Season of Life

Basil Biggs hid like a runaway slave for three days. He had never imagined such a thing could be so hard on the soul.

To the passing eye, it might not have seemed all that bad. The loft of the barn sheltering him was tolerably comfortable in an itchy, sleeping-on-straw kind of way, with a straight view down the Hanover Pike to the west, from where danger would most likely come. He ate good, heavy soup handed up to him in a traveler’s pail kept for the needy, declining the invitation to dine with Frederick and his family with the excuse that he wanted to be ready to run, and there was no lie in that. Confederate soldiers had been up and down the road in the weeks before on their way to the Susquehanna and they might appear again. They had gone twice through Gettysburg, on the way to the battle that now raged not so far away. Every colored man, woman, and child in the county knew the men from the South hunted them. Hundreds who had chosen not to run had been taken and roped like cattle and sent to slavery; runaway or born free in the North, it made no difference.

It was not pain or hunger or the disturbingly loud rat sounds in the straw that plagued Biggs. His life now consisted of a bellyful of fear. Bright sunlight no longer cheered him. The blue sky above and the wind, both of which he loved so much, the sweet smell of a healthy field of corn and that skin-tingling rustle of living sound the hay made in the absence of wind when it grew quickly—all these things that had for years filled him with contentment had now turned to fear. He tasted it on his tongue like copper.

Most colored men would listen to that grimly, Biggs knew, and say that was life.

In the dark and for some part of the hot days he slept on the bales with a borrowed blanket, hardly needed in the heat, disturbed only on the second night by the faint rumble of cannon fire finding its way from Gettysburg. Like distant thunder, it was more felt than heard. It brought on unease just like that of waking from nightmares except that wakefulness did not provide relief. It was real.

Anton Frederick came out during it. They spoke in hushed tones for a while about what it could mean, Biggs high above in the loft and Frederick down below on the ground and then said a prayer together. Biggs sat on the edge of the upper hay door after the Quaker went back inside, legs dangling down, feeling the warm air on him and listening until that frightening sound finally ended. He nearly dozed himself into a fall from the height. Only Rosalie’s voice saying his name saved him, faint as a whisper but utterly clear. He grabbed the lintel of the door, stopping his pitch forward with one hand as his heart beat madly, almost as much from the sound of the voice as from the thought of the fall.

The next morning Biggs abandoned the loft, craving distraction and sick of doing nothing. He passed the time checking Frederick’s stock for signs of illness and watching the changing sky. Dark clouds gathered above after days of unrelenting sunshine, scudding along quickly and threatening rain. Gusts of wind now and then reached the ground and tossed about the trees and the grain. Biggs’s mind filled with memories of his mother, misty things woken by last night’s voice, a small child’s view of a small world, kitchen and yard and the fullness of her apron, and the warmth of her arms around him. His mother had been the cook and housekeeper for a well-off white family who kept no slaves on principle, though Biggs knew nothing of that then. He and his mother lived in a small, comfortable cabin behind that great house, in the country and away from the world, she tending to the main house and to the cooking and to the healing of those who came to seek her out. Biggs began to see that his mother possessed a special gift, was famed for it, and not just of the healing of the flesh but also of the mind and spirit. The family who employed her not only tolerated the crowds and her duties with them but encouraged her in it, seeing the larger contribution she made. Like all children in such extraordinary circumstances, none of this seemed odd or unusual to Biggs. It was just life. Biggs played with the sons and daughters of the family and for his first years knew nothing of colored or white as they did not; just play and laughter and the sense of one larger family amidst the joyous blindness of childhood. Only when Biggs finally stepped out into the larger world at his mother’s side for those first visits to the market did he see the true way of things. A memory came to him of looking at his own hands, turning them over and over and seeing that he was the same as these people treated with such scorn and degradation in the very acts of living their lives, and of Rosalie’s face looking down at him so sadly, seeing the lifting of the veil in him.

Thinking of Rosalie made him think of his father, Arthur. Biggs had never known him in life, but he had heard the story of the midnight escape from Virginia many times. When whispered news came one gray November day from the big-house servants that Arthur was to be sold very soon, he and Rosalie, very much in love and her pregnant with Biggs, had run to the north. Finding an old scow tied up along the bank of the river with no oars in it, and the dogs close behind, Arthur towed Rosalie across the five long miles of the frigid Potomac, rope in his teeth as he swam to Maryland and freedom. They staggered to an abandoned hunter’s shack on the other side where Rosalie used all her skills to try to bring life back to Arthur’s frozen body. But in the morning, he was dead.

