Read Online Underground Airlines by Ben Winters - Free Book Online Page B

felt to be so tired, looking up into Castle’s eyes, big and white, like I was dreaming them.
    “Go on. Try and say it. Carburetor.”
    “Carburetor.”
    He was ten, and I was eight. We were little boys. I don’t know how he trained his body to wake, but he did, and he’d shake me till I woke up, too, and then he’d tell me stories and teach me words.
    The dead-to-life breathing of the other ones, a darkness filled with sleep. The fat, shuddering snores of the Old Man. Just me and Castle, alive together in the dark.
    “Good, honey. Right on. A carburetor is a little part of a car, or of a tractor. Or of one of the small carts, you know, them the working whites putter around on. It’s a little part in the engine, helps get it started.”
    “Oh.” My head drifting back toward the pillow, Castle flicking me with his fingers, going, “No, love. No, honey, no. Eyes open, now. I got more for you.”
    I huddled together with him underneath our scratchy blanket, sleep swimming in and out of my head. Murmuring car parts and cities.
    “Montreal.”
    “Montreal.”
    “Chicago.”
    “Chicago.”
    From the near distance, on the opposite side of the farm, came the mournful night songs of the cows, mooing in their lairages.
    Castle told me stories, too: a man who got eaten by a whale and came swimming out fine. A boy and a girl who fell in love and killed a witch and ate her.
    We had to be real quiet, of course, whispering back and forth so soft it was almost like just thinking. Obviously lying there talking in bunk you could get charged: Theft of Rest. Bad Use of Time. There had been a man in our Family named Bones, one of the older of the youngers, a skinny broomstick of a man with sharp elbows. Someone flagged him for being a masturbator—Theft of Rest; Bad Use of Time; Act Against God; Act Against Mr. Bell. We all got woke in the dead of night from him hollering as they were dragging him out for it. They charged him right there and took two witness statements in the presence of a Franklin, who certified the verdict, then they hauled him to the shed. The shed was just a few yards from where our cabin was along the fence, and you could hear Bones in there weeping and whatnot, right till morning.
    “Betcha he ain’t playing with his little thing about now,” said Harbor. “Not with his hands bound up behind him.” Harbor had a hard smile like a knife slit that showed up when others were suffering. “No, I betcha he is not.” I never wondered who had whispered against poor Bones.
    But we kept nice and quiet, Castle and me, and we were all right. Our Old Man in those early years, he was a heavy kind of sleeper, and once he was down he was down till the rooster. Harbor never heard us, I guess, and no one else did, either. We were charmed in some way: just me and Castle in a private world, beneath the blankets, with only the dimmest glow of moonlight in there with us, like we were somewhere under the sea.
    There were certainly many of those nights when I did not care to be woke. By the end of the day I ached all over from tending that pile. Head aching from the sun, back aching from crouching, arms aching from the hauling: dung buckets, rumen buckets, hay, and straw. Raking it and raking it. Last thing I wanted sometimes was to be shook awake, feel all the ache of my body again while Castle whispered me words. His wide white eyes hovering in the dark above me were unwelcome as searchlights, sometimes, and I’d complain bitterly, whisper hotly at him to leave me be.
    “Listen, honey,” he would say when I moaned. Never getting cross. Never even the littlest bit. Only one of us I knew who never did. “Listen, love. Deep nighttime is the only time we got. This is our opportunity.”
    “Our opportunity.” My tongue was thick with exhaustion.
    “That’s right. We crazy we don’t take it.”
    “What about all these, then?” I blinked, gummy-eyed in my tiredness, looked around the room at the other ones.
    “What