was all Alvin and Bowie could do, to move it forward.

“Maybe,” said Arthur Stuart, “the two of you could stand at the
back
of the raft so it didn’t dig so deep in front and make it such a hard pull.”

Embarrassed, Abe and Cuz did so at once. And in the thick fog of midstream, it made them mostly invisible and damped down any sound they made so that conversation was nigh impossible.

It took a good while to overtake the steamboat, but the pilot, being a good man, had taken it slow, despite Captain Howard’s ire over time lost, and all of a sudden the fog thinned and the noise of the paddlewheels was right beside them as the
Yazoo Queen
loomed out of the fog.

“I’ll be plucked and roasted,” shouted Abe. “That’s a right fine steamboat you got here.”

“Tain’t our’n,” said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart noticed how little time it took Bowie to get himself up on deck and away from the boat, shrugging off all the hands clapping at his shoulder like he was a hero. Well, Arthur couldn’t blame him. But it was a sure thing that however Alvin might have scared him out on the water, Bowie was still a danger to them both.

Once the dinghy was tied to the
Yazoo Queen
, and the raft lashed alongside as well, there was all kinds of chatter from passengers wanting to know obvious things like how they ever managed to find each other in the famous Mizzippy fog.

“It’s like I said,” Alvin told them. “They was right close, and even then, we still had to search.”

Abe Lincoln heard it with a grin, and didn’t say a word to contradict him, but he was no fool, Arthur Stuart could see that. He knew that the raft had been nowheres near the riverboat. He also knew that Alvin had steered straight for the
Yazoo Queen
as if he could see it.

But what was that to him? In no time he was telling all who cared to listen about what a blame fool job he’d done a-making the raft, and how dizzy they got spinning round and round in the fog. “It twisted me up into such a knot that it took the two of us half a day to figure out how to untie my arms from my legs and get my head back out from my armpit.” It wasn’t all that funny, really, but the way he told it, he got such a laugh. Even though the story wasn’t likely to end up in Taleswapper’s book.

Well, that night they put to shore at a built-up rivertown and there was so much coming and going on the
Yazoo Queen
that Arthur
Stuart gave up on his plan to set the twenty-five Mexica slaves free that night.

Instead, he and Alvin went to a lecture being held that night in the dining room of the riverboat. The speaker was none other than Cassius Marcellus Clay, the noted anti-slavery orator, who persisted in his mad course of lecturing against slavery right in the midst of slave country. But listening to him, Arthur Stuart could see how the man got away with it. He didn’t call names or declare slavery to be a terrible sin. Instead he talked about how much harm slavery did to the owners and their families.

“What does it do to a man, to raise up his children to believe that their own hands never have to be set to labor? What will happen when he’s old, and these children who never learned to work freely spend his money without heed for the morrow?

“And when these same children have seen their fellow human, however dusky of hue his skin might be, treated with disdain, their labor dispraised and their freedom treated as nought—will they hesitate to treat their aging father as a thing of no value, to be discarded when he is no longer useful? For when one human being is treated as a commodity, why should children not learn to think of all humans as either useful or useless, and discard all those in the latter category?”

Arthur Stuart had heard plenty of abolitionists speak over the years, but this one took the cake. Because instead of stirring up a mob of slaveowners wanting to tar and feather him, or worse, he got them looking all thoughtful and glancing at each other uneasily, probably thinking on their own children and what a useless set of grubs they no doubt were.

In the end, though, it wasn’t likely Clay was doing all that much good. What were they going to do, set their slaves free and move north? That would be like the story in the Bible, where Jesus told the rich young man, Sell all you got and give it unto the poor and come follow me. The wealth of these men was measured in slaves. To give them up was to become poor, or at least to join the middling sort of men who have to pay for what labor they hire. Renting a man’s back, so to speak, instead of owning it. None of them had the courage to do it, at least not that Arthur Stuart saw.

But he noticed that Abe Lincoln seemed to be listening real close to everything Clay said, eyes shining. Especially when Clay talked about them as wanted to send Black folks back to Africa. “How many of you
would be glad to hear of a plan to send
you
back to England or Scotland or Germany or whatever place your ancestors came from? Rich or poor, bond or free, we’re Americans now, and slaves whose grandparents were born on this soil can’t be sent
back
to Africa, for it’s no more their home than China is, or India.”

