The Widow's War

by Mary Mackey

  Yet this trip up the Missouri to Westport is as hot as anything she ever experienced in the tropics. The wind has died down; not a leaf moves. The air is as wet and heavy as a boiled sheet. Gasping and fanning themselves, the other passengers seek shade, but it is even hotter inside than on deck, so Carrie holds her ground as the land speculators retreat to the main salon and order iced wine, and a plump, pretty woman from Worcester faints and has to be carried to the ladies’ lounge, unlaced, and revived with smelling salts.

  I should be fainting, too. Carrie thinks. After all, I’m with child. Fortunately, all the nausea of the first few weeks has disappeared, and after days of being fed nothing but salt pork and biscuits, her fantasies at the moment are equally divided between ice, William, and ripe mangos.

  Suddenly the western sky turns black. Clouds boil up out of nowhere, and Carrie hears the rushing of wind. On shore, trees and bushes suddenly show the silver undersides of their leaves. Branches crack off and fly through the air. The wind hits the Magnolia Queen, and everything goes rocking. Wine bottles fly off tables, cargo slides across the deck; the sky opens up. Rain falls in torrents, blowing sideways, soaking everyone. In the Amazon, it would have been a warm rain, but here it is cold as ice. As lightning races across the sky in long jagged lines, the thunder is deafening.

  Carrie hangs onto the rail, continues to stand her ground, and waits it out. Within seconds she is soaked to the skin and her skirts are plastered to her legs. Then as suddenly as it began, the rain stops, the sun comes out, and except for a wet deck, wet passengers, and soaked cargo, it’s as if nothing has happened.

  “That weren’t so bad,” the mountain man in buckskins says. He takes off his cap and beats the water off it. “You ever seen a twister?”

  “No,” Carrie says. “What’s a twister?”

  He smiles at her, exposing three missing teeth and two black ones. “Whirlwind.” He makes a spiraling motion with his index finger. “Whoosh. And there goes a buffalo, miss. Up in the air to be dropped like a rock.”

  “I’ve never seen a buffalo.”

  He shakes his head in amazement and spits a mouthful of tobacco juice over the rail. “Welcome to the prairie, miss. You look like you got some grit, but most of them other dudes look like they’re runnin’ blind toward a cliff with a band of Sioux warriors shooting arrows into their butts.” His face suddenly turns bright red. “Excuse me, miss. I been away from cities too long. I need to recollect to temper my language in front of ladies.”

  Reassuring him that she’s not offended, Carrie excuses herself and goes back to her stateroom to change into dry clothing. I may die in Kansas from fever, disease, weather, starvation, gunshot wounds, or—if I’m lucky—old age, she thinks, but apparently I’m not likely to die of boredom.

  Three hours later they reach Westport. The town sits on a high clay bluff above the Kansas Landing. Thanks to the rain, the mud is ankle-deep, so while the Southern ladies strap small metal rings onto the bottoms of their shoes, Carrie and the New Englanders pull on sturdy rubber boots and make their way to an oxcart, which takes them up to the city.

  She stays at the Gilliss House, a hotel recently purchased by the Emigrant Aid Company. Above the front desk is a banner that proclaims: KANSAS MUST BE FREE! and another, smaller sign that warns that anyone who draws a gun on the premises will be “Summarily Evicted and Possibly Shot Dead.”

  “Vigilante groups,” the desk clerk says, “that’s what we fear, miss. We’ve had threats.”

  “What sort of threats?.”

  “This is Missouri, miss. Slavery is legal here. You walk out on the street around the time the saloons are filling up—which I wouldn’t advise—and proclaim yourself an abolitionist, and well, I imagine a lady would still be safe, but a man might just up and disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Or worse,” the desk clerk says cheerfully as he checks her into a room with a view of the river. “That will be one dollar and fifty cents, unless you are staying for a week, in which case we have a special rate of ten dollars, all meals included.

