Later, when the boys and Mr. Epps and I had fed and bedded down the animals and returned to the house, we all seated ourselves at the Partridges’ long trestle table before a steaming pot of venison stew. Mr. Epps, however, hung back by the corner of the fireplace, where he stood with his dark face held deliberately away from us. Finally, Father noticed him there and said, “Ah, Mister Epps! Come quickly, or your bowl will be snatched by one of these greedy children!”
The Partridges, all three, even the old lady, looked up at Father with expressions of mild surprise on their bland faces. But Mrs. Partridge quickly fetched another plate and spoon, and Mr. Epps crossed to the table and joined us, seating himself with serious mien between me and Watson and directly across from Father, who then took the liberty, as he put it, of blessing the meal — whereupon with great appetite we all did eat.
We stabled our animals in the barn that night and — except for Mary, Ruth, Sarah, and Annie, who were given pallets inside the house by the fire — slept in the loft above. It had once been a fine, tight structure, but now the roof leaked, floorboards were rotting, and the hay was several years old and filled with dust and debris. Two scrawny milch cows were all the Partridges seemed to own for livestock, and they looked like aged, weak milkers ready to quit.
Apparently, most of the Partridges’ cattle had died off in recent years or had been butchered for beef or sold. For income during the long winters, Mr. Partridge had taken to killing large numbers of deer and shipping the venison by sledge south to Albany. He complained that the place was too large for him and his wife to work alone, and there were no men in the area who hired out. The woman had inherited the property from her father, a veteran of the Ticonderoga campaigns in the Revolution, who had taken a land grant here as payment for his military services and thus had been one of the first settlers in the region. Mr. Partridge, the landless third son of a New Hampshire grower of flax, had himself been a farmer for hire, had wandered here from New England, and had come to ownership of the farm nearly six years ago by marrying his employer’s only child and heir a few months before his employer’s death.
I learned all this the next morning, following our departure from the farm, from Father, who had stayed up late talking with Mr. Partridge, after the rest of us had staggered off to the barn to sleep. The Old Man had a way of eliciting personal information from strangers when he got them alone. His questions were disarmingly direct, and his inquiry seemed almost scientific in its detachment, which in a sense it was, for he was not so much interested in a man’s personal life as he was in learning about his character and about human nature generally. Usually, when Father interrogated a person new to him, his immediate aim was to move the inquiry, by way of questions about family and background, to the question of slavery and race, so as to distinguish friend from foe, certainly, but also because, according to Father, it was on this question more than any other that a white man revealed the true nature of his character.
“Our benefactor and new neighbor, Mister Partridge;’ he said to me as we walked along at the head of our little caravan, “is one of those men who says he finds slavery and Negroes equally repugnant. But I believe that he would happily accept both, if it saved his wife’s farm from ruin and left him free to hunt and fish.” He added, “I doubt he’ll be of much use to us.”
We had left just at sunrise, under a cloudless deep blue sky with the morning star and a half-moon floating high beside us in the south like a diamond and a silver bowl. The road was somewhat mudded from yesterday’s rain, but Mr. Epps expected it to be dried out by the time we got up into the mountains again, where, he explained, the road crossed mostly stone anyhow. After passing through the tiny settlement of Keene — a post office, general store, log church, tavern, and a half-dozen log houses huddled together and guarded by mangy, long-haired dogs that all seemed to be related — we crossed the East Branch of the Au Sable River and made our way easefully uphill past freshly plowed fields, switch-backing towards the notch that cut through the range of mountains which lay between us and North Elba.
I had not liked Mr. Partridge, and I told Father that.
“No,” he said, “nor did I.1 suspect he beats the woman and secretly mistreats the old lady. The man bears watching, though. Somewhere along the line,” he said, “I fear we’ll have to cut him down.”
This, of course, I could not then imagine, for no one seemed less likely to oppose us and our work with the Negroes of Timbuctoo in any focused way than the lazy young man in whose house we had just stayed. But when it came to knowing ahead of time who would oppose him, the Old Man could be downright prescient. On a dozen or more occasions, I had seen him accurately predict which man from a congregation or town, to keep us Browns from fulfilling our pledge to rid this nation of slavery, would threaten our very lives, which man would simply turn away and let us continue, and which man would join us in the work. The Lord’s Work, as Father called it.
“Well,” said I, “at least the fellow was hospitable to travelers.”
“I would not call it that.”
“We’re ten people. Nine of us and Mister Epps, and he fed and housed us all, and he let us enjoy his fire and shelter our animals. I’d call that hospitable, Father.” Though I did not like Mr. Partridge, in those days I sometimes found myself feeling sorry for individuals that the Old Man harshly condemned.
“You don’t know him as well as I.”
“Tell me, then. Tell me what you know about Mister Partridge that I don’t. Beyond his marrying a homely woman for her property.”
“Trust me, Owen.”
“Father, I’m trying to!”
We walked in silence for a while, and then Father said, “You remember when he came out to help me hitch the team to the wagon, while the rest of you were tending the beeves and sheep, and Ruth and Mary and the girls were inside the house?”
“I saw him out there, yes.”
“Well, the man came up to me and asked for payment for our food and lodging. He presented me with an itemized bill, written out.” It was an embarrassment to Father. Not because he had no money to give Mr. Partridge, he said, but because he had not expected it. If he had anticipated Mr. Partridge’s charges, he would have negotiated an acceptable arrangement beforehand, and failing that, we would have camped someplace alongside the river. Mr. Partridge had surprised Father, and he found himself painfully embarrassed by it.
We resumed walking uphill in silence, with the wagon and team of Morgans, in Mr. Epps’s capable hands, clambering along behind us, Mary and Ruth and the girls all together now on foot and cheerfully admiring the spectacular vistas opening up on either side of the track, and, at the rear, the boys and our small herd of livestock. The road made its circuitous, slowly ascending way along the back of a buttressing ridge. The morning sun was shining full upon our backs now, and it was as if yesterday’s brief snowstorm had never occurred.
“I must make a confession, Owen,” the Old Man went on. I said nothing, and he continued. “It concerns Mister Partridge. The man’s request for payment confused me. I told him that I could not pay him with money, because I had none. I’m ashamed to say that I gave him instead the clock.”
“The clock? Your grandfather’s clock?”
“Yes.”
I was astonished. Except for his chest of books, Great-Grandfather Brown’s mantel clock was Father’s most valued household possession. Made of cherrywood, it was a treasure that had been entrusted to Father’s care years earlier by his own father; it was perhaps his only family heirloom. It made no sense to me. How could he have handed it over to Mr. Partridge so easily? And in exchange for so little — a single night’s lodging.