…because what the beam of my flashlight showed me was not a shaft. It was a stair. A narrow wooden stair, steep as a ladder, going straight down into the dark inside that hollow brick column, the treads worn into shallow dips by the passage of many feet. A cold breath of air came up out of it, smelling of earth and cedar and something very old. I stood on the rooftop in Grafton, with the sun beating down, and I stared into that hole for a full minute. Twenty five years I had worked chimneys, and no chimney had ever once breathed back. I called down the ladder to the owner, a woman named Mrs. Odom. “Mrs. Odom,” I said. “You might want to come up here.”
Mrs. Odom was eighty eight years old and did not intend to climb a ladder. So I went back down, and carried the whole matter to her kitchen table, and described it to her in plain words. She listened with her hands folded. When I finished, she was silent a long time. Then she said, in her soft Appalachian voice, “So it is true.” I asked what she meant. “My grandmother told me about it when I was a little girl,” she said. “She said that when the Union was young, there was a stairway in this house. She said it was never to be talked about to strangers. I thought it was a tale to scare children.”
We went up together the next afternoon, her son carrying her on the ladder like a bride. She stood at the open top of the chimney, small and straight in the wind, and looked down the stair. Her son and I went first, with lanterns. The stair led thirty steps down, below the foundation of the house, into a little room cut into the clay of the hillside. It was perhaps ten feet by twelve, lined with cedar planks, with a low ceiling and a dirt floor. In one corner stood a rough bench. In another, a cot frame, too small for a grown man. And on the cedar wall, scratched with a nail, were rows of tally marks, hundreds of them, and below them, names.
A brick chimney with no fireplace and no flue hid a staircase leading down to the names of everyone it once saved.
I read them by lantern light. Some were just first names, scratched in a hurry. Eli. Dinah. Moses and wife. Mary Ann, age 6. Some had a date, 1858, 1859, 1860. At the top, in careful capital letters, was a line that made my throat close: THE LORD IS MY LIGHT. Mrs. Odom had come down the stair behind us on the arm of her son, step by step, and now she stood at the bottom with her hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness.” She touched the wall. She read the names one after another, whispering them aloud, like a woman calling the roll at a church. “They were here,” she said. “They were really here.”
The house had stood on the Underground Railroad. The family who built it, a pair of Quaker farmers named Whitcomb, had run a way station for freedom seekers heading north from Virginia toward the Ohio River. They had hidden men, women, and children in that room, some for a night and some for weeks, and fed them from the kitchen above.
To hide the stair, they had built a chimney that served no stove, and every neighbor who passed took it for the sign of a proper house. Cleverness was the thing that kept them alive. And I, who had thought that cleverness was a bad sign, understood that it had been a kind of love.
The historical society came the following week, three people with notebooks and a camera. A professor drove up from Morgantown. In a month, the Odom House was listed on the national register, and the room beneath the chimney was documented, and measured, and photographed from every angle. The professor said that it was the best preserved hidden chamber of its kind in the region. Mrs. Odom sat in a kitchen chair at the top of the stair, listening, nodding. She was so happy that she cried openly. She told me that her grandmother would have been proud of her for keeping the secret all these years.
She asked me, though, to do one more thing. She wanted the chimney rebuilt, but not hidden. She wanted it open to the sky, with a proper door set into the base, so that anyone who came to see it could walk down the stair for themselves. I took on the job at a price that made my wife laugh. It took me six weeks. I took out the sealed top and replaced it with a copper cap. At the foot of the shaft I set a heavy oak door, hung on iron hinges, and over it a bronze plaque. It named every name we could read on that wall.
The dedication was on a bright Saturday in October. Four hundred people came, and the mayor spoke, and a choir from the Baptist church sang a spiritual in four part harmony while a breeze shook the maple leaves. Mrs. Odom sat in a wheelchair at the front with a blanket on her knees. A line formed at the door of the chimney, schoolchildren, grandparents, a man in a veteran cap. One by one they went down the stair, and one by one they came up again quiet and changed. A little boy of about eight stopped beside me and asked, “Did you build this?” I told him I had just opened it.
Mrs. Odom passed the next spring, at the age of eighty nine, in her own bed, with the window open. Her son told me that on her last evening she asked for the door to the chimney to be left unlocked. I go by that house sometimes, on my way home from jobs, and I always slow the truck. The copper cap glows green in the light. There is still smoke coming out of it, now and then, when the town burns a fire in the little iron brazier at the foot of the stair. It is a ceremony, they say, on the first night of every winter. And it is the only chimney I know that has ever carried a house back toward the light.