But she looked to them in vain. No man defended her. A “silent and almost speechless gaze”13 met her eyes instead.
Elizabeth blinked, unsettled. The cavalry was there, all present and correct, but they were stiffly playing silent statues: an unmoving army that had surrendered all its arms.
Unknown to Elizabeth, Deacon Dole had told the crowd that the sheriff had a formal warrant for her committal and that anyone who interfered with this legal course of action was liable to be arrested.
And no man wants to lose his liberty.
Against her will, Elizabeth Packard is carried to the train at Manteno station
Elizabeth’s grip on her own was fading fast. She looked desperately from man to man, but their silent sympathy, “like dead faith,”14 was of no account to her. “All the oppressor asked or needed was neutrals [who would] not…interfere,”15 she later wrote. “The hungry wolf can carry his prey through the street in his clenched teeth… He can pace the platform of a crowded depot, and still thrust his fangs into her…and no dumb dog dares to bark to oppose him.”16
The dogs merely watched, mute, as the wolves took her: wordless witnesses as she was carried closer to the cars. Elizabeth felt her hope start to slide, the knowledge that her friends’ words were weightless summoning it south. At times, she caught whispered sighs of encouragement. “You will not be there long,”17 said the Methodist minister, whose church she’d joined after leaving her husband’s. Another promise filtered through that they would get her out “in a few days.”18 Mention was made of “speedy liberation under the habeas corpus act.”19
But no one dared to fight for her. No one dared to stand up for her or to intervene. Even Mr. Blessing later said, “I did not like to interfere between man and wife.”20
No, they were “double-minded”21 men, “unstable as water,” part of a rising current that Elizabeth felt surrounding her—a current too powerful to resist. She felt her head slip under it, felt the pull of the undertow grabbing at her limbs. She wanted to scream—but if she screamed, she sealed her fate. She had to keep her rage locked up inside her, her feelings as tightly buttoned as her blouse.
Amid the vast crowd that had gathered to bear witness, just one person spoke aloud. The voice was high-pitched and pleading: female, a friend. “Is there no man in this crowd to protect this woman?” Rebecca Blessing shouted, pacing the platform. “Is there no man among you? If I were a man, I would seize hold upon her!”22
But Rebecca was not a man. She had no power.
In a heartbeat, anyway, it was too late. Deacon Dole deposited Elizabeth at the doorway to the cars, and she was pulled inside, the door quickly latched behind her “to guard against any possible reaction of the public.”23 With Theophilus, Dole, and Burgess as her bodyguards, she was ushered swiftly to a seat, the train already beginning to pull away, to build up speed, to bear her away from her home.
But it was not just her home Elizabeth was leaving. Her liberty lay scattered on the railroad track, her reputation for sanity dead beside it. But worst of all, her children…her children. Her Isaac, her Libby, her Samuel, her George. Her Arthur. Her Toffy. All gone. All left to this pack of wolves that had ravaged her.
“O!”24 she suddenly exclaimed as the world outside her window changed from familiar to strange. The word itself was a gulp of grief.
All morning, she had not cried a single tear. She had kept herself together; she had fought with dignity and drive. But a “deep gush of emotion”25 now overwhelmed her, her love for her children bursting the confines within which she had kept it caught. It rushed through her, unstoppable as a river headed to the sea, and she gave herself up to it, her head pressed to the seat in front, her body bent in pain.
Her sun, moon, and stars. Her sun, moon, and stars.
But the sky was black and empty.
As empty as her eyes that could not see her children now. She was blind as knowledge cruelly caught them in its net, as Isaac returned from his pointless errand to find that she was gone. For the first time in his young life, he tasted bitter truth: that promises are paper tracts too quickly torn. Libby, meanwhile, wept “almost unceasingly,”26 her tears tinged by female fate. She was the only woman in the household now; her future was fast-fixed.
Though Arthur was too young to know, George was far too old. He tore himself from his keepers when the truth found him: he ran free, ran fast, ran after his mamma as quick as his legs could go. His mother had gone on the train, they’d said, so he determined to follow. But although he ran and ran and ran along the railway track, till his little legs could run no more, she never came any closer. He never caught sight of the train.