The Good Lord Bird

10. A Real Gunslinger

The brothers started haggling not two minutes after the Old Man departed. They stopped their wrangle long enough to bury Frederick atop a knoll that looked down on the town from across the river, plucking some of his Good Lord Bird feathers and giving them out to each of us. Then they hanked among themselves some more about who said this or that, and who shot who and what to do next. It was decided they’d split up and I’d be tagged up with Owen, though Owen weren’t particular about the idea. “I’m going to Iowa to court a young lady, and I can’t move fast with the Onion on me.”

“You weren’t saying that when you kidnapped her,” Jason said.

“It was father’s idea to take a girl on the trail!”

On it went some more, just fussin’. There weren’t no clear leader between them once the Old Man had gone. Nigger Bob was standing ’round as they quarreled. He had run and been plumb gone and disappeared during all the fighting—that nigger had a knack for that—but now that the shooting stopped, he showed up again. I guess wherever he run to weren’t good or safe enough. He stood behind the brothers as they went at it. Hearing them fussin’ ’bout me, he piped up, “I will ride the Onion to Tabor.”

I weren’t particular about riding with Bob no place, for it was his pushing me along that helped me to my situation of playing girl for the white man. Plus Bob weren’t a shooter, which Owen was. I’d been on the prairie long enough to know that being with a shooter counted a whole mess out there. But I didn’t say nothing.

“What do you know about girls?” Owen said.

“I know plenty,” Bob said, “for I have had a couple of my own, and I can look after the Onion easily if it pleases you. I can’t go back to Palmyra nohow.”

He had a point there, for he was stolen property and was tainted goods no matter how the cut go or come. Nobody would believe nothing he said about his time with John Brown, whether he actually fought with the Old Man or not. He’d likely get sold to New Orleans if, according to his word, things went the way they did among the Pro Slavers, with white folks believing that a slave who tasted freedom weren’t worth a dime.

Owen groused about it a few minutes but finally said, “All right. I’ll take you both. But I’m going back across the river first to scrounge what’s left of my claim first. Wait here. We’ll head out soon’s I get back.” Off he went, harring up his horse and riding straight into the thickets.

Course the brothers one by one reckoned they too would scrounge what they could from their claims, and followed him along. John Jr. was the oldest of the Old Man’s sons, but Owen was more like the Old Man, and it was his notions that the rest followed. So Jason, John, Watson and Oliver, and Salmon—they all had different notions ’bout fighting slavery, though all was against it—they followed him out. They rode off, tellin’ me and Bob to wait and watch from across the river and holler a warning if I seen some rebels.

I didn’t want to do it, but it seemed like the danger had passed. Plus it brought me some comfort being near where Fred slept. So I told ’em I’d holler loud and clear for sure.

It was afternoon now, and from the knoll where we sat, Bob and I could see clear across the Marais des Cygnes River into Osawatomie. The rebels had mostly cleared out, the last looters hurrying out of town whooping and hollering, with a few bullets of a few early Free Staters who had started to make their way back across the river whistling in their ears. The fight had mostly gone out of everybody.

The brothers took the logging trail that looped out of our sight for a minute, heading to the shallow part of the river to wade across. From my position, I could see the bank, but after several long minutes of leaning over the knoll to watch them cross the river, I still didn’t see them reach the other side.

“Where they at?” I asked. I turned ’round but Bob was gone. The Old Man always had a stolen wagon and horse or two tied about, and every firefight usually ended up with all kinds of items laying about as folks scrambled to duck lead. As luck would have it, there was an old fat mule and a prairie wagon setting there among the stolen booty in the thickets just beyond the clearing where we stood. Bob was back there and he was in a hurry, digging out lines and traces from the back of the wagon. He slapped the lines onto the mule, hitched it to the wagon, hopped atop the driver’s seat, and harred that beast up.

“Let’s scat,” he said.

“What?”

“Let’s git.”

“What about Owen? He said to wait.”

“Forget him. This is white folks’ business.”

“But what about Frederick?”

“What about him?”

“Reverend Martin shot him. In cold blood. We ought to level things out.”

“You can seek that if you want, but you ain’t gonna come out clear. I’m gone.”

No sooner did he utter them words than a bunch of hollering and shooting came from the same direction as the brothers disappeared to, and two horseback-riding rebel riders in red shirts busted through the thicket and into the clearing, circling ’round the long row of trees and coming right at us.

Bob jumped down from the driver’s seat and commenced to pulling the mule. “Wrap that bonnet tight on your little head,” he said. I done it just as the redshirt riders come through the clearing, saw us in the thicket of trees, and charged us.

Both of them were young fellers in their twenties, their Colts drawed for business, one of them pulling a mule behind his horse loaded with gunnysacks. The other feller, he seemed to be the leader. He was short and thin, with a lean face and several cigars stuffed in his shirt pocket. The feller pulling the mule was older and had a hard, sallow face. Both their horses was loaded with goods, rolling fat, with bags stuffed busting to the limit with booty taken from the town.

Bob, trembling, tipped his hat to the leader. “Morning, sir.”

“Where you going?” the leader asked.

“Why, I’m taking the missus here to the Lawrence Hotel,” Bob said.

“You got papers?”

“Well, suh, the missus here got some,” Bob said. He looked at me.

I couldn’t explain nothing and didn’t have paper the first. That set me back. God-damned fool put me on the spot. Oh, I stuttered and bellowed like a broke calf. I played it as much as I could, but it weren’t that good. “Well, I don’t need papers in that he is taking me to Lawrence,” I stuttered.

“Is the nigger taking you?” the leader said, “Or is you taking the nigger?”

“Why, I’m taking him,” I said. “We is from Palmyra and was passing through this country. There was quite a bit of mess with all the shooting, so I drug him ’round this way.”

The leader moved in close on his horse, staring. He was a ripe, good-looking drummer, with dark eyes and a rowdy look to him. He stuck a cigar in his mouth and chewed it. His horse clunked like a marching band as he plopped his mount ’round me, circling me. That pinto was loaded down with so much junk it was a pity. She looked ready to shut her eyes in death. That beast was carrying a house worth of goods: pots and pans, kettles, whistles, jars, a miniature piano, apple peelers, barrels, dry goods, canned goods, and tin drums. The older feller behind him pulling the mule had twice as much junk. He had the nervous, rough look of a gunfighter, and hadn’t said nothing.

“What are you?” the leader asked. “Is you part nigger or just a white girl with a dirty face?”

Well, I was fluffed, wearing that bonnet and dress. But I had some practice being a girl by then, having been one for the several months past. Besides, my arse was on the line, and that’ll unstring your guts quick when you’re in a tight spot. He throwed me a bone and I took it. I mustered myself up and said as proudly as I could, “I am Henrietta Shackleford and you ought not to talk ’bout me like I am a full-blooded nigger, being that I am only half a nigger and all alone in this world. The best part of me nearly as white as you, sir. I just don’t know where I belongs, being a tragic mulatto and all.” Then I busted into tears.

That boo-hooing moved him. That just stuck him! Whirled him backward! His face got soft and he throwed his Colt in its sleeping place, and nodded at the other feller and told him to do the same.

“All the more reason to run these Free Staters out of this country,” he said. “I’m Chase.” He motioned to his partner. “That’s Randy.”

I howdied ’em.

“Where’s your Ma?”

“Dead.”

“Where is your Pa?”

“Dead. Dead, dead, dead. They all dead.” I boo-hooed again.

He stood there watching. That throwed him some more. “Quit crying for God’s sake, and I’ll give you a peppermint,” he said.

I stood sniffling while he reached in one of them bags on his horse and throwed me a candy. I throwed it down my little red lane without hesitation. It was my first time tasting one of them things, and by God, the explosion in my mouth gived me more pleasure than you can imagine. Candy was rare in them days.

He seed the effect of it and said, “I has plenty more of them, little missus. What’s your business in Lawrence?”

He had me there. I hadn’t no business in Lawrence, and wouldn’t know Lawrence from Adam. So I commenced to choking and fluttering on that candy to give me a minute to think, which made Chase leap off his horse and pound my back—but that didn’t work, neither, for he slammed me so hard, the candy got throwed out my mouth and hit the dust, and that gived me a reason to pretend to be sorry about that, which I was in a real way, so I bawled a little more, but this time it didn’t move him, for we both stared at the candy on the ground. I reckon we was both trying to decide a good way to get it up, clean, and eat it as it should be eaten. After a minute or so, I still hadn’t come up with nothing.

“Well?” he said.

I glanced at the thicket, hoping Owen would come back. Never had I wanted to see his sour face so much. But I heard shots from the woods where he and the brothers had departed, so I figured they’d had their own troubles. I was on my own.

I said, “My Pa left me this sorry nigger Bob here, and I told him to take me to Lawrence. But he got to giving me so much trouble—”

By God, why did I do that? Chase drawed out his heater again and stuck it in Bob’s face. “I’ll beat this nigger cockeyed if he’s giving you trouble.”

Bob’s eyes widened big as silver dollars.

“No, sir, that’s not it,” I said hurriedly. “This nigger’s actually been a help to me. It would do me great harm if you hurt him, for he is all I have in this world.”

“All right then,” Chase said, holstering his six-shooter. “But lemme ask you, honey. How can a part-way nigger own a full-way nigger?”

“He’s paid for fair and square,” I said. “They do that in Illinois all the time.”

“I thought you said you was from Palmyra,” Chase said.

“By way of Illinois.”

“Ain’t that a Free State?” Chase said.

“Not for us rebels,” I said.

“What town in Illinois?”

Well, that stumped me. I didn’t know Illinois from a mule’s ass. I couldn’t think of a town there to save my life, so I thunk of something I heard the Old Man say often. “Purgatory,” I said.

“Purgatory,” Chase laughed. He turned to Randy. “That’s the right name for a Yankee town, ain’t it, Randy?”

Randy stared at him and didn’t say a natural word. That man was dangerous.

Chase looked ’round and seen Frederick’s grave where we’d buried him.

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t know. We been hiding in this thicket while the Free Staters was scouting ’round here. I heard ’em say it was one of theirs.”

Chase pondered the grave thoughtfully. “It’s a fresh grave. We ought to see if who’sever in there got on boots,” he said.

That throwed me, for last thing I wanted to do was for them to dig up Frederick and pick all over his parts. I couldn’t bear the thought of it, so I said, “I heard ’em say he got his face blowed off and it was all mush.”

“Jesus,” Chase mumbled. He backed away from the grave. “Damn Yanks. Well, you ain’t got to fear them now, little angel. Chase Armstrong done drove ’em off! Wanna ride with us?”

“We is going to the Lawrence Hotel to get a job, and Bob is a help to me. We was waylaid, see, when you all whipped up on them darn Free Staters. But thanks to you, the danger is gone. So I reckon we’ll be off.”

I motioned to Bob to har up the mule, but Chase said, “Hold on now. We’re going to Pikesville, Missouri. That’s in your general direction. Why not come with us?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“These trails is dangerous.”

“They ain’t that bad.”

“I think they is bad enough that you ought not ride alone,” he said. It weren’t no invitation the way he said it.

“Bob here is sick,” I said. “He got the ague. It’s catching.”

“All the more reason to roll with us. I know a couple of nigger traders in Pikesville. Big nigger like that would draw some good money, sick or not. A couple thousand dollars, maybe. Give you a good start.”

Bob shot a wild look at me.

“I can’t do that,” I said, “for I promised my Pa never to sell him.”

I motioned for him again to har up the mules, but Chase grabbed the traces this time and held them tight. “What’s waiting for you in Lawrence? Ain’t nothing but Free Staters there.”

“There is?”

“Surely.”

“We’ll go to the next town, then.”

Chase chuckled. “Ride our way.”

“I weren’t going that way. Plus Old John Brown’s riding these woods. They’re still dangerous.”

I motioned Bob to har up the mule one more time, but Chase held ’em tight, looking at me out the corner of his eye. He was serious now.

“Brown is done. The redshirts is shooting up what’s left of his boys in the woods yonder. And he’s dead. I seen him with my own eyes.”

“That can’t be!”

“Yep. Deader than yesterday’s beer.”

That floored me. “That’s a low-down, rotten, dirty piece of luck!” I said.

“How’s that?”

“I mean it’s rotten luck that ... I ain’t never seen him dead, him being a famous outlaw and all. You seen him surely?”

“He’s stinking to high heaven right now, the nigger-stealing thief. I seen him hit at the bank and fall into the Marais des Cygnes myself. I would’a run down there and chopped his head off myself but”—he cleared his throat—“me and Randy had to run ’round to protect the flank. Plus there was a hardware store on the back end of town that needed cleaning out, if you get my drift, being that them Free Staters won’t be needin’ this stuff ...”

I knowed he was wrong about the Old Man’s whereabouts then, and I was relieved. But I had to take care of myself too, so I said, “I am so glad he is gone, for this territory is now safe for good white folks to live free and clear.”

“But you ain’t white.”

“Half-white. Plus we got to take care of the coloreds here, for they needs us. Right, Bob?”

Bob looked away. I knowed he was mad.

I reckoned Chase decided I was close enough to white for him, for Bob’s manner sullied him. “You’s a sour-faced coon,” he muttered, “and I ought to bust you ’cross the jibs for attitude.” He turned to me. “What kind of work you seeking in Lawrence that you carry ’round such a sour nigger?”

“Trim’s my business,” I said proudly, for I could cut hair.

He perked up. “Trim?”

Now, having growed up with whores and squaws at Dutch’s, I should’a knowed what that word “trim” meant. But the truth is, I didn’t.

“I sell the best trim a man can get. Can do two or three men in an hour.”

“That many?”

“Surely.”

“Ain’t you a little young to be selling trim?”

“Why, I’m twelve near as I can tell it, and can sell trims just as good as the next person,” I said.

His manner changed altogether. He polited up, wiping his face clean with his neckerchief, fluffing his clothes, and straightening out his ragged shirt. “Wouldn’t you rather have a job waiting or washing?”

“Why wash dishes when you can do ten men in an hour?”

Chase’s face got ripe red. He reached in his sack and drawed out a whiskey bottle. He sipped it and passed it to Randy. “That must be some kind of record,” he said. He looked at me out the corner of his eye. “You want to do me one?”

“Out here? On the trail? It’s better to be in a warm tavern, with a stove cooking and heating your victuals, while you enjoys a toot and a tear. Plus I can clip your toenails and soak your corns at the same time. Feet’s my specialty.”

“Ooh, that stirs my britches,” he said. “Listen, I know a place there that’s perfect for you. I know a lady who’ll give you a job. It’s in Pikesville, not Lawrence.”

“That ain’t in our direction.”

