Tender Betrayal

by Rosanne Bittner

  He closed his eyes. Kansas. He hoped Audra was still there. If she wasn’t, he might never find her. A whole year! It was incredible. “I…had a song I…carried in my pocket,” he told Carl. “Audra…wrote it…for me. Did you find it? Do you…still have it?”

  “We found it,” his brother answered. “It’s with your things.”

  “Get it, will you? Take it…to Nichole. Have her try to play it. Once she gets used to the tune…maybe she can sing it for me. I’ve never heard it sung.”

  “Anything you want, little brother.” Carl rose, and Lee noticed how he had aged, graying heavily at the temples. Eighteen sixty-six—Carl would be forty now. He was thirty-six himself. How old would Audra be? She was seventeen that summer she spent here. That made her twenty-four, still young enough to have children, maybe his children. But then that was probably too much to hope for. “You just rest,” Carl told him. “Beverly will take the song down to Nichole, and I’m going to send for the doctor.”

  They both left the room, and Lee lay staring at the ceiling still finding it difficult to comprehend that a whole year could have gone by. A myriad of thoughts whirled through his mind, and tears wanted to come again. God, he hated being so weak! He had to get out of this bed.

  He tried again to rise, but it was impossible. He lay back, listening then as Nichole began playing a different tune on the piano. She played it hesitantly at first, and he figured that by now the notes on Audra’s sheet music were probably so faded that Nichole was having a hard time reading them. She played the tune a few more times until it flowed beautifully. It was a lovely tune.

  Lee, my love, she began singing,

  Just as the sun shines

  And the ocean wind blows wet and wild,

  I love you as a woman loves,

  But you see me as a child.

  Lee, my love,

  When I am with you

  I never want the days to end.

  I love you more than life itself,

  Yet to you I’m just a friend.

  Lee, my love,

  You stand before me

  Tall and strong, your eyes so blue,

  I long to feel your arms around me,

  To hear the words, I love you.

  Lee, my love,

  We walk together,

  We feel the sand and smell the sea,

  I know we live in different worlds.

  A life together can never be.

  Was that true? After all these years, it certainly seemed so. Seven years it had been since that summer here. Seven years. By the time he was able to get out of this bed and find her, it would probably be closer to eight, but he’d made a promise to Joey, and he was, by God, going to keep it.

  32

  August 1867

  Audra heard the riders first, then saw them, a long line of men on horses, looking ghostly as the Kansas heat made their images waver and ripple on the horizon. She dropped her basket of corn and began running, catching up with Toosie and telling her to scream at the top of her lungs for everyone to take shelter. She could not raise her own raspy voice high enough to warn them.

  Intuition told her that the dreaded moment had come, and she and the others did not have to wait until these riders came closer to know that the same gang of rebel outlaws who had raided other Negro settlements was now paying a visit to Brennan, Kansas. Because it had been a whole year since the first Negro refugees had come to them, and there had been no trouble, Audra had hoped they were going to be spared. Other victims of raids had joined them, so that their little settlement had grown into a town of roughly 220 people, about 50 of them white. They now had a school where both Toosie and Audra taught in winter; a little church, where a white minister who had come to live among them preached sermons every Sunday; a livery; a blacksmith shop; a small rooming house; a clothing shop, where Wilena and some of the other women, both Negro and white, made men’s and women’s apparel; a general store, run by Joseph and Elijah; and several frame houses. Many of the people still lived out of wagons or tepees or sod houses, but the town’s goal was that eventually everyone would have a real house, with windows and wood floors.

  “Please help us!” Audra prayed as she ran, scooping up Wilena’s youngest girl, Yolanda. Toosie carried little Joey in her arms, hollering for people to lock their doors and close their shutters. Many others had apparently already seen the riders, as Toosie was not the only one yelling out warnings. There were other shouts, men leaving barns and businesses to arm themselves with guns and clubs, women grabbing their children and running.

