The cave-in that had so distressed Cora was a ruse to camouflage the operation below. Despite its success, the new laws in North Carolina had rendered the station inoperable—he was visiting the mine merely to leave a message for the underground railroad that he could accept no more passengers. When it came to harboring Cora, or any other runaway, Martin was unprepared in every way. “Especially given the present circumstances,” he whispered, as if the patrollers waited at the top of the gully.
Martin told her he needed to fetch a wagon and Cora wasn’t convinced he was coming back. He insisted he wouldn’t be long—dawn was approaching and after that it would be impossible to move her. She was so grateful to be outside in the living world that she decided to believe him, and almost threw her arms around him when he reappeared, driving a weather-beaten wagon pulled by two bony draft horses. They repositioned the sacks of grain and seed to make a slim pocket. The last time Cora needed to hide in this manner, they required room for two. Martin draped a tarpaulin over his cargo and they rumbled out of the cut, the station agent grumbling profane commentary until they gained the road.
They had not traveled long when Martin stopped the horses. He removed the tarpaulin. “It will be sunrise soon, but I wanted you to see this,” the station agent said.
Cora did not immediately know what he meant. The country road was quiet, crowded on both sides by the forest canopy. She saw one shape, then another. Cora got out of the wagon.
The corpses hung from trees as rotting ornaments. Some of them were naked, others partially clothed, the trousers black where their bowels emptied when their necks snapped. Gross wounds and injuries marked the flesh of those closest to her, the two caught by the station agent’s lantern. One had been castrated, an ugly mouth gaping where his manhood had been. The other was a woman. Her belly curved. Cora had never been good at knowing if a body was with a child. Their bulging eyes seemed to rebuke her stares, but what were the attentions of one girl, disturbing their rest, compared to how the world had scourged them since the day they were brought into it?
“They call this road the Freedom Trail now,” Martin said as he covered the wagon again. “The bodies go all the way to town.”
In what sort of hell had the train let her off?
When she next emerged from the wagon, Cora sneaked around the side of Martin’s yellow house. The sky was growing light. Martin had brought the wagon as far back into his property as he dared. The homes on either side of his were quite close—anyone awakened by the horses’ noise could see her. Toward the front of the house, Cora saw the street, and beyond that, a grass field. Martin urged her on and she crept onto the back porch and then inside. A tall white woman in her nightclothes leaned against the wainscoting in the kitchen. She sipped a glass of lemonade and did not look at Cora as she said, “You’re going to get us murdered.”
This was Ethel. She and Martin had been married for thirty-five years. The couple did not speak as he washed his trembling hands in the basin. They had quarreled over her while she waited at the mine, Cora knew, and would resume that argument once they dealt with the matter before them.
Ethel led Cora upstairs while Martin returned the wagon to his store. Cora got a brief look at the parlor, which was modestly furnished; after Martin’s warnings, the morning light through the window quickened her step. Ethel’s long gray hair extended halfway down her back. The woman’s manner of walking unnerved Cora—she seemed to float, aloft on her fury. At the top of the stairs, Ethel stopped and pointed to the washroom. “You smell,” she said. “Be quick about it.”
When Cora stepped into the hallway again, the woman summoned her up the stairs to the attic. Cora’s head almost brushed the ceiling of the small, hot room. Between the sloping walls of the peaked roof, the attic was crammed with years of castoffs. Two broken washboards, piles of moth-eaten quilts, chairs with split seats. A rocking horse, covered in matted hide, sat in the corner under a curl of peeling yellow wallpaper.
“We’re going to have to cover that now,” Ethel said, referring to the window. She moved a crate from the wall, stood on it, and nudged the hatch in the ceiling. “Come, come,” she said. Her face set in a grimace. She still had not looked at the fugitive.
Cora pulled herself up above the false ceiling, into the cramped nook. It came to a point three feet from the floor and ran fifteen feet in length. She moved the stacks of musty gazettes and books to make more room. Cora heard Ethel descend the stairs, and when her host returned she handed Cora food, a jug of water, and a chamber pot.
Ethel looked at Cora for the first time, her drawn face framed by the hatch. “The girl is coming by and by,” she said. “If she hears you, she’ll turn us in and they will kill us all. Our daughter and her family arrive this afternoon. They cannot know you are here. Do you understand?”
“How long will it be?”
“You stupid thing. Not a sound. Not a single sound. If anyone hears you, we are lost.” She pulled the hatch shut.
The only source of light and air was a hole in the wall that faced the street. Cora crawled to it, stooping beneath the rafters. The jagged hole had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant who’d taken issue with the state of the lodgings. She wondered where the person was now.
That first day, Cora acquainted herself with the life of the park, the patch of green she’d seen across the street from the house. She pressed her eye to the spy hole, shifting around to capture the entire view. Two-and three-story wood-frame houses bordered the park on all sides, identical in construction, distinguished by paint color and the type of furniture on their long porches. Neat brick walkways crisscrossed the grass, snaking in and out of the shadows of the tall trees and their luxurious branches. A fountain warbled near the main entrance, surrounded by low stone benches that were occupied soon after sunup and remained popular well into the night.
Elderly men with handkerchiefs full of crusts for the birds, children with their kites and balls, and young couples under the spell of romance took their shifts. A brown mutt owned the place, known to all, yipping and scampering. Across the afternoon, children chased it through the grass and onto the sturdy white bandstand at the edge of the park. The mutt dozed in the shade of the benches and the gigantic oak that dominated the green with majestic ease. It was well-fed, Cora observed, gobbling down the treats and bones offered by the citizens. Her stomach never failed to rumble at the sight. She named him Mayor.
As the sun approached its zenith, and the park bustled with midday traffic, the heat transformed the hidey-hole into a wretched furnace. Crawling to different sections of the attic nook, searching for imaginary oases of cool, became her principal activity after her vigil over the park. She learned that her hosts would not visit her during the day, when their girl Fiona was working. Martin tended to his store, Ethel came and went on her social rounds, but Fiona was always downstairs. She was young, with a prominent Irish accent. Cora heard her going about her duties, sighing to herself and muttering invectives toward her absent employers. Fiona did not enter the attic that first day, but the sound of her steps turned Cora as stiff as her old sailing mate Skipper John. Ethel’s warnings the first morning made their intended impression.