Light of dim mornings; shield from heat and cold;
Balm for all ailments; substitute for praise;
Comrade of those who plod in lonely ways . . .
Spell that knits friends, but yearning lovers parts.
“Duty,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
HARRIET SPENT THE LAST HOURS OF the afternoon giving the cookhouse a final scrubbing. It seemed important to put things to rights for Septima in case she didn’t return. So she filled two iron pots with water, heated them to boiling, rolled up her sleeves, and went to work with rags and a brush. The hot, soapy water felt good on her forearms. The sun declined in the red and inflamed sky while she scoured the last stains from the old stove.
As twilight turned into dark, she lit the kerosene lantern and uncovered the slice of pork pie Septima had left on the mixing table sometime earlier on the Sabbath. Montgomery had instructed them to be at the John Adams by noon the next day. The first of June. The beginning of slavery’s end in South Carolina, Harriet prayed.
Perched on the cookhouse stool, Harriet applied herself to the cold supper. The food tasted like nothing. She ate because she needed sustenance, but she took little interest in the proceedings until a shadow appeared on the windowsill and then jumped to the table. “There you are, you ornery critter,” Harriet said. She stroked the cat, which arched its back as she transferred it to the floor along with a large pinch of pie. Companionship made the pastry more interesting, and together they made short work of it. As she finished the homely meal, Harriet wondered if it would be her last supper. Considered that way, it was a feast.
Once she’d washed the plate, Harriet decided to walk off her restlessness. It was too hot for a shawl, so she splashed vinegar on her neck to ward off mosquitoes before shutting the window and closing the door behind her. The danger ahead loomed like thunder clouds that caused the air to crackle with electricity. Pickets awaited them at Fields Point, Tar Bluff, and the Combahee ferry landing. An army of two thousand men camped nearby. Confederate cannons were somewhere on the route to Savannah. Rebels had bled the Union for two years. Hundreds of thousands had died, and more would perish. Maybe Harriet Tubman.
She decided to return to the cookhouse to sleep. If this were her last night, she didn’t want to spend it under Ruby Savan’s roof. The times she had laid her head on the floors of strangers came back to her, and she felt close in spirit to the men and women who had followed her to Canada. They whispered encouragement now. She hadn’t lost a single one. Perhaps Louisa May Alcott would put that in an epitaph.
Harriet walked along Bay Street until she passed the wharf. The stevedores had deserted it, but colored sentinels paced the length between bright torches. A shooting star streaked across the night sky and lost its way somewhere in the ocean. The moon was just short of full. Harriet came to the row of private jetties from which fishermen and other folk plied the waterways between Hilton Head, Port Royal, St. Helena, Lady’s, Parris, Coosaw, and all the neighboring islands where the Gullah people were building lives outside slavery. A fresh breeze beckoned, and Harriet turned onto a dock to walk out over the water.
Hammering boomed from a small boathouse toward the end of the row. A carpenter on a ladder nailed the roof of a second-story addition by the glow of a lantern that hung from the eave. As she approached the last pilings that anchored the jetty in the shallow bay, Harriet wondered why the impatient man didn’t wait until morning, when the sun would provide all the light necessary, especially when she heard him exclaim as he hit his thumb.
“Dang it to heck!” came a familiar deep voice.
Harriet stopped short and contemplated turning around. She didn’t feel like seeing Samuel—but the cheat owed her an explanation, she decided as she continued to the boathouse. She halted under the ladder.
Samuel reached into a pail that sat on the edge of the roof, withdrew something, and resumed hammering.
“Hey up there,” she called, loud enough to be heard but not startle him.
Samuel turned cautiously, holding onto the ladder. He looked down. “Harriet,” he said. She couldn’t see his features in the shadow cast by the moonlight but heard a smile in his voice. “Stand back, sugar, and I’ll come on down.”
Harriet retreated two steps as Samuel descended the ladder with his hammer in the pail. “What’s this place?” she asked as she took another step backward, out of arm’s reach, once he’d gained the dock.
“My boathouse,” he said. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think I don’t know nothing about it.”
“I got it off the tax rolls last month. It’s one a them the Secesh abandoned. Commissioner Brisbane’s letting me make payments. It’ll be all mine by the end a the year.”
“How you paying for it?” she asked.
“I been repairing old dugouts and selling em,” he said proudly. “Dragged my first from the marsh. I think it got away in a storm. I’m here first thing every morning when we ain’t scouting. When I sell one trus-me-Gawd, I find another.”
Harriet shook her head with wonder. “You fixing to be a boat builder?”
“Yep. But my main idea is to start a ferry business. People need to get back and forth ’tween the islands. When the war’s over, that gone be me. Ain’t nobody rows faster. The packet to Sa’leenuh goes but twice a day. I’ll take folk whenever they want. Gone train Jake to row. Sam can take the money.”
