Fiddlehead

“It’s a shame there’s no glass in these windows, don’t you think?” Maria asked with a shudder. She tightened her coat and twisted her gloved hands up in her scarf, but that wasn’t enough to make her comfortable, not with the wind rushing inside the cab.



“Not such a shame if you’re keen to keep breathing. The exhaust creeps up from the engine—that’s why the windows are fixed this way. It’ll warm up a bit as we go, I promise. Heat also creeps inside, especially at your feet.”



They drove a few blocks east, which was not at all in the direction of Lookout Mountain—a fact that Maria knew because she could see its craggy, winter-bald point off to the south. She was on the verge of asking why they were taking this path when Henry explained, “We have to get past the wall, and the nearest gate is over here. Under different circumstances, I’d take the long way around to cover our tracks … but we’re short on time, and I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anyone following us.”



“No, we’ve been fortunate so far,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.



Before long, the wall loomed up close.



It was a sheer, flat, inscrutable thing—a vast construction designed with traditional military precision and lack of finer detail. A massive half-moon over a hundred feet high, it was painted Confederate gray, partly as a patriotic statement, partly to protect it from the elements, and partly because gray paint was cheap. A wide double gate hung open, with one lane of traffic spilling slowly inward, and one lane of traffic proceeding outward at a somewhat faster pace.



Maria reached into her bag for the papers identifying her as a nurse, but Henry told her not to bother. “They check you coming in, not going out.”



“They didn’t check me coming in.”



“You came in on the train.”



“Ah.” That was true—and her papers on the far end had been carefully scrutinized, now that she was awake enough to remember the process.



Henry waved to the guard, who waved back in a casual, unconcerned manner. Then they were outside, in the poorer suburbs that had been chopped off from the urban military center. Off in one direction, Maria saw Missionary Ridge curving gently around the valley; and to the right, she could barely see the leaning tip of the mountain peeking over the wall. It all felt very medieval to her, like a castle surrounded by serfs.



Henry guided the car to an overgrown side road, where they could watch travelers come and go through the gate without being easily observed. Several minutes passed without anything suspicious happening, so he and Maria concluded that they hadn’t been followed, and were on their way with a somewhat greater sense of security.



Outside the wall, the roads were not made for horseless travel. They took it slowly because the engine was quieter in a lower gear, and because the brick-paved streets were rough on the hard-rubber wheels of the car, never mind its occupants. Horses came and went, sometimes ridden, and sometimes pulling loads; children dashed out into the slow-moving traffic, chasing dogs, toys, or one another. Potholes abounded, for bricks were sometimes pulled from the street and used to patch, repair, restore, and rebuild outhouses, sheds, and crumbling foundations. Intersections did not always meet at the correct angles, and no signs indicated which way traffic was expected to flow.



Big trees stood seasonally naked on corners and in yards, and their brittle branches reached high overhead, throwing scattered shadows around these outlying places. The houses were small and fiercely guarded, or else they were large and in uncertain repair. The people were overwhelmingly poor and not in the military—Maria did not spy a single uniform. And the closer they came to the mountain, the more colored families she saw.



“I feel … conspicuous,” she whispered as softly as she could, while still making herself heard above the engine.



“We are conspicuous. But we are relatively safe.”



“What if someone comes along behind us and asks if anyone has seen a carriage like ours?”



He shrugged. “The locals will say they’ve seen no such thing. No one who asks them questions has their best interests in mind. It’s safer for them to see nothing, and say nothing. But they won’t hand us over, because they know what we’re doing.”



“They can’t possibly. We barely know what we’re doing.”



“They know we’re going to the Church. Pretty much any white people who come out this way … that’s where they’re headed. And most of the people who live out here keep themselves blind and quiet, because it’s the only way to help without putting themselves in danger.”



Up to the long, narrow mountain’s ridge they rode, rattling past the edge of the river’s bend and along a packed dirt road that led under the railroad overpass that took all the trains around Lookout. The arch was overgrown with the dead trees left behind by winter—long branches, stripped roots, and a dangling lattice of Japanese weed, gone brown from the dry and chill. Along the arch’s top a train crept slowly, its wheels churning, its cars hauling coal or timber from east to west, or farther down south.



