Across a Border

By Bill Pate

When successful musician and producer Bobby Sawyer's earliest musical mentor falls terminally ill, Bobby returns to the place where they grew up to comfort his friend and say farewell. Through another of their original partners, Bobby learns of an ancient ritual that he can employ to extend his dying friend's life; what he doesn't know is that choosing to do so will have a dramatic impact upon his own life and career.

Part historical fiction, part pop music chronology, and all supernatural spellbinding mystery, Across a Border is the rare first novel that will make you wonder, smile, and even bring back favorite old songs as you accompany its characters from their beginnings - in some cases, all the way back to the early days of the Underground Railroad - into the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350959031

Bill Pate

Bill Pate is a retired professional musician whose career included performing, writing, arranging, and teaching music. Pate has created an award-winning educational program that entertained tens of thousands of students and their families across the eastern United States. His career culminated with the implementation of a successful music therapy program for one of the country's leading drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers. "Across a Border" is his debut novel.

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Cover of Across a Border by Bill Pate

Across a Border

©2024 Bill Pate

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

print ISBN: 979-8-35095-902-4

ebook ISBN: 979-8-35095-903-1

To Maggie -

My heart and soul

For fifty wonderful years

Contents

SEPTEMBER 1851

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

BOOK FOUR

EPILOGUE

SEPTEMBER 1851

It wasn’t just a desperate wish anymore: Tatum found himself believing that they were going to make it.

After weeks of running and hiding; sleeping fitfully in bug-ridden farm fields during sweltering afternoons while one of them kept watch from beneath a shady tree, and then trying to keep silent while wading along along banks of cold rivers and streams at night, Tatum and his companions had finally reached the mouth of the Beaver River, just a night’s walk inside Pennsylvania’s western border.

We truly gon’ get there! Tatum marveled. Four of us run away from Barker Dawson, and now all four of us come here - almost safe.

Tatum’s wife Zeeb, her sister Bara, and Bara’s husband, Polly, all swore up and down that they owed their good fortune to some face in the clouds that they called Jesus Christ, but Tatum knew better. The members of their party were beneficiaries of cunning and stealth, lots of luck, and nothing more. To him, the whole idea of some white devils’ god looking out for them while they ran away from the very slaver whose own wife tried to make believers out of them was just foolish. The little Haitian runaway had kept his jaw set and his back turned whenever his companions took to whispering their prayers and singsongs, but Tatum could sense that Zeeb was torn.

He was certain that beneath her thin veneer of recently-painted-on Christian faith, Zeeb knew the truth: this white Jesus lived inside a picture frame on Missa Dawson’s wall and cared nothing for fugitive slaves.

Not Polly, though. Polly called himself Man-of-God and he pronounced the title as if it was something that could make the dogs lose their scent and cause buckshot from white mens’ rifles to scatter harmlessly all around them.

Jesus delivered us here, Polly uttered hoarsely in his too-loud whisper. Praise Jesus!

The women murmured their assent to his statement, but Tatum remained facing away from them. He stood motionless and silent, gazing beyond the mouth of the river they’d been working to reach since first hearing of it over a week earlier. Just to the east of where the Beaver River flowed into the much larger Ohio, Tatum could sense - more than see - the thin band of indigo forming on the horizon.

We need find some place fo’ bed down, he murmured.

He would have liked nothing more than to finish their mission now, but Tatum and his companions had been warned: although safety lay just four miles up the Beaver River in the industrial town of New Brighton, access to the Quaker families there who would help them required careful navigation past the communities of Bridgewater (where they now stood) and Fairport (where they’d been instructed to cross over to). Both communities, they were warned, were frequented by bounty hunters. Many residents of both little towns were rumored to be informants eager to catch fugitive slaves and hold them for ransom. Tatum could smell a fire still smoldering just up the promontory from where they stood on the south side of the smaller river. He’d also heard a couple of dogs barking farther inland; even though he was certain that they were too far away to be seen or heard - and, with their feet safely in the cold water, to be tracked - they were also in closer proximity to a larger concentration of white civilization than they had been at any previous time since leaving the hell of Dawson’s ramshackle plantation. This was not the time to become reckless.

