27 
27 Is this my dream, or the truth?
W.B. YEATS
On Sunday night, Asa found the boy, Silas, considerably stronger. He was sitting up, eating a bowl of rice pudding. Not with gusto, perhaps, but at least he seemed not to tire with the effort.
“It’s good to see you looking better,” Asa said, watching him.
The boy nodded without looking up.
Asa put a hand to the youth’s forehead. “I would say the fever is gone. Eat well. You need to get your strength back.”
Again the boy gave a nod but said nothing as he scraped up the last few bites of pudding and then set his bowl aside. Asa studied him, relieved to see the improvement from only the night before.
Although he sensed no invitation in the boy’s demeanor, he sat down on the floor beside him. Silas darted a brief look before pulling a blanket more snugly about his shoulders.
“Perhaps you’d best lie down,” Asa said. “You don’t want to overdo.”
“I’m all right.”
“You were very sick.”
“I’m strong. I heal fast.”
“You’re fortunate then.” Asa paused. “Last night—you were calling for your mama. Is she already in the North?”
Silas snapped around to look at him, his dark brows knit together in a frown. “What?”
“Last night. When your fever was so high. You called for Mama Ari.”
The boy’s expression suddenly shuttered, and he made no reply. Asa persisted, however, curious about this youth, wondering if he were a self-appointed leader of the runaways or if the responsibility somehow had been thrust upon him. “Is your mama already waiting for you in the North?” he repeated
Silas lowered his head slightly. “My mama is dead,” he muttered, his tone sullen.
Taken aback, Asa drew in a long breath. “I’m sorry.” He hesitated and then asked, “Has she been gone long?”
The boy shook his head. “She died on our last trip, a few months ago.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Asa said again. “Had she been sick?”
This time the boy looked directly at him, his eyes glazed with what appeared to be a combination of pain and fury. “No. A slave catcher shot her.”
Sadness crept over Asa, weighing him down like a sodden blanket. “That’s a hard thing.”
He was surprised when the boy offered more. “They’d been after her a long time.”
“They?”
Silas nodded. “She was one of the best conductors there’s ever been. The catchers, they’d been trying for a long time to stop her, but they never could.” He stopped. “They couldn’t capture her, so they killed her.”
“How did it happen?”
The boy looked off into the shadows. “They ambushed us. Meant to take us all. But Mama, she tricked them and took off in a different direction. Told me before she ran that I wasn’t to follow, that if anything happened to her I was to take the people on. So that’s what I did.” He stopped but then added, “Guess they wanted her more than all the rest of us put together. There was three of them…and they shot her three times. We heard it all. And then I did what she said. We ran, and I led the way. I knew how…I’d been with her many a time, so we all got away. All but her.”
Asa ached to reach out to the boy, to touch him and try to console him. But he sensed that young Silas would reject any attempt to comfort, so he remained still.
“Your mama was a hero.”
The boy’s expression cleared a little. “I know. They wanted her bad. Slave catchers had tried to get her other times too, but she was always too smart for them. This time she just…she let them kill her.” He sounded as if he were about to strangle. “They hated her,” he said, his tone edged with a strange note of pride. “All the slave catchers hated her. They hated her so much they didn’t care about getting paid to trap her alive. They just wanted rid of her. They all wanted to be the ones who caught Ariana.”
The boy’s words struck Asa like a bolt of lightning. “Ariana?” he choked out. “That was your mama’s name?”
“Uh-huh. Most folks called her Ari though.”
Asa remained silent, thinking… True, Ariana was an uncommon name, but not unheard of. Still, there was no point in stirring the boy’s curiosity. Yet he had searched for her so long, looked in so many places, hoping, always hoping… how could he not ask?
Finally he ventured another question. “Where…where are you from, boy, you and your mama?”
Silas shrugged. “Here and there. Nowhere special. We lived on the road a lot. Mama, she said once she came from Alabama but had me in Georgia.” He eyed Asa suspiciously. “Why you asking so many questions anyways?”
Alabama…
His gaze swept over the boy’s features, more white than black, for certain, but clearly mixed blood.
“Just wondering about you,” he said. “How you got so far away from home, how you got involved as a conductor…”
“Mama was the conductor. I told you, I just took over after she…after she was gone. I learned all I needed to know from her.”
“But how did she get caught up in it? You don’t find too many women conductors.”
Silas gave him a dubious look. “I reckon you know about Miz Tubman, don’t you?”
“The one they call Moses,” Asa said. “Yes, I’ve heard about her.”
“There are others…other women besides Mama and Miz Tubman, I mean. Mama, she said she started to the North once all on her own. Never made it though. Instead she met up with some people who had lost their way, so she took them as far as Ohio. She took sick not long after that. Came down with the pneumonia. A white man—a preacher—and his wife took her in and took care of her. She said she stayed with them, worked as their housekeeper for several months. A group of runaways who’d lost their conductor came through about that time, so she took them partway up North, then went back to Cincinnati and started helping other folks too. After that, a lot of people depended on her, I reckon.”
