The Good Lord Bird

1. Meet the Lord

I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.

My Pa was a full-blooded Negro out of Osawatomie, in Kansas Territory, north of Fort Scott, near Lawrence. Pa was a barber by trade, though that never gived him full satisfaction. Preaching the Gospel was his main line. Pa didn’t have a regular church, like the type that don’t allow nothing but bingo on Wednesday nights and women setting around making paper-doll cutouts. He saved souls one at a time, cutting hair at Dutch Henry’s Tavern, which was tucked at a crossing on the California Trail that runs along the Kaw River in south Kansas Territory.

Pa ministered mostly to lowlifes, four-flushers, slaveholders, and drunks who came along the Kansas Trail. He weren’t a big man in size, but he dressed big. He favored a top hat, pants that drawed up around his ankles, high-collar shirt, and heeled boots. Most of his clothing was junk he found, or items he stole off dead white folks on the prairie killed off from dropsy or aired out on account of some dispute or other. His shirt had bullet holes in it the size of quarters. His hat was two sizes too small. His trousers come from two different-colored pairs sewn together in the middle where the arse met. His hair was nappy enough to strike a match on. Most women wouldn’t go near him, including my Ma, who closed her eyes in death bringing me to this life. She was said to be a gentle, high-yaller woman. “Your Ma was the only woman in the world man enough to hear my holy thoughts,” Pa boasted, “for I’m a man of many parts.”

Whatever them parts was, they didn’t add up to much, for all full up and dressed to the nines, complete with boots and three-inch top hat, Pa only come out to ’bout four feet eight inches tall, and quite a bit of that was air.

But what he lacked in size, Pa made up for with his voice. My Pa could outyell with his voice any white man who ever walked God’s green earth, bar none. He had a high, thin voice. When he talked, it sounded like he had a Jew’s harp stuck down his throat, for he spoke in pops and bangs and such, which meant speaking with him was a two-for-one deal, being that he cleaned your face and spit-washed it for you at the same time—make that three-for-one, when you consider his breath. His breath smelled like hog guts and sawdust, for he worked in a slaughterhouse for many years, so most colored folks avoided him generally.

But white folks liked him fine. Many a night I seen my Pa fill up on joy juice and leap atop the bar at Dutch Henry’s, snipping his scissors and hollering through the smoke and gin, “The Lord’s coming! He’s a’comin’ to gnash out your teeth and tear out your hair!” then fling hisself into a crowd of the meanest, low-down, piss-drunk Missouri rebels you ever saw. And while they mostly clubbed him to the floor and kicked out his teeth, them white fellers didn’t no more blame my Pa for flinging hisself at them in the name of the Holy Ghost than if a tornado was to come along and toss him across the room, for the Spirit of the Redeemer Who Spilt His Blood was serious business out on the prairie in them days, and your basic white pioneer weren’t no stranger to the notion of hope. Most of ’em was fresh out of that commodity, having come west on a notion that hadn’t worked out the way it was drawed up anyway, so anything that helped them outta bed to kill off Indians and not drop dead from ague and rattlesnakes was a welcome change. It helped too that Pa made some of the best rotgut in Kansas Territory—though he was a preacher, Pa weren’t against a taste or three—and like as not, the same gunslingers who tore out his hair and knocked him cold would pick him up afterward and say “Let’s liquor,” and the whole bunch of ’em would wander off and howl at the moon, drinking Pa’s giddy sauce. Pa was right proud of his friendship with the white race, something he claimed he learned from the Bible. “Son,” he’d say, “always remember the book of Heziekial, twelfth chapter, seventeenth verse: ‘Hold out thy glass to thy thirsty neighbor, Captain Ahab, and let him drinketh his fill.’”

I was a grown man before I knowed there weren’t no book of Heziekial in the Bible. Nor was there any Captain Ahab. Fact is, Pa couldn’t read a lick, and only recited Bible verses he heard white folks tell him.

Now, it’s true there was a movement in town to hang my Pa, on account of his getting filled with the Holy Ghost and throwing hisself at the flood of westward pioneers who stopped to lay in supplies at Dutch Henry’s—speculators, trappers, children, merchants, Mormons, even white women. Them poor settlers had enough to worry ’bout what with rattlers popping up from the floorboards and breechloaders that fired for nothing and building chimneys the wrong way that choked ’em to death, without having to fret ’bout a Negro flinging hisself at them in the name of our Great Redeemer Who Wore the Crown. In fact, by the time I was ten years old in 1856, there was open talk in town of blowing Pa’s brains out.

They would’a done it, I think, had not a visitor come that spring and got the job done for ’em.

Dutch Henry’s sat right near the Missouri border. It served as a kind of post office, courthouse, rumor mill, and gin house for Missouri rebels who come across the Kansas line to drink, throw cards, tell lies, frequent whores, and holler to the moon ’bout niggers taking over the world and the white man’s constitutional rights being throwed in the outhouse by the Yankees and so forth. I paid no attention to that talk, for my aim in them days was to shine shoes while my Pa cut hair and shove as much johnnycake and ale down my little red lane as possible. But come spring, talk in Dutch’s circled ’round a certain murderous white scoundrel named Old John Brown, a Yank from back east who’d come to Kansas Territory to stir up trouble with his gang of sons called the Pottawatomie Rifles. To hear them tell it, Old John Brown and his murderous sons planned to deaden every man, woman, and child on the prairie. Old John Brown stole horses. Old John Brown burned homesteads. Old John Brown raped women and hacked off heads. Old John Brown done this, and Old John Brown done that, and why, by God, by the time they was done with him, Old John Brown sounded like the most onerous, murderous, low-down son of a bitch you ever saw, and I resolved that if I ever was to run across him, why, by God, I would do him in myself, just on account of what he done or was gonna do to the good white people I knowed.

Well, not long after I decided them proclamations, an old, tottering Irishman teetered into Dutch Henry’s and sat in Pa’s barber chair. Weren’t nothing special ’bout him. There was a hundred prospecting prairie bums wandering around Kansas Territory in them days looking for a lift west or a job rustling cattle. This drummer weren’t nothing special. He was a stooped, skinny feller, fresh off the prairie, smelling like buffalo dung, with a nervous twitch in his jaw and a chin full of ragged whiskers. His face had so many lines and wrinkles running between his mouth and eyes that if you bundled ’em up, you could make ’em a canal. His thin lips was pulled back to a permanent frown. His coat, vest, pants, and string tie looked like mice had chewed on every corner of ’em, and his boots was altogether done in. His toes stuck clean through the toe points. He was a sorry-looking package altogether, even by prairie standards, but he was white, so when he set in Pa’s chair for a haircut and a shave, Pa put a bib on him and went to work. As usual, Pa worked at the top end and I done the bottom, shining his boots, which in this case was more toes than leather.

After a few minutes, the Irishman glanced around, and, seeing as nobody was standing too close, said to Pa quietly, “You a Bible man?”

Well, Pa was a lunatic when it come to God, and that perked him right up. He said, “Why, boss, I surely is. I knows all kinds of Bible verses.”

The old coot smiled. I can’t say it was a real smile, for his face was so stern it weren’t capable of smiling. But his lips kind of widened out. The mention of the Lord clearly pleased him, and it should have, for he was running on the Lord’s grace right then and there, for that was the murderer Old John Brown hisself, the scourge of Kansas Territory, setting right there in Dutch’s Tavern, with a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward on his head and half the population in Kansas Territory aiming to put a charge in him.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Tell me. Which books in the Bible do you favor?”

“Oh, I favors ’em all,” Pa said. “But I mostly like Hezekiel, Ahab, Trotter, and Pontiff the Emperor.”

The Old Man frowned. “I don’t recollect I have read those,” he said, “and I have read the Bible through and through.”

“I don’t know ’em exact,” Pa said. “But whatever verses you know, stranger, why, if it would please you to share them, I would be happy to hear ’em.”

“It would please me indeed, brother,” said the stranger. “Here’s one: Whosoever stoppeth his ear at the cry of the Lord, he also shall cry himself.”

“Hot goodness, that’s a winner!” Pa said, leaping into the air and clapping his boots together. “Tell me another.”

“The Lord puts forth his hand and touches all evil and kills it.”

“That warms my soul!” Pa said, leaping up and clapping his hands. “Gimme more!”

The old coot was rolling now. “Put a Christian in the presence of sin and he will spring at its throat!” he said.

“C’mon, stranger!”

“Free the slave from the tyranny of sin!” the old coot nearly shouted.

“Preach it!”

“And scatter the sinners as stubble so that the slave shall forever be free!”

“Yes, sir!”

Now, them two was setting dead center in Dutch Henry’s Tavern as they went at it, and there must’ve been ten people milling ’bout within five feet of them, traders, Mormons, Indians, whores—even the Old John Brown hisself—who could’a leaned over to Pa and whispered a word or two that would have saved his life, for the question of slavery had throwed Kansas Territory into war. Lawrence was sacked. The governor had fled. There weren’t no law to speak of. Every Yankee settler from Palmyra to Kansas City was getting his duff kicked from front to back by Missouri roughriders. But Pa didn’t know nothing ’bout that. He had never been more than a mile from Dutch’s Tavern. But nobody said a word. And Pa, being a lunatic for the Lord, hopped about, clicking his scissors and laughing. “Oh, the Holy Spirit’s a’comin’! The blood of Christ! Yes indeedy. Scatter that stubble! Scatter it! I feel like I done met the Lawd!”

All around him, the tavern had quieted up.

And just then, Dutch Henry walked into the room.

Dutch Henry Sherman was a German feller, big in feature, standing six hands tall without his boots. He had hands the size of meat cleavers, lips the color of veal, and a rumbling voice. He owned me, Pa, my aunt and uncle, and several Indian squaws, which he used for privilege. It weren’t beyond old Dutch to use a white man in that manner, too, if he could buy his goods that way. Pa was Dutch’s very first slave, so Pa was privileged. He come and go as he pleased. But at noon every day, Dutch came in to collect his money, which Pa faithfully kept in a cigar box behind the barber’s chair. And as luck would have it, it was noon.

Dutch walked over, reached behind Pa’s barber chair to the cashbox, removed his money, and was about to turn away when he glanced at the old man setting in Pa’s barber chair and saw something he didn’t like.

“You look familiar,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Shubel Morgan,” the Old Man said.

“What you doing ’round these parts?”

“Looking for work.”

Dutch paused a moment, peering at the Old Man. He smelled a rat. “I got some wood out back needs chopping,” he said. “I’ll give you fifty cents to chop wood half a day.”

“No, thanks,” the Old Man said.

“Seventy-five cents.”

“Naw.”

“How about a dollar, then?” Dutch asked. “A dollar is a lot of money.”

“I can’t,” the Old Man grunted. “I’m waiting on the steamer to come down the Kaw.”

“That steamer don’t come for two weeks,” Dutch said.

The Old Man frowned. “I am setting here sharing the Holy Word with a brother Christian, if you don’t mind,” he said. “So why don’t you mind your marbles, friend, and saw your wood your own self, lest the Lord see you as a fat sow and a laggard.”

Dutch carried a pepperbox in them days. Tight little gun. Got four barrels on it. Nasty close up. He kept it in his front pocket for easy pickings. Not in a holster. Right in his front pocket. He reached in that pocket and drawed it out, and held it, barrel down, all four barrels pointed to the floor, talking to that wrinkled Old Man with a gun in his hand now.

“Only a white-livered, tit-squeezing Yankee would talk like that,” he said. Several men got up and walked out. But the Old Man sat there, calm as an egg. “Sir,” he said to Dutch, “that’s an insult.”

Now, I ought to say right here that my sympathies was with Dutch. He weren’t a bad feller. Fact is, Dutch took good care of me, Pa, my aunt and uncle, and several Indian squaws, which he used for rootin’-tootin’ purpose. He had two younger brothers, William and Drury, and he kept them in chips, plus he sent money back to his maw in Germany, plus fed and clothed all the various squaws and assorted whores his brother William drug in from Mosquite Creek and thereabouts, which was considerable, for William weren’t worth a shit and made friends with everybody in Kansas Territory but his own wife and children. Not to mention Dutch had a stall barn, several cows and chickens, two mules, two horses, a slaughterhouse, and a tavern. Dutch had a lot on him. He didn’t sleep but two or three hours a night. Fact is, looking back, Dutch Henry was something like a slave himself.

He backed off the Old Man a step, still holding that pepperbox pointed to the floor, and said, “Get down off that chair.”

The barber’s chair was set on a wood pallet. The Old Man slowly stepped off it. Dutch turned to the bartender and said, “Hand me a Bible,” which the bartender done. Then he stepped up to the Old Man, holding the Bible in one hand and his pepperbox in the other.

“I’m gonna make you swear on this Bible that you is for slavery and the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “If you do that, you old bag, you can walk outta here none the worse. But if you’re a lying, blue-bellied Free Stater, I’mma bust you across the head so hard with this pistol, yellow’ll come out your ears. Place your hand on that,” he said.

Now, I was to see quite a bit of Old John Brown in the coming years. And he done some murderous, terrible things. But one thing the Old Man couldn’t do good was fib—especially with his hand on the Bible. He was in a spot. He throwed his hand on the Bible and for the first time, looked downright tight.

“What’s your name?” Dutch said.

“Shubel Isaac.”

“I thought you said it was Shubel Morgan.”

“Isaac’s my middle name,” he said.

“How many names you got?”

“How many I need?”

The talk had stirred up an old drunk named Dirk, who was asleep at a corner table nearby. Dirk sat up, squinted across the room, and blurted, “Why, Dutch, that looks like Old John Brown there.”

When he said that, Dutch’s brothers, William and Drury, and a young feller named James Doyle—all three would draw their last breath in another day—got up from their table near the door and drawed their Colts on the Old Man, surrounding him.

“Is that true?” Dutch asked.

“Is what true,” the Old Man said.

“Is you Old Man Brown?”

“Did I say I was?”

“So you ain’t him,” Dutch said. He seemed relieved. “Who are you then?”

“I’m the child of my Maker.”

“You too old to be a child. You Old John Brown or not?”

“I’m whoever the Lord wants me to be.”

Dutch throwed the Bible down and pushed that pepperbox right on the Old Man’s neck and cocked it. “Stop shitting around, you God-damned potato-head! Old Man Brown. Is you him or not?”

Now, in all the years I knowed him, Old John Brown never got excitable, even in matters of death—his or the next man’s—unless the subject of the Lord come up. And seeing Dutch Henry fling that Bible to the floor and swearing the Lord’s name in vain, that done a number on him. The Old Man plain couldn’t stand it. His face got tight. Next when he spoke, he weren’t talking like an Irishman no more. He spoke in his real voice. High. Thin. Taut as gauge wire.

“You bite your tongue when you swear about our Maker,” he said coolly, “lest by the power of His Holy Grace, I be commanded to deliver redemption on His behalf. And then that pistol you holding there won’t be worth a cent. The Lord will lift it out your hand.”

“Cut the jitter and tell me your name, God dammit.”

“Don’t swear God’s name again, sir.”

“Shit! I’ll swear his cock-dragging God-damn name whenever I God-damn well please! I’ll holler it up a dead hog’s ass and then shove it down your shit-eating Yank throat, ya God-damned nigger turned inside out!”

That roused the Old Man, and quick as you can tell it, he throwed off that barber’s bib and flashed the butt end of a Sharps rifle beneath his coat. He moved with the speed of a rattler, but Dutch already had his pistol barrel at the Old Man’s throat, and he didn’t have to do nothing but drop the hammer on it.

Which he did.

Now that pepperbox is a fussy pistol. It ain’t dependable like a Colt or a regular repeater. It’s a powder cap gun. It needs to be dry, and all that sweating and swearing must’ve sprouted water on Dutch’s big hands, is the only way I can call it, for when Dutch pulled the go switch, the gun hollered “Kaw!” and misfired. One barrel exploded and peeled sideways. Dutch dropped it and fell to the floor, bellowing like a calf, his hand nearly blowed off.

The other three fellers holding their Colts on Old Brown had stepped back momentarily to keep their faces clear of the Old Man’s brains, which they expected to splatter across the room any minute, and now all three found themselves gaping at the hot end of a Sharps rifle, which the old fart coolly drawed out all the way.

“I told you the Lord would draw it out your hand,” he said, “for the King of Kings eliminates all pesters.” He stuck that Sharps in Dutch’s neck and drawed the hammer back all the way, then looked at them three other fellers and said, “Lay them pistols down on the floor or here goes.”

They done as he said, at which point he turned to the tavern, still holding his rifle, and hollered out, “I’m John Brown. Captain of the Pottawatomie Rifles. I come with the Lord’s blessing to free every colored man in this territory. Any man who stands against me will eat grape and powder.”

Well, there must’ve been half a dozen drummers bearing six-shooters standing ’round that room, and nary a man reached for his heater, for the Old Man was cool as smoke and all business. He throwed his eyes about the room and said calmly, “Every Negro in here, those of you that’s hiding, come on out. You is now free. Follow me. Don’t be afraid, children.”

Well, there was several coloreds in that room, some on errands or tending to their masters, most of ’em hiding under the tables, shaking and waiting for the blasting to start, and when he spoke them words, why, they popped up and took off, every single one of ’em. Out the door they went. You didn’t see nothing but the backs of their heads, hauling ass home.

The Old Man watched them scatter. “They is not yet saved to the Lord,” he grumbled. But he weren’t finished in the freeing business, for he wheeled around to Pa, who stood there, trembling in his boots, saying “Lawdy, Lawdy ...”

This the Old Man took to be some kind of volunteering, for Pa had said “Lawd” and he’d said “Lord,” which I reckon was agreement enough. He clapped Pa on the back, pleased as punch.

“Friend,” he said, “you has made a wise choice. You and your tragic octoroon daughter here is blessed for accepting our blessed Redeemer’s purpose for you to live free and clear, and thus not spend the rest of your lives in this den of iniquity here with these sinning savages. You is now free. Walk out the back door while I hold my rifle on these heathens, and I will lead you to freedom in the name of the King of Zion!”

Now, I don’t know about Pa, but between all that mumbling about kings and heathens and Zions and so forth, and with him waving that Sharps rifle around, I somehow got stuck at the “daughter” section of that speech. True, I wore a potato sack like most colored boys did in them days, and my light skin and curly hair to boot made me the fun of several boys about town, though I evened things out with my fists against those that I could. But everybody in Dutch’s, even the Indians, knowed I was a boy. I weren’t even partial to girls at that age, being that I was raised in a tavern where most of the women smoked cigars, drunk gut sauce, and stunk to high heaven like men. But even those lowly types, who was so braced on joy juice they wouldn’t know a boll weevil from a cotton ball and couldn’t tell one colored from the other, knowed the difference between me and a girl. I opened my mouth to correct the Old Man on that notion, but right then a wave of high-pitched whining seemed to cover the room, and I couldn’t holler past it. It was only after a few moments that I realized that all that bellowing and wailing was coming from my own throat, and I confess here I lost my water.

Pa was panicked. He stood there shaking like a shuck of corn. “Massa, my Henry ain’t a—”

“We’ve no time to rationalize your thoughts of mental dependency, sir!” the Old Man snapped, cutting Pa off, still holding the rifle on the room. “We have to move. Courageous friend, I will take you and your Henrietta to safety.” See, my true name is Henry Shackleford. But the Old Man heard Pa say “Henry ain’t a,” and took it to be “Henrietta,” which is how the Old Man’s mind worked. Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

“But my s—”

“Courage, friend,” he said to Pa, “for we has a ram in the bush. Remember Joel first chapter, fourth verse: ‘That which the palmerworm hath left, hath the locust eaten. And that which the locust hath left, hath the cankerworm eaten. And that which the cankerworm hath left, hath the caterpillar eaten.’”

