The Seeker (26 page)

He stood up to follow her for a better look, but a Shaker brother stepped in front of him. “You must stay on the visitors’ bench until all are inside and, then if you wish to leave our meeting you must do so quietly out the brothers’ door, my friend.” His voice was firm. He looked to be in his middle years with a barrel chest and muscular arms that stretched tight the sleeves of his dark coat. There was no way Adam could push him aside to go check out the departing sister if the man didn’t give ground.

“Sorry.” Adam stayed where he was. “I’m not accustomed to the separate doors for the sexes. I was simply concerned for the sister who was leaving. Do you think she was ill?”

“If so, Sister Martha will see to it that she has proper care.” The man settled his eyes on Adam for a moment before he asked, “Did you know her in the world before she came here?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t get a good look at her, but something about her seemed familiar. Who is she?”

“She’s new to our Society and her name escapes my memory. There are many sisters.” The man looked over his shoulder toward the sisters’ door now empty as the last of the Shakers had come into the building. “I can ask another if you have need to know, but our meeting is commencing and silence at the proper times is expected.”

“Yes, of course. Forgive me. I promised Elder Logan I would abide by the rules and not disrupt your service in any way.”

“That would be well.”

It wasn’t exactly a threat, but Adam noted that the man sat on a bench near him instead of crossing the room to join the other Shaker brethren as they sat ramrod straight on their rows of benches, facing the sisters perched primly on like benches across from them. For a brief moment, Adam considered breaking his promise and doing something outrageous like asking one of the sisters to dance, simply because he hated rules for rules’ sake. He glanced over at the Shaker brother who continued to watch him warily. There was little doubt the man would escort Adam out of the building and perhaps the village if he had such a lapse of good sense. So he swallowed his penchant for rebellion, turned to a fresh sheet in his sketchpad, and settled down to work.

The first dances were sedate enough. The Shakers marched back and forth and then made circles within circles as the lines of men and women wove around each other in obviously practiced patterns of movement. Some of the faces were animated as they sang and danced. Others were stiff and without expression. Occasionally on some signal that Adam never caught, the entire body would clap their hands or stomp their feet. There were no musical instruments other than the voices of the singers. The songs were simple and repetitious and the dances almost hypnotic as they shuffled back and forth in time to the voices.

Then just as Adam was wondering if all the reports of the Shakers’ wild dancing had been nothing more than stories, the mood in the building changed. He could almost feel the charge in the air when the singers picked up the tempo and many of the dancers also started singing. The sound bounced off the walls and sent some of the dancers into a frenzy as the order of the dance completely broke down. A good number of the men and women began to throw their hands and feet out wildly as they leaped about in no particular fashion while shouts and screams against the devil took the place of the singing. Rules had obviously flown out the window, and those Shakers under the spirit were dancing and shouting in whatever way the spirit led them.

Adam stopped sketching and stared. He spotted Edwin Gilbey with his eyes closed and trembling violently before he collapsed to the floor. A couple of the brethren pulled him off to the side. He saw the stern sister who had worn such a dark frown as she had shooed the young Sister Gemma from his sight the day before now wearing a peaceful, otherworldly look on her face as she spun in place with her hands lifted to heaven. A few of the younger-looking Shaker men were jumping into the air and making whooping noises with their hands clapping against their mouths as if they were children playing Indians.

A Shaker woman stopped her leaping directly in front of Adam to stare at his face as she shouted, “Away from me, Satan.” She pushed the palms of her open hands toward him and began stomping, and the intensity of her feeling twisted her plain features into something fierce. Others caught the stomping fever from her until the building vibrated with the banging of feet against the floor. Some added to the noise by slapping their hands on the benches as if they were drums.

The man Adam had thought remained close by to guard the Shakers against his presence now moved in front of Adam to protect him from the fury that had overtaken so many of the Shakers but that seemed not to have affected him in any manner. Adam looked over the man’s shoulder and caught sight of Elder Logan. He wasn’t stomping or shouting, but was smiling serenely as he stood like an oasis of peace in the midst of the bedlam. Adam picked up his pencil and drew as quickly as he could. He wanted to capture that peace amid the fury.

Then as suddenly as it had started the furor died away, and those who had collapsed on the floor either crawled to the benches or were carried there by others while the remaining dancers began the orderly sedate marching back and forth. The singers’ voices controlled the tempo of the meeting once more. Adam listened to the words of the song as his pen flew across the page almost without thought.

O the simple gifts of God, they’re flowing like an ocean,

And I will strive with all my might to gather in my portion.

I love, I love the gifts of God. I love to be partaker,
And I will labor day and night to be an honest Shaker.

The singers repeated the song until all the Shakers had recovered from the fervor of their worship and began filing out of the building. Adam followed the last man out the proper men’s door to watch the lines of Shakers walking back to their houses in disciplined columns of two. An odd people. He had thought to come among them, draw their faces, and be able to understand why they lived as they lived, but some things were beyond his understanding.

He didn’t stay for the midday meal. Instead he took the food Elder Logan had kindly asked the sisters to pack for Adam’s journey and headed his horse toward Frankfort. Before he went back east, he wanted to check out how the state’s legislature was doing at maintaining a neutral stance and staying out of the coming conflict. Adam aimed to maintain a neutral stance too, but he had no intention of missing the conflict while his competitors sent their illustrations of the action into the living rooms of the citizens. Most in Washington thought one battle would have the Confederate states begging for mercy, but nobody expected that attack to be launched for weeks, perhaps months, as the army was still gathering.

Plus, Adam no longer had an excuse to go to Virginia since Sam Johnson had telegraphed him not to worry about that illustration of General Lee in his Rebel uniform. It had been easy enough to take a picture already on file of the general in his Federal uniform and have someone redraw him in Confederate gray. Sam knew how to satisfy his readers, but he also knew how to save a dollar.