He paused, lifted his chin, and added, “I heard tell from another conductor that Mama set hundreds of our people on their way to freedom and never lost a passenger, just like Miz Tubman.”
Asa chose his next words with care. “And what about your daddy?”
Again a closed, glum expression locked the boy’s features up tight. “Never knew him. According to Mama, she got sassy one time too many with the white man who used to own her. He up and beat on her and then sold her to one of them places where men go and do bad things to women. She finally got away from there, but she was carrying me by them. After she had me, she never left the life, just kept helping folks get to the North.”
Asa’s heart began to bleed a little and then hammer with reluctant hope. The boy’s story lined up with the little he knew about his younger sister. His half-sister. They’d had the same mother but not the same father. Ariana’s father had been the white master of the plantation where they’d both lived for several years. But eventually she had been sold from there—sold by her own father into a bawdy house because she was “mouthy…too uppity for her own good.”
After that, Asa never heard of her again, though the Lord knew he had tried over and over throughout the years to find her. Everywhere he and Gant had gone, he asked after her but never found a trace.
Now, after all these years, was it possible he’d finally learned her fate? Was this boy seated beside him his sister’s son?
“Have you no other family?” he ventured.
Silas shook his head. “No. There was only my mama.” He stopped but then went on. “She told me once that she’d had an older brother. Sounded as though he’d been pretty good to her. But she hadn’t seen him for years, not since she was taken away from the plantation where she grew up. She said it was just as well…she wouldn’t have wanted him to know how hard things had been for her once she got sold.”
A bitter, sick taste rose in Asa’s throat, and he hauled himself to his feet in a sudden urgency to get away from the boy—far enough away to clear his head, to think about what he had just heard.
“I…I need to go the house for a spell and get some things,” he said, rushing his words. “I’ll be back…later.”
The boy gave him a questioning look but said nothing.
Outside, he stood shaking, breathing in the cold air in huge gulps as if to cleanse the nausea churning up inside him. The blood thundered in his head as the full import of the story he’d just heard flooded over him like a tidal wave.
Could it be? If the Ariana Silas had known as his mother was actually Asa’s sister, then she was dead. A guide to freedom for many, yes, but lost to him forever. But her son—if this Silas was truly Ariana’s child—the boy was his nephew!
For the first time in years, he had family. Someone of his own blood, his own flesh. For so long, he had had no one. No one but the captain. A man he cared about as much as family, surely, but still not family.
Too overwhelmed to think, too shocked to do anything but feel, Asa braced himself against the cold, stinging wind, his head framed between his hands, his heart roaring like a storm at sea, and wept. He wept for the fragile, thin waif of a sister with the soulful eyes, torn away from him without warning. He wept for the battered woman he’d never had a chance to know, the woman who had given up her life to save the lives of a company of strangers. He wept for her son, who had known no real childhood, no home other than a road that led either to freedom or the grave.
He wept for the years that were now lost to him, the years that had passed without the help he might have given had he known his help was needed. He wept for the love he might have offered had he known that someone out there, his own flesh and blood, existed in a harsh and loveless life.
The pain was excruciating, and yet there was some small, tenuous comfort in knowing that the search that had driven him for years was finally over.
Gant sat at the kitchen table, the low, thin, flickering glow from a lamp the only light in the room. The tension that had been building in him all afternoon now threatened to burn a hole in his chest. One minute he felt as if he were going to be sick, and the next, he thought he might explode.
He knew he had no call to take on like this. What had he expected? That Doc would jump in his buggy right after the church service and roll into town with news about the selection of the new bishop? Hardly. But there was always the possibility he might have driven in to check on Silas and the still ailing Tabitha.
Well, he hadn’t, so that was that.
More incredible still, had he actually thought he might hear the outcome from Rachel? That she’d suddenly appear at his door, flushed with excitement and good news?
He groaned, running both hands through his hair. This waiting was making a fool of him.
Ah, but then he had a thought to defend his fancifulness—what about Gideon? He often spent part of his Sundays with Doc and Susan. He didn’t attend church with them, but surely he would know something of the day’s events.
It was late though. Late enough that the boy most likely wasn’t coming back to town until morning.
That hope dashed, Gant forced himself to get up and wash the dishes he’d stacked in the sink earlier. He took his time, stalling because he knew there was no point in going to bed. The thought that he was almost certainly destined for another sleepless night piled more coals on the fire of agitation already burning through him. He went to the bedroom to get his fiddle and then returned to the kitchen table. Mac’s attention followed his movements, but he didn’t offer to move from his cozy bed by the stove.
For several minutes, Gant attempted to play, but the music simply wasn’t in him tonight. Every piece he started sounded raspy and thin, like a sick cat bemoaning its troubles.
Just then the real cat—the bobcat—made his presence known with a quarrelsome yowl.
Sounds like he doesn’t care for my music-making tonight any more than I do…
“So where have you been?” Gant said aloud. “I haven’t heard anything from you for some time now.” He put the fiddle down and went to the window, but there was nothing to be seen in the darkness.