“What’s that mean?” Pa asked.

“You’ll be eaten alive if you stay here.”

“But my child here ain’t no gi—”

“Shush!” said the Old Man. “We can’t tarry. We can talk raising her to the Holy Word later.”

He grabbed my hand and, still holding that Sharps at the ready, backed toward the rear door. I heard horses charging down the back alley. When he got to the door, he released my hand for a moment to fling it open, and as he did, Pa charged him.

At the same time, Dutch lunged for one of the Colts laying on the floor, snatched it up, pointed the hot end at the Old Man, and fired.

The bullet missed the Old Man and struck the edge of the door, sending a sliver of wood about eight inches long out sideways. The sliver jutted out the side of the door like a knife, straight horizontal, about chest high—and Pa runned right into it. Right into his chest it went.

He staggered back, dropped to the floor, and blowed out his spark right there.

By now the clabbering of horses making their way down the alley at hot speed was on us, and the Old Man kicked the door open wide.

Dutch Henry, setting on the floor, hollered, “Nigger thief! You owe me twelve hundred dollars!”

“Charge it to the Lord, heathen,” the Old Man said. Then he picked me up with one hand, stepped into the alley, and we was gone.

2. The Good Lord Bird

We drove hard out of town, left the beaten California Trail, and headed straight into Kansas flatlands. There was three of them, the Old Man and two young riders. The two riders charged ahead of us on pintos, and the Old Man and me bounced behind them atop a painted horse with one blue eye and one brown eye. That horse belonged to Dutch. So the Old Man was a horse thief as well.

We rode hard for a couple of hours. The cottonwoods showed some distance off, and the hot wind beat against my face as we flew along. Kansas Territory is flat, wide-open hot earth to the sight, but when you making hot speed atop a horse, it’s hard riding. My arse took a pretty strong beating bouncing atop that horse’s back, for I had never ridden one before. It knotted up to about the size of a small bun, and just when I thought I couldn’t bear it no more, we hit the top of a rise and stopped at a crude camp. It was a clearing with a three-sided tent held up by sticks, stretched along a rock wall with the remnants of a campfire. The Old Man stepped off the horse and helped me down.

“Time to water these horses and rest, my child,” he said. “We can’t tarry. The others is coming soon.” He looked at me for a moment, his wrinkled face frowned up. I reckon he felt guilty for kidnapping me and getting my Pa kilt, for he seemed a little funny about the eyes, and stared at me a long time. Finally he begun ransacking his flea-bitten coat pocket. He rummaged through it and pulled out what appeared to be a ball covered with feathers. He dusted it off and said, “I reckon you is not feeling righteous about what has just transpired thereabouts, but in the name of freedom we is all soldiers of the cross and thus the enemy of slavery. Like as not, you now believes you has no family or may ne’er see what family you has ever again. But the fact is, you is in the human family and is welcome to this one as any. I like that you might hold this, my child, as a token of your newfound freedom and family, joining us as freedom fighters, even though you is a girl and we need to get rid of you as soon as possible.”

He held the thing out to me. I didn’t want whatever it was, but, being that he was white and hurrumped and hawed over the dang thing so much, I reckon I had to take it. It was an onion. Dried, dusty, covered with feathers, cobwebs, lint, and other junk from his pocket. That thing looked worse than dried mule shit. The Old Man had a high tolerance for junk, and in later years, I was to see him produce from his pockets enough odds and ends to fill a five-gallon barrel, but, being that this had been a scouting expedition to Dutch’s, he’d been traveling light.

I took the thing and held it, frightened and afraid, so, not knowing what he wanted, I reckoned he wanted me to eat it. I didn’t want to, of course. But I was hungry from the long ride and I was also his prisoner, after all, so I bit into it. That thing tasted foul as the devil. It went down my gullet like a stone, but I got the job done in seconds.

The Old Man’s eyes widened, and for the first time I seen a look of sheer panic run across his old face, which I took for displeasure, though in later years I learned a look from him could mean just about anything you could render it to.

“That there’s my good-luck charm you just swallowed,” he grunted. “I had that thing for fourteen months and nar a knife has nicked me nar bullet touched my flesh. I reckon the Lord must mean it to be a sign for me to lose it. The Bible says it: ‘Hold no idle objects between thouest and me.’ But even a God-fearing man like myself has a pocketful of sins that flagellate betwixt my head—and my thighs too, truth be to tell it, for I has twenty-two children, twelve of them living, Little Onion. But my good luck lives between your ears now; you has swallowed in your gut my redemption and sin, eatin’ my sin just like Jesus Christ munched on the sins of the world so that you and I might live. Let that be a lesson to me, old man that I am, for allowing sacrilegious objects to stand between me and the great King of Kings.”

I didn’t make head nor tails of what he was saying, for I was to learn that Old John Brown could work the Lord into just about any aspect of his comings and goings in life, including using the privy. That’s one reason I weren’t a believer, having been raised by my Pa, who was a believer and a lunatic, and them things seemed to run together. But it weren’t my place to argue with a white man, especially one who was my kidnapper, so I kept my lips closed.

“Since you has shown me the way of the Maker and is now my good-luck charm, Little Onion, I will give you good fortune as well, and hereby absolve myself of all these trickerations and good-luck baubles which is the devil’s work.” And here he dug in his pockets and produced a thimble, a root, two empty tin cans, three Indian arrowheads, an apple peeler, a dried-up boll weevil, and a bent pocketknife. He throwed them all in a sack and gived it to me.

“Hold these things, and may they bring you good fortune till you come along and meet the soul that shows you the way of the Maker, Onion. For the prophet may cometh in the form of man, boy, or a woman-child, as in the case of you, and each person must attain his wisdom of the Almighty when they meets their own prophet maker of the word who holds the sign to redemption at the ready, and that includes you, Little Onion.” Then he throwed in there, “And may you meet another Little Onion in your travels, so that she might be your good-luck charm and thus rid you of these baubles and make you truly free like me.”

Here he produced the last from his pocket, an odd, long black-and-white feather, and throwed the feather in my head, tucked it right in my curly napped hair, then paused a moment, reflecting, staring at that feather in my head. “Feather of a Good Lord Bird. Now, that’s special. I don’t feel bad about it neither, giving my special thing to you. The Bible says: ‘Take that which is special from thine own hand, and giveth to the needy, and you moveth in the Lord’s path.’ That’s the secret, Little Onion. But just so you know, you ought not to believe too much in heathen things. And don’t stretch the Great Ruler’s word too much. You stretch it here, stretch it there, before you know it, it’s full-out devilment. We being fighters of His righteous Holy Word, we is allowed a few indulgences, like charms and so forth. But we ought not take too much advantage. Understand?”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but, being he was a lunatic, I nodded my head yes.

That seemed to please him, and he thrust his head toward the sky and said, “Teach thy children the ways of our King of Kings, and they shall not depart from it. I hear Thee, oh great Haymaker, and I thank Thee for blessing us every minute of every day.”

I don’t know but that God said to him aye-aye and proper, for after that, the Old Man seemed satisfied with the whole bit and forgot about me instantly. He turned away and pulled a huge canvas map from his saddlebag. He clopped to the canvas lean-to in his worn boots, plopped down on the ground under it, and stuck his head in the map without saying another word. As an afterthought, he motioned for me to sit on the ground next to him, which I done.

By now the two other riders had dismounted and come up, and by the look of it, they was the Old Man’s sons, for they was nearly ugly as him. The first was a huge, strapping youth about twenty years old. He was taller than Dutch, six feet four inches tall without his boots. He had more weapons hanging off him than I ever seen one man carry: two heavy seven-shot pistols strapped to his thighs by leather—that was the first I ever saw such a thing. Plus a broadsword, a squirrel gun, a buckshot rifle, a buck knife, and a Sharps rifle. When he moved around, he rattled like a hardware store. He was an altogether fearsome sight. His name, I later come to know, was Frederick. The second was shorter, more stocky, with red hair and a crippled arm, a good bit older. That was Owen. Neither one of ’em spoke, but waited for the Old Man to speak.

“Water these horses and scare us up a fire,” he said.

The Old Man’s words got them movin’ while I sat in the lean-to next to him. I was frightfully hungry despite being kidnapped, and I must say my first hours of freedom under John Brown was like my last hours of freedom under him: I was hungrier than I ever was as a slave.

The Old Man settled his back against the wall under the canvas tent and kept his face to the map. The camp, though empty, had been used heavily. Several guns and effects lay about. The place was odorous, downright ripe, and the smell brung mosquitoes, which swarmed about in thick black clouds. One of them clouds settled on me and the mosquitoes had at me right away something terrible. As I swatted at them, several mice scurried about in a rock crevice on the wall behind the Old Man, just over his shoulder. One of the mice fell off the rock crevice directly onto the Old Man’s map. The Old Man studied it a moment, and it studied him. The Old Man had a way with every animal under God’s creation. Later I was to see how he could pick up a baby lamb and lead it to slaughter with kindness and affection, could tame a horse just by gently shaking and talking to it, and could lead the most stubborn mule out of mud stuck up to its neck like it was nothing. He carefully picked up the mouse and gently placed it back in the rock crevice with the rest of its brother mice, and they set there quiet as pups, peeking over the Old Man’s shoulder as he stared at his map. I reckoned they was like me. They wanted to know where they was, so I asked it.

“Middle Creek,” he grunted. He didn’t seem in a talking mood now. He snapped at his boys, “Feed this child.”

The big one, Frederick, he moved ’round the fire and come up to me. He had so many weapons on him, he sounded like a marching band. He looked down, friendly, and said, “What’s your name?”

Well, that was a problem, being that I didn’t have no time to think of a girl one.

“Henrietta,” the Old Man blurted out from his map. “Slave but now free,” he said proudly. “I calls her Little Onion henceforth for my own reasons.” He winked at me. “This poor girl’s Pa was killed right before her eyes by that ruffian Dutch Henry. Rascal that he is, I would have sent a charge through him, but I was in a hurry.”

I noted the Old Man hadn’t said a word about scrapin’ by with his own life, but the thought of Pa being run clean through with that wood pike made me weepy, and I wiped my nose and busted into tears.

“Now, now, Onion,” the Old Man said. “We’re gonna straighten you out right away.” He leaned over and dug out his saddlebag again, rumbled through it, and brung out yet another gift, this time a rumpled, flea-bitten dress and bonnet. “I got this for my daughter Ellen’s birthday,” he said. “It’s store-bought. But I reckon she’d be happy to give it to a pretty girl like you, as a gift to your freedom.”

I was ready to give up the charade then, for while I weren’t particular about eating the flea-bitten onion that lived in his pocket, ain’t no way in God’s kingdom was I gonna put on that dress and bonnet. Not in no way, shape, form, or fashion was I gonna do it. But my arse was on the line, and while it’s a small arse, it do cover my backside and thus I am fond of it. Plus, he was an outlaw, and I was his prisoner. I was in a quandary, and my tears busted forth again, which worked out perfect, for it moved them all to my favor, and I seen right off that crying and squalling was part of the game of being a girl.

“It’s all right,” the Old Man said, “you ain’t got but to thank the Good Lord for His kindnesses. You don’t owe me nothing.”

Well, I took the dress, excused myself, and went into the woods a ways and throwed that nonsense on. The bonnet I couldn’t tie proper atop my head, but I mashed it on some kind of way. The dress come down to my feet, for the Old Man’s children was stout giants to the last. Even the shortest of his daughters stood nearly six feet fully growed without her shoes, and head and shoulders above yours truly, for I followed my Pa in the size department. But I got the whole business fixed right as I could, then emerged from behind the tree and managed to say, “Thank you, marse.”

“I ain’t master to you, Onion,” he said. “You just as free as the birds run.” He turned to Frederick and said, “Fred, take my horse and teach Onion here to ride, for the enemy will be hurrying our way soon. There’s a war on. We can’t tarry.”

That was the first I heard the word war. First I ever heard of it, but at the moment my mind was on my own freedom. I was looking to jump back to Dutch’s.

Fred led me to Dutch’s old pinto, the one me and the Old Man was riding, prompted me on it, then led my horse along by the reins, holding it steady, while riding his. As we rode, Fred talked. He was a chatterbox. He was twice my age, but I seen right off that he had half a loaf, if you get my drift; he was slow in his mind. He had a bubble in his head. He chatted about nothing, for he couldn’t fix his mind on one thing more than a minute. We plodded along like that for a while, him blabbing and me quiet, till he piped up, “You like pheasant?”

“Yes, massa,” I said.

“I ain’t your massa, Onion.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, for I was of the habit.

“Don’t call me sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Then I’ll call you missy.”

“Okay, sir.”

“If you keep calling me sir, I’ll keep calling you missy,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

This went on for several minutes, us sirring and missying one another, till finally I got so hot I wanted to take a rock and bust him across the head with it, but he was white and I was not, so I busted into tears again.

My tears throwed Fred. He stopped the horse and said, “I am sorry, Henrietta. I takes back every word I said.”

I quit bawling and we headed forth again, pacing slowly. We rode about a half mile down the creek where the cottonwood thickets stopped. The clearing met woods near a set of rocks and wide trees. We dismounted and Fred looked around the area. “We can leave the horses here,” he said.

I seen a chance to jump. My mind was on escape, so I said, “I got to toilet, but a girl needs a bit of privacy.” I near choked calling myself a member of the opposite nature, but lying come natural to me in them times. Truth is, lying come natural to all Negroes during slave time, for no man or woman in bondage ever prospered stating their true thoughts to the boss. Much of colored life was an act, and the Negroes that sawed wood and said nothing lived the longest. So I weren’t going to tell him nothing about me being a boy. But everybody under God’s sun, man or woman, white or colored, got to go to the toilet, and I really did have to answer nature’s call. Since Fred was slow as gravy in his mind, I also seen a chance to jump.

“’Deed a girl does need her privacy, Little Onion,” he said. He tied our horses to a low-hanging tree branch.

“I hopes you is a gentleman,” I said, for I had seen white women from New England speak in that manner when their wagon trains stopped off at Dutch’s and they had to use his outdoor privy, after which they usually come busting out the door coughing with their hair curled like fried bacon, for the odor of that thing could curdle cheese.

“I surely am,” he said, and walked off a little while I slipped behind a nearby tree to do my business. Being a gentleman, he walked off a good thirty yards or so, his back to me, staring off at the trees, smiling, for he never weren’t nothing but pleasant in all the time I knowed him.

I ducked behind a tree, done my business, and busted out from behind that tree running. I come out flying. I leaped atop Dutch’s cockeyed pinto and spurred her up, for that horse would know the way home.

Problem was, that beast didn’t know me from Adam. Fred had led her by the reins, but once I was on her myself, the horse knowed I weren’t a rider. She raised up and lunged hard as she could and sent me flying. I went airborne, struck my head on a rock, and got knocked cold.

When I come to, Fred was standing over me, and he weren’t smiling no more neither. The fall had throwed my dress up around my head, and my new bonnet was turned ’round backward. I ought to mention here that I had never known nor worn undergarments as a child, having been raised in a tavern of lowlifes, elbow benders, and bullyboys. My privates was in plain sight. I quickly throwed the dress back down to my ankles and sat up.

Fred seemed confused. He weren’t all the way there in his mind, thank God. His brains was muddy. His cheese had pretty much slid off his biscuit. He said, “Are you a sissy?”

“Why, if you have to ask,” I said, “I don’t know.”

Fred blinked and said slowly, “Father says I ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and lots of things confuse me.”

“Me too,” I said.

“When we get back, maybe we can put the question to Father.”

“’Bout what?”

“’Bout sissies.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said quickly, “being that he’s got a lot on his mind, fighting a war and all.”

Fred considered it. “You’re right. Plus, Pa don’t suffer foolishness easily. What do the Bible say ’bout sissies?”

“I don’t know. I can’t read,” I said.

That cheered him. “Me neither!” he said brightly. “I’m the only one of my brothers and sisters who can’t do that.” He seemed happy I was dumb as him. He said, “Follow me. I’mma show you something.”

We left the horses and I followed him through some dense thickets. After pushing in a ways, he shushed me with his finger and we crept forward silent. We followed a thick patch of bushes to a clearing and he froze. He stood silent like that, listening. I heard a tapping noise. We moved toward it till Fred spotted what he wanted and pointed.

Up at the top of a thick birch, a woodpecker hammered away. He was a good-sized feller. Black and white, with a touch of red around him.

“Ever seen one of them?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t know one bird from the next.”

Fred stared up at it. “They call that a Good Lord Bird,” he said. “It’s so pretty that when man sees it, he says, ‘Good Lord.’”

He watched it. That stupid thing darn near hypnotized him, and I had a mind to break for it then, but he was too close. “I can catch or trap just about any bird there is,” he said. “But that one there ... that’s an angel. They say a feather from a Good Lord Bird’ll bring you understanding that’ll last your whole life. Understanding is what I lacks, Onion. Memories and things.”

“Whyn’t you catch it, then?”

He ignored me, watching through the thick forest as the bird hammered away. “Can’t. Them things is shy. Plus, Father says you ought not to believe in baubles and heathen stuff.”

How do you like that? Stuffed in my pocket was the very sack his own Pa gived me with his own baubles and charms, including a feather that looked like it come off that very creature we was staring at.

I had my eye on jumping, and since he was loony, I figured to confound him further and keep his mind off seeing I was a boy, and also give me a better chance to get away. I rummaged through my small gunnysack and pulled out that very same feather his Pa gived me and offered it to him. That floored him.

“Where’d you get that?”

“I ain’t allowed to say. But it’s yours.”

Well, that just knocked him flat. Now, truth is, I didn’t know whether that thing come from a Good Lord Bird or not. His Pa said it did, but I didn’t know whether his Old Man told the truth or not, for he was a kidnapper, plus white folks was full of tricks in them days, and I was a liar myself, and one liar don’t trust another. But it seemed close enough. It was black, had a bit of red and white in it. But it could’a come from an eagle or a plain hummingbird for all I know. Whatever it was, it pleased Fred something terrible and he aimed to return the favor. “Now I’mma show you something special,” he said. “Follow me.”

I followed him back to the horses, whereupon he dumped his seven-shooters, his sword, gun belt, and rifles all on the ground. He pulled out from his saddlebag a blanket, a handful of dried corn, and an oak stick. He said, “We can’t shoot out here, for the enemy might hear. But I’ll show you how to catch pheasant without firing a shot.”

He led me to a hollowed-out tree stump. He laid the corn along the ground in a straight line leading into the stump. He throwed a few pieces inside, then chose a spot not too far from the stump to sit. With his knife, he cut two peepholes in the blanket—one for him and one for me—then throwed it over us. “Every game bird in the world is afraid of man,” he whispered. “But with a blanket over you, you ain’t a man anymore.”

I wanted to say I weren’t feeling like a man no matter how the cut came or went, but I kept my peace. We sat like that under the blanket, staring out, and after a while I growed tired and leaned on him and fell asleep.

I was awakened by Fred stirring. I peeked through my hole and, sure enough, a pheasant had dropped by to help himself to Fred’s corn. He followed that line of dried corn just as you please right into the tree hollow. When he stuck his head inside it, Fred snapped the oak twig he was holding. The pheasant froze at the sound, and quick as I can tell it, Fred throwed the blanket on him, grabbed him, and snapped his neck.

We caught two more pheasants in this manner and headed back to camp. When we arrived, Owen and the Old Man was busy arguing about the Old Man’s map, and sent us to ready our catch for dinner. As we readied the birds at the campfire, I got worried about Fred blabbing about what he seen and said, “Fred, you remembers our deal?”

“’Bout what?”