  “By the way, if you do decide to step outside the hotel after you unpack your trunk, you will see notices offering a reward of two hundred dollars to anyone who will deliver Eli Thayer up to the pro-slavers. Reportedly, the original wording of the posters was ‘de liver up Eli Thayer, founder of the Emigrant Aid Company, dead or alive,’ but the moderates appear to have prevailed, for which we can all be thankful. Since Mr. Thayer remains in Massachusetts, he is in no great danger, but the existence of such posters is one of the reasons I keep a loaded shotgun behind the front desk.”

  “What time do the saloons start filling up?”

  “Around six.”

  “Then they’re filling up right now?”

  “Yes, miss. Excuse me for asking, but you aren’t thinking of going into any of them and preaching temperance, are you? We had a very unfortunate incident with an elderly lady a few weeks ago. She went into the Black Dog and tried to break some whiskey bottles with her umbrella and a drunken bushwhacker shot at her. Fortunately, he missed.”

  Reassuring the desk clerk that she will not attempt to save bushwhackers from the evils of alcohol, Carrie pays for one night and accepts the key to her room.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There are six saloons within a hundred and fifty yards of the Gilliss House. The nearest is the Black Dog. Hoping she’ll have better luck than the elderly lady who preceded her, Carrie pushes aside the swinging doors and enters.

  Her first impression is of a large, rectangular room so blued with cigar smoke she can hardly see across it. Men stand at an elaborately carved mahogany bar resting their feet on a brass rail and drinking beer from tin mugs and whiskey from small glasses. Behind the bar is a shelf of bottles and a large oil painting of a plump, naked woman that leaves nothing to the imagination. The woman is smiling and beckoning to a platter of ham sandwiches, some jars of pickled eggs, and a sign that says: FREE LUNCH.

  As her eyes adjust to the darkness, Carrie sees other men sitting at the back of the saloon at small tables playing card games. Although some wear suits that would not attract notice in any eastern city, most are decked out in high boots, flannel shirts, and broad-brimmed hats. Many wear their hair long and their beards wild, and there is a fierce air about them, as if they would as soon fight as talk. The fact that they are, to a man, armed increases this impression. Even on the upper Amazon, where civilization is only a distant rumor and the law is enforced by gun thugs, Carrie has never seen so many revolvers and knives in one place.

  One of the men at the bar looks up and catches sight of her. “Boys!” he yells. “We got a visitor.”

  She is prepared for catcalls, taunts, and obscenities, but what she gets instead is a sudden, terrifying silence as every face in the saloon turns toward her.

  “What do you want?” the bartender says.

  “I’m looking for William Saylor.”

  “Get out, lady,” he snarls. “Now!”

  There’s a kind of seething in the saloon, violent and nasty as a bag of snakes. A man at one of the back tables stands up and his companions pull him down again. Deciding she’s not going to find out anything about William here, Carrie turns and leaves. Behind her, she distinctly hears someone say the words “abolitionist bitch.”

  Her experience at the Black Dog turns out to be a preview of what’s in store for her. The Mule Skinner is a hastily thrown up tent where men sit on wooden packing crates. Before Carrie can enter, two saloon girls stop her.

  “You don’t want to go in there, miss,” the youngest says. She cannot be much older than sixteen, and the hem of her pretty blue silk dress is stained with mud.

  “There’s twenty men in this town to every woman,” her companion warns. “And they’re all hungry.”

  “Have either of you seen or heard of a man named William Saylor? He’s a little under six feet tall, lanky, very dark eyes, brown hair. He has a small scar just above his right eyebrow.
”

  “Handsome, is he?”

  “Very.”

  “Your sweetheart?”

  “You might call him that.”

  “I wish I’d met him, but no such luck.”

  “Well maybe someone in the Mule Skinner will remember seeing him.” Carrie starts for the tent, but the girls step in front of her.

  “You can’t go in there, miss.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you got abolitionist written all over you, and that’s a bushwhacker saloon if there ever was one. Me and Annie here know what places is dangerous and what ain’t.”

  Carrie tries to persuade them to let her pass, but they just keep repeating that if she steps inside the Mule Skinner, she isn’t going to come out in one piece.

