The Widow's War

by Mary Mackey

  William picks up the buffalo robe, gives it a shake, and folds it over his arm. He is about to bend over to retrieve his guns, when Carrie puts her hand on his arm. “Listen,” she says. “What’s that?”

  They listen and hear the drumming of hoofbeats. Looking east, they see a dark smudge on the horizon growing larger by the second. The smudge divides into five, six—perhaps seven—men on horseback. The riders are whipping their horses, urging them forward with all possible speed.

  “Travelers?”

  “Not at this time of day, not at a full gallop. Stay here. Hide in the grass. Don’t come out where they can see you.” Throwing down the buffalo robe, William scoops up his guns and runs toward the hotel.

  “Border ruffians!” he yells.

  Carrie has never heard the term, but she instantly understands it means pro-slavers come over the border from Missouri. Crouching down, she parts the grass and sees William pounding on the door of the hotel.

  “Trout, wake up! Gentlemen, arm yourselves!”

  A few moments later, the riders gallop up in a cloud of dust. One leaps off his horse and points a pistol at William’s head. The man wears a flannel shirt, broad-brimmed felt hat, tall boots, a fringed buckskin jacket, and buckskin leggings with beadwork up the sides. He’s blond with a red beard: Irish or maybe German.

  “You slave-stealing, abolitionist sonofabitch!” he yells as he advances on William. “I should shoot you where you stand, but I ain’t got time for it. Throw down your guns and surrender the fugitives.”

  “What fugitives?” William’s pistols are pointed at the man’s chest. Can one of them shoot the other before getting shot? Carrie scrambles around looking for something to use as a weapon, but all she comes up with is a rock. William should have left her one of his guns. What if they recognize him as the man described in the wanted poster?

  “You know damn well what fugitives! We got warrants to repossess three males slaves that go by the names of Bilander, Cush, and Marcellus, all legal property of one Amos Hawkins, and you’re concealing them in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act.”

  “What are their last names?”

  “They ain’t got no last names, damn it! They’re slaves.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “We know you got Hawkins’s property,” another rider says. “Hand ’em over, or there’s gonna be one less abolitionist bastard voting come election time.”

  “Trout!” a third rider yells, “open your damn door right now or we’ll break it down!”

  The door of the hotel opens and the barrel of a shotgun emerges. Behind it stands Mr. Trout. “Go back to Missouri, boys,” Trout says. “We ain’t got no runaway slaves in here, and if you’ll look up, you’ll see why breakin’ down my door is a mighty poor idea.”

  The raiders look up. At each of the six second-story windows stands a New England abolitionist with a gun. Most wear the long underwear they were sleeping in when awakened, but one has slipped into a suit coat and another has put on a top hat. In the light of day, it’s clear Trout’s is constructed to serve as a fortress. The windows are narrow with heavy shutters that can be slammed shut, and there must be a hatch somewhere because more armed men stand on the roof.

  “Damn yer eyes!” yells the leader of the Missourians. “Y’all brought a whole army out from Massachusetts!”

  “We reckon we got a right to defend ourselves,” Trout says.

  “You treasonous bastards are in violation of the laws of the United States of America!”

  “And proud of it,” William says. Carrie is afraid this remark is going to get him shot, but the man in the buckskin jacket merely spits a mouthful of tobacco juice on the ground and glares at him and then at Mr. Trout.

  “Trout, we know you’re harboring them fugitive slaves, but you got us outgunned. You damn well better keep a bucket of water handy, because someday soon we’re gonna come back and burn you out.” He gestures to the other raiders. “Come on, boys.”

  They ride off, but apparently they don’t go far, because as the teamsters are hitching up the oxen and the emigrants are climbing into the wagons, another smudge appears on the horizon. This one is long and gray with dirty yellow borders, and it brings with it the smell of smoke.

  “Prairie fire!” shriek the New England ladies. Gathering up their children, they start to head for the creek, but Mr. Trout stops them.