“’Bout nothing,” I said. “But you probably ought not tell nobody what I gived you,” I murmured.

He nodded. “Your gift’s giving me more understanding even as I speak it, Onion. I am grateful to you and won’t tell a soul.”

I felt bad for him, thin-headed as he was, and him trusting me, not knowing I was a boy and planned to jump. His Pa already gived that feather to me and told me not to tell it. And I gived that feather to his son and told him not to tell. They didn’t know what to believe, is how I figured it. Back in them days white folks told niggers more than they told each other, for they knowed Negroes couldn’t do nothing but say, “Uh-huh,” and “Ummmm,” and go on about their own troubled business. That made white folks subject to trickeration in my mind. Colored was always two steps ahead of white folks in that department, having thunk through every possibility of how to get along without being seen and making sure their lies match up with what white folks wanted. Your basic white man is a fool, is how I thought, and I held Fred in that number.

But I was wrong, for Fred weren’t a complete fool. Nor was his Pa. The bigger fool turned out to be yours truly, for thinking they was fools in the first place. That’s how it goes when you place another man to judgment. You get stretched out wrong to ruination, and that would cost me down the road.

3. The Old Man’s Army

No sooner had we roasted those pheasants than the rest of the Old Man’s men straggled in. Old John Brown’s fearsome army which I heard so much about weren’t nothing but a ragtag assortment of fifteen of the scrawniest, bummiest, saddest-looking individuals you ever saw. They were young, and to a man skinny as horsehair in a glass of milk. There was a Jew foreigner, an Indian, and a few other assorted no-gooders. They were downright ugly, poor men. They’d been on a raid of some sort, for they clattered into camp on a wagon that clanged like a dry-goods store, with pots, cups, saucers, furniture, card tables, spindles, leather strips, bits of this and that hanging off the sides.

They brung everything but food, and the aroma of the birds drawed them to the fire right off. They stood around it in a circle. One of ’em, the Jew named Weiner, a thin, taut, lean feller wearing suspenders, was bearing a newspaper which he gived to Owen. “Hold it till after we eat,” he said, staring at the fire. “Otherwise the Captain will want to ride off directly.”

But the Old Man come up and seen him and he snatched the newspaper. “Mr. Weiner, no doubt the news from Lawrence is pressing,” he said. “But worry not, for I has had a vision on it already.” He turned to the others and said, “Men, before you stuff your gullets, let us thank our Holy Provider for these victuals, since we is after all spreading freedom in His name.”

The men stood in a circle with their heads bowed while the Old Man stood in the center, hat in hand, bowing his wrinkled old face over the roasted birds and the fire.

Thirty minutes later the fire was out, the dinner as cold as Dick’s ice house, and he was still prattling on. I ought to give you a full sample of Old John Brown’s prayers, but I reckon they wouldn’t make sense to the dear reader who’s no doubt setting in a warm church basement a hundred years distant, reading these words wearing Stacy Adams shoes and a fake fur coat, and not having to do no more than waddle over to the wall and flick a button to warm his arse and heat his coffee. The Old Man’s prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt pheasant rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department. Just when he seemed to wrap up one thought, another come tumbling out and crashed up against the first, and then another crashed up against that one, and after a while they all bumped and crashed and commingled against one another till you didn’t know who was who and why he was praying it, for the whole thing come together like the tornadoes that whipped across the plains, gathering up the sagebrush and boll weevils and homesteads and tossing them about like dust. The effort of it drawed his sweat, which poured down his leathery neck and runned down his shirt, while he spouted about burnt offerings and blood from the lamp stand of Jesus and so forth; all the while that dress of mine itched to high heaven and the mosquitoes gnawed at my guts, eating me alive. Finally Owen murmured, “Pa! We got to get up the trail! There’s a posse riding!”

That brung the Old Man to his senses. He coughed, throwed out a couple more Hail Marys and Thank You Lords, then wound the whole business down. “I ought to give Thee a full prayer,” he grumbled, “rather than just a few bumbling words to our Great Redeemer Who hath paid in blood and to Whose service we is obliged.” He was given to saying “thees” and “thous” in his talks.

The men collapsed on their haunches and ate while the Old Man read the newspaper. As he done so, his face darkened, and after a few moments he balled the newspaper up in a large, wrinkled fist and shouted, “Why, they attacked our man!”

“Who’s that?” Owen asked.

“Our man in Congress!” He uncrinkled the newspaper and read it aloud to everyone. From what I could gather, two fellers got into a wrangle about slavery in the top hall of the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., and one of them knocked the other cold. Seemed like a feller from Massachusetts named Sumner got the worst end of it, being that a feller from South Carolina broke his cane over Sumner’s head and got a bunch of new canes in the mail from people that liked his side of the whole bit.

The Old Man throwed the newspaper down. “Roust up the horses and break down the tent. We shall strike back tonight. Hurry, men, we have work to do!”

Well, them men was in no hurry to leave, being they’d just got there and was busy stuffing their faces. “What difference do it make,” one feller said. “It can wait a day.”

“The Negro has waited two hundred years,” the Old Man said.

The feller snorted. “Let ’em wait. There ain’t enough food in this camp.” He was a raggedy-dressed feller like the rest, but he was a thick man, bearing a six-shooter and real riding pants. He had a thick, wrinkled neck of a turkey buzzard, and he kept his mouth movin’ on that pheasant as he talked.

“We is not out here to eat, Rev. Martin,” the Old Man said.

“Just because two fools have a fight in Congress don’t mean nothing,” he said. “We has our own fights out here.”

“Rev. Martin, you is on the wrong side of understanding,” the Captain said.

The Reverend munched away and said, “I aim to better my reading so I don’t have to hear your interpretations of things, Captain, which I is no longer sure of. Every time I ride out and come back to your camp, you got another face rooting around, eating. We ain’t got enough food for the men here already.” He nodded at me. “Who’s that there?”

I was stuffing my face with bird fast as I could, for I had my own plan on escaping.

“Rev. Martin, that’s Onion,” Frederick announced proudly.

“Where’d she come from?” he asked.

“Stolen from Dutch Henry’s Tavern.”

The Reverend’s eyes widened and he turned to the Old Man. “Of all the troublemakers in this country, why’d you pick a fight with him?”

“I didn’t pick no fight,” the Old Man said. “I went to scout his territory.”

“Well, you done scouted trouble. I wouldn’t pick a fight with Dutch for a box of crackers. I ain’t come to this country to shoot it out with him.”

“Nobody’s shooting nothing,” the Old Man said. “We are riding for redemption, and the Bible says it, ‘Hold truth to thine own man’s face, and the Lord shall deliver.’”

“Don’t pick no boil with me about the Bible,” the Reverend snorted. “I know more about it than any man here.”

He bit off the wrong end then, for in my 111 years on God’s green earth, I never knowed a man who could spout the Bible off better than Old John Brown. The Old Man straightened up, reared back, and throwed off half a dozen Bible verses right in the Reverend’s face, and when the Reverend tried to back-fire with a couple of his own, the Old Man drowned him out with half dozen more that was better than the first. Just mowed him down. The Rev was outgunned.

“All right already,” he snapped. “But you sporting trouble. Dutch got a mess of Missouri redshirts ’round his place. You just gived him a reason to set ’em loose. He’ll come after us hard.”

“Let him come,” the Old Man said. “Onion’s part of my family, and I aim to keep her free.”

“She ain’t part of mine,” the Reverend said. He sucked a pheasant bone and tossed it down coolly, licking his fingers. “I’m fighting to free Kansas, not to steal oily-headed niggers like this one.”

The Old Man said icily, “I thought you was a Free State man, Reverend.”

“I am a Free State man,” the Reverend said. “That ain’t got nothing to do with getting aired out for stealing somebody’s nigger.”

“You shouldn’t’a rode with this company if you were planning to peck and hoot ’bout the colored being free,” Old Man Brown said.

“I rode with you out of common interest.”

“Well, my interest is freeing the colored in this territory. I’m an abolitionist through and through.”

Now as them two was wrangling, most of the men had finished up eating and sat on their haunches watching.

“That’s Dutch’s nigger. Bought and paid for!”

“He’ll forget about it soon enough.”

“He won’t forget that kind of wrong.”

“Then I’ll clear his memory of it when he comes.”

The Indian, Ottawa Jones, stepped to the Captain and said, “Dutch ain’t a bad sort, Captain. He done some work for me before he got his tavern. He weren’t for slavery then. He should have the chance to change his mind.”

“You just defending him ’cause you had a slave or two yourself,” another man piped up.

“You’re a liar,” Jones said.

That started more disruption, with several leaning this way and that, some with the Old Man, others with the Reverend. The Old Man listened in silence and finally waved ’em quiet.

“I aim to strike a blow at the slavers. We know what they done. They killed Charles Dow. They sent Joe Hamilton to our Maker right in front of his wife. They raped Willamena Tompkin. They’re rapists. Pillagers. Sinners, all. Destroying this whole territory. The Good Book says, ‘Hold thine enemy to his own fire.’ Dutch Henry is an enemy. But I’ll allow if he don’t get in the way, he won’t suffer injury from me.”

“I ain’t going up against Dutch,” Reverend Martin said. “I got no hank with him.”

“Me neither,” another man said. “Dutch gived me a horse on credit. Plus this here army’s got too many angles to it. I didn’t come all the way from Connecticut to ride with Jews.”

The Jew Weiner, standing next to Jones, stepped toward the man with his fists balled. “Peabody, you open your mouth sideways again, I’ll bust you straddle-legged.”

“That’s enough,” the Old Man said. “We riding on Osawatomie tomorrow night. That’s where Pro Slavers are. Whoever wants to ride, come on. Whoever don’t want to can go home. But go north by way of Lawrence. I don’t want anyone riding south to warn Dutch.”

“You wanna ride against Dutch, go ’head,” the Reverend said. “I won’t get in the way. But nobody tells me where to ride—especially not over a nappy-headed, bird-gobbling nigger.” He placed his hand on his shooter, which hung on his left side. Peabody and a couple of other men stepped aside with him, and suddenly, just like that, the Old Man’s army split in half, one side standing with the Old Man, the other angling behind the Rev.

There was a rustle in the crowd behind the Old Man, and the Reverend’s eyes growed to the size of silver dollars, for Fred came at him and he was hot, drawing his hardware as he come. He handled them big seven-shooters like twigs. Quick as you can tell it, he was on the Reverend and mashed both his seven-shooters on the Reverend’s chest. I heard the cocks snap back on both of them.

“If you say another word about my friend Onion here, I’ll bust a charge in your chest,” he said.

The sound of the Old Man’s voice stopped him. “Frederick!”

Fred froze, pistols drawed out.

“Leave him be.”

Frederick stepped away. The Reverend huffed and glared, but he didn’t pull his metal, and he was wise not to, for Owen had stepped out the crowd, and so had two of Brown’s other sons. They was a rough bunch, them Browns. They was holy as Jesus to a man. They didn’t swear, didn’t drink. Didn’t cuss. But God help you if you crossed ’em, for they didn’t take no backwater off nobody. Once they decided something, it was done.

The Reverend gathered his rifle and things, got on his horse, and hit off without a word. Peabody and two others followed. They rode north out the campgrounds, the way the Captain told ’em to do.

The Old Man, Ottawa Jones the Indian, and the Jew Weiner stood together and watched Reverend Martin and his men leave.

“You ought to duck-hunt that Reverend in his back while you got the chance,” Weiner said. “He won’t be out of sight five minutes before he turns south and heads to Dutch’s Crossing. He’ll hoot and holler to Dutch loud as he can.”

“Let him holler,” the Old Man said. “I want everyone to know what I aim to do.”

But he made a mistake letting the Reverend go that day, and it would cost him down the line.

4. Massacre

The Old Man’s plan to attack Osawatomie got delayed, like most things he done, and we spent the next few days wandering the county, stealing from Pro Slavers so we could eat. The Old Man was always broke and delayed in everything. For one thing, he had a lot of men to feed, twelve in all. That’s a lot. I sometimes reckon that Old John Brown wouldn’t have started no trouble at all if he didn’t have to feed so many people all the time. Even at home he had twelve children there, not to mention his wife and various neighbors who throwed in with him, from what I’m told. That’s a lot to feed. That’ll make anyone mad at anything. Weiner fed us at his trade store in Kinniwick. But after two days, his wife was done with the slavery fight and throwed us out. “We’ll be slaves ourselves once this is done,” she growled.

Them first few days of wandering the territory gived me time to get a read on things. From the Old Man’s side of things, new atrocities was occurring all up and down Kansas Territory, the business in Congress being the last straw. From his point of view, the Yank settlers was being plundered regular by the Kickapoo Rangers, the Ranting Rockheads, the Border Ruffians, Captain Pate’s Sharpshooters, and a number of such bloodthirsty, low-down drunks and demon outfits bent on killing off abolitionists or anyone being suspected of being one. Many of them types was personal favorites of mine, truth be told, for I growed up at Dutch’s and knowed many a rebel. To them the Old Man’s Yanks was nothing more than a bunch of high-siddity squatters, peddlers, and carpetbaggers who came west stealing property with no idea ’bout how things was, plus the Yanks wasn’t fighting fair, being that they got free guns and supplies from back east which they used against the poor plainsmen. Nobody asked the Negro what he thunk about the whole business, by the way, nor the Indian, when I think of it, for neither of their thoughts didn’t count, even though most of the squabbling was about them on the outside, for at bottom the whole business was about land and money, something nobody who was squabbling seemed to ever get enough of.

I weren’t thinking them thoughts back then, of course. I wanted to get back to Dutch’s. I had an aunt and uncle back there, and while I weren’t close to them, anything seemed better than starving. That’s the thing about working under Old John Brown, and if I’m tellin’ a lie I hope I drop down a corpse after I tell it: I was starving fooling with him. I was never hungry when I was a slave. Only when I got free was I eating out of garbage barrels. Plus, being a girl involved too much work. I spent my days running around, fetching this or that for these young skinflints, washing their clothes, combing their hair. Most of ’em didn’t know their heads from their arses and liked having a little girl to do this and that for ’em. It was all, “Fetch me some water, Onion,” and “Grab that gunnysack and bring it yonder,” and “Wash this shirt in the creek for me, Onion,” and “Heat me some water, dearie.” Being free weren’t worth shit. Out of all of ’em, only the Old Man didn’t demand girl chores, and that’s mostly ’cause he was too busy praying.

I was done in with that crap and almost relieved when he announced after a few days, “We is attacking tonight.”

“You ain’t gonna tell us where it is?” Owen grumbled.

“Just sharpen your broadswords.”

Well, that kind of talk goes down fine when you giving orders to a Negro. But them men was white, and there was some grousing from them about not knowing exactly what they was supposed to attack and so forth. The Old Man’s army was brand new, I found that out. They hadn’t been in a war before, none of ’em, not even the Old Man. The hell-raisin’ they’d done was mostly stealing food and supplies. But now the game turned serious, and he still wouldn’t tell ’em where they was going to fight. He ignored ’em when they asked. He never gived out his plans to nobody in all the years I knowed him. Then, on the other hand, looking back, maybe he didn’t know his own self, for he was prone to stop on his horse in the middle of the afternoon, cup his hand to his ear, and say, “Shh. I’m getting messages from our Great Redeemer Who stoppeth time itself on our behalf.” He’d set several minutes, setting on his horse with his eyes closed, meditating, before movin’ on.

After he announced the attack for the night, the men spent the day sharpening their broadswords on stones and getting ready. I spent the day looking for a chance to run off, but Fred was on me. He kept me busy tending the fire and learning to sharpen broadswords and clean rifles. He wouldn’t give me two minutes on my own and kept me close to him. Fred was a good teacher in them things but a pain in the neck, for he had adopted me, and it pleased him to see his little girl catch on so quickly riding a horse and ignoring the mosquitoes and being so adaptable, he said, “almost like a boy.” The dress itched me something terrible, but as the days wore into the cold nights, it growed right warm and comfortable. And I ought to say it here—I ain’t proud to report it—it also kept me from the fight. Somebody was gonna get their head blowed off, and I had no interest in that business.

Afternoon turned to dusk, and the Old Man announced, “The hour is near, men.” No sooner did he say it when, one by one, the men begun to peel off and make excuses to quit. This one had to tend to his livestock. That one had to cut crops. That one had a sick child at home, another had to run home to fetch his gun, and so on. Even Ottawa Jones begged off at the last second, promising to meet us later.

The Old Man let them go with a shrug. “I’d rather have five dedicated, trained fighters than an army of frightened ninnies,” he scoffed. “Why, take Little Onion here. A girl and a Negro besides, tending to her duties like a man. That,” he pointed out proudly to Fred and Owen, “is dedication.”

By evening, the company of twelve had whittled down to eight, not counting yours truly, and the pep had gone out of them that stayed. There was a new color to the thing now, for it growed serious, and hunger struck again. The Old Man hardly ever ate, so his needs for food wasn’t great. But them others was dying of hunger, as was yours truly. Seemed like the closer the hour came to mounting the attack, the hungrier I got, till midnight rolled past, and the hunger changed to fear, and I forgot all about being hungry.

Well into the wee hours, the Old Man gathered what was left of the Pottawatomie Rifles ’round him to pray—I’d say on average he prayed about twice an hour, not counting meals and including the times when he went to the privy, for which he uttered a shortie even before he ducked into the woods to remove his body’s impurities. They gathered ’round him, and the old man rousted it up. I can’t recollect all what he said—the terrible barbarity that followed stayed in my mind much longer—though I do recall standing in my bare feet while the Old Man called on the spirit of Jesus with an extra long spell of Old Testament and New Testament workings, hollering about the Book of John and so forth. He barked and prayed and howled at God forward and backward a solid forty-five minutes, till Owen called out, “Pa, we got to roll. It’ll be light in three hours.”

That rousted the Old Man, who came out his spell grumbling, “Course you would interrupt my reckonings to our dear departed Savior upon Whose blood our lives rest,” he said, “but I reckon He understands the impatience of children and is partial to their youth and recklessness. C’mon, men.”

They gathered in a wagon with horses tied to follow, and I hoisted myself aboard. There was but eight souls left aboard now from the original Pottawatomie Rifles, and only on the wagon as we rolled did I come to the knowledge that five of those was the Old Man’s sons: Owen and Fred, course, then Salmon, Jason, and John Jr., plus one son-in-law, Henry Thompson. The other two were James Townsley and Theo Weiner, the Jew.

We stayed off the California Trail, the main trail which runs clear through Kansas, and rode an old logging path for about an hour, then veered off to a trail that led toward a group of houses. Not a one of them fellers lost a breath or showed any hesitation as we moved, but I overheard them fussin’ about where Dutch lived, them guessing he wanted to attack Dutch’s, and there was some confusion about where it was, for it was dark, and there weren’t much of a moon, and new settlements was popping up along the California Trail every day, changing the look of things. Course I knowed Dutch’s place and everything within a mile of it, but I weren’t quite sure of where we was, either. I know we wasn’t in his country just yet. Wherever we was, we was off the California Trail, clear on the other side of Mosquite Creek. I believe we would’a ended up in Nebraska if the Old Man allowed it, for he didn’t know where he was, either.

I didn’t say a word while they rode back and forth, trying to figure it, and after a while when I looked over at the Old Captain to hear his word on it, I seen he’d fallen asleep in the wagon. I reckon they didn’t want to wake him. He lay there snoring as the others led us ’round in circles for about an hour. I was happy he was asleep, and thought he’d sleep through the whole business and forget it. I was to learn later Old John Brown could stay up for days at a time without eating a crumb, then shut down and sleep for five minutes before waking up to do any kind of task under God’s sun, including killing man or beast.

