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When Scipio Granville heard, from the wheelwright who told the cooper who told Deborah as she stole off over the hill at night to see her husband, he ran. He wanted to be the first to go, before Thomas Granville heard the news of Lord Dunmore's promise and did something to stop the men he thought he owned from joining the King's army and claiming freedom as their reward.
The first thing Scipio did was forge a pass stating he was sending a message from his master up to Charlottesville. The second thing he did was leave the name of Scipio behind, spitting it out into the pokeweed and Queen Anne's lace that sprung up between the forest and the road. Never again would he be another tribute to Thomas Granville's learning, forced, like everyone he loved, to carry names like Cato, Caesar, and Venus through the fields and the kitchens and the ledgers balancing profit and loss. He thought of prophecy and judgment, of cannons and bayonets and the end of everything, and decided to call himself John.
The third thing he did was join Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment and swear to defend the King's rule against the colonists' rebellion.
The war, of course, was not a very good apocalypse. The disease that swept through the freezing, muddy camps and the rot that could set in from only a graze of a musket ball meant that you were more likely to die groaning and lingering than you were to blaze out in a glorious, fiery instant on the battlefield. John did neither. He survived the war. The King's army left America without him, and there he was in someone's burnt-out cowshed in the stinking outskirts of New York, surrounded by men who were looking to sell him back into slavery: spoils of the battlefield.
He ran.
He made it onto a ship to Nova Scotia. He survived the journey and he survived the coldest winter he'd ever known and he survived so many broken promises--for land, for work, for real freedom--he lost track of them all. His children kept that forged pass of his in the family Bible, though by the time the Bible was in the hands of his grandchildren, the pass had long since gone and the last record of John's life as Scipio had fallen away between some floorboards or in the cool grass behind his daughter's house or in the cold waters of the river. And by the time that Bible had been replaced with another, John Granville's story was just a story, told and retold by those that came after.
Evie Harrison grew up hearing those stories of her family's first winter in Birchtown. She thought about it that day in December, as the icy wind cut across the water, whistling through the ships that had brought the Great War to Halifax. She'd told herself John Granville's story every night since she'd come to the city, just another new arrival, along with the ships and the jobs and everything else. A winter and a war that spelled out nothing but death somehow gave you a new life: it felt familiar.
It was the war, after all, that had finally snapped her free from the small circuits that her life had run in: the old house to the church to the school to the market and back again, all under the same few groves of pine and spruce. It was the war that brought money to Halifax, and brought her to the city in its wake.
She found a place as a housekeeper. She learned that Mrs. MacKenzie liked her tea so hot it could scald off your skin if you spilled it on the way up from the kitchen, that Mr. MacKenzie would not allow discussion of the war except between himself and whoever brought him his morning paper, and that their son Henry had dangerous ideas.
In October, he'd invited her to sit with him in the back garden. In November, he'd given her a necklace that his sister had left behind, forgotten, when she'd married last spring. Evie thought she knew what it meant when people said a man was trouble, but she'd never expected trouble to be so interesting, to make her blush as she climbed the back stairs day after day.
In December, he said that if she ever refused him, he'd report his sister's necklace stolen.
Evie didn't have to say anything to that, not right away. He'd left the room before she could answer. And so she dusted the china cabinet. Then, before she even knew what she was doing, she put down the rag, moved quietly through the hall, took Mrs. MacKenzie's fur coat, walked out the front door, and kept walking.
It was only after she'd walked a few blocks that she began to panic. Now she really had stolen something, and not something as easy to hide as a necklace. She was already getting odd looks from people on the street--one look at the coat, then her face, then the coat again. Somebody would start asking questions, even before the MacKenzies come looking for her. She could have handled Henry, cajoled him and laughed at the right times, brought him some good wine from the family cellar and made him forget he'd ever been angry. But part of her just said no. That was the part of her that ignited, the part of her that would smash everything in that house if she didn't just walk and keep walking.
And then she was on the ground and her first thought was oh God, a policeman, or Henry, but wasn't the weight of a person that knocked her off her feet and as she turned her aching head around to look up at the street, her ears were ringing and there was smoke rising from over the hill, blotting out the whole sky, and all around her were snapped branches and bricks and shards of glass. She got up. She was dizzy, but she had to keep going. She didn't know where. The smoke kept filling the sky. That cloud was the biggest thing she'd ever seen.
Now nobody would ask about her fur coat. Everyone was too scared it was a German bombing raid, that it wasn't over. She spent the night sleeping on a church pew. Then the blizzard came. By the time she'd heard what happened--a munitions ship had caught fire in the harbour--she'd almost forgotten to wonder. She'd gotten so used to the fact of it: the cold, the splintered branches, the shattered walls where the MacKenzies' house once stood. It no longer seemed like a question, just an answer to any question you might think of.
There was that, and there was one more truth, she thought to herself as she traced a path through the field of foundations and snapped-off trees. Knowing when to run is all you need to know.
This is what she tells her daughter, years later, as she shows her the new houses along the waterfront and tells her about the time half the city blew away. Her daughter remembers and takes it with her when she goes.
Reggie's working the line and and Betty says something, like she always does, and Reggie tries to blow it off because she needs this job and she needs all the second chances Mrs. Corbett can give her, so she turns away, says nothing.
"Running away from your troubles again?" snaps Betty. "That's no way to live."
Reggie seethes. It is exactly how to live. She's slept in bus stations and train stations and the seediest rooming houses down by the docks, she's gutted fish and cut through steel, she's let her wages and her wits take her from Halifax to Winnipeg and halfway back again, and the only thing she's bothered to bring along everywhere she's gone are these stories. Stories of the ones who ran. The ones who survived.
And so when Reggie walks up to Betty in the cafeteria and knocks her tray right out of her hands and watches Betty rush to tackle her to the ground, it's like telling her exactly how she intends to survive, and it is worth it. As Betty tries to tear the turban off of Reggie's hair, Reggie thinks she sees a glimmer of the same thought in Betty. And when Mrs. Corbett pulls her aside and tells her this is her last chance, she knows she'll never get to hit Betty like that again and so she savors the memory of it, locks it away with all the other things she carries with her and tells herself that this is all she needs to keep her going through the winter, through the war.
"Is there anything you have to say for yourself?" asks Mrs. Corbett.
"Mrs. Corbett," says Reggie. "Let me tell you a story."