  Giving up, she moves on. The Mud Flat is a billiards parlor, the Holy Moses a dance hall, the River Rat an icehouse with a sign that promises cold beer. Instead of being greeted with silence, Carrie is taunted, propositioned, and pawed at. Since no decent woman ever walks into a saloon, men take her presence as an invitation. They offer her money, grab at her skirts, pull her into drunken embraces, and assail her with whiskey-flavored kisses.

  Carrie wiggles out of their grip, raises her voice, asks if anyone has seen William. No one has, or if they have, they aren’t talking.

  The last saloon she enters is called the Bon Ton. Despite the French name, it’s like all the rest: carved wooden bar, gilt-framed mirrors, floor slick with tobacco juice, advertisements on the walls for Bristol’s Sarsaparilla and German beers. Perhaps the beer is flat or the whiskey is laced with tea, because the men here don’t seem quite as drunk, and when Carrie walks up to the bar, none of them grab for her or offer to buy her a drink. They just stand there, drinking and staring at her.

  “Good evening,” she says to the bartender. “I’m looking for a man named William Saylor.”

  The bartender looks her up and down and grins. “Ain’t we all,” he says.

  Carrie doesn’t know what to make of this. “William’s about six feet tall,” she continues. “Dark eyes, brown hair, a small scar above—”

  “Above his right eyebrow? Yep, that’s the one.” The bartender reaches behind the bar, brings out a rolled up piece of paper, and hands it to Carrie. When she unrolls it, she finds herself looking at a poster.

  WANTED

  DEAD OR ALIVE

  WILLIAM SAYLOR

  FOR ARMED ROBBERY

  5’11” tall, black eyes, brown hair

  1” scar above right eyebrow

  $150 REWARD

  Leaning forward, the bartender peers at the poster. “Could you describe him some more? There ain’t no picture of him on this poster, and that’s a tempting sum of money they’re offering.”

  Carrie doesn’t reply. She’s staring at the poster and things are falling into place: William hasn’t joined a wagon train and gone to California. He’s living somewhere in the Kansas Territory. And where would he live? Why Lawrence, of course, because there’s only one thing he’d steal at gunpoint, only one thing both Southern ladies and a New England minister would refuse to talk about, and Lawrence is the only place he could live and go on stealing it without falling into the hands of the law.

  Handing the poster back to the bartender, she tells him that the description is all wrong. William Saylor has no scar above his right eyebrow. His hair is coal black, his eyes green, and he often uses an alias.

  “What does he call himself?” the bartender asks.

  “Deacon Presgrove,” Carrie tells him. “You really should get a pencil and write this down.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  She returns to the Gilliss House feeling more hopeful than she has since William first arrived in Brazil and asked her to marry him. That night at dinner, she meets more emigrants headed for Kansas. One is a missionary named Samuel Adair who has come from Michigan to see about resettling his family near Osawatomie Creek and founding a Congregational church there. Reverend Adair sits next to Carrie, and as they eat, he engages her in conversation.

  “Are you headed to Lawrence?” he inquires after he introduces himself. “Almost everyone staying at this hotel seems to be.”

  “Yes,” Carrie says. It’s a relief to finally be able to tell someone where she’s going.

  Adair helps himself to the mashed potatoes and passes the bowl to Carrie. “Florella, my wife, is reluctant to live so far from her family, but we both believe we are called by God to enter into the spiritual struggle against slavery.” He pauses, fork in hand. “My brother-in-law, John, is even more determined.”

  “He, too, supports the cause of abolition?” Carrie inquires politely.

  Reverend Adair puts down his fork. “‘Supports,’ is putting it mildly. John believes he is the right hand of God sent to free the slaves and punish the masters for their sins.” Adair lowers his voice. “He has consecrated himself to the destruction of slavery. He says most New England abolitionists are all talk and no action. He speaks of insurrection. When I remind him violence is unchristian, he quotes scripture at me: Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel!”

  “Psalm Two,” Carrie says.

  “You know your Bible.”