  How can God do this to us? Audra fretted inwardly. They were a Christian community, made up of good people who were working together, sharing all they had so that no one went without, families helping families with chores and building homes and barns. They had accomplished so much here. Trade with travelers had been excellent, and they had even begun selling food to Fort Riley, and to the booming new cattle town of Abilene, both places many miles to the north but worth the trip by wagon for the profits they made.

  Right now she wished the fort were closer. They could use the help of soldiers, and Audra had asked more than once for a patrol to be sent to guard their little town; but the commander at the fort had told her there had not been much trouble this year with outlaws. His biggest problem was with Indians who were growing more restless and resentful since more and more people had begun coming west to claim their lands. Audra suspected part of the reason they could get no protection was because the town was made up mostly of Negroes. Whites in general, even those from the North who had been willing to fight to free the slaves, still were not ready to help Negroes survive the new world into which they had been tossed.

  Audra’s only hope had been that their little town had grown large enough that perhaps the outlaws had decided they were a little too much to take on, but from the thundering sound of horses approaching, it was apparent that the outlaws’ numbers had also grown.

  She found Joseph and handed little Yolanda to him. She saw the terror in the man’s eyes, and she knew that in spite of the fact that a few of the Negro men had purchased guns and had practiced shooting them, facing the real thing was another matter. She had learned to understand their thinking. Most of these men were strong and healthy, and ones like Joseph could probably break any man’s neck in a moment; but most of these Negroes had grown up learning to fear white men with guns and whips. Since the day they were born, they had been taught to submit, were torn from loved ones, many of them whipped mercilessly when they disobeyed or tried to run away. There was a deep terror in their blood that would make it difficult to fight these white men, even though they were themselves free now and had a perfect right to defend their town and their women and children.

  “Don’t be afraid, Joseph,” she told the man sternly. “Stay calm, and don’t shoot at anyone unless he’s close enough that you’re sure you’ll hit him. When he is, don’t you be afraid to pull the trigger. This is our town, and they aren’t going to destroy it or chase us out!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered, nodding and running off to his own home with Yolanda. Audra headed for the two-story frame house she shared with Toosie and Elijah and little Joey. Toosie was expecting another child, and Audra prayed nothing would happen today to make her lose her baby. She reached over and took Joey from her, worried about the woman having to run. All over town people were scurrying for shelter, closing the doors to their little shops, scampering for their homes, those unable to get that far hiding under boardwalks, taking shelter anywhere they could find it. The outlaws were already on the outskirts of town when Audra and Toosie reached the house, relieved to see that Elijah was already there loading his rifle.

  “Get under a bed with Joey!” he commanded Toosie. “You find a place to hide, too, Miss Audra.”

  “Like hell I will! This is my town!” she protested, going to an old china cabinet she had bought from a traveler and taking her father’s rifle down from the top of it. “I can use this thing, and
I will use it!” She took a position at a window, and Elijah knew there was no arguing with her. His own heart pounded with fear. He had never shot at white men before, and he could almost feel a rope around his neck.

  “Some of them are riding through the cornfields,” Audra said as she watched out the window, her voice amazingly calm. “Thank God we had an early season and a lot of it is already in.”

  “At least they can’t hurt the potatoes,” Elijah answered. “They ain’t even dug yet.” Both of them just watched, helpless to stop the pack of at least thirty men as they tied ropes to support posts of some of the buildings and ripped them away, howling and carrying on like wild Indians. One man threw a torch into the livery. A few headed toward Audra’s house, and Audra wondered why the townspeople were not shooting at them. Was it that old fear? She looked over at Elijah, saw the sweat on his forehead. Why shouldn’t these poor Negro men be afraid? They had never in their lives been allowed to fight back. She realized then that no one was going to fire a gun unless forced into it.

