When the door came open it startled me from a doze. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. Hebron was back with the lantern and my bedroll.

  “Don’t get up.” He hung up the one, tossed the other on the ground, and upended one of the stout bushel baskets to serve as a stool. When he sat down and pushed his hat back with a knuckle, he appeared more relaxed than he had since we’d met. He looked at me with the machinery of his thoughts working behind his face. Then he unbuttoned a pocket on his flannel shirt and drew out a leadfoil pack of ready-made cigarettes and a box of matches.

  He held out the pack. I shook my head. “I never got the habit.”

  He speared one between his lips and set fire to it. He counted the cigarettes remaining in the pack before he put it away.

  “I’ve had good reasons to wish I’d done the same,” he said. “No matter how careful I am about it I always run out a week or so before one of us makes the monthly trip to Fort Chipewyan for supplies. Some winters the month between runs ninety days. Then there’s the cost.”

  “I never heard anyone who uses tobacco complain about the price.”

  “That’s three cents a pack that could be spent on candy for the children. Life up here is hard for the small ones. It’s like burning up the one thing they might have to look forward to.”

  “Cheaper to buy the makings and roll your own.”

  He let the cigarette droop and held out his hands. The palms were shiny with callus and the knuckles were swollen as big as walnuts. I understood then why he didn’t carry a gun; he’d have had to file off the guard to get one of those fingers close to the trigger.

  “Rolling your own requires dexterity. I took rheumatism cutting cane in Mississippi for fifteen years. Some days I can’t bend my hands around a pick handle.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. The lantern was putting out heat, but the air inside the building felt as cold as it had at the start. He was being too friendly. Anyone can manage to work up affection for the soon-to-be extinct. Sometime while I was asleep a decision had been reached.

  “How long have you been behind a badge?” he asked me then.

  “Coming on six years.”

  “I guess a man has to be able to take care of himself to hang on so long in that line. Deputies especially; they get all the muddy work. I know a little about that. I was a sergeant with the Tenth Cavalry.”

  “I figured something on that order. I rode cavalry during the war.”

  “I was infantry then. Thirty-sixth Colored. I was among the first to sign on with the Tenth when they were putting it together.”

  “That was after the war. Then you didn’t come up here as a slave.”

  He flicked a scrap of glowing ash at the ground, then returned the cigarette to its groove in his lower lip. “No, I didn’t.”

  Seeing the barricade across that road, I asked him if the Committee of Public Vigilance had settled my case.

  “We’re going to put you in with Brother Babel. You know which one Babel is?”

  I nodded. “Pike’s Peak with a hat.”

  “The last time he changed hands as a slave, he sold for a thousand dollars. That’s five times what a prime specimen of healthy buck brought on the Virginia market. It was a bargain. The first time he tried to ride a mule it bucked him. He got up, shook the dust off his pants, picked up the mule, and threw it. That’s not a story. I saw him do it.”

  “I’m supposed to fight him with what?”

  “Your hands.” He spat out smoke. “It was Brother Enoch’s idea.”

  “I was pretty sure I wasn’t popular with him.”

  “Nothing personal. There was nothing personal about taking slaves either.”

  “Where’d he get this idea?”

  “He was just a boy when Sherman burned the plantation where he worked with his mother. His father went down the river to auction before Enoch was old enough to remember what he looked like. Whenever two bucks got into a fight, the overseer broke it up and told them to work out their differences in the barn. He invited his friends and took bets, just like at a cockfight. Usually one of the brawlers took a beating and gave up. Occasionally one died. When that happened, the overseer had to pay the owner of the plantation for the loss of a good field hand, but he usually made enough laying bets to make a profit even then.”

  “Then the free African community of Shulamite is just a plantation with the colors reversed.”

  “What did you expect, some kind of noble experiment? Everything we learned about governing we learned from the white man.”