Rosalie had never spoken to him before in that way, from the grave. Biggs shivered with the sadness of long memory and faint dread. His practical nature came to his rescue, and he tried to dismiss the thought as coming from too much idle time and worry, but the experience had been too vivid, too real to ignore or forget. He turned to the animals for diversion. All seemed well there. The sheep were a fine band of bronzed-faced Tunis, naturally strong of constitution, sixty of them adequately cared for by Frederick’s son, Harry, although their legs needed better trimming. Two dozen Kerry cows grazed happily in their large field, lowing deep-voiced greetings when he approached. They knew him well. A quick check of eye color and hooves and udders, a running of hands along flanks and bellies, and he was sure of their health. After that he walked Frederick’s fields of barley and wheat and corn, never too far from the barn, admiring and envying the Quaker’s ruler-straight plow lines.

Biggs had come late to living from the land. Five years before, he had been hauling goods by wagon along the roads of Maryland from port to town and making a sideline of nursing the other teamsters’ stock when trouble came, as it always did with horses and mules. His hands and eyes could see the life within any animal, a talent his mother had seen early in him and nurtured, tolerating the hordes of cats, dogs, and creatures of the forest he took home and which he kept somehow from tearing each other to pieces, as if their little corner of the world was a sanctuary from the savagery of the natural world. Biggs had traded one kind of hard life for another coming to Gettysburg, regretting nothing, because in Pennsylvania his children could be taught to read and write without flouting the law. They could only attend a colored school, but that was life. Biggs wondered what that life was like for well-to-do white men like the man from whom he rented his farm, John Crawford, going to his work every day wearing a starched collar and never lifting anything heavier than a pencil. Looking at the sky, Biggs imagined walking down a street to some store or office, dressed in finery each day as if going to worship on Sunday. Rosalie laughed within his mind and said in words as clear as crystal and as faint as air that nothing was impossible in the Lord’s world.

The words pierced him with a sense of presence, as if the very warmth of her body was beside him. He wheeled around, startled, but only the stalks of grain stood nearby.

“No more of that,” Biggs whispered to the wind.

He had no desire to hear the dead—even as nonsense he had made up in his own head—and he hoped Rosalie understood that, if she really did speak to him from some faraway place.

The wind grew, gusting to a strange kind of madness that seemed to threaten the very lives of the trees. They bent but did not break except in the very young ends of the branches that tumbled down like thatch. A swath of cloud darkened the sun for a long minute before finally exposing one blinding fragment to light the world.

Two black dots appeared across the field just above the swaying stalks of grain, a pair of crows with wings almost touching. Biggs watched with open mouth as they came straight for him, lit up in glorious sheen by the sun, the reflection of their black eyes clearly visible. They hurtled past and he was sure a wingtip had brushed his shoulder. Once by him, the birds powered upward with heavy flaps of wings and settled into a nearby oak.

Biggs touched the rim of his hat to them and turned back to his walk.

Rosalie had always had a peculiar relationship with the crows, part respect and affection and part distrust of their thieving ways. More than one cooling pie had been ruined by their probing beaks, but her anger at that had almost seemed like pantomime to Biggs, an act for his benefit. There had been something else as well, an appreciation for the vision they had for things beyond the sight of the human eye. She spoke to them almost as people, at times of strange things Biggs did not understand, and it seemed they spoke to her by just a cock of their black heads or a lowering of their eyelids. The windowsill of the cabin was always littered with their little glistening gifts, and even once an actual pearl earring. Rosalie was never without a pair of the birds when she went to visit someone in need, especially when the need was of the mind or the soul rather than the flesh. For all his love of animals, Biggs had always been wary of crows because of their relationship with his mother. They lacked the essential simplicity of other animals. He fed them from respect and they accepted it diffidently, as if only for his mother’s sake.

In season, Frederick bought a portion of Biggs’s hay, all that Biggs did not need for his own stock, and most of his many cucumbers, which the Quaker pickled in jars by some Dutch recipe and sold from the back of his cart in town on winter Sundays at twenty cents a jar. That was good money. It made Biggs wonder if he should begin holding on to part of his crop to do a little pickling of his own. Yet the bargain was long struck, and he knew that it could set him up against a white man, even one as mild and generous as Anton Frederick. Biggs did not want that kind of attention. Forty hard years of life had taught him how to live alongside the white man’s world. There was gratitude to be counted, too. Frederick had been good to Biggs and his family early on when they had arrived from Maryland, a rare and precious thing and maybe that was because the man was a Quaker, bound by rules of generosity and tolerance. Yet kindness was kindness and had to be remembered. Pennsylvania was not Massachusetts. Whites here did not welcome coloreds, seeing only lost jobs and an upset to life from those fleeing slavery. Biggs suspected they were not exactly welcomed in Mass either, but up north lived fewer coloreds to hate. Why, he had heard that a colored man up there could ride in the same train cars and trams as a white, and vote, and even work in the post office!

After a long walk, Biggs returned to the loft, waiting with tense shoulders for Rosalie’s next words to come out of the air.

End of excerpt