  “No need, ladies. The fools got the wind wrong.” And sure enough, the flames that were meant to burn Trout’s Hotel sweep by without touching it. Still the fire is an alarming sight. The red, crackling inferno moves faster than a horse can gallop, driving animals out of the grass. Carrie sees soot-covered rabbits running for their lives, deer, a small herd of buffalo.

  “Buffalo fur burns right slow,” Mr. Trout remarks, “which is why they ain’t runnin’ full out.” He is standing beside Carrie picking his teeth with an ivory toothpick. “This is a pissant fire as fires go. I cleared a firebreak around this place last spring. About all this blaze is gonna do is clear a bigger break, so those Missouri bastards—saving your presence, Miz Vinton—can’t try this particular trick again for at least a year.”

  Marching down a gully, the fire finally puts itself out in the creek, leaving a black swath of burned-out prairie in its wake. Such a waste, Carrie thinks, but when she voices this sentiment to Mr. Trout, he grins.

  “No use getting’ upset about a prairie fire, unless it burns down your house or takes your crops. The Indians light ’em all the time to clear the brush. Makes hunting easier. Of course a big one, well that’s another matter. You get in the way of a big fire racin’ across the prairie, and you’ll go deaf from the roar of it, if you don’t choke yourself sick or burn to a crisp first.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Trout. I find the idea of burning to a crisp very encouraging.”

  Trout nods and says without a trace of irony: “Yer welcome, ma’am.”

  Again the wagons prepare to leave, but there is still another surprise in store, for when the fire has burned itself out completely, three figures emerge from the charred grass so covered with mud and soot that for a few seconds it’s impossible to tell if they’re male or female.

  “You Bilander, Cush, and Marcellus?” Trout yells.

  “Yes, sir,” the tallest of the three yells back.

  “Well come on in and wash up.”

  The last Carrie sees of the three fugitive slaves, they’re being handed pans of water and soap by Mr. Trout’s Yankee cook.

  Of course, I already know how they escaped,” Carrie says, “not to mention why they chose to sleep out in the open last night instead of bedding down in the hotel where they might be trapped and retaken, but I’ll hold my tongue and ask no questions.” She is riding beside William on a mule, Trout not having had a horse to rent, and as a result they are moving slowly in the wake of the wagon train.

  William flicks her a sideways glance and grins. “You ever hear the term ‘jayhawk,’ sweetheart?”

  “No, I can’t say that I have.”

  “Well, you should learn it because you just married one.”

  “What’s a jayhawk?”

  “A mythological bird that sneaks like a jay and pounces like a hawk.”

  “I take it that the jayhawk is the only bird that can ride a horse, shoot a gun, steal slaves out of Missouri, and vote in a territorial election?”

  “The only.”

  The wind picks up, and the tall sunflowers that line the road begin to sway. The grass rustles as if an invisible army is marching along beside them. The dust from the wagons rises and is tinted by the light of the setting sun. Some of the dust goes into Carrie’s mouth and eyes. Some turns as gold as the centers of the sunflowers; some as pale and red as blood.

  Carrie laughs and kicks her mule forward toward Lawrence and whatever is coming next.

  PART 4

  The Siege of Lawrence

  William

  Lawrence, Kansas, November 1854

  You are sleep
ing on a grass-stuffed pallet under a pile of buffalo robes: your mouth slightly open, your head turned to one side, your hair spread out on the pillow like a golden net. I want to walk over to you, bury my face in your hair, smell the sweetness of it, kiss you awake, and plead with you to take better care of yourself, but I can no more control you than I can control the wind that blows across Kansas tonight like the breath of an angry god.

  It’s a cold wind that smells of snow. Winter is arriving. I want to keep you warm and safe, but you will have none of it. You’re the same wild girl I knew when I was a boy—just as stubborn, just as unpredictable.

  You insisted on working side by side with me as we built our house. You lifted boards out of the wagon and nailed them to the studs, cut grass and tied it into bundles so we could thatch the roof, then climbed up on the roof and helped me with the thatching. When the walls were up, you mixed up a paste from flour and water and papered the inside with old copies of The Herald of Freedom and The Kansas Free State, joking that this abolitionist wallpaper would not only keep out the wind but give us something to read on long winter nights.

