Chapter 6

They heard about the reward on the second day.

The safe house was a farm outside a small Tennessee town that had no particular distinction except that it sat at the intersection of two roads that the network used and had a root cellar that could hold six people if necessary and a farmer named Caleb Reese who had been doing this work for seven years with his wife Anna and their two sons who were old enough to understand what their parents did and young enough to believe completely that it was right.

Caleb came in from town on the second afternoon with flour and feed and the particular careful stillness of a man carrying information he hasn’t decided how to deliver yet. He set the flour on the kitchen table and looked at Johnny and Naomi sitting by the fire and said, “There’s a handbill.”

Johnny went still.

“How much?” he said.

“Five hundred dollars,” Caleb said. “For information leading to the return of a runaway slave girl answering to the name Naomi, approximately fifteen years of age, and the apprehension of one John Francis Brighton, age sixteen, wanted for the theft of property and the crime of—” He stopped. Looked at Naomi. “I won’t read the rest of it.”

“Read it,” Naomi said quietly.

Caleb looked at her for a moment. Then at the paper in his hand.

“Wanted for the crime of race mixing and the corruption of natural law,” he said. His voice was flat and careful and entirely without the opinion he clearly had about those words.

The fire crackled between them.

Johnny looked at the floor. Something moved through him that was anger and shame and the cold iron weight he’d felt at the checkpoint and something else underneath all of it that was new. Something that understood for the first time in a way that was physical rather than intellectual exactly what his father thought of what he’d done. What his world thought of it.

Corruption of natural law.

He looked up at Naomi.

She was looking at the fire with her face composed and still and her hands folded in her lap and her eyes carrying something that had been there before he’d ever met her. Something old and practiced and deeply acquainted with being defined by other people’s language.

She felt him looking.

She turned and met his eyes.

“Five hundred dollars,” she said. Almost to herself. “He always did know the price of everything.”

Johnny felt something crack open in his chest. Not breaking. Opening.

“Are we safe here?” he asked Caleb.

“For now,” Caleb said. “There’s a search party working the roads north. Two men. Hired. Your father’s money.” He folded the handbill and put it in his coat. “They’ll sweep through in a day or two and move on. We wait them out.”

“How long?”

“Three days. Maybe four.” He looked between them. “You stay inside. No movement. No lights after dark that can be seen from the road.” He paused. “Anna will bring food. You rest. You let the road come to you instead of going to it.”

He left them by the fire.

Three days.

The safe house was small and warm and entirely sufficient and by the second day it felt like the walls were breathing. Not closing in exactly. Just present. Reminding them that outside those walls two hired men were riding the roads with a handbill and five hundred reasons to look carefully at every face they passed.

Johnny read. Caleb had a small shelf of books and Johnny worked through them with the focused attention of a man who needs his mind occupied or it will occupy itself with things he can’t afford to dwell on.