For the first time, Randy opened his talking hole. “Sure it is,” he said. “Unless you playing us for a fool. You all could be lying. ’Cause you ain’t showed us no papers—’bout you or him.”

He looked rough enough to scratch a match off his face. I didn’t have no choice, really, for he had called me out so I said, “You is not a gentleman, sir, to accuse a young lady of my background of lying. But, being that it’s dangerous on this trail for a girl like myself, I reckon Pikesville is as good a place to go as any. And if I can make money there selling trims as you claims, why not?”

They ordered Bob to help unload their horses and mules, then spotted some knickknacks among the stolen goods the Old Man’s sons had left about. They jumped off their horses to gather that stuff.

The moment they was out of earshot, Bob leaned over from the driver’s seat and hissed, “Aim your lies in a different direction.”

“What I done?”

“Trim means ‘tail,’ Henry. Birds and the bees. All that.”

When they come back I seen the glint in their eyes, and I was tied in a knot. I’d have gived anything to see Owen’s sour face come charging, but he didn’t come. They tied their beasts to ours, throwed what they gathered up in the wagon, and we rolled off.

11. Pie

We followed the trail half a day northeast, dead into Missouri slave territory. I sat behind Bob in the wagon while Chase and Randy followed on horseback. On the trail, Chase did all the talking. He talked about his Ma. Talked about his Pa. Talked about his kids. His wife was half cousin to his Pa and he talked about that. There weren’t nothing about himself he didn’t seem to want to talk about, which gived me another lesson on being a girl. Men will spill their guts about horses and their new boots and their dreams to a woman. But if you put ’em in a room and turn ’em loose on themselves, it’s all guns, spit, and tobacco. And don’t let ’em get started on their Ma. Chase wouldn’t stop stretching his mouth about her and all the great things she done.

I let him go on, for I was more concerned with the subject of trim, and what my doings was gonna be in that department. After a while them two climbed in the back of the wagon and opened a bottle of rye, which helped commence me to singing right away, just to keep them two off the subject. There ain’t nothing a rebel loves more than a good old song, and I knowed several from my days at Dutch’s. They rode happily back there, sipping moral suasion while I sang “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Please, Ma, I Ain’t Coming Home,” and “Grandpa, Your Horse Is in My Barn.” That cooled them for a while, but dark was coming. Thankfully, just before true night swallowed the big prairie sky, the rolling plains and mosquitoes gived way to log cabins and squatters’ homes, and we hit Pikesville.

Pikesville was rude business back in them days, just a collection of run-down cabins, shacks, and hen coops. The streets were mud, with rocks, tree stumps, and gullies lying about the main road. Pigs roamed the alleyways. Ox, mules, and horses strained to pull carts full of junk. Piles of freight sat about uncollected. Most of the cabins was unfinished, some without roofs. Others looked like they were on the verge of collapse altogether, with rattlesnake skins, buffalo hide, and animal skins drying out nearby. There were three grog houses in town, built one on top of the other practically, and every porch railing on ’em was thick with tobacco spit. That town was altogether a mess. Still, it was the grandest town I’d ever seen to that point.

We hit the town to a great hubbub, for they’d heard rumors about the big gunfight at Osawatomie. No sooner had we pulled up than the wagon was surrounded. An old feller asked Chase, “Is it true? Is Old John Brown dead?”

“Yes, sir,” Chase crowed.

“You killed him?”

“Why, I throwed every bullet I had at him sure as you standing there—”

“Hoorah!” they hollered. He was pulled off the wagon and clapped and pounded on the back. Randy got sullen and didn’t say a word. I reckon he was wanted and there was a reward for him somewhere, for the minute they pulled Chase off the wagon howling, Randy slipped on his horse, grabbed his pack mule, and slipped off. I never seen him again. But Chase was riding high. They drug him to the nearest grog house, sat him down, pumped him full of whiskey, and surrounded him, drunks, jackals, gamblers, and pickpockets, shouting, “How’d you do it?”

“Tell us the whole thing.”

“Who shot first?”

Chase cleared his throat. “Like I said, there was a lotta shooting—”

“Course there was! He was a murdering fool!”

“A jackal!”

“Horse thief, too! Yellow Yank!”

More laughter. They just throwed the lie on him. He weren’t aiming to lie. But they pumped him full of rotgut as he could stand it. They bought every bit of his stolen booty, and he got soused, and after a while he couldn’t help but to pump the thing up and go along with it. His story changed from one drink to the next. It growed in the tellin’ of it. First he allowed that he shot the Old Man hisself. Then he killed him with his bare hands. Then he shot him twice. Then he stabbed and dismembered him. Then he throwed his body into the river, where the alligators lunched on what was left. Up and down he went, back and forth, this way and that, till the thing stretched to the sky. You’d a thunk it would’a dawned on some of them that he was cooking it all up, the way his story growed legs. But they was as liquored up as him, when folks wanna believe something, the truth ain’t got no place in that compartment. It come to me then that they feared Old John Brown something terrible; feared the idea of him as much as they feared the Old Man hisself, and thus they was happy to believe he was dead, even if that knowledge was just five minutes long before the truth would come about to it and kill it dead.

Bob and I set quiet while this was going on, for they weren’t paying us no mind, but each time I stood up to step toward the door and slip away, catcalling and whistling drove me back to my chair. Women or girls of any type was scarce out on the prairie, and even though I was a mess—my dress was flattened out, my bonnet torn, and my hair underneath it was a wooly mess—the men offered me every kind of pleasure. They outworked a cooter in the nasty chattering department. Their comments come as a surprise to me, for the Old Man’s troops didn’t cuss nor drink and was generally respecters of the woman race. As the night wore on, the hooting and howling toward me growed worse, and it waked Chase, who ended up with his head on the bar, lubricated and stewed past reason, out his stupor.

He rose from the bar and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. I am tired after killing the most dastardly criminal of the last hundred years. I aim to take this little lady across the road to the Pikesville Hotel, where Miss Abby is no doubt holding my room for me on the Hot Floor, on account of having heard of my late rasslings with that demon who I wrestled the breath from and fed him to the wolves in the name of the free living state of Missoura! God bless America.” He pushed me and Bob out the door and staggered across the street to the Pikesville Hotel.

The Pikesville was a high-class hotel and saloon compared to the previous two shitholes that I aforementioned, but I ought to say here that looking back, it weren’t much better. Only after I seen dwellings in the East did I learn that the finest hotel in Pikesville was a pigsty compared to the lowliest flophouse in Boston. The first floor of the Pikesville Hotel was a dark, candlelit drinking room, with tables and a bar. Behind it was a small middle room with a long dining table for eating. On the side of that room was a door that led to a hall leading to a back alley. At the back of the room was a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

There was a great hubbub when Chase came in, for word had proceeded him. He was pounded on the back and hailed from one corner of the room to the other, drinks shoved into his hands. He hailed everyone with a great big howdy, then proceeded to the back room, where several men seated at the dining table howdied him and offered to give him their seats and more drinks. He waved them off. “Not now, fellers,” he said. “I got business on the Hot Floor.”

On the stairs at the back of the room, several women of the type that frequented Dutch’s place sat along the bottom rungs. A couple were smoking pipes, shoving the black tobacco down into the cups with wrinkled fingers and shoving the pipes into their mouths, clamping down with teeth so yellow they looked like clumps of butter. Chase staggered past them and stood at the bottom of the stairs, hollering up, “Pie! Pie darling! C’mon down. Guess who’s back.”

There was a commotion at the top of the stairs, and a woman made her way from the darkness and stepped halfway down the stairs into the dim candlelight of the room.

I once pulled a ball from the ham of a rebel stuck out near Council Bluffs after he got into a hank out there and someone throwed their pistol on him and left him bleeding and stuck. I cleared him, and he was so grateful, he drove me to town afterward and gived me a bowl of ice cream. That was something I never had before. Best thing I ever tasted in my life.

But the feeling of that ice cream running down my little red lane in summertime weren’t nothing compared to seeing that bundle of beauty coming down them stairs that first time. She would blow the hat off your head.

She was a mulatto woman. Skin as brown as a deer’s hide, with high cheekbones and big brown dewy eyes as big as silver dollars. She was a head taller than me but seemed taller. She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of smoke. I weren’t no stranger to nature’s ways then, coming on the age of twelve as I believe I was more or less that age, and having accidentally on purpose peeked into a room or three at Dutch’s place, but the knowing of a thing is different from the doing of it, and them whores at Dutch’s was generally so ugly, they’d make the train leave the track. This woman had the kind of rhythm that you could hear a thousand miles down the Missouri. I wouldn’t throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.

She surveyed the room slowly like a priestess, and when she seen Chase, her expression changed. She quick-timed to the bottom of the stairs and kicked him. He toppled off the stair like a rag doll as the men laughed. She came down to the bottom landing and stood over him, her hands on her hips. “Where’s my money?”

Chase got up sheepishly, dusting himself off. “That’s a hell of a way to treat the man who just killed Old John Brown with his bare hands.”

“Right. And I quit buying gold claims last year. I don’t care who you killed. You owe me nine dollars.”

“That much?” he said.

“Where is it?”

“Pie, I got something better than nine dollars. Look.” He pointed at me and Bob.

Pie looked right past Bob. Ignored him. Then she glared at me.

White fellers on the prairie, even white women, didn’t pay two cents’ worth of attention to a simple colored girl. But Pie was the first colored woman I seen in the two years since I started wearing that getup, and she smelled a rat right off.

She blew through her lips. “Shit. Whatever that ugly thing is, it sure needs pressing.” She turned to Chase. “You got my money?”

“What about the girl?” Chase said. “Miss Abby could use her. Wouldn’t that square us?”

“You got to talk to Miss Abby about that.”

“But I carried her all the way from Kansas!”

“Must’a been some party, ya cow head. Kansas ain’t but half a day’s ride. You got my money or not?”

Chase got up, brushing himself off. “Course I do,” he muttered. “But Abby’ll be hot if she finds out you let this tight little thing shimmy across the road and work for the competition.”

Pie frowned. He had her there.

“And I ought to get special favor,” he throwed in, “on account of I had to kill John Brown and save the whole territory and all, just to get back to you. So can we go upstairs?”

Pie smirked. “I’ll give you five minutes,” she said.

“I take ten minutes to whiz,” he protested.

“Whizzes is extra,” she said. “Come on. Bring her, too.” She moved upstairs, then stopped, glaring at Bob, who had started up the stairs behind me. She turned to Chase.

“You can’t bring that nigger up here. Put him in the nigger pen out back, where everybody parks their niggers.” She pointed to the side door of the dining hall. “Miss Abby’ll give him some work tomorrow.”

Bob looked at me wild eyed.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but he belongs to me.”

It was the first thing I said to her, and when she throwed them gorgeous brown eyes on me, I like to have melted like ice in the sun. Pie was something.

“You can sleep out there with him, too, then, you high-yellow, cornlooking ugler-ation.”

“Wait a second,” Chase said. “I drug her all this way.”

“For what?”

“For the men.”

“She’s so ugly, she’d curdle a cow. Look, you want me to job you or not?”

“You can’t leave her in the pen,” Chase said. “She said she ain’t a nigger.”

Pie laughed. “She’s close enough!”

“Miss Abby wouldn’t like that. What if she gets hurt out there? Let her come upstairs and send the nigger to the pen. I got a stake in this, too,” he said.

Pie considered it. She looked at Bob and said, “G’wan to the back door out there. They’ll fetch you some eatings in the yard. You.” She pointed to me. “C’mon up.”

There weren’t nothing to do. It was late and I was exhausted. I turned to Bob, who looked downright objectable. “Sleepin’ here’s better’n the prairie, Bob,” I said. “I’ll come get you later.”

I was good to my word, too. I did come for him later, but he never forgave me for sending him out the door that day. That was the end of whatever closeness was between us. Just the way of things.

We followed Pie upstairs. She stopped at a room, throwed open the door, and pushed Chase inside. Then she turned to me and pointed to a room two doors down. “Go in there. Tell Miss Abby I sent you, and that you come to work. She’ll see you get a hot bath first. You smell like buffalo dung.”

“I don’t need no bath!”

She grabbed my hand, stomped down the hall, knocked on a door, flung it open, throwed me into the room, and closed the door behind me.

I found myself staring at the back of a husky, well-dressed white woman setting at a vanity. She turned away from the vanity and rose up to face me. She was wearing a long white fancy scarf ’round her neck. Atop that neck was a face with enough powder on it to pack the barrel of a cannon. Her lips was thick and painted red and clamped a cigar between them. Her forehead was high, and her face was flushed red and curdled in anger like old cheese. That woman was so ugly, she looked like a death threat. Behind her, the room was dimly lit by candles. The smell of the place was downright infernal. Come to think of it, I have never been in a hotel room in Kansas but that didn’t smell worse than the lowliest flophouse you could find in all of New England. The odor in that place was ripe enough to peel the wallpaper off the worst sitting room in Boston. The sole window in the room hadn’t been disturbed by water for years. It was dotted with specks of dead flies that clung to it like black dots. Along the far wall, which was lit up by two burning candles, two figures lounged on two beds that set side by side. Between the beds sat a tin bathtub that, to my reckoning, in the dim light, appeared to be filled with water and what looked to be a naked woman.

I started to lose consciousness then, for as my eyes took in the sight of these two figures, two young ones setting on the bed, one combing the other one’s hair, and the older one setting in the tub smoking a pipe, her love bags hanging low into the water, my fluids runned clear out of my head and my knees gived way. I slipped to the floor in a dead faint.

I was awakened a minute later by a hand slapping my chest. Miss Abby stood over me.

“You flat as a pancake,” she said dryly. She flipped me over onto my stomach, gripped my arse with a pair of hands that felt like ice tongs. “You small in that department, too,” she grunted, feeling my arse. “You young and homely. Where’d Pie get you?”

I didn’t wait. I leaped to my feet, and in doing so, that pretty white scarf of hers caught my arm and I heard it tear as I took off. I ripped that thing like paper and hit the door running and scampered out. I hit the hallway at full speed and made for the stairs, but two cowboys were coming up, so I busted into the closest door, which happened to be Pie’s room—just in time to see Chase with trousers down and Pie sitting on her bed with her dress pulled down to her waist.

The sight of them two chocolate love knobs standing there like fresh biscuits slowed my step, I reckon, long enough for Miss Abby, who was hot on my tail, to grab at my bonnet and rip it in half just as I dove under Pie’s bed.

“Git out from under there!” she hollered. It was a tight squeeze—the bedsprings was low—but if it was tight for me, it was tighter for Miss Abby, who was too big to lean over all the way and get at me. The smell under that feather bed was pretty seasoned though, downright rank, the smell of a thousand dreams come true, I reckon, being that its purpose was for nature’s deeds, and if I wasn’t worried ’bout getting broke in half, I would’a moved out from under it.

