Chapter 2 continued

Summoning to a Quest

Saturday, January 19, 1861

Jude Royer shut the door.

He avoided the desk and went to the window, shocked by the sudden moral dilemma, angry with the woman for it and even angrier with himself.

Justice?

What did justice mean, anyway? A law professor once quipped a different definition of justice existed for every man alive.

Did he even believe in justice?

Jude peered through the window at the boys running down Courtland Street, shouting for Maryland’s governor to be impeached for refusing to hold a secessionist vote.

He’d chosen Courtland Street for the solitude away from the ceaseless din of horseshoes and grinding axles on the busy thoroughfares, but he hadn’t reckoned on the bellows of the oyster peddlers, the cry of the scissor grinders and especially not the hoots and catcalls of rival street gangs allied with the political parties.

Was it possible for anyone in these deeply flawed times to be a good person, let alone a just person?

Feeling the cold drafts for the first time, Jude stifled a shiver and turned away from the window. “Wouldn’t it be easier for you to go to Mr. Swann and warn him yourself?” he asked sharply.

The colored woman’s face became withdrawn. “Oh, I cain’t do that. ’Cause he won’t listen to me.”

Yes, Jude admitted. He knew why. He came to a decision.

“I will warn Mr. Swann he is in danger. It will be up to him to respond to the information I am able to relay to him. I cannot do more for I am not a hero. I am an ordinary man and cannot be expected to perform miracles.”

The woman’s eyes became translucent. A subtle change rippled across her face.

Jude saw just enough to suggest a wiser intelligence based on an understanding of circumstances he didn’t know.

It lasted a second before her eyes went flat again. She nodded.

“Good,” said Jude, unnerved but pleased the bizarre exchange should be over soon. His heart sank when the visitor spoke again.

“I knows life ain’t fair, Mistah Royer, and I’s sorry if I done burden you with something you ain’t want to do. I got no choice but to sit here bein’ a lick spittle, askin’ for help. I’ve to ask people for help all my life so sometimes I forget why some people ain’t like it.”

She wheezed.

“Least promise me to keep Mistah Matthew from Monument Square today. Then maybe everything be ok. Then maybe Moses’ll be ok. And that be important. Very important. If you believe in justice.”

Moses? The last part made no sense to Jude and he remained uneasy when the colored woman hobbled out of the room, taking the shame of her smell with her.

Everyone knew the coloreds smelled, of course, but he also thought of hardscrabble farms in the hills of Frederick County, fifty miles west from Baltimore and where he’d grown up. Farms where too many white children ran barefoot, even in winter. These people, sallow faced at their best, always seemed to smell. Of dank cabins and unwashed clothes. Of burning fat and tallow grease. The smell of poverty.

The farmers in the valleys believed the hill people deserved their fate due to laziness. White trash. Cracker. Dirt eaters. Words they muttered to each other in disapproval at the slovenly poor. If anyone was poor in this free and bounteous land, it was surely entirely their own fault.

In disquieting moments Jude wondered if such judgments weren’t quite…just.

He dipped his hands into the washstand pitcher and broke through the film of ice. The shock of freezing water promised to drive away the grime of the woman’s hands, but he shivered when he rubbed the palms dry and the stains of sins, past and present, stubbornly refused to go.

Through the window he followed the woman up Courtland Street. She ambled, swaying from side to side, singing in the peculiar way of the coloreds, and the quilt flapped in the wind. Capped by the red turban, she looked like an oversized rag doll.

A street gang popped around a corner and almost cannonballed into into her. A boy threw a stick but hit a stray cat instead, who hissed and scampered away. The woman hurried from her tormentors and turned towards St. Paul Street and out of sight.

Life ain’t fair, she’d said.

And she’d claimed the devil was in Baltimore, too?

As was wont to happen at unexpected moments, unwanted nightmares came roaring into Jude’s mind.

He gripped the windowsill and closed his eyes and saw the fateful afternoon again, as clear as if it’d been yesterday and not seventeen years ago.

The memories always started with running through the orchards with hot tears streaming down his face. He could still feel the tree branches scratching him and bees fluttering around his head and his bare feet squelching on decomposing fruit. The earthy smell of the land, still damp from recent rains and intermingling with rotten pungency and honeysuckles, emerged in his nostrils, almost as sharp, no, even sharper than on that day.

Above all, he remembered his anger. He’d been so angry!

He remembered the child’s fierce determination to keep running as far as Frederick. Maybe even Baltimore! Any place where no man would shout about sinning while holding a belt in one hand and grabbing for his bottom with the other, when he’d done nothing wrong.

Memories of reaching the end of the orchards swam into focus and he saw with clarity how the lower pastures opened into the great valley of Frederick County beyond. The panorama of the lavish greenery of a Maryland summer and the thousands of acres of tidy cornfields dotted with large barns and stone and brick farmhouses and framed by a startling blue sky should be a memory pleasant to most people.

Not to Jude.

To his left rose a ridge crowned with a line of trees, survivals from the primeval forest which once stretched across all of Maryland. These trees stood taller and bigger than the trees of the valleys planted by the settlers. The leaves were darker and the shadows within spookier than they’d any right to be.

Over the ridge lay Pennsylvania. Maybe he’d run to Harrisburg! Philadelphia!

And Jude the boy made his fateful decision. He hopped over the stone wall closing off the orchards and ran towards the ridge. He burst through the masses of trees and tripped over an upright rifle and tumbled into a little hollow and onto a knapsack.

“Whoa there, boy!” drawled a friendly voice, an unexpectedly soft dialect amid the nasally twangs of Frederick County.

***

Jude blinked, his fury battling with the memories to return to the present.

What made bad memories feel realer? In bad memories everything seemed sharper. The colors brighter. The shadows darker. The heat hotter. The anger fiercer. The humiliation severer.

The valley was never as green as on that day. He’d never seen a summer sky as blue. He’d never seen as jovial a smile. He should have gone south towards Frederick. Then where would he now be?

It didn’t matter. He would have returned to the farm. Little boys always did when they ran away from home.

But it wasn’t the point. What had happened might then never have happened and he would instead have become a very different Jude Royer.

He tried to swallow the anger, resenting how past deeds were never to be undone.

The unfairness, even unjustness of it, had haunted him ever since. And now an old colored woman had come to him, demanding he must believe in justice!

Jude remained at the window long after the colored woman disappeared. More people were now walking in the direction of Monument Square. Did he see urgency in their steps? Or only imagining dangers he wouldn’t have if not for the woman’s strange tale? But times were strange and every day brought worrisome news from the South.

He remembered he still needed to finish the brief and deliver it to the courthouse and began to wonder if he should do it soon before any troubles emerged.

But something else still bothered him.

He’d long doubted if such a thing as justice truly existed, even though he recognized injustice when he saw it. He puzzled over why the colored woman cared about Matthew Swann when she’d been denied justice all her life?

But she’d been right about one thing.

Jude knew who the devil was, for he was right there in this very room.

The hairs on his neck rose.

Jude Royer had an unerring suspicion that despite his doubts, justice very firmly believed in him.

****

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