Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge
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than curious now. Nothing moved. “Who’s there?”
Silence. Breathing, then, constricted but deep. A man’s.
“You hurt in there? You want me to come in after you?”
Panic, very clear, to the left, behind the wild raspberries picked clean by the starlings. Lily walked in that direction. She was not afraid, though the fixed intensity of her stare might have suggested so.
“I won’t hurt you…”
She heard the body turn over. It was down in the twitch-grass, and struggling to rise. Lily moved quickly through the raspberries into the afternoon shadow of the tree-line. The figure had collapsed face-down, its head in the shade, its shoulders and body in the sunny grass. The body was motionless except for the steep breathing.
No sign of injury or wounds, no blood. The man, for so he definitely was, was clothed in rags, mere strips of cloth that might have been a shirt and trousers. No shoes at all; the feet were blistered and scarred. And the fellow was incredibly dirty; he must have slept in ploughed fields. Through the holes in his shirt Lily saw what appeared to be more scars on the back, like livid vipers twisted in some foul congregation.
His entire body began to tremble, the way a child’s lower lip might quiver just before it bursts into tears. Maybe he had some terrible disease, cholera or fever. She saw the sweat bead on his almost bare shoulders. Holding her breath, she gently touched his arm to bid him turn over. “Please, sir, let me help you.”
“I’se past help,” came the voice, fatigued yet vivid and deep. Wearily, one limb at a time, the man rolled over in the grass. He was not dirty. He was black.
“His name is Solomon Johnson,” Papa told her later. “He run away from us soon as we touched shore.” Papa shook his head slowly. “Wouldn’t believe he was in Canada; he thought we meant to trick him.” He was talking more to himself than to Lily, who sat rigid beside him. “Poor bugger…”
Papa had not explained much that afternoon when he came home to find the black man in his bed being tended to by Lily. But it was more than she had ever heard before about what he had been doing on all those hunting trips. Papa and some men from the township had rowed Mr. Johnson across the River in the moonless dark. Solomon was a slave in the United States, Papa said, a life to be pitied. But once safe in Chatham, he would be free forever. Right now some bad men were chasing him, trying to take him back to his chains. Lily tried to imagine chains that could bind a human limb; all she could picture were the teeth on the muskrat trap, like a skeleton’s smile.
After talking a long time with the black man, Papa helped him to his feet and led him outside and around the cabin to the root cellar. Lily followed, at Papa’s prompting. They descended the little steps. Papa held up his hand. They stopped. Then he reached down and pulled the platform that served as a floor up on its hidden hinges. Lily gasped at the revelation of an even deeper pit below. Without hesitating, the black man stepped down into the dark and disappeared. A matched flared, then a flickering candle revealed a miniature bedroom about five-by-six and six-feet high. A pallet of blankets served as a bed. There was a stool and a bench to hold the candle or other necessities.
The black man looked up at them, exposing his huge, sad eyes. Then he smiled the widest smile Lily had ever seen. “How c’n I thank yo’all?” he said.
“Lily will bring you your food. You can stay up here long’s nobody comes ’round. You need somethin’, you just tap on this wall,” Papa said, demonstrating.
“If’n you doan mind, suh, I prefers to stay down here. Down here I feels safe.”
Papa didn’t reply. He turned to leave. “I got a sturdy lock on this shed door,” he said. “Lily’s gonna lock it every time she brings you what you need. Nobody’ll get in here. You’ll be safe. I gotta go to Chatham, to the Committee. Won’t be more than a day or so. We’ll work out a safe route once we know where those Yankee bastards are or if they’ve gone back where they belong.”
“I’se gon’ stay right here, Mistuh Cor’cran, suh. I’se gon’ be all right now. I be no more trouble, no suh.”
“I’ll be back in two or three days. You just keep your hopes up, Mr. Johnson. My Lily will take good care of you.”
Papa showed Lily how to fit the key in the lock and open it. She felt trusted, like a grown-up, and charged with excitement. She wanted to learn more about the black men they brought across the River, about slavery, and these Yankee bastards who were chasing Solomon. But now was not the time, it seemed. While she prepared some cold beef, greens, and biscuits for Solomon’s supper, Papa prepared to leave again.
Lily watched him reach the road that lead south, but instead of wheeling left he paused and looked up the line as if he were waiting for someone to catch up. Even from this distance Lily could tell that the jauntiness and intensity of purpose that had earlier quickened his gait and given an edge to every action, was now completely gone.
The voices hailing Papa were recognizable long before the figures emerged against the fading light. This time, though, the Scotch cousins were accompanied by a third man who, despite his powerful, squarish slope, trod a respectful distance behind his betters. An official of some kind, Lily thought. Old Smoothie greeted Papa, and together the entourage continued at a ruminative pace towards Chatham.
I’ll never tell anyone he’s down there, thought Lily. Ever.
Two days passed with no sign of Papa. Lily rehearsed what she would say when Old Samuels or one of the LaRouche boys came over. No one appeared. The sun shone, and the bees settled nicely in their new hive. Lily and Solomon had the homestead to themselves.
The first two or three times that Lily brought around his food, Solomon said nothing except “Thank yuh, Miz Lil, ma’am,” his eyes downcast or averted.
“Why don’t you eat up here? The sun’s comin’ through.”
Solomon, below, devoured his food noisily.
“I can fetch a chair from the house, with a back on it.”
The empty tin plate and clean spoon rose through the trap-door. “Thank yuh, Miz Lil, ma’am.”
“Did you like the pickles, Solomon? Maman and me made them last fall.”
A hand, seemingly detached, reached up and pulled the trap-door down like a mouth snapping shut. Reluctantly Lily gathered the utensils and with difficulty locked the outside door. She could feel him waiting to hear the comfort of its click.
“Tell me what it’s like in the United States.”
“Well, Miz Lil,” Solomon replied, finishing the last of the dills from his noon dinner and settling back a little on Papa’s chair. “Yuh wouldn’ wanna go dere, no ma’am. It’s an evil place, a wicked, wicked place –’da devil hisself don’t wanna dere.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Cain’t talk ’boud dat, Miz Lil. Jus’ cain’t.” He looked at the cellar floor.
“It’s nice in Chatham. Maman says they got brick houses there. And board sidewalks. And schools for little children.”
“Long’s they ain’t got no slaveholders, Ol’ Solomon be happy.”
Lily was accustomed to posing many questions in exchange for few answers, but she barely noticed that as the afternoon eased westward and Solomon showed no inclination to escape, she was doing more talking than she ever had. It appeared Solomon was a good listener, unfailingly alert and eager for her words. So attentive an audience was entirely new to her; even Solomon’s sadness and hair-trigger jumpiness seemed to abate.
She told him all the things she knew that were interesting and that he might need to know when he got his freedom down in Chatham. He got an earful about the LaRouches and the war against the Yankees, about Old Samuels and his miraculous all-day pipe; about the quilting bee at Maman’s last summer when the Frenchman drank too much hooch and dressed up like a priest in one