  “My mother taught me to read from it. When I was a child, it was the only book we had. The termites ate all the others.”

  Adair nods and goes back to his meal. If he wonders why termites ate their books, he doesn’t ask. In fact, he stops speaking to her altogether even though she hasn’t mentioned William. She finds this peculiar, but a few years later, when the name John Brown becomes a household word, she remembers this conversation and realizes Reverend Adair feared he had already said far too much about his brother-in-law.

  The next morning, she meets another person who is destined to play an important role in her life. It’s Sunday, and in honor of the Sabbath, the New Englanders hold a church service in the lobby of the hotel, presided over by Reverend Adair who takes as the text of his sermon Isaiah 58:6: “Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, and . . . let the oppressed go free.”

  Except that it is given in a slave state in a hotel under siege, Reverend Adair’s sermon is not particularly memorable, but what is memorable is a brief speech given by a free black woman named Elizabeth Newberry who stands up at the end of the service just before the benediction. Mrs. Newberry is tall and thin with graying hair, piercing eyes, a square, stubborn jaw, and a voice that could fill a cathedral.

  “I was a slave in Maryland,” she says, “and my mother was a slave before me, taken out of Africa and illegally smuggled into this country by slave traders who mocked the laws of the United States and cursed the federal government. When my master died, he freed me. As a condition of my freedom, I was forced to leave the state of Maryland immediately, thus abandoning my mother who had not been freed. When I told Mother I would give up my freedom in order to stay with her, she pleaded with me to leave, saying that no life was worse than that of a slave, and reminding me that a new master might sell me in which case she and I would never see each other again.

  “In Michigan I met and married a good man and had three sons with him. My sons and I are now on our way to Kansas to do what we can to help ensure the territory enters the Union as a free state. We cannot vote in the plebiscite. That goes without saying. But we can help defend those who are able to vote. Yet because of the color of our skins, we cannot travel openly through Missouri without risking death or re-enslavement. Instead, we must pretend to be Mrs. Elijah Hulett’s slaves.

  “Mrs. Hulett, who sits quietly among us today, is a Quaker. I do not want you to think this good woman is actually a slave-owner, so I stand before you to thank her for providing my sons and me with her protection, and to urge you to do everything in your power to make sure that in future years when my grandchildren are grown, they will not be forced to choose between being murdered or traveling around their own country in disguise.”

&nb
sp; She gestures toward the back of the room. “Mrs. Hulett, will you please stand.” There is a protest and some whispered urging. Finally an old woman rises to her feet. She looks frail, but when she speaks her voice is surprisingly strong.

  “I am doing nothing except what my conscience dictates,” she says. “All men and women are equal in the sight of God. I am sixty-three. My children tell me I should be putting up preserves and quilting, but I tell them I am going to Kansas to fight. Yes, fight. Do not delude yourselves that the slavers will let us settle peacefully. War it will be. I would call it a holy war but no war is holy, so instead I will simply say that if you are not ready to fight with me to bring Kansas into the Union free, than you should turn around and go back to New England.”

  No one turns around or goes back, or at least if they do they slink off quietly in the middle of the night. The next morning just before dawn, the emigrants board wagons headed for Lawrence. In preparation for what is likely to be a hot day, the women put on sunbonnets with flapping blinders that make it impossible for them to see anything not directly in front of them. Carrie, who intends to enjoy the scenery, wears a straw hat with a wide brim, which earns her stares of disapproval.

  “‘Tisn’t very feminine,” a lady whispers. “Would you like to borrow a sunbonnet, Miss Vinton?”

  “No, thank you,” Carrie says.

  “Your hat looks like a Mexican sombrero,” confides another. “I can’t imagine why you wear it.”

  “I wear it to keep my nose from falling off,” Carrie tells her, and reaching down she plucks a stem of blue sage and sticks it in the headband.

  When she climbs into her wagon, she is pleased to discover she will be sharing it with Mrs. Newberry, Mrs. Newberry’s sons and their wives, and several other members of the Newberry family, including three children under the age of seven.