Miss Abby tried pulling the bed from side to side to expose me, but I clung to the springs and moved with the bed as she slung it.

Pie come ’round to the other side of the bed, leaned on all fours and placed her head on the floor. It was a tight fit down there but I could just see her face. “You better come out here,” she said.

“I ain’t.”

I heard the click of a Colt’s hammer snapping back. “I’ll get her out,” Chase said.

Pie stood up and I heard the sound of a slap, then Chase hollered, “Ow!”

“Put that peashooter up before I beat the cow-walkin’ hell outta you,” Pie said.

Miss Abby commenced to razzing Pie something terrible for me ripping her scarf and causing a ruckus in her business. She cussed Pie’s Ma. She cussed her Pa. She cussed all her relations in all directions.

“I’ll fix it,” Pie protested. “I’ll pay for the scarf.”

“You better. Git that girl out, or I’ll have Darg come up here.”

It growed silent. From where I lay, it felt like all the air had left the room. Pie spoke softly—I could hear the terror in her voice—“You don’t have to do that, missus. I’ll fix it. I promise. And I’ll pay for the scarf, missus.”

“Get busy counting your pennies, then.”

Miss Abby’s feet stomped toward the door and left.

Chase was standing there. I could see his bare feet and his boots from where I was. Suddenly Pie’s hand snatched up his boots, and I reckon she handed them to him, for she said, “Git.”

“I’ll straighten it out, Pie.”

“Skinflint! Dumbass. Who told you to bring me that snaggle-mouth headache here? Git out!”

He put on his boots, grumbling and muttering, then left. Pie slammed the door behind him and stood against it, sighing in the silence. I watched her feet. They slowly came toward the bed. She said softly, “It’s all right, honey. I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

“You sure?” I said.

“Course, baby. You a young thing. You don’t know nuthin’. Sweet thing, ain’t got nobody in the world, coming here. Lord have mercy. It’s a shame, Miss Abby hollering about some silly old scarf. Missouri! Lord, the devil’s busy in this territory! Don’t be scared, sweetie. You gonna suffocate down there. C’mon out, baby.”

The soft tenderness of that woman’s voice moved my heart so much, I slipped out from under there. I come out on the opposite side of the bed, though, just in case she weren’t good for her word, but she was. I could see it in her face when I stood up, watching me from across the bed now, smiling, warm, dewy. She gestured to me with an arm. “C’mon over here, baby. Come ’round the side of the bed.”

I melted right off. I was in love with her right from the first. She was the mother I never knowed, the sister I never had, my first love. Pie was all woman, one hundred percent, first rate, grade A, right-from-the-start woman. I just loved her.

I said, “Oh, Mama,” and runned ’round the bed to nestle my head between them big brown love knockers, just cram my head in there and sob out my sorrows, for I was but a lonely boy looking for a home. I felt that in my heart. And I was aiming to tell all my story to her and let her make it right. I throwed myself at her and put my heart in hers. I went over there and put my head on her chest, and just as I done so, felt myself being lifted like a pack of feathers and throwed clear across the room.

“God-damn, cockeyed idiot!”

She was on me before I could get up, picked me up by the collar, and whomped me twice, then throwed me on the floor on my stomach, and put a knee on my back. “I’mma send you hooting and hollering down the road, ya goober-faced tart! Ya lying lizard.” She whomped me twice more on the head. “Don’t move,” she said.

I stayed where I was as she got up, frantically pushed the bed aside, then dug at the floorboards underneath it, pulling them out till she found what she was looking for. She reached in and pulled out an old jar. She opened it, checked its contents, seemed satisfied, throwed the jar back in there, and put the whole assembly of floorboards back in place. She slid the bed back in place and said, “Git outta here, cow face. And if any of my money’s missing while you’re in this town, I’ll cut your throat so wide, you’ll have two sets of lips working at the top of your neck.”

“What I done?”

“Git.”

“But I don’t have no place to go.”

“What do I care? Git out.”

Well, I was hurt, so I said, “I ain’t going no place.”

She marched over to me and grabbed me up. She was a strong woman, and while I resisted, I weren’t no match for her. She throwed me over her knee. “Now, you high-yellow heifer, think you so high-siddity? Got me paying for a damn scarf I ain’t never had! I’mma warm your two little buns the way your Ma should’a,” she said.

“Wait!” I hollered, but it was too late. She throwed my dress up, and seed my true nature dangling somewhere down there between her knees at full salute, being that all that wrestling and tugging was a wonderment to the fringlings and tinglings of a twelve-year-old who never knowed nature’s ways firsthand. I couldn’t help myself.

She yelped and throwed me to the floor, her hands cupped her face as she stared. “You done put me in the fryer, you God-damned pebble-mouthed, wart-faced sip of shit. You heathen! Them was women you was in that room with... . Was they working? Lord, course they was!” She was furious. “You gonna get me hanged!”

She leaped at me, throwed me over her knee, and went at it hard again.

“I was kidnapped!” I hollered.

“You lyin’ lizard!” She spanked me some more.

“I ain’t. I was kidnapped by Old John Brown hisself!”

That stopped her flinging and flailing for a second. “Old John Brown’s dead. Chase killed him,” she said.

“No, he’s not,” I hollered.

“What do I care!” She throwed me off her lap and set on the bed. She was cooling off now, though still hot. Lord, she looked prettier burnt up than she did regular, and the sight of them brown eyes boring into me made me feel lower than dirt, for I was plumb in love. Pie just done something to me.

She sat thinking for a long moment. “I knowed Chase was a liar,” she said, “or he would’a gone on and collected that money on Old John Brown’s head. You likely lying, too. Maybe you working with Chase.”

“I ain’t.”

“How’d you get with him?”

I explained how Frederick was killed and how Chase and Randy rolled up on me and Bob when the Old Man’s sons went to town to collect their belongings.

“Randy still here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope not. You’ll end up in an urn buried in somebody’s yard fooling with him. There’s a reward out on him.”

“But the Old Man’s alive surely,” I said proudly. “I seen him get up out the river.”

“What do I care? He’ll be dead soon enough, anyway.”

“Why does every colored I meet say that?”

“You ought to worry about your own skin, ya little snit. I had a feeling about you,” she said. “God-damned Chase! Damn cow turd!”

She cussed him some more, then sat a moment, thinking. “Them rebels find out you was on the Hot Floor, peeking at them white whores, they’ll cut out them little grapes hanging between your legs and stick them down your gizzard. Might pull me in on it, too. I can’t take no chances with you. Plus you seen where my money is.”

“I ain’t interested in your money.”

“That’s touching, but everything on this prairie’s a lie, child. Ain’t nothing what it looks like. Look at you. You’s a lie. You got to go. You ain’t gonna make it on the prairie as a girl nohow. I know a feller drives a stagecoach for Wells Fargo. Now he’s a girl. Playing like a man. But whatever she fancies herself, girl or boy, she’s a white thing. And she’s going from place to place as a stagecoach driver. She ain’t setting in one place, selling tail. And that’s what you’d do here, child. Miss Abby got a business here. She got no use for you. Unless you wanna service ... can you still service as a boy? Do that interest you?”

“The only service I know is washing dishes and cutting hair and such. I can do that good. Me and Bob can work tables, too.”

“Forget him. He’s gonna get sold,” she said.

It didn’t seem proper to remind her that she was a Negro herself, for she was ornery, so I said, “He’s a friend.”

“He’s a runaway like you. And he’s getting sold. And you too, unless you let Miss Abby work you. She might work you to death, then sell you.”

“She can’t do that!”

She laughed. “Shit. She can do whatever she wants.”

“I can do other things,” I pleaded. “I knows working ’round taverns. I can clean rooms and spittoons, bake biscuits, do all manner of jobs, till maybe the Captain comes.”

“What Captain?”

“Old John Brown. We call him Captain. I’m in his army. He’s gonna ride on this town once they find out I’m here.”

It was a lie, for I didn’t know whether the Old Man was living or not, or what he was gonna do, but that peaked her feathers some.

“You sure he’s living?”

“Sure as I’m standing here. And the fur’s gonna fly if he comes here and finds out Bob’s sold, for Bob’s his’n, too. For all we know, Bob’s likely spreading the word among them niggers downstairs right now, saying he’s a John Brown man. That gets certain niggers rowdy, y’know, talking ’bout John Brown.”

Fear creased that pretty little face of hers. Old Brown scared the shit outta every living soul on the prairie. “That’s all I need,” she said. “Old John Brown riding here, screwing things up and whipping them pen niggers into a frenzy. It’ll drive these white folks crazy. They’ll wail away on every nigger in sight. If it was up to me, every nigger in that pen would be sold down the river.”

She sighed and sat down on the bed, then flattened her hair, and pulled her dress up tighter ’round them love lumps of hers. Lord, she was beautiful. “I don’t want no parts of what Old John Brown’s selling,” she said. “Let him come. I got my own plans. But what I’m gonna do with you?”

“If you take me back to Dutch’s Tavern, that might help me.”

“Where’s that?”

“Off Santa Fe Road on the border with Missouri. West of here. About thirty-five miles. Old Dutch might take me back.”

“Thirty-five miles? I can’t go thirty-five feet out this hotel without papers.”

“I can get you papers. I can write ’em. I know my letters.”

Her eyes widened, and the hardness fell away from her face. For a moment she seemed fresh as a young child on a spring morning, and the dew climbed back into her face again. Just as fast, though, the dew hit the road, and her face hardened again.

“I can’t ride no place, child. Even with a pass, too many people ’round here know me. Still, it’d be nice to pass the time reading dime books like the other girls. I seen it done,” she said.

She smirked at me. “Can you really read? Knowing your letters is something you can’t lie about, y’know.”

“I ain’t lying.”

“I expect you can prove that out. Tell you what. You teach me letters, and I’ll girl you up and work it out with Miss Abby so you start out cleaning beds and emptying piss pots and things to pay off her scarf and your keep. That’ll give you a little time. But keep away from the girls. If these rebels find out about that little nub swinging between your legs, they’ll pour tar down your throat. I reckon that’ll work for a while till Miss Abby decides you old enough to work the trade. Then you on your own. How long’ll it take me to learn my letters?”

“Not long.”

“Well, however long that takes, that’s how much time you got. After that, I’m done with you. Wait here while I fetch you another bonnet to cover them nigger naps and a clean something to wear.”

She rose, and by the time she disappeared out the door and shut it behind her, I missed her already, and she hadn’t been gone but a few seconds.

12. Sibonia

I settled into Pikesville pretty easy. It weren’t hard. Pie set me up good. She done me up like a real girl: Cleaned me up, fixed my hair, sewed me a dress, taught me to curtsey before visitors, and advised me against smoking cigars and acting like the rest of them walking hangovers who worked Miss Abby’s place. She had to twist Miss Abby into keeping me, for the old lady didn’t want me at first. She weren’t anxious to have another mouth to feed. But I knowed a thing or two about working in taverns, and after she seen how I emptied spittoons, cleaned up tables, scrubbed floors, emptied chamber pots, carted water up to the girls all night, and gived haircuts for the gamblers and jackals in her tavern, she growed satisfied with me. “Just watch the men,” she said. “Keep ’em liquored up. The girls upstairs will do the rest,” she said.

I know this was a whorehouse, but it weren’t bad at all. Fact is, I never knowed a Negro from that day to this but who couldn’t lie to themselves about their own evil while pointing out the white man’s wrong, and I weren’t no exception. Miss Abby was a slaveholder true enough, but she was a good slaveholder. She was a lot like Dutch. She runned a lot of businesses, which meant the businesses mostly runned her. Whoring was almost a sideline for her. She also runned a sawmill, a hog pen, a slave pen, kept a gambling house, had a tin-making machine, plus she was in competition with the tavern across the street that didn’t have a colored slave like Pie to bring in money, for Pie was her main attraction. I was right at home in her place, living ’round gamblers and pickpockets who drank rotgut and pounded each other’s brains out over card games. I was back in bondage, true, but slavery ain’t too troublesome when you’re in the doing of it and growed used to it. Your meals is free. Your roof is paid for. Somebody else got to bother themselves about you. It was easier than being on the trail, running from posses and sharing a roasted squirrel with five others while the Old Man was hollering over the whole roasted business to the Lord for an hour before you could even get to the vittles, and even then there weren’t enough meat on it to knock the edges off the hunger you was feeling. I was living well and clean forgot about Bob. Just plain forgot about him.

But you could see the slave pen from Pie’s window. They had couple of huts back there, a canvas cover that stretched over part of it that was fenced all ’round, and once in a while, between my scamperings ’round working, I’d stop, scratch out a clean spot on the glass, and take a peek. If it weren’t raining, you could see the colored congregated and bunched up out in the yard near a little garden they put together. Otherwise, if it was raining or cold, they stayed under the canvas. From time to time I’d take a look out the window to see if I could spot old Bob. Never could, and after a few weeks I got to wondering about him. I spoke to Pie about it one afternoon while she sat on her bed combing her hair.

“Oh, he’s around,” she said. “Miss Abby ain’t sold him. Let him be, darling.”

“I thought I might bring him some victuals to eat.”

“Leave them niggers in the yard alone,” she said. “They’re trouble.”

I found that confusing, for they done her no wrong, and nothing they could do would hurt Pie’s game. She was right popular. Miss Abby gived her the run of the place, let her choose her own customers more or less, and live as she wanted. Pie even closed down the saloon at times. Them coloreds couldn’t hurt her game. But I kept quiet on it, and one evening I couldn’t stand it no more. I slipped down to the slave pen to see about Bob.

The slave pen was in an alley behind the hotel, right off the dining room back door. Soon as you opened that door you stepped into an alley, and two steps across it and you was there. It was a penned-in area, and beside it was a little open area in the back where the colored set on crates, played cards, and had a little vegetable garden. Behind that was a hog pen, which opened right to the colored pen for easy tending of Miss Abby’s hogs.

Inside both them pens combined—the pen where they fed the pigs and the pen where the slaves lived and kept a garden—I reckon it was about twenty men, women, and children in there. Up close it weren’t the same sight that it was from above, and right then I knowed why Pie kept away and wanted me off from it. It was evening, for most of ’em was out working during the day, and the dusk settling on that place, and the swill of them Negroes—most of ’em dark-skinned, pure Negroes like Bob—was downright troubling. The smell of the place was infernal. Most was dressed in mostly rags and some without shoes. They wandered ’round the pen, some setting, doing nothing, others fooling ’round a bit in the garden, and there in the middle of ’em, they kinda circled ’round a figure, a wild woman cackling and babbling like a chicken. She sounded like her mind was a little soft, babbling like she was, but I couldn’t make out no words.

