Fire on the Mountain Read Online Free Page B

at one stroke, and not as “Kansas” or “Osawatomie” Brown but as Shenandoah Brown. The railroad man told how the hotel had been torched and in the confusion Brown and his men had retreated across the Shenandoah into the Loudon Heights, which is what we called the Blue Ridge there. They had fast-firing breech-loading Sharps rifles. Once in the laurel thickets, who would follow them? “Not the Virginny milisshy,” the soldier said, laughing. “They’re at the tavern a-soaking their wounds in gov’mint whiskey.” I will attempt no more dialect. The railroad man seemed to take the soldier’s words for an insult and sulked and spat, wordless from there on. The soldier’s cut was not altogether true, anyway, I found out later: four of the “Virginias” had been killed in the fighting before falling back, all upon one another. I felt a deep, harmonious excitement stealing over me, though I did not at that time truly understand the events or what they meant. Who did, Merican or n’African?
    Deihl was in a hurry to get back to Charles Town, but he was a man of steady habits and so we had to stop at the Shenandoah Tavern, as usual. I stayed with the wagon. I usually took the chance when Deihl was in the tavern to poke around Harper’s Ferry, but this day I felt I should stay with the tack; I have noticed in my sixty some odd years that in times of civil unrest even the most timid acquire a sudden ability to steal. Sees Her was still prancy and whickery, smelling abolition or blood or smoke, or whatever it was that agitated him. The steep and usually sleepy streets of Harper’s Ferry were filled, and everybody seemed confused. Stranded train passengers were wandering around with slaves dragging their luggage behind them. I got off the wagon once, just to stretch, and a man with a Carolina accent tried to hand me his carpetbag to carry; after that I stayed glued to the wagon seat. Those Deep South types thought every black face belonged to them. Sitting alone in the wagon, I was the only African in sight that wasn’t hauling some white person’s luggage around and I felt several curious looks, as though I were to blame for all the smoke and ashes (I hadn’t yet seen any blood); perhaps it was my imagination, perhaps not. At first I shrank; then I sat up straight, experiencing fully for the first time that mingled sense of pride and terror that makes war such a favorite of men.
    I saw an Irish boy I knew and hailed him, but he ran; I saw another boy I hardly knew and didn’t like, and he stopped; he was black like me. This was my second lesson about war. It trues up the lines. The boy stopped at the wagon and in a conspiratorial whisper told me that two hundred “abs” had tried to burn the town and had shot the mayor dead. He sounded simultaneously shocked, scared, and boastful. Four of the raiders were buried in a common grave down on the river, he said; he’d tried to go down and see the bodies, but the soldiers were “thicker than flies.” They weren’t really soldiers anyhow, just Virginias, he said, with leftover Hall’s pattern muskets from the Mexican War. The “abs” all had Kansas buffalo guns that would blow a man in half. Deihl came out and we headed home for Charles Town, six miles across the Valley. As usual when he had been at the tavern, Deihl was more talkative, which meant that he said about four words a mile. But I learned from him that rumors were flying: the “niggers” had all run away; the “niggers” had all joined Brown; the “niggers” were coming down from the mountain as soon as dark fell, with spears as tall as church steeples. In fact, later that week a wagonload of spears was found abandoned. Brown, or some of his backers, had obviously figured the slaves wouldn’t know how to use rifles. Aaron Stevens, a military man and one of Brown’s commanders (after Kagi and Green), and I met again thirty years later, in Ireland, in ‘89, when I was chief surgeon at the Medical