“I can’t lie to you.”
“‘Appreciate that,” he said. “I’m going in now. We can discuss all those priorities and responsibilities of yours later on, if you want. But I got some of my own need tending first.” He turned, straightened, and walked towards the house and went quickly inside.
I saw smoke curling from the chimney; Mary had set the fire, and I could see her through the window at the stove, smiling broadly at Lyman as he entered, and Susan crossing the room towards him with her arms out. The others were probably already up and about, too, and were greeting him, welcoming him home, relieved that he had gotten back from the border safe and unharmed. And I saw that I, who was going to lead them, would now have to follow.
We remained friends, Lyman and I, but only of a sort, for there was now between us a nearly tangible distance, as if we were condemned to carry a long stick together, which connected us one to the other and at the same time kept us strictly apart. Each man was at all times painfully conscious of the other’s presence and, when it occurred, his absence as well. A difficult intimacy; but it was all we had now.
I made no further argument against his priorities or for mine, and whenever he took the horse and wagon and was gone from the farm for two or three days at a time, I barely acknowledged to him that I had noticed. When he returned and had rested, he would come directly to me, say nothing about where he had been, and politely ask where did I want him to work that day. I assigned him to whatever task was at hand, and he pitched himself whole-heartedly into it. But then a few days or a week would pass, and word would come that he had passengers waiting over at Timbuctoo, and he’d be gone again.
I forbade the boys to join him on these runs, causing at first some tension between me and Watson, particularly; he had grown stridently anti-slavery — as a way of asserting his new manhood, I supposed. But he was eventually mollified by my promise that, as soon as we had the place in shape for winter, he and I both would join Lyman carrying slaves to freedom. We’d go back to “the work.”
By the time the snows were falling heavily and regularly and temperatures no longer went above zero and the winds from Canada had begun their scraping howl, there were no more escaped slaves coming our way, and we all, even Lyman, from then till spring, spent our days and nights pretty much inside. By mid-December, however, before the heavy snows and cold hit, we had managed to cut and stack close to fifty cords of firewood, most of which, to Lyman’s and the boys’ credit, came from hardwood trees that they had dropped and trimmed in the forest earlier in the autumn. We finished the cold cellar and the other outbuildings, fenced in the sheepfolds, bred the ewes, did all the fall butchering, ran a short sawdust barrier around the base of the house, and completed half-a-hundred other chores and jobs — all of it done before winter finally descended with its full strength.
After that, Lyman withdrew and spent his days mostly in his blacksmith’s shop, manufacturing ironwork for the farm, everything from nails to fireplace dogs, and I worked alone, too, usually in the barn, where, among other useful things, I built a set of sled runners and affixed them to the wagon in place of the wheels, making a sleigh of it, which enabled us to get quickly and comfortably to church on the Sabbath and into the settlement, where we milled our grain and corn, sold fleeces, leather, and woolen cloth for a little cash money, and visited the few families we still felt comfortable with, such as the Nashes, the Brewsters, and the Thompsons; with the latter, through the connection between their son Henry and sister Ruth, we were becoming nicely linked.
I remember that winter, despite the tense stand-off between me and Lyman, as the most peaceful of all our winters in North Elba. Perhaps it was because we were free for once of “the work” and because Father was away. It put us more at ease with our neighbors, certainly, for it made us more like them — abolitionist in principle but not in action; devoted to our farm and livestock, but not at the cost of not socializing with our neighbors; religious to the point of regularly attending services on the Sabbath and otherwise honoring the day as we always had, but not preaching to everyone and thumping people with the Bible on every possible occasion.
Except for the fact that we had a Negro man and woman living with us in our house, we were no different from any other white family settled in that area. Like them, we holed up against the winter, did some hunting, ice-skated on Mirror Lake, repaired and built tools and furniture, spun wool and wove cloth, tanned hides and made new boots, harness, hats, and belts, and tended our flocks and cattle and horses. We ate our stores of salt pork, mutton, venison, and salt fish; we ate it roasted, boiled, baked, and in stews; with potatoes, squashes, beets, beans, pumpkins, carrots, and turnips from the cold cellar. We drank plenty of fresh milk, made cheese and butter in abundance, mashed our apples into cider, and warmed ourselves before the fire with sassafras tea. Like all good abolitionists, we eschewed sugar, but for sweets we had gallons of honey taken in the early autumn, and as we would not be able to tap our own trees till spring, we swapped hides with our neighbors for their extra maple syrup, using it to flavor meats, vegetables, and bread, and made maple sugar from it and sheets of hard maple candy. And we grew healthy and strong inside our warm house.
We said grace over every meal, prayed together in the evening, and sang the old hymns, and sometimes we even sang new songs, which we learned from our neighbors or from Susan or that Mary remembered from her childhood. We read The Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s North Star and from Father’s collection of books, and we older folks taught the little ones their ABCs and numbers, while Ruth worked with Susan and Lyman, teaching them with the primer to read adult books and periodicals.
And we read Father’s letters. Every few weeks, a new, long letter arrived from one of the stops in his odyssey through the courts, letters from Springfield, Troy, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Hartford. Instructional and scolding, as always, but also warm and affectionate, they were. As had been the practice for many years, we read them aloud, and then I or Watson copied the letters; we left the originals out on his desk, for further perusal and to keep track of his instructions, and placed the copies in Father’s steel box, protecting them against flood, fire, or theft. For posterity, as Father said, although up to that time preserving his letters had seemed mere vanity to me — especially after the Gileadites and our adventures in England, which had left me feeling somewhat disillusioned regarding posterity’s interest in my father and his work.
But increasingly that winter, Father’s letters spoke in unusual detail of his meetings with famous men and women, abolitionists all, some of them well-known white ministers and teachers, like Reverends Channing and Parker and the famous Horace Mann, some of them known as well for their support of female rights, like Dr. Howe and Miss Lydia Maria Child and Miss Abby Kelley, who was one of the best orators he had ever heard, said Father. There were famous Negroes, too: he met with Bishop Loguen in Syracuse and confided his plan, which, according to Father, “Bishop Loguen thinks noble and very possibly workable.” At a meeting in Hartford, he heard Miss Harriet Tubman address a hundred white people very bravely. Personally introduced to her afterwards by Frederick Douglass, Father said he “spoke at considerable length with her and found her a great warrior.” In Boston, he frequently found himself in the company of literary people and mentioned Thomas Wentworth Higginson and a young editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Franklin Sanborn, who took him to Concord to meet personally with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Father now admired, and his friend Henry Thoreau, “a firebrand on the subject of slavery,” wrote Father, “but a strangely misanthropic fellow, due to his loss of religion, I believe. I know nothing of his writings, but Mr. Sanborn assures me they are very good.” There were even some businessmen, he told us, who were becoming interested in aiding the movement generally and Father in particular: a fellow in the cloth-manufacturing business named George Stearns and “several rich men who want their money to go for something more substantial than speeches and newspapers and travel expenses for public speakers. I intend to satisfy them of this,”he wrote.