The Negroes were in bad shape, Watson said, and Susan confirmed: harried by the local whites, fearful of being carried off by slave-catchers and marshals, and not at all prepared for winter. Also, Watson explained, there was a growing number of whites, led by our old friend Mr. Partridge of Keene, who wished that both the Browns and the citizens of Timbuctoo would go back to wherever they came from. Some of these whites had previously been supporters of Father’s efforts to help the Negroes, but now they, too, coveted the Negroes’ and our land out on the flats — rich, silted land, rare in the Adirondacks, which they could see was not being farmed properly. By their lights, we were misusing it, wasting our good fortune, and this angered them, for they were New England-style farmers, the type that likes to regard waste as a sin. Mr. Partridge, himself no great shakes as a farmer, was exploiting these resentments for his own purposes, which Watson said surely included gaining revenge for our having invaded his home in August, when we shot the slave-catcher and then freed Lyman and Mr. Fleete from the Elizabethtown jail.
Now, suddenly, where before I had thought of that episode with something approaching shame, I found myself regarding it almost with nostalgia, and I wished that we had done more damage than we did, wished that we had actually slain the slave-catcher and maybe Mr. Partridge, too, and wished that I had been the one to pull the trigger. There were tensions and conflicts everywhere breaking out, and I could not see how they could be quickly resolved, least of all by me. I could not step forward in church like Father and preach the Lord’s work to the whites one week and then preach it to the Negroes the next, or walk into the midst of a crowd of white men at a cattle auction and scold them for their sloth and cowardice as only the Old Man could scold, and then ride over to Timbuctoo and do the same to a crowd of glowering, suspicious ex-slaves.
Even so, while there was little or nothing I could do to improve relations with the local people, white or black, I could nonetheless pull things together here on the farm. Eager to get an early start, and not a little tired from my journey, I begged off Watson’s and Ruth’s entreaties to tell them still more of the story of Father’s and my travels abroad and climbed up to the loft well before the others. Lying in my cot there in the darkened chamber, I listened to the murmur of the voices of my family below: Mary and Ruth were carding wool and spinning, and the boys were coming and going between the house and barn, bedding down the animals, bringing in firewood, the last household chores of the day, while the little girls and Susan took turns reading from the primer, teaching one another to read and now and again appealing to Ruth or Mary to settle a dispute over a word’s meaning or spelling. With those sweet sounds filling my ears, I drifted into peaceful sleep.
A while later, when the others came up to bed, I woke and listened in the darkness as, one by one, they, too, fell into slumber. But this time, however, I myself could not fall back to sleep. I lay wide-eyed in the silent darkness of the room for hours, my mind a-buzz with half-completed thoughts startling and interrupting one another. I could not figure what was keeping me so agitated — I almost never had any difficulty sleeping. Quite the opposite. Hours slipped by, and then I lost all track of how long I had been awake, and not until the first bleeding away of darkness signaled the near approach of dawn did I suddenly realize that I was waiting for Lyman to come home. And when I knew that, I thought only of it, and him. Until pale daylight began to filter into the room, when I rose and dressed and directly set about putting things right: like Father, the first one up and working.
I remember thinking on that first frosty morning home, as I walked the grounds and examined the outbuildings and livestock, that it would be a simple matter to make up for Father’s and my lengthy absence and set the place straight. And, in a sense, it was simple, but not the way I expected. I calculated thirty days of steady work for the five of us — three boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, and two grown men, Lyman Epps and me. I had learned early in life from Father how to organize a crew and lay out the day’s work before breakfast, how to see each job through to the end before commencing another, how to make sure that each of us knew exactly what was expected of him for the entire day, and so on.
Father had never been easy with distributing authority of any kind anyhow, and he had failed to do it here also. Although, as usual, he had included in his letters long lists of things to do and when and how, he had simply left taking care of the farm to his family members and Lyman and Susan in a general way, without explicitly stating who was in charge of what and whom — so, in a way, it was more the Old Man’s fault than anyone else’s that the place had come undone. No family members were lazy or incapable. They had just needed a captain, or in this case, due to the captain’s absence, a first mate. Without one, they had been working at sixes and sevens, each person responding only to his or her immediate needs, laboring more against each other than with each other, with no long view of things, no plan. Every man or boy for himself.
I will set everything right with ease, said I to myself. I had finished my inspection of the place with a circuit of the barn and a stop at the privy, where I noted the need to remove the season’s night soil, and was about to return to the house and lay the kitchen fire for Mary before any of the others were out of bed. Between Mounts Tahawus and Mclntyre the sun had already broken the horizon, and rosy streaks of new light spilled across the rippled, silvery sky. Over towards the village, the clouds were opening up, and in the dark blue western sky the morning star and a crescent moon were slipping towards the horizon. I stopped and took it in. It was dawn — first light, a marvelous, cold, half-illumined stillness — and made a comforting, reflective pause between night and day, between autumn and winter.
I could make out the village from the belfry of the church and a few threads of chimney-smoke rising from a black line of spruce trees by the river. There was a glaze of frost on the distant, yellowed fields and on the leafless branches and stalks of the chokecherry and alder bushes along the road from town and on the roofs of the house and barn and the unfinished outbuildings — a pale caul or a shroud, I could not say which, but it made everything look fresh and clean. I gazed around me and inhaled the cold mountain air with pleasure, the first pure pleasure I had felt in many days, since the night of the formation of the Gileadites.
My anger was gone. Soon everyone would admire me and be glad that I had come back.
As I neared the house to go in, I heard from the direction of the village the rumble of wagon wheels on the frozen road and the clop of a slow-moving horse. Around the curve in the road there came the second Morgan, Poke, the mare, pulling our old wagon at a plodding pace, and up on the box sat Lyman Epps, evidently asleep. Until the horse, smelling the barn, I suppose, accelerated somewhat and jolted him awake.
From the doorstoop, I watched him for a moment, without his having yet noticed me. He was exhausted, slump-shouldered, and barely able to hold his head up; his skin color was flat gray, like pewter, and his hair stuck out from under his cap in short, knotty clumps, and he seemed older, almost middle-aged: he looked more like an escaped slave himself, a man on the run, than a conductor on the Underground Railroad. How dangerously thin, especially now, I thought, was the line between an escaped slave and a freed slave, between the Negro man who was chattel and the one who was free. And how wide the gulf that lay between a Negro man, slave or free, and me.