The Widow's War

by Mary Mackey

  “Biscuit, Miss Vinton?” Mrs. Newberry asks, opening a large carpetbag. “Or would you rather have cold ham?” Carrie looks into the bag and sees that Mrs. Newberry has brought enough food to outlast a siege.

  “Both, thank you.”

  Mrs. Newberry pulls out a cold biscuit, tears it in half, slathers it with butter, and puts a slab of salt-cured ham between top and bottom. Carrie is just finishing the last crumb, when the teamster slaps the reigns against the backs of the oxen.

  “Walk on!” he yells.

  As the oxen begin to plod toward Lawrence, the wagon moves through a thin mist that rises off the river. For a little over half an hour, trees, bushes, and grass all look as if they have been draped in gauze. Then they put the river behind them and roll into sunshine so intense it makes Carrie wish the brim of her hat were even broader.

  Since the city of Lawrence was founded beside the Kaw River less than two months ago, only about five hundred emigrants have settled there, but the road is as wide and well-worn as a turnpike. After a while, the teamster sits back, drapes the reigns around the whip holder, and explains why.

  “Yer on the famous Santa Fe Trail,” he tells Carrie and the others. “Where it meets up with the Oregon Trail, also known as the California Road, we’ll be turnin’ north toward Lawrence. ’Bout a million mules and oxen done stomped both trails hard as rock. Then you got your horses and your shoe leather packing them down even more. Number of pour souls walked all the way to California thinkin’ they was gonna get rich. I don’t hold with walkin’. Give me an ox team any day.”

  He points to the two beasts that draw their wagon. “The big one there goes by the name of Brock and the smaller by Whitehorn. As fer me, I’m what they call a bullwhacker, seeing as how it’s my job to whack my team down this trail if they shows signs of lingerin’. But I hardly ever have to whip ‘em. Brock and Whitehorn is fast fer oxen. I reckon we’re gonna move at a good clip. Two and a half miles an hour or more unless it rains. Then all bets is off, and Betty bar the door!”

  Carrie scans the sky for clouds, but it’s blue and clear for as far as she can see. They are moving west across a rolling, open prairie of tall grasses broken by small creeks lined with oaks of all varieties, tall white-barked sycamores, willows that sway in the wind, red cedars, honey locusts whose dangling pods look like giant peas, ash, dog-wood, hickories, black walnuts, pecans, and cottonwoods. This is the timber that will supply the materials for cabins and fences, and the Newberrys are relieved to see it.

  “I feared Kansas might be flat as a plate and bare as a tabletop,” Mrs. Newberry says. “But I see pies in those trees. Pecan, walnut, and—”

  The wagon strikes a rut, gives a lurch, and she slides off the bench in slow-motion and tumbles to the floorboards. Prosser and Toussaint, her two oldest sons, grab her under the arms and put her back on the bench again. They are identical twins who must once have been hard to tell apart, but who now must rarely be mistaken for each other. Prosser sports a scalded place on his cheek that suggests someone once threw a pan of hot water at him, and Toussaint is missing an earlobe. Except for these differences, they are both handsome, tall, healthy men in their early twenties with dark skin and curly black hair: broad shouldered, good-natured, and not above teasing their mother who they clearly adore.

  “You’re gonna break yourself, Mama,” Toussaint says.

  “Gonna shatter like an old lantern shade,” Prosser agrees.

  Mrs. Newberry settles back on the bench, arranges her skirts, and looks at them the way she probably looked at them when they were four years old and pilfered cookies out of the cookie jar.

  “Sons, you may be grown men with wives and children of your own, and I may be an old woman, but I can still tan your bottoms when you get too big for your britches.”

  “Sorry, Mama,” Toussaint says.

  “Sorry,” says Prosser.

  “Don’t whip ’em,” begs Spartacus, the youngest of the three, thirteen at most, with his mother’s high cheekbones and a chin already showing signs of stubbornness.

  “I’ll spare ‘em this time,” Mrs. Newberry says. “You hear that, sons? Your baby brother has intervened for you.” She turns to Carrie. “Spare the rod and spoil the child. What do you think?”

  “I think they’re too old to spank.”

