Anthony dreamed

he walked a familiar forest, following a time-worn path of the Tuscaroras. The trail seemed the same as he had known it all his life. The way he walked it, without making any sound, was true to the way ancient Indian braves had walked it. But now the once familiar evergreens on either side were gigantic. Their needles were as large as railroad spikes. He had no trouble accepting the great new height of the trees of the long, smooth size of the needles. It was the awful smell of resin and oil over everything that upset him. The odor nearly chocked him;the trees gave it off, as though they were raining turpentine. He seemed to feel it on his hair and on his hands. His palms itched and his eyes burned. He tried to get the smell out of his mind and stopped on the path to cut an enormous branch from a fallen pine.
He made tiny marks on the bark with one of his whittling tools, and he didn't find it unusual to be using so small an istrument for such hard work. He'd always used whittling tools to cut branches. He had started whistling to himself when a man swung down fron a mile-high spruce.
"Stay back," the man said. He lifted the huge branch Anthony wanted anf flung it away as if it were nothing.
Anthony stood still. He began to feel small. "Papa says you will do," he told the man, "but I don't say it. "We are going anyway."
"Carolina is for you," the man said. "Stay back." He reached for Anthony with arms covered with curls of white hair. His eyes glowed red and then soewed fire.
Anthony leaped for a tall pair of silts against a tree. Fastening them to his legs, he turned around on the path.
"I'm running," he said. But when he moved, the silts sank into the bed of oversized pine needled covering the fround.
The man grabbed Anthony's ankles. Anthony fell slowly forward from a long way up. He could hear the wind whistling by his ears as he fell.
I'll never reach the end of the trail, he thought. And for the first time, he was arfaid.
Anthony White lurched out his dream, walking his twin brothers at the same time. The boys leaned against him and looked at him with wide, senseless eyes. Anthony didn't dare to move. His heart pounded as the dream fear moved up and down his back. He couldn't think where he was.
In a few minutes, the twins were sleeping again. Anthony could rearrange them and rest his arms.
That was a good dream. Good and scary, he thought. I was in the trees at home and the man was somebody I should know. I can't place right now, but I do know him.
He glanced out of the car window and smiled. He knew where he was now and everything was fine. The day was a dismal Saturday; the month was March. All around were heavy patches of mist, and there was a staedy rain. His papa's sedan with the red trailer attached was the lone automobile on the Blue Ridge Mountain Highway. Anthony was thirteen years old today and never in his life had he been so far from home.
Home, he thought. Well , I'm sorry.
He and his family were leaving an old house and folks who were mostly relatives. He had known the old house and the old people forever.
"Like Great-grandmother Jeffers," he said to himself. His papa had asked Great-grandmother to come with them to live. Anthony recalled how she'd been leaning on her bright blue gate at the time.
No longer was there a fence around Great-grandmother Jeffers' house. Its blue pickets had long since fallen and rotted back into the ground. But the gate continued to stand, and Anthony, since he age of ten, had painted it bright blue every spring.
Great-grandmother had laughed when his father asked her to come with them. Her hand was propped under her chain as she leaned heavily on that old gate.
"You go look at the North two, three times," she had said to his papa. "Then come back here one day and tell me if it's better."
"I'll tell you now," his papa had said. "It won't be worse." He had smiled and kissed Great-grandmother. No need to tell her to take care of herself. She always had. He turned and walked swiftly away.
Anthony has stayed a moment. "Who will keep your gate?" he had asked her. "Who will paint it each spring?"
"You think you are the only boy in all these parts that can paint my gate?" she had asked him.
"I'm the only one who ever has," Anthony had said.
"Well, that's so," she has answered. She looked at Anthony hard. "You can trot back here next spring and paint it again, if you have a mind to. Spring," she said softly. "That is a long row to hoe."
Anthony saw something in her eyes that made him feel sad. But them whatever it had been was gone. She'd looked at him with that mean epression she used only with him and the bobwhite quail that lived off her handouts. He had to smile, foe he knew she liked him even better than the bobwhite.
"I've got to go now," she had said. "No telling what fool thought took hold of your papa to leave these hills to go live in some craven house. I'm going to fix my chicory. I expect I'll roast it all night and all day tommorrow. Maybe then your papa will get you all there in one piece." She believed roasting chicory was the best power to ward off calamity. Anthony accepted the fact and was comforted.
Great-grandmother had turned and, not looking back, slowly walked to her house. At the steps, she held up her arm in a wave. Anthony hadn't needed to say anything. Within the wave was everything between them.
