The Underground Railroad

“That’s what I was trying to say before, miss. I’m in maintenance.” Because of his age, he told her, he was entrusted with the engine but not its human freight. After the Georgia station shut down-he didn’t know the details, but gossip held it had been discovered-they were testing all the lines in order to reroute traffic. The train she had been waiting for was canceled, and he didn’t know when another one would be through. His instructions were to make a report on conditions and then head back to the junction.

“Can’t you take me to the next stop?”

He motioned her to the edge of the platform and extended his lantern. The tunnel terminated fifty feet ahead in a ragged point.

“We passed a branch back there, heads south,” he said. “I’ve got just enough coal to check it out and make it back to the depot.”

“I can’t go south,” Cora said.

“The station agent will be along. I’m sure of it.”

She missed him when he was gone, in all of his foolishness.

Cora had light, and another thing she did not have in South Carolina-sound. Dark water pooled between the rails, fed in steady drips from the station ceiling. The stone vault above was white with splashes of red, like blood from a whipping that soaked a shirt. The noise cheered her, though. As did the plentiful drinking water, the torches, and the distance she had traveled from the slave catchers. North Carolina was an improvement, beneath the surface.

She explored. The station abutted a rough-hewn tunnel. Support struts shored up the wooden ceiling and stones embedded in the dirt floor made her stumble. She chose to go left first, stepping over spill that had come loose from the walls. Rusting tools littered the path. Chisels, sledges, and picks-weaponry for battling mountains. The air was damp. When she ran her hand along the wall it came back coated in cool white dust. At the end of the corridor, the ladder bolted into the stone led up into a snug passage. She lifted the torch. There was no telling how far the rungs extended. She braved the climb only after discovering that the other end of the corridor narrowed into a glum dead end.

A few feet into the level above, she saw why the equipment had been abandoned by the work gangs. A sloping mound of rocks and dirt, floor to ceiling, cut off the tunnel. Opposite the cave-in, the tunnel terminated after a hundred feet, confirming her fear. She was trapped once more.

Cora collapsed on the rocks and wept until sleep overtook her.

The station agent woke her. “Oh!” the man said. His round red face poked through the space he’d made at the top of the rubble. “Oh, dear,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m a passenger, sir.”

“Don’t you know this station is closed?”

She coughed and rose, straightening her filthy dress.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” he said.

His name was Martin Wells. Together they widened the hole in the wall of stone and she squeezed through to the other side. The man helped her clamber down to level ground as if helping a lady from the finest carriage. After several turns, the mouth of the tunnel extended a dim invitation. A breeze tickled her skin. She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the stars made succulent and ripe after her time below.

The station agent was a barrel-shaped man deep in his middle age, pasty-complected and soft. For an agent of the underground railroad, presumably no stranger to peril and risk, he evinced a nervous personality. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, repeating the engineer’s assessment. “This is a very regrettable turn.”

Martin huffed through his explanation, washing his sweaty gray hair from his face as he spoke. The night riders were on patrol, he explained, casting agent and passenger into dangerous waters. The old mica mine was remote, to be sure, exhausted long ago by Indians and forgotten by most, but the regulators routinely checked the caves and mines, anyplace a fugitive might seek refuge from their justice.

The cave-in that had so distressed Cora was a ruse to camouflage the operation below. Despite its success, the new laws in North Carolina had rendered the station inoperable-he was visiting the mine merely to leave a message for the underground railroad that he could accept no more passengers. When it came to harboring Cora, or any other runaway, Martin was unprepared in every way. “Especially given the present circumstances,” he whispered, as if the patrollers waited at the top of the gully.