The Underground Railroad

Boseman slid her chains through the ring in the floor and secured them. Ten rings were bolted to the wagon floor, two rows of five, enough for the occasional big haul. Enough for these two. Jasper claimed his favorite spot on the bench, crooning with vigor, as if he’d just gobbled down a Christmas feast. “When the Savior calls you up, you’re going to lay the burden down, lay that burden down.”

“Boseman,” Ridgeway said softly.

“He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done, sinner, He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done.”

Boseman said, “Oh.”

The slave catcher got into the wagon for the first time since he picked up Cora. He held Boseman’s pistol in his hand and shot Jasper in the face. The blood and the bone covered the inside of the canopy, splashing Cora’s filthy shift.

Ridgeway wiped his face and explained his reasoning. Jasper’s reward was fifty dollars, fifteen of that for the tinker who brought the fugitive to jail. Missouri, back east, Georgia-it would be weeks before they delivered the man to his owner. Divide thirty-five dollars by, say, three weeks, minus Boseman’s share, and the lost bounty was a very small price to pay for silence and a restful mind.

Homer opened his notebook and checked his boss’s figures. “He’s right,” he said.

Tennessee proceeded in a series of blights. The blaze had devoured the next two towns on the cindered road. In the morning the remains of a small settlement emerged around a hill, an arrangement of scorched timber and black stonework. First came the stumps of the houses that had once contained the dreams of pioneers, and then the town proper in a line of ruined structures. The town farther along was larger but its rival in destruction. The heart was a broad intersection where ravaged avenues had converged in enterprise, now gone. A baker’s oven in the ruins of the shop like a grim totem, human remains bent behind the steel of a jail cell.

Cora couldn’t tell what feature of the landscape had persuaded the homesteaders to plant their futures, fertile earth or water or vistas. Everything had been erased. If the survivors returned it would be to confirm the resolution to try again somewhere else, scurrying back east or ever west. No resurrection here.

Then they escaped the wildfire’s reach. The birches and wild grasses vibrated with impossible color after their time in the burned land, Edenic and fortifying. In jest, Boseman imitated Jasper’s singing, to mark the change in mood; the black scenery had worked on them more than they knew. The robust corn in the fields, already two feet high, pointed to an exuberant harvest; with equal force the ruined territory had advertised reckonings to come.

Ridgeway called for a stop shortly after noon. The slave catcher stiffened as he read aloud the sign at the crossroads. The town up the road was overcome by yellow fever, he said. All travelers warned away. An alternative trail, smaller and uneven, led southwest.

The sign was new, Ridgeway observed. Most likely the sickness had not run its course.

“My two brothers passed of yellow fever,” Boseman said. He grew up on the Mississippi, where the fever liked to visit when the weather turned warm. His younger brothers’ skin turned jaundiced and waxen, they bled from their eyes and asses and seizures wracked their tiny bodies. Some men took away their corpses in a squeaky wheelbarrow. “It’s a miserable death,” he said, his jokes taken from him again.

Ridgeway knew the town. The mayor was a corrupt boor, the food turned your guts runny, but he held a good thought for them. Going around would add considerable time to their trip. “The fever comes on the boats,” Ridgeway said. From the West Indies, all the way from the dark continent, following in the wake of trade. “It’s a human tax on progress.”

“Who’s the taxman came to collect it?” Boseman said. “I never saw him.” His fear made him skittish and petulant. He didn’t want to linger, even this crossroads too close to the fever’s embrace. Not waiting for Ridgeway’s order-or obeying a signal shared only by the slave catcher and the boy secretary-Homer drove the wagon away from the doomed town.

Two more signs along the southwesterly course maintained the warning. The trails feeding into the quarantined towns displayed no sign of the danger ahead. Traveling through the handiwork of the fire for so long made an unseeable menace more terrifying. It was a long time, after dark, before they stopped again. Time enough for Cora to take stock of her journey from Randall and make a thick braid of her misfortunes.