“All passengers ride coach on this train, miss. They’re pretty strict about that.”
To call the flatcar a coach was an abuse of the word. It was a boxcar like the one she rode to South Carolina, but only in foundation. The plane of wooden planks was riveted to the undercarriage, without walls or ceiling. She stepped aboard and the train jolted with the boy’s preparations. He turned his head and waved at his passenger with disproportionate enthusiasm.
Straps and ropes for oversize freight lay on the floor, loose and serpentine. Cora sat in the center of the flatcar, wrapped one around her waist three times, grabbed another two and fashioned reins. She pulled tight.
The train lurched into the tunnel. Northward. The engineer yelled, “All aboard!” The boy was simple, Cora decided, responsibilities of his office notwithstanding. She looked back. Her underground prison waned as the darkness reclaimed it. She wondered if she was its final passenger. May the next traveler not tarry and keep moving up the line, all the way to liberty.
In the journey to South Carolina, Cora had slept in the turbulent car, nestled against Caesar’s warm body. She did not sleep on her next train ride. Her so-called coach was sturdier than the boxcar, but the rushing air made the ride into a blustery ordeal. From time to time, Cora had to turn her body to catch her breath. The engineer was more reckless than his predecessor, going faster, goading the machine into velocity. The flatcar jumped whenever they took a turn. The closest she had ever been to the sea was her term in the Museum of Natural Wonders; these planks taught her about ships and squalls. The engineer’s crooning drifted back, songs she did not recognize, debris from the north kicked up by the gale. Eventually she gave up and lay on her stomach, fingers dug into the seams.
“How goes it back there?” the engineer asked when they stopped. They were in the middle of the tunnel, no station in sight.
Cora flapped her reins.
“Good,” the boy said. He wiped the soot and sweat from his forehead. “We’re about halfway there. Needed to stretch my legs.” He slapped the side of the boiler. “This old girl, she bucks.”
It wasn’t until they were moving again that Cora realized she forgot to ask where they were headed.
A careful pattern of colored stones decorated the station beneath Lumbly’s farm, and wooden slabs covered the walls of Sam’s station. The builders of this stop had hacked and blasted it from the unforgiving earth and made no attempt at adornment, to showcase the difficulty of their feat. Stripes of white, orange, and rust-colored veins swam through the jags, pits, and knobs. Cora stood in the guts of a mountain.
The engineer lit one of the torches on the wall. The laborers hadn’t cleaned up when they finished. Crates of gear and mining equipment crowded the platform, making it a workshop. Passengers chose their seating from empty cases of explosive powder. Cora tested the water in one of the barrels. It tasted fresh. Her mouth was an old dustpan after the rain of flying grit in the tunnel. She drank from the dipper for a long time as the engineer watched her, fidgeting. “Where is this place?” she asked.
“North Carolina,” the boy replied. “This used to be a popular stop, from what I’m told. Not anymore.”
“The station agent?” Cora asked.
“I’ve never met him, but I’m sure he’s a fine fellow.”
He required fine character and a tolerance for gloom to operate in this pit. After her days beneath Sam’s cottage, Cora declined the challenge. “I’m going with you,” Cora said. “What’s the next station?”
“That’s what I was trying to say before, miss. I’m in maintenance.” Because of his age, he told her, he was entrusted with the engine but not its human freight. After the Georgia station shut down—he didn’t know the details, but gossip held it had been discovered—they were testing all the lines in order to reroute traffic. The train she had been waiting for was canceled, and he didn’t know when another one would be through. His instructions were to make a report on conditions and then head back to the junction.
“Can’t you take me to the next stop?”
He motioned her to the edge of the platform and extended his lantern. The tunnel terminated fifty feet ahead in a ragged point.
“We passed a branch back there, heads south,” he said. “I’ve got just enough coal to check it out and make it back to the depot.”
“I can’t go south,” Cora said.
“The station agent will be along. I’m sure of it.”
She missed him when he was gone, in all of his foolishness.
Cora had light, and another thing she did not have in South Carolina—sound. Dark water pooled between the rails, fed in steady drips from the station ceiling. The stone vault above was white with splashes of red, like blood from a whipping that soaked a shirt. The noise cheered her, though. As did the plentiful drinking water, the torches, and the distance she had traveled from the slave catchers. North Carolina was an improvement, beneath the surface.
She explored. The station abutted a rough-hewn tunnel. Support struts shored up the wooden ceiling and stones embedded in the dirt floor made her stumble. She chose to go left first, stepping over spill that had come loose from the walls. Rusting tools littered the path. Chisels, sledges, and picks—weaponry for battling mountains. The air was damp. When she ran her hand along the wall it came back coated in cool white dust. At the end of the corridor, the ladder bolted into the stone led up into a snug passage. She lifted the torch. There was no telling how far the rungs extended. She braved the climb only after discovering that the other end of the corridor narrowed into a glum dead end.
A few feet into the level above, she saw why the equipment had been abandoned by the work gangs. A sloping mound of rocks and dirt, floor to ceiling, cut off the tunnel. Opposite the cave-in, the tunnel terminated after a hundred feet, confirming her fear. She was trapped once more.
Cora collapsed on the rocks and wept until sleep overtook her.
The station agent woke her. “Oh!” the man said. His round red face poked through the space he’d made at the top of the rubble. “Oh, dear,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m a passenger, sir.”
“Don’t you know this station is closed?”
She coughed and rose, straightening her filthy dress.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” he said.
His name was Martin Wells. Together they widened the hole in the wall of stone and she squeezed through to the other side. The man helped her clamber down to level ground as if helping a lady from the finest carriage. After several turns, the mouth of the tunnel extended a dim invitation. A breeze tickled her skin. She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the stars made succulent and ripe after her time below.
The station agent was a barrel-shaped man deep in his middle age, pasty-complected and soft. For an agent of the underground railroad, presumably no stranger to peril and risk, he evinced a nervous personality. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, repeating the engineer’s assessment. “This is a very regrettable turn.”
Martin huffed through his explanation, washing his sweaty gray hair from his face as he spoke. The night riders were on patrol, he explained, casting agent and passenger into dangerous waters. The old mica mine was remote, to be sure, exhausted long ago by Indians and forgotten by most, but the regulators routinely checked the caves and mines, anyplace a fugitive might seek refuge from their justice.