Anthony had few children to play with in thos mountains he and his fsmily were leaving. Homes were sometimes foothills apart. Most of the families apart. MOst of the families with boys Anthony's age had already gone North. No on heard from them again and old people like Great-grandmother Jeffers took this to be a sign that the North was a place of sorrow. Still Anthony hadn't minded being alone most of the time. There had been the forest to walk and there had been Great-grandmother to talk to.
He stared out of the car window and thought about the trees spreading up and over the hills behind his old home. There were times when he had sensed a coming rain and raced it to the pines. Diving under heavy branches, he had watched the rain slant into the forest. It never reached where he lay sheltered, but from the tree's farthest boughs made a silver circle around him.
"I won't think about it again," he promised imself. "It will be fun living somewhere in Ohio." They were to live in a big house, and only his father had seen it.
Anthony sat wondering why it was taking then so long to get there.
Maybe an axle will break, he thought. Maybe we'll run of fas in night, with woods on both sides of the road!
If that happened, he would creep through the darkness in search of a house. And at last he would see gostly lights flickering through the trees.
"Papa," he said suddenly, "tell about the new house again."
His father drove hunched over the steering wheel of the car. When Anthony broke the silence, Mr.White took up a cloth of wipe the windshield. Then he rubbed the cloth on the back of his neck. He was tired of driving and tired of the rain that had stayed with them since morning. Yet he hadn't changed his plan to reach the new house by this afternoon at the latest
"How amny times must I tell it to you before you get it all?" he asked Anthony.
"Just once more, Papa," said Anthony.He had the story straight after the first time he heard it. He simply liked the tone of his papa's voice whenever he spoke about anything so full of history as the new hpuse in Ohio.
"Well," his father began "it has gabls and eaves and pillars. It's large, quite large. There are manyh windows from floor and ceiling and there's a veranda all the way around on the outside."
"It must look like a plantation house," Anthony said. He pictured a gold mansion with green trim and a lawn as long as forever.
"No, not quite

like that," said Mr. White, smiling. "Not that stately. Our place is more...more...well..." he hesitated.
"...more sinister," Mrs. White finished for him.
Neither Anthony nor his father had realized that Mrs. White was awake. For most of the morning's journey, she'd slept in the front seat with her head cradled on a pillow. Now she shivered and sighed. "How I could let myself get talked into this!" she said. "Going off to live somewhere I've never seen. Rattling around in a big old place!"
"You're just as excited about going as Papa and me,"Anthony said. He leaned forward against the front seat and looked sideways at his mother. He liked the way she almost smiled when in the rain much anymore though,Papa," he said.
His father lsughed, and his mother had to laugh, too. No, she didn't like so much rain. That was why she'd slept so long. She didn't like thinking about a big CIvil War house she had never laid eyes on. It had been an important station on the Underground Railroad, and Anthony still wanted to hear about it, even if his mother didn't.
"Does the house look haunted?" he asked.
Mr. White was a long time answering. He finally sgrugged. "It's a hansome place, once you get used to it," he said. "A fine period piece. It will be the talk of the whole town once I have it painted and lanscaped properly."
"What'sthe town like?" Anthony asked.
:Oh, it's like any small village," Mr. White said. "And like most Ohio towns, it has a good college at one end of it. But our house isn't a town, Anthony>"
"I thought it was," said Anthony.
"No, it sits alone on a rise in a kind of wilderness." His father spoke then to Mrs. White. "I believe the townspoeple thought I was out of my mind when I finally signed that lease."
Anthony heard caution come into his father's voice. "I never did get the complete floor plans from the real estate people-did I tell you that? They said the plans have been missing for years. They've no idea how many hidden rooms and such the house has. We do have the partial plans though. I should be able to puzzle the whole of it from them. But it's odd, don't you think, that all the complete plans should be gone?"
"That should tell you there's something funny about that house and anything to do with it," Mrs. White said.
Anthony's father cleared his throat loudly and gave Mrs. White a warning glance. But Anthony had heard what she said and let his mother's words pass into his mind in a neat line. He would think about them some other time. Right now, he was thinking about the new hoyse sitting alone.
"I do wish the rain would stop before we reach that place," Mrs. White said. She shivered again and tied her scarf tighter about the neck.
"Papa..." Anthony said, "does 'wilderness' mean the soil is dead and trees can't grow? Does it mean there's no hope left in the land?"
"What a funny thing to think of!" said Mrs. White.
