Chapter 8

Ohio was kind to them for exactly four days.

Not kind the way Tabor would be kind. Not the deep settled kindness of a community that had decided who it was and what it stood for and acted accordingly without exception. Ohio kind was more provisional than that. More careful. A state that had made its choice on paper and was still working out what that choice meant in practice when the choice showed up cold and wet on your doorstep at three in the morning needing shelter.

But it was kind enough.

Thomas Webb was a tall quiet man who moved through his own county like a man who knew exactly which shadows to use and had been using them long enough that it had become instinct. He took them from the river bank through three miles of frozen Ohio bottomland to a farmhouse that sat back from the road behind a stand of bare sycamores and knocked four times on the back door in a pattern that was not three soft one hard but had the same quality of language. The same sense of a code that meant something specific to the people who knew it.

The door opened.

Warmth came out of it like a living thing.

The woman who opened it was perhaps thirty, plain dressed, with a lamp held low and eyes that took in Johnny and Naomi with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this before and knew that efficiency was its own form of kindness.

“Come in,” she said. “Quickly.”

They came in.

The house smelled of woodsmoke and something cooking that had no business smelling that good at three in the morning but did anyway. Johnny stood in the warmth of the kitchen and felt the cold begin to release its grip on him degree by degree and felt the specific gratitude of a body that has been asking for warmth for hours and is finally receiving it.

Naomi stood beside him and said nothing and looked at the fire in the kitchen hearth with an expression he recognized.

She was fixing it in her memory. The way she fixed all of them. The woman at the door. The lamp held low. The warmth coming out like a living thing.

Carrying them to Iowa.

The woman’s name was Hannah Porter. Her husband Isaiah was already up, because men who do this work learn to sleep light and wake complete, and he was at the table with his hands around a cup looking at Johnny and Naomi with the assessing eyes of someone calculating risk and finding it acceptable.

“How far back?” he said to Thomas Webb.

“Two men on the Kentucky bank,” Webb said. “They’ll know the crossing failed at Gideon’s point by morning. They’ll start looking for alternate crossings.” He paused. “They’re good. Whoever hired them hired well.”

Isaiah nodded slowly. “How long do we have?”

“A day. Maybe two before they work out the western crossing point.” Webb looked at Johnny. “You need to move tomorrow night. I know that’s not much rest.”

“We’ll be ready,” Johnny said.

Naomi said nothing. But he felt her nod beside him.

Hannah Porter put food on the table without being asked and they ate and said little and when the eating was done she showed them to a room at the back of the house and told them to sleep and they lay down still wearing most of their clothes against the possibility of needing to move fast and Johnny put his arms around Naomi and she settled against him and was asleep in minutes.

He lay awake a little longer.

Listening to Ohio.

It sounded different from Tennessee. Flatter. More open. The wind had more room to move and it used that room with a freedom that Georgia wind never had, hemmed in as it was by the plantation trees and the weight of everything that happened under them.

He thought about the two men on the Kentucky bank.

Good. Whoever hired them hired well.

His father’s money. His father’s reach extending north across the river into free territory because the Fugitive Act had given it the legal right to do exactly that. Because Robert Morgan Brighton had decided that five hundred dollars was a reasonable price for the return of his property and the punishment of his son.

His property.

Johnny lay in the dark of Hannah Porter’s back room and felt the familiar cold iron weight of that phrase and then felt something else underneath it. Something that had been growing since Georgia and was considerably larger now than it had been when they started.