Elm Creek Quilts [07] The Sugar Camp Quilt (20 page)

“My brother’s insistence on accuracy at last becomes clear,” said Lorena, a trifle dryly. “He could not leave a map or written directions at the sugar camp where a slavecatcher might discover them.”

Nor would written instructions have been useful to fugitive slaves who could not read. Dorothea thought of her uncle’s request for scraps of serviceable fabrics, of the mud he had wiped from his boots. He had wanted the quilt to seem old and worn, nothing so precious that it could not have been left behind in a sugarhouse.

Dorothea stroked the quilt and was suddenly struck by a profound sense of loss. Her uncle had concealed his brave secrets, unwilling to incriminate his family but also wary that they might expose him. What an unnecessary effort his secrecy had been. The Grangers were outspoken in their views, but they were not fools. They would have been a great help to him, had they but known. He had underestimated his family, and it may have cost him his life. Dorothea could have assisted him on the night of the school exhibition. She could have helped him think of a plausible excuse for crossing on the ferry. If only Uncle Jacob had trusted her, he would not have been alone on Mr. Liggett’s land when the apoplexy befell him.

But he had not been alone. “What became of the runaway who was with Uncle Jacob on the night he died?”

From Mr. Wright’s expression, she knew he had been expecting the question—and dreading it. “I figure he continued on north, on horseback.”

“Of course. What other choice had he?” said Lorena briskly. “He could not have done anything for my brother in any event.”

“I hope he at least tried,” said Robert.

He spoke quietly, but there was an odd note of contempt in his voice that drew Dorothea’s attention away from the quilt.

“Robert,” said Lorena steadily. “There is no reason to believe that this unfortunate fugitive killed my brother for his horse. He had no need. Jacob was transporting him in greater safety than if he attempted to go alone.”

“I’m not saying he killed him,” said Robert, “but perhaps he left him to die.”

“The runaway didn’t know the way to the next station,” Mr. Wright reminded him. “He needed Jacob.”

“All he needed to know was how to get to the sugar camp. If he gave the horse her lead, she would have taken him right past it on the way to the barn. Once the runaway saw the quilt, he would have known where to go.”

Lorena reached out and stroked his arm. “You heard what Mr. Donne said. My brother almost certainly died instantly. There was no sign of any struggle, any suffering. Can you imagine how terrified the runaway must have been? Would you have expected him to stay rather than flee for safety? Why? Out of respect for the deceased, out of concern for our sensibilities?”

“Sam,” said Mr. Wright. His face was stone. “His name is Sam. This runaway is a man. He has a name. He is not some killer on the run. He is fleeing
for
justice, not from it.”

Robert looked away. “We’ll never know that, will we?”

Dorothea studied the quilt. “It may be possible.” She addressed Mr. Wright. “You said you do not know where the signs in this quilt are meant to lead?”

He shook his head. “It’s better that I don’t know.”

“One of us must find out.” She plunged ahead before her parents could object. “One of us must know where the next station lies if we mean to continue Uncle Jacob’s work. We do mean to continue?”

Mr. Wright tensed almost imperceptibly, but only Dorothea saw it. Her parents were looking at each other, debating their decision without saying a word. A moment later they turned back to Dorothea and Mr. Wright and nodded. “Of course,” said Lorena. “We would have helped before if your uncle had allowed.”

“You should think carefully before you decide,” cautioned Mr. Wright, though his relief was evident. “There are laws against helping runaways, and folks like Liggett who would give you up in a heartbeat.”

Dorothea thought of how Uncle Jacob had disparaged Mr. Schultz for following his better nature. “I am not afraid,” she said, emboldened by her disappointment that Uncle Jacob had not shown more faith in them. “Were we not already exposed to prosecution by virtue of my uncle’s actions? Had he been detected, who would have believed that we had not known?”

“No one would have considered a girl your age complicit in any crime, Dorothea,” said her father. He nodded to Mr. Wright. “I will figure out the riddle of this quilt tonight. Tomorrow morning, I will follow wherever it leads.”

“No, Father,” said Dorothea. “I should do it.”

They regarded her with surprise. “It is good that you want to help,” said her mother, “but you are too young. It is too dangerous.”

“I am a grown woman and I know the Elm Creek Valley better than anyone.” Only Jonathan knew the forest and fields so well, and if he were there, Dorothea knew he would insist upon going instead of her parents, who never left the well-traveled roads. “It is as Father said: No one would suspect me. That is why, like Uncle Jacob, I should be the one to do this. I know I can.”

They looked doubtful, even fearful. She thought they would forbid it outright. Instead they sent her from the room to begin supper while they discussed it. By the time she called them to the table, they had decided.

Dorothea would follow the route depicted in the Sugar Camp Quilt to discover where it lay and to meet the stationmaster there. He and Mr. Wright would advise them how to proceed. The Grangers knew little of the operations of the Underground Railroad, but they would learn. The sugar camp would remain a haven for runaways. There was never really any question of doing otherwise.

Together the Grangers would continue the work Uncle Jacob had begun, the work he had not trusted them to share.

