Slave-catchers and their collaborators that spring were skulking like hungry wolves in and around all the towns and cities that lay along the usual routes north, especially in western New York and in the Hudson and Champlain valleys from Albany to Plattsburgh, and as a result, agents of the Underground Railroad in places like Utica, Syracuse, and Schenectady were sending many more fugitives than before over the considerably more arduous Adirondack mountain and wilderness route that Lyman favored. This in spite of the harsh weather, the bad roads, the long distances between stations, and the threat of meeting wolves and other wild animals. Along about the middle of March, fugitives first began arriving late at night in Timbuctoo, and the next morning one of our few allies from the settlement, a person known to us, would arrive at the farm to apprise us of the situation. That same night, regardless of our obligations at the farm, Lyman and I and Watson would hitch up the team and drive the wagon over to Timbuctoo, where we would pick up our poor, frightened human cargo and carry it north to Canada and freedom.
Happily, during this period Lyman and I came to be like brothers again. We renewed our old joking manner with one another and even began having serious talks on such subjects as religion and the relations between men and women. But not race. Prior to our confrontation in the fall, race had been the central subject of all our serious talks with one another, and we rarely, if ever, discussed our true beliefs regarding religion or men and women. Now, however, race was the sole unspoken subject between us. We could talk truthfully and as equals about the Lord, about His work, and about being men, like any two friends of the same color, but we could no longer talk about one of us being black and the other white. I secretly grieved over this particular loss of intimacy, for I had never shared it with a Negro man before. But at the same time I was glad of it, too. Perched up on the box alongside Lyman, with Watson crouched at the rear of the wagon with his rifle at the ready, our precious cargo huddled out of sight underneath the tarpaulin, I felt somehow freed to pretend that Lyman, like me, was a white man, or that I, like him, was black, and we were merely two American men out doing the Lord’s work together.
There were fifteen or twenty runs that spring, but I remember best the morning in mid-April when we came back to the farm from an especially arduous run to the Ontario border. We had been gone for three days and four nights, had almost lost the wagon in a muskeg south of Potsdam, had been forced to travel half a day off our route on an old lumbermen’s trail to find a place where we could safely ford the Raquette River, and at the end had narrowly escaped a pair of slave-catchers encamped outside Massena, just south of the border. Watson had performed bravely, and though he claimed to have shot both of them when they pursued us in the gray, early morning light for several miles along the bank of the broad, still-frozen St. Lawrence, he certainly hit one, which discouraged the other, and thus we were able finally to deliver our cargo safely at the crossing to Cornwall.
The trip back to North Elba, though less risky — since now the only Negro aboard was Lyman, who always carried his old, tattered manumission papers in a wallet strapped to his leg like a knife — was not much easier, as the weather alternated between rain, sleet, and snow. We crossed marsh and muskeg, saw mists at dawn rising off the wilderness lakes where deer and moose came down to the edge to drink and look up and watch us as we passed along the opposite shore. We penetrated deep into the ancient blue spruce and balsam forests, passed through miles of beech woods and hickory, circled beaver ponds, saw the tracks of lion and heard the howl of wolves and the coughing bark of bears, were brought up short at fast-running, rock-bottomed streams choked with snowmelt and overflowing their banks and sending us back up into the woods on lumber trails in long complex loops until we could return again to the road, which was never a real road, only a lonely, wagon-wide path through the northwoods, a deer trail become an Indian trail widened by horses and sledges bringing out timber and by supply wagons going into the camps.
As on other such difficult, demanding treks, with little or no sleep, we had gone a whole day without food, without seeing a settlement or farm or even another human being, save for an occasional trapper crossing the trail into the deep woods to check his lines, furtive and solitary as a wild animal himself. What did the enslavement of three million Negroes mean to him? Or the Fugitive Slave Law? Did he know, much less care, who was President? Had he even heard of abolitionism? Sometimes when I saw one of these pelt-covered, bearded fellows with his backpack and steel-toothed traps and long-barreled rifle disappearing into the wilderness, I almost envied him. His ignorance and single-minded pursuit of the skins of animals was a kind of innocence that I would never know again, if I had ever known it at all.
It was dawn when we finally arrived at the farm. The overcast sky was soft as flannel and gray in the east above Tahawus and soot black in the west. It had rained most of the night, a raw, penetrating rain that had soaked straight through our cloaks and hats and made our bones feel brittle as iron. As we pulled into the yard, we saw lamplight inside the kitchen and smoke from the chimney, and Lyman remarked on it, for normally, with Father away, no one would be out of bed this early. I think that we both at the same instant realized what had wakened the family, for without saying a word to one another, as we passed the house, I handed the reins to Watson, and Lyman and I jumped down from the wagon and made for the door.
It was indeed as we had expected — Susan’s baby had come. Susan’s baby—Lyman’s baby as well. Yet somehow I could not see it that way. Even then, long before I had come to any awareness of the true nature of my feelings for Susan, I seemed to be cutting Lyman out of his privileges and prerogatives, so that when I looked from face to face in the warm, dimly lit kitchen and saw only grief and exhaustion, saw none of the exhilaration and pride that I expected, I did not think once of Lyman’s loss. Only of Susan’s, and in some small, illegitimate way, my own.
Mary slumped at the table with her Bible open before her, but she was not reading from it; she merely gazed out the window opposite at the slowly brightening field and woods beyond. Ruth was seated on the bed next to Susan, wiping the woman’s face with a damp cloth. Ruth’s expression was grim, tight-lipped, frightened, but accepting, as if during the night and long hours into dawn she had learned some terrible thing about her own coming fate. The other children moved about slowly in their pantaloons and union suits; half-dressed, sad-faced waifs they seemed, trying to put together a bit of breakfast for themselves. The women looked drained and exhausted; they had clearly been up all night, struggling to bring a child into the world. Susan herself, mother of the child, lay back among the pillows with her eyes closed, her hands beneath the covers, all color drained from her face so that she was nearly as white as Ruth, and for an instant I thought that she had died and felt a moan begin to rise in my throat.
Then her eyes blinked open. She turned her head slowly on the pillow and, expressionless, looked at her husband and me at the door, the two of us huge and cold, noisy in our heavy boots and rain-soaked clothes, clumsy, obdurate, and male, all out of place in this silent, warm, sad company of women and children. I was thinking hard thoughts. So many babies are born dead, you dare not wish for them to be born at all.
And so many die right after they are born, you wonder why they were allowed to live in the first place. And if they live awhile, so many soon sicken and die, you wish they had died at the start and had not let you learn to love them. The women, they weaken and grow sadder with each loss, but the men, what do they do? I thought that they must gnash their teeth and pound the walls with their fists, as I did then. I balled my right hand into a fist and banged it hard against the wall, one, two, three times, each blow stronger than the last, until I thought I would bring down the wall like blinded Samson. Then, frightened by my own fury, I went to a far corner of the room and closed my eyes and wished for words of prayer, but found none.