The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5
They were four days into Tennessee when they met the first real trouble.
Johnny had known it was coming. Moses had told them before he left and Thomas Marsh had confirmed it in his quiet specific way at the kitchen table — Tennessee was not South Carolina. The Quaker communities were thinner on the ground and the slave catching operations were thicker and the roads between safe houses were longer and less forgiving of mistakes.
Ezra Cole had said the same thing when they’d arrived at his farm outside Knoxville on a cold November night with their horses blowing steam in the dark yard and their bodies carrying the particular dense tiredness of people who had been alert for too many consecutive hours.
Cole was sixty years old and built like a man who had spent those sixty years doing exactly what his body was designed for. He had a white beard and a Bible on his kitchen table and a rifle above the fireplace that he maintained with the same care he gave the Bible which told you everything you needed to know about Ezra Cole’s theology. He’d looked at them both with eyes the color of creek water in winter and said welcome and meant it and fed them and put them in a room and told them to sleep.
They’d slept for twelve hours.
In the morning Cole had sat them down and told them about Tennessee the way a doctor tells a patient about a difficult surgery. Directly. Without softening it.
“There’s a checkpoint,” he said. “Twenty miles north. State road. You can’t go around it without adding four days through mountain terrain in November which I don’t recommend. You go through it.” He looked at Johnny. “You’ve got the papers. You’ve got the story. You’re James Carter, free born in Pennsylvania, traveling north with your wife to visit family in Ohio. You’ve made this trip twice before. You know the road. You’re not nervous because you have no reason to be nervous.” He paused. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
Cole looked at him steadily. “The man running that checkpoint is named Briggs. He’s not stupid. He’s been doing this for nine years and he knows what nervous looks like and he knows what rehearsed looks like and he knows what a runaway situation smells like.” He paused. “He also responds to authority. To a certain kind of white man who expects to be believed and doesn’t explain himself.” Cole’s eyes were direct and completely without apology. “You’re going to have to be that man.”
Johnny understood what Cole was telling him. He was going to have to be his father.
The thought sat in his stomach like cold iron.
“I can do it,” he said.
Cole looked at Naomi. “You say as little as possible. Eyes mostly down. Let him do the talking. If Briggs addresses you directly you answer simply and quietly and you look at your husband before you answer like a wife checking in.” He paused. “I know what I’m asking you to perform.”
Naomi looked at this old man across the kitchen table with his creek water eyes and his Bible and his rifle and said, “I’ve been performing exactly that my entire life. The difference is this time I choose to.”
Cole nodded slowly. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
They reached the checkpoint on a grey Tuesday morning with a thin cold rain coming down that turned the road to mud and made the trees on both sides look like they were apologizing for something.
There were two men. One sitting inside a rough wooden shelter out of the rain. One standing in the road with his coat collar up and his hat pulled low and the particular expression of a man who has been cold and wet for several hours and is taking it personally.
That was Briggs.
He was perhaps fifty, thick through the chest, with a face that had made a lot of assessments over a lot of years and was making one now as Johnny and Naomi came down the road toward him at a steady unhurried pace that Johnny had calibrated carefully to communicate exactly the right amount of nothing.
Briggs raised his hand. “Hold up.”
Johnny held up. He looked down at Briggs from the saddle with an expression he’d borrowed from his father — not arrogant exactly, just settled, the expression of a man who stops for checkpoints because he has nothing to hide and not for any other reason.
“Morning,” he said. Pleasantly. Like a man with somewhere to be who doesn’t mind a brief delay.
Briggs looked at him. Then at Naomi. Then back at Johnny.
“Papers,” he said.
Johnny produced them without hurry. Reached inside his coat, found the document, handed it down. Briggs took it and read it with the slow thoroughness of a man who had learned to read slowly because rushing had cost him once and he hadn’t forgotten.
Johnny waited. He felt the rain on his hat and the cold in his hands and Naomi still and close beside him and underneath all of it the cold iron weight in his stomach that he was not going to show to this man under any circumstances.
He thought about his father at the parlor table with his bourbon and his ledgers. The way Robert Morgan Brighton occupied space. The absolute unquestioned certainty that the world was correctly arranged around his comfort and convenience. The voice that never asked and always told.
He borrowed it. He hated himself for borrowing it. He borrowed it anyway.
“We’ve made this trip twice before,” Johnny said, in a tone that was offering information rather than explaining himself. “Family in Ohio. The roads are worse than last time.”
Briggs looked up from the papers. “Pennsylvania born?”
“That’s right.”
“Long way from home.”
“Family’s a long way from home,” Johnny said pleasantly. The same tone. Unhurried. Certain.
Briggs looked at Naomi. “This your wife?”
“Yes,” Johnny said. Before Naomi could answer. The way a man answers for his wife because it doesn’t occur to him not to.
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