"I did say the house stood alone," Mr. White said. "Anthony was thinking of that."
"No, I was thinking about North Carolina and Great-grandmother," said Anthony."I was thinking that Great-grandmother and all the other old people had lived in wilderness just forever almost. Maybe she thought she was only changing one wilderness for another."
Mr. White was silent for a time. "Some folks might think a hindred-mile strech of pine was wilderness," he said, "although you wouldn't, Anthony, because you grew up in pine country. And some might call the prairie wilderness, but I suspect it must have looked pretty good to the pioneer. No, I meant by 'wilderness' that the house itself has about it an atmosphere of desolation."
"Buy you say it's a town," said Anthony.
"Yes," Mr. White said.
"And you say it sits alone."
"Absolutely alone," Mr. White answered. "There's no way to describe the feel of it or its relation to the town. You have to dee it and know about it that way."
"I wish we'd hurry and get there," Anthony said. "It feels like we've been riding forver."
They lapsed into silence. Anthony could think of no better birthday present than to have the new house suit him. He wanted to like it the same way he liked the masses of clouds in front of a storm or the dark wood of the pine forest back home.
His father had given him a book for his birthday. It was a volume, bound in real leather, about the Civiil War, the Underground Railroad and slaves. Anthony loved the smell of real leather, and he rubbed the book ligtly back anf forth beneath his nose. Then he leaned back, flipping idly through the pages. In a moment his brothers were nestled against him, but Anthony did not even notice.
He had come across a curious piece of information earlier. Of the one hundred thousand slaves who fled from SOuth to Canada between 1810 and 1850, forty thousand of them had passed through Ohio. Anthony didn't know why this fact surprised him, yet it did.He knew about slaves. His father had taught civil War history in North Carolina. He would be teaching it in Ohio in the very town in which they were going to live. He had taught Anthony even more history than Anthony cared to know. Anthony knew that Damion Brown had been the "superintendent" of the Underground Railroad in Ohio and that he had finally died in prison in Kentucky. He knew that in the space of seven years, one thousand slaves had died in Kentucky. He knew that in the space of seven years, one thousand slaves had died in Kentucky. But the fact that forty thousand escaping slaves had fled through Ohio started him thinking.
Ohio will be my new home, he thought. A lot of those slaves must have stayed in Ohio because Canada was farther then they could heve believed. Or they had liked Damion Brown so much, they'd just stayed with him. Or maybe once they saw the Ohio River, they thought it was the Jordan and that the Promised Land lay on the other side.
The idea of exhausted slaves finding the Promised Land on the banks of the Ohio River pleased Anthony. He'd never seen the Ohio River, but he could clearly imagine freed slaves riding horses up and down its slopes. He pictured the saves living in great communities as had the Iroquois, and they had brave leaders like old Damion Brown.
"Papa..."Anthony said.
"Yes, anthony," said Mr. White.
"Do you ever wonder if any runaway slaves from North Carolina went to Ohio?"
Mr. White was startled by the question. He laughed and said, "You've been reading the book I gave you. I'm glad, it's a good book. I'm sure some slaves fled from North Caroina. They escaped from all over the South, and it's likely the half of them passed through Ohio on their way to Canada."
Anthony sank back into his seat, arranging his sprawling brothers against him. He smoothed his hand over the book and had half a mind to read it from cover to cover. He would wake the twins and read it all to them. They loved for him to read aloud, even though they couldn't understand very much.
No thought Anthony. They are being up late last night.They will only cry.
Anthony's brothers were named David and Ty and they knew all sorts of things. Once Anthony had taken up a cotton ball just to show them about it. They understood right away what it was. They had turned toward Great-grandmother Jeffers' house. She had a patch of cotton in her garden, and they must have seen her chopping it.
They loved pine, as Anthony did, although they couldn't whittle it. Anthony's papa said the boys probably never would be as good at whittling as he was. Anthony had a talent for wood sculpture, so his father said. There were aleays folks coming from distances offering Anthony money for what he had carved. But Anthony kept most of his carvings for himself. He had a whole box of figures tied up in the trailor attached to the car. He intended placing them on the counters and mantles all over the new house.
Anthony could sit in front of his brothers, carving an image out of pine, and they would jump and roll all around him. When the carving was finished, the twin for whom it made would grab it and crawl off with it. Anthony never need say, and never once were twins wrong in knowing what carving was for which boy.
They were fine brothers, Anthony knew.
If the new house is haunted, he thought, the twins will tell me!

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 19.12.2010

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