He awoke in good time sure enough, sat up, and barked out, “Stop near that cabin in clearing yonder. Our work is here.”

Now he was as lost as the rest of us, and didn’t know his way out of the particular patch of woods and that homestead any more than a bird knows his way out of a privy with the door closed, but he was the leader, and he had found what he wanted.

He stared at the cabin in the dim moonlight. It weren’t Dutch’s place at all, but no one, not even Owen or Frederick, said a wrong thing about it, for no one wanted to back-talk him. Truth be told, Brown’s Station, the farmstead where he and his boys stayed, was within ten miles of Dutch’s place, and some of his boys had to know we was at the wrong spot, but none said a word. They was afraid to cross their father. Most of ’em would speak up against Jesus Christ Himself before they took on the Old Man, except Owen, who was the least religious of all his boys and the most sure of hisself. But Owen too looked unsure, at the moment, for this whole conundrum attack and warring in the middle of the night was his Pa’s idea, not his, and he followed his Pa like the rest, right to the brink.

The Old Man was sure, he spoke with the strength of a man who knowed hisself. “To the cause,” he whispered. “Dismount and tie off the two trailing horses.” The men done it.

It was dark but clear. The Old Man leaped out the back of the wagon and led us behind some thickets, peering at the cabin.

“I do believe we’ll catch him by surprise,” he said.

“Are you sure this is Dutch’s?” Owen asked.

The Old Man ignored that. “I can smell slavery within it,” he declared. “Let us strike quickly with the Lord’s vengeance. Broadswords only. No guns.”

He turned to me and said, “Little Onion, you are a courageous child, and while I knows you wants to strike a blow for freedom yourself, tonight is not the time. Stay here. We’ll be back shortly.”

Well, he didn’t have to tell me twice. I weren’t going nowhere. I stood by the wagon and watched them go.

The moon peeked from behind the clouds and it allowed me to see them approach the cabins, spread out in a line. Several switched to guns, despite what the Old Man told ’em, as they approached the front door.

When they were almost on the front door, and a good thirty yards from me, I turned around and ran.

I got no more than five steps and runned right into two four-legged mongrels who jumped at me. One knocked me down and the other barked holy hell and would’a tore me apart had not something dropped on him and he fell. The other mutt ran off howling into the woods.

I looked up to see Fred standing over the slain dog with his broadsword and the Old Man and the rest standing over me. The Old Man looked grim, and the sight of them tight, gray eyes boring into me made me want to shrivel up to the size of a peanut. I thought he was going to chastise me, but instead he turned and glared at the others. “It’s Lucky Onion here had the mind to look out for watchdogs behind us, which none of you had the mind to consider. I reckon you can’t prevent someone from fighting for their freedom. So come on, Little Onion. I knows you want to come. Stay back from us, and be very quick and quiet.”

Well, he done me a worse service, but I done as he said. They trotted toward the cabin. I followed at a safe distance.

Owen and Fred stepped up to the front door, guns bared, and knocked politely, while the Old Man stood back.

A voice inside said, “Who’s there?”

“Trying to get to Dutch’s Tavern,” Old Man Brown called out. “We’re lost.”

The door opened and Owen and Fred cold-kicked the man inside the house and stepped in behind him. The rest tumbled inside.

I went to a side window and watched. The cabin was but a room, lit by a dim candle. The Old Man and his sons stood over none other than James Doyle, who had been in the tavern and held his .45 Colt on the Old Man, and Doyle’s three sons and his wife. Doyle and his boys were pressed to the wall, facing it, while the Old Man’s boys held Sharps rifles and swords at their necks. The Old Man stood over them, shuffling one foot to the other, his face twitching, searching in his pockets for something.

I don’t reckon he knowed what to do at first, for he had never taken nobody prisoner before. He dug in his pockets a good five minutes before he finally pulled out a piece of yellowed, rumpled paper and read from it in a high, thin voice: “I’m Captain Brown of the Northern Army. We come here from back east to free the enslaved people of this territory under the laws of our Redeemer the Lord Jesus Christ Who spilt His blood for you and me.” Then he balled up the paper, stuck it in his pocket, and said to Doyle, “Which one of you is Dutch Henry?”

Doyle was white-faced. “He don’t live here.”

“I know that,” the Old Man said, though he didn’t know it. He had just learnt it. “Is you related to him?”

“None of us here is.”

“Is you Pro Slavers or against?”

“I don’t own no slaves myself.”

“I ain’t ask that. Ain’t I seen you at Dutch Henry’s?”

“I was just passing through,” Doyle said. “He lives down the road a piece, don’t you remember?”

“I don’t recollect every step I take in doing my duties as the Almighty directs me to them,” the Old Man said, “for I am commingling with His spirit almost every minute. But I do recollects you being one of them ruffians wanting to blast me over there.”

“But I’m not Dutch,” Doyle said. “Dutch’s Tavern is two miles east.”

“And a heathen’s haven it is,” the Old Man said.

“But I didn’t fire on you,” Doyle pleaded. “I could have but didn’t.”

“Well, you should have. You kin to Dutch, by the way?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Well, I ask you again. Is you for slavery or not?”

“You won’t find one slave ’round here,” Doyle said. “I got nar one.”

“Too bad, for this is a big homestead,” Old Brown said. “It’s a lot of work to keep it going.”

“You telling me,” Doyle said. “I got more plowing than me and my boys can handle. I could use a couple of niggers around here. You can’t make it in Kansas Territory without help. Why, just yesterday—”

And then he stopped, for he knowed he made a mistake. Old Brown’s face changed. The years dropped off him, and a youngness climbed into him. He straightened up and his jaw poked out. “I come to deliver the Redeemer’s justice to free His people. And to exact the Lord’s revenge on the murdering and kidnapping of the Negro people by slavers and them like yourself who has robbed and stole in the name of that infernal institution. And all that it involves, and all who’s involved in it, who has partaken in its spoils and frivolities. There ain’t no exceptions.”

“Do that mean you don’t like me?” Doyle said.

“Step outside,” the Old Man said.

Doyle growed white as a sheet and pleaded his case. “I meant you no harm at Dutch’s,” he said. “I’m just a farmer trying to make a dollar change pockets.” Then he suddenly swiveled his head, glanced at the window—my face was stuck dead in it and the window was right there—and saw me peering in, wearing a dress and bonnet. A puzzled look come across his face, which was stone-cold frightened. “Ain’t I seen you before?” he asked.

“Save your howdys for another time. I’m doing the talking here,” Brown said. “I’ll ask you for the last time. Is you Free State or Slave State?”

“Whatever you say,” Doyle said.

“Make up your mind.”

“I can’t think with a Sharps under my chin!”

The Old Man hesitated, and Doyle was almost off the hook, till his wife hollered out, “I told you, Doyle! This is what you get for running with them damn rebels.”

“Hush, Mother,” he said.

It was too late then. The cat was out the bag. Brown nodded to his boys, who grabbed Doyle and throwed him and his two older boys out the door. When they reached for the last, the youngest, the mother throwed herself at Old Brown.

“He’s just sixteen,” the missus pleaded. “He ain’t had nothing to do with them law-and-order people. He’s just a boy.”

She pleaded with the Old Man something terrible, but he weren’t listening. He was lost. Seemed like he went to a different place inside his head. He looked past her head, beyond her, like he was looking to heaven or something far off. He got downright holy when it was killing time. “Take thine own hand and split an ax with it,” he said. “That’s Eucclestsies twelve seven or thereabouts.”

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“This one’s coming with me, too.”

Well, she fell on her knees and howled and pleaded and scratched some more, so much she throwed the Old Man out of his killing stupor for a minute, and he said, “All right. We’ll leave him. But I’m keeping a man with a muzzle trained on this door. If you or anybody else pokes their head outside it, they gonna chew a powder ball.”

He left a man to watch the door and split the rest, half taking Doyle to one part of the thickets, the other half a few yards off with Doyle’s two boys. I followed Fred, Owen, and the Old Man, who took Doyle a few steps into the thicket, stopped, and placed him standing with his back to a large tree. Doyle, barefoot, quaked like a knock-kneed chicken and begun moaning like a baby.

The Old Man ignored that. “Now, I’mma ask you for the last time. Is you Pro Slavery or Free State?” Brown said.

“It was just talk,” Doyle said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.” He commenced to shaking and crying and begging for his life. His sons, several feet away, couldn’t see him, but they heard him bellowing like a broke calf and begun to moan and howl as well.

The Old Man didn’t say nothing. Seem like he was hypnotized. He didn’t seem to see Doyle. I couldn’t stand it, so I moved out the thicket, but not fast enough, for Doyle seen me in the glint of the moonlight and suddenly recognized me. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “Tell ’em I’m all right! You know me! Tell ’em. I never done you no wrong.”

“Shush,” Brown said. “I’ll ask you for the last time. Is you a Pro Slaver or not!”

“Don’t hurt me, Captain,” Doyle said. “I’m just a man trying to make a living slinging wheat and growing butter beans.”

He might as well have been singing to a dead hog. “You didn’t say that to Lew Shavers, and them two Yankee women you ravaged outside Lawrence,” the Old Man said.

“That weren’t me,” Doyle murmured quietly. “Just those I knowed.”

“And you wasn’t there?”

“I was. But that ... was a mistake. It weren’t me that done that.”

“I’ll beg the Lord your forgiveness, then,” Brown said. He turned to Fred and Owen and said, “Make quick work of it.”

By God, them two raised their swords and planted them right in the poor man’s head, and down he went. Doyle wanted to live so bad he fell down and got up in the same motion, with Fred’s broadsword still planted in his skull, scrambling for life. Owen struck him again and knocked his head nearly clean off, and this time he went down and stayed there, still twitching as he lay on his side, legs running sideways, but even with his head half sheared off, Doyle hollered like a stuck hog long enough for his sons, not more than ten yards off in the thickets, to hear. The sound of their Pa’s getting murdered and bellowing spooked them to howling like coyotes, till the thud of swords striking their heads echoed out the thicket and they was quieted up. Then it was done.

They stood in the thicket, the whole bunch of ’em panting and exhausted for a minute, then a terrible howling emerged. I jumped in my skin, thinking it was from the dead themselves, till I saw a soul running off through the woods and seen it was one of Brown’s own sons, John. He ran toward the cabin clearing, squawking like a madman.

“John!” the Old Man hollered, and took off after him, the men following.

There weren’t going to be another chance. I turned into the thickets where the wagon and two horses were tethered. One of them, Dutch’s old pinto, had been ridden over by one of the Old Man’s men. I leaped atop it, turned it toward Dutch’s, and put it to work as fast as it would go. Only when I was clear of the thickets did I look behind me to see if I was clear, and I was. I’d left them all behind. I was gone.

5. Nigger Bob

I made it to the California Trail as fast as that horse could stand it, but after a while she tired down and moved to a trot, so I ditched her, for light was coming and me riding her would attract questions. Niggers couldn’t travel alone in them days without papers. I left her where she was and she trotted on ahead while I moved on foot, staying off the road. I was a mile from Dutch’s Tavern when I heard a wagon coming. I jumped into the thickets and waited.

The trail curved around and dipped before it hit an open wood area near where I was, and around the curve, up over the dip, came an open-back wagon driven by a Negro. I decided to take a chance and hail him down. I was about to jump out when, around the curve behind him, a posse of sixteen redshirts on horses in columns of twos appeared. They was Missourians, and traveling like an army.

Sunlight was laying across the plains now. I laid in the thickets, crouched behind a row of bramblers and thick trees, waiting for them to pass. Instead, they halted at the clearing just a few feet from me.

In the back of the wagon was a prisoner. An elderly white feller in a beard, dirty white shirt, and suspenders. His hands was free but his feet was roped to a metal circular hook built into the floor of the wagon. He looked downright tight. He sat near the back flap of the wagon, while the rest passed a bottle of joy juice among them, regarding him.

A man rode to the front of them, a sour-looking feller with a face like molded bread, pock-faced. I reckon he was their leader. He dismounted his horse, swayed, two sheets to the wind, then suddenly swerved around and staggered right toward me. He stepped to the woods not two feet off from where I crouched hidden. He swayed so close to my hiding place I saw the inside of his ear, which looked like the cross-section of a cucumber. But he didn’t spot me for he was clean soused. He leaned against the other side of the tree where I hid, and emptied his bladder, then staggered into the clearing again. From his pocket he brung out a rumpled piece of paper and addressed the prisoner.

“Okay, Pardee,” he said. “We gonna try you right here.”

“Kelly, I already told you I weren’t a Yank,” the old man said.

“We’s see,” Kelly mumbled. He held the rumpled piece of paper up to the sunlight. “I got several resolutions here saying the Free State men is liars and law-breaking thieves,” he said. “You read them out loud. Then sign them all.”

Pardee snatched the paper. He held it close to his eyes, then far off at arm’s length, then close again, straining to see. Then he thrust it back at Kelly. “My eyes ain’t what they once was,” he said. “You g’wan and read it.”

“You ain’t got to follow it to the dot,” Kelly barked. “Just put your mark on it and be done with it.”

“I ain’t scratching my name to nothing till I know what it is,” Pardee grumbled.

“Stop making it tough, ya stupid idiot. I’m making it easy for ya.”

Pardee throwed his eyes to the paper again and started reading.

He took his time about it. Five minutes passed. Ten. The sun shone full overhead and the liquor bottle the men passed around was emptied and tossed. Another liquor bottle appeared. They passed that. Twenty minutes passed. He was still reading.

Several fellers dozed off while Kelly sat on the ground, doodling with his gun belt, drunk as a fish. Finally he looked up at Pardee. “What you waiting on, the steamboat?” he snapped. “Just sign it. It’s just a few declarations.”

“I can’t read ’em all at once,” Pardee said.

Well, it occurred to me that Pardee probably couldn’t read at all. But he acted like he could. The men begun to curse him. They cursed him for the better part of ten minutes. He kept on reading. One man went up to Pardee and blowed cigar smoke in his face. Another come up and yelled into his ear. A third come up, hawked, and spit right on his face. That made him put the paper down.

“Hatch, I’m gonna bust you across the jibs once I get clear here,” Pardee growled.

“Just finish!” Kelly said.

“I can’t read with your cousin screwing up my figuring. Now I got to start all over again.”

He throwed the paper to his face again. The men grew more furious. They threatened to tar and feather him. They promised to hold an auction and let the Negro driver sell him. Still, Pardee kept reading. Wouldn’t look up. Finally Kelly stood up.

“I’mma give you one last chance,” he said. He looked serious now.

“Okay,” Pardee said. He thrust the paper out to Kelly. “I’m finished. I can’t sign it. It’s illegal.”

“But it’s signed by a bona fide judge!”

“I don’t care if it’s signed by Jesus H. Christ. I ain’t signing nothin’ that I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand nothin’ in it.”

Now Kelly got mad. “I’m giving you a break, ya watery-mouth, yellow-livered Free Stater. Sign it!”

“That’s some way to treat a feller who rode cattle with you for two years.”

“That’s the only reason you’re drawing air now.”

“You lyin’, bowlegged cockroach. You just tryin’ to stake my claim!”

That stirred the men. Suddenly the thing went the other way. Claim jumpers in Kansas, folks who throwed themselves on another’s land who already made a claim on that land, why, they was almost worse than horse and nigger thieves.

“Is that true, Kelly?” one of them asked. “You trying to stake his land?”

“Course not,” Kelly said hotly.

“He’s straight out been aiming on my land since we got here,” Pardee said. “That’s why you calling me a Yank, ya leech!”

“You’s a blue-bellied, pet house-paupin’ liar!” Kelly roared. He snatched the paper from Pardee and gived it to the driver of the wagon, a Negro.

“Nigger Bob, you read it out loud,” he said. He turned to Pardee. “And whatever that nigger reads off here, if you don’t agree and sign off on it, I’m gonna bust a charge into your neck and be done with you.”

He turned to the Negro. “G’wan and read it, Nigger Bob.”

Nigger Bob was a hardy, tall, fit Negro, not more than twenty-five, setting atop the driver’s bench on the wagon. He took the paper with shaking hands, his eyes wide as silver dollars. That nigger was panicked. “I can’t read, boss,” he stammered.

“Just read it.”

“But I don’t know what it says.”

“G’wan and read it!”

That Negro’s hands shook and he stared at the paper. Finally he blurted nervously, “Een-y. Mean-y. Mine-y. Moe. One-two-three.”

Several men burst out laughing, but Kelly was hot now, as was several others, for the men growed impatient.

“Kelly, let’s hang Pardee and get up the road,” one said.

“Let’s tar and feather him.”

“What you fooling ’round for, Kelly? Let’s go.”

Kelly waved them to silence, then blew out his cheeks, hemming and hawing. He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Being full of gulp sauce weren’t helping him, neither. He said, “Let’s vote on it. All in favor of hanging Pardee for being a nigger-loving Free State Yankee and an agent of the New England Emigrant Yellow Belly Society, raise your hand.”

Eight hands were raised.

“All in favor of not hanging?”

Eight more hands went up.

I counted sixteen men. It was a tie.

Kelly stood there swaying, drunk, in a quandary. He tottered over to Nigger Bob, who sat in the wagon driver’s seat, trembling. “Since Pardee here’s an abolitionist, we’ll let Nigger Bob decide. What’s your vote, Nigger Bob? Hang Pardee here or not?”

Pardee, setting in the back of the wagon, suddenly leaped up in a snit. “Hang me then!” he howled. “I’d rather hang than have a nigger vote on me!” he cried, then tried to leap out the wagon, but fell flat on his face, for his feet were tied.

The men howled even more. “You pukin’ abolitionist egghead,” Kelly said, laughing, as he helped Pardee up. “You should’a read them resolutions like I told you.”

“I can’t read!” Pardee said.

That stopped Kelly cold and he took his hands off Pardee like he was electrified. “What? You said you could!”

“I was lying.”

“What about that land title at Big Springs? You said it was ...”

“I don’t know what that was. You wanted it so damn bad!”

“You blockhead!”

Now it was Kelly’s turn to be on the spot while the other men laughed at him! “You should’a said something, ya damn dummy,” he growled. “Whose land is it then?”

“I don’t know,” Pardee sniffed. “But you been told. Now. You read these resolutions to me and I’ll sign ’em.” He thrust the paper out to Kelly.

Kelly hemmed and hawed. He coughed. He blew his nose. He flustered around. “I ain’t much on reading,” he muttered. He snatched the paper from Pardee and turned to the posse. “Who here reads?”

Weren’t a man among them spoke. Finally a feller in the back said, “I ain’t setting here watching you fiddle with your noodle a minute more, Kelly. Old Man Brown’s hiding out near here somewhere, and I aim to find him.”

With that he galloped off, and the men followed. Kelly rushed to follow them, staggering to his mount. When he swung his horse around, Pardee said, “At least gimme my gun back, ya knobhead.”

“I sold it in Palmyra, ya mule-face abolitionist. I oughta kick your teeth out for screwing up that land title,” Kelly said. He rode off with the rest.

Pardee and Nigger Bob watched him leave.

When he was out of sight, Nigger Bob moved from the driver’s seat to the back and untied Pardee’s ankles without a word.

“Ride me home,” Pardee fumed. He said it over his shoulder as he rubbed his ankles, setting in back of the wagon.

Nigger Bob hopped into the driver’s seat, but didn’t move. He sat atop the wagon and looked straight ahead. “I ain’t riding you no place,” he said.

That floored me. I had never heard a Negro talk to a white man like that before in my entire life.

Pardee blinked, stunned. “What you say?”

“You heard it. This here wagon belongs to Mr. Settles and I’m taking it home to him.”

“But you got to pass Palmyra! That’s right where I live.”