Their party had crossed the Ohio River two weeks earlier, making landfall into the mostly slavery-free state of Ohio. They first came ashore at Grape Island, an outcropping of rich river silt swarming with tangled vines thicker than a man’s ankle, just upriver from Marietta. A kindly white farmer and his wife were the sole inhabitants of the two-acre island. The couple put Tatum and his relatives up for two nights, feeding them and plying them with homemade wine, providing them with shelter and rest, and patching up their wounds. Zeeb and Bara both had multiple infected insect bites; one of Polly’s eyes was swollen nearly shut as a result of a collision with a mulberry branch; and all three suffered from issues with their feet. Traveling barefoot, even Tatum had cuts and bruises and two of Bara’s toes were swollen and apparently broken. Aside from his feet, Tatum was the only one among them to make the weeks-long flight from Welch, Virginia, mostly unscathed.

The couple on Grape Island confirmed the existence of what up until then had only been a hopeful rumor: there was, in fact, something that was now being referred to as an Underground Railroad - a network of abolitionists who could assist fugitive slaves in getting all the way to Lake Erie, over four hundred miles to the north from where they had escaped, and then across the water into Canada and true freedom.

The way this man told it, even though they were barely halfway through their journey, they were almost as good as there now that they’d reached Ohio - so long as they remained cautious. There was an even bigger catch, though: the customary route due north from where they now rested had become congested with refugees. Almost all of the Underground Railroad stops along the canals and footpaths of Ohio’s Western Reserve featured birds in cages on their front porches, signaling that the dwellings were already occupied by fugitives.

The man told them of his cousin, a German emigrant who had settled in the village of Fairport, Pennsylvania, and earned his living mining for clay and firing bricks. The cousin had visited Grape Island just a few weeks earlier spreading word of an alternate route on the Freedom Trail that ran to the northeast through Pennsylvania. He said that New Brighton, a town settled by Quaker industrialists, was a welcoming haven for escaped slaves. The whole community there had become part of a network who would smuggle them in canal boats all the way north to the Great Lakes. It was not lost on Polly and the women that these Quakers were devout followers of Christianity.

Reinhold said iffin’ we ever come across such as youns, we was to send you his way, said the man. He says there’s too many pryin’ eyes in his town for him to put anyone up, but iffin’ youns kin find the straw bin at his brickyard, ye’s welcome to lay out a day there before the final leg of your trip.

Along with that invitation came specific instructions for precisely locating a safe house. They were told that they would cross countless creeks and runs feeding the Ohio River from the north, but the travelers were instructed to gauge their progress by three larger tributaries in Ohio: Sunfish Creek at Clarington on what should transpire to be the fourth night of their trek; Short Creek just beyond Martin’s Ferry on the seventh night, and; Yellow Creek near Wellsville on their ninth. Zeeb had learned to count all the way into four figures, so she was charged with the responsibility of knowing when they reached Little Beaver Creek, which they would cross on the tenth night. That would mark their passage into Pennsylvania.

From there, if they pressed hard, it would be just one more night’s journey to the Beaver River.

Ye’ll know it when ye sees it, the man told them. "Reiny says it’s a splendid little river, full of fish and otters and muskrats, but he says don’t dawdle there. Get across to the north bank any way youns can under cover of darkness, and then skedaddle right past town ‘til you get to Fosburg Run. He says ye’ll know it by its waterfall. Climb right up there, walk another quarter mile or so and ye’ll see his brickyard. Right tidy little place from the sound of it.

Ye can spend a day sleepin’ in his hay crib if ye like, but seems to me ye’ll do better to keep the North Star over yer right shoulder and press on overland. In about a mile, ye’ll come to McKinley Run: more waterfalls and down over the hill - practically to the exact same place where ye crossed the Beaver River in the first place, but just a mile up. Reinhold says it makes all the difference in the world, though; he says that little section of riverbank that you’ll get to bypass by takin’ all this trouble is a godforsaken swamp called Boalsville. Not much more than a few shacks and a boatyard, but there’s also a tavern there what’s always got a bountyman or two put up. The Quakers ye all are seekin’ out ain’t afraid to do whatever they thinks is right, but they only bear their arms in their own town. The shitheels who want to capture you and drag ye back to your Masters stay holed up in Boalsville. Reiny says they’s another tavern just alike ‘cross the river in a place called Sharon - just above Bridgewater - so you don’t dare risk tryin’ to go upriver that way, neither. You’ll be wise to trouble yerselves by takin’ his overland route. It might cost youns an extry few hours, but it won’t cost ye yer freedom, ayuh!