  “Wouldn’t do any good anyway. Like the time they told me they were going to go to California, strike gold, and become millionaires. You remember that, sons?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Prosser and Toussaint say in chorus. Prosser’s wife, Eulie, laughs, and Toussaint’s five-year-old daughter giggles and buries her head in her mother’s apron.

  “And what did I tell you?”

  “You said we were damn fools, Mama.”

  “I said damn?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you did.”

  “Toussaint Newberry, I got half a mind to wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “Your words, Mama, not mine.”

  “What did I say when you and your brother told me your fool plan?”

  “You said we’d have to cross to Missouri if we wanted to join a wagon train, and that Missouri was a slave state, and sure as God is in Heaven, we’d be captured and sold South.”

  “And was I right?”

  “No, ma’am. We didn’t cross Missouri. We decided to take a boat instead, but it put in at Charleston, and we went ashore—”

  “And got drunk,” Spartacus supplies eagerly.

  “And perhaps had a drink or two beyond what we should have,” Prosser continues. “And while we were walking back to the docks, wham! Something hit me on the head and something hit Toussaint, and the next thing we knew, we were chopping cotton on the plantation of Mr. Horace Labrie for one pair of pants a year, and a peck of cornmeal, a pinch of salt, and three dried fish a week, and those fish stunk to high heaven.”

  “But you were free men!” Carrie says. “Surely you had your papers on you!”

  “Oh, we had our papers on us all right,” Prosser says, running his finger over the scald mark on his cheek. “But when we tried to show them to our kidnappers, they weren’t impressed. In retrospect, I suspect they could not read. In any event, they didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on the finer points of the laws governing free men of color.”

  “They were drunken barbarians,” says Toussaint, “with the manners of hogs.”

  “Hogs or not, they had you,” Mrs. Newberry says, “and if it weren’t for me, you’d still be chopping that cotton and eating those nasty fish.”

  Carrie turns to her, amazed. “You helped them escape?”

  Mrs. Newberry sighs. “Fools or not, they were my baby boys, so what choice did I have? Not all Southerners are in favor of slavery. Some are abolitionists, although they have to tread mighty softly. I contacted some Quaker friends in Charleston. They told me rumor had it that a planter named Labrie had just bought two black men who’d been kidnapped off a boat headed for the Panama crossing. Labrie wasn’t satisfied with his purchase. He complained his new slaves were ‘overeducated’ and didn’t know their place. He said they were so ‘uppity’ they quoted Shakespeare at the drop of a hat. When I heard that, I knew I’d found my boys.

  “I arranged for a rescue. I would have gone myself if I could have, but given their particular situation, I was more likely to end up chopping cotton next to them than setting them free if I did. In short, someone else picked their locks—I’m not naming any names here—nailed them into crates, drove them down to the Charleston docks in the dead of night, and loaded them on a clipper headed for Boston.”

  “They escaped on the Underground Railroad?” Carrie whispers.

  Mrs. Newberry nods.

  “Are you a conductor?”

  “Yes.” She moves closer to Carrie. Putting her lips to Carrie’s ear, she says: “You might as well know it all, Miss Vinton, since it won’t be a secret in this party much longer. My boys and I are headed to Osawatomie Creek to establish a station for slaves fleeing from Missouri.
Reverend Adair and his wife will soon settle there, too. The Adairs and Newberrys worked together in Michigan running slaves over the border to Canada, and in Ohio before that we helped fugitives from Kentucky move farther north. I’ve been South five times, usually accompanied by Mrs. Hulett, who pretends to be my mistress.”

  “You’re very brave.”

  “Brave, am I? Every time I go into a slave state, I’m scared witless. Helping slaves escape is a hanging offense for a white man. Can you imagine what they’d do to a black woman? Mrs. Hulett’s sixty-three and white, but I don’t doubt that they’d shoot her and throw her in some swamp if they discovered she was helping me.”

  She sits back and glares at Prosser and Toussaint. “You show me a man so brave he doesn’t take account of human meanness, and I’ll show you a fool. Am I right, boys?”

  “Yes, Mama,” they say.

  Carrie wonders if she should ask Mrs. Newberry about William. Mrs. Newberry has just come from Michigan, which means she’s unlikely to know anyone living in Lawrence, but she’s an Underground Railroad conductor. She might have heard something. If I do ask her, Carrie thinks, I need to wait until we’re alone. Given that the slavers are offering a hundred-and-fifty-dollar reward for information about William, I’m probably going to have a lot of explaining to do before she’ll trust me.

