The Underground Railroad(49)
His many work trips during Martin’s childhood were in fact abolitionist missions. Midnight meetings, riverbank chicanery, intrigue at the crossroads. It was ironic that given his communication difficulties, Donald functioned as a human telegraph, relaying messages up and down the coast. The U.G.R.R. (as he referred to it in his notes) operated no spurs or stops in North Carolina until Donald made it his mission. Working this far south was suicide, everyone said. He added the nook to the attic nonetheless, and if the false ceiling was not without seams, it kept his charges aloft. By the time a loose shingle undid him, Donald had conveyed a dozen souls to the Free States.
Martin helped a considerably smaller number. Both he and Cora decided his skittish personality had not helped them during the close call the previous night, when in another bad omen the regulators knocked on the front door.
—
IT had been just after dark and the park was full of those afraid to go home. Cora wondered what waited for them that they lingered so purposefully, the same people week after week. The fast-walking man who sat on the fountain’s rim, dragging his fingers through his wispy hair. The slovenly, wide-hipped lady who always wore a black bonnet and muttered to herself. They weren’t here to drink the night air or sneak a kiss. These people slumped on their distracted circuits, looking this way and that, never in front. As if to avoid the eyes of all the ghosts, the dead ones who had built their town. Colored labor had erected every house on the park, laid the stones in the fountain and the paving of the walkways. Hammered the stage where the night riders performed their grotesque pageants and the wheeled platform that delivered the doomed men and women to the air. The only thing colored folks hadn’t built was the tree. God had made that, for the town to bend to evil ends.
No wonder the whites wandered the park in the growing darkness, Cora thought, her forehead pressed into the wood. They were ghosts themselves, caught between two worlds: the reality of their crimes, and the hereafter denied them for those crimes.
Cora was informed of the night riders’ rounds by the ripple passing through the park. The evening crowd turned to gawk at a house on the opposite side. A young girl in pigtails let a trio of regulators inside her home. Cora remembered the girl’s father had trouble with their porch steps. She hadn’t seen him for weeks. The girl clutched her robe to her neck and closed the door behind them. Two night riders, tall and densely proportioned, idled on the porch smoking their pipes with complacent sloth.
The door opened half an hour later and the team huddled on the sidewalk in a lantern’s circle, consulting a ledger. They crossed the park, eventually stepping beyond the spy hole’s domain. Cora had closed her eyes when their loud rapping on the front door shocked her. They stood directly beneath.
The next minutes moved with appalling slowness. Cora huddled in a corner, making herself small behind the final rafter. Sounds furnished details of the action below. Ethel greeted the night riders warmly; anyone who knew her would be certain she was hiding something. Martin made a quick tour of the attic to make sure nothing was amiss, and then joined everyone downstairs.
Martin and Ethel answered their questions quickly as they showed the group around. It was just the two of them. Their daughter lived elsewhere. (The night riders searched the kitchen and parlor.) The maid Fiona had a key but no one else had access to the house. (Up the stairs.) They had been visited by no strangers, heard no strange noises, noted nothing out of the ordinary. (They searched the two bedrooms.) Nothing was missing. There was no cellar—surely they knew by now that the park houses did not have cellars. Martin had been in the attic that very afternoon and noticed nothing amiss.
“Do you mind if we go up?” The voice was gruff and low. Cora assigned it to the shorter night rider, the one with the beard.
Their footfalls were loud on the attic stairs. They navigated around the junk. One of them spoke, startling Cora—his head was inches below her. She kept her breath close. The men were sharks moving their snouts beneath a ship, looking for the food they sensed was close. Only thin planks separated hunter and prey.
“We don’t go up here that much since the raccoons made a nest,” Martin said.
“You can smell their mess,” the other night rider said.
The regulators departed. Martin skipped his midnight rounds in the attic, scared that they were in the teeth of an elaborate trap. Cora in her comfortable darkness patted the sturdy wall: It had kept her safe.
They had survived the chamber pot and the night riders. Martin’s final bad omen happened that morning: A mob strung up a husband and wife who hid two colored boys in their barn. Their daughter turned them in, jealous of the attention. Despite their youth, the colored boys joined the grisly gallery on the Freedom Trail. One of Ethel’s neighbors told her about it in the market and Ethel fainted dead away, pitching into a row of preserves.
Home searches were on the rise. “They’ve been so successful rounding up people that now they have to work hard to meet their quotas,” Martin said.
Cora offered that perhaps it was good the house had been searched—it would be some time before they returned. More time for the railroad to reach out, or for another opportunity to present itself.
Martin always fidgeted when Cora raised the idea of initiative. He cradled one of his childhood toys in his hands, a wooden duck. He’d worried the paint from it these last months. “Or it means the roads will be twice as hard to pass,” he said. “The boys’ll be hungry for a souvenir.” His face lit up. “Ravening—I think it means very hungry.”