  “Start shooting, Elijah Jakes!” she commanded, as though he were one of her hands. She fired her own gun, and to her surprise, one of the outlaws went down. Elijah let out a whoop and fired his own rifle, but missed. Audra shot at another man, hitting his horse. The animal went down, and the man cried out when it landed on his leg. Finally some of the others began shooting, and a few more outlaws fell from their horses. Many went on through town, and Audra knew they would most likely steal several head of their precious cattle. They had been working at breeding and building a herd, now that the railroad had come to Abilene. There was a lot of money in the cattle business, and the few they had were precious and valuable.

  “Damn them!” she muttered, firing at another outlaw. The man’s horse came to a sudden halt, and the wounded rider flew forward and landed smack on Audra’s front porch with a thump and a cry of pain. He rolled away from her window, and for a moment Audra could not see him. Suddenly someone yanked Elijah’s rifle right out of his hands. Elijah had been kneeling at the other front window with the rifle barrel sticking out. He gave out a yelp and ducked when the man on the porch turned the gun and stuck it back through the window and fired. Elijah ran into the kitchen, and before Audra could react, the front door was kicked open. The raider, whose fall had apparently done little to inhibit his mobility, charged into the house.

  Audra turned to shoot at him, but her gun jammed, and in an instant the man ripped it from her hands and threw it aside. “Well, well,” he said with a grin. “Look what we have here! A pretty white whore livin’ with a nigger man!”

  Audra reached for a vase and threw it at him, but he ducked just in time, then rammed the butt of Elijah’s rifle into her middle, knocking the wind out of her. She fell backward, and the man was on her in an instant, jerking her to her feet with one hand, still holding Elijah’s rifle in the other.

  “Let’s go, lady! Me and my friends know what to do with women like you.” He dragged her toward the door, but Audra fought and struggled, managing to kick the door shut before the man could get her outside. He flung her sideways then like a rag doll, slamming her against a table. A terrible pain ripped through Audra’s rib cage. The man forced her to bend backward over the table then, and he laid the rifle across her throat. “Where’d you get that scar, honey? Some jealous nigger man give it to you?”

  “Get out!” she answered through gritted teeth.

  “Word is you folks do a lot of sellin’ to the army and folks at Abilene and such. You got money layin’ around here? Hand it over, and I won’t strip you naked and have at you!”

  Suddenly Elijah sprang out of seemingly nowhere. He knocked the man away from her, and the rifle went flying. The two men got into a vicious fight, crashing into furniture, knocking over plants and breaking vases and dishes. Toosie stood at the bedroom door clinging to little Joey, her eyes filled with terror for Elijah and her son.

  Audra managed to find her own rifle, the pain in her side so fierce, she struggled just to breathe. She felt a wicked hatred welling up inside her soul. How dare these men come here and attack innocent people who had worked so hard to survive! Elijah landed a hard punch to the outlaw’s jaw, and the man staggered backward. Audra tried again to shoot the man, but the rifle still would not fire. The man groaned and started to rise, and Audra saw her chance. She turned the rifle and whacked him in the head with the butt end.

  All the horrors of the past crashed in on her then, and she took it out on the outlaw, beating him over and over with the rifle. This blow was for burning Brennan Manor. This one was for cutting her throat. Another for the loss of her voice. This one was for Richard’s hideous abuse, that one for all the troubles between North and South keeping her from the only man she had ever really loved. This blow was for Lena and Henrietta, that one for burning Baton Rouge. Another for losing her home, her hope for happiness. Another for Joey…Joey…Joey, even though these men were southerners themselves. They were animals who had decided to take advantage of the victims of the war.

  Elijah finally grabbed her and forced her to stop, and it was only then she realized the man’s face was horribly battered and unrecognizable. The rifle was broken, the butt splintered and bloody. Her own dress was spattered with blood, and reality returned, bringing with it an awareness of the awful pain of her own injury. She grasped her ribs and bent over, gasping for breath.