“I ain’t going nowhere with you, Mr. Pardee. You can go where you want, however you please. But this here wagon belongs to Marse Jack Settles. And he ain’t give me no permission to ride nobody in it. I done what Mr. Kelly said ’cause I had to. But I ain’t got to now.”

“Git down off that seat and come down here.”

Bob ignored him. He sat in the driver’s seat, staring off into the distance.

Pardee reached for his heater, but found his holster empty. He stood up and glared at Nigger Bob like he was fit to whup him, but that Negro was bigger than him and I reckon he thought better of it. Instead, he jumped down off the wagon, stomped down the road a piece, picked up a large stone, walked back to the wagon, and chinked out the wood cotter pin on one of the wagon wheels. Just banged it right out. That pin held the wheel on. Bob sat there as he chinked. Didn’t move.

When Pardee was done, he throwed the pin in the thickets. “If I got to walk home, you walking too, ya black bastard,” he said, and stomped up the road.

Bob watched him till he was out of sight, then climbed down from the wagon and looked at the wheel. I waited several long minutes before I finally come out the woods. “I can help you fix that if you take me up the road a piece,” I said.

He stared at me, startled. “What you doing out, little girl?” he said.

Well, that throwed me, for I forgot how I was done up. I quick tried to untie the bonnet. But it was tied tight. So I went at the dress, which was tied from behind.

“Good Lord, child,” Bob said. “You ain’t got to do that to get no ride from Nigger Bob.”

“It ain’t what it looks like,” I said. “In fact, if you’d be so kind as to help me take this thing off—”

“I’ll be heading out,” he said, backing away.

But I had my chance and I weren’t going to lose it. “Wait a minute. Help me. If you don’t mind, just untie—”

Good God, he jumped atop the wagon, hustled onto the driver’s seat, called up that horse to trotting, and was off, pin or no pin. He got about ten yards before that back wheel got to wobbling so bad—it just about come clean off—before he stopped. He jumped down, pulled a stick from the thickets, stuck it into the pin hole, and commenced to banging it into place. I ran up on him.

“I got business, child,” he said, chinking away at the wheel. He wouldn’t look up at me.

“I ain’t a girl.”

“Whatever you think you is, honey, I don’t think it’s proper that you unstring that dress from ’round yourself in front of ol’ Nigger Bob—a married man.” He paused a minute, glanced around, then added, “Less’n you want to, of course.”

“You got a lot of salt talking that way,” I said.

“You the one asking for favors.”

“I’m trying to get to Dutch’s Crossing.”

“For what?”

“I live there. I’m Gus Shackleford’s boy.”

“That’s a lie. Old Gus is dead. And he ain’t have no girl. Had a boy. Wasn’t worth shit neither, that child.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say ’bout somebody you don’t know.”

“I don’t know you, child. You a sassy thing. How old are you?”

“It don’t matter. Take me back to Dutch’s. He’ll give you a little something for me.”

“I wouldn’t ride to Dutch’s for a smooth twenty dollars. They’ll kill a nigger in there.”

“He won’t bother you. It’s Old John Brown he’s after.”

At the mention of that name, Bob glanced around, taking stock up and down the trail, making sure nobody was rolling toward us. The trail was empty.

“The John Brown?” he whispered. “He’s really ’round these parts?”

“Surely. He kidnapped me. Made me wear a dress and bonnet. But I escaped that murdering fool.”

“Why?”

“You see how he got me dressed.”

Bob looked at me closely, then sighed, then whistled. “There’s killers all up and down these plains,” he said slowly. “Ask the red man. Anybody’ll say anything to live. What would John Brown want with you anyhow? He need an extra girl to work his kitchen?”

“If I’m tellin’ a lie I hope I drop down dead after I tell it. I ain’t a girl!” I managed to pull the bonnet back off my head.

That shook him some. He peered at me close, then stuck his face into mine and it hit him then. His eyes got wide. “What the devil got into you?” he said.

“Want me to show you my privates?”

“Spare me, child. I takes your word for it. I wouldn’t want to see your privates any more than I’d want to stick my face in Dutch Henry’s Tavern. Why you paddling ’round like that? Was John Brown gonna run you north?”

“I don’t know. He just murdered three fellers up about five miles from here. I seen that with my own eyes.”

“White fellers?”

“If it look white and smell white, you can bet it ain’t buzzard.”

“You sure?”

“James Doyle and his boys,” I said. “Deadened ’em with swords.”

He whistled softly. “Glory,” he murmured.

“So you’ll take me back to Dutch’s?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He seemed lost in thought. “I heard John Brown was about these parts. He’s something else. You ought to be grateful, child. You met him and all?”

“Met him? Why you think I’m dressed like a sissy. He—”

“Shit! If I could get Old John Brown to favor me and carry me to freedom, why, I’d dress up as a girl every day for ten years. I’d be thoroughly a girl till I got weak from it. I’d be a girl for the rest of my life. Anything’s better than bondage. Your best bet is to go back with him.”

“He’s a murderer!”

“And Dutch ain’t? He’s riding on Brown now. Got a whole posse looking for ’em. Every redshirt within a hundred miles is rolling these plains for him. You can’t go back to Dutch nohow.”

“Why not?”

“Dutch ain’t stupid. He’ll sell you south and git his money for you while he can. Any nigger that’s had a sip of freedom ain’t worth squat to the white man out here. High-yellow boy like you’ll fetch a good price in New Orleans.”

“Dutch wouldn’t see me sold.”

“You wanna bet?”

That gived me pause then. For Dutch weren’t too sentimental.

“You know where I can go?”

“Your best bet is to go back to Old Brown. If you ain’t lyin’ ’bout being with his gang and all. They say they’re fearsome. Is it true he carries two seven-shooters?”

“One of ’em does.”

“Ooh, wee, that just tickles me,” he said.

“I’d rather blow my brains out than run around dressed like a girl. I can’t do it.”

“Well, save yourself the bullet and go on back to Dutch, then. He’ll send you to New Orleans and death’ll be knocking shortly. I never heard of a nigger escaped from there.”

That done me in. I hadn’t considered none of that. “I don’t know where the Old Man is now,” I said. “I couldn’t find him by myself nohow. I don’t know these parts.”

Bob said slowly, “If I help you find him, you think he could lead me to freedom, too? I’ll dress like a girl for it.”

Well, that sounded too complicated. But I needed a ride. “I can’t say what he’ll do, but he and his sons got a big army. And more guns than you ever saw. And I heard him say it clear, ‘I’m an abolitionist through and through, and I aims to free every colored in this territory.’ I heard him say that many times. So I expect he would take you.”

“What about my wife and children?”

“I don’t know about that.”

Bob thunk on it a long moment.

“I got a cousin down near Middle Creek who knows everything in these parts,” he said. “He’ll know where the Old Man’s hideout is. But if we set here too long, another posse’s gonna roll up, and they might not be drunk like the last. Help me tie that wagon wheel back.”

I hopped to work. We rolled a fallen tree stump under the wagon. He harred the horse up so it pulled the wagon high enough to free the bottom, then tied the rope to a tree and harred the horse up again, creating a winch. We piled planks and stones under it to keep it up. I searched the thickets and found that cotter pin and helped him put the wheel back on and chink it in. The sun was near to noon when we finished, and we was hot and sweaty by the time we got the thing done, but we got that wagon wheel spinning like new, and I hopped aboard the driver’s seat next to him, and we was off in no time.

6. Prisoner Again

We didn’t get two miles down the road before we runned into patrols of every type. The entire territory was in alarm. Armed posses crisscrossed the trail every which way. Every passing wagon had a rider setting up front with a shotgun. Children acted as lookouts for every homestead, with Pas and Mas setting out front in rocking chairs holding shotguns. We passed several wagons pulling terrified Yankees going in the opposite direction, their possessions piled high, hauling ass back east fast as their mules could go, quitting the territory altogether. The Old Man’s killings terrified everyone. But Bob got safe passage, for he was riding his master’s wagon and had papers to show it.

We followed the Pottawatomie Creek on the California Trail toward Palmyra. Then we cut along the Marais des Cygnes River toward North Middle Creek. A short way along the river, Bob stopped the wagon, dismounted, and tied off the horse. “We got to walk from here,” he said.

We walked down a clean-dug trail to a fine, well-built house on the back side of the river. An old Negro was tending flowers at the gate, turning dirt on the walkway as we come. Bob howdied him and he hailed us over.

“Good afternoon, Cousin Herbert,” Bob said.

“What’s good about it?”

“The Captain’s good about it.”

At the mention of the word “Captain,” Herbert glanced at me, shot a nervous look at his master’s house, then fell to turning that dirt again on his hands and knees, getting busy on that dirt, looking down. “I don’t know nothing about no Captain, Bob.”

“C’mon, Herbert.”

The old feller kept his eyes on that dirt, turning it, busy, tending flowers, talking low as he worked. “Git on outta here. Old Brown’s hotter than a pig in shit. What you doing fooling with him? And whose knock-kneed girl is that? She too young for you.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Who?”

“Stop fooling. You know who I’m talking about.”

Herbert glanced up, then back down at his flowers. “There’s posses from here to Lawrence combing this whole country for him. They say he throwed the life spark outta ten white fellers up near Osawatomie. Knocked their heads clean off with swords. Any nigger that mentions his name’ll be shipped outta this territory in pieces. So git away from me. And send that girl home and run on home to your wife.”

“She belongs to the Captain.”

That changed things, and Herbert’s hands stopped a moment as he considered it, still looking down at the dirt, then he started digging again. “What that got to do with me?” Herbert said.

“She’s Captain’s property. He’s running her out this country, outta bondage.”

The old man stopped his work for a minute, glancing at me. “Well, she can suck her thumb at his funeral, then. Git. Both of y’all.”

“That’s a hell of a way to treat your third cousin.”

“Fourth cousin.”

“Third, Herbert.”

“How’s that?”

“My Aunt Stella and your Uncle Beall shared a second cousin named Melly, remember? She was Jamie’s daughter, second cousin to Odgin. That was Uncle Beall’s nephew by his first marriage to your Mom’s sister Stella, who got sold last year. Stella was my cousin Melly’s second cousin. So that makes Melly your third cousin, which puts your Uncle Jim in the back behind my uncles Fergus, Cook, and Doris, but before Lucas and Kurt, who was your first cousin. That means Uncle Beall and Aunt Stella was first cousins, which makes me and you third cousins. You would treat your third cousin this way?”

“I don’t care if you is Jesus Christ and my son together,” Herbert snapped. “I don’t know nothing ’bout no Captain. ’Specially in front of her,” he said, nodding at me.

“What you gettin’ in a knot over her for? She’s just a child.”

“That’s just it,” Herbert said. “I ain’t gonna eat tar and feathers over that high-yellow thing there who I don’t even know. She don’t look nothing like the Old Man, whatever he do look like.”

“I didn’t say she was his kin.”

“Whatever she is, she don’t belong with you, a married man.”

“You ought to check yourself, cousin.”

He turned to me. “Is you colored or white, miss, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“What difference do it make?” Bob snapped. “We got to find the Captain. This little girl is rolling with him.”

“Is she colored or not?”

“Course she’s colored. Can’t you see?”

The old man stopped his digging to stare at me a moment, then started digging again, and snorted, “If I didn’t know no better, I’d say she was kin to old Gus Shackleford, who they say got his spark blowed out on account of talking to John Brown in Dutch’s Tavern four days past, bless his soul. But Gus had a boy, that trifling Henry. He worried Gus to devilment, that one. Acting white and all. He needs a good spanking. I ever catch that little gamecock nigger outside Dutch’s I’ll warm his little buns with a switch so hard, he’ll crow like a rooster. I expect his devilment is what sent his Pa to his rewards, for he was as lazy as the devil. Children these days is just going to hell, Bob. Can’t tell ’em nothing.”

“Is you done?” Bob said.

“Done what?”

“Fluffling your feathers and wasting time,” Bob snapped. “Where’s the Captain? Do you know or not?”

“Well, Bob. A jar of peaches’ll go far in this kind of weather.”

“I ain’t got no peaches, Herbert.”

Herbert straightened. “You work your mouth awful good for a feller who never gived his cousin a penny in this world. Driving ’round in your high-siddity wagon with your high master. My marse is a poor man, like me. Go find yourself a bigger fool.”

He turned away and dug more dirt into his flower bed.

“If you won’t tell it, cousin,” Bob said, “I’ll go inside and ask your marse. He’s a Free Stater, ain’t he?”

The old man glanced back at the cabin. “I don’t know what he is,” he said dryly. “He come out to this country Free State, but them rebels is changing these white folks’ mind fast.”

“I’ll tell you this, cousin. This here girl do belong to John Brown. And he’s looking for her. And if he do find her, and she tells him you was pushing the waters against him, he’s liable to ride down here and place his broadsword on your back. And if he sets his mind to that kind of blood frolic, nothing’ll stop him. Who’s gonna look after you then?”

That done it. The old man grimaced a bit, glanced up at the woods beyond the cabin behind him, then returned to digging his flowers. He talked with his face to the ground. “Circle ’round the cabin and move straight back into the woods, past the second birch tree beyond the corn field yonder,” he said. “You’ll find an old whiskey bottle stuck between two low branches on that tree. Follow the mouth of that bottle due north two miles, just the way the mouth is pointed. Keep the sun on your left shoulder. You’ll run into an old rock wall somebody built and left behind. Follow that wall to a camp. Make some noise ’fore you roll in there, though. The Old Man’s got lookouts. They’ll pull the trigger and tell the hammer to hurry.”

“You all right, cousin.”

“Git outta here ’fore you get me kilt. Old Brown ain’t fooling. They say he roasted the skulls of the ones he kilt. That’s the Wilkersons, the Fords, the Doyles, and several folks on the Missouri side. Ate their eyeballs like they was grapes. Fried the brains like chitlins. Used the scalps for wick lamps. He’s the devil. I ain’t never seen white folks so scared,” he said.

That’s the thing about the Old Man back in them days. If he done a thing, it got whipped up into a heap of lies five minutes past breakfast.

Herbert covered his mouth and chortled, licking his lips. “I want my jar of peaches, cousin. Don’t forget me.”

“You’ll git ’em.”

We bid leave of him and headed toward the woods. When we reached them, Bob stopped. “Little brother,” he said, “I got to cut you loose here. I’d like to go, but I’m getting shaky. Being that Old John Brown has chopped off eyeballs and heads and all, I don’t think I can make it. I’m fond of my head, since it do cover the top of my body. Plus, I got a family and can’t leave ’em just yet, not unless they has safe passage. Good luck, for you is going to need it. Stay a girl and go with it till the Old Man’s dead. Don’t worry ’bout old Nigger Bob here. I’ll catch up to you later.”

Well, I couldn’t assure him of nothing about whether or not the Old Man would take his head or be deadened, but there weren’t nothing to do but take my leave of him. I followed old Herbert’s directions, walking through the tall pines and thickets. A short while later, I recognized a piece of the rock wall—that was the same wall the Old Man had leaned on to follow the map when he first kidnapped me, but the camp was gone. I followed that wall along till I seen smoke from a fire. I went behind the wall, on the far side, intending to go behind the Old Man and holler at him and his men so they’d recognize me. I made a wide circle, snaking through trees and thickets, and after I was sure I was far back off ’em, I rose up, stepped behind a wide oak, and sat down to gather myself. I didn’t know what kind of excuse I would cook up for ’em and needed time to think of one. Before I knew it, I fell asleep, for all that trekking and running around in the woods got me exhausted.

When I woke, the first thing I saw was a pair of worn boots with several toes sticking out of them. I knowed them toes, for just two days previous, I’d seen Fred throw a needle and thread at them things as we set by the fire salting peanuts. From where I lay, them toes was looking none too friendly.

I looked up into the barrel of two seven-shooters, and behind Frederick was Owen and several more of the Old Man’s army, and none was looking too happy.

“Where’s Pa’s horse?” Fred asked.

Well, they brung me to the Old Man and it was like I hadn’t gone no place. The Old Man greeted me like I had just come back from an errand to the general store. He didn’t mention the missing horse, me running off, or none of them things. Old Brown never cared about the details of his army. I seen fellers walk off from his army one day, stay away a year, and a year later walk back into his camp and set down by the fire and eat like they had just come back from hunting that morning, and the Old Man wouldn’t say a word. His abolitionist Pottawatomie Rifles was all volunteers. They came and went just as they pleased. In fact, the Old Man never gave orders unless they was in a firefight. Mostly he’d say, “I’m going this way,” and his sons would say, “Me too,” and the rest would say, “Me too,” and off they went. But as far as giving orders and checking attendance and all, the abolitionist army was a come-one, come-all outfit.

He was standing over a campfire in his shirtsleeves, roasting a pig, when I walked up. He glanced up and seen me.

“Evening, Onion,” he said. “You hungry?”

I allowed that I was, and he nodded and said, “Come hither and chat whilst I roast this pig. Afterward, you can join me in praying to our Redeemer to give thanks for our great victory to free your people.” Then he added, “Half your people, since on account of your fair complexion, I reckon you is one half white or thereabouts. Which in and of itself, makes this world even more treacherous for you, sweet dear Onion, for you has to fight within yourself and outside yourself, too, being half a loaf on one side and half the other. Don’t worry. The Lord don’t have no contention with your condition, for Luke twelve, five says, ‘Take not the breast of not just thine own mother into thy hand, but of both thy parents.’”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, course, but figured I’d better explain about his horse. “Captain,” I said. “I got scared and run and lost your horse.”

“You ain’t the only one that run.” He shrugged, working that pig expertly. “There’s several ’round here who’s shy to putting God’s philosophy into action.” He glanced around at the men, several of whom looked away, embarrassed.

By now the Old Man’s army had gotten bigger. There were at least twenty men setting about. Piles of arms and broadswords were leaned up against trees. The small lean-to tent I first saw was gone. In its place was a real tent, which, like everything there, was stolen for it was painted in the front with a sign that read Knox’s Fishing, Tackle, and Mining Tools. Out near the edge of camp, I counted fourteen horses, two wagons, a cannon, three woodstoves, enough swords to supply at least fifty men, and a box marked Thimbles. The men looked exhausted, but the Old Man looked fresh as a daisy. A week’s worth of white beard had growed on his chin, bringing it closer down to his chest. His clothes were soiled and torn worse than ever, and his toes protruded so far from his boots, they looked like slippers. But he moved spry and sprite as a spring creek.

“The killing of our enemies was ordained,” he said aloud, to no one in particular. “If folks ’round here read the Good Book, they wouldn’t lose heart so easily when pressing forth in the Lord’s purpose. Psalms seventy-two, four, says, ‘He shall judge the poor of the people, and save the children of the needy, and break into pieces the oppressor.’ And that, Little Onion,” he said sternly, pulling off the fire the pig that was now roasted clean through, and glancing around at the men who looked away, “tells you all you need to know. Gather ’round a moment as I pray, men, then my brave Little Onion here will help me serve this ragged army.”

Owen stepped forward. “Let me pray, Pa,” he said, for the men looked to be starving, and I reckoned they couldn’t stand an hour of the Captain doodling at the Almighty. The Old Man grumbled but agreed, and after we prayed and ate, he huddled with the others around his map, while Fred and I stayed away from them and cleaned up.

Fred, short as he was in his head, was terrific glad to see me. But he seemed worried. “We done a bad thing,” he said.

“I know it,” I said.

“My brother John who run off, we never found him. My brother Jason, too. We can’t find neither.”

“Where you think they gone?”

“Wherever they are,” he said glumly. “We gonna fetch ’em.”

“Do we got to?”

He glanced furtively at his Pa, then sighed and looked away. “I missed you, Little Onion. Where’d you run off to?”

