A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

John looked at his animals, one by one.

  Time of Louis Catorze, said the stableman as he accepted ten dollars for the cart. Most here head for the gold, he said. Used ta be fur for trade. Beaver’s what dis part was built upon.

  John studied the hooves of Gina’s pony. She needs to be shod, he said.

  The old Kansa village, the liveryman went on, and the Pawnee. Hides, ya know. Buflo robes. Out here’s necessity for a night’s sleep. He patted the pony. Wanta sell er?

  Can’t.

  Beads, mirrors, guns, and that. Wen on for years but now de Anglish trap on dare land…take it without a word a tanks. He shook his head. Not like us.

  John’s heart was barely beating. Every piece of him ached.

  An we got eight hunerd fired up Lawrence just this spring. Burn down de govnor house. Set canon to de hotel and stores so dey got ta sell out of tents, no church, no place for a guest. A shock ta them come out from Boston ta free up nigras.

  John asked about shoeing the pony and added that he desired to sleep in her stall overnight.

  The old stableman was apparently prepared for anything.

  71

  She paddled twenty-five miles or perhaps thirty north and then east to a confluence with the La Moine with the Native people along the way offering directions and food. These people lived in small clusters because the tribes had been moved southwest to Indian country but the Illinois tribe hung on in spots, sharing their calumet pipes with the Delaware woman and the runaway slave along with their melons and beans. Gifts of Nanapush, the woman explained to Bry. Word was that the Sioux in Nebraska had killed a white family and it was said around fires at night that there would be reprisals and the fires were quickly smothered at the slightest unrecognized sound after dark. Bry was surprised by these successful, communal lives, and surprised by the small white enclaves they also passed, which were haphazard and ugly. He had passed no communities of any kind until he was taken off to market to be sold to Mister Spradling for a mere four hundred dollars, but now, in the canoe, the Delaware woman spoke of Indian troubles with whites and he tried to understand her unusual English over birdsong and the whirr of bugs and sometimes the sound of trees being logged and groaning like injured giants. The wilderness was not pristine, it was busy with hunters and trappers and loggers and Indian fighters. On rare occasions, when the river was quiet, Bry talked back to the birds, red-tailed hawk his favorite, that sharp, single scream. He thought of the birdman as he paddled, one two, one two, adjusting his weight on his knees. He thought about a white man coming down from the North to talk to a room full of woebegone slaves who were hungry and sick and angry and always exhausted, a man distributing compasses and roughly drawn maps that included mistakes or neglected to mention the direction of a river’s current. He thought of a man describing a black woman who had carried a baby to Canada. Then it was hard to avoid the thought of himself as an unwanted thing abandoned by that woman when she ran away. He kept all these thoughts to himself because discussion with the Delaware woman was tiring and the farther they went the more tumult he felt as the land on either side of the river was pretty here and pretty there but sometimes broken or burned or bare. It was ground he didn’t touch unless they stopped to defecate or eat or sleep, although once they stopped in a place inhabited by a Sauk group arguing over a treaty the government had made with the Yankton Dakota. Here, the Delaware woman was given no welcome, although the part in her hair was red like theirs. At this place, the Sauk gave her only a handful of beans and told her to be on her way.

  One night in the small tent mashed up against the woman, Bry dreamed of Jemima and he woke cold because dreaming of the dead is a sign. He pulled the shared blanket around more of himself and lay there remembering the smooth skin of Jemima’s belly stretched over his own conceived child. Bry could not sleep and the Delaware woman woke to his restlessness and told him something about her mother, most of which he couldn’t understand. He listened though, and came to believe that mother and daughter had stayed on a plot of land in Missouri they’d claimed when the Delaware left for a reserve in Kansas Territory. Sometime later her father and brother went to Ontario, but her mother refused to go north, where it was cold and dark a long part of the year. Later she met a trapper and left for Wyoming with him.