  “Take her to the bed,” Elijah was telling someone. “I’ll hide the body till we’re sure they’ve rode off. Then we’ll bury it with the others they leave behind. Them men’s got our cattle. They ain’t gonna come back right away. They’ll herd the cattle off first.”

  “What if they do come back!” Toosie lamented. “They’re going to get their revenge, Elijah, because we fought back.”

  “Damn them all!” Elijah swore. “Get Audra to her bed and put Joey in that playpen I made for him so’s he can’t run off. I got to get my rifle and reload.”

  Audra could hear Joey crying. She wanted to go back and help with the fighting, but she wasn’t even sure where her next breath would come from. She managed to crawl onto her bed, then rolled onto her back, gasping for breath, finally blacking out from the pain.

  Lee halted his horse and took a moment to look at the little town before him. Brennan, Kansas, the commander at Fort Riley had told him it was called. The man had also told him a very pretty white woman named Audra Potter more or less owned the town and had dealt several times with him, talking him into buying corn and potatoes for the fort. Lee found it incredible that it could all be true, that the woman the commander told him about dressed like any rugged pioneer woman, had work-worn hands from helping dig potatoes and pick corn. Rumor had it the woman had founded a little school in Brennan, taught Negro children to read and write.

  Audra—teaching Negroes, helping them build a town, getting her hands dirty. That didn’t sound like the Audra he had known, but then, if anybody had the spunk and determination to do such a thing, Audra did. It was just that he never imagined she would go this far, helping Negroes build a town. Who else could the woman be but his own Audra? What other white woman would name a town Brennan? After two months of searching since he had arrived in Kansas, to think that she could be minutes away made his heart beat faster, and he took a deep breath for courage. Was it necessary, after all this time, to tell her he was the one who had killed Joey? Three years had passed, yet when he relived the event in his dreams, it seemed like yesterday.

  He pushed back his Stetson and opened the top few buttons of his denim shirt. It was going to be another hot August day, and out here on the prairie there were no trees for shade. This land was certainly a far cry from Connecticut and even from Louisiana. He had never seen such endless horizons, and how anyone managed to break through the tough sod of this country and turn it into a farm was beyond his imagination; yet out there in the distance were cornfields.

  He decided that in spite of its desolate, uncivilized state, he liked this country. He
wanted to see more of it, maybe go to the Rockies. He’d been told there was a new city west of here called Denver, right at the foot of the mountains, a town growing explosively because of the discovery of gold. A railroad was being built, figured to connect clear across the continent within two years. With all the misery back east and in the South, the West was sure to grow fast now. A man who got in on the ground floor could make his own fortune, start new.

  That was what he needed to do. Start all over someplace new. Everything back east brought back too many painful memories, and he supposed it was probably that way for Audra when she thought about Louisiana and Brennan Manor. There came a time when a person just had to stop looking back, and maybe once he told her about Joey, he could stop looking back, too. If he couldn’t obtain Audra’s forgiveness, he could never go forward and make something decent of the rest of his years.

  He was done with the whiskey. A year of lying unconscious and going without had cured him of that. Months of rehabilitation had taught him the value of life and health, and he had discovered he had a great desire to live again, to be whole and enjoy life…and find Audra. Maybe, by some miracle, whatever future he formed for himself, he could share with her. Maybe she could find a way to forgive him, and they could both put the past behind them and go on from here, perhaps to Denver, where he could start a new law firm. There must be a need for lawyers out here where most places were just beginning to grow, where people were just beginning to enjoy the things taken for granted in more civilized places. He kind of liked the fact that a man could set his own laws out here. There were no constraints on how a man lived or even how he dressed. He wore denim shirts and pants instead of suits, leather boots instead of polished shoes. No one cared if a man got a little dusty or sweaty. They didn’t even care what a man’s name was, where he was from, what his background was. In most of the little towns he had visited in Kansas, people were just glad to see someone, especially those homesteading miles from any kind of town. Everyone was welcomed and fed.