  Even after we bought a stove, you refused to sit in front of it knitting baby clothes. Instead, you cut up one of your dresses and sewed the curtains that hang at our windows, braided a rag rug for our floor, made a broom out of prairie grass, searched out herbs and traded them for buckets and books and butter molds. One day while I was out tending to a patient, you put up shelves for my medical texts. Then you began to study them.

  You have a talent for healing. Already you’ve learned how to set dislocated shoulders, splint broken limbs, and pick buckshot out of human flesh. You are amazing, my love. You never stop working. I admire your energy, yet sometimes I’m afraid it’s fueled by fear. You tell me you will not lose this baby as you lost Willa, that you carry the child high, that you are healthy and in love and that our love will protect you. I wish I believed this, but tonight when I look at you, I feel such a grasping in my throat that I can hardly breathe. I have seen too many women die in childbirth to believe anything short of divine grace can protect them, and I am not sure I believe in divine grace.

  Do you? I can’t tell. You go to church every Sunday and sing the hymns as loudly as anyone, but I think that you mostly do it to defy public opinion. You and I are a scandal. Only Mrs. Crane comes to visit you, and even men occasionally cross to the other side of the street when they see us coming.

  Dearest Carrie, I’m afraid for you. Lawrence is an abolitionist town surrounded by slavers who would like to see it burned to the ground. Trouble is coming; it’s simply a matter of time. I know that when the raiders attack, you’ll insist on putting yourself at risk. I can’t forbid you to do this. I can’t nail up the windows and doors and imprison you. If I tried, you’d simply escape, and I’d never try.

  I’ve known you too long to underestimate you. You’ll always do what you want to do. You always have. But take care of yourself, I beg you. I lost you once. I couldn’t bear to lose you again.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Savannah, Georgia, November 1854

  In early September, a violent hurricane had struck Savannah, wiping out bridges, killing slaves on the barrier islands, and endangering the city. On the day the storm made landfall, the sky became a green-black cauldron, the wind wailed like a demon, roofs blew off the warehouses that lined Factors Walk, and thousands of dollars’ worth of cotton was pummeled into a sodden, unsalvageable mess. Now, in early November, the fall storms are over, the temperature is in the high seventies, and in Oglethorpe Square in the parlor of a private home where the Marquis de Lafayette once occupied an upstairs bedroom, Senator Bennett Presgrove is red-faced and sweating from an hour and a half of almost uninterrupted oration.

  Bennett has been traveling through the South for nearly a month now on a speaking tour that has taken him to Nashville, Memphis, Richmond, Petersburg, Birmingham, Mobile, New Orleans, Charleston, and nearly every other Southern city with a population over fifteen thousand. He has even spoken in the newly founded town of Atlanta because his train stopped there unexpectedly.

  The subject of Bennett’s speech this afternoon is ostensibly States’ Rights, by which he means the right of the citizens of Georgia to resist the federal government by any means necessary, including joining with other slave states to form a new nation. But the meat of his topic—the real reason he is dripping with sweat, mopping his brow, and waxing eloquent—is Kansas. The first territorial election is about to occur—not the one that will decide if Kansas joins the Union free or slave, but an important election, nevertheless; one that will select Kansas’s first delegate to Congress.

  “Gentlemen,” Bennett says, “we cannot let this election slip through our fingers! We must send John W. Whitfield to Washington.” He pauses and looks intently at his audience. They are the usual mix of merchants, professional men, exporters, and slave owners from the rice and cotton plantations. Sixty some years ago Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin not more than twelve miles from where he now stands. Cotton has made Savannah one of the most important ports in the South. It is planted by slaves, cultivated by slaves, and harvested by slaves. Slaves gin it; slaves bale it; slaves carry it onto the ships that transport it to the mills of England and New England. A strong, healthy male slave between the ages of fourteen and thirty-three is currently selling for as much as $700 with some bringing as much as $1500.

