Underground Airlines(56)

Cook turned to him, incredulous. “He’s a nigger stealer.” Then, back to me, with a taunting grin. “Ain’t that right? Nigger stealer. Soul catcher.”

Maris looked astonished. He looked me up and down like I was a ghost, an ogre of myth. “He’s from the government?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Cook. “He’s from the f*cking government.”

I felt Kevin feel this new information. Felt his body change as he understood what kind of salvation he had fallen into this time.

“He is an undercover agent,” Father Barton said quietly, sadly, a wise parent explaining wickedness to a child. And then, to me, with sympathy: “What miseries you have seen…what grief you have encountered on this earth.”

Maris took a step toward me, his big fists clenched and half raised—ready, now that he knew what I was, to tear my head off my body. I pivoted a quarter turn, made sure he saw how tightly I was holding their precious cargo.

“Now,” I said. “Tell me about this boy. Now.”

Barton nodded very slightly. The sun was just starting to come up, washing our desperate scene in a hazy yellow light. There was a railroad bridge fifty yards to the south, the underside of it marked with graffiti, like petroglyphs. Barton stepped toward me as he started to speak. Looked me dead in the eye, me with my gun and my hostage. A man used to breathing God’s true word even into the face of monsters.

“Five years ago our organization was made aware of certain actions being undertaken by this particular plantation. Garments of the Greater South. We had information from multiple sources. We worked out a way for evidence of these activities to be gathered. Brought north. And made public.” As he spoke, Barton’s clerical calm melted off of him, and his voice rose, and he began to nod as if from the altar, and his hands slowly came up, like he was delivering an invocation. “And in this way we can shake the very foundations, bring down not just this plantation but all the plantations…in this way we can strike at the very heart of the old evil. In this way the scales will fall from the eyes of the world…”

He had changed entirely, a hellfire evangelical emerged from the shell of the inward young priest. What was he like, I wondered, on the other side of the confessional curtain, murmuring God’s forgiveness? What was he like in a meeting of abolitionist donors, pressing flesh, demurely tucking folded checks inside his cassock? He was many men. He suited the need. He was like me.

“So all right,” I said. “So you recruited him. You sent him down there.”

“That’s right,” said Cook. “And the boy was perfect. He was goddamn perfect.”

Barton nodded, posed, arms extended and palms raised, breathing. Now he spoke to Kevin, who looked back at him, face frozen with repulsion.

“I remember that night. I remember how proud I felt to have met you, to have found you. How inspired we were. How excited we both were for this undertaking.”

“He came to my school,” said Jackdaw suddenly, and I jerked him closer to me. “This man here. In plainclothes, you know, jeans and a shirt and the collar. All f*cking cool. My sophomore year, Earlham College. He shows up at a black students’ meeting, talking all hot about taking responsibility. Saying, hey, who’s tired of signing petitions? Whose feet are tired from marching? Who’s ready to do something real? And I said…” Kevin spoke faintly, mockingly, contemptuous of his former self. “I said me. I said me. I was all fired up.” He closed his eyes, energy spent, and hung limp as a doll in my arms.

“How much time?” I asked Barton. “How long did he have to work down there before risking his life to get your—whatever it is.”

Barton raised a single finger, thin as a bone. “One year.”

I felt Jackdaw’s heart pulsing warmth where I held him. I felt the sacrifice of this, for this kid from Detroit, a kid growing up with his pals in the free world, playing basketball, going to school. College sophomore, liberal arts, textbooks and term papers, bumping fists on the quad, and then a year behind the Fence. I could not imagine it, except that I could; I could imagine it exactly. Mine had been a livestock slavery, the blood knife and the dirt, and his had been a glass-wall slavery, stitch-house slavery, needle and thread, but the baseline is the same. The bare facts are always the same.

“And he performed…” Barton trailed off into a smile, took another step toward us, held out his hands to Jackdaw. “He performed perfectly. Kevin? Are you listening to me, Kevin? You performed beautifully.”

Jackdaw cleared his throat and shot a thick wad of spit onto the priest’s face. Barton did not flinch; very gently he raised one arm and wiped the spit away. I kept one eye, meanwhile, on the other men, still up there on the slope. Cook with his arms crossed, eyes narrow. Mr. Maris, hulking and furious, brow furrowed with concentration, waiting for his moment. Waiting for a chance to separate us, to push the boy out of the way so he could tear me to bits.

“So where is it?” Silence from everyone. River rush, distant traffic. Someone honking on southbound 65. “Come on. The boy goes down, performs beautifully, gathers up the evidence. Where is it?”

“Ask the boy,” said Barton, and I said, “I’m asking you.”

“This crazy motherf*cker didn’t bring it,” said Cook. He took one step down the slope toward us, and I tightened my grip and he stepped back. “He says he got it out, but he stashed it somewhere on the way up.”