The Underground Railroad(74)
She told him she didn’t know why it was there, or what it meant. All she knew is that she didn’t want to run anymore.
November sapped them with Indiana cold, but two events made Cora forget about the weather. The first was Sam’s appearance on the farm. When he knocked on her cabin, she hugged him tight until he pleaded for her to stop. They wept. Sybil brewed cups of root tea while they composed themselves.
His coarse beard was entwined with gray and his belly had grown large, but he was the same garrulous fellow who’d taken in her and Caesar those long months past. The night the slave catcher came to town had cleaved him from his old life. Ridgeway snatched Caesar at the factory before Sam could warn him. Sam’s voice faltered as he told her how their friend was beaten in the jail. He kept mum about his comrades, but one man said he’d seen the nigger talking to Sam on more than one occasion. That Sam abandoned the saloon in the middle of his shift—and the fact some in town had known Sam since they were children and disliked his self-satisfied nature—sufficed to get his house burned to the ground.
“My grandfather’s house. My house. Everything that was mine.” By the time the mob tore Caesar from the jail and mortally assaulted him, Sam was well on his way north. He paid a peddler for a ride and was on a ship bound for Delaware the next day.
A month later under cover of night, operatives filled in the entrance to the tunnel beneath his house, per railroad policy. Lumbly’s station had been dealt with in similar fashion. “They don’t like to take chances,” he said. The men brought him back a souvenir, a copper mug warped from the fire. He didn’t recognize it but kept it anyway.
“I was a station agent. They found me different things to do.” Sam drove runaways to Boston and New York, hunkered over the latest surveys to devise escape routes, and took care of the final arrangements that would save a fugitive’s life. He even posed as a slave catcher named “James Olney,” prying slaves from jail on the pretext of delivering them to their masters. The stupid constables and deputies. Racial prejudice rotted one’s faculties, he said. He demonstrated his slave-catcher voice and swagger, to Cora’s and Sybil’s amusement.
He had just brought his latest cargo to the Valentine farm, a family of three who’d been hiding out in New Jersey. They had insinuated themselves into the colored community there, Sam said, but a slave catcher nosed around and it was time to flee. It was his final mission for the underground railroad. He was western bound. “Every pioneer I meet, they like their whiskey. They’ll be needing barkeeps in California.”
It heartened her to see her friend happy and fat. So many of those who had helped Cora had come to awful fates. She had not got him killed.
Then he gave her the news from her plantation, the second item that took the sting out of the Indiana cold.
Terrance Randall was dead.
From all accounts, the slave master’s preoccupation with Cora and her escape only deepened over time. He neglected the plantation’s affairs. His day to day on the estate consisted of conducting sordid parties in the big house and putting his slaves to bleak amusements, forcing them to serve as his victims in Cora’s stead. Terrance continued to advertise for her capture, filling the classifieds in far-off states with her description and details of her crime. He upped the considerable reward more than once—Sam had seen the bulletins himself, astounded—and hosted any slave catcher who passed through, to provide a fuller portrait of Cora’s villainy and also to shame the incompetent Ridgeway, who had failed first his father and then him.
Terrance died in New Orleans, in a chamber of a Creole brothel. His heart relented, weakened by months of dissipation.
“Or even his heart was tired of his wickedness,” Cora said. As Sam’s information settled, she asked about Ridgeway.
Sam waved his hand dismissively. “He’s the butt of humor now. He’d been at the end of his career even before”—here he paused—“the incident in Tennessee.”
Cora nodded. Red’s act of murder was not spoken of. The railroad discharged him once they got the full story. Red wasn’t bothered. He had new ideas about how to break the stranglehold of slavery and refused to give up his guns. “Once he lays his hand to the plow,” Royal said, “he is not one to turn back.” Royal was sad to see his friend ride off, but there was no bringing their methods into convergence, not after Tennessee. Cora’s own act of murder he excused as a matter of self-protection, but Red’s naked bloodthirstiness was another matter.
Ridgeway’s penchant for violence and odd fixations had made it hard to find men willing to ride with him. His soiled reputation, coupled with Boseman’s death and the humiliation of being bested by nigger outlaws, turned him into a pariah among his cohort. The Tennessee sheriffs still searched for the murderers, of course, but Ridgeway was out of the hunt. He had not been heard of since the summer.
“What about the boy, Homer?”
Sam had heard about the strange little creature. It was he who eventually brought help to the slave catcher, out in the forest. Homer’s bizarre manner did nothing for Ridgeway’s standing—their arrangement fed unseemly speculations. At any rate, the two disappeared together, their bond unbroken by the assault. “To a dank cave,” Sam said, “as befits those worthless shits.”
Sam stayed on the farm for three days, pursuing the affections of Georgina to no avail. Long enough to mix it up with the shucking bee.