He leaned down towards her, trying to keep the hunger out of his voice, for he had already spent nine days and a good deal of his advance tracking the Dreamer and come up with a blank. This was a live clue and, he suspected, a clean one.
—You seen her? he asked. A colored girl? ’Bout twenty. Pretty-faced? Brown like tree bark? High-minded?
The colored woman stared at the creek, her face a silhouette in the darkness of the blanket surrounding it.
—I didn’t say I seen her. But my brother’s been acting funny.
—In what way?
—Just funny, is all.
—Maybe your brother got something to do with that missing boy.
—Wasn’t for Jeff Boy and my son, I s’pect my brother’d be on the gospel train by now.
The admission surprised him, and from atop his saddle he bent low to look into the face surrounded by the quilt to see if any truth lived in her eyes. The woman wasn’t even looking at him. She stared down the road, wiped her eyes, then looked into the distance again, the rain dripping off her head wrap, forming a stream that ran down her face. She was a thoughtful, obviously bright woman.
—I never did get your name, he said.
—You never asked it.
He noticed that she no longer addressed him as sir or with any degree of politeness that Negroes usually reserved for talking to whites. Any other time he might have found that inexcusable, but these were not normal times. Clearly she was on edge and not paying the least bit of attention to him. She gazed down the road once more, wiping the rain from her face, as if expecting to see someone appear any moment. Her face raced from rage to grief to sorrow and back to rage. He had walked into a mess.
—I reckon I did not, he said. I’m asking now.
—Name’s Mary, she said.
—Why you wanna turn your brother in, Mary? He’s in deep water if he’s helping that girl.
—Word gets out that Amber helped that woman, he’s sold south, she said. It’s the end of him. He’ll be blamed for everything, including Jeff Boy going missing. He got nothing to do with Jeff Boy being gone. I swear to Jesus he don’t.
—What you want from me?
—I can help you find my brother.
—You know where he is?
—No. But I can get word to him.
—How so?
She ignored the question and instead said, If I help you get him, will you keep quiet about him being the one that helped the Dreamer? He’d be in a heap less trouble. Wouldn’t nobody know the difference.
Denwood found himself shaking his head. He was fresh off a deal with Willard Rush that had cost him a bottle of rum and two precious days, with nothing to show for it.
—Forget it, he said.
—You’ll git what you want. You’ll git her. Ain’t that what you want?
—Ain’t none of your business what I want.
—I hear you got a lot of goodness in your heart, Mr. Gimp.
—You’re mistaken.
Mary looked at him squarely, her eyes firm, unblinking.
—Then I’m counting on God to give you goodness.
Denwood spat furiously, irritated now, peering at the road that led out of the Neck towards Cambridge. The land narrowed about a mile west of where he stood, with the Choptank on one side and Blackwater Creek on the other. In another hour or so, in this weather, the road would be impassable, and then he’d have to hitch a ride to Cambridge City with one of the watermen, most of whom had already departed and could be seen in the distance, tacking back towards Cambridge City as fast as possible.
—What is it with you people? he said. I ain’t a goddamned preacher. If your brother’s in the soup, the hell with him. I can’t do nothing for him. Why you want to turn him in anyway?
—I ain’t turning him in. If that little missy is who they say she is, she can find Jeff Boy and my son too.
—No deal, Denwood said.
The woman stepped back from the horse, her face grim and resolute.
—Suit yourself, she said.
What insolence! Denwood leaned down and hissed at her, not loud enough to be heard by Travis, who was still by the bank, watching the last of the watermen leave.
—I could turn you in just for knowing what you do.
—G’wan, then, Mary said. See if I sign a note on my son’s life. Long as there’s a chance he’s living, I won’t do it. They’d have to kill me ’fore I tell on my own account.
