It was a sight Wendell Crow would remember all of his days. A line at least forty people long stretched from the bank of the river up through the woods to the cabin, buckets filled with water going up, empty buckets coming back down, everybody yelling, little kids crying, and Wendell right in there with them, the only white face in a sea of colored ones.
It wasn’t any place he’d ever expected to be, and what he was feeling wasn’t something that he expected to feel: that the cabin burning down was his fault, for trying to claim it for his own. Listening to the pieces of talk coming up and down the line with the passed buckets, Wendell was putting the puzzle together. That cabin wasn’t his, and it wasn’t his dad’s or his uncles’, and it sure as heck wasn’t Ray Sanders’s. The only person ever to have officially laid a claim on it was named Mary Barnett, and she had used it to help runaway slaves on the way to the river.
Miss Mary. The name traveled up and down the line. Meanest old white woman that ever lived, somebody said, and somebody else said, They say she started out Catholic up in Cincinnati but switched over to the Quakers ’cause them Quakers against owning slaves. Say her family kicked her out, so she crossed the river and built herself a cabin.
They say she let it be known she a friend to the runaways, took ’em in and hid ’em in the underneath if anybody was chasin’ ’em.
Wendell stood halfway down the path between the river and the cabin, his jeans soaked with the water that sloshed from the buckets as he passed them up to Carl Jr., who passed them up to Callie. He’d lived less than a half mile away from that cabin his entire life without ever knowing it was there until five days ago. Never knew about runaway slaves crossing the river at Jericho’s Point.
They stopped at Miss Mary’s to wait for dark and to get a bite to sustain ’em, so they have enough in their stomachs to get across and all the way into Ohio.
And now Miss Mary’s cabin was burning, and it was Wendell’s fault for bringing Ray Sanders up to see it. Oh, he knew it was Ray who’d done it. Who else would it be? Wendell had passed Ray on Main Street on Saturday, coming out of McKinley’s Drug, and Ray had leaned in close, whispered, “I’m gonna get ya,” and then called Wendell a name his mother would slap him for repeating, but it had to do with being friends with colored folks.
How long had they been passing buckets up and down the line before word started trickling down that the cabin was gone? It felt like days to Wendell, but might have only been a half an hour.
“Anything left?” someone called from down the line, and the question echoed up the hill. “Just the underneath,” came the answer a few minutes later, each person passing it on to the next.
“That’s where I was hiding,” Callie told Carl Jr. “That’s where Wendell found me.”
Carl Jr. looked at Wendell, and Wendell nodded. “When I looked down into that hole, I thought it was a place to store things,” he explained. “Like a root cellar or something.”
“It felt strange,” Callie said. “Felt like something was down in there with me. And now that hole’s all that’s left of the whole place.”
“Cabin was falling down anyway,” Carl Jr. pointed out. “Sooner or later it was just gonna be that underneath.”
Maybe, Wendell thought. But maybe they would have built that old cabin back up. Not to turn it into a fishing camp or a clubhouse, but to make it, well, like some kind of museum, he guessed. He looked up the hill and squinted, trying to imagine runaway slaves coming through here, running through the woods to the river. He bet they’d been scared. He would’ve been.
Wendell saw the editor of the colored newspaper, Mr. Renfrow, walking down the hill. “Miss Callie,” he called out. “You and your brother and Wendell go on home and change. I want to see you in my office in an hour.”
Suddenly Wendell felt like everybody was looking at him, like they’d just noticed there was a white boy in their midst. Wendell kept his eyes to the ground. He’d let Callie and Carl Jr. explain what he was doing there. Except they didn’t really know, did they? They didn’t know the fire was his fault.
Back home, Wendell found the house empty, so he didn’t have to explain to anyone why he was soaked from tip to toe, or why he had ash on his hands. He wasn’t exactly sure himself where the ash had come from. He thought of the fireplace in the cabin filled up with ashes, and he thought of the name Jim written on the wall next to the door.
And then he thought of the old dog. Had anybody seen the old dog that morning? He’d thought he heard him barking when they were running up from the river with their buckets of water, but Wendell couldn’t recall seeing him.
Wendell raced to change clothes, then rode his bike into town as fast as he could.