Under the arch, a horse appeared, galloping quickly toward them. Its rider almost lost his hat as he rode beneath the train, but he held it fast—and he drew his horse up short when he reached their car. Its hooves scattered bits of brick and pebbles, which clanged against the car’s metal plating, and the animal shifted nervously from foot to foot.



“Henry, don’t tell me that’s you…?” the rider called. He firmly reined the horse up to Henry’s window, and leaned his head down low. “Well, I’ll be damned. My luck ain’t usually this good.”



Maria leaned over, cocking her head to the side a bit so she could look up at him. “Mr. Troost! Just the man we were coming to see.”



He spit a gob of tobacco to the side of the horse, away from the car. “I should damn well hope so. Can’t imagine why else you’d be out this way. Anyway, I’m glad to see you’ve saved me a trip downtown. We got problems.”



“We got telegrams,” Maria agreed.



“And I got another one just now,” he said. His eyes were hard, and his hands were tight on the reins of the unhappy horse. “Follow me back to the Church and I’ll give you what I know. And jack that thing a little faster. We haven’t got all day. Shit, we might not have all morning.”



He nudged the horse back the way he came, and kicked it into a gallop once more.



Henry urged the car through first gear and into second, which had Maria clinging to the door and wondering if she might be sick. The vehicle tumbled over the lumpy roads, shuddering like it might come apart at any moment, but it stayed intact as it trailed Kirby Troost’s horse through an overgrown neighborhood of small, cheaply built bungalows with rickety porches and crooked steps. They gave friendly chase down a narrow street, Maria praying at every moment that they wouldn’t meet anyone or anything coming the opposite direction.



They passed one church on the left, a tall, flat-faced wooden structure painted white, but apparently this wasn’t the Station. They kept going until they found a sturdy stone African Methodist Episcopal church a few blocks farther down and partway up a steep embankment that disappeared into the mountain itself. Kirby Troost disappeared behind this church, down two scuffed ruts that passed for an alley. Henry followed him as far as he dared, until the winter-dead foliage threatened to bog down the car and stop it for good.



He pushed his foot down on the brake and hopped out.



Maria waited for him to open her door, then took his hand as she descended into the grass.



Kirby tied his horse to a post beside the church steps and then joined them. “Y’all’d better come inside.”



Inside, everything was dark except for the colored light that trickled through the tinted glass windows. The place was wired for electricity and gas lamps, and she could see how old fixtures had been refitted for the newer technology. But nothing was turned on, and the place was cold. There was certainly a furnace, but no one had lit it. The church looked deserted. Maybe that was the intent.



They marched past straight-backed wooden pews in tidy rows with Bibles and the occasional dog-eared hymnal scattered here and there. Then they climbed straight down into the baptismal font. Maria felt strange about it, but she stood aside and smiled when a false bottom opened up and a secret staircase was revealed below.



“Ladies first,” Kirby Troost said.



Henry elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t be an ass, Kirby. You have a light?”



“Right here.” He pulled an electric torch out of his coat and offered it to Henry.



But Maria snatched it out of his hand and pulled the switch to turn it on. “Ladies first,” she reminded them, then sidled past them down the stairs. At the bottom she found a landing and a door, and Kirby Troost was beside her, though she’d never heard him join her. Only a superhuman effort kept her from flinching as he reached past her face and pressed a button once, twice, and three times … then paused and hit it once more.



“That’s so nobody shoots when we walk inside,” he told her as he retrieved the light. “This time, we’ll have to set chivalry aside. They know me, and there’s a chance they might know you, so stand back.”



The door opened a crack. Around the corner peeked a colored woman about Maria’s age with a lantern in her hand and a wary look in her eye. “Mr. Troost,” she said levelly. “And you’re not alone.”



“No, ma’am, and the cat’s not in the tree, either.”



She nodded and withdrew, taking the lantern with her. Its glow illuminated the interior of a large, comfortable living area with three other people in it: an older woman and a boy of maybe eight or nine, both colored; and a white man with a gun who nodded at Troost and said, “Back so soon?”



“They were on their way to meet me, so I found them faster than expected,” he said. “Everyone, this is Mary and Hank. They’re here to help. Or, from another angle, they’re here so I can help them, but that’s how it goes. Mary, Hank, that’s Dr. Bardsley’s mum and nephew right there, Sally and Caleb.”