The Underground Railroad

On the way back Royal turned the buggy down an overgrown path. Cora wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Cottonwood swallowed the entrance. He said he wanted to show her something. She thought it might be a pond or a quiet place no one knew about. Instead they rounded a turn and stopped at a forlorn, ramshackle cottage, gray like chewed-up meat. Shutters slanted off, wild grasses bowing from the roof. Weather-beaten was the word-the house was a whipped mutt. She hesitated at the threshold. The grime and moss gave her a lonesome feeling, even with Royal there.

Weeds pushed out of the floor of the main room as well. She covered her nose from the stench. “It makes that manure smell sweet,” she said. Royal laughed and said he’d always thought manure smelled sweet. He uncovered the trapdoor to the cellar and lit a candle. The stairs creaked. Animals scurried in the cellar, outraged over the intrusion. Royal counted off six paces and started digging. He stopped when he had exposed the second trapdoor, and they descended to the station. He warned her about the steps, which were slick with a gray slime.

It was the sorriest, saddest station yet. There was no drop to the tracks-the rails started at the end of the steps and jetted into the dark tunnel. A small handcar rested on the tracks, its iron pump waiting for a human touch to animate it. As in the mica mine in North Carolina, long wooden planks and struts buttressed the walls and ceiling.

“It’s not made for a locomotive,” Royal said. “The tunnel is too small, see. It doesn’t connect to the rest of the line.”

No one had been there in a long time. Cora asked where it went.

Royal grinned. “It’s from before my time. The conductor I replaced showed me when I took over this section. I took that handcar a few miles in, but it was too unsettling. The walls hugging and coming close.” Cora knew better than to ask who built it. All the railroad men, from Lumbly to Royal, countered with a variation of “Who do you think made it? Who makes everything?” She’d get him to tell her one day, she decided.

The ghost tunnel had never been used, Royal said, as far as anyone knew. No one knew when it was dug, or who had lived above. Some engineers told him the house had been built by one of the old surveyors, like Lewis and Clark, who had explored and mapped the American wilderness. “If you saw the entire country,” Royal said, “from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the great Niagara Falls and the Rio Grande, would you make a home here, in the woods of Indiana?” An old station master offered that it had been the home of a major general in the Revolutionary War, a man who had witnessed much bloodshed and had withdrawn from the young nation after helping to bring it into existence.

A recluse story contained more sense, but Royal thought the army part was claptrap. Did Cora notice that there was no sign that someone had lived there, not even an old toothpick or a nail in the wall?

A notion crept over her like a shadow: that this station was not the start of the line but its terminus. Construction hadn’t started beneath the house but at the other end of the black hole. As if in the world there were no places to escape to, only places to flee.

In the cellar above, the scavengers roused to activity, scraping.

Such a dank little hole. Any trip with this point of origin could only be ill-fated. The last time she’d been in one of the railroad’s departure stations it had been brightly lit, generous in its comforts, and had delivered her to the bounty of Valentine. That was in Tennessee, when they waited to be carried away from the dangerous escapade with Ridgeway. The events of that night still made her heart quicken.

– 

ONCE they left the slave catcher and his wagon, her rescuers gave their names. Royal was the man who’d spied her in town; his partner was Red, owing to the rusty color of his curly hair. The timid one was Justin, a fugitive like her and unaccustomed to waving bowie knives at white men.

After Cora agreed to go with them-never had an inevitability been so politely proposed-the three men made haste to hide the signs of the altercation. Homer’s looming presence, somewhere in the dark, magnified the urgency. Red kept watch with his rifle as Royal and Justin chained first Boseman and then Ridgeway to the wagon. The slave catcher did not speak, sneering at Cora with his bloody mouth the while.

“That one,” she said, pointing, and Red chained him to the ring her captors had used for Jasper.

They drove the slave catcher’s wagon to the far edge of the pasture, hiding it from the road. Red shackled Ridgeway five times over, using every chain in the wagon’s boot. He tossed the keys into the grass. They chased away the horses. Of Homer, there was no sound; perhaps the boy skulked just outside the lantern light. Whatever head start these measures gave would have to suffice. Boseman let out a mortifying gasp as they departed, which Cora took as his death rattle.