There. There it was. The Negro ace in the hole. The colored who played that card usually meant it. He remembered, all at once, why he’d gotten out of the game five years ago. It was coloreds like this one: the ones to whom death was a relief, an answer for their pain; they were no good to anyone, even themselves. He realized with a bit of shock, as his horse shook itself, the wetness from its mane flying into his own mouth, that their lives were exact mirrors of his, filled with silent, roaring, desperate human fury and humiliation. He realized at that moment that he despised them even as he admired them. How could you hate someone and like them at the same time? He was tired, he realized, and running out of money. The impressive advance the captain had given him was drying up in hotel costs, meals, and other supplies needed on the road that he could garner at home for free. The Dreamer was eight steps ahead of him and the distance was growing fast. And here this colored woman before him was throwing more logs in his path. Five years ago he would have kicked her in the head and ridden off. But instead here he was, watching her in the rain, crazed with grief, picking at a fresh scab in his own insides, one that did not need much pricking to draw blood: his own dead son, whom he’d sent to eternity on a joke because he’d insulted a goddamned, sniveling, pitch-knotted preacher who couldn’t take a joke from a walking drunk, which was what, he had to admit, he had been. He never thought about what a terrible father he had been. He had learned from the best. The memory of his own father made his insides twist with frustration, and he waited for the familiar rage to cover him, the angry calm to rush into his ears and send his hand to the Colt pepperbox in order to air this Negro hussy out, but instead he felt despair and loneliness.
—Okay, he said. Turn the screws in your own coffin, then.
But he might as well have been talking to himself. He had lost her. She was gone. She stared out into the pouring rain, watching the road, desperation tracing the long runs of water down her face. When she spoke, she uttered the words more to herself than him.
—I have faith in this woman, she said. I got faith in what the Dreamer knows. She dreams the future. She got magic.
She looked up at him from beneath the soaked quilt draped around her face.
—You never know, she said. You might could use a little magic your own self.
Denwood hesitated. Deals like this rarely worked out in his favor.
—How do I know you can get word to him? he asked.
—Even Amber don’t know I knows the code, Mary said.
—If he’s close enough for you to get word to him, I can track him myself, he said.
—Time you turn that mount towards him, he’ll get word and be gone, she said.
Denwood thought about it for a long minute. He disliked making deals with slaves and free blacks. It hampered him in too many ways, mostly internally, because in making deals with them, they became more human to him, and in doing so—try as he might to resist the feeling—they became less slave and more man to him. He could not make a deal with a pig, or a dog, or a piece of pork. But if a man says to another man or woman, I’ll give you this for that, then who are you dealing with? An equal? Or chattel? But he had no choice. She was enemy or friend.
—Okay. You got my word. I won’t give him up.
—Thank you. You wait in the barn, and after this storm passes in the morning, I’ll have got word to him.
—How you gonna do that in this weather?
—Don’t you trouble yourself, sir, I’ll get it done.
He rode his horse slowly towards the barn, watching
the colored woman as he went. Instead of going inside the house, she walked around to the west side of the building, removed the quilt that covered her head, and, in full view of the constable and several other watermen, placed it atop the half-finished bungy in dry dock that sat near the river, the planks atop keeping it from getting wet. He noticed that she hung it with its design facing outwards towards the lapping waters of Blackwater River. The quilt was blue and white, with the design of a broken five-star motif quilted in, but with only three of the stars finished. She spread the quilt out carefully, making sure the motif faced the river, then quickly scampered inside.
There was only one thing in Dorchester County that moved during a heavy storm, and that was the mail. It arrived in Cambridge City once a week, rain or shine, ferried across from the outer bays and tiny islands by a twenty-foot, two-masted schooner named Miss Squeak, piloted by Captain Dill Reitzer, assisted by two colored hands. Reitzer was born and raised on the eastern shore, a garrulous, hardened old sea captain who spent most of the week oystering and supplemented his meager income by delivering the mail. On board with him were his two blackjacks, Manny and Walter, both seasoned oystermen.
That afternoon, just two hours after Constable House pulled the search crews from the stormy, white-tipped Blackwater River, the captain and Miss Squeak’s crew of two made their way, yawing and bobbing, up Blackwater River, working towards the tip of Joya’s Neck to round it and head into the larger Choptank, which would take them into Cambridge City. As they did, they weaved and swayed past Kathleen Sullivan’s front door, where, in full view of the water, Mary’s quilt lay across the half-finished bungy at the bank, its broken five-star motif facing west.
