Gilead: Pages 58-63 Summary & Analysis

John remembers a story, likely embellished, that his grandfather and friends used to tell. Once, in an abolitionist settlement near Gilead, the people established a dry-goods store on one side of the road and a livery stable on the other. Then they built a tunnel between the two buildings. The people were so serious about this tunnel that they made it much too large, and it wasn’t stable.

One day, a stranger rode into town on a big horse, paused at just the wrong spot, and suddenly sank into the tunnel up to the horse’s shoulder. When the townspeople came out and saw the man walking around in bewilderment, they decided to act bewildered, too. They soaked some oats in whiskey and fed them to the horse until it fell asleep. The man (a teetotaler himself) became even more upset.

Knowing any Bushwhacker or slave-hunter would quickly figure out the situation, one of the townspeople finally offered the stranger his own smaller horse, which he finally accepted. After he left, they tried to figure out what to do about the stuck horse, which was beginning to sober up. Trying to dig around the horse would be a big effort. In the meantime, since by this time “only foolish choices [were] possible,” they placed a shed over the horse.

Eventually they dug a trench to free the horse, but ultimately the only way to deal with the collapsing tunnel was to fill it in by leveling a nearby hill. But for all their hard work, the section where the tunnel had been invariably sagged whenever there was rain. At last, the people ended up having to move the whole town half a mile down the road. Nowadays the former tunnel has become a creek bed, and people often picnic beside it. Without knowing it, they sit above the town’s few, forgotten graves, but John says this is “on balance, a pleasant thing.”