He would not be the first white man to see the underground railroad, but the first enemy. After all that had befallen her, the shame of betraying those who made possible her escape. She hesitated on the top step. On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song. She waited until the slave catcher was on the third step. She spun and locked her arms around him like a chain of iron. The candle dropped. He attempted to keep his footing with her weight on him, reaching out for leverage against the wall, but she held him close like a lover and the pair tumbled down the stone steps into the darkness.
They fought and grappled in the violence of their fall. In the jumble of collisions, Cora’s head knocked across the stone. Her leg was ripped one way, and her arm twisted under her at the bottom of the steps. Ridgeway took the brunt. Homer yelped at the sounds his employer made as he fell. The boy descended slowly, the lantern light shakily drawing the station from shadow. Cora untwined herself from Ridgeway and crawled toward the handcar, left leg in agony. The slave catcher didn’t make a sound. She looked for a weapon and came up empty.
Homer crouched next to his boss. His hand covered in blood from the back of Ridgeway’s head. The big bone in the man’s thigh stuck out of his trousers and his other leg bent in a gruesome arrangement. Homer leaned his face in and Ridgeway groaned.
“Are you there, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good.” Ridgeway sat up and howled in anguish. He looked over the station’s gloom, recognizing nothing. His gaze passed over Cora without interest. “Where are we?”
“On the hunt,” Homer said.
“Always more niggers to hunt. Do you have your journal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have a thought.”
Homer removed his notes from the satchel and opened to a fresh page.
“The imperative is…no, no. That’s not it. The American imperative is a splendid thing…a beacon…a shining beacon.” He coughed and a spasm overtook his body. “Born of necessity and virtue, between the hammer…and the anvil…Are you there, Homer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me start again…”
Cora leaned into the pump of the handcar. It didn’t move, no matter how much weight she heaved on it. At her feet on the wooden platform was a small metal buckle. She snapped it and the pump squeaked. She tried the lever again and the handcar crawled forward. Cora looked back at Ridgeway and Homer. The slave catcher whispered his address and the black boy recorded his words. She pumped and pumped and rolled out of the light. Into the tunnel that no one had made, that led nowhere.
She discovered a rhythm, pumping her arms, throwing all of herself into movement. Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike. She never got Royal to tell her about the men and women who made the underground railroad. The ones who excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for the deliverance of slaves like her. Who stood with all those other souls who took runaways into their homes, fed them, carried them north on their backs, died for them. The station masters and conductors and sympathizers. Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. The secret triumph you keep in your heart.
She put miles behind her, put behind her the counterfeit sanctuaries and endless chains, the murder of Valentine farm. There was only the darkness of the tunnel, and somewhere ahead, an exit. Or a dead end, if that’s what fate decreed—nothing but a blank, pitiless wall. The last bitter joke. Finally spent, she curled on the handcar and dozed, aloft in the darkness as if nestled in the deepest recess of the night sky.
When she woke, she decided to go the rest of the way on foot—her arms were empty. Limping, tripping over crossties. Cora ran her hand along the wall of the tunnel, the ridges and pockets. Her fingers danced over valleys, rivers, the peaks of mountains, the contours of a new nation hidden beneath the old. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. She could not see it but she felt it, moved through its heart. She feared she’d gotten turned around in her sleep. Was she going deeper in or back from where she came? She trusted the slave’s choice to guide her—anywhere, anywhere but where you are escaping from. It had gotten her this far. She’d find the terminus or die on the tracks.
She slept twice more, dreaming of her and Royal in her cabin. She told him of her old life and he held her, then turned her around so they faced each other. He pulled her dress over her head and took off his trousers and shirt. Cora kissed him and ran her hands over the territory of his body. When he spread her legs she was wet and he slid inside her, saying her name as no one had ever said it and as no one ever would, sugary and tender. She awoke each time to the void of the tunnel and when she was done weeping over him she stood and walked.
The mouth of the tunnel started as a tiny hole in the dark. Her strides made it a circle, and then the mouth of a cave, hidden by brush and vines. She pushed aside the brambles and entered the air.
It was warm. Still that stingy winter light but warmer than Indiana, the sun almost overhead. The crevice burst open into a forest of scrub pine and fir. She didn’t know what Michigan or Illinois or Canada looked like. Perhaps she wasn’t in America anymore but had pushed beyond it. She kneeled to drink from the creek when she stumbled on it. Cool clear water. She washed the soot and grime from her arms and face. “From the mountains,” she said, after an article in one of the dusty almanacs. “Snowmelt.” Hunger made her head light. The sun told her which way was north.
It was getting dark when she came upon the trail, worthless and pocked rut that it was. She heard the wagons after she’d been sitting on the rock awhile. There were three of them, packed for a long journey, laden with gear, inventories lashed to the sides. They were headed west.
The first driver was a tall white man with a straw hat, gray-whiskered and as impassive as a wall of rock. His wife sat beside him on the driver’s box, pink face and neck poking out of a plaid blanket. They regarded her neutrally and passed on. Cora made no acknowledgment of their presence. A young man drove the second wagon, a redheaded fellow with Irish features. His blue eyes took her in. He stopped.
“You’re a sight,” he said. High in pitch, like a bird’s chirping. “You need something?”
Cora shook her head.
“I said, do you need anything?”
Cora shook her head again and rubbed her arms from the chill.
The third wagon was commanded by an older negro man. He was thickset and grizzled, dressed in a heavy rancher’s coat that had seen its share of labor. His eyes were kind, she decided. Familiar though she couldn’t place it. The smoke from his pipe smelled like potatoes and Cora’s stomach made a noise.
“You hungry?” the man asked. He was from the south, from his voice.
“I’m very hungry,” Cora said.
“Come up and take something for yourself,” he said.
Cora clambered to the driver’s box. He opened the basket. She tore off some bread and gobbled it down.
“There’s plenty,” he said. He had a horseshoe brand on his neck and pulled up his collar to hide it when Cora’s eyes lingered. “Shall we catch up?”
“That’s good,” she said.
He barked at the horses and they proceeded on the rut.
“Where you going?” Cora said.
“St. Louis. From there the trail to California. Us, and some people we going to meet in Missouri.” When she didn’t respond he said, “You come from down south?”
“I was in Georgia. I ran away.” She said her name was Cora. She unfolded the blanket at her feet and wrapped herself in it.
“I go by Ollie,” he said. The other two wagons came into view around the bend.
The blanket was stiff and raspy under her chin but she didn’t mind. She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.