As the boat passed the Sullivan farm, the two blackjacks, busy tying down a swinging boom at the bow of the yawing, groaning boat, spotted the quilt and exchanged a glance. They said nothing to each other, simply tacking forward and working briskly.
An hour later Miss Squeak listed into Cambridge City, rocking and creaking, its caulking straining under a full load of mail and parcels but docking in good time as usual. The blackjacks leapt onto the pier, tied her to the docks, and immediately got busy.
As usual, Manny and Walter tossed the bags of mail and other parcels ashore, then lifted several casks onto the pier. Then they grabbed the old wagon that lay on the dock for hauling purposes. After loading their cargo, with one pushing the wagon and the other pulling it, they moved their freight to the center of town, the captain following. The two noted that Captain Reitzer did not take his usual stroll into the Tin Teacup to wet his whistle while they made their drops that morning. Instead he came along.
The rain had ceased. The two coloreds, their heavy pushcart bearing mail, parcels, and barrels of pickles and supplies, splashed through the mud to the general store. They set the mailbag by the counter for Franz to sort, then, with the help of Clarence, went about stacking the barrels of pickles, nails, and other goods.
The tension was high now and the two blackjacks knew it, for word about the missing white boy who had possibly been kidnapped by a colored had spread up and down the Chesapeake. The captain’s presence confirmed it. The old man, they knew, never wasted time on anything worthless, and now he was watching them closely. Captain Reitzer, for his part, had also heard about the strange colored boy who could not speak English now sitting in Cambridge City’s jailhouse, and about the slave stealer Patty Cannon’s missing Negroes. He had no idea as to the reasons, but he knew one thing for certain: the coloreds were always pining for freedom, and any strange doings were probably tied to that fact. For years he’d heard stories of clever Negro stowaways on the sidewheeler steamships running in and out of Baltimore. He’d spoken to the other captains who sailed the big oyster dredgers up and down the Chesapeake for the big outfits in New England and New York City. The coloreds had ways of slipping to freedom that a white man couldn’t dream of.
Reitzer hadn’t always been so watchful. He thought he knew the coloreds well until the son of one of his hands—Manny’s son—ran off. That puzzled Reitzer. He had treated the boy with the utmost kindness, taught him everything he could about being a waterman, and still the teenage boy absconded in the most clever fashion, right before his eyes, vanishing into a crowd of coloreds at port in Baltimore during a mail run. Since then he’d never let his Negroes venture too far out of his sight. He’d long suspected the coloreds had some secret way of passing information among themselves, and always checked to see if his boys were part of it. He kept his eyes on Manny and Walter as they went about their business in Franz’s general store with the help of Clarence.
However, the two colored watermen did nothing suspicious. They took to the task of unloading the heavy cart in brisk fashion without fuss. Other than a simple grunted greeting, not a single word was passed among the three men. First they unloaded the pickle barrels, stacking them in a far corner of the store. The two watermen stacked the casks five high, then reduced the pile to three, then tied them down with ropes. Manny used two knots to tie them securely, then stepped back to see if the rope would hold. Clarence stepped forward and added a third knot. Walter added a fourth knot. And finally Clarence, eyeing the stack, shook his head as if to say no, that wouldn’t secure the pile together, and added yet another, fifth slipknot for safekeeping. Altogether there were five knots roping the stack together, where the discerning eye would have deduced only two knots were needed. The three regarded it for a moment. Manny then stepped forward and undid two of the knots, leaving only three.
When they were done, the three coloreds proceeded to stack the wooden crates filled with glass water and wine bottles. Manny bent low to pick up a crate, stacked three in quick succession, contemplated them for a moment as if trying to figure out the best way to order them, then rearranged the stack so that the stenciled lettering of the crates faced the side window of the store, which happened to be west. Walter added a fourth crate and turned the lettering to the west. Clarence added a fifth crate, turning his so that its lettering faced the west as well. Again one of them stepped forward and removed two of the crates, to make the stack three. That job completed, they secured the stack in similar fashion to the pickle barrels, with five knots, then removed two because only three were necessary. Then they stacked the nails, shovels, and empty bottles in the same fashion, next to the other stacks, in the same arrangement, facing them in the same direction as the others, to the west, before the two blackjacks decided to stack them in threes instead. Yet again they tied the crates using three knots, then five, then three knots again. They arranged the various kitchen and household sundries, tea kettles, meat grinders, apple peelers, and dry produce in the same way, in threes, neatly laid out, corners pointing westward, with three tied knots, then five, and finally three.