  Bry repeated some of this story in order to understand it but she next told him about a beaver who tried to marry her. A man in a beaver hat? He thought she was mixing up English words. Time meant only more or less heat, more or less damp, more or less hunger or tiredness, and they sat in silence after the story of the beaver until he heard her laughing about what she understood as his mistake. Not me, she said, clapping a hand on her mouth. This a story we tell about a girl and a beaver, crazy Jack!

  Bry turned, twisting his mouth into a smile.

  You tell, she said.

  He told her that he was born to a girl whose grandmother came from Africa. The girl was taught by her grandmother to heal the sick with plants. The grandmother, he added, was taught about those plants by a Cherokee woman, both of them slaves. Bry said: That is my story. He was happy that night, and the next morning they got back in the big half-tree and went on paddling until they discovered an empty cabin some distance from the river where they might eat and sleep in real shelter. The fireplace was cold and there was a smell of rot in the corner but they were glad of the roof and they spread the blanket out on the sagging floor and built a fire with logs that had been left as if to welcome them. With the rifle under his right arm, Bry stepped out into just enough light to catch the flash of a rabbit’s tail or the sight of a squirrel rounding a nearby tree. He had never used a gun, but he was bound to make use of the stone fireplace and his sudden sense of tenderness for the woman whose gruel he disliked along with her unpleasant pemmican. Even so, she had fed him. She had coated his skin with bear grease. She had steered their course. Now he would provide, although he was not sure that the gun had a bullet or powder inside and he shook it lightly. Then he crept along holding it up to one eye and peering through the sight. The woods were light-featured, late sun coming down through the leaves, and when he listened, he heard a bird call and saw a whirr of brown feathers and held the gun up to the fancy display of a turkey in the bush and as he fired he heard a shattering scream and he spun around to see a white man holding the Delaware woman, both of them startled by the gunshot, both of them wild-eyed. Let her go! Bry yelled, forgetting the turkey and everything else. The white man was shouting, saying she’d eaten the brains of a live cow. He pulled her against him, holding a knife to her throat, and the woman said something in her language and Bry stepped out with his rifle still raised. Let go! Bry said. Leave my woman alone.

  The white man said: Well, it’s a nigger, looka here. And then he put the woman between them and Bry had the sensation of enduring something that was already old.

  Let go my woman, he said clearly. It was falling dark and he seemed to be standing next to himself, unbelieving.

  Sioux bitch eats cow brains fore it’s kilt.

  Take your hands off her! She’s Delaware. He felt no fear, which was the wonder of it. He felt insatiable.

  A cow was tooken and she gets scalped.

  The woman was shaking her head violently, although her captor had hold of her hair.

  But she’s Delaware, Bry said, rifle held and aimed.

  Same thing and you a runaway don’t need no murder to pay for, I bet.

  Bry stood in the dark that had fallen on them.

  We get a posse up, the white man promised, but he dropped his hands, one from the hair and one holding the knife, and then backed away into the obstruction of trees. A few minutes later a horse could be heard blowing and snorting: leather and metal and male curses.

  Bry and the woman packed up and got into the dugout and paddled hard in the night over rocks and logs and unseen interruptions. My woman! she repeated and laughed and reached forward and patted his back.

  My slave! he said.

  For sleep,
they stopped and felt their way in the dark and erected the tent and had nothing to eat. Maybe the turkey had flown away or maybe it lay wounded or dead. They went on the next day past Peoria and skirted it very carefully, the river having become so wide and open that the dugout canoe was visible to anyone on either side. Native woman and black man paddling through white people’s land that had once housed the Kickapoo, now gone so thoroughly that only scattered evidence of their past lives remained, bits of bone, broken baskets, and a scalp tied to a stick showing remnants of dried blood.

  They went east then through a series of channels and through small settlements that depended on those waters. The paddling was harder than before but there was little portaging and the waters were full of fish. Bry, who had never liked the taste of such creatures, learned to eat perch and pickerel blackened by fire because the woman was adept at catching them, wading into the lapping water, standing like stone, plunging at the necessary moment. The land where they rested was covered by maple and elm festooned by wild grape and bittersweet, the rocky beaches home to shore