Wilderness Run by Maria Hummel Read Free Book Online

slumped in Johnny Mulcane’s arms, dangling his shattered right foot, deprived of his last and only possessions, the will to flee and the means.
    The story would go on for years in Bel’s mind. She would be telling Laurence how it happened that they had lost the one thing they’d thought they could save, as the war came so quickly after that, and the end of all the young boys who raced their sleds, or stitched the fields to the headlands with their wooden plows, or battled for who would dance with the best girl. She would remember for both of them, because for eight days, Laurence would be ill with fever. Her father had Johnny carry the wounded man into Greenwood, stricken with what he had asked another man to do, and yet not quite asked; he would say this to himself and to Faustina, who, for almost a month, could not look at him with her full green gaze because that would mean forgiveness.
    Bel would tell Laurence of things she should not have seen, the bloody rags and shattered foot beneath, Mary tossing the burlap hat into the fire, the hatred in the runaway’s eyes when Bel touched his stiff fist. She would remember the blur of the doctor arriving, and that Johnny Mulcane stole the bullet from the basin where it lay, then vanished for three days. He was not punished by the pudgy, myopic constable, who spoke to the runaway in a loud voice about how the kind Mr. Lindsey had offered to buy his freedom if no slave owner claimed him for a week, and that this was unusual generosity, but in Vermont they didn’t believe that some men could not be free.
    She moved through that week numbly, knowing that Dr. Cochran had said the runaway’s foot would never heal entirely. She wished she could plot with her mother how to rescue him, but Faustina was like a stone underwater those days, moving only slightly with the current of life around her. Whenever Bel brought up the runaway, a shadow would cross Faustina’s face and she would send her daughter to Mary, who made the girl thumb clumsily through the rosary and ask forgiveness for betraying her father’s wishes.
    Meanwhile, Laurence tossed listlessly, his brown eyes wide with delirium. When Bel went to sit with him, he alternately muttered and shouted about ice and darkness, and mentioned his coat several times. His mother brought it to him, washed clean of the smell of the runaway, but he refused it, saying, This is not mine . As soon as he recovered, his father booked him on the next train to Boston, and Laurence did not even enter Greenwood to say good-bye, hunched to his chin in a heavy coat, his eyes already distant.
    Bel’s father buried himself in business, spending all day at the lumberyards. He designed plans for a new building on the nonexistent waterfront, a floating hotel that newlyweds could reach by a narrow walkway, because he did not fully believe a war was coming to drain his city of all the young men who might marry. Yet it was he who bore the news to his family, telling them that a farmer from Georgia had claimed the runaway, that he seemed like a good man, that they had already headed back together on the train. Why didn’t you buy him? asked Faustina. I was too late , replied Daniel, taking off his gloves and then putting them on again, over and over, as he spoke, his left hand sticking in the fingers.
    And if the law changes, Daniel, will you finally be ashamed, if the law tells you that we were wrong?
    We are prominent citizens of this city. If we break the law, who will abide?
    You and I no longer live in the same city, Daniel .
    In the story Bel told her cousin, this was one ending, her father and mother facing each other across the stairs, where Bel hid behind a balustrade on the second floor. The other ending was the continuing of time, her hope that the slave might have escaped again, more than a year passing, the first shots fired on Sumter, and her father going down to the green to watch the new Vermont regiments