That task done, the two seamen tossed the outgoing mail into their barrel, helped Clarence toss the incoming mail onto a shelf for sorting, nodded a good-bye to him, and headed back to Miss Squeak, followed by the unsuspecting captain, to make the rest of their drops down the Choptank River.
Old Clarence grabbed his wheelbarrow full of mail and parcels and moved on to his morning rounds. He stopped at the Tin Teacup, dropped off a few letters, spices, and garnishes, proceeded to the town stable, dropped off more mail, then slowly made his way down the alley of muddy planks and discarded oyster shells to the doorway of the blacksmith’s shop.
The blacksmith was repairing a white customer’s horseshoes when Clarence arrived, and the old man waited respectfully at the door in the driving rain until the white man inside nodded at him that it was okay to enter.
He pushed his cart inside and spoke to the blacksmith.
—I got one letter and the axe handles you ordered, Clarence said.
—Set ’em on the table there, the blacksmith said, nodding at the worktable behind him.
Clarence lined the letters and the axe handles in neat rows of five, then removed two axe handles and placed them atop the remaining three handles so that they faced
left—which happened to be the west—and turned to leave.
—Clarence, old as you is, this rain don’t bother you? the blacksmith asked. Don’t it tire you down?
—I got plenty time to rest, the old man said. The Bible says whoever is tired, let him return and depart early from Mount Gilead. That’s Judges, you know.
The blacksmith rolled his eyes as his customer grinned.
—Surely I know it, old man.
Clarence turned and departed. The blacksmith turned back to work.
In full view of his white customer, he hammered out the code: Five rings. Stop. Five more rings. Stop. Two rings. Stop. Two more rings. Stop. Three rings. Stop. Then three more. Stop.
The message: Wake up the network. Colored’s gone running. Two of them.
The blacksmith wondered who it was. He hoped it wasn’t Amber. Amber, he was sure, was home and safe. His reputation was impeccable. Miss Kathleen would believe him and forgive him. Still, he was worried, and he hammered the code out again a second time, just in case, as his customer watched, unsuspecting.
The blacksmith’s warning rang across Cambridge City and was carried by mouth, horse, boat, and buggy into seven different plantations within an hour, all of whose code runners checked their contacts and found all their coloreds intact. But the eighth plantation discovered the missing souls. Ollie Wilson, driver and house servant of the Wilson family, overheard his master recount the story of the Sullivans several times. The Sullivans from Joya’s Neck had a boy missing named Jeff Boy, about eight years old, and a colored named Wiley had disappeared, too. Both were believed to have been attacked by a bear, or maybe drowned in the bay. A patrol had been mounted.
The Sullivan family, Ollie knew, was Amber. Amber was the only one among the Sullivans’ coloreds who, Ollie believed, knew the code.
That afternoon Ollie walked the grounds of the Wilson plantation and spread the word to the colored oystermen at the pier who were readying Mr. Wilson’s oyster fleet for delivery to the big schooners in the harbor at Cambridge that took Maryland’s delicious oysters to the fish restaurants and taverns of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Gone missing is Amber. If you see anything, holler. Within three hours, a colored waterman from nearby Bucktown named Blair Rush sailed in from the bay to drop a load of oysters and, before turning out to the bay again, heard the story that Ollie had spread. While his master ate lunch, Blair slipped home to tell his wife of a white horseman and a Negro he had seen while dredging for oysters with his master in the Blackwater River near Joya’s Neck. Walking with the horseman by the bank of the river, nearly hidden in the brush grass there, was a Negro that looked like the snobbish, skinny little Amber Sullivan—Miss Kathleen’s Amber, he said. He’d noticed the white man lead Amber past the turnoff that led to the Sullivan place. They looked like they were heading towards the old swamps at Sinking Creek, where the old Indian burial ground was, close to Cook’s Point, the deserted area where that old spook the Woolman was said to be living.