After a couple of hours, Adam spotted a creek along a deserted stretch of the road where he could let his horse drink. The creek, full from the spring rains, sparkled in the sun as it rushed along its rocky bed in a hurry to join up with a river somewhere downstream. The day was warm, and Adam slid out of the saddle to splash the cool water up on his face. He munched on the Shakers’ meat and bread and watched his horse graze. The birds were in full song over his head, and off in the distance a dog barked like it might be trailing a rabbit. Here was real peace, Adam thought. Nature’s peace. He’d met few travelers even on the more populated portions of the road.

On the Sabbath, the faithful rested. He imagined his own mother and grandfather sitting in their Boston parlor in their dark Sabbath clothes. His grandfather would be reading the Bible. His little brother Harry would be trying not to doze on the couch. And Jake, well, Jake was gone from the picture now the same as Adam was. Jake was in Washington learning to march and shoot a gun. Hardly a Sabbath day occupation. Maybe Adam should have found a way to make Jake go home the way Phoebe wanted. But the boy was nineteen. A lot of the volunteers were even younger.

Adam’s horse raised his head and pricked his ears forward, bringing Adam away from his thoughts. Something was running up the creek. Adam moved over to the horse and caught its reins before he reached into his saddlebag for the gun he carried there. He didn’t often have occasion to pull it out, but in some of the places he’d been in the West, it was good to be prepared.

He checked the load and kept it pointed at the ground as the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Trouble was coming. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. The baying dog was still some distance away but getting closer. Perhaps it was on the trail of a fox or deer instead of a rabbit. His horse pranced sideways nervously, and Adam clucked his tongue to calm him as he climbed back into the saddle. It was probably just some locals out running their dog. Nothing that had to involve him in any way.

He was turning his horse away from the creek to head back to the road when he caught sight of a flash of blue through the trees that lined the creek. Adam’s hands froze on the reins. It wasn’t a deer the dog was trailing, but a person. He could hear the panting breaths of the runner along with the water splashing now. A runaway slave and absolutely nothing he could do to help the person as much as he might want to. It was against the law to interfere with those trying to capture a runaway. And in a godforsaken place like this, it wouldn’t matter what was legal or what was not. He was liable to be shot for his trouble. Even so, he sat like a stone on his horse and waited for the poor man to come into sight.

It wasn’t a man, but a woman grasping up her skirts and running through the knee-deep water. She stopped when she saw him, her eyes wide and frightened. Then she dropped her skirts down in the water and put her hands over her heart.

“Is you really there, Mr. Adam?” she gasped as she tried to catch her breath.

22

He recognized her at once. Not only as the black sister from the Shaker village, but now here with panic alive on her face, he knew why she had tried to speak to him. She was Charlotte’s maid he’d met at Grayson. And it didn’t matter what the law said anymore.

“How far behind you?” He got straight to the point.

“Don’t know.” She pushed the breathless words out as she stared back down the creek and shuddered with fear. “They wouldn’t believe my papers. Tried to steal them from me.”

“Grab that stick there in the water.” He shoved his gun in the back of his waistband before he guided his horse down into the creek. When she obediently held up the stick, he said, “Now rip off a piece of your dress to tie to it.”

She tried to do as he said, but the skirt’s cloth was too tightly woven. “It won’t tear.”

He grasped the top of her sleeve and jerked the seam loose. She slipped it off her arm and with trembling hands managed to tie it to the stick. “What’s this gonna help?”

He didn’t take time to answer her as he reached for her to pull her up on his horse.

The creek water swirled around her skirt as she stared at him and didn’t take his hand. “You best leave me be and ride on, Mr. Adam. They got guns. They’d a done shot me if I hadn’t been worth more to them breathin’. But you, they might think it sport to shoot a Northerner like you.”

“Take my hand, Mellie.” He remembered the name Charlotte called her. “Hurry or my blood will be on your head.”

She let him pull her up in front of him and awkwardly straddled the horse as she stuffed her full skirt under her legs. She grabbed hold of the horse’s mane to steady her seat, then held up the stick with her other hand. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Hold on to it a minute.” He walked his horse down the creek a little way until he found a spot where the bank was rocky. “Now drop it in.” He watched the stick to be sure the current caught it and swept it downstream before he turned his horse to the bank. The dog was getting closer and now he heard a man shouting.

At the sound of the man’s voice, Mellie began shaking so hard that Adam wrapped an arm around her waist to keep her from tumbling off the horse. She leaned back against him and whispered, “Lord a mercy, help us.”

The words carried such raw feeling that even Adam hoped some higher power might be listening, but he wasn’t ready to depend on that alone as he guided the horse through the trees. He wanted to kick his heels into the horse’s flanks and push him to a full gallop, but it was wiser to go quietly like a fleeting shadow the chasers might not notice. Perhaps because of Mellie’s simple prayer, a line of Scripture surfaced in his mind from all the passages his grandfather had forced him to memorize in his school.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

As if Mellie had heard his thoughts, she whispered, “Puts your hand over top us, Lord, and bring us on out a this dark place.”

Once back out on the road, the sun was too bright, pointing them out as something not right to anybody who might see them. A white stranger with a Negro woman in a bedraggled Shaker blue dress riding in front of him on his horse. That would be something a person would remember if the slave catchers talked to them. So maybe the darkness was more to be desired after all. Adam went off the road again at the next stand of trees. He needed to come up with a plan. He couldn’t hear the dog or the men chasing Mellie anymore, so that was good. But they wouldn’t give up. She must have looked like easy money to them. They’d keep looking.

When he was sure no one could see them from the road, he dismounted and helped Mellie down. Her legs almost gave way with her, and he had to hold her up until she was able to pull herself together and step away from him.