I walked to the fence. Several men and women were working along the back end of it, feeding hogs and tending the garden there, and when they seed me they glanced up, but never stopped working. It was twilight now. Just about dark. I stuck my face to the fence and said, “Anybody see Bob?”

The Negroes gathered at the back of the pen working with shovels and rakes kept working and didn’t say nary a word. But that silly fool in the middle of the yard, a heavyset, settle-aged colored woman setting on a wooden box, cackling and babbling, she got to cackling louder. She had a large, round face. She was really off her knob the closer you got to her, for up close, the box she set on was pushed deep into the muddy ground nearly up to its top, it was wedged so deep, and she set on it, commenting and cackling and warbling about nothing. She seen me and croaked, “Pretty, pretty, yeller, yeller!”

I ignored her and spoke generally. “Anybody seen a feller named Bob?” I asked.

Nobody said nothing, and that feebleminded thing clucked and swished her head ’round like a bird, gobbling like a turkey. “Pretty, pretty, yeller, yeller.”

“He’s a colored feller, ’bout this high,” I said to the others.

But that crazy thing kept her mouth busy. “Knee-deep, knee-deep, goin’ ’round, goin’ ’round!” she cackled.

She was feebleminded. I looked to the other Negroes in the pen. “Anybody see Bob?” I said. I said it loud enough for all of ’em to hear it, and nar soul looked at me twice. They busied themselves on with them hogs and their little garden like I weren’t there.

I climbed the first rung of the fence and stuck my face high over it and said louder, “Anybody see B—” and before I could finish, I was struck in the face by a mud ball. That crazy fool woman setting on the box scooped up another handful of mud by the time I looked, and throwed that in my face.

“Hey!”

“Goin’ ’round. Goin’ ’round!” she howled. She had got up from her box, came to the edge of the fence where I was, picked up another mud ball, and throwed that, and that one got me in the jaw. “Knee-deep!” she crowed.

I flew hot as the devil. “Damn stupid fool!” I said. “Git! Git away from me!” I would have climbed in there and dunked her head in the mud, but another colored woman, a tall, slender slip of water, broke off from the rest on the other side of the pen, dug the crazy woman’s box out the mud, and come over. “Don’t mind her. She’s feebleminded,” she said.

“Don’t I know it.”

She set the crazy woman’s box down by the edge of the fence, set her own down, and said, “Sit by me, Sibonia.” The crazy coot calmed down and done it. The woman turned to me and said, “What you need?”

“She needs a flogging,” I said. “I reckon Miss Abby would flog her righteous if I was to tell it. I works inside, you know.” That was privileged, see, to work inside. That gived you more juice with the white man.

A couple of colored men pushing that hog slop ’round with rakes and shovels glanced over at me, but the woman talking to me shot a look at them, and they looked away. I was a fool, see, for I didn’t know the dangerous waters I was treading in.

“I’m Libby,” she said. “This here’s my sister, Sibonia. You awful young to be talking about flogging. What you want?”

“I am looking for Bob.”

“Don’t know no Bob,” Libby said.

Behind her, Sibonia hooted, “No Bob. No Bob,” and chucked a fresh mud ball at me, which I dodged.

“He’s got to be here.”

“Ain’t nar Bob here,” Libby said. “We got a Dirk, a Lang, a Bum-Bum, a Broadnax, a Pete, a Lucious. Ain’t no Bob. What you want him for anyway?”

“He’s a friend.”

She looked at me a long minute in my dress. Pie had fixed me up nice. I was dressed warm, clean, in a bonnet and warm dress and socks, living good. I looked like a real high-yeller girl, dressed damn near white, and Libby set there dressed in rags. “What a redbone like you need a friend in this yard for?” she asked. Several Negroes working shovels behind her leaned over them and chuckled.

“I ain’t come out here for you to sass me,” I said.

“You sassing yourself,” she said gently, “by the way you look. You own Bob?”

“I wouldn’t own him with your money. But I owes him.”

“Well, you ain’t got to fret about paying him what you owe, so you should be happy. ’Cause he ain’t here.”

“That’s strange, ’cause Miss Abby said she hadn’t sold him.”

“Is that the first lie you heard from white folks?”

“You sure got a smart mouth for an outside nigger.”

“And you got a smarter one for a big-witted, tongue-beating, mule-headed sissy. Walking ’round dressed as you is.”

That flummoxed me right there. She knowed I was a boy. But I was an inside nigger. Privileged. The men in Miss Abby’s liked me. Pie was my mother, practically. She had the run of things. I didn’t need to bother with no mealymouth, lowlife, no-count, starving pen nigger who nobody wouldn’t pay no attention to. I had sauce, and wouldn’t stand nobody but Pie or a white person sassing me like that. That colored woman just cut me off without a wink. I couldn’t stand it.

“How I covers my skin is my business.”

“It’s your load. You carry it. Ain’t nobody judging you out here. But dodging the white man’s evil takes more than a bonnet and some pretty undergarments, child. You’ll learn.”

I ignored that. “I’ll give you a quarter if you tell me where he is.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Libby said. “But I can’t use it where I’m at now.”

“I know my letters. I can show you some.”

“Come back when you ain’t full of lies,” she said. She picked up Sibonia’s box and said, “Come on, sister.”

Sibonia, standing there holding a dripping mud ball in her hand, then did something strange. She glanced at the hotel door, saw it was still closed, then said to Libby in a plain voice, “This child is troubled.”

“Let the devil have him, then,” Libby said.

Sibonia said to her softly, “Go on over yonder with the rest, sister.”

That just about dropped me, the way she was talking. She and Libby looked at each other for a long moment. Seemed like some kind of silent signal passed between ’em. Libby handed Sibonia her wooden crate and Libby slipped away without a word. She stepped clean away to the other side of the fence with the rest of the Negroes who was bent over, tending to the garden and the hogs. She never said a word to me again for the rest of her life, which as it turned out weren’t very long.

Sibonia sat on her box again and stuck her face through the fence, looking at me close. The face peeking through the slats with mud on her cheeks and eyelashes didn’t sport an ounce of foolishness in it now. Her manner had flipped inside out. She had brushed the madness off her face the way you’d brush a fly away. Her face was serious. Deadly. Her eyes glaring at me was strong and calm as the clean barrel of a double-barreled shotgun boring down at my face. There was power in that face.

She runned her fingers in the ground, scooped up some mud, shaped it into a ball, and set it on the ground. Then she made another, wiping her face with her sleeve, keeping her eyes on the ground, and set that new mud ball next to the first. From a distance she looked like a fool setting on a box, piling up mud balls. She spoke with them shotgun eyes staring at the ground, in a voice that was heavy and strong.

“You sporting trouble,” she said, “playing folks for a fool.”

I thought she was talking ’bout the way I dressed, so I said, “I’m doing what I got to do, wearing these clothes.”

“I ain’t talking ’bout that. I’m talking ’bout the other thing. That’s more dangerous.”

“You mean reading?”

“I mean lying about it. Some folks’ll climb a tree to tell a lie before they’ll stand on the ground and tell the truth. That could get you hurt in this country.”

I was a little shook about how she was so tight in her mind, for if I played a girl well, she played a fool even better. There weren’t no fooling somebody like her, I seen that clear, so I said, “I ain’t lying. I’ll get a piece of paper and show you.”

“Don’t bring no paper out here,” she said quickly. “You talk too much. If Darg finds out, he’ll make you suffer.”

“Who’s Darg?”

“You’ll see soon enough. Can you write words?”

“I can draw pictures, too.”

“I ain’t studying no pictures. It’s the words I want. If I was to tell you about your Bob, would you write me something? Like a pass? Or a bill of sale?”

“I would.”

She had her head to the ground, busy, her hands deep in the mud. The hands hesitated and she spoke to the ground. “Maybe you best think on it first. Don’t be a straight fool. Don’t sign no note you can’t deliver on. Not out here. Not with us. ’Cause if you agrees to something with us, you gonna be held to it.”

“I said I would.”

She glanced up and said softly, “Your Bob’s been bounded out.”

“Bounded out?”

“On loan. Miss Abby loaned him out to the sawmill ’cross the village. For a price, of course. He been out there practically since the day he got here. He’ll be back soon. How come he never spoke of you?”

“I don’t know. But I’m worried Miss Abby’s planning on selling him.”

“So what? She’s gonna sell us all. You, too.”

“When?”

“When she’s good and ready.”

“Pie never said nothing about that.”

“Pie,” she said. She smiled grimly and said nothing more. But I didn’t like the way she said it. That pulled at me some. She moved her hands in the mud and packed up another mud ball.

“Can you get word to me about Bob?”

“I might. If you do what you said you would.”

“I said I would.”

“When you hear tell of a Bible meeting for the colored out here in the yard, come on. I’ll get you to your Bob. And I’ll take you up about them letters.”

“All right, then.”

“Don’t stretch your mouth to nobody about this, especially Pie. If you do, I’ll know about it, and you’ll wake up with a heap of knives poking out that pretty neck of yours. Mine’s be the first. Loose talk’ll have us all sleeping on the cooling board.”

And with that she turned, picked up her box, and cackled her way across the yard, movin’ into the center and setting that box deep in the mud again. She sat on it, and the Negroes gathered ’round her again, holding picks and shovels, working the ground all ’round her, glaring at me, picking at the mud ’round her while she set on her box in the middle of ’em, cackling like a chicken.

13. Insurrection

About a week later, a colored girl from the yard named Nose runned into the saloon carrying a pile of kindling, set it by the stove, and passed by me as she left, whispering, “Bible meeting’s in the slave pen tonight.” That evening I slipped out the back door and found Bob. He was standing near the front gate of the yard, leaning on the fence, alone. He looked tore up. His clothes was a ragged mess, but it was him and he was yet living.

“Where you been?” I asked.

“At the sawmill. They killing me out there.” He glanced at me. “I see you living high.”

“Why you giving me the evil eye? I ain’t got run of this place.”

He glanced nervously ’round the pen. “I wish they’d’a kept me at the sawmill. These niggers in here are gonna kill me.”

“Stop talking crazy,” I said.

“Nobody talks to me. They don’t say nar word to me. Nothing.” He nodded at Sibonia in the back corner, cackling and crowing on her wooden crate. The coloreds surrounded her, working the ground garden with rakes and shovels, making a silent wall ’round her, pushing dirt, slinging up rocks and weeding. Bob nodded at Sibonia. “That one there, she’s a witch. She’s under a mad spell.”

“No, she ain’t. I owe her now on account of you.”

“You owe the devil, then.”

“I done it for you, brother.”

“Don’t call me brother. Your favors ain’t worth shit. Look where I got ’cause of you. I can’t hardly bear to look at you. Look at you,” he snorted. “All high-siddity, playing a sissy, eating well, living inside. I’m out here in the cold and rain. And you sportin’ that new, fancy dress.”

“You said running ’round this way was a good idea!” I hissed.

“I ain’t say get me kilt!”

Behind Bob, a sudden hush come over the yard. The rakes and hoes moved quicker, and every head snapped down to the ground like they was tending work hard. Someone whispered in a hurried fashion, “Darg!” and Bob quickly slipped over to the other side of the yard. He got busy with the rest ’round Sibonia, pulling weeds in the garden.

The back door of a tiny hut on the other side of the slave pen opened up, and a huge colored feller emerged. He was nearly tall as Frederick, but just as wide. He had a thick chest, wide shoulders, and big, thick arms. He wore a straw hat and coveralls and a shawl around his shoulders. His lips was the color of hemp rope, and his eyes was so small and close together, they might as well have been shoved in the same socket. That fool was ugly enough to make you think the Lord put him together with His eyes closed, guessing. But there was power in that man, too, he was raw powerful, and looked big enough to pick up a house. He moved quick, slipping to the edge of the pen a minute and pausing there, peering in, air whooshing out huge nostrils, then he moved along the side to the gate to where I stood.

I backed off when he come, but when he got close, he removed his hat.

“Evening, pretty redbone,” he said, “what you need at my pen?”

“Pie sent me here,” I lied. I didn’t think it was a good thing to bring Miss Abby up, just in case he said something to her about it, for while I had never seen him inside the saloon, knowing he was boss of that yard meant he could pass word to her some kind of way. I weren’t supposed to be there and reckoned he knowed it.

He licked his lips. “Don’t mention that high-siddity bitch to me. What you need?”

“Me and my friend here”—I pointed to Bob—“was just having a word.”

“You soft on Bob, girl?”

“I ain’t soft on him in no way, form, or fashion. I is here to merely visit him.”

He smirked. “This is my yard,” he said. “I tends to it. But if the missus say so, it’s all right, it’s all right. If she don’t, you got to move on. You check with her and come back. Unless”—he smiled, showing a row of huge white teeth—“you can be Darg’s friend. Do old Darg a sweet favor, give him a li’l sugar. You old enough.”

I would step off to hell before I touched that monster-looking nigger with a stick. I backed off quick. “It ain’t that important,” I said, and I was gone. I took one last look at Bob before I cut inside. He had his back turned, pulling weeds in the garden fast as he could, the devil keeping score. I betrayed him, is how he felt. He didn’t want no parts of me. And I couldn’t help him. He was on his own.

I got nervous about the whole bit and told it to Pie. When she heard I was in the yard, she was furious. “Who told you to consort with them outside niggers?”

“I was looking in on Bob.”

“Hell with Bob. You gonna bring trouble for us all! Did Darg say sumpthing ’bout me?”

“He didn’t bring a word on you.”

“You’s a bad liar,” she snapped. She cussed Darg for several minutes, then throwed me in for good measure. “Keep off them low-down, no-count niggers. Either that, or don’t come ’round me.”

Well, that done it. For I loved Pie. She was the mother I never had. The sister I loved. Course I had other ideas, too, ’bout who she was to me, and them ideas was full of stinkin’, down-low thoughts which weren’t all bad when I thunk them up, so that stopped me from thinking about Bob and Sibonia and the pen altogether. Just quit it altogether. Love blinded me. I was busy anyhow. Pie was the busiest whore on the Hot Floor. She had heaps of customers: Pro Slavers, Free Staters, farmers, gamblers, thieves, preachers, even Mexicans and Indians lined up outside her door. Me being her consort, I was privileged to line ’em up in order of importance. I come to know quite a few important people in this fashion, including a judge named Fuggett, who I’ll get to in a minute.

