Fire on the Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

Center in Dublin. Stevens was dying of cancer, for which there was then no cure. He yearned to talk of old times, as dying soldiers do. He told me, laughing, that it had taken the average black slave who joined them “a full thirty seconds” to become deadly with the Sharps. The fact was, hardly any slaves joined Brown at first anyway. Mostly we n’Africans were waiting to see, waiting to see. Even the few who had joined him in the excitement of the raid (he had passed out rifles, not spears) had stayed behind rather than follow across the river and up the mountain, perhaps mistaking his retreat for a defeat. Some pretended to have been kidnapped and told fantastic tales: which is probably the origin of the story that Lewis Washington, George Washington’s grandson, had been shot by Brown while quoting Patrick Henry. I knew the man, for Deihl had sold him a team of mules, which he abused so scandalously that I had to go fetch them back. He was no Patrick Henry quoter. The fact was, I found out later, Washington was killed by a stray bullet from the militia, and Brown never intended to kill him at all, which was a sore point between Brown and his soldiers, who wanted no hostages. As to the story about the spears, maybe Deihl believed it, or maybe it was Kate: anyway, we got to Charles Town in record time, long before darkness fell.

    The Harper’s Ferry Museum was filled with dead things. Rifles that hadn’t been fired in a hundred years and would never be fired again; wool coats with bullet holes in them, one with blood splashed all over the collar. Swords, spears, pistols, knives. Harriet was sick of history. First a famous father, now a famous great-grandfather. Great-great. There was no room for real life. Her famous father crowded out the real father she loved remembering. Her mother spent her life digging up bones.
    Scuffling along in her ploddy new shoes, she followed her mother through the dim, almost deserted museum, trying to keep her eyes from alighting on any of the exhibits, resisting their power with her own.
    The Second International Mars Expedition was just making sub-Deimos orbital insertion as Yasmin entered the museum director’s office, according to the vid on the wall behind his desk. Grissom stood up and punched it off, coming around the corner of his desk to meet his guest. Yasmin had heard that he was in the war, but she hadn’t known he was missing a leg. She could see that standing up was his way of letting people know it, so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. A one-legged man was a shock, almost as old-fashioned as the artifacts out in the museum.
    He scanned down the vid—also considerately, she suspected: guessing, correctly, that it might be painful to her.
    Still, she was glad to know that the boys and girls were safely through the Door, as Leon had called it: the Deimos Door. He was always very romantic about anything having to do with Mars.
    “Scott Grissom.”
    “I’m Dr. Abraham’s great-granddaughter, Yasmin. And this is his great-great . . .“
    But somehow, Harriet was not behind her. She had gone off somewhere. Well, let her explore. Or sulk. Or whatever. Kids loved old guns.
    Yasmin knew Grissom had fought in 1948, in the Second Revolutionary War, so she’d had him figured for a man about her own age. She was surprised to see he was twenty years older, in his late fifties at least. She was also a little surprised that he was white, since even after a hundred years, even after a war and a revolution and almost ten years of building socialism, most of the Mericans who admired Brown and Tubman were black, like her mother-in-law.
    Yasmin handed Grissom the doctor’s bag, and Grissom turned it over as if he were trying to find the spot where he could see through it. He looked at Yasmin and she nodded and he opened it. He grinned at the rich smell of old pills, and Yasmin decided she liked him. He took out the crinkly typed papers and hefted them, smacked them, turned them