I was about to tell him when a horse and rider charged into camp. The rider cornered the Old Man and spoke to him, and a few moments later, the Captain called us to order, standing in the middle of the camp by the fire while the men gathered around.

“Good news, men. My old enemy Captain Pate has a posse raiding homes on the Santa Fe Road and planning to attack Lawrence. He got Jason and John with him. They are likely to drop ’em at Fort Leavenworth for imprisonment. We going after them.”

“How big is his army?” Owen asked.

“A hundred fifty to two hundred, I’m told,” Old Man Brown said.

I looked around. I counted twenty-three among us, including me.

“We only got ammo for a day’s fight,” Owen said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What we gonna use when we run out? Harsh language?”

But the Old Man was already movin’, grabbing his saddlebags. “Lord’s riding on high, men! Remember the army of Zion! Mount up!”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, Father,” Owen said.

“So what?”

“What say we wait till Monday and catch Pate then. He’s likely headed to Lawrence. He won’t attack Lawrence on a Sunday.”

“In fact, that’s exactly when he’ll attack,” the Old Man said, “knowing I’m a God-fearing man and likely to rest on the Lord’s day. We’ll ride up by way of Prairie City and cut him off at Black Jack. Let’s pray, men.”

Well, there weren’t no stopping him. The men gathered around him in a circle. The Old Man dropped to his knees, stretched out his hands, palms toward the sky, looking like Moses of old, his beard angling down like a bird’s nest. He commenced to praying.

Thirty minutes later Fred lay on the ground snoring, Owen stared into space, and the others milled about, smoking and doodling with saddlebags and scrawling letters home while the Old Man carried on, hollering up to the Anointed One with his eyes closed, till Owen finally piped out, “Pa, we got to ride! Jason and John is prisoner and headed to Fort Leavenworth, remember?”

That broke the spell. The Old Man, still on his knees, opened his eyes, irritated. “Every time I gets to the balance of my words of thanks to my Savior, I gets interrupted,” he grumbled, getting to his feet. “But I expect the God of Gods has understanding about the patience of the young, who don’t favors Him to the necessary ends so as to give Him proper thanks for blessings which He giveth so freely.”

With that, we saddled up and rode due north, to meet Captain Pate and his posse, and I was full-blown back in his army and the business of being a girl again.

7. Black Jack

Like most things the Old Man planned out, the attack against Captain Pate’s Sharpshooters didn’t work out the way he drawed it up. For one thing, the Old Man always got bad information. We rode out against Captain Pate on a Saturday in October. Come December, we still hadn’t found him ... Everywhere we went, the story changed. We’d roll toward Palmyra and a settler on the trail would holler, “There’s a fight with the rebels yonder in Lawrence,” and off we’d go toward Lawrence, only to find the fight two days past and the rebels gone. A few days later a woman on her porch would exclaim, “I seen Captain Pate over near Fort Leavenworth,” and the Old Man would say, “We have him now! Go men!” and off we’d bust out again, full of pluck, riding two days, only to find out it weren’t true. Back and forth we went, till the men was plumb wore out. We went like that all the way into February, the Old Man spoiling for a fight, and getting none.

We picked up another dozen or so Free Staters this way though, wandering around southern Kansas near the Missouri border, till we growed to about thirty men. We was feared, but the truth is, the Pottawatomie Rifles weren’t nothing but a bunch of hungry boys with big ideas running ’round looking for boiled grits and sour bread to stuff their faces with in late February. Winter come full on then, and it growed too cold to fight. Snow blanketed the prairie. Ice formed eighteen inches deep. Water froze in pitchers overnight. Huge trees, covered with icicles, crackled like giant skeletons. Those in the Old Man’s army who could stand it stayed in camp, huddled under the tent. The rest, including me and the Old Man and his sons, spent the winter keeping warm wherever we could. It’s one thing to say you’s an abolitionist, but riding for weeks on the plains in winter, with no spare victuals, you weeding a bad hoe for satisfaction to test a man’s principles that way. Some of the Old Man’s men was turned toward slavery by the time winter was over.

But truth be to tell it, it weren’t killing me to be with the Old Man. Lazy slob that I was, I growed used to being outside, riding the plains looking for ruffians, stealing from Pro Slavers, and not having no exact job, for the Old Man changed the rules for girls in his army after he seen how I’d been put to scrubbing back and forth. He announced, “Henceforth every man in his company has to shift for himself. Wash your own shirts. Do your own mending. Fix your own plate.” He made it clear that every man was there to fight slavery, not get his washing done by the only girl in the outfit who happened to be colored. Fighting slavery is easy when you ain’t got that load. Fact is, it was pretty easy altogether, unless you was the slave, course, for you mostly rode around and talked up how wrong the whole deal was, then you stole whatever you could from the Pro Slavers, and off you went. You weren’t waking up regular to cart the same water, chop the same wood, shine the same boots, and hear the same stories every day. Slave fighting makes you a hero, a legend in your own mind, and after a while the thought of going back to Dutch’s to be sold down to New Orleans, and barbering and shining shoes and my skin smacking against that rough old potato sack I wore versus the nice soft, warm wool dress I had begun to favor, not to mention the various buffalo hides I covered myself with, growed less and less sweet. I weren’t for being a girl, mind you. But there was certain advantages, like not having to lift nothing heavy, and not having to carry a pistol or rifle, and fellers admiring you for being tough as a boy, and figuring you is tired when you is not, and just general niceness in the way folks render you. Course in them days colored girls had to work harder than white girls, but that was by normal white folks’ standards. In Old Brown’s camp, everyone around him worked, colored or white, and fact is, he busied all of us so much that at times slavery seemed no different than being free, for we was all on a schedule: The Old Man woke everyone at four a.m. to pray and mumble and blubber over the Bible for an hour. Then he put Owen on me to teach me letters. Then he throwed Fred on me to teach me the way of the woods, then he throwed me back to Owen again, who showed me how to throw a bullet into a breechloader and fire it. “Every soul has got to learn to defend God’s word,” the Old Man said. “And these is all defenses of it. Letters, defense, survival. Man, woman, girl, boy, colored or white, and Indians, needs to know these things.” He teached me himself how to make baskets and bottom chairs. How you do it is simple: You take white oak, split it, and then it’s just a manner of folding. Inside a month I could make any kind of basket you wanted: musket basket, clothes basket, feed basket, fish basket—I caught catfish big and wide across as your hand. On long afternoons while we waited for the enemy to cross the trail, Fred and I went and made sorghum syrup from sugar maple trees. There weren’t nothing to it. You sap it out the tree, pour it in a pan, fire it over a fire, skim them skimmings off the top with a stick or fork, and you done. Most of your job is to put the syrup away from the skimmings on the top. When you cook it right, you got the best sugar there is.

I come to enjoy that first winter with the Old Man’s army, especially with Fred. He was as good a friend as a feller—or a girl who was really a feller—could want. He was more like a child than a man, which meant we fit together well. We never run short on playthings. The Old Man’s army stole everything from the Pro Slavers a child could want: fiddles, saltshakers, mirrors, tin cups, a wooden rocking horse. What we couldn’t keep, we used for target practice and blasted up. It weren’t a bad life, and I growed used to it and forgot all about running off.

Spring came on like it always did, and one morning the Old Man went out scouting by himself, looking for Pate’s Sharpshooters, and come back driving a big schooner wagon instead. I was setting by the campfire, making a fish basket when he rolled in. I looked up at the wagon as it rolled past and saw it had a busted-up back wheel with the hardwood brake shorn off. I said, “I knows that wagon,” and no sooner had I said it than Nigger Bob and five Negroes tumbled out the back.

He seen me right off, and while the rest tumbled out to follow the Old Man to the campfire to eat, he cornered me.

“I see you is still working your show,” he said.

I had changed over the winter. I had been out some. Seen a little bit. And I weren’t the meek little thing he had seen the fall before. “I thought you said you weren’t going to join this army,” I said.

“I come to live large like you,” he said happily. He glanced ’round, seen nobody was close, and then whispered, “Do they know you’re ... ?” and he done his hand in a wiggly way.

“They don’t know nothing,” I said.

“I won’t tell,” he said. But I didn’t like him having that on me.

“You plan on riding with us?” I asked.

“Not hardly. The Captain said he had but a few things to do and then we’s gone to freedom.”

“He’s riding against Captain Pate’s Sharpshooters.”

That floored Bob. “Shit. When?”

“Whenever he finds ’em.”

“Count me out. There’s two hundred in Pate’s army. Probably more. Pate got so many rebels wanting to join you’d think he was selling Calpurnia’s flapjacks. He’s turning ’em away. I thought Old Brown was working the freedom train. Riding north. Ain’t that what you said last fall?”

“I don’t know what I said then. I don’t remember.”

“That’s what you said. Said he was riding for freedom. Gosh darnit. What other surprises is around here? What’s his plan?”

“I don’t know. He don’t tell me. Whyn’t you ask him?”

“He favors you. You ought to ask.”

“I ain’t gonna ask him them things,” I said.

“Ain’t you angling on freedom? What you routin’ ’round here for then?”

I didn’t know. Up till then, escaping back to Dutch’s was in my plans. Once that changed, it was day-to-day living. I never was one to look too far past angling meat and gravy and biscuits down my throat. Bob, on the other hand, mostly had a family to consider, I reckon, and he had his mind on the freedom line, which weren’t my problem. I growed used to the Old Man and his sons. “I reckon being practiced on a sword and a pistol is what I been learning ’round here,” I said. “And reading the Bible. They do lots of that, too.”

“I ain’t come here to read nobody’s Bible and fight nobody’s slavery,” Bob said. “I come to get myself out from under it.” He looked at me and frowned. “I guess you don’t have to worry about it, the way you playing it, being a girl and all.”

“You the one that told me to do it.”

“I ain’t tell you to get me kilt!”

“You come here ’cause of me?”

“I come here ’cause you said the word ‘freedom.’ Sheesh!” He was mad. “My wife and children’s still in bondage. How I’m gonna plan on earning money to buy them if he’s monkeying ’round, fighting the Missourians?”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“There weren’t no asking,” Bob said. “My marse and I was rolling to town. I heard a noise. Next thing I know, he stepped out the woods holding a rifle in marse’s face. He said, ‘I’m taking your wagon and freeing your colored man.’ He didn’t ask me if I wanted to be free. Course I come along ’cause I had to. But I thought he was gonna free me to the north. Nobody said nothing about fighting nobody.”

That was the thing. The Old Man done the same to me. He reckoned every colored wanted to fight for his freedom. It never occurred to him that they would feel any other way.

Bob stood there, fuming. He was hot. “I done gone from the frying pan to the fire. Captain Pate’s rebels is gonna burn us up!”

“Maybe the Captain’ll find somebody else to fight. He ain’t the only abolitionist ’round these parts.”

“He’s the only one that counts. Cousin Herbert said there’s two companies of U.S. dragoons combing this country, looking for this outfit. That’s U.S. Army, I’m talking. From back east. That ain’t no posse. They gonna blame us for whatever he does when he’s caught, you can bet on it.”

“What we done wrong?”

“We here, ain’t we? If we’s caught, you can bet whatever they do to him, they’ll double the potion on the niggers. We’ll be in deep grease. You never thunk that, did you?”

“You didn’t sing that song when you told me to run with him.”

“You didn’t ask it,” Bob said. He got up, looking toward the campfire, where the smell of food beckoned. “Fight for freedom,” he said, sucking his teeth. “Sheesh.” He turned and spotted the bevy of stolen horses tied to the outer barrier, where several scouts stood. Looked to be at least twenty horses there and a couple of wagons to boot.

He looked at them and back to me. “Whose horses is those?”

“He always got a bunch of stolen horses around.”

“I aim to take one of them and get gone. You can come if you want.”

“Where to?”

“Jump across the Missouri, then find Tabor, Iowa. They say there’s a gospel train there. Underground Railroad. That’ll run you north to Canada. Distant country.”

“You can’t run a horse that far.”

“We’ll take two, then. The Old Man won’t mind one or two missing.”

“I wouldn’t snatch a horse from him.”

“He ain’t gonna live long, child. He’s crazy. He thinks the nigger’s equal to the white man. He showed that on the way here. Calling the coloreds in the wagon ‘mister’ and ‘missus’ and so forth.”

“So what? He does that all the time.”

“They gonna kill him for being so dumb. He ain’t right in his mind. Ain’t you seen that?”

Well, he had a point, for the Old Man weren’t normal. For one thing, he rarely ate, and he seemed to sleep mostly atop his horse. He was old compared to his men, wrinkled and wiry, but nearly as strong as every one of them except Fred. He marched for hours without stopping, his shoes full of holes, and was overall gruff and hard generally. But at night he seemed to soften some. He’d pass Frederick sleeping in his roll, lean over, and tuck the giant’s blanket roll tightly with the gentleness of a woman. There weren’t a dumb beast under God’s creation—cow, ox, goat, mule, or sheep—that he couldn’t calm or tame to touch. He had nicknames for everything. Table was “floor tacker,” walking was “tricking.” Good was “dowdy.” And I was “the Onion.” He sprinkled most of his conversation with Bible talk, “thees” and “thous” and “takest” and so forth. He mangled the Bible more than any man I ever knowed, including my Pa, but with a bigger purpose, ’cause he knowed more words. Only when he got hot did the Old Man quote the Bible exact to the letter, and then it was trouble, for it meant someone was about to walk to the quit line. He was a lot to deal with, Old Brown.

“Maybe we ought to warn him,” I said.

“’Bout what?” Bob said. “About dying for niggers? He made that choice. I ain’t getting into no hank with no rebels about slavery. We’ll be colored when the day’s done, no matter how the cut comes or goes. These fellers can go back to being Pro Slavers anytime they want.”

“If you stealing from the Old Man, I don’t want to know about it,” I said.

“Just keep shut ’bout me,” he said, “and I’ll keep quiet ’bout you.” And with that he got up and headed over to the campfire to eat.

I decided to warn the Old Man about Bob the next morning, but no sooner did I consider it than he marched into the middle of camp and shouted, “We found ’em boys! We found Pate! He’s close by. Mount up! On to Black Jack!”

The men tumbled out of their rolls, grabbed their weapons, and staggered to their horses, tripping over pots and pans and junk, getting ready to roll outta camp, but the Old Man halted ’em and said, “Wait a minute. I got to pray.”

He done it quick—twenty minutes, which was fast for him, sawing away at God for His goodwill, advice, benefit, and so forth, while the men stood around, jumping on one foot to keep warm, which gived Bob a chance to prowl the camp and arm himself with every little bit of foodstuff that was left, which weren’t much. I seen him on the outside of the circle, nobody bothering him, for the Old Man’s camp was full of every abolitionist and colored who needed a gun or a hot meal. The Captain didn’t mind it a bit, for while he was big on stealing swords, guns, pikes, and horses from Pro Slavers, he didn’t mind anyone in his camp helping themselves to one of them things, so long as they was all for the good cause of the abolitionists. Still, Bob rooting around a bunch of rifles lined against a tree while everyone else was looking for food perked his interest, for he thought Bob wanted to arm himself. After his prayer, while the men broke camp and placed pikes, Sharps rifles, and broadswords in a wagon, the Captain marched over to Bob and said, “Good sir, I see you is ready to strike a blow for your own freedom!”

That hemmed Bob up. He pointed to the rifles and said, “Sir, I don’t have no knowledge of how to use them things.”

The Captain thrust a sword into Bob’s hands. “Swinging this high is all the knowledge you need,” he grunted. “Come now. Onward. Freedom!”

He hopped into the rear of an open-back wagon driven by Owen, and poor Bob had to follow. He looked downright unsettled, and set there, quiet as a mouse, while we rode. After a few minutes, he uttered, “Lord, I’m feeling weak. Help me, Jesus. I need the Lord is what I need. I need the blood of Jesus!”

This the Old Man took as a sign of friendship, for he grabbed Bob’s hands in his and jumped into a roaring prayer about the Almighty in the book of Genesis, then washed it down with several more verses from the Old Testament, then throwed some New Testament in there, and tossed that about for a good while. A half hour later Bob was dead asleep and the Old Man was still prattling on. “The blood of Jesus binds us as brothers! The Good Book says, ‘Hold thine own hand to the blood of Christ and you will see the coming of thine own intervention.’ Onward, Christian soldiers! Glorious redemption!”

He got just plain joy hollering out the Bible, and the closer we got to the battlefield, the more redeemed he got, and his words made my insides quiver, for he had prayed like that at Osawatomie when he knocked them fellers’ heads off. I weren’t for no fighting, and neither was some of his army. As we drawed closer to Black Jack, his herd, which had growed to nearly fifty by that time, thinned out just like they done at Osawatomie. This one had a sick child, that one had to tend crops. Several in the column on their horses let their mounts slow-trot till they faded to the back of the column, then turned around and scooted. By the time we got to Black Jack, about only twenty remained. And them twenty was exhausted from the Old Man’s prayer, which he throwed out to full effect en route, and them mutterings had a way of putting a man to sleep on his feet, which meant the only person awake and fired by the time we reached Black Jack was the Old Man himself.

Black Jack was a boggy swamp with a ravine cutting through it and woods sheltering either side. When we reached it, we proceeded to a ridge outside the village, where it sheered off the trail and cut straight into the woods. The Old Man waked the troops in the wagon and ordered the rest on horse to dismount. “Follow my orders, men. And no talking.”

It was hot and broad daylight. Early morning. No night charge here. We proceeded on foot for about ten minutes to a clearing, then he crawled up a ridge to look over the crest to the valley of Black Jack below to see where Pate’s Sharpshooters was. When he come back off the ridge he said, “We’re in a good position, men. Take a look.”

We crawled to the edge of the ridge and looked over into the town.

By God, there was three hundred men swilling around on the other side of the ravine if there was one. Several dozen had lined up as shooters, laying on the ridge that defended the town. The ridge overlooked a creek in a ravine with a small river. Beyond it was the town. Since they was beneath us, Pate’s shooters hadn’t seen us yet, for we was hidden by the thickets above them. But they was ready, sure enough.

After reconnoitering the enemy, we headed back to where the horses were tied, whereupon the Old Man’s sons began to wrangle about what came next. None of it sounded pleasant. The Old Man was keen for a frontal attack by coming down one of the ridges, for they was protected by rocks and the slope of the land. His boys preferred a sneak surprise attack at night.

I walked off from ’em a bit, for I was nervous. I walked out and down the trail a bit, heard the sound of hoofbeats, and found myself staring at another Free State rifle company that galloped past me and into our clearing. There were about fifty, in clean uniforms, all spit and shine. Their captain rode up in a smartly dressed military outfit, leaped off his horse, and approached the Old Man.

The Old Man, who always kept himself deep in the woods, away from his horses and wagon lest a surprise attack come, popped out the woods to greet them. With his wild hair, beard, and chewed-up clothes, he looked like a mop dressed in rags compared to this captain, who was all shined up from his buttons to his boots. He marched up to the Old Man and said, “I’m Captain Shore. Since I got fifty men, I’ll command. We can go straight at them from the ravine.”

The Old Man weren’t keen on taking orders from nobody. “That won’t do,” he said. “You’re wide open that way. The ravine circles them all the way around. Let’s work our way to the side and kill off their supply line.”

“I come here to kill ’em, not starve ’em,” Captain Shore said. “You can work your way ’round the side all you want, but I ain’t got all day.” With that he mounted up, turned to his men, and said, “Let’s take them,” and sent his fifty men on their horses straight down the ravine toward the enemy.