My days was generally the same. Every afternoon when Pie got up, I brung her coffee and biscuits and we would set and talk about the previous night’s events and so forth, and she’d laugh about some feller who’d made a fool of hisself on the Hot Floor one way or the other. Being that I cavorted all over the tavern and she spent the night working, she missed out on events in the saloon, which privileged me to give her the gossip on who done what and who shot John and the like downstairs. I didn’t mention the slave pen to her no more, but it was always on my mind, for I owed Sibonia, and she didn’t strike me as the type a body ought to owe something to. Every once in a while Sibonia would slip word for me through some colored or other to come out to see her and live up to my promise of teaching her letters. Problem was, getting out there was tough business. The pen could be seen from every window in the hotel, and the slavery question seemed to be putting Pikesville on edge. Even in normal times, fistfights was common out west on the prairie in them days. Kansas and Missouri drawed all types of adventurers—Irishman, German, Russian, land speculators, gold diggers. Between cheap whiskey, land claim disputes, the red man fighting for their land, and low women, your basic western settler was prone to a good dustup at any time. But nothing stirred up a row better than the slavery question, and that seemed to press in on Pikesville at that time. There was so much punching and stabbing and stealing and shouting on account of it, Miss Abby often wondered aloud if she ought to get out of the slave game altogether.

She often set up in the saloon smoking cigars and playing poker with the men, and one night, while she throwed cards at the table with a few of the more well-off fellers from town, she piped out, “Between the Free Staters and my niggers running off, slavery’s getting to be a bother. The real danger in this territory is there’s too many guns floating around. What if the nigger gets armed?”

The men at the table, sipping whiskey and holding their cards, laughed her off. “Your basic Negro is trustworthy,” one said.

“Why, I’d arm my slaves,” said another.

“I’d trust my slave with my life,” said another. But not long after that, one of his slaves drawed a knife on him, and he sold every single slave he had.

I was mulling these things in my head, course, for I was smelling a rat in all of it. Something was happening outside of town, but word on it was thin. Like most things in life, you don’t know nothing till you want to know it, and don’t see what you don’t want to see, but all that talk about slavery was drawing water for something, and not long after, I found out.

I was heading past the kitchen, drawing water, and heard a terrible hank coming from the saloon. I peeked in there to find the place packed with redshirts, three deep from the bar, armed to the teeth. Through the front window, I could see the road out front was full of armed men on horseback. The back door leading to the slave alley was shut tight. And before that stood several redshirts, and they was armed. The hotel bar was going full steam, packed tight with rebels bearing weapons of all kinds, and Miss Abby and Judge Fuggett—that same judge who was a good customer of Pie—them two was having a full-out fight.

Not a fistfight, but a real wrangle. I had to keep movin’ as I worked, lest somebody stop me for lingering, but they was so hot that nobody paid me no mind. Miss Abby was furious. I believe if that room wasn’t full of armed men surrounding Judge Fuggett, she’d’a drawed on him with the heater she carried around on her waistband, but she didn’t. From what I could gather, them two was arguing about money, lots of it. Miss Abby was burning up. “I declare I won’t go along with it,” she said. “That’s a loss of several thousand dollars for me!”

“I’ll arrest you if I have to,” Judge Fuggett said, “for that business needs doing.” Several men nodded with him. Miss Abby took a backseat then. She backed off, fuming, while the judge took the center of the room and told the others. I lingered with my face behind a post and listened as he told it: There was a planned insurrection. It involved the Negroes from the pen, at least a couple dozen of ’em. They was planning on killing white families by the hundreds, including the town minister, who loved the Negro and preached against slavery. Several pen Negroes, some that belonged to Miss Abby and several others—for slave owners who come to town to do business often parked their Negroes in the yard—was all arrested. Nine was found out. The judge was planning to try all nine the next morning. Four of ’em was Miss Abby’s.

I run back upstairs to Pie’s room and busted in the door. “There’s big trouble,” I blurted out, and told her what I heard.

For the rest of my life, I would remember her response. She was setting on the bed as I told it, and when I was done, she didn’t say a word. She got up from her bed, walked to the window, and stared down at the slave pen, which was empty. Then she said over her shoulder, “That’s all? Only nine?”

“That’s a lot.”

“They should hang ’em all. Every one of them low-down, no-count niggers.”

I reckon she saw my face, for she said, “Just be calm. This don’t involve you and me. It’ll pass. But I can’t be seen talking to you right now. Two of us is a crowd. Git out and listen around. Come up when it’s safe and tell me what you hear.”

“But I ain’t done nothing,” I said, for I was worried about my own tail.

“Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you. I already fixed it with Miss Abby for me and you. Just be quiet and listen to what’s said. Tell me what you hear. Now get out. And don’t be seen talking to any niggers. Nary a one. Lay low and listen. Find out who them nine is, and when it’s safe, slip back in here and tell me.”

She shoved me out the door. I ventured down to the saloon, slipped into the kitchen, and listened in as the judge told Miss Abby and the others what was to come. What I heard about made me nervous.

The judge revealed that he and his men questioned every slave in the yard. The coloreds denied the insurrection plans, but one colored was tricked into confessing or just told it some way or other, I reckon. Somehow they’d got the information about them nine coloreds from somebody, and they snatched them nine from the yard and throwed them in the jailhouse. The judge further explained that he and his men knowed who the leader of the whole thing was, but the leader weren’t talking. They aimed to fix that problem straightaway, which was the reason for all the men and various town folks setting up shop in the saloon, armed to the gizzards, shouting down Miss Abby. For the leader of the insurrection was one of Miss Abby’s slaves, the judge said, downright dangerous, and when they brung Sibonia in twenty minutes later wearing chains on her ankles and feet, I weren’t surprised.

Sibonia looked worn out, tired, and thin. Her hair was a mess. Her face was puffy and swollen, and her skin shiny. But her eyes shone calm. That was the same face I’d seen in the pen. She was calm as an egg. They slammed her into a chair before Judge Fuggett, and the men surrounded her. Several stood before her, cursing, as the Judge pulled up a chair before her. A table was throwed in front of him, and a drink was set before him. Somebody handed him a cigar. He settled himself behind the table and lit it, puffing and sipping his drink slowly. He weren’t in a hurry, and neither was Sibonia, who sat there silent as the moon, even as several men around her cussed her up and down.

Finally Judge Fuggett spoke up and shushed everybody. He turned to Sibonia and said, “Sibby, we aims to find out about this murderous plot. We know you is the leader. Several people has said it. So don’t deny it.”

Sibonia was calm as a blade of grass. She looked straight at the judge and looked neither sideways nor over his head. “I am the woman,” she said, “and I am not ashamed or afraid to confess it.”

The way she spoke, talking straight at him, in a room crowded full of drunk rebels, that just floored me.

Judge Fuggett asked her, “Who else is involved?”

“Me and my sister, Libby, and I ain’t confessing to no other.”

“We got ways of getting you to tell it if you want.”

“Do your wants, then, Judge.”

Well that blowed his top. He went low-grade then, he got so hot it was a pity. He threatened to beat her, whip her, tar and feather her, but she said, “Go ahead. You can even get Darg if you want. But it can’t be whipped out of me nor coerced in any way. I am the woman. I done it. And if I had the chance, I would do it again.”

Well, the judge and the men around him stomped and hollered something grievous; they railed about how they was gonna grind her to a stump and rip her private parts off and feed her to the pigs if she didn’t tell the names of the others. Judge Fuggett promised they’d start a bonfire in the middle of the town square and throw her in it, but Sibonia said, “Go ahead. You have me, and no other one shall you git through me.”

I reckon the only reason they didn’t string her up right then and there was them not being sure who the other traitors might be, and worried that there might be bunches more of ’em. That flummoxed ’em, so they harangued some more and threatened to hang her right then and there, told her they’d pull out her teeth and so forth, but at the end of it they got nothing from her and throwed her back in jail. They spent the next few hours trying to figure matters through. They knowed her sister and seven others was involved. But there was twenty to thirty slaves that lived in the pen at various times, not to mention several that passed there every day, for the masters coming to town parked their slaves in the pen when they come to do business. That meant dozens of coloreds from near a hundred miles around might be involved in the plot.

Well, they argued into the night. It weren’t just the principle of the thing neither. Them slaves was worth big money. Slaves in them days was loaned out, borrowed against, used as collateral for this, that, or the other. Several masters whose slaves was arrested upped and declared their slaves innocent and demanded to get Sibonia back and pull her fingernails out one by one till she gived up who was in the plot with her. One of ’em even challenged the judge, saying, “How is it you knows of the plot in the first place?”

“I was told in confidence by a colored,” he said.

“Which one?”

“I ain’t telling it,” the judge said. “But it’s a colored that told me—a trusted colored. Known to many of you.”

That gived me the shivers, too, for there weren’t but one colored in town known to many of them. But I throwed that thought from my mind at the moment, for the judge declared right then and there that it was already three days since they found out about the insurrection, and they had better find a way to make Sibonia give up more names, for he feared the insurrection had already gone past Pikesville. They all agreed.

That was the monkey wrench she throwed on ’em, and they couldn’t stand it. They was determined to break her, so they thunk and thunk on it. They broke that night and met the next day and talked and thunk on it some more, and finally, late that night on the second day, the judge himself come up with a scheme.

He called on the town’s minister. This feller ministered to the coloreds in the yard every Sunday evening. Since the plot was favored to murder him and his wife, the judge decided to ask the minister to go to the jailhouse and talk to Sibonia, ’cause the coloreds knowed him as a fair man, and Sibonia was known to respect him.

It was a master idea, and the rest agreed on it.

The judge summoned the minister to the saloon. He was a solid, firm-looking man in whiskers, dressed in a button-down jacket and vest. He was clean by prairie standards, and when they brung him before Judge Fuggett, who told him of the plan, the minister nodded his head and agreed. “Sibonia will not be able to lie to me,” he announced, and he marched out the saloon and headed toward the jailhouse.

Four hours later he staggered back into the saloon exhausted. He had to be helped into a chair. He asked for a drink. A drink was poured for him. He throwed it down his throat and asked for another. He drunk that. Then he demanded another, which they brung him, before he could finally tell Judge Fuggett and the others what happened.

“I went to the jail as instructed,” he said. “I greeted the jailer, and he led me to the cell where Sibonia was held. She was held in the very back cell, the last one. I went inside the cell and I sat down. She greeted me warmly.

“I said, ‘Sibonia, I come to find out everything you know about the wicked insurrection’—and she cut me off.

“She said, ‘Reverend, you come for no such purpose. Maybe you was persuaded to come or forced to come. But would you, who taught me the word of Jesus; you, the man who taught me that Jesus suffered and died in truth; would you tell me to betray confidence secretly entrusted to me? Would you, who taught me that Jesus’s sacrifice was for me and me only, would you now ask me to forfeit the lives of others who would help me? Reverend, you know me!’”

The old minister dropped his head. I wish I could repeat the tale as I heard the old man tell it, for even in the retelling of it, I ain’t tellin’ it the way he rendered it. He was broke in spirit. Something in him collapsed. He bent forward on the table with his head in his hands and asked for another drink. They throwed that on him. Only after he flung it down his throat could he continue.

“For the first time in my ministerial life, I felt I had done a great sin,” he said. “I could not proceed. I accepted her rebuke. I recovered from my shock at length and said, ‘But, Sibonia, yours was a wicked plot. Had you succeeded, the streets would run red with blood. How could you plot to kill so many innocent people? To kill me? And my wife? What have my wife and I done to you?”

“And here she looked at me sternly and said, ‘Reverend, it was you and your wife who taught me that God is no respecter of persons; it was you and your missus who taught me that in His eyes we are all equal. I was a slave. My husband was a slave. My children was slaves. But they was sold. Every one of them. And after the last child was sold, I said, ‘I will strike a blow for freedom.’ I had a plan, Reverend. But I failed. I was betrayed. But I tell you now, if I had succeeded, I would have slain you and your wife first, to show them that followed me that I could sacrifice my love, as I ordered them to sacrifice their hates, to have justice for them. I would have been miserable for the rest of my life. I could not kill any human creature and feel any less. But in my heart, God tells me I was right.’”

The reverend sagged in the chair. “I was overpowered,” he said. “I could not answer easily. Her honesty was so sincere, I forgot everything in my sympathy for her. I didn’t know what I was doing. I lost my mind. I grasped her by the hand and said, ‘Sibby, let us pray.’ And we prayed long and earnestly. I prayed to God as our common Father. I acknowledged that He would do justice. That those deemed the worst by us might be regarded the best by Him. I prayed for God to forgive Sibby, and if we was wrong, to forgive the whites. I pressed Sibby’s hand when I was done and received the warm pressure of hers pressing mine in return. And with a joy I never experienced before, I heard her earnest, solemn ‘Amen’ as I closed.”

He stood up. “I ain’t for this infernal institution no more,” he said. “Hang her if you want. But find someone else to minister to this town, for I am finished with it.”

And with that he got up and left the room.

14. A Terrible Discovery

They didn’t waste time roasting corn when it come to hanging Sibonia’s coloreds. The next day, they started building the scaffold. Hangings was spectacles in them days, complete with marching bands, militia, and speeches and all the rest. On account of Miss Abby losing so much money, being that four of hers was going to the scaffold, they drug the thing out longer while she fussed about it. But it was already decided. It brought plenty money to the town. Business boomed the next two days. It kept me busy running drinks and food all day long for the folks who come from miles around to watch. There was a sense of excitement in the air. Meanwhile, any master who had slaves slipped out of town taking their colored, they disappeared with their colored and stayed away. Them folks wanted to keep their money.

News of that hanging drawed some other troubles, too, for there was a rumor that Free Staters got wind of it and was roaming around to the south. Several raids was said to have gone on. Patrols was sent out. Every settler walked around with a rifle. The town was locked up tight, with roads in and out closed off to everybody unless you was known to the townsfolk. What with the booming business, the rumors, and the sense of excitement in the air that runned everywhere, the actual thing took nearly a full week before they got to the show itself.

But they finally got to it on a sunny afternoon, and no sooner did the people assemble in the town square and the last militia arrive did they drag Sibonia and the rest of them out. They come out the jailhouse in a line, all nine of them, escorted on both sides by rebels and militia. It was a mighty crowd that came to witness it, and if them coloreds had any notions of being rescued by Free Staters at the last minute, all they had to do was look around to see it weren’t going to happen. There was three hundred rebels armed to the teeth at formation around the scaffold, about a hundred of ’em being militia in uniform with bright bayonets, red shirts, and fancy trousers, even a real drummer boy. The colored from all the surrounding areas was brought in too—men, women, and children. They lined ’em up right in front of the scaffold, to let them witness the hanging. To let them see what would happen if they tried to revolt.

It weren’t a long distance from the jailhouse to the scaffold that Sibonia and them walked, but for some of ’em, I reckon it must’ve felt like miles. Sibonia, the one they’d all come to see hang, she come last in line. As the line walked to the steps leading to the scaffold, the feller in front of Sibonia, a young feller, he got timid and collapsed at the bottom of the scaffold stairs as they were led up to the hanging platform. He fell down on his face and sobbed. Sibonia grabbed him by his collar and pulled him to his feet. “Be a man,” she said. He got hisself together and climbed up the stairs.

