of the bridge. In every one of these stories—Santi into the river, you out of the Goose, us over the pier…”
I sat there dumb.
I still wasn’t getting it. And at that Harriet laughed.
“Water, Hiram. Water. Conduction got to have water.”
My mouth must have dropped, because Harriet started laughing even harder. And she had a right to laugh. It seemed so obvious now. Every time I’d felt the pull of the thing, felt the river of Conduction rushing along—from the water trough in the stables, to the Goose that pulled Maynard and me off the bridge, to the Schuylkill near Bland’s home—there had always been water within reach. And now I thought of all of Corrine’s absurd efforts to access the power, and never once had we noted that element that now seemed most obvious.
“Why didn’t you use it for Lydia?” I asked. We were now walking toward the cabin.
“Because, to tell a man a story, you gotta know how it end,” said Harriet. “I never been to Alabama. Can’t jump to an end I ain’t never seen. And even knowing beginning and end, I have to know something of who I’m conducting in order to bring ’em along. Don’t usually have that luxury. Which is why my normal means are as any other agent. This time, though, it’s folks I know.”
* * *
—
We walked over to the cottage and found those people. The door opened as we approached, and warmth breathed out. It was now deep into the night, but inside the cabin, everything teemed. We were greeted by a motley group of four men, all of them in tasking clothes. Two of these men had an aspect similar enough to Harriet that I knew they were kin. A third tended the fire that I’d seen burning through the window. My eyes lingered on the fourth, sensing something amiss, and then I realized that this one was a woman with her head nearly totally shorn. I thought of the two white women at the Convention who preached equality in every sphere, but I knew that this was a scheme of a different sort.
“Hiram, this is Chase Piers,” Harriet said, gesturing toward the man tending the fire. “He is our host and we are thankful for his part in this.”
Then, smiling at the other two men, whom I took to be kin, she said, “No such kind words for these two rascals.” Then she hugged them both and they all laughed.
Harriet said, “These are my brothers Ben and Henry. Finally got some steel in these boys, took ’em long enough. But I guess if Henry had not stayed down this way he never woulda met his wife.”
And now Harriet went over to the woman whose hair was shorn, rubbed the round egg of her head, and laughed.
“Every whit of this is your making,” the woman said, smiling but annoyed. “Why, I knows the Lord must be carrying us up out the coffin, for he would not have a girl give away a blossom of hair such as mine for still another chain.”
“Worked, didn’t it?” said Harriet.
The girl nodded and smiled, less annoyed.
“This is Jane,” Harriet said. “She’s Henry’s wife.”
Jane now smiled at me. The absence of hair put the focus on her striking face, the sharp angles of her cheeks, her small eyes and large ears. And there was a boisterous faith in her, a feeling shared among all who gathered before the hearth. By then I had been party to enough rescues to know that this was not normal. Fear was normal. Whispers were normal. But this group laughed like they was already North. It was nothing like I’d seen in Virginia or even among those who’d come through the Philadelphia station. The difference was Harriet, who by way of Conduction, by weaving of legend, was now her own one-woman war against the Task, and in particular against the county that had her so. And seeing this, even after having seen Conduction, I decided that the stories really must be true. Harriet really had pulled the pistol on the coward. She really had conducted across a river in winter. The whip really had melted in the overseer’s hand. She was the only agent never to fail at a single rescue, never to lose a passenger on the rail. And though that is the story, it was known, even then, among those huddling in the warmth of that cabin. For when they spoke of their departure, they spoke of