  I said nothing. He smoked the cigarette short enough to singe his fingers, then dropped it and pressed it out with the toe of his boot. “I didn’t vote in favor of it, if that means anything. I wanted to shoot you and be done with it. I’ve got no stomach for drawing things out.”

  “What did Queen Fidelity say?”

  “She never takes a hand in these things unless she’s invited.”

  “How did you wind up with a voodoo witch for a priest?”

  “All the Negro ministers we knew preached the white man’s gospel. Voodoo belongs to us. I can’t say I care much for it. The ceremonies give me a headache and are a waste of good chickens besides. When I cut one up, it’s to eat. But then I wasn’t much of a Christian, either. Turning the other cheek is what got us over here to begin with.”

  “Whose decision was it to name you all after cities in the Bible?”

  “Not all. Some of us hung on to the names we used in the States. The women especially. Those who decided to change chose the Old Testament. It got Jesus out of the picture and the names were easier to pronounce than African. Queen Fidelity’s the only one here who ever even saw that place. She left Capetown, where the competition was too thick to make a living, and got run out of Philadelphia and Baltimore by witch burners. She came up here from the American territories ten or twelve years ago. You need women to make religion take and there weren’t enough of them down there.” He dug out the cigarette pack, but just to play with; the cigarettes stayed inside. “She spends most of her time casting spells to help the crops.”

  “Do any good?”

  “Most of the Shulamites seem to be of that opinion. I suspect we’d have the same number of droughts and blights and bumpers with or without her dead chickens, and have that many more eggs to eat without. A lot of our people came straight up here on the Underground without learning anything of the world on the way, so it makes as much sense to them as the miracle at Cana. My thought is anyone who could make wine out of water ought to have figured out a way to come down off that cross.”

  “I’ve been wondering where you took your schooling.”

  He showed his teeth in an idiot’s grin.

  “Ain’t all us nigras as dumb as rocks, boss. I had me the benefit of a master who taught the classics at Jefferson before he retired to the genteel ways of the gentleman farmer. I reckon I was his pet. He showed me how to read the Bible in English and then Caesar in Latin. It got me out of the canebrakes, so I didn’t put up no holler. I dipped me a toe in Homer, too, but he was all Greek to me. Hee-hee.”

  His imitation of a whiny coon set my teeth on edge. “You don’t have to do that. I’d have asked the same of any white man this side of Chicago who talked like Matthew Arnold. Most of them can’t manage Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.”

  “I beg your pardon. We aren’t equal no matter what John Brown said. When someone says something you don’t take to, you’ve got the privilege of thinking he just doesn’t like you. I’ve got to figure in being black as well.”

  “I wish I could say for sure your being black didn’t have anything to do with what I said.”

  “You’re honest, and that’s a fact.” He took out a cigarette this time and lit it. “Who’d you ride with in the war?”

  “Rosecrans.”

  “Army of the Cumberland. I heard he was good. Lincoln almost put him in charge of the whole shebang.”

  “It would’ve been a mistake. He was a stubborn Kraut, and he read too much history. He’d have thrown away the best we had defending Little Roundtop with a copy of Napoleon’s Maxims in one hand.”

  He smoked for a moment in silence. “I fought the Cheyenne in Nebraska.”

  “I fought them in Dakota. They were worth fighting.”

  “I deserted.”

  I let that one drop all the way to the ground. “I guess you had your reasons.”

  “I thought so at the time. After Custer and the Seventh wiped out Black Kettle at the Washita I couldn’t see celebrating my freedom by making slaves of some people I didn’t have any complaint with. That’s how I wound up here. I’ll warrant there’s a firing squad waiting for me at Fort Kearney.”

  “In that case you were right to keep running once you started. The army used up all its sharpshooters in the war. What’s left would shoot you in all the places that didn’t count and some lieutenant would have to walk up and put a ball in your head with his side arm.”