When all of ’em got to the top and was gathered there, the hangman asked which of them would go first. Sibonia turned to her sister, Libby, and said, “Come on, sister.” She turned to the others and said, “We’ll give you an example, then obey.” She stepped up to the noose to let the rope get drawed around her neck first, and Libby followed.

I wish I could express for you the tension. It seemed like a rope had knotted itself around the sunlight in the sky to keep every leaf and fig in place, for not a soul moved nor did a breeze stir. Not a word was spoken in the crowd. The hangman weren’t pushy nor rude, but rather polite. He let a few more words pass between Sibonia and her sister, then asked if they was ready. They nodded. He turned to reach for the hood to place over their heads. He moved to cover Sibonia’s head first, and as he done so, Sibonia suddenly sprung away from him, jumped high as she could, and fell heavily through the galley hole.

But she only went halfway through. The knotted rope weren’t adjusted right to make her drop all the way. It checked her fall. Instantly her frame, which was halfway down the opening, was convulsed. In her writhing, her feet kicked and instinctively tried to reach back for the landing where she had stood. Her sister, Libby, her face turned toward the rest of the coloreds, put her hand on Sibonia’s side and, leaning forward, held Sibonia’s wriggling body clear of the landing with her arm, and said to the rest, “Let us die like her.” And after a few shaking, quivering moments, it was done.

By God, I would’a passed out, had not the thing gone in the wrong direction entirely, which made the whole of it a lot more interesting right away. Several rebels in the crowd started muttering they didn’t like the business at all, others said it was a damn shame to hang them nine people in the first place, since one colored’ll lie on another just as easily as you can snap your trousers, and nobody knows who done what, and it’s better to hang them all. Still others said the Negroes hadn’t done nothing, and it was all just a bunch of malarkey, ’cause the judge wanted to take over Miss Abby’s businesses, and others said slavery ought to be done with, since it was so much trouble. What’s worse, the colored watching the whole thing become so agitated after seeing Sibonia’s courage that the military rushed up on them to cool them down, which caused even more of a stir. It just didn’t go the way nobody expected it.

The judge seen the thing winging out of control, so they hung the rest of the convicted Negroes fast as they could, and in a few minutes Libby and all the rest was asleep on the ground together.

Afterward I stole off to seek a word of consolation on it. Since Pie hadn’t seen it, I reckoned she’d want to know about it. She stayed in her room during the past few days, for the business of selling tail went on day and night, and in fact increased during times of trouble. But now that the thing was over, it gived me a chance to get back in her graces, passing the news to her, for she always enjoyed hearing gossip, and this was a hot one.

But she got strange on me. I come to the room and knocked. She opened the door, cussed me out a bit, told me to get lost, then slammed the door in my face.

I didn’t think too much of it at first, but I ought to say here while I weren’t for the hanging, I weren’t totally against it neither. Truth is, I didn’t care too much either way. I got plenty chips from it in the way of food and tips for it was a spectacle. That was fine. But the upshot was Miss Abby had lost a great deal of money. Even before the insurrection, she had come to hinting that I could make more money on my back than on my feet. She was preoccupied with the hanging, course, but now that it was done, I should have been worried about her next intentions for me. But they didn’t bother me in the least. I weren’t worried about the hanging, nor Sibonia, nor the whoring, not Bob neither, who didn’t get hanged. My heart was aching only for Pie. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with me. She cut me off.

I didn’t make much of it at first. There was a lot of discombobulation, for it was a troublesome time anyway, for colored and whites. They had hung nine coloreds, and that’s a lot of folks—even for coloreds, that’s a lot of folks. A colored was a lowly dog during slave time, but he was a valuable dog. Several owners whose slaves hung fought against the hanging till the end, for it weren’t never clear who did what and who planned what and what Sibonia’s real plan was and who told who. There was just plain fear and confusion. Some of them Negroes that was hung confessed one way before they died, then turned around confessed another, but their stories banged up against each other, so no one ever knew who to believe, for the ringleader never told it. Sibonia and her sister Libby never sung their song, and left the place more of a mess than it was when they was living, which I reckon was their intent. The upshot was that several slave traders showed up and done a little business for a few days after the hanging, but not much, for slave traders was generally despised. Even Pro Slavers didn’t favor them much, for men who traded cash for blood wasn’t considered working people, but more like thieves or traders in souls and your basic superstitious pioneer didn’t take to them types. Besides, no busy slave trader wanted to journey all the way to Missouri Territory to get a troublesome slave, then run them all the way to the Deep South and sell them, for that troublesome Negro could start an insurrection down south in New Orleans just as easy as he could up here, and word would get back, and that slave trader had a reputation to keep. Them colored from Pikesville was marked as bad goods. Their trading price gone down, for nobody knowed who among them was in the insurrection and who weren’t. That was Sibonia’s gift to them, I reckon. For otherwise, every one of them would’a been gone south. Instead, they stuck where they was, nobody wanting them, and the slave traders left.

But the stink of the thing lingered. Especially with Pie. She had wanted the hanging, but now seemed put out by it. I knowed what she done, or suspected it, tellin’ the judge of the insurrection, but truth is, I didn’t blame her for it. Colored turned tables on one another all the time in them days, just like white folks. What difference does it make? One treachery ain’t no bigger than the other. The white man put his treachery on paper. Niggers put theirs in their mouth. It’s still the same evil. Someone from the pen must’ve told Pie that Sibonia was planning a breakout, and Pie told it to the judge for some kind of favor, and when the stew got boiled down and shared out, why, it weren’t a breakout at all, but rather murder. Them’s two different things. Pie had opened a shit bag, I reckon, and didn’t know it till it was too late. The way I figure it, looking back, Judge Fuggett had his own interests. He didn’t have no slaves, but wanted some. He had everything to gain by Miss Abby going broke, for I’d heard him say later on that he wanted to open his own saloon, and like most white men in town, he was scared and jealous of Miss Abby. The loss of them slaves cost her big time.

I don’t think Pie figured on all that. She wanted to get out. I reckon the judge had made some kind of promise to her to escape, is the way I figure it, and never owned up to it. She never said it, but that’s what you do when you in bondage and aiming on getting out. You make deals. You do what you got to. You turn on who you got to. And if the fish flips out the bucket and on you and jumps back in the lake, well, that’s too bad. Pie had that jar of money under her bed and was learning her letters from me, and turned on Sibonia and them who hated her guts for being yellow and pretty. I didn’t blame her. I was sporting life as a girl myself. Every colored did what they had to do to make it. But the web of slavery is sticky business. And at the end of the day, ain’t nobody clear of it. It whipped back on my poor Pie something terrible.

It deadened her. She’d let me into her room to clean and tidy and give her water and empty bedpans and so forth. But soon as I was done, out I went. She wouldn’t say more than a few words to me. Seemed like she was emptied out, like a glass of water poured onto the ground. Her window looked over the slave yard—you could just see the edge of it, and it gradually filled back up—and many an afternoon I’d walk in on her and find her staring down there, cussing. “They ruined everything,” she said. “God-damn niggers.” She complained the hanging throwed her business off, though the lines of customers outside her room was still long. She’d stand at the window, cussing about the whole business, and would throw me out on one pretext or another, leaving me to sleep in the hallway. She kept her door closed always. When I come by offering to teach her letters, she weren’t interested. She simply stayed inside that room and humped them fellers dry, and some of ’em even took to complaining she fell asleep right in the middle of the action, which wouldn’t do.

I was lost. And also—and I ought to say it here—I growed so desperate for her, I gived some thought to stop playing a girl. I didn’t want it no more. Watching Sibonia changed me some. The remembrance of her picking that feller up at the scaffold, saying, “Be a man,” why, that just stuck in my craw. I weren’t sorry she was dead. That’s the life she chose to get rid of, in her own form and fashion. But it come to me that if Sibonia could stand up like a man and take it, even if she was a woman, well, by God, I could stand up like a man, even if I weren’t acting like one, to declare myself for the woman I loved. The whole damn thing was jippity in my head, but there was a practical side, too. Miss Abby had lost four slaves to that hanging—Libby, Sibonia, and two men, fellers named Nate and Jefferson. And while she’d been hinting my time on my back was coming, I figured she could use another man or two to replace them that was hung. I figured I would fit the bill. At age twelve, I weren’t quite a man, and I never was a big man, but I was a man still, and now that she had lost a lot of money, Miss Abby might see things my way and take me as a man, since I was a hard worker no matter how the cut comes or goes. I reckon I decided I didn’t want to play like a girl no more.

This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider. I was working against myself. I risked being sold south and losing everything ’cause I wanted to be a man. Not for myself. But for Pie. I loved her. I was hoping she would understand me. Accept me. Accept my courage about throwing off my disguise and being myself. I wanted her to know I weren’t going to play girl no more, and for that reason, I was expecting she’d love me. Even though she weren’t being good to me, she never turned me away outright. She never said, “Don’t come back.” She always let me in her room to clean up and tidy a little bit, and I took that to be encouragement.

I had them thoughts in my head one afternoon and decided I was done with the whole charade. I went up to her room with the words ready in my mouth to say ’em. I opened the door, closed it tight, for I knowed her chair sat behind the dressing partition, which set by the window, so that she could look out, for you could set there and see the slave pen and past the alley outside, and she favored setting in that chair, looking out into the alley.

When I come into the room I couldn’t see her from the door, but I knowed she was there. I couldn’t quite face her, but my mind was set, so I spoke to the partition and declared what was in my heart. “Pie,” I said, “no matter how the cut goes or comes, I’m gonna face it. I’m a man! And I’m gonna tell Miss Abby and everybody else in this tavern who I am. I’ll explain everything to ’em.”

It was quiet. I looked behind the partition. She weren’t there. That was unusual. Pie hardly ever left her room, ’specially since she had that money hidden under her bed.

I checked the closet. The back stairs. Under the bed. She was gone.

I stole around to the kitchen to look for her, but she weren’t there, either. I went to the saloon. The outhouse. Gone. I went back to the slave pen and didn’t find her there, neither. It was empty, for the few slaves that was held out there spent most days loaned out or working elsewhere. I looked up and down the alley by the pen. Not a soul. I turned and was about to head back inside the hotel when I heard a noise from Darg’s hut, on the other side of the alley, directly across from the slave yard. It sounded like struggling and fighting, and I thought I heard Pie squawking in there, in pain. I whipped over there quick.

As I hurried over, I heard Darg cursing and the sound of skin hitting skin, and a yelp. I rushed to the doorway.

It was fastened by a nail from the inside, but you could push it open a crack and peer inside. I peeked in there and seen something I would not soon forget.

From the sliver of lights in the broken shutter I seen my Pie in there on a straw bed on the floor, buck naked, on all fours, and behind her was Darg, holding a little tree switch about six inches long, and he was just doing her something terrible, just having his way with her and striking her with that whip at the same time. Her head was throwed back and she was howling while he rode her and called her a high-yellow whore and turncoat for turning in all them niggers and revealing their plot. He whipped her with that switch and called her every name he could think of. And she was hollering that she was sorry and had to confess it to someone.

I kept a two-shot pepperbox revolver under my dress, fully loaded, and I would’a busted in there and put both loads in his head right then, but for her look of liking the whole business immensely.

15. Squeezed

I never said nothing to nobody about what I seen. I done my duties around the Pikesville Hotel like normal. Pie come to me a few days later and said, “Oh, sweetie, I been so terrible to you. Come on back to my room and help me out, for I wants to work on my letters.”

I didn’t have the spirit for it, to be honest, but I tried. She seen I weren’t shining up to her like normal, and got mad and frustrated and throwed me out as usual, and that was the end of it. I was turned out in a way, changing, and for the first time was coming to some opinions of my own about the world. You take a boy and he’s just a boy. And even when you make him up like a girl, he’s still a boy deep down inside. I was a boy, even though I weren’t dressed like one, but I had my heart broke as a man, and ’cause of it, for the first time I had my eye on freedom. It weren’t slavery that made me want to be free. It was my heart.

I took to spilling a little rotgut down my throat in them times. It weren’t hard. I growed up around it, seen my Pa go his way with it, and I went with it. It was easy. The men in the tavern liked me, for I was a good helper. They let me help myself to the suds at the bottom of their mugs and glasses, and when they found out I had a good singing voice, throwed me a glass of rye or three for a song. I sung “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Rebels Ain’t So Hard,” “Mary Lee, I’m Coming Home,” and religious songs I heard my Pa and Old John Brown sing. Your basic rebel was as religious as the next man, and them songs moved ’em to tears every time, which encouraged them to throw more happy water in my direction, which I put to good use, sousing myself.

It weren’t long before I found myself the life of the party, two sheets to the wind, staggering around the saloon, singing each night and tellin’ jokes and making myself handy the way my Pa done. I was a hit. But a girl in them times, colored or white, even a little one, who drinks and carouses with men and acts a fool, is writing an IOU that’s got to be cashed in sooner or later, and them pinches on my duff and old-timers chasing me ’round in circles at closing time was getting hard to take. Luckily, Chase appeared. He’d tried his hand at cattle rustling in Nebraska Territory and got broke at it, and he come back to Pikesville heartsick about Pie as I was. We spent hours setting on the roof of Miss Abby’s, drinking joy juice and pondering the meaning of all things Pie as we stared out over the prairie, for she wouldn’t have squaddly to do with neither of us now. Her room on the Hot Floor was for only those who paid now, no friends, and we two was clean out of chips. Even Chase, feeling low and lonely, tried his hand at getting fresh with me. “Onion, you is like a sister to me,” he said one night, “even more than a sister,” and he groped at me like the rest of them old-timers in the tavern, but I avoided him easily and he fell flat on his face. I forgived him course, and we went on like sister and brother from then on, my kidnapper and me, and spent many a night drunk together, howling at the moon, which I generally enjoyed, for there ain’t nothing better when you sunk to the bottom to have a friend there.

I would’a gone whole hog with it and been a pure dee bum, but Sibonia’s hanging brung more trouble. For one thing, several of them dead Negroes was owned by masters who wasn’t agreed to Judge Fuggett’s rulings. A couple of fistfights got started on account of it. Miss Abby, who had argued against it, got called an abolitionist, for she runned her mouth about it considerable too, and that caused more wrangling. Judge Fuggett quit town and run off with a girl named Winky, and reports that Free Staters was causing trouble down in Atchinson was becoming more frequent, and that was troublesome, for Atchinson was cold rebel territory, and it meant the Free Staters was making headway against the shirts, which made everybody nervous. Business at the hotel dropped off, and the town’s business slowed up generally. Work got hard to find for everyone. Chase declared, “Ain’t no more claims to be had around here,” and he quit town to head west, which left me on my own again.