S
NOW FELL OVERNIGHT
, BUT the next morning dawned clear and brisk. Dorothea set out after completing her chores, bundled warmly against the cold. Her breath ghosted through her muffler in faint white puffs as she broke a trail to the sugar camp, the quilt under one arm. She and her father had begun studying it as soon as Mr. Wright had departed the day before, and they had stayed up late into the evening, uncertain how to decipher the patchwork symbols. Lorena had searched through Uncle Jacob’s belongings for a journal, letters, anything that might explain the meaning of the quilt’s design. Mr. Wright had warned them this would be a wasted effort, for like any good stationmaster, Uncle Jacob knew better than to put his secrets in writing. Some might consider even the wordless symbols of the Sugar Camp Quilt too great a risk. Sure enough, Lorena’s search turned up nothing. Even the sketches Uncle Jacob had made for Dorothea were gone.

Eventually the Grangers concluded that the designs had so many potential meanings the quilt was, perhaps intentionally, incomprehensible to anyone who could not see their actual counterparts. Since Dorothea was fairly confident she understood the first clue, she decided to proceed and hope she recognized the other landmarks when she encountered them.

She committed the patterns to memory and draped the quilt over the bench as she had seen it the night Uncle Jacob went missing. On the day of his burial, she had found it on the ground and had assumed she had knocked it down in her haste, but gazing at it now, she wondered if the runaway named Sam had done so. Perhaps her father was right and he had let the horse lead him there before continuing north. Perhaps her father was right about Sam in other matters.

Dorothea shook off the thought and focused on the five unusual blocks Uncle Jacob had sketched. The star in the center of the quilt, with its longest point directed to the upper left corner, had seemed off-kilter and strange to her before, but now that she understood the quilt’s true purpose, the design resembled a compass rose pointing to the northwest. Since the Four Brothers were depicted in the upper left corner of the outermost border of Delectable Mountains blocks, and since the real mountains lay northwest of the farm, Dorothea surmised that the fugitives were supposed to bear in that direction.

She studied the quilt one last time and left it behind in the sugar camp, regretting the necessity. She would have liked to bring it along in case she had neglected an important detail in the patterns, but she could not afford to be seen using the quilt as a map. Uncle Jacob’s compass was a reassuring weight in her pocket as she made her way through the maple grove, her footsteps muffled by the thin layer of snow covering the fallen leaves. Her father had insisted she take the compass, though she had argued she probably would not need one, since the fugitives did not and had to be able to follow the quilt regardless. Now she was glad he had insisted.

At the last moment her father had also urged her to travel on horseback rather than walk. Mr. Wright had told them stations were ideally no more than ten miles apart, a long day’s walk even in fair weather. Dorothea had been tempted, but Uncle Jacob would have assumed the runaways would travel on foot. The landmarks might be so subtle that she would miss them if she rode. So she packed food and dry stockings in her coat pockets, hoped the stationmaster would allow her to spend the night by his fire, and prayed the journey would not be long.

An old worm fence marked the boundary between Uncle Jacob’s land and his neighbor’s, zigzagging off in both directions and disappearing into the trees. Dorothea lifted her skirts and climbed over it, glancing up through the bare-limbed trees for the position of the sky to be sure she still headed northwest. She considered checking the compass when, with a sudden flash of insight, she halted and peered over her shoulder at the fence. It resembled a crooked ladder on its side, or the quilt block she had inadvertently encouraged her uncle to redraft.

She hesitated, uncertain. The fence did seem to run almost due north, the logical direction for a runaway slave to go, but if she were mistaken, she could find herself wandering far from the correct route until nightfall with no shelter from the cold. “Any wrong choice will have the same consequences,” she said aloud. The air seemed colder when she stood still, so she approached the fence and rested her hand upon it. She had to keep moving; she had to choose.

The crooked ladder block lay in the ring of blocks encircling the central compass rose. If the center indicated the beginning of the route, the crooked ladder clue, which could indeed depict a worm fence, would be the second clue, the first landmark.

Lacking any reason to choose otherwise and unable to conceive of anything that would resemble Uncle Jacob’s sketch more than the fence, Dorothea decided to follow it north. She quickly dismissed the troubling thought that the fence snaked off to the south as well as to the north, and that even if she had found the right landmark, she might be traveling in the wrong direction.

Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the maple grove at the bottom of a low slope that rose to the west. She followed the fence to the top, from where she looked out over acres of old cornstalks sticking up through the snow. A house, barn, and three smaller outbuildings sat at the far edge of the fields. Dorothea searched her memory for the name of the family. “Wheeler,” she murmured. They had eleven children and had sent only the youngest boys to her school. She was not sure how they would feel about her trespassing on their land, or what excuse she might invent for her presence there.

Walking would be easier on the open ground on the Wheelers’ side of the fence, but she quickly climbed back to the eastern side and concealed herself in the woods. She could still glimpse the fence through the tree trunks as she made her way north, but she feared she might miss the next landmark entirely. The next concentric square of Delectable Mountains blocks contained a patch that resembled a narrow braid stretching from left to right on a slight angle. She assumed that was the next block pattern to interpret since it followed the sequence moving outward from the center.

Her dress caught on a tree branch; she tried to pull free but stopped at the sound of fabric tearing. She stopped to untangle herself, wishing Uncle Jacob had been more explicit despite the need for secrecy. It was a wonder Uncle Jacob’s runaways had not given up and returned to the sugar camp for better directions.

She continued, stumbling through the underbrush with the worm fence six paces to her left. She passed the Wheelers’ house and barn. In the distance, she heard a dog bark, but she did not see it nor any sign of the home’s inhabitants, save a thin trace of smoke curling from the chimney.

The corner post of the fence appeared. Dorothea paused to catch her breath, regarding it with misgivings. The fence continued west along the road directly in front of the Wheeler farm. Anyone walking alongside it could easily be spotted from the house or barn.