“What! How could that be?” Father demanded. “He deceived us, then! The Quaker lied! Good Lord, is there no one on this earth we can trust?”
Patiently, Mary related to him what the boy had told her. His father’s boat had been forced back a few miles north of Plattsburgh by a sudden, dangerous turn in the weather, and by the time Captain Keifer made a second attempt to take them into Canada, his Underground Railroad operatives on the further side of the border had been notified by Canadian authorities that the couple was wanted in the United States, not for fleeing slavery, for which there were at that time no federal warrants, but for crossing state lines in flight from arrest for murder, and as a result they had refused to accept them. Not knowing what else to do with the couple, Captain Keifer had brought them into his own home in Port Kent and had attempted to hide and protect them there until such time as he could arrange to move them into Canada by some other means. Most of the villagers in Port Kent were soon aware of the presence of the Negro couple and did not object, and consequently Captain Keifer had grown careless as to their easy coming and going about the place. Thus it was not difficult for the marshal and his deputies to take them by surprise.
“Surely”‘ Mary said, “the poor man is desolated by this turn of events. He asked his son to beg you for your understanding and forgiveness, Mister Brown,” she said, addressing him as she always did — although in his absence she, like the rest of us, generally referred to him as Father or the Old Man. “The boy himself was mighty agitated and seemed burdened by guilt. Poor lad, all full of his thees and thous.” She had comforted him as much as she could and sent him back with assurances to Captain Keifer that Father would bear him no ill will and would not judge him for this calamity. After all, Captain Keifer had more to fear now from the law than did any of us, she pointed out. “He has been harboring people who he knew were accused murderers, not just escaped slaves.”
Father sat heavily down at the table and sighed. I sensed that he was giving something up. John and Jason and I glanced at one another nervously. What now? The ride from Father’s peaks to his valleys was often a rough one, and we were still perched on the heights of our day’s adventure, trying to sort out the meanings of our bloody encounters and the death of Mr. Fleete, hoping to be able to use them to energize us and entitle us to further brave acts. We were young men, after all, armed, freshly tested in battle, and puffed up with righteous wrath, and it did not take much in those days to set our hearts to pounding. Even Jason. We did not want Father to abandon us now and, as was his wont at times like this, to slump down into a slough of despond, where we would doubtless have to follow.
“Let me have one of my babies,” Father said in a low voice. “Annie or Sarah. Let me have Sarah. Bring me little Sarie, will you, Ruth?” Suddenly, the Old Man looked very tired — bone-weary and aged.
Ruth went obediently to the sleeping loft to fetch the child. Father said, “Everything seems to have come undone, doesn’t it, children? Our neighbors have abandoned us. Men have been shot. Blood spilt. And a beloved, courageous friend has been shot dead. And now those whom we would assist in their plight have been captured by the enemy and taken off south to be hung, or worse. Oh, I can barely think of it!”
No one answered. The younger boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, lounged at the door to the further room, waiting eagerly for the bloody details, who shot whom and where, which they knew would come later, when we elder sons went upstairs to bed and were freed by the absence of our parents to brag to one another. Mary silently placed food down on the table, and Lyman, John, Jason, and I all drew up our stools and set to eating. In a moment, Ruth returned carrying the sleepy-eyed Sarah, and deposited the child on Father’s lap. He smiled wanly down into her puffy face, and when she rose to wakefulness, recognized him, and grinned, he brightened somewhat and began to rock her slowly in his arms.
“John says I must return to Springfield,” he said to us. In a calm, low voice, he explained that he was needed there to settle some painful arguments and tangled disputes between the woolen buyers and the sheep farmers in Ohio and our main support, Mr. Perkins — old claims and counter-claims that John thought would be more easily resolved if Father was there to face down these nettlesome people in person. It had seemed a bad idea to Father at first. “Now… now I don’t know, maybe he’s right. I had hoped to be needed more here, however, than in Springfield,” he said, and he sighed heavily again. “I think our Negro friends across the valley in Timbuctoo, like our white friends here in North Elba, will no longer want to work with us. What think you, Lyman?”
Lyman looked up from his plate of ham and corn bread and baked beans, chewed silently for a moment, and finally said, “Mister Brown, I can’t speak for them other folks. Just for me and my wife here. And we’re going to do whatever you decide you need us for. You and your boys, you got me out of that jail today. And if it was me instead of poor ol’ Elden that got killed, and he was the one sitting here tonight eating supper, I know he’d be telling you the same thing. But them other folks over at Timbuctoo, they’re probably going to want to lay low for a spell. Sort of playing possum, you know. They got to, Mister Brown. You can understand that.”
“Playing possum, eh? But not you and Susan?”
“No, no, we’re colored folks, too, Mister Brown. For sure. But we’re living here now in this house. We’re not settled with them across the valley in Timbuctoo no more. That’s why we’ve got to take more consideration of what you people do than they do over there. It’s like we got this here debt that we owe to you and the family, Mister Brown. And we want to be paying it off” He looked across the room at his wife as if for confirmation, and she nodded, and he went back to eating.
“All right, then,” Father said. “It’s settled.”
“What is?” said I, warm corn bread and butter like soft, crumbled gold in my mouth.
“We’ll go down to Springfield with John and Jason.”
“We?”
Father shot me a hard look. “You and I. Isn’t that what, not so long ago, you were begging for, Owen? I need you there, for a month at least, while Jason returns to Ohio and sets things right for us out west and sees to his wife and poor Fred, who have been making do on their own these months. Taking care of Fred is no simple matter, as you know. The good woman probably did not bargain for that when she agreed to marry Jason.”
“Ellen loves Fred, Father,” Jason said. “Believe me, he’s no burden to her. She has no fear of him, even when he goes off on one of his spells.”
“Yes, well, even so, she needs you, son. And I need you there, too, to make what payments we can for the unsold fleeces and to explain our delay to the rest.”
As fast as it could be said, then, it had been decided. Father, John, and I would return to Springfield, Jason would head back to Ohio, and Lyman and Susan Epps would stay on at the farm with the remainder of the family, tending to the harvest and setting the farm up properly for winter. Lyman had replaced me, as I had replaced Jason. And there was more. Father wished to travel to England, he said, where, according to John, the price for wool was now up to seventy dollars per hundredweight, nearly twice what Brown & Perkins was getting for it in Springfield. He would go there and attempt to convince the British to buy American wool for the first time. By setting the British buyers off against the American, he might thereby break the monopoly that was crippling the producers and driving Father and Mr. Perkins deeper and deeper into debt as they purchased the wool and held it in the Springfield warehouse, waiting for the prices to rise.