“Sophia,” I said, “I am ready to tell you for what and I am ready to tell you how.”
She had been looking up into the gabled rafters, and now she rolled over, pulled the osnaburg blanket over herself, and turned to me.
“It’s about where I been,” I said. “About where I was and what happened when I was there.”
“Wasn’t Bryceton,” she said.
“It was,” I said. “But that was just the start of it.”
Even in that darkness, I could see her eyes, and they were too much for me to take. I rolled over so that my back was to her. I breathed in deep, and then breathed back out.
And then I told her that I had, in the time I was gone, seen another country, taken in the easy Northern air, that I had awakened when I wanted and moved as I pleased, that I had trained in to Baltimore, walked through the carnival of Philadelphia, and driven through the uplands of New York, and that I had done this all through my affiliation with that agency of freedom known only to her in whispers and tales—the Underground.
And I told her how it had happened, how Corrine Quinn had found me, how they had trained me at Bryceton, how Hawkins and Amy were in on the ruse. I told her how Georgie Parks had been destroyed, and how I had been party to that destruction. I told her about the family White, how they had loved me, how they had saved Mary Bronson, how Micajah Bland had given up his life. I told her how I had met Moses, how Kessiah had survived the racetrack, how she remembered Thena, how I had promised to conduct Thena and how I now planned to conduct her too.
“I promised to get you out,” I said. “And I mean to keep that promise.”
I turned back over, and I found those eyes waiting for me. There was a kind of deadness in them now—no shock or surprise, no emotion betrayed.
“That why you come,” she said. “To keep your promise.”
“No,” I said. “I come back because I was told to.”
“And had you not been told to?” she asked.
“Sophia, I thought of you all the time up there,” I said. I reached over and stroked her face with my hand. “I worried for you, worried for what they might have done to you…”
“But while you were worrying,” she said, “I was down here. Not knowing what was coming. Not knowing what had happened to you. Not knowing anything of that woman Corrine’s intentions.”
“She got your title from Nathaniel,” I said. “You ain’t going to Tennessee.”
She shook her head and said, “And what am I supposed to make of that? You come back with this tale, and I do believe it, I really do, but Hiram, I know you, I do not know them.”
“But you do know me,” I said. “And I am sorry for how it has come down, but I have heard you now, I have heard all of what you were saying from the start. And I understand that it is not just you, but Caroline. I am getting you out. Thena too.”
“And what about you?” she said.
“I am here until told otherwise,” I said. “I am part of this now. It is bigger than me and my desires.”
“Bigger than me too,” she said. “Bigger than this girl who you said was your blood.”
There was a long silence and then Sophia rolled over again, so that she was staring at the rafters.
“And you still ain’t said how,” she said. “I told you I needed a how.”
“How, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah, how,” she said.
“Come on,” I said.
“What?”
“You said you wanted to know how. Well, you wanna know or you don’t?”
By then I was climbing down the ladder. At the door I put on my brogans and wrapped myself in my fear-no-man coat. Looking back, I saw Sophia gazing at Caroline, still snoring lightly on Thena’s bosom.
“Come on,” I said.
We walked along that route that had now become sacred to me. I had been practicing, experimenting as I could with the powers and reach of memory, so that when we arrived, minutes later, at the banks of the river Goose, I felt myself in control.
I turned to Sophia and said, “You ready?” To this she rolled her eyes and shook her head. I took her hand, and in the other hand I clutched the wooden horse.