I thought about running, but I’d gotten soft living indoors. The thought of riding on the prairie by myself, with the cold, the mosquitoes, and the howling wolves, weren’t useful. So one night I went to the kitchen and clipped some biscuits and a mug of lemonade and slipped out to see Bob at the slave pen, being that he was the only friend I had left.

He was setting on a crate at the edge of the pen by himself when I come, and he got up and moved off when he seen me coming. “Git away from me,” he said. “My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel ’cause of you.”

“These is for you,” I said. I reached in the pen with the biscuits, which was in a handkerchief, and held them out to him, but he glanced at the others and didn’t touch them.

“Git off from me. You got a lot of nerve comin’ ’round here.”

“What I done now?”

“They say you gived up Sibonia,” he said.

“What?”

Before I could move, several Negro fellers watching from the far side of the pen slipped over closer to us. There was five of them, and one, a young, strong-looking feller, broke off the pack and come over to the fence where I was. He was a stout, handsome, chocolate-skinned Negro named Broadnax who done outside work for Miss Abby. He was wide around the shoulders, with a firm build, and seemed an easygoing feller most times, but he didn’t look that way now. I backed off the fence and moved along the rail quick back to the hotel, but he moved quicker and met me just at the corner of the fence and stuck a thick hand through the fence rail, grabbing my arm.

“Not so fast,” he said.

“What you need me for?”

“Set a minute and talk.”

“I got to go work.”

“Every nigger in this world got to work,” Broadnax said. “What’s your job?”

“What you mean?”

He had my arm tight, and his grip was strong enough to snap my arm in two. He leaned against the fence, speaking calm and evenly. “Now, you could be sproutin’ a lie ’bout what you knowed about Sibonia and what you didn’t know. And ’bout what you said and didn’t say. You could say it to your friend here, or you could say it to me. But without a story, who knows what your job is? Every nigger got the same job.”

“What’s that?”

“Their job is to tell a story the white man likes. What’s your story?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Broadnax squeezed my arm harder. His grip was so tight, I thought my arm might break off. Holding my arm, he peered around to make sure the way was clear. From where we was, you could see the hotel, the alley, and Darg’s house behind the pen. Nobody was about. In normal times, three or four people would wander down that alleyway during the day. But Pikesville had thinned out since Sibonia died. That woman was a stone witch.

“I’m talking letters,” he said. “Your job was to come back and write Sibonia some letters and passes and be quiet about it. You agreed to it. I was here. And you didn’t do it.”

I had stone-cold forgot about my promise to Sibonia by then. By now Broadnax’s friends had slipped up to the fence behind Broadnax and stood nearby holding shovels, movin’ dirt, looking busy, but listening in close.

“There weren’t time to get out here. The white folks was watching me close.”

“You awful close to Pie.”

“I don’t know nothing ’bout Pie’s business,” I said.

“Maybe she told it.”

“Told what?”

“About Sibonia.”

“I don’t know what she done. She don’t tell me nothing.”

“Why would she, you frittering around dressed as you is.”

“You ain’t got to pick my guts about it,” I said. “I’m just trying to make it along like you. But I never had nothing against Sibonia. I wouldn’t stand in the way of her jumping.”

“That lie ain’t worth a pinch of snuff out here.”

The fellers behind Broadnax edged to the corner of that fence, close now. A couple of ’em had plain stopped working altogether. Weren’t no pretense to them working now. I had that two-shot pepperbox sleeping under my dress, and a free hand, but it wouldn’t do nothing against all of them. There was five of them altogether, and they looked mad as the devil.

“God hears it,” I said. “I didn’t know nothing ’bout what she was aiming to do.”

Broadnax peered at me straight. Didn’t blink once. Them words didn’t move him.

“Miss Abby’s selling off the souls in this yard,” Broadnax said. “Did you know that? She’s doing it slow, thinking nobody notices. But even a dumb nigger like me can count. There’s ten souls left in this yard. Two weeks ago there was seventeen. Three of ’em’s been sold off in the past week. Lucious there”—here he pointed to one of the men standing behind him—“Lucious lost both his children. And them children ain’t never been inside Miss Abby’s hotel, so they couldn’t’a told it. Nose, the girl who gived you the word about the Bible meeting, she was sold off two days ago, and Nose didn’t tell it. That makes just us ten left here. We all likely be sold off soon, ’cause Miss Abby thinks we is trouble. But I aim to find out who sung about Sibonia before I leave. And when I do, they gonna suffer. Or their kin. Or”—he glanced at Bob—“their friends.”

Bob stood there trembling. Didn’t say a word.

“Bob ain’t been inside the hotel since Miss Abby throwed him out here,” I said.

“He could’a talked at the sawmill, where he works every day. Told one of them white folks over there. That kind of word’ll pass fast.”

“Bob couldn’t know—’cause I didn’t know. Plus he ain’t one to run his mouth at white folks. He was scared of Sibonia.”

“He should’a been. She didn’t trust him.”

“He ain’t done no wrong. Neither did I.”

“You just trying to save your skin.”

“Why not? It covers my body.”

“Why should I believe a sissy who frolics ’round in a frock and a bonnet?”

“I’m tellin’ you, I didn’t tell nobody nothing. And neither did Bob.”

“Prove it!”

“Bob rode with Old John Brown. So did I. Why didn’t you tell him, Bob?”

Bob was silent. Finally he piped up. “Ain’t nobody gonna believe me.”

That stopped Broadnax. He glanced around at the others. They’d all gathered in close now, they didn’t care who was watching from the hotel. I certainly hoped somebody from the hotel would bust out the back door, but nar soul come. Glancing over to the hotel back door, I seen they’d posted a lookout anyway. A Negro was over there, sweeping the dirt around with his back to the door, so if somebody come busting through, he’d hold that door closed a minute to give ’em all a chance to pop back into place. Them pen colored fellers was organized.

But I had their attention now, for Broadnax looked interested. “Old John Brown?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Old John Brown’s dead,” Broadnax said slowly. “He was killed at Osawatomie. Your friend killed him. The feller you get soused with, which is all the more reason to skin you.”

“Chase?” I would’a laughed if I weren’t feeling so chickenhearted. “Chase ain’t killed nobody. Two hundred drunks like him couldn’t deaden the Old Captain. Why, at Black Jack, there was twenty rebels there with dead aim and they couldn’t hurt the Old Man. Turn me loose and I’ll tell it.”

He wouldn’t turn me loose all the way, but he motioned them fellers to back off, which they done. And right there, standing at the fence, with him gripping my arm tight as a raccoon trap, I gived it to him. Quickly told them everything: About how the Old Man come to Dutch’s and took me. How I run off and met Bob near Dutch’s Crossing. About how Bob refused to ride Pardee home once the rebels rode off. How Bob helped me get back to the Old Man and was stolen along with his master’s wagon by the Old Man hisself and brung into camp. How Chase and Randy brung us there after Old Man Brown run off after Osawatomie, where Frederick was murdered. I left out the part about not knowing for sure if the Old Man was alive.

It moved him enough not to kill me right there, but he weren’t moved enough to turn me loose. He considered what I spoke on though, then said slowly, “You had the run of things in the hotel for months. How come you never took off?”

I couldn’t tell him about Pie. I still loved her. He could’a put it all together and suspected what I knowed. They would’a deadened Pie right off, though I suspected they planned as such anyway, and I didn’t want that. I hated her guts but I still loved her. I was in a tight spot all the way around.

“I had to wait on Bob,” I said. “He got cross with me. Wouldn’t run. Now the trap’s sprung. They watching everybody close now. Ain’t nobody going nowhere.”

Broadnax pondered it thoughtfully, and he softened some, letting go of my arm. “That’s a good thing for you, for these fellers here is game to send their knives rambling across your pretty little face and throw you in the hog pen without instructions. I’ll give you a chance at redemption, for we got bigger game. Turncoat like you, you’ll get reward for your labor from us or somebody else down the road one way or the other.”

He backed off the fence and allowed me to straighten myself out. I didn’t turn and run. Weren’t no use in that. I had to hear him through.

“This is what I want you to do,” he said. “We hear word the Free Staters is riding this way. Next time you get wind of where they are, come out here and pass it to me. That’ll even us.”

“How I’m gonna do that? I can’t get out here easy. The missus is watching me close. And Darg’s out here.”

“Don’t you study ol’ Darg,” Broadnax said. “We’ll take care of him. You just pass the word on what you hear ’bout the Free Staters. Do that, and we’ll leave your Bob alone. But if you tarry, or we get word about them Free Staters from some corner other than you? Well, you’ll be overdue. And you won’t have to sneak out here with lemonade and biscuits for Bob no more, ’cause we’ll bust him so hard across the head, he’ll have a headache that’ll deaden him right where he is. As it is, only reason he’s drawing air right now is ’cause of me.”

With that, he snatched the handkerchief holding the biscuits and the mug of lemonade I brung out for Bob, shoved the biscuits down his mouth, drunk down the lemonade, and handed me the mug. Then he turned and walked back to the other side of the pen, and the others followed.

Oh, I was stuck tight then. Love will hang you up in many a direction. I thunk on it quite a while that day, thunk about Broadnax busting Bob’s brains out and coming into the hotel after me, and that was a worrisome notion. That Negro was determined. A man would have to pump a bunch of iron into a feller like that to stop him. He had a purpose, and that strangled the hope outta me. I fretted on it quite a bit that night and the next morning, then decided to run outta town, quit the idea right off, then thunk on it again all afternoon, decided to run again, waited all night, quit on the idea again, then runned the same whole bit around my head in the same fashion the next day. The third day I got tired of spinning ’round and fretting in that fashion, and gone back and done what I normally done in them days, ever since I lost Pie really: I got drunker with greater purpose.

The fourth night after Broadnax made his threat, I went on a bender with a redshirt who’d stumbled into the saloon full of trail dust, and we was having a good go at it—me more than him, to be honest. He was a young feller, broad-chested feller, more thirsty for water than liquor it seemed. He sat at a table in a big hat pulled close over his face, a long beard, and his arm in a sling. He stared at me in silence while I laughed and joked at him and throwed his rotgut down my red lane while double-talking him and switching glasses so as to jug him more water than his whiskey. I overserved myself and he didn’t seem to mind it a bit. In fact he seemed to enjoy watching me get out my skull, which, on the prairie, if you can’t please a man one way, why you can always please him another. I seen Pie do that a million times. I took this big young feller for one of those, and after several toots and tears and swipes at his glass with him watching and saying nothing, I flat out asked him if I could polish off the entire bottle of whiskey which he had purchased, as it sat on the table hardly getting used by him in the proper manner and it was a waste of breakfast, lunch, and dinner and mother’s milk to let such a precious thing go to waste.

He remarked, “You drinks a lot of rotgut for a girl. How long has you worked here?”

“Oh, long enough,” I said, “and if you allows me to finish that bottle of bleary on the table there, sir, why, this lonely colored girl will fillet your ears with a song about fish.”

“I will do just that if you tells me where you is from, dear maiden,” he said.

“Many places, stranger,” I said, for I was of the habit about lying about myself, and the “dear maiden” part of his talking meant that he was prone to perhaps buy me a second bottle of that buttercup whiskey after we finished the first. Fact is, when I thunk on it, seemed like he hadn’t drunk much at all, and seemed to enjoy watching me do all the sipping and soaking of the alkie for him, which at that point was more than a thrill, for I was already two sheets to the wind and wanted more. I said, “If you buy us a second bottle of moral suasion, I’ll give you the whole sad story, plus a haircut, stranger. Then I’ll sing ‘Dixie Is My Home’ for you, which will stir your spirits and put you right to sleep.”

“I will do that,” the feller said, “but first I needs a favor. I got a saddlebag on my horse, which is tied outside on the alley side of the hotel. That saddlebag needs cleaning. On account of my arm”—and here he pointed to his arm, which was hung in a sling—“I can’t lift it. So if I can trust you to go out and fetch that saddlebag and bring it inside and lather it up with saddle soap, why, I’ll give you two bits or even three and you can buy your own whiskey. I rides the brown-and-white pinto.”

“I will be happy to do that, friend,” I said.

I went outside and untied his saddlebag from his pinto in a jiffy, but it was loaded up full, and that thing was heavy. Plus I was pixilated. I lost my grip on it when I got it loose from the horse and it fell to the ground, and the leather top flap popped open. When I bent to close the flap, I noticed in the moonlight an odd thing sticking out the top of that flap.

It was a feather. A long, black-and-white feather with a touch of red on it. Drunk as I was, I still knowed what it was. I hadn’t seen a feather like that in two years. I seen a plume of them very same type feathers on Frederick Brown’s chest when he was buried. A Good Lord Bird.

I quick stuffed it back into the saddlebag, turned to go inside, and walked straight into the feller who’d sent me out there. “Onion?” he said.

I was two sheets to the wind and seeing double, and he was so tall standing up there in that dark alley that I couldn’t quite make out his face, and I was seeing threes anyway. Then he pulled off his hat, throwed back his hair, leaned down to look at me close, and I seen past his beard into his face, and found myself staring at Owen Brown.

“I been seeking you for two years,” he said. “What is you doing here, carousing around like a drunk?”

I was shocked out my petticoat, practically, and didn’t know what to cook up to tell him on the spot, for lying takes wit, and that was on a high shelf in my brain on account of that essence, which tied up my tongue, so I blurted the truth: “I has fallen in love with someone who don’t want no parts of me,” I said.

To my surprise, Owen said, “I understands. I too has fallen in love with someone who don’t want no parts of me. I went to Iowa to fetch a young lady but she said I am too grumpy. She wants prosperity and a man with a farm, not a poor abolitionist. But that didn’t turn me into a drunk like you. Is I too grumpy, by the way?”

Fact is, there weren’t a soul in Kansas Territory more grumpy than Owen Brown, who would grumble to Jesus Himself on account of just about anything that weren’t to his liking. But it weren’t for me to say. Instead I said, “Where was you at Osawatomie? We was waiting for you.”

“We runned into some rebels.”

“Whyn’t you come back and get me and Bob?”

“I’m here, ain’t I?”

He frowned, glanced up and down the alley, then picked up his saddlebag, and throwed it on his horse with one hand, tying it, using his teeth to hold one of the straps as he did so. “Set tight,” he said. “We’ll be ridin’ here soon. And quit sipping that joy juice.”

He mounted up on his horse. “Where’s the Old Man?” I hissed. “Is he dead?”

But he had already turned his horse up the alley and was gone.