They hadn’t got five steps down that ravine before Pate’s Sharpshooters met them with a hail of bullets. Knocked five or six clean off their mounts and diced, sliced, and chopped every one of the rest that was stupid enough to follow their captain down that ridge. The rest that could make off their mounts hotfooted it up that ridge fast as the devil on foot, with their captain running behind them. Shore collapsed at the top and took cover, but the remainder of his men that got up there kept going, right past their captain, taking off down the road.

That Old Man watched ’em, irritated. “I knew it,” he said. He ordered me and Bob to guard the horses, sent a few men to a distant hill to take aim at the enemy’s horses, then sent a few more to the far edge of the ravine to block the enemy’s escape. To the rest he said, “Follow me.”

Now, yours truly weren’t following him no place. I was happy to guard the horses, but a few of Pate’s men decided to fire on our horses, which put me and Bob in the hothouse. Shooting suddenly erupted everywhere on the ridge where we was, and the Old Man’s army broke apart. Truth be to tell it, much of the grapeshot whistling past my ears was from our side as come from the enemy, for neither side was coolheaded about what they was doing, loading and firing fast as they could, the devil keeping score. You had as much chance getting killed by your neighbor blowing your face off in them days as you did the enemy hitting you from a hundred yards distant. A bullet’s a bullet, and there was so many of ’em snapping and pinging against the trees and limbs, there weren’t no place to hide. Bob cowered under the horses, which was heavy taking fire and rearing in panic, and staying with them didn’t seem safe to me, so I followed the Old Man down the hill. He seemed the safest bet.

I got halfway down the hill when I realized I had lost my mind, so I throwed myself to the ground and cowered behind a tree. But that wouldn’t do, for there was lead slapping up against the bark ’round my face, so I found myself rolling down the crest into the ravine right behind the Old Man, who had plopped down next to about ten of his men in a line behind a long log they used for cover.

Well, that charged up the Old Man when he seen me land down there behind him, for he said to the others, “Look! ‘And a child shall lead them!’ The Onion’s here. Look, men. A girl among us! Thanks be to God to inspire us to glory, to bring us luck and good fortune.”

The men glanced at me, and while I can’t say whether they was inspired or not, for they was taking fire, I will say this: When I looked down that line of fellers, weren’t a single man from Captain Shore’s company there, except Captain Shore himself. He had somehow got the nerve to come back. His clean uniform and shiny buttons was muddied up now, and his face was drawed-out nervous. His confidence was spent. His men had turned and cut clean out on him. Now it was just the Old Man and his fellers running the show.

The Old Man looked down the line at his men who lay there in the ravine firing and barked, “Halt. Down.” They done as he said. He used his spyglass to inspect the Missourians’ pickets who was firing from their side. He ordered his men to load up, told ’em exactly where to aim their fire, then said, “Don’t fire till I say so.” Then he got up, and paced back and forth along the log, tellin’ ’em where to shoot as balls whizzed past his head, talking to his men who were reloading and firing. He was cool as ice in a glass. “Take your time,” he said. “Line ’em up in your sights. Aim low. Don’t waste ammunition.”

Pate’s Sharpshooters wasn’t organized and they was scared. They blowed a lot of ammunition firing willy-nilly and exhausted themselves after a few minutes. They started falling back in numbers on their ridge. The Old Man shouted, “The Missourians are leaving. We must compel them to surrender.” He ordered Weiner and another feller named Biondi to move down the side of the ravine to flank them and shoot their horses, which they done. This caused cussing and more firing from the Missouri side, but the Old Man’s men was confident, shooting dead-on and putting a hurting on ’em. Pate’s men took a lot of bad hits, and several runned off without their horses to avoid capture.

An hour later, the fight had gone clean out of them. The Old Man’s fellers was organized, whereas Pate’s forces wasn’t. By the time the shooting stopped, there weren’t but thirty or so of Captain Pate’s men left, but it was still a stalemate. Nobody could hit nobody. Each side was tucked behind ridges, and anybody on either side stupid enough to stand up got their balls blowed off, so nobody done it. After about ten minutes of this, the Old Man got impatient. “I will advance some twenty yards by myself,” he said, crouching in the ravine and cocking his revolver, “and when I wave my hat, you all follow.”

He stepped out into the ravine to run forward, but a sudden wild shout in the air stopped him.

Frederick, riding a horse, galloped straight past us, down the ravine, across the bottom of the ravine, and up the hill toward the Missourians, waving a sword and screaming, “Hurrah, Father! We got ’em surrounded! Come on, boys! We cut ’em off!”

Well, he was light as a feather in his mind, and dotty as they come, but the sight of Fred rolling at ’em, huge as he was, hollering to beat the band, wearing enough guns to arm Fort Leavenworth, it was too much for ’em, and they stone quit. A white flag come up from their ravine, and they surrendered. They come out with their hands up.

Only when they was disarmed did they learn to whose hands they had fallen in, for they hadn’t known it was the Old Man they was shooting at. When the Old Man walked up and grumbled, “I’m John Brown of Osawatomie,” several panicked and looked to sprout tears, for the Old Man in plain view was a frightening sight. After months in the cold woods, his clothes was tattered and worn, so you could see the skin underneath. His boots was more toes than anything. His hair and beard were long and scraggly and white and nearly to his chest. He looked mad as a wood hammer. But the Old Man weren’t the monster they thought he was. He lectured several on their cussing and gived them a word or three on the Bible, which plain wore ’em out, and they calmed down. A few even bantered with his men.

Me and Bob tended to the wounded while the Old Man and his boys disarmed Pate’s troops. There was a great many of them rolling on the ground in agony. One feller received a bullet through the mouth that tore away his upper lip and shattered his front teeth. Another, a young boy no more than seventeen or so, lay in the grass, moaning. Bob noticed he was wearing spurs. “You think I can have them spurs, since you won’t be needing them no more?” Bob asked.

The boy nodded, so Bob stooped down to take them off, then said, “There’s only one spur here, sir. Where’s the other?”

“Well, if one side of the horse goes, the other must,” said the boy. “You won’t need but one.”

Bob thanked him for his kindness, took his one spur, and the feller expired.

Up at the top of the ravine, the rest of the men had gathered their prisoners, seventeen in all. Among them was Captain Pate himself and Pardee, who had it out with Bob after he was tried by Kelly and his gang near Dutch’s. He spotted Bob among the Captain’s men and couldn’t stand it. “I should’a beat the butt covers off you before, ya black bastard,” he grumbled.

“Hush now,” the Old Man said. “I’ll have no swearing ’round me.” He turned to Pate. “Where is my boys John and Jason?”

“I ain’t got ’em,” Pate said. “They are at Fort Leavenworth, under federal dragoons.”

“Then we will go there directly and I will exchange you for them.”

We set off for Fort Leavenworth with the prisoners, their horses, and the rest of the horses that Pate’s men left behind. We had enough horses to stock a horse farm, maybe thirty in all, along with mules, and as much of Pate’s booty as we could carry. Myself, I made off with two pairs of pants, a shirt, a can of paint, a set of spurs, and fourteen corncob pipes I was aiming to trade. The Old Man and his boys didn’t take a thing for themselves, though Fred helped hisself to a couple of Colts and a Springfield rifle.

It was twenty miles to Fort Leavenworth, and on the way Pate and the Old Man chatted easily. “I’d just as soon aired you out,” Pate said, “if I had known that was you standing down there in that ravine.”

The Old Man shrugged. “You missed your chance,” he said.

“We ain’t gonna reach the fort,” Pate said. “This trail is full of rebels looking for you, aiming to collect on your reward.”

“When they come, I’ll make sure my first charge is in your face,” the Old Man said calmly.

That quieted Pate up.

Pate was right, though, for we got about ten miles down the road, near Prairie City, when an armed sentinel in uniform approached. He rode right at us, shouting, “Who goes there?”

Fred was in the lead and he hollered out, “Free State!”

The sentry spun his horse ’round, hurried back down the trail, and reappeared with an officer and with several U.S. dragoons, heavily armed. They was federal men, army men, dressed in flashy colored uniforms.

The officer approached the Old Man. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m John Brown of Osawatomie.”

“Then you are under arrest.”

“For what?”

“For violating the laws of Kansas Territory.”

“I don’t abide by the bogus laws of this territory,” the Old Man said.

“Well, you will abide by this,” the officer said. He drawed his revolver and pointed it at the Old Man, who stared at the revolver in disdain.

“I don’t take it personal your threats on my life,” the Old Man said calmly. “For you are given orders to follow. I understand you have a job to do. So go ahead and drop the hammer on that thing if you want. You will be a hero to some in this territory if you do it. But should you burst a cap into me, your life won’t be worth a plugged nickel. You will be food for the wolves come evening, for I got a charge to keep from my Maker, Whose home I hope to make my own someday. I done no harm to you and will not. I will let the Lord have you, and that is a far worse outcome than any that you can put forth with what you holding in your hand, which compared to the will of our Maker, ain’t worth a fingernail. My aim is to free the slaves in this territory no matter what you do.”

“On whose authority?”

“The authority of our Maker, henceforth and forevermore known as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

I don’t know what it is, but every time the Old Man started talking holy, just the mention of his Maker’s name made him downright dangerous. A kind of electricity climbed over him. His voice become like gravel scrapin’ a dirt road. Something raised up in him. His old, tired frame dropped away, and in its place stood a man wound up like a death mill. It was most unsettling thing to see, and the officer got unnerved by it. “I ain’t here to debate you on the premise,” he said. “Tell your men to lay down their arms, and there won’t be no trouble.”

“Don’t want none. Does your work include taking prisoners and exchanging them?” the Old Man asked.

“Yes, it does.”

“I got seventeen prisoners here from Black Jack. I could have killed them directly, for they was intent on taking my life. Instead I am bringing them to Fort Leavenworth for your justice. That ought to be worth something. I want my boys who is held there and nothing more. If you will take these prisoners in exchange for them, I will call it a square deal and hand myself over to you without a fight or harsh word. But if you don’t, you will be worm food, sir. For I am in service of a Greater Power. And my men here will aim for your heart and no one else’s. And while we are outnumbered here two to one, your death will be certain, for they will aim for you alone, and after that, you will suffer the death of a thousand ages, having to explain to your Maker the support of a cause that has enslaved your fellow human beings and entrapped your soul in a way you know not. I have been chosen to do His special work and I aim to keep that charge. You, on the other hand, have not been chosen. So I am not going with you to Fort Leavenworth today, nor am I leaving this territory, until my boys are freed.”

“Who are they?”

“They are Browns. They had nothing to do with any killings in this area. They came here to settle the land and have lost everything, including their crops, which were burned by the very rebels you see before you.”

The officer turned to Pate. “Is that true?” he asked.

Pate shrugged. “We did burn these nigger-stealer’s crops. Twice. And we will burn their homes if we get the chance, for they are lawbreakers and thieves.”

That changed up the officer, and he said, “That sounds like a pretty rotten piece of business.”

“Is you Pro Slave or Free State?” Pate asked.

“I’m U.S. State,” the officer snapped. “Here to enforce the territorial laws of the United States government, not Missouri or Kansas.” He now turned his gun on Pate and said to Brown, “If I carry your prisoners back to Leavenworth, can I trust you to stay here?”

“So long as you bring my sons back in exchange for ’em.”

“I cannot promise that, but I will speak to my superior officer about it.”

“And who would that be?”

“Captain Jeb Stuart.”

“You tell Captain Stuart that Old John Brown of Osawatomie is here at Prairie City awaiting his sons. And if they are not back here in exchange for these prisoners in three days, I will burn this territory.”

“And if they do come back? Would you surrender yourself?”

The Old Man folded his hands behind his back.

“I would do that,” he said.

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

The Old Man held up his right hand. “You have it here before God that I, John Brown, will not leave here for three days while I wait for you to bring my boys back. And I will surrender myself to the will of Almighty God upon their return.”

Well, the officer agreed and set off.

The Old Man was lying, of course. For he didn’t say nothing about surrendering himself to the U.S. government. Anytime he said something about the will of God, it meant he weren’t going to cooperate or do nothing but as he saw fit. He had no intentions of leaving Kansas Territory or turning himself in or paying attention to what any white soldier told him. He would tell a fib in a minute to help his cause. He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.

8. A Bad Omen

The Old Man said he’d wait three days for the federals to bring his boys back. He didn’t get to wait that long. The very next morning, a local feller, friendly to our side, come charging in on his horse, breathless, and told him, “The Missourians got a column heading to burn down your homestead.” That was Brown’s Station, where the Old Man and his boys had staked out claims and built homes, near Osawatomie.

The Old Man considered it. “I can’t leave till the federals come back with John and Jason,” he said. “I gived my word. I can’t go back home and face their wives with empty palms.” Some of his son’s wives wasn’t too fond of the Old Man for pulling their husbands into the war and getting ’em damn near kilt—in fact, before it was over, some of ’em was kilt outright—over the slavery question.

He turned to Owen and said, “Take Fred, Weiner, Bob, the Onion, and the rest of the men to Osawatomie. See what you see and report back with the men. But leave the Onion in Osawatomie with your sister-in-law Martha or the Adairs, for she has seen enough killing. Don’t tarry.”

“Yes, Father.”

He turned to me and said, “Onion, I is sorry I am taking you out the fight. I knows how much you like fighting for your freedom, having seen you in action at Black Jack”—I ain’t done a thing there that I recall other than cower and holler in that ravine when we was taking fire, but the Old Man looked over there and saw me down there with the best of his men, and I reckon he claimed that as bravery. That was the thing with the Old Man. He seen what he wanted to see, for I knowed I was square terrified, and unless you count hollering uncle and curling up into a ball and licking your toes signs of courage and encouragement, there weren’t nothing too courageous about what I done down there. Anyway, he went on: “Brave as you are, we involved here is men, even Bob here, and it is best that you stay in Osawatomie with my friends the Adairs till things calm down, then think about heading north to your freedom where it is safer for a girl to be.”

Well doggone it I was ready to hit out hooting and hollering that minute. I was done with the smell of gunpowder and blood. Him and his men could pick fights and spur their horses into shoot-outs for the rest of their days as far as I was concerned. I was finished. But I tried not to show too much joy about the whole bit. I said, “Yes, Captain, I will honor your wishes.”

Osawatomie was a full day’s ride from Prairie City, and Owen decided to lead his men on the main California Trail, which was a little more risky for chance meetings with Pro Slave patrols, but he wanted to get back to his Pa in quick fashion. The Adairs who I was set to stay with lived off that trail too, in the same general direction as Osawatomie, so all the more reason to take the trail. It worked out well at first. As we rode, I gived a thought or two to where I’d slip off to once Owen and the Old Man’s men left. I had a few boy’s items I’d picked up in my travels, and a few little items. But where to go? North? What was that? I didn’t know north in any way, shape, fashion, or form in them days. I was considering this thought as I rode along with Fred, which always made me feel better about myself, for Fred didn’t require but a half a mind to talk to, being that he weren’t but half a glass, which made him a good talking partner, for I could think one thing to myself and chat to him about another, and he generally was agreeable to anything I said.

Me and him lingered in the rear of the column, with Weiner and Owen leading up front, and Bob in the middle. Fred seemed blue.

“I heard Owen say you know all your letters now,” he said.

“I do,” I said. I was proud of it.

“I’m wondering why I can’t hold a letter in my head,” he said drearily. “I learns one at a time and forgets ’em right off. Everybody else can hold their letters in their head except me. Even you.”

“Knowing letters ain’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I said. “I ain’t read but one book. It’s a Bible picture book I got from the Old Man.”

“You think you could read it to me?”

“Why, I’d be happy to,” I said.

When we stopped to water the horses and eat, I got my book out and throwed a few words at Fred. I gived him my version of it anyway, for while I knowed my letters, I didn’t know more than a few words, so I cooked up what I didn’t know. I gived him the book of John, and John’s tellin’ the people of Jesus’s coming and Jesus being so great that John weren’t even worthy to fasten his slippers. The story growed to the size of an elephant in my retelling of it, for when’s the last time you read in the Bible ’bout a horse named Cliff pulling his wagon ’round into the city of Jerusalem wearing slippers? But Fred never said a cross or contrary word as he listened. He liked it fine. “It’s the most dandy reading of the Bible I ever heard,” he declared.

We mounted up and followed the trail that crossed to the north side of the Marais des Cygnes River, which cuts through Osawatomie. We were passing close to the Brown settlement but not quite at it, when the smell of smoke and hollering suddenly drifted into the wind.

Owen rode ahead to look, then returned at full gallop. “The Missourians is having it out with a bunch of Free State Indians, looks like. Maybe we should run back and fetch Father.”

“No. Let’s join the Indians and attack the rebels,” Weiner said.

“We got orders from our Pa,” Owen said.

Them two argued about it, with Weiner favoring joining the Indians and attacking the redshirts, and Owen in favor of obeying the Old Man’s orders and movin’ on to check on Osawatomie, or at least run back and fetch the Old Man. “By the time we get anywhere, the redshirts will have burned them Indians out and moved into Osawatomie,” Weiner said.

“We got my orders to ride on,” Owen said.

Weiner was itching mad but kept quiet. He was a stout, stubborn man who loved a good fight, and you couldn’t tell him nothing. We rode closer and seen the Free State Indians and Missourians engaging through the thin pine trees of the wooded area in the clearing. It weren’t a big fight, but them Indians defending their free settlement was outnumbered, and when Weiner spied it, he couldn’t help hisself. He rode off, busting through the woods on his horse, leaning low. The other men followed him.

Owen watched them go, frowning. He turned on his horse and said, “Fred, you and Onion ride forward toward Osawatomie and wait outside the settlement while we chase off these Missourians. I’ll be back shortly.” And off he went.

Now, Bob was setting there on his mount and he watched them ride off. And nobody said nothing to him. And he rode off in another direction. Said, “I’m gone,” and took off. That nigger ran off a total of seven times, I believe, from John Brown. Never did get free from the Old Man right off. He had to run all the way back to slavery—to Missouri territory—to get free. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

That left me and Fred setting there on our stolen ponies. Fred looked itching for a fight, too, for he was a Brown, and them Browns liked a good gunfight. But no way in God’s kingdom was I gonna go over there and fight it out with the Missourians. I was done. So I said, just to distract him, “Gosh, this little girl is hungry.”

That snapped him right to me. “Ohhh, I will get you some eatings, Little Onion,” he said. “Nobody lets my Little Onion go hungry, for you is halfway to being growed now, and you needs your rest and victuals so you’ll grow into a great big sissy.” He didn’t mean nothing by it and I took no offense from it, for neither of us knowed what the word really meant, though the leanings of it from what I knowed weren’t flattering. Still, it was the first time he said the word sissy since he first come to knowing of my secret some time back. And I took note of it and was glad to be leaving him before he gived me away.

We rode forward into a patch of thick woods about a mile farther up the trail, then cut off it to follow an old logging trail. It was peaceful and quiet, once we drawed away from the shooting. We crossed a creek and come to where the old logging trail picked up again on the other side and tied our horses off there. Fred pulled off his hardware and got his blanket and hunting things out—beads, dried corn, dried yams. Took him several minutes to unstrap them guns, for he was loaded. Once he done that, he give me a squirrel rifle and took one for hisself. “Normally I wouldn’t use this,” he said, “but there’s enough shooting ’round here so it won’t draw no attention, not if we hurry.”

It weren’t dark yet but evening was coming. We walked about a half mile along the creek bank, with Fred showing me the markings and the likes of where a beaver family was busy making a dam. He said, “I’ll cross the creek and work him from the other side. You come up this way, and when he hears you coming, that’ll flush him out, and we’ll just meet yonder near where the creek bends to get him.”

He crept over on the other side and disappeared in the thickets, while I come up on the other side of it. I was about halfway to where we was to meet when I turned and seen a white man standing about five yards off, holding a rifle.