Abe nodded at that, and Arthur Stuart got the impression that up to now, the lanky fellow probably thought that the way to solve the Black problem was exactly that, to ship ’em back to Africa.

“And what of the mulatto? The light-skinned Black man who partakes of the blood of Europe and Africa in equal parts? Shall such folk be split in two like a rail, and the pieces divvied up between the lands of their ancestry? No, like it or not we’re all bound together in this land, yoked together. When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the Black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the Black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror. Do you think your children will not see you in that state, and fear you, too? You cannot wear one face to the slave and another face to your family, and expect either face to be believed.”

When the talk was over, and before Arthur and Alvin separated to their sleeping places, they had a moment together at the rail overlooking the flatboat. “How can anybody hear that talk,” said Arthur Stuart, “and go home to their slaves, and not set them free?”

“Well, for one thing,” said Alvin, “I’m not setting
you
free.”

“Because you’re only pretending I’m a slave,” whispered Arthur.

“Then I
could
pretend to set you free, and be a good example for the others.”

“No you can’t,” said Arthur Stuart, “because then what would you do with me?”

Alvin just smiled a little and nodded, and Arthur Stuart got his point. “I didn’t say it would be easy. But if everybody would do it—”

“But everybody won’t do it,” said Alvin. “So them as free their slaves, they’re suddenly poor, while them as don’t free them, they stay rich. So now who has all the power in slavery country? Them as keep their slaves.”

“So there’s no hope.”

“It has to be all at once, by law, not bit by bit. As long as it’s permitted to keep slaves anywhere, then bad men will own them and get advantage from it. You have to ban it outright. That’s what I can’t get Peggy to understand. All her persuasion in the end will come to nothing, because the moment somebody stops being a slaveowner, he loses all his influence among those who have kept their slaves.”

“Congress can’t ban slavery in the Crown Colonies, and the King can’t ban it in the States. So no matter what you do, you’re gonna have one place that’s got slaves and the other that doesn’t.”

“It’s going to be war,” said Alvin. “Sooner or later, as the free states get sick of slavery and the slave states get more dependent on it, there’ll be a revolution on one side of the line or the other. I think there won’t be freedom until the King falls and his Crown Colonies become states in the union.”

“That’ll never happen.”

“I think it will,” said Alvin. “But the bloodshed will be terrible. Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust.” He spat into the water. “Go to bed, Arthur Stuart.”

But Arthur couldn’t sleep. Having Cassius Clay speaking on the river-boat had got the belowdecks folk into a state, and some of them were quite angry at Clay for making White folks feel guilty. “Mark my words,” said a fellow from Kenituck. “When they get feelin’ guilty, then the only way to feel better is to talk theirself into believing we
deserve
to be slaves, and if we deserve to be slaves, we must be very bad and need to be punished all the time.”

It sounded pretty convoluted to Arthur Stuart, but then he was only a baby when his mother carried him to freedom, so it’s not like he knew what he was talking about in an argument about what slavery was really like.

Even when things finally quieted down, though, Arthur couldn’t sleep, until finally he got up and crept up the ladderway to the deck.

It was a moonlit night, here on the east bank, where the fog was only a low mist and you could look up and see stars.

The twenty-five Mexica slaves were asleep on the stern deck, some of them mumbling softly in their sleep. The guard was asleep, too.

I meant to free you tonight, thought Arthur. But it would take too long now. I’d never be done by morning.

And then it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t so. Maybe he could do it faster than he thought.

So he sat down in a shadow and after a couple of false starts, he got the nearest slave’s ankle iron into his mind and began to sense the metal the way he had that coin. Began to soften it as he had softened his belt buckle.

Trouble was, the iron ring was thicker and had more metal in it than either the coin or the buckle had had. By the time he got one part softened up, another part was hard again, and so it went. It began to feel like the story Peggy read them about Sisyphus, whose time in Hades was spent pushing a stone up a mountain, but for every step up, he slid two steps back, so after working all day he was farther from the top than he was when he began.