  For reasons he does not care to acknowledge openly, Bennett knows these prices right down to the penny. For the last ten years he and Deacon have been smuggling slaves into the United States from Africa and Brazil in defiance of federal law. Presgrove ships always carry legitimate cargo—sacks of refined sugar, bolts of cloth, casks of rum—but before they off-load these goods at U.S. ports, they stop at the Southern barrier islands and off-load their human cargo in the dead of night.

  Slave smuggling is a very profitable business and not particularly dangerous. Thanks to the high death rate of native-born slave children, there is always a labor shortage on the larger plantations. When rich, powerful men are eager to buy your goods, you are not likely to find yourself charged with a crime. In fact, at this very moment some of Bennett’s best customers are sitting right in front of him. He knows the exact worth of their slaves, which means he also knows exactly how much they stand to lose if the abolitionists triumph.

  He lets the silence gather. The grandfather clock in the corner chimes the quarter hour. Outside a carriage rolls by.

  “Do y’all know what the Yankees are up to?” he says. “Have y’all any idea what nefarious schemes they have concocted in the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of New York and Boston? Well, gentlemen, let me show you.”

  He reaches for a string, gives a dramatic tug, and unrolls a map that has been fastened to the parlor wall over the protests of the mistress of the house. It’s the same map Carrie consulted, but it has been scribbled over, altered, and brought up to date by Bennett himself.

  Seizing his gold-headed walking stick, he points to the great, rose-colored oblong of the Kansas Territory. “See here where the Indians are said to dwell? Well, cross them out, gentlemen. We’ve driven most of them off. They’re either going, gone, penned in reservation, or dying. Smallpox and pneumonia have done our work for us. You won’t find any wagon trains burning in Kansas these days, but what you will find is savages—Yankee savages—a whole army of them, gentlemen, a damnable army of New England abolitionists streaming into the territory like vultures coming down on a dead mule. Y’all know what they’ve done? Well, look here.” Again he raps the map with his stick.

  “Here’s Kickapoo, Lecompton, Atchison, and Leavenworth—good southern, pro-slave towns mostly founded by boys from Missouri. But here’s Osawatomie. An abolitionist rats’ nest, gentlemen. A vermin-harboring, slave-stealing town that will vote to bring Kansas into the Union as a free state, and then vote to take away your God-given right to own slaves.

  “And what’s worse than Osawatomie? What’s the carbun
cle on the face of freedom that should be burned down and sown with salt? Lawrence. The name turns my stomach, gentlemen. I hate to even utter it. It’s not a normal city. It’s an abomination: an entire New England village brought out to the prairie piece by piece.

  “I have a map of it, drawn up by men who sympathize with our cause. I reckon I don’t have to explain why I posses such a map. The honorable gentlemen of Savannah have a long history of military service. Why right here, not more than a few blocks away, stands a cemetery filled with the graves of heroes of the first Revolutionary War.”

  He leans forward, smiles, and lowers his voice. “I say the first Revolutionary War because I believe there’s going to be a second. Yes, a second. But more of that later in private over cigars and whiskey.” Straightening up, he resumes speaking in a normal tone.

  “As y’all know, when y’all are contemplatin’ a siege, you got to know the lay of the land.” Reaching up, he draws down another, smaller map.

  “This is Lawrence, Kansas, gentlemen. As of the first of August of this year, it consisted of about fifteen tents and had a population of thirty or so abolitionist squatters. Now look at it. This is Lawrence as of three weeks ago. The Yankees have surveyed the prairie and are selling off land to emigrants who are leaving Massachusetts in packs to the sound of hymns and trumpets.”

  “They’ve brought out an entire sawmill in pieces and set it up on the bank of the Kaw River. Right this very minute, it’s churning out milled lumber faster than shit goes through a goose. The Yankees brought printing presses with them and are already publishing two abolitionist newspapers. No, I misspoke. They came with the first editions of those inflammatory, traitorous rags already printed up and ready for distribution. They’re making barrels and wagons, nails, and guns. Well, they don’t have to make too many guns since the New England abolitionists are arming them to the teeth. I hear tell they even got mortars.