“What you doing with that rifle, missy?” he said.

“Nuthin’, sir,” I said.

“Put it down, then.”

I done like he said, and he come up on me, snatched my rifle from the ground, and, still holding his rifle on me, said, “Where’s your master?”

“Oh, he’s ’cross the creek.”

“Ain’t you got a sir in your mouth, nigger?”

I was out of practice, see. I hadn’t been ’round normal white folks in months, demanding you call ’em sir and what all. The Old Man didn’t allow none of that. But I righted up. I said, “Yes, sir.”

“What’s your marse’s name?”

I couldn’t think of nothing, so I said, “Fred.”

“What?”

“Just Fred.”

“You call your marse Fred or just Fred or Marse Fred or Fred sir?”

Well, that tied me in knots. I should’a named Dutch, but Dutch seemed a long way away, and I was confused.

“Come with me,” he said.

We started off through the woods away from the creek, and I followed on foot. We hadn’t gotten five steps when I heard Fred holler. “Where you going?”

The man stopped and turned. Fred was standing dead in the middle of the creek, his squirrel gun cocked to his face. He was a sight to see, big as he was, frightening to look at with dead intent, and he weren’t no more than ten yards off.

“She belong to you?” the man said.

“That ain’t your business, mister.”

“You Pro Slave or Free State?”

“You say one more thing, and I’mma deaden where you is. Turn her loose and git your foot up that road.”

Well, Fred could’a burned him, but he didn’t. The feller turned me loose and trotted off, still holding my squirrel rifle.

Fred climbed out of the water and said, “Let’s come off this creek and head back toward where the others is. It’s too dangerous out here. There’s another creek on the other side from where they left.”

We went back to where the horses were tied off, mounted, and rode a half hour or so north, this time to a clearing near where another, bigger creek widened out. Fred said, “We can catch a duck or a pheasant or even a hawk here. It’s gonna be dark soon and they’ll be collecting their last vittles of the day. Stay here, Little Onion, and don’t make a sound.” He dismounted and left, still holding his squirrel rifle.

I stuck close to the spot where he left me and watched him move through the woods. He was smooth business out there, quiet as a deer, not a sound come out of him. He didn’t go far. Maybe thirty yards off, I could see his silhouette in the trees, then he spotted something up in a long birch that stretched skyward. He raised his rifle and let a charge go, and a huge bird fell to the earth.

We run up on it and Fred paled. It was a fat, beautiful catch, black, with a long red-and-white stripe on its back, and a strange, long beak. It was a nice bird, plenty meat, about twenty inches long. Wingspan must’ve been nearly a yard. Big as any bird you’d want to eat. “That’s a hell of a hawk,” I said. “Let’s move away from here just in case somebody heard the shot.” I moved to grab it.

“Don’t touch it!” Fred said. He was pale as a ghost. “That ain’t no hawk. That’s a Good Lord Bird. Lord!”

He sat on the ground, just ripped up. “I never saw it clear. I only had one shot. See that?” He held up the squirrel rifle. “Damn thing. Only got one shot. Don’t take much. Man sins without knowing, and sins come without warning, Onion. The Bible says it. ‘He who sins knows not the Lord. He does not know Him.’ You think Jesus knows my heart?”

I growed tired of his mumbling confusion ’bout the Lord. I was hungry. I was supposed to be getting away from the fighting and here I was held up by more of the same. I was irritated. I said, “Stop worrying. The Lord knows your heart.”

“I got to pray,” he said. “That’s what Father would do.”

That wouldn’t do. It was almost dark now, and the others hadn’t caught up to us yet, and I worried that the shot would draw somebody. But there ain’t nothing to tell a white man, or any man, who’s made up his mind to a prayerful thing. Fred set there on his knees and prayed just like the Old Man, fluffering and blubbering to the Lord to come to his favor and this and that. He weren’t nearly as good as his Pa in the praying department, being that he weren’t able to attach one thought to the next. The Old Man’s prayers growed up right before your eyes; they was all connected, like stairways running from one floor to another in a house, whereas Fred’s prayers was more like barrels and clothing chests throwed about a fine sitting room. His prayers shot this way and that, cutting hither and yon, and in this way an hour passed. But it was a precious hour which I’ll tell you about in a minute. After he gived up them various mumblings and jumblings he gently picked up the bird, gived it to me, and said, “Hold it for Pa. He’ll pray on it and favor God to fix the whole thing up righteously.”

I grabbed it, and as I done, we heard horses coming fast on the other side of the creek. Fred snapped over his shoulder, “Hide quick!”

I had just enough time to jump into the thickets holding that bird as several horses splashed across the creek, came straight up the bank, and busted through the thickets and to where Fred was standing. They came straight on him.

There wasn’t nowhere to run, for we had tied our horses a quarter mile off, and they’d come from that very direction, which meant they likely found our mounts anyway. I had just enough time to dive deep into the thickets before they sloshed up the bank and marched up to Fred. He stood there smiling, wearing all his hardware, but his seven-shooters wasn’t drawn. The only gun he had in his hand was that squirrel gun, and it was spent.

They sloshed up the bank right to him quick as you can tell it. There were maybe eight of ’em, redshirts, and riding in the lead of ’em was Rev. Martin, the feller Fred drawed on back at the Old Man’s camp.

Now Fred was thick, but he weren’t an altogether fool. He knowed how to survive in the woods and do lots of outdoor things. But he weren’t a quick thinker, for if he was, he’d’a drawed his heater. But two or three thoughts at once was more than he could handle. Plus he didn’t recognize the Reverend right off. That cost him.

The Reverend was riding with two men on either side of him bearing six-shooters and the rest behind him heavily armed. The Rev hisself wore his two shiny pearl-handled numbers on his belt, which he likely stole off some dead Free Stater, for he hadn’t had them things before.

He rode right up to Fred while his men surrounded Fred, cutting off his escape.

But still Fred didn’t get it. Fred said, “Morning.” He was smiling. That was his nature.

“Morning,” the Reverend said.

Then Fred’s mind checked itself. You could see his head cock to the side, something whirring in there. He stared at the Reverend. He was trying to figure out whether he knowed him.

He said, “I know you ... ,” and quick as you can tell it, without a word, the Reverend, setting atop his horse, drawed his shooter and took him. Blasted Fred right in the chest, buttered him with lead and powder, and the blessed God, the ground caught him. Fred twitched a few times and breathed his last.

“That’ll teach you to draw on me, you apple-headed, horse-thieving, nigger-loving bastard,” the Reverend said. He come down off his horse and took every single gun Fred was wearing. He turned to the others. “I got me one of Brown’s boys,” he said proudly. “Got the biggest one.”

Then he throwed his eyes to the woods ’round him, where I was hiding. I held tight to where I was. Didn’t move an inch. He knowed I was close.

“Look for the second rider,” he barked. “There was two horses.”

Just then another feller spoke up, a feller sitting on a horse behind the Rev. “You ain’t had to shoot him cold-blooded like that,” he said.

Rev. Martin turned to the man. It was the feller that had caught me in the woods just a while before. He was still holding my squirrel gun, and he weren’t pleased.

“He would’a returned the favor,” the Reverend said.

“We could’a exchanged him for one of ours,” the feller said.

“You wanna change out prisoners or fight a war?” the Rev said.

“He could’a aired me out an hour ago back down the creek there and he didn’t,” the man said.

“He was Free State!”

“I don’t give an owl’s ass if he was George Washington. The man didn’t draw on you and he’s deader’n a turnip. You said you was looking for a cattle rustler and nigger thieves. He ain’t no cattle rustler. And the nigger he had weren’t nobody’s nigger I know. What kind’a war rules is we fighting under here?”

This started a hank between ’em, with several taking this feller’s side and others holding with the Reverend. Several minutes gone by as they wrangled, and by the time they finished, dusk had come. Finally Rev. Martin said, “Brown won’t tarry when he finds his boy dead out here. You wanna wait till he comes?” That done it. That silenced ’em all, for they knowed there was consequences to the whole bit. They took off on their horses without another word.

I come out the clearing in the dusk, and took a long look at my old friend in the growing darkness. His face was clear. He still had a little smile on his face. I can’t say whether his superstition about that Good Lord Bird done him in or not, but I felt low, standing there holding that dumb bird. I wondered if I should wander someplace and fetch a shovel with the aim of burying Fred and the bird together, since he called it an angel and all, but I quit that idea and decided to run off instead. Weren’t nothing to this life of being free and fighting slavery, was how I thunk of it. I was so bothered by the whole bit I can’t tell it. I didn’t know what to do. The idea of running back home to Dutch and trying to work it out, that worked in there, too, truth be to tell it, and I aimed on seeing to that, for Dutch was all I knowed outside the Old Man. But to be honest, I was broke up by the way the whole deal added up, me running ’round as a girl and not knowing what to do. I couldn’t think of nothing to do at the moment, and as usual, the whole business just wore me out. So I set on the ground next to Fred and curled into a ball and fell asleep next to him, holding that Good Lord Bird. And that’s how the Old Man found me the next day.

9. A Sign from God

I woke up to the sound of cannon fire and the Old Man standing before me. “What happened, Little Onion?”

I gently set the Good Lord Bird on Fred’s chest and explained to him who done the deed. He listened, his face grim. Behind him the sound of gunfire and artillery cannon boomed and sent grapeshot slinging through the woods right over his head. Me and Fred had wandered right near Osawatomie, and the fight that Weiner and them had joined in had spilled over into there just as Weiner said it would, with blasting full out. The men ducked low on their horses and held on while the grape whipped past, but none of ’em moved off their mount as the Old Man stood over me. I noted Jason and John among them, but nobody weren’t explaining how they got there and why the Old Man weren’t in federal prison. They was all hot, staring at Fred, especially his brothers. He was still wearing his little cap, with the Good Lord Bird now perched on his chest where I had rested it.

“Is you gonna find the Reverend?” I asked.

“We ain’t got to,” the Old Man said. “He has found us. Stay with Fred till we get back.” He mounted his horse and nodded toward the sound of the fighting. “Let’s go!”

They dashed toward Osawatomie. The town weren’t but a short distance off, and I cut through the woods a few steps to a high knoll, where I could see the Old Man and his men take the trail that circled ’round and led to the river and the town on the other side of it. I didn’t want to set ’round with Fred and that dead bird asleep in death, and there weren’t nothing to say to him nohow.

From where I was, I could see the town. The bridge crossing the Marais des Cygnes River leading to Osawatomie was swarming with rebels who had hauled two cannons over it. A few hundred yards off was the first cannon, which was perched downstream, along a grassy ridge, where you could wade across the water. There were several Free Staters firing on our side, trying to make it across there, but rebels on the other side was holding them off, and every time a group of Free Staters got close in, that cannon cleaned them out.

The Old Man and his boys busted right through them and charged down the hill and into the shallow water like wild men. They come up on the other side firing, and just like that sent the rebels on the other bank scrambling.

This fight was hotter than Black Jack. The town was in a state of panic and there were women and children about, scattering every which way. Several homesteaders was desperately trying to douse the fires on their homes, for the Reverend’s riders had torched several houses, and the Rev’s men shot them as they tried to put out the flames, which gived the busy homesteaders one less task to do, being that they was deadened. Altogether the Free Staters in town was badly organized. The Missourians’ second cannon was on the other side of town, blasting away, and between that one barking on one end of town, and the other barking at the riverbank on the other end, they was cleaning up the Free Staters.

The Old Man and his men charged out the water with guns blazing and cut to the right toward the first cannon that was downstream. The Free Staters who couldn’t cross on account of that cannon took courage when the Old Man’s army come and runned past them to take the bank, but the rebels at the cannon held. The Old Man’s men hacked and shot their way halfway to the cannon working alongside the creek, which ridged up as it reached the cannon. They pushed the enemy back, but more enemy arrived on horses, dismounted, regrouped, and swung that cannon to bear on them. That thing blowed off to deadly effect and halted the Old Man’s charge cold. Sent grapeshot whistling into the trees and cut down several Free Staters, who fell down the riverbank into the creek and didn’t get up. The Old Man mounted a charge again, but the cannon sent another volley that sent the Old Man and his men backward again, this time several falling halfway down the riverbank. And this time the rebels leaped out from behind the cannon and charged.

The Old Man’s men was outgunned and his boys fell back farther to the ridge, the creek right at their backs now, no place else to back up. There was a line of timber at the riverbank there, and he shouted quickly to his fellers to mount a line, which they did, just as the rebels charged the riverbank again.

I don’t know how they held it. The Old Man was stubborn. The Free Staters was badly outnumbered, but they held on until a second party of rebels flanked them from the rear, on the same side of the stream. A few of the Old Man’s team turned ’round to fight them off while the Old Man held his boys on the line, urging his men on. “Hold men. Steady. Aim low. Don’t waste ammunition.” He walked up and down the line shouting directions as bullets and cannon shot tore the leaves and limbs off the trees ’round him.

Finally, behind him, the Free Staters trying to hold off the rebels in that direction quit and run for it across the river, eating lead the whole way, and several of them breathed their last in the river. It was just too many enemy. The Old Man was cut off from a clean retreat now, taking fire from two sides, with the cannon blasting grape at him and rebels closing from the other way, with the creek behind him. He weren’t going to make it. He was defeated, but he wouldn’t give in. He held his men there.

The Missourians, cussing and hollering, quit for a minute to move their cannon closer, and took some lead from the Old Man’s men. But they got it mounted up again within fifty yards or so of the Old Man’s line and blowed a big hole in the line, sending several of his men into the water. Only then did he give up. He was done. He hollered, “Back across the river!” The men gladly did it, scrambling fast, but not him. He stood, big as you want, firing and reloading until the last man got out the tree line, hit the bank, and waded across. Owen was the last to go, and when he was at the riverbank and seen his Pa weren’t there, he turned back, hollering, “Come, Father!”

The Old Man knowed he was defeated, but couldn’t stand it. He squeezed off one more blast from his seven-shooter, turned to run, and as he did, a cannon volley whipped through the tree line and got him. He was hit square in the back and went down like a rag doll, knocked clean off the ridge and back into the bank. He rolled off the ridge down to the river’s edge and didn’t move. He was done.

Dead.

He weren’t dead, though, only stunned, for that ball had spent itself before it got to him. It plunked a hole in his coat and pierced the skin of his back and lost juice right as it got to him. The Old Man’s skin was thicker than a mule’s ass, and while that ball drawed blood, it didn’t go deep. He jumped up quick as you can tell it, but the sight of him falling off that ridge toward the water drawed a cheer from the Missourians at the top of the bank who smelled red meat but couldn’t see him at the water’s edge, and several jumped down to the bank after him, only to find the Old Man waiting with that seven-shooter which was still dry and loaded. He busted a cap into the face of the first man, cracked the skull of the second man with the butt of that thing—that gun is heavy as the dickens—and sent a third to his Maker with his broadsword just as easy as you please. A fourth feller ran down toward him, and when the poor bastard got over the ridge and seen the Old Man still living, he tried to stop hisself and scramble back to safety. But Owen had scrambled back to the bank to help his Pa and busted a shot at him and blowed out his spark.

It was just them two going at it close, and the sight of them two fighting off rebels attacking ’em from all sides now caused a round of cursing and swearing from the Free Staters who made it to the other side of the river, and they blowed several rounds into the rest of the charging Missourians, who was at the top of the ridge near the tree line. The rebels scattered and fell back. This gived the Old Man and Owen time to get across the river.

I had never seen the Old Man retreat before. He seemed a queer figure there in the river, in a broad straw hat and linen duster, his coattails flung out behind him, arms outspread on the water, as he waded over, a revolver held high in each hand. He climbed onto the opposite bank, out of range of the rebels now, mounted atop his horse, and scrambled his horse up the bank to where I was, followed by the other men, all of ’em joining me on the knoll.

From that knoll you could see Osawatomie clear, the town blazing brightly in the afternoon sun, every house burning to the ground, and every Free Stater stupid enough to hang ’round and try to put out the fire eating his house getting shot to shit by Reverend Martin and his men, who were drunk, laughing and whooping it up. They defeated the Old Man and hollered it all across Osawatomie, several shouting that he was dead and claiming to be the one who done it, whooping that they’d burned his house to the ground, which they’d done.

Most of the other Free Staters who survived had taken the tall timber once they got across the creek to our side. Only the Old Man and his sons remained on our side, watching the rebels celebrate: Jason, John, Salmon, the two younger ones Watson and Oliver, who had joined us, Owen course, all of ’em atop their mounts, staring angrily at the town, for their houses was burning up, too.

But the Old Man didn’t look at it once. When he reached the knoll, he slowly paced his horse back to Frederick and got off it. The rest followed him over.

Fred was where we left him, his little cap atop his head, the Good Lord Bird atop his chest. The Old Man stood over him.

“I should’a come out of hiding to help him,” I said, “but I don’t know how to shoot.”

“And shoot you should not,” the Old Man said. “For you is a girl soon to be a woman. You was a friend to Fred. He was fond of you. And for that I am grateful to you, Little Onion.”

But he might as well have been talking to a hole in the ground, for even as he spoke, his mind was somewhere else. He knelt over Fred. He looked at him several minutes, and for a moment, the old gray eyes softened and it seemed like a thousand years had washed over the Old Man’s face. He sighed, gently pulled Fred’s cap off his head, pulled a feather off the Good Lord Bird, and rose. He turned and stared at the town grimly, burning in the afternoon sun. He could see it plain, the smoke spiraling up, the Free Staters fleeing, the rebels firing at them, whooping and hollering.

“God sees it,” he said.

Jason came up to him. “Father, let’s bury Frederick and let the federals have the fight. They’ll be here soon enough. I don’t want to fight no more. My brothers and me, we had enough. We’re decided on it.”

The Old Man was silent. He fingered Fred’s cap and eyed his sons.

“Is that how you want it, Owen?”

Owen, setting atop his horse, looked away.

“And Salmon. And John?”

Six of his sons was there: Salmon, John, Jason, Owen, and the young ones, Watson and Oliver, plus their kin, the Thompson brothers, two of them. They all looked down. They was spent. Not a one of ’em spoke up. Didn’t say a word.

“Take Little Onion with you,” he said. He tossed Fred’s cap into his saddlebag and made ready to get on his horse.

“We’ve done enough for the cause, Father,” Jason said. “Stay with us and help us rebuild. The federals will find Rev. Martin. They’d catch him and put him in jail, try him for Fred’s killing.”

The Old Man ignored him and mounted his horse, then stared out at the land before him. He seemed to be someplace else in his head. “This is beautiful country,” he said. He hold out the feather from the Good Lord Bird. “And this is this beautiful omen that Frederick left behind. It’s a sign from God.” He stuck it in his weathered, beaten straw cap. It stuck straight up in the air. He looked ludicrous.

“Father, you are not hearing me,” Jason said. “We are done! Stay with us. Help us rebuild.”

The Old Man stretched his lips in a crazy fashion. It weren’t a real smile, but as close as he could come. Never saw him out and out smile up to that point. It didn’t fit his face. Stretching them wrinkles horizontal gived the impression of him being plumb stark mad. Seemed like his peanut had poked out the shell all the way. He was soaked. His jacket and pants, which was always dotted full of holes, was a mass of torn and ripped clothing. On his back was a bit of blood where he’d taken a grape ball. He paid it no attention. “I have only a short time to live,” he said, “and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done. I will give these slaveholders something to think about. I will carry this war into Africa. Stay here if you want. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a cause worth dying for. Even the rebels have that.”

He turned his horse ’round. “I have to go and pray and commingle with the Great Father of Justice upon whose blood we live. Bury Fred right. And take care of Little Onion.”

With that, he turned on his horse and rode off east. I wouldn’t see him again for two years.