  At noon the wagons stop beside a creek. White linen tablecloths appear accompanied by elegant wicker picnic baskets. Some of the ladies carry chairs out of the wagons and arrange them in a circle. Jugs of lemonade and unfermented cider are passed around, and the liquids are poured into china teacups temporarily removed from the straw that protects them from breaking. A tall, nearsighted lady from Concord produces a small travel harp and plucks it as the men retreat to the shade of the wagons to smoke, the children play hide-and-seek, and the female emigrants wander arm in arm along the creek exclaiming over the clarity of the water and the size of the fish.

  “Civilization has come to the prairies,” Carrie says to Mrs. Newberry. She is biding her time. Making small talk. They are still not out of earshot of Prosser’s and Toussaint’s wives and children, and it appears they are not likely to be any time soon.

  Mrs. Newberry contemplates the settlers for a moment and shrugs. “They remind me of a flock of chickens waiting for the axe. I just hope they can shoot straight.”

  “Don’t underestimate them. Some are veterans of the Mexican War.”

  “From here they look more like preachers. They’re wearing coats, ties, and stovepipe hats.”

  “You can fight in a stovepipe hat just as easily as in a plainsman’s cap. Take Dr. Robinson for example, the man who picked out the site where Lawrence now stands. I’ve been told he also looks like a preacher, but he held off pro-slavers at gunpoint the very day Lawrence was founded. The newspapers say his motto is ‘suffer and grow strong.’”

  Mrs. Newberry laughs. “Grim, but fitting. Thank you, Miss Vinton. You’ve relieved me of considerable anxiety.

  They chat for a while longer. Then Carrie goes back to the wagon and retrieves her sketchbook and a small spade. Grabbing an apple and a hunk of cheese from the lunch that has been spread out for the travelers beneath a large oak, she walks through the forest, up a limestone bank, over the lip of the wash, and out onto the prairie. Here the grasses tower over her, seven feet high or more, their stems purple and red with hints of green. She cannot see more than a few feet in front of her, and as the wind blows the grasses bend and brush against her arms and cheeks as lightly as the tips of birds’ wings.

  Making herself a nest of sorts, she sits down and watches a monarch butterfly drift from one purple thistle to another. Above her, a stand of sunflowers forms a golden ring. A meadowlark calls and is answered by another, and when she digs her fingers into the earth, she finds it so matted with roots it feels as if it’s been woven into a carpet.

  Pulling out her sketchbook, she stands up again and draws a stem of bluestem grass, known to botanists as Andropogon gerardii. Bluestem is not a rare plant. It grows from Massachusetts to Missouri, but here it grows more luxuriantly than she has ever seen it grow: nine feet tall, with three dense flower clusters at the top that look like a turkey’s foot.

  When she finishes sketching, she picks up the spade, kneels down, and starts to dig up the roots so she can send the entire specimen back to Professor Gray at Harvard. A quarter of an hour later, she is three feet down and still digging. Later she discovers that the roots of a single clump of Kansas bluestem can be more than fifteen feet long.

  She digs for a while longer, and then gives up, chops off the roots, and stares at the result. How is she going to dry and press a plant this big? She will need a piece of mounting paper as long as a roll of wallpaper. And who would have wallpaper in the middle of the wilderness? Why the same people who have harps, crystal glasses, good china, and linen tablecloths.

  Making her way back to the wagons, she buys a roll of wallpaper from Mrs. Arthur Crane of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The paper that was destined for the walls of Mrs. Crane’s cabin is decorated with large pink roses, and as Carrie breaks the stem of the grass into a zigzag pattern and folds it into the paper so it will unfold like an accordion, she hopes Professor Gray will be amused. She decides she will press the plant by putting it between two boards and sitting on it.

  Lunch over, the wagons move on across the prairie, through the grasses, which form a high wall on either side of the trail. Overhead, hawks circle. Once they come upon a buffalo standing in the middle of the road chewing its cud. When the teamsters yell at it and crack their whips, the great beast lumbers off slowly, leaving a space in the grass a buffalo-width wide. Carrie has not expected buffalo to be so big. This one looked powerful enough to tip over their wagon.

