Free Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson Page A

as the pounding on the door increased in volume. His bodyguard, Adam I believe it was, tugged at his sleeve, but Douglass shook him off.
    “As you may know, there is a warrant for my arrest as a confederate,” (he said) “They flatter me. I am flattered because I know whereof I speak when I speak of the fainthearted, the hands that faltered.” He held out his hand, then studied it himself as if it were a book.
    “Here is one hand that faltered. Black as it is, it faltered. Brown asked for my help, but I thought his scheme would fail. Our own Tubman knew him better. She knew the man, she knew the times, and most of all she knew our people. Now the two of them have my unconditional support, this hand is theirs, and if that be treason, if loyalty to my own dark, enslaved, suffering, and benighted people be treason to the U.S.A., so be it.”
    At this point, as if by a signal, the massive iron fittings gave way and the door crashed down, inward. Two of Douglass’s guards wrapped him in a cloak as if to make him invisible, in a scene befitting Shakespeare, while others leaped to their feet in the aisle. The panicked crowd meanwhile drew back into the pews. Six, eight, twelve federal marshals swarmed in across the fallen door just as Douglass was being hastened out of the pulpit, toward the choir door. The minister, an older Colored man, pushed through the aisle to try and calm the scene, but the marshals knocked him aside roughly. The crowd muttered angrily and there were cries. I counted twelve marshals and remember thinking they seemed severely outnumbered, and feeling both exultation and fear. I saw guns beneath their long coats, but there were no shots, not at that time. The crowd fell back and the marshals pushed forward for the pulpit.
    Then full twelve of Douglass’s men, the longshoremen, all black, filled the aisle, blocking them. Emboldened, but more slowly, others from the pews filled in behind them, placing a wall of men (and women) between the marshals and Douglass. Douglass himself stopped by the organ, drawing away from those who were hastening him through the choir door, to watch the drama behind him. The marshals ordered “Stand aside!” but the men in the aisle neither made answer nor moved. They seemed to be under the command of the giant Negro Adam, who stood in their midst, but I could not be sure; it was all done with flickers of eyes. They held long wooden pins from the docks.
    The leader of the marshals called over them directly to Douglass; he waved a piece of paper without reading from it; perhaps like many U.S. marshals, he could not read the papers he served but committed his writs to memory. Douglass answered him, but with what, in the muttering and scraping, I could not hear. The marshal swore and pointed his Walker Colt at the great vaulted ceiling of the church, and—fired! Silence fell like thunder; the other marshals had opened their jackets and put their hands on exactly similar Colts. We all stood stunned; even Douglass froze like a statue at the choir door; all were stunned at the profanity of a shot in church: the only sound was the old preacher crying out “Oh, Lord” as if he himself had been shot, until someone, I think it was his own Daughter, shut him up. His Colt still pointed up, the head marshal stepped forward toward the line of Colored men. At this their leader, Adam, instead of falling back as expected, raised his wooden pin and pointed with it, in a great slow arc, like Moses with his Rod, to the balcony of the church, first to the right and then to the left, where I was standing. There was a steely rattle like snakes all around me, and the marshals stopped and looked up. I was as surprised as they to see guns drawn all around me, cocked and primed. Levasseur held his LeFebre across his nose like a dueling master; others, mostly Colored but with some whites mixed in, and several of them students I knew, across from me and behind me did the same; stalwarts with derringers