  “I wouldn’t mind too much if the lieutenant was Henry Flipper. He’s a Negro, first one to graduate West Point. I never knew him, though; he came after I left. I read about it in the Toronto Mail. Could be he’s whiter than some whites. They tell me that can happen when you live among them.” He got rid of some ash. “But even if it was him and he was black through and through, I wouldn’t take to being shot for a coward. The cowardly thing would have been to stick and keep on doing what I’d been. Most of the brave things that are done get done because someone was more afraid not to do them.”

  “That may be your problem,” I said. “Too much education.”

  “There isn’t a day goes by I don’t cuss out that damn schoolteacher.”

  The lantern began to flicker. It was running low. He stood up, turned down the wick, and took the lantern off its nail. He looked down at me from the doorway.

  “Not that it will do you any good,” he said. “There’s a stronghold on Cree Lake up north where some of Sitting Bull’s Sioux live. They didn’t turn themselves in with the old man and they’re pledged to fight to the death to avoid going back to America. We trade with them sometimes. Brother Zoan speaks a little Sioux and is friendly with their leader, Wolf Shirt. He’s been known to offer hospitality to desperadoes from below the border.”

  All the cold went out of me then. “Did your Brother Zoan see Lorenzo Bliss and Charlie Whitelaw there?”

  “He hasn’t been there in a month, but when a door opens for a man on the run, it doesn’t take him long to find it. I’d look for your fugitives there before I went anywhere else.”

  “Wolf Shirt would have to be worse than Geronimo to harbor a bunch like that.”

  “Whitelaw being Cherokee would help. It’s a Sioux trait to look down on every tribe that isn’t Sioux, but they don’t hate the others the way they hate Americans. Americans at war with America are another story. That’s why Wolf Shirt trades with us. The fact that Bliss and Whitelaw are wanted would only sweeten the pot. Indians will do just about anything to inconvenience the big chief in Washington.”

  “Do the Mounties know this?”

  “If they don’t, they will. Canada has no beef against the Sioux for what happened to Custer, but after what this gang did on the Saskatchewan, the Mounties would track them through hell and fight the devil on his own ground.”

  “That’s the first good thing I’ve heard you say about a bunch of white men.”

  “Canadian white men. Canada never took slaves.”

  “Thank you for the information. I’ll follow up on it just as soon as I finish with Brother Babel.”

  He looked down at me from the doorway, sucking on his cigarette.

  “Babel has long arms,” he said then. “As long as your legs. Some men try to stay outside their reach. That’s a mistake when you don’t have room to run. You want to get inside them if you plan to do any damage.”

  “You betting on me?”

  He dropped the butt and squashed it out, shaking his head. “If anyone in Shulamite had money to bet with I wouldn’t put mine on you, and there aren’t any takers on Babel. He’ll kill you, all right. I’d just like to see someone in your situation get a better chance than those chickens.”

  20

  I actually slept the rest of the night. I’m an old man now, and wakefulness has never been among my maladies. It might have been then, if I’d had any hope of surviving a fight with Brother Babel. When you know how a thing is going to come out and that nothing you do will change it, you can stop thinking and rest. I wrapped myself in my blanket, tugged the badger hat down over my ears, put my head down on my knees—and the next thing I knew there was sunlight sifting through the places where the chinking had fallen out from between the logs and the noises outside of a settlement coming to life.

  The door opened and Brother Enoch stood just outside it with his Spencer across his thighs while a man whose name I didn’t know, but who had been present among the members of the Committee of Public Vigilance when our camp was broken, set a tin cup of steaming coffee and a plate heaped with scrambled eggs on the ground inside my reach. That meant at least one of Queen Fidelity’s chickens hadn’t yet gone to the altar.

  Smelling the eggs, I realized I was famished. I shoveled them in using the wooden cooking spoon provided and drove the chill out of my bones with the hot coffee, either one of which would have passed muster in San Francisco; as indefensible as slavery was, it had taught some talented people a good trade.