He was still standing, looking out, when Mac got up and scrambled to the door, but as soon as Asa stepped inside, the big dog went back to his bed. Gant watched his friend haul himself through the door, and in that instant his preoccupation with his own troubles fled.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “You look like…are you sick? I told you to stay out of that barn. The boy is better, and the little girl is getting stronger. You don’t need—”
Asa stood leaning against the door, and Gant stopped his tirade midstream when he saw that the other was trembling. “What is it? You are sick, aren’t you!”
Asa shook his head and raised a hand as if to curb Gant’s questions. “No, I’m all right. I just…no, I’m not sick, Captain.”
“Well, you look sick!”
Gant crossed the room and yanked a chair away from the table. “Here… sit down.”
Asa hesitated and then lowered himself onto the chair while Gant went to the sink and got him a cup of water. He waited until Asa drank the water and then sat down across from him.
“So…tell me.”
His friend sat as still as a stone, not speaking for several seconds. When he finally raised his head to meet Gant’s gaze, he lifted both hands in a small gesture that indicated he was overcome. Perhaps even dazed.
By now Gant was beginning to feel genuine concern. “Asa? What’s going on?”
The other finally spoke, his voice as tremulous as that of a feeble old man. “You remember my telling you about Ariana…my sister?”
“I do, sure.”
“Well, the boy…Silas…he was telling me about his mother…”
“You got him to talk about himself? That’s real progress.”
Asa shook his head. “Not so much about himself. A little. But mostly about his mother…Ariana.”
Gant stared at him. “His mother was named Ariana?”
“She was. And she was originally from Alabama.”
Gant looked up. “That’s…surely that’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t think so. Not after hearing the whole story.”
He told Gant then. About the boy’s mother being sold to a brothel, about her being a conductor of some reputation, about her saving the runaways from the slave catchers, and about her death.
Stunned, Gant sat listening to it all, trying at each pause in his friend’s story to sort out the truth and finally realizing that what Asa had related was no coincidence, though for Asa’s sake he almost wished it was.
Asa had hoped and prayed to one day find his sister alive, to have resolution as to her fate and be in a position to care for her. Instead, Ariana was gone. There would be no glad reunion, not on this side of heaven anyway.
After a long silence, Asa’s question jerked him back to his surroundings. “So what do you think?”
Gant looked at him. “You’re convinced the boy is Ariana’s son? That would make him your nephew.”
“What else can I think? He even looks like her.”
“Could be that now that you’ve heard his story, he looks like her,” Gant suggested. But even as he spoke, he remembered the sting of familiarity that had tugged at him the first time he saw the boy.
“It’s true, I would never have noticed before he told me what he did. But can’t you see it too?”
Thinking about the photograph he’d carried all these years to help Asa in his search for his younger sister and the only time he’d seen her, yes, Gant understood. The light skin, the dark and hooded eyes, the delicate yet strangely exotic features…yes, the boy resembled Ariana.
Even so, he continued to question Asa. “You’re sure about this?”
Asa studied him. “How can I not be?”
Finally Gant nodded. “You mean to tell him, I expect.”
Asa drew in a long breath. “Of course. But not tonight. Not yet. I need to think about how to tell him.” He paused. “Do you think he’ll believe me?”
Gant thought for a moment. “You carry his mother’s picture. You know something of her beginnings and her life, at least as a child. Why wouldn’t he believe you?”
Asa’s features cleared. “That’s so. Tomorrow then. Tomorrow I will tell him. For now, I’m going to think about my words, what I need to say.”
“You should also concentrate on getting some sleep,” Gant pointed out. “You’ve had little enough these past few nights.”
With a nod, Asa got to his feet and started toward the hallway that led to the back of the house. He turned then, his face creased with a faint smile that wasn’t altogether without a hint of sadness. “I should be happy about this, shouldn’t I? But it’s painful to think of Ariana gone. After hoping to find her for so many years, I can’t think what it will be like to no longer search for her everywhere we go.”
Without waiting for Gant to reply, he left the room.
Gant also had some thinking to do, and the realization was overladen with a blanket of guilt. The guilt had come with the reminder that many years ago he had actually found Ariana. In his search for her, he’d come upon the girl through a storekeeper who directed him to the local brothel. Once he found her, he’d attempted to convince her to wait for him while he negotiated with the brothel owner who had purchased her from her former master. But he’d returned from what had been a successful negotiation only to find her gone. He never saw her again.
He never told Asa. He hadn’t told anyone except Rachel.
Asa’s little sister, as he often called her, had appeared hard and bitter, having aged terribly from the lovely young girl in the photograph. Gant had assumed that she simply didn’t want her brother to know what had become of her, and at the time he’d figured it would be easier on Asa if he didn’t know.
Now, however, Gant wished he’d told him because now he had to decide whether he still should tell him. At the time, although he didn’t like keeping anything so important from his friend, it had seemed kinder to say nothing.
He no longer knew if that decision had been right or wrong. He only knew that he dreaded the way Asa might look at him if he knew about the secret that had been kept from him all these years.