The Underground Railroad

Cora thought that the whites would be loath to give up their freedoms, even in the name of security. Far from instilling resentment, Martin told her, the patrollers’ diligence was a point of pride from county to county. Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill. A night rider’s call on the home of a comely young woman had led to more than one happy engagement.

They twice searched Martin and Ethel’s house before Cora appeared. The riders were perfectly pleasant, complimenting Ethel on her ginger cake. They did not look askance at the attic hatch, but that was no guarantee that next time things would proceed along the same lines. The second visit caused Martin to resign from his duties with the railroad. There were no plans for the next leg of Cora’s journey, no word from associates. They would have to wait for a sign.

Once again, Martin apologized for his wife’s behavior. “You understand she’s scared to death. We’re at the mercy of fate.”

“You feel like a slave?” Cora asked.

Ethel hadn’t chosen this life, Martin said.

“You were born to it? Like a slave?”

That put an end to their conversation that night. Cora climbed up into the nook with fresh rations and a clean chamber pot.

Her routine established itself quickly. It could not have been otherwise, given the constraints. After she knocked her head into the roof a dozen times, her body remembered the limits on her movement. Cora slept, nestled between the rafters as if in the cramped hold of a ship. She watched the park. She worked on her reading, making the best of the education that had been cut short in South Carolina, squinting in the spy hole’s dim light. She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

Every Friday the town held its festival and Cora retreated to the opposite side of the nook.

The heat was impossible most days. On the worst she gulped at the hole like a fish in a bucket. Sometimes she neglected to ration her water, imbibing too much in the morning and staring with bitterness at the fountain the rest of the day. That damned dog cavorting in the spray. When the heat made her faint, she awoke with her head smeared into a rafter, her neck feeling like a chicken’s after Alice the cook tried to wring it for supper. The meat she put on her bones in South Carolina melted away. Her host replaced her soiled dress with one his daughter had left behind. Jane was scarce-hipped and Cora now fit into her clothes with room.

Near midnight, after all the lights in the houses facing the park were extinguished and Fiona had long gone home, Martin brought food. Cora descended into the attic proper, to stretch and breathe different air. They talked some, then at a certain point Martin would stand with a solemn expression and Cora clambered back into the nook. Every few days Ethel permitted Martin to give her a brief visit to the washroom. Cora always fell asleep following Martin’s visit, sometimes after an interval of sobbing and sometimes so quickly she was like a candle being blown out. She returned to her violent dreams.

She tracked the regulars on their daily transits through the park, assembling notes and speculations like the compilers of her almanacs. Martin kept abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets in the nook. They were a danger; Ethel wanted them gone, but they had been his father’s and predated their residence in the house so Martin figured they could deny ownership. Once Cora had gleaned what she could from the yellowed pamphlets, she started on the old almanacs, with their projections and ruminations about the tides and stars, and bits of obscure commentary. Martin brought her a Bible. On one of her short interludes down in the attic, she saw a copy of The Last of the Mohicans that had been warped and swollen by water. She huddled by the spy hole for reading light, and in the evening curled around a candle.

Cora opened Martin’s visits with the same question. “Any word?”

After a few months, she stopped.

The silence from the railroad was complete. The gazettes printed reports of raided depots and station agents brought to raw justice, but those were common slave-state fables. Previously, strangers knocked on Martin’s door with messages concerning routes, and once, news of a confirmed passenger. Never the same person twice. No one had come in a long time, Martin said. By his lights, there was nothing for him to do.

“You won’t let me leave,” Cora said.

His reply was a whimper: “The situation is plain.” It was a perfect trap, he said, for everyone. “You won’t make it. They’ll catch you. Then you’ll tell them who we are.”

“On Randall, when they want you in irons, they put you in irons.”

“You’ll bring us to ruin,” Martin said. “Yourself, me, and Ethel, and all who helped you up and down the line.”

She wasn’t being fair but didn’t much care, feeling mulish. Martin gave her a copy of that day’s newspaper and pulled the hatch into place.