  “Let’s don’t keep Brother Babel waiting,” said Enoch when I set aside the plate and cup. “He ain’t as patient as he looks.”

  He and the other man flanked me to the meeting hall. The sky, clear yesterday, had turned the color of tarnished silver and rolled down almost to the ground. A dull pain in my cracked ribs, nearly healed now, told me we were in for a change in the weather. The air smelled and tasted of iron.

  They had shoved and stacked the trestle tables against the walls in the great dining room and uncovered the windows, but the gray sunlight was inadequate, and so pitch-smeared torches burned in brackets and a wagon-wheel fixture with lanterns attached hung from the center rafter, casting pools of shadow at the feet of the assembled citizens of Shulamite. There were right around a hundred of them, the men in overalls and flannel, the women in print dresses and gingham, all homespun. The collected years of enforced servitude had taught them all the skills necessary for a community to survive amid the desolation of unsettled territory. No cry went up when I entered with my escort, and no cheer either when Babel came in a few minutes later, attended by another member of the committee; the spectators remained silent in their wide circle, their faces as solemn as the jury they were. This was no sporting event but an execution.

  I looked for Philippe, Fleurette, and Claude, wondering if they had left as Queen Fidelity had promised. I spotted them finally near the south wall, the woman and the boy standing atop one of the tables to see above the heads of the crowd. Philippe nodded slightly when our eyes met. His expression was grave.

  No one stood along the west wall. There below the stuffed moose head hung a black cloth the size of a bedsheet, with a chalk drawing on it of a cross with a skull and crossbones suspended beneath the axis, surrounded by symbols that meant nothing to me. It might have been painted by a moderately talented child. In front of the cloth sat Queen Fidelity in her rocker. The effect of those stacked heads—moose, skull, old hag—was comical and ghastly at the same time. She looked exactly as she had the night before, in spectacles, ratty shawl, and steamer rug. A fixture of the building, she might have been picked up, chair and all, in the adjoining room and set down on that spot without stirring.

  She could have been mistaken for an ebony carving for all the life she showed as I was led to the center of the plank floor and stopped with a prod of Enoch’s Spencer. Babel joined me a moment later, and we stood four feet apart without speaking. He had on loose woolen trousers held up by braces and a faded striped shirt made from enough material for two garments of ordinary size. His bare feet were as big as skillets and gripped the floor as if they had been bolted in place. My head came to his breastbone. I could have hidden behind his bulk on the back of the little mustang. His big face was blank; given the atmosphere of black magic, I might have thought he was in some kind of trance if I hadn’t attended my share of prizefights and seen that same lack of expression on the faces of the combatants. There were no thoughts in that great inverted kettle of a head beyond those connected with my annihilation.

  Most of the details of the ceremony that preceded the fight were lost to me, busy as I was attempting to attain that same mental state in regard to Babel. When Queen Fidelity arose finally, with the assistance of a woman on each side wrapped in an identical white sheet secured at the shoulders with pins, she was barely taller than she had been sitting. Behind the chair, nearly touching the cloth, stood the black-covered platform I had seen in the other room, moved there and set up with a collection of clay vessels arranged at precise intervals in a straight line. She lifted the largest of the jugs and, raising it above her head, offered it to the four directions, the way I had seen Indian shamans do with a medicine pipe. As she did so she recited something in a singsong language that I identified belatedly as English, sprinkled with foreign terms such as loa, rada, and petro. Lowering the jug, she turned and poured some of its contents into each of three smaller jars on the platform, muttering something that I thought at the time sounded like Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, though I don’t credit it now. After setting down the big jug she took a handful of sand or coarsely ground flour from another vessel, then turned and stepped in front of her chair and let it sift out the bottom of her fist to the floor in a rotating motion, so that the pattern roughly resembled the shape of the skull painted on the black cloth behind the platform. Then she stood aside while the two women in sheets came forward—or rather backward, as they advanced with their backs turned away from the wall—until they stood on either side of the crude skull on the floor.