men went through the tunnel from either end to check the state of its
legs, since if one was broken they would have to shoot the creature. Then they could have dismembered it as needed and
pulled it underground and filled in the hole in the road so as to conceal it. But the legs were sound.
Excavating around the horse would only open more tunnel, but they decided that they had no other choice than to make a big enough excavation to allow them to walk the horse up out
of that hole. In the meantime, there it was, sobering up, nickering and switching its tail.
So they decided to lift a shed off
what it had for a foundation and set it down over the horse there in the middle of the road.
It was a small shed, so it had to be set over the horse at a diagonal, the length of the horse being, in effect, the hypotenuse of two right triangles.
All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse ofjudgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish
choices are possible. Someone noticed that the horse's tail was lying out on the road, so they had to put a child through the shed window to gather it in.
As it happened, there was a young Negro fellow in the settlement at that time, the first fugitive to make his way there.
60
This made the people feel serious and purposeful, and it also heightened their embarrassment about the matter of the
horse. The young man, who stayed in the dry-goods store unless there was some ground for alarm, saw and heard everything. And it was pretty obvious how much he wanted to laugh. He was just lolling and languishing with the effort it cost him not to do it. He avoided their eyes, and he bit his lips almost raw. When the shed had been walked down to the road, and just as it was being set crosswise over the horse, there came from the store one harsh, painful, unwilled whoop of laughter. It was at that point they bethought themselves of the fact
that the fellow might be feeling some justifiable alarm having to do with the question of their good sense. And indeed it was that very night he did escape, so to speak, and headed north on his own, no doubt rightly concluding that so much had happened to make the region suspect that he had best get some distance from it.
When they realized what had happened, a couple of the
men rode after him on the two fairly serviceable horses that had not been traded for the horse in the hole (they wanted to be sure the stranger got far enough away not to trouble coming back, so it was their best horse they had given him). In any case, they hoped to overtake the fugitive in order to provide him with some food and clothes and direct him to the next abolitionist settlement, but for two days he eluded them. Then, when they had stopped for the night and were lying down to sleep, he stepped out of the dark and said, 'I thank y'all kindly, but I think I best do this on my own.' They handed him the bundle they had brought for him and he stepped back into the dark and said,
'Y'all get that horse out yet?' and laughed a little, and that was the last they heard of him.
They did dig a sloping trench they could walk the horse up, so that worked out well enough. But then they had to deal with 6 1
the fact that a tunnel is a hard thing to be rid of. They had taken pains, when they were digging it, to scatter the dirt they removed as widely as possible, to conceal the excavation, and there was of course no way to reverse that process. And while they had made the tunnel secretly and at leisure,, they were obliged to unmake it openly and in haste. The edges around the hole kept crumbling, falling in, exposing more of it every day. (They had removed that shed, prudently, since a shed in a hole in the middle of the road would be no easier to account for than a horse.) The quickest solution would have been to collapse the tunnel altogether and fill it in from the top, but then the path it made from the store to the stables would have been visible immediately and indefinitely. So they chose a hill to level and began carting earth into the tunnel day and night, having placed a lookout on the roof of the dry-goods store to signal the approach of strangers. If asked, they would say they were constructing terraces, as in a certain book the preacher had which illustrated the customs of the Orient. I suppose that was the best they could do in the circumstances.
These were hardworking people, but there is simply no way in the world to pack soil from the side, or in any wise to pack it and settle it as firmly as rain and snow and heat have done in
the years since the world began. That is to say, with all their hard work to undo all the hard work they had done, with the
first good rain the road sagged from one end of that tunnel to the other. Then they began filling it from the top, having no other choice and nothing at all to lose. And still it sagged as often as there was a good rain.
So when the winter finally came and there was a hard
freeze and snow, they pried up the few buildings they had and set them on planks and hitched their horses to them and moved the town, such as it was, half a mile down the road. They had to pry up their grave markers to hide where the 62
town had been, and that was a sad thing, though there weren't more than three or four.
The tunnel became a kind of creek bed, a freshet in the spring, with nice grassy banks and flowers that had run wild from the old gardens. People who didn't know better would picnic beside it, spreading their blankets and baskets over those poor, forgotten graves, which was, on balance, a pleasant thing.
You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was
in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well,
but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when
