“Hear, hear,” Bartholomew agreed.
—
The next morning, John and Charles hitched up Castor and Pollux. Moses came to bid them goodbye. “Thank you. Take care of my Ailee.”
“We will,” John promised.
Charles added, “You are free now, Moses. The manumission papers I forged look better than legitimate ones. Let Bartholomew keep them safe. Give them a year of labor. Everything is paid for and then do as you please, but don’t come back to Virginia.”
John put his hands on Moses’s shoulders. “It would be death. Truly it would. Dennis’s pursuit should have told you that, and you can’t expose Ailee to danger.”
“Can she not escape as I have?” Moses almost pleaded.
“Perhaps, but it will take time, and she will be fleeing with a baby,” Charles stated. “So you would be exposing your love and your child to grave danger.”
Tears filled Moses’s eyes. “I know. Look after them.”
John impulsively grabbed Moses’s hand in his. “May God keep you. Trust in Him. He is all we have.”
Martin whinnied when his friends left. They took the steeple with them, dropping it off just south of the town where they noticed a new church being built. No one was there, but they managed to lift it off. Charles left no note. Perhaps it would be considered a miracle.
Back in the wagon, they chattered about what they’d seen, heard, and, of course, Bartholomew and Mary, to whom they said farewell in the house.
They had given the Graveses the horse, a fine gift, but they also left five hundred dollars for the feeding and care of Moses.
October 6 was brisk, promising to be a radiant fall day. York isn’t that far from the Maryland line. The two now hoped they might be miles beyond it by nightfall.
“Well, have you thought about what we do when we arrive home?” Charles asked.
“Yes. We say nothing, we do nothing. If Hiram comes to us, we say we didn’t see Dennis, and we don’t know why he would wish to catch us up.”
“True. We don’t know who McComb told or what he told them if he did. Best not to say he was after us.”
“Do you think Moses will stay in York?” John inquired.
“I don’t know. He knows if found in Virginia, he will die. He might lead an intelligent constable to Ailee. He didn’t strike me as stupid, only as beaten, saddened, lost.”
“Yes.” John nodded, then changed the subject. “It’s different, killing a civilian, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t think about it. Kill or be killed.” Charles considered what he’d just said. “Perhaps we wouldn’t have been killed by McComb, but it would have ruined Ewing and we would have been hauled into court for conveying a murderer and stolen property.”
“True, but I think about the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. But we put on a uniform and we’re told to kill someone in a different uniform, someone who has done nothing to earn our enmity, except to fight for another power, a king. But kill we did and it’s a sin. How do you know what’s right from wrong?”
“You don’t.” Charles said this with finality. “I served the king with pride. Then he abandoned us in the prisoner-of-war camps. You, my enemy, treated me better than my own king and his council. And my countrymen killed American prisoners of war, jamming them in the holds of ships in Boston harbor, starving them, not tending to their wounds. This gnawed at me. An officer of long-standing, Bartholomew paid me to write false discharge papers and then he escaped. He told me this was a land for young men. If it hadn’t been for Piglet”—Charles petted his constant canine friend—“I think I would have felt totally alone. I lived because some of the men under my command were prisoners with me and I was their commanding officer. But in time, John, I questioned everything, and I, too, escaped. So am I traitor to my king?”
“No. Your king abandoned you.” John was sure of this. “You had to fend for yourself.”
Returning to the subject of Dennis McComb, Charles said, “You and I should agree to the same story, which is we don’t know anything.”
“Yes.”
They rode in silence for an hour, the clip-clop of Castor and Pollux soothing. Piglet fell asleep and quietly snored.
John finally spoke. “I never thought life could be so—” He tried to find the word or phrase.
Charles found it for him. “Complicated.”
Friday, August 12, 2016
“I’ve put three hundred miles on this car in three weeks. That’s the bugger about living out in the country. It’s twelve miles to go buy a tomato.” Harry looked down at the odometer on her Volvo station wagon, now reading 199,062.
“You don’t have to go twelve miles. Walk in the backyard.” Cooper noticed the sign for Zion Crossroads as they passed it, heading east on Interstate 64.
“True. I’m so glad you got an unexpected day off and Friday, too. I’ve been dying to go to Ledbury’s and it’s one thing after another. Haven’t been able to get to it.”
In downtown old Richmond, Ledbury’s was a relatively new men’s clothier, specializing in shirts designed by the owners. Harry wanted to buy a fancy shirt for Fair.
“It’s so quiet in the car without the animals,” Cooper remarked.
“I fear opening the door when I return home. Revenge.” Harry had considerable experience with feline payback.
“Hey, I looked at your new website. That was up fast. What did you think of working with Rae Tait? We watched those video outtakes together, but I never asked you how it was working with Crozet Media.”
“Good. I don’t have much to compare it to, but I thought she was organized, creative, and careful about the money. She finished early and under budget. Now, there’s a rare experience.”
“We still have no idea who broke into the office,” said Cooper. “Granted, it’s not number one on the burner as nothing of value was lifted. Still, it irritates me.”
“Maybe it was a couple of kids having a destructive or light-fingered moment,” Harry posited. “Remember when every year mailboxes would be smashed by baseball bats? Kids. A couple of them were bored, decide to break in and see what’s there.”
“Right now it’s as good an explanation as any, but I don’t know. The good thing, there have been no other break-ins or attempted robberies. None in Crozet. Not Old Trail, either.”
“I’d be tempted to break into Over the Moon and steal those beautiful notecards and some books, but I like Anne DeVault too much.”
Cooper found driving on I-64 somewhat hypnotic. “Who would have thought a bookstore would succeed?”
Harry defended the little town. “Cooper, Crozet may not be much to look at, but its citizens do read.”
“It’s the old southern story. The money is out on big estates, while the towns not so much.”
“Up until the Industrial Revolution, that was the story everywhere,” said Harry, a history buff. Can you imagine what the country looked like without railroad tracks, paved highways, telephone poles, and electrical poles? Lines hanging overhead. It must have been so beautiful and quiet. I mean, look at this four-lane highway. It could be any four-line highway until you’re on the other side of the Mississippi. Looks different then.” Harry liked the old roads but you couldn’t make good time.
“We live in the twenty-first century. We have no choice but to deal with it,” Cooper sensibly replied.
“People leave,” said Harry. They move far into the country or up into the mountains. We don’t have to live like this.” She paused. “Sometimes I just want to go, like deep into Wyoming or Montana or northern Nevada. Just far away from everything, and then I remember the screen door shutting, Dad walking into the house, or the smell of Mom’s fried okra. I look at the mountains, I inhale the air, and I listen to the redtail hawk. I don’t know as I could go anywhere else.”