“But why you working after dark? Why you down here fore we set sail?” She heard her voice rise. “Why you . . . leave this morning?”
Samuel cocked his head. “Oh, that’s right. My noggin.” He reached up and touched it tentatively. “I decided to get back to work. Found a medic. He said the wound looked dry. Walter stopped by after you left, so I knew he made it back after seeing Lucy. She’s in on the plan, he said. The rock a Jesus, she is.”
Harriet didn’t know what to say. Of course his wife was a rock. She was there for Samuel’s children. Harriet knew she should be grateful that Lucy Heyward was prepared to risk everything for their mission, but it was hard to hear her name.
“Why the hurry?” she asked. “Seems like healing up your head fore the raid is more important than this roof.”
Samuel looked down at his pail. “I need to get it ready by tomorrow.” His voice was no longer prideful. “I got to finish this for Luce and the boys. Especially now,” he said as he reached out to touch her elbow.
“Why now?” she said.
“They gone live upstairs.”
They. He’d said they, not we. He must be planning to live apart from his wife. Perhaps he was rushing to finish the roof to ease his guilt. An awkward silence grew between them. Three boys, she thought. Sam, Jake, and Abe.
“Nobody can say my boys want for anything. Nobody,” Samuel added, as if nailing an argument and not just the roof. “And Lucy, she didn’t want me to start with. She don’t need me.”
Harriet drew a deep breath. He was wrong and would see it once reality in the shape of a wife and three boys arrived, should they be lucky enough to get out. This was the world for which they were fighting: one where fathers and mothers weren’t separated from their children. Where they lived free lives together under one roof.
She was glad it was dark so he couldn’t see the cracks in her expression. “It’s a fine boathouse,” Harriet said, struggling to keep her voice even. “Don’t let me interrupt. I jest passing by.”
He glanced up at the roof. “Ain’t much left. Another few rows.” He looked down at her in the dark, his beard in silhouette. “What you doing?”
“Taking care a loose ends at the cookhouse.” She adjusted her headscarf. “I best knuckle down. See you tomorrow. Montgomery says be there by noon.”
He caught her elbow. “Not so fast, sweet girl. What about tonight?”
Harriet allowed her eyes to warm on the chance that he could see them in the moonlight, though she felt as cold as it was possible to feel on the eve of June in South Carolina. The shape of her solitary life was as clear in her mind as the family home on the dock. She hardly even knew what to think about Samuel. If he were a good man, he wouldn’t leave Lucy. If he were a good man, he would be loyal to Harriet.
“We both got a lot to do,” Harriet said. “There’ll be plenty a time when this is over.”
Samuel leaned close to kiss her, but Harriet drew back. “Not here,” she said by way of excuse. “Get yourself some sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Moses,” he corrected himself with a chuckle. “I’ll lay my head here tonight. Later, it’ll be different.”
Harriet retraced her steps along the road. She strolled at a measured pace, but once she’d passed the army dock, she broke into a fast, hard walk. The macadam road beat her thick soles. She wanted to get away from Samuel Heyward as quickly as possible. Put distance between their mission in the morning and the image of a woman and three boys eating supper alone under those eaves.
Tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that would be different from what they expected, as he said. But no matter what happened, if Harriet made it back alive, she wouldn’t be the one who wrecked that home.
Harriet took an apron from the nail inside the door of the cookhouse and rolled it into a hard pillow. The humid air was blanket enough. She settled on the floor behind the worktable. Harriet closed her eyes, numb with fatigue, and was drifting toward sleep when Trouble emerged from the dark and nestled against her chest. She circled the cat with her arm to make a wall against the world and fell into a deep slumber.
In her dream, Samuel’s hand gently traced the outline of her breast until his fingertips rested lightly on her nipple, which he pinched as delicately as a gardener testing a peach. Harriet’s breath deepened, and she took in the warm smell of him, though she made no effort to assist his exploration. Instead, she waited, as patient as nature, allowing herself to experience what happened next. Wait, she told herself. Wait, and he would come to her, she thought as the sweet ache swelled. In the dream, his large hand traveled down her side, holding her entire hip between his thumb and fingers, until it slipped away, and she felt only the absence of fabric as he lifted her dress.
Harriet’s head tilted back as Samuel parted her legs—as she wanted him to—but the apron-roll suddenly gave way to the hard stone of the floor, and she jerked, startled awake by the jarring bump.
Samuel slid up next to her. “Baby,” he whispered in her ear, “Couldn’t stay away. I don’t want another night when we not together. Not one.”
Still half asleep, Harriet wrapped her arms around him. She shut her eyes against the world that allowed her no love and the war that might kill them both tomorrow. Emotion and desire overcame every resolve. Even if it would never be right, she wanted him. She would have him.