  In the late afternoon, they pass two graves set side by side, marked with marble stones. Carrie is surprised to see tombstones in so remote a place, but the teamster driving their wagon tells her that some emigrants to California carry their own grave markers with them.

  “Farther west, the trail is lined with graves,” he says. “Children and women, mostly, but a good scattering of men, too. And such stuff as you wouldn’t believe: barrels, ploughs, pianos, trunks full of fancy suits and ball dresses, clocks, carpets, perambulators, tin bathtubs, fiddles, whole sets of china, more books than a fellah could read in a lifetime. There ain’t a thing known to man that ain’t scattered along the gold routes. Folks just give up and give out. Cholera takes ‘em, or the oxen die, or they just cain’t stand it no more, so they lighten up the wagon, throw things out. They starve, too. Crazy thing to starve when there’s buffalo to be had, but starve they do. And freeze and die of the heat. Not all as sets out for California gets there.”

  This is a sobering thought, and as the graves disappear into the tall grass, Carrie finds herself wondering how many of her fellow passengers will be alive six months from now.

  “Winter,” the teamster continues, “now that’s the worst. Blizzards come howling down from the north and the frost gets so thick you could use it as window glass. Take a breath and the inside of yer nose freezes. Go out to the necessary, and you can’t find your way back. Many a man’s frozen to death less than a hundred yards from his own cabin. Last time I was in Lawrence, they was still livin’ in tents. I don’t mean teepees like the Indians live in. Teepees’ll stand up to the wind. I mean little canvas tents not fit for hogs.” He pauses. “Say miss, I ain’t scaring you, am I?”

  “No, I’ve seen worse,” Carrie tells him, but secretly she wonders if she has.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As Carrie walks beside the wagon, the night smell of the prairie rises up around her, sweet and dry, perfumed with the scent of grass and flowers. To her right, the oxen plod along with a muffled clopping sound that reminds her of coconut shells being softly clapped together. On his perch, the teamster is asleep and snoring. In the grass, crickets hum and fireflies give off bursts of light. Everything else is lost in the silence of wilderness, s
leep, or exhaustion.

  At noon it was over one hundred degrees, so they are taking advantage of what relief night has brought to push on toward Lawrence. To amuse herself, Carrie is silently reciting the names of the wildflowers she has identified so far. Clover, blue-eyed grass, mullein, milkweed, black-eyed Susan, oxalis, ironweed, asters of all kinds, lespedeza, goldenrod, poppy, sunflower, coreopsis coneflower . . .

  She comes to the end of the list and goes back to the beginning, turning the names into a chant that moves in time to her footsteps. Most of the plants are not in bloom this time of year, so she has had to identify them by their leaves. This has not been particularly difficult. They all grow in Indiana and Kentucky as well as in Kansas, so their names have come back to her like a foreign language she has not spoken since childhood.

  Clover, blue-eyed grass, mullein, milkweed—

  Waking up with a start, the teamster jerks on the reins to restrain the oxen who have suddenly taken it into their heads to gallop, or at least to do what an ox might consider a gallop, although it strikes Carrie as more of a disorganized lumbering.

  “Whoa!” he yells. All the oxen in the train are now hurrying forward as if wolves are at their heels. Carrie runs to catch up and arrives just in time to see the teamster jerk the beasts back to a slow walk. Whitehorn snorts and Brock looks sideways at Carrie as if hoping she’ll intervene.

  “What’s gotten into them?” she asks.

  “Trout’s,” the teamster says as he slips his whip back in the whip holder. “I reckon they’re hungry.”

  “The oxen eat trout?”

  The teamster guffaws and spits a mouthful of tobacco juice between the traces. “No, miss. Oxen don’t eat nothin’ but hay and corn and such, but there’s a place up ahead run by a Mr. Everett Trout. Trout has what some calls a travelers’ hotel, although I’d call it more of a saloon. Not that Trout himself touches a drop of whiskey. The man’s as sober as a Methodist preacher. Farms about a hundred acres of corn, has a store where he sells kegs of nails and salt and calico and such, buys skins and hides if they’re in good condition. Everyone who travels the California Road has got to pass by Trout’s Hotel. Why, it’s a famous landmark.”