16. Busting Out

It was the next day before I got a chance to slip out to the pen. Someone had tipped off the town that the Free Staters was coming, and that made the white folks get busy and also watch the niggers close. The town loaded up all over again. They never really geared down after Sibonia’s hanging, truth be told, but now the sure sign of Free Staters picked things up. The saloon bar was packed three deep with rebels and militia armed to the teeth. They made plans to block off the streets to the town, this time with cannons on both sides, facing outward. They posted watchouts on both ends and on the hills around the town. They knowed trouble was coming.

I was sent to draw water after lunch the next afternoon, and got out to the yard. I found Bob pining at the edge of the pen by himself as usual. He looked about low as a man can get, like a feller waiting for his execution, which I reckon he was. As I trotted to the gate, Broadnax and his men seen me and peeled away from their side, where they was working with the hogs, and come on over. Broadnax stuck his face inside the rails.

“I got news,” I said.

The words hadn’t left my mouth when the back door of the hut on the other side of the alley opened and Darg rolled out. That big Negro always moved fast. The slaves scattered when he came, except for Broadnax, who stood alone at the gate.

Darg stomped up to the gate and glared inside the pen. “Git along the back of the fence there, Broadnax, so I can make my count.”

Broadnax took his face out the fence railing and stood up straight, facing Darg.

“Git along,” Darg said.

“I ain’t got to jump like a chicken every time you open that hole in your face,” Broadnax said.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Without a word, Darg removed his shawl, pulled out his whip, and moved to unwire the gate and unlock the fence to go inside.

I couldn’t stand it. There was rebels three deep in the saloon just inside. A dustup between them two would bring Miss Abby and twenty-five armed redshirts out of the back door ready to throw lead at every colored out there, including them two. I couldn’t have that, not with freedom so close. Owen said he was coming, and his word was good.

I stepped in front of Darg and said, “Why, Mr. Darg, I am glad you is here. I come out here to check on my Bob, and Lord these niggers is ornery. I don’t know how to thank you on account of your kindness and bravery for keeping these yard niggers in check. I just don’t know how to thank you.”

That tickled him. He chuckled and said, “Oh, I can think of many ways to thank me, high yeller, which I’ll get to in a minute.” He flung the gate open.

When he done that, I fell out. Fainted dead out right in the mud, just like I seen the white ladies do.

Gosh darnit, that done it. He hustled over to me, leaned over, and picked me up clear off the ground by the collar with one hand. He stuck his face close to mine’s. I didn’t want that, so I come out my swoon and said, “Lordy, don’t do that. Pie might be looking out the window!”

Well, he dropped me to the ground like a hot potato, and I bounced in the mud and played dead again. He shook me a couple of times, but I didn’t come to right off this time. I played possum good as I could for a few seconds. Finally I come to and said, “Oh, Lord, I is ill. Is it possible for a gallant gentleman like you to get a girl a glass of water? I’m ever so shook now with gratefulness, having been jooped and jaloped around by your kind protection.”

That done him. He was right loopy over me. “Wait here, little sweetness,” he grumbled. “Darg’ll take care of you.”

He bounced up and runned toward the alley of the hotel, for there was a big water barrel along the side of it that the kitchen used. The moment he scampered off, I pulled my head out the mud long enough to bark at Broadnax, who stood there, and he caught my words.

“Be ready,” I said.

That’s all I had the chance to do, for Darg came racing back holding a ladle. I played sick while he picked up my head and throwed a slug of nasty, putrid water down my gullet. It tasted so terrible I thought he’d poisoned me. Suddenly I heard a bang, and the ladle knocked into the fence post, which was right next to my head. The thing struck that fence post so hard, I thought that nigger had figured my ruse out and swung at me with it and missed. Then I heard another bang, and that fence post was nearly sheared off, and I knowed it weren’t no ladle that busted that wood apart, but steel and powder. I heard more blasts. Them was bullets. The back door of the hotel suddenly flung open, and somebody from inside hollered, “Darg, come quick!”

There was blasting out front, a lot of it.

He dropped me and rushed inside the hotel. I picked myself out the mud and followed.

There was chaos inside. Soon as I hit the kitchen doorway, two Indian cooks knocked me over scrambling for the back door. I got up and scampered through the dining room, and hit the saloon just in time to see the front window blast inward and shower several rebels with pieces of glass. Several Free Staters followed the glass in, leaping into the room and blasting as they come. Behind them, outside the broken window, at least a dozen more could be seen charging on horses down Main Street, firing. At the front door, about the same number kicked their way inside.

They came in there in a hurry and all business, kicking over tables and throwing their pistols on every rebel dumb enough to reach for his hardware, and even those that tossed their guns to the floor was aired out, too, for it was a shooting frolic. A few rebels near the back of the room of the dining hall doorway managed to throw up a table as a barrier and fire back on the enemy, backing toward the doorway where I crouched. I stayed where I was once they got there, trying to get up enough guts to make a dash for the stairs in the dining room to check on Pie, for I could hear the girls on the Hot Floor screaming, and could see from my view out the window that several Free Staters had hopped to the second-floor roof from outside by standing on the backs of their horses. I wanted to go up them stairs, but couldn’t bring myself to make a dash for ’em. It was too hot. We was overrun.

I stayed crouched where I was long enough to see the rebels in the saloon make a small comeback, for Darg had been preoccupied somewhere else and come in the saloon fighting like a dog. He smashed a Free Stater in the face with a beer bottle, tossed another Free Stater out the window, and made the dash into the dining room without being hit, despite heavy fire. He took the back stairs to the Hot Floor on the quick. That was the last I ever saw of him, by the way. Not that it mattered, for no sooner had his back disappeared up the stairs than a fresh wave of Free Staters rushed in the front door to add to those that was chewing up the remaining rebels in the saloon, while yours truly was still cowering in the corner near the dining room, where I could see both rooms.

The rebels in the dining room put up a fight, but in the saloon they was outnumbered, and that room was already compromised. Most of the rebels in there was down or dead. In fact, several Free Staters had already gived up the fight for the dining room and pillaged the bar, grabbing bottles and drinking them down. In the midst of that, a tall, rangy feller with a wide-brim hat walked into the busted front door of the saloon and announced, “I’m Captain James Lane of the Free State Militia, and you is all my prisoners!”

Well, there weren’t hardly no prisoners to speak of in the saloon where he spoke, for every Pro Slaver in there had gone across the quit line or was just about to, save for two or three souls squirming on the floor, giving their last kicks. But the rebels who had backed into the dining room caught their breath now and put up a fight. The size of the room favored them, for the dining room was tight and there weren’t room for the superior numbers of Yanks, which made shooting at the remaining Pro Slavers in there sloppy business. There was some panic, too, for several drummers fired within ten feet of each other and missed. Still, a good number of the Free Staters took balls in that frolic and their friends, seeing that, weren’t taking a liking to it. Their attack slowed. Their surprise was gone, and now it was just a hot fight. There was some crazy talk and laughing, too, for one Pro Slaver exclaimed, “God-damn fucker shot my boot,” and there was more laughing. But them rebels done a good enough job to hold them Yanks out the dining room for the moment, and when I seen a path clear to the back door to the alley where the slave pen was, I made for it as quick as I could. I didn’t make for the stairs to help Pie. Whether Darg, her new love, was there and got her out, I didn’t know. But she was on her own. I never did see either of ’em again.

I busted out that back door running. I hustled over to the slave pen, where the Negroes was scrambling trying to break the lock, which was fastened from the outside. I quick undid it and flung open the gate. Broadnax and the rest run out there with hot feet. They didn’t look at me twice. They vanished out the gate quick as you can tell it and hauled ass down the alley.

Bob, though, stood in the corner in the same spot where he always stood, gaping like a fool, his mouth hanging open.

“Bob, let’s roll.”

“I’m done running with you,” he said. “G’wan ’bout your business and leave me be. This is one of your tricks.”

“It ain’t no trick. C’mon!”

Behind me, at the far end of the alley, a group of rebel townsmen on horses rounded the corner and charged the alleyway, hooping and hollering. They fired over our heads at the fleeing Negroes who was making it for the other end of the alley. The alley dead-ended at a T. You had to turn right or left to get to the road on either side. Them coloreds was making for that intersection something terrible.

I didn’t wait. I took off after them. I reckon Bob looked over my shoulder and got a taste of them rebels’ bullets singing over his head, for he jumped up like a rabbit and took off right behind me.

The escaped Negroes from the yard was only about twenty-five yards in front of us. They made it to the end of the alley on a dead run and split apart, some cutting right and the others left, out of sight. Me and Bob headed there, too, but didn’t get no farther than halfway to the end of the alley when a rebel on horseback rounded the corner on that very same end from the main street side where several Negroes had disappeared to. He charged down the alley toward us. He had a Connor rifle in his hand, and when he seen me and Bob coming at him, he charged dead at us and raised his rifle to fire.

We stopped cold in our tracks, for we was caught. The redshirt slowed his horse as it trotted on us, and as he pulled his traces on his horse he said, “Stay right there.” Just as he said it—he weren’t more than five feet from us—a feller stepped out from one of the doorways in the alley and swiped that rebel clean off his horse with a broadsword. Knocked him clean down. The rebel hit the ground cold.

Me and Bob made to hotfoot it around him. But the feller who knocked him down throwed his foot out as I passed, and I tripped clean over it and fell face-first in the mud.

I turned to get up, and found myself staring up into the barrel of an old seven-shooter, a familiar-looking one, and at the end of it was the Old Man, and he didn’t look none too pleased.

“Onion,” he said. “Owen says you is a drunk, using tobacco and swearing. Is that true?”

Behind him, slowly stepping out the alleyway door come his boys: Owen, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, the new man Kagi, and several men I didn’t recognize. They stepped out that doorway slow and steady, never rushing. The Old Man’s army was trained to be calm and cool in a fight as usual. They glanced at rebels down at the other end of the alley firing at us, formed a firm firing line, set up, and opened fire.

Several rebels fell. The rest who got a taste of that trained army bucking lead at them hopped off their horses, and took cover behind the slave pen, returning the favor.

Bullets whizzed back and forth down the alley, but the Old Man, standing over me, paid them no mind. He stared at me, clearly annoyed, waiting for an answer. Well, since he was waiting, I couldn’t tell him a lie.

“Captain,” I said. “It’s true. I fell in love and had my heart broke.”

“Did you commingle with anyone in a fleshly way of nature without being married?”

“No, sir. I am still clean and pure as the day I was born in that fashion.”

He nodded grumpily, then glanced down the alley as bullets zinged past him and struck the shingles of the building next to him, pinging the wood out into the alley in splinters. He was a fool when it come to standing around getting shot at. The men behind him ducked and grimaced as the rebels gived them fire, but the Old Man might as well been standing in a church at choir practice. He stood mute, as usual, apparently thinking something through. His face, always aged, looked even older. It looked absolutely spongy with wrinkles. His beard was now fully white and ragged, and so long it growed down to his chest and could’a doubled for a hawk’s nest. He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before: black trousers, black vest, frock coat, stiff collar, withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. His boots was worse than ever, crumpled like pieces of text paper, curled at the toes. In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.

“That is a good thing, Little Onion,” he said. “The Good Book says in Ezekiel sixteen, eight: ‘When I passed by thee and looked upon thee behold, that was the time of love and the Lord spread his skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness.’ You has kept your nakedness covered?”

“Much as possible, Captain.”

“Been reading the Bible?”

“Not too much, Captain. But I been thinking in a godly way.”

“Well, that’s something at least,” he said. “For if you stand to the Lord’s willingness, He will stand for you. Did I ever tell you the story of King Solomon and the two mothers with one baby? I will tell you that one, for you ought to know it.”

I was aching for him to move, for the firing had ramped up even more. Bullets zinged high overhead and kicked around his boots and near my face, but he stood where he was a good five minutes, lecturing his thoughts on King Solomon and about me not reading the Good Book. Meanwhile, just behind him at the near end of the alley, which he couldn’t see, Broadnax and his band from the slave yard had made their return. They somehow got hold of the rebels’ cannon, which had been parked at the edge of town, and they plumb rolled that thing back to the end of the alley and swung the hot end to face the rebels. The barrel of that thing was just over the Old Man’s shoulder. He didn’t notice, course, for he was preaching. His sermon about the Holy Word and King Solomon and the two mothers with one baby was clearly important to him. He went on warbling about his sermon as one of Broadnax’s Negroes flared a light and set fire to the cannon’s fuse.

The Old Man didn’t pay it a lick of mind. He was still bellowing on about King Solomon and the two mothers when Owen piped up, “Pa! We got to go. Captain Lane’s riding outta town and gonna leave us.”

The Old Man looked down the alley as bullets whizzed past his head and at the lit cannon over his shoulder, then down at the rebels firing and cussing at the other end of the alley gathered behind the slave pen, trying to mount up the nerve to charge. Behind him, the fuse of Broadnax’s cannon was lit and was kicking out thick smoke as it headed home. The Negroes backed away from it in awe, watching the fuse burn. The Old Man, watching them, seemed straight-out irritated that they was taking the fight from him, for he wanted the glory.

He stepped out in the clear, right in the middle of the alley, and shouted to the rebels who was shooting at us from the slave pen. “I’m Captain John Brown! Now in the name of the Holy Redeemer, the King of Kings, the Man of Trinity, I hereby orders you to git. Git in His holy name! Git! For He is always on the right side of justice!”

Well, I don’t know if it was that lit cannon belching smoke over his shoulder that done it, or them rebels losing heart when they seen the Old Man hisself in person standing in the clear, untouched with their bullets zinging past his face, but they turned and took the tall timber. They took off. And with that cannon fuse lit and burning home to its maker, the Old Man stood right next to it and watched the fuse burn to nothing and fizzle out. It didn’t hit the hammer. The thing was dead.

Looking back, I reckon cannon fuses blowed out all the time. But that cannon not firing only gived the Old Man more reason to believe in divine intrusions, beliefs of which he weren’t never short. He watched the fuse fizzle out and said, “Good Lord. God’s blessing is eternal and everlasting, and now I sees yet another sign that His ideas which has come to me lately is on the dot and that He is speaking to me directly.”

He turned to Owen and said, “I don’t want to run behind Jim Lane no more. I come this far only to gather up Little Onion, who is a good-luck charm to me and this army and also a reminder of our dear Frederick, who lies sleeping in this territory. Now that I has got what I come for, our Redeemer has sprung forth yet another rain bucket of ideas for me to lead the way to freedom for the multitudes of His children, like Little Onion here. I have been making some hatchings of various sundry plans, with God’s help, and after we help ourselves to some of God’s gifts from the hardware and dry-goods stores of these heathen slave owners, we will gather our bees for hiving to a greater purpose. Kansas Territory don’t need me no more. We have great work. To the east, men! Onward!”

And with that the Old Man plopped me on his horse, and we sped down that alley, right past that cannon, out of Pikesville, and into legend.