The grizzled man stopped talking and stared at the four of them. Beside him, his wife removed the pipe from between her pursed lips, spat, and then spoke for the first time.

"What Reiny actually said,’’ she rasped, glaring at her husband, was, ‘The devil lives in Boalsville, and his brother’s acrosst the river in Sharon. The stem of her pipe went back between her few remaining teeth, and she resumed her silence as she stared off across her vineyards

"I reckon maybe them was his precise words, chuckled the man. There was a twinkle in his eye as he fondly regarded the stoic, nearly-toothless woman. From there on, though, it sounds pretty simple. Reiny says you’ll find Blockhouse Run in just about another half-mile. He says it’s big enough to take a canoe up iffin’ ye had one. Just follow it until it bends and then keep your eyes peeled on the hillside up to your left: ye’ll be lookin’ for a light behind a pane of red-stained glass. You’ll need to cross a big open field and climb up the hillside to the back door, but Reiny swears you’re safe once you’re in New Brighton."

The argument began the moment Polly ceased his testifying, and Tatum turned back around to face them. They were ankle-deep in the larger river just below the Stone’s Point boatyard which would soon become active with workers. Crossing the five-hundred-foot width of the Beaver River now and proceeding up the bank of the Ohio in search of the waterfall was out of the question. A covered bridge stood just a few hundred yards away, connecting Bridgewater to Fairport, but Tatum could plainly see a tollkeeper slumped on a stool beneath the flame of a trimmed sconce. The man appeared to be asleep, but it was unlikely that they’d be able to sneak past him. Their only way across the Beaver River would be to swim, but Tatum knew that this final leg of this portion of their journey would need to wait until night fell again - a seemingly interminable fifteen hours away.

We need find some place fo’ bed down, he repeated.

Tatum had just begun to stride back downriver toward thickets of fragrant blackberry brambles they had passed only moments before - uncomfortable for sleeping, perhaps, but perfect for hiding - when Polly reached out and grabbed him by his shoulder.

Polly was over a head taller than any of them. Tatum, in fact, was barely taller than the women, but had been the undisputed leader of their party up to this moment. His eyes flared as he pulled back from Polly.

Nah this time, said the larger man. "We too close to freedom to wait any day more. We go now - and we go that way."

Tatum couldn’t believe his eyes or ears. Polly was pointing directly up the Beaver River, past the settlements of Boalsville and Sharon - places they’d been warned to stay out of; places that Tatum could now plainly see, even in the pre-dawn gloom, were populated by countless white settlers.

You’ll kill us all, Tatum whispered. White man tell us how to go, and to stay ‘way from the taverns on them banks.

White man a liar, growled Polly, making no effort to conceal his voice with whispers. "White man send you straight to his cousin - and his cousin take you straight back to Marse Dawson.

You do it your way, he continued, his eyes shifting to regard Zeeb for the first time, but me an’ yo sister go now.

Zeeb’s eyes darted nervously between Bara’s husband and her own. Tatum could see that she was also impatient to finish this leg of their journey. He calmly reached out and took her hand.

We’ll wait, he said. He could hear Zeeb’s disappointed sigh and felt the nearly imperceptible slump of her shoulders. He gently laced his fingers through hers as he began to trudge onto the bank toward the foliage cascading down the hillside.

Hide with us - just one more day, he murmured without turning around. Must be your Jesus would say it so - if you listen past the sound of your own voice.

Mock me and mock the Lord, replied Polly in a plain and angry voice. To Tatum, the voice was deafening. He couldn’t believe Polly’s arrogance; it was almost as if he wanted them to be discovered.

Tatum would’ve been dumbfounded to know that Polly intended to swim against the current along the shore until he reached McKinley Run. Polly reasoned that in the pre-dawn gloaming, his and Bara’s heads would resemble nothing more than a pair of muskrats making their way upriver.

Tatum would’ve been further amazed to know that less than ninety minutes later, while he and Zeeb attempted fitful daylight sleep at an almost-upright angle amidst thorny canes in their hillside hiding place, Polly and Bara would brazenly cross an open field in the full daylight and knock on the back door of Underground Railroad conductor William P. Townsend’s palatial new mansion. The red glow of an oil lamp behind a stained piece of glass had been visible even against the glare of the rising sun. One of Townsend’s servants - a man of African heritage, just like them, but dressed in splendid butler’s garb - greeted them warmly without so much as a furtive glance over their heads to see if they’d been followed. He ushered them directly into the kitchen of the massive brick and stone home, sat them at a table, and fed them. Neither of them had ever been served a meal inside a white man’s house.

When their journey began, Tatum had been the only one of the four able to swim; it was not a skill to which any of the others had given even a cursory thought. Running was their mode of conveyance. They covered over forty miles of rocky, thickly forested mountain sides over the first two and a half days of their escape, running almost non-stop the entire time. They heard no hounds, nor rifles, nor human voices, having apparently timed their departure perfectly; they had cleared the first mountaintop on foot even before their overseer checked their stone and stucco dwellings at around midnight. The terrain was too steep for them to be pursued on horseback.

Their first prolonged rest came at the foot of Saulsville Mountain after they had waded across the rocky bottom of the shallow Guyandotte River. Tatum urged the other three to allow him to show them how to float, a skill his brothers had taught him when he was just a toddler on the island of Haiti, but their terror was an obvious impediment. A few days later, however, these fears needed to be overcome when they came to the wide, deep and rapid Kanawha River near the town of Montgomery, Virginia. Tatum spent most of that night in the cold water teaching his three companions first how to relax and hold their breath long enough to become buoyant, then how to dog paddle alongside the shore, and finally how to overcome their fears of sinking long enough to trust in the lengthy strokes and kicks he showed them. Just before dawn, all four of them succeeded in propelling themselves to the opposite shore of the river.

Bara turned out to be a graceful, natural swimmer, and stubborn Polly, aided by his brute strength, had little trouble once he overcame his considerable fear of drowning. (It had actually been quite amusing for Tatum to watch this muscular, arrogant ape of a man reduced to tears as he tried to subdue his fear of choking the first dozen or so times his face touched the river surface.)

But Zeeb found it impossible to follow suit. She remained petrified in the current, shivering and sobbing whenever she entered water over her head. She gamely kicked and thrashed, barely moving forward. She finally succeeded in gaining the opposite bank, but took far longer to get across than her companions, and once she crawled ashore, was immobilized from her exertions.

And now this was what Tatum faced again at the end of a long, stifling afternoon of waiting. The sun was setting beyond the hillside behind them at last. The boatyard at Stone’s Point had grown quiet shortly after he awakened and he contemplated his best method of getting his partner quickly across the mouth of the river. He decided upon tucking her chin into the crook of his elbow and towing her as he side-crawled across the water; he’d watched one of his brothers haul the body of a drowned friend ashore from far out in the Caribbean Sea when he was young. The boys had been crabbing on volcanic rocks that jutted out of the deep water when a huge wave swept the boy away; Tatum felt confident that he could pull his wife across a few hundred feet of water that way if he could just get her to relax. After she awoke, he coached her and encouraged her to be calm as they shared a scant meal of cress and acorn meat. He was dismayed to see her eyes close and lips form white men’s prayers as they waited for darkness following sunset.

At last Tatum determined that it was time for them to cross. He took Zeeb’s hand and spoke soft words of encouragement as they followed the path past the boatyard and down to the shore of the Beaver River. Tatum could feel Zeeb begin to quiver as their feet sunk into the mud beneath the chilly water. She’d protested against swimming across every other river and stream they’d encountered, but her obstinacy reached a new level.

This our last one, Tatum encouraged. Jus’ let me hold you; I can get you ‘cross.

So wide, she shuddered. I c’yan’ make it.

Tatum wrapped his right arm firmly around Zeeb’s waist as he pivoted on his heel and backed down the sloped river bottom. She began to buck and thrash the moment the water came up over her chest. Tatum kicked off from the muddy bottom and reached out with his left arm for his first sidestroke, loosening his grip from around her waist. Before he could catch her chin under his elbow, however, Zeeb’s panic intensified. She thrashed harder and shrieked as he allowed her body to slide below his right arm.

Tatum straightened and pulled Zeeb’s head beneath the surface of the river to silence her. She came up wild-eyed and sputtering. Her mouth flew open to scream again, but Tatum dunked her under the water once more, this time holding her down until her wrestling against him weakened.

You tryin’ kill me, she gasped when he finally hoisted her up by her ribcage and raised her head back into the air. She vomited spumes of river water.

I’m trying to keep both of us alive, he whispered as he shook her by the shoulders. You need to come quiet so I can bring you ‘cross this river.

I’ll never make it, she said again. Go without me.

Although her suggestion was not even a momentary consideration to him, Tatum stood still in water up to his chin contemplating just what his options truly might be. He had underestimated the strength of the current where he stood barely fifteen feet from the shore; he reckoned that the pull toward the Ohio’s current would be much stronger at the middle of the Beaver River’s mouth.

Just as he came to his decision of how to handle the situation, however, Zeeb found her footing in the silty river bottom and tried to pull away from him. In a flash, he spun around and swung her into deeper water, applying pressure against her windpipe. He meant his partner no harm, but the only way he could think to combat her hysterics was to cut off just enough wind to render her unconscious. He would then crawl across the surface of the river, dragging her in a chokehold, and revive her on the opposite shore.

All might have gone exactly as he’d planned had they not been seen by a man walking with his dog in the high grass at Stone’s Point. The barking dog charged toward the bank; the man followed, calling out to the silhouetted heads, Ahoy! Do you need help out there?

Tatum pushed off from the soft bottom again, this time squeezing Zeeb’s throat under his left arm as he pulled against the water with his right. He had drawn Zeeb a quarter of the way across the river by the time the man reached the shore.

Nigras! the man shouted as he reached the water’s edge, winding the dog up into a barking frenzy. There’s a nigra in the river and he’s drowning another one!

Tatum looked up the Beaver River to see the toll collector’s head appear around the side of the covered bridge on the Bridgewater side. The man rang a bell, and by the time Tatum was halfway across the river, a more people had appeared on the banks at Stone’s Point. Glancing over his frantically windmilling right arm, however, he was amazed to find that there didn’t appear to be a solitary soul on the darkened shore at Fairport. Tightening his hold on the motionless Zeeb, he clawed and kicked even harder at the river. Despite the clamor on the opposite shore, Fairport was completely shut down for the night.

Dragging Zeeb’s waterlogged body ashore was like hauling a sack of wet sand. Her ankles were still in the river as Tatum, shaking from fear and exertion, toppled backwards. From a sitting position, he frantically searched her throat for any sign of a pulse and felt nothing.

And then, over the clamor coming from across the river, he heard an encouraging sound from the otherwise quiet community of Fairport.

The nicker of a horse.

Tatum let go of his partner and peered through the darkness down Water Street, the little town’s modest main thoroughfare, and his heart leaped in his chest. Just two hundred feet away, a saddled horse stood lashed to a post outside a darkened hotel.

Tatum ran down the dusty street and untied the horse. Returning to the riverbank with it, he heaved Zeeb’s motionless body onto its back. They quickly cleared the length of the little town and easily found the waterfall on the hillside. Tatum dismounted and began the arduous chore of hauling his partner up a series of rocky terraces along Fosburg Run, climbing over 150 feet above the level of the river before finding Reinhold’s brickyard. Locating the straw shanty, he carried Zeeb inside and gently placed her body among a couple of broken bales. Then he lay down beside her, panting heavily.

Tatum did not grieve at his knowledge that Zeeb was dead. He felt no remorse in understanding that he had killed her. He didn’t know whether he had choked her to death, or merely rendered her unconscious as he had intended but then drowned her as he dragged her across the water.

It made no difference. Either way, Zeeb was no longer breathing.

After a short rest, Tatum rose and stepped out of the small hay barn into the light of the full moon. His face showed no sorrow, but rather an inscrutable countenance of concentration as he tried to recall exactly how his mother had accomplished what she had done all those years ago when his brother had dragged his friend’s drowned body ashore.

The chant had been simple - just four lines, each followed by blowing breath into the corpse’s mouth:

Come back to life

Come back to life

Make your wish

And move on

The only difficult part was remembering the exact Creole words to use, but Tatum vividly recalled his astonishment as his brother’s friend sat up, shook his head a couple of times, and began to step nonchalantly toward his home as if nothing unusual had just happened. Almost as an afterthought, the boy had looked over his shoulder at Tatum’s mother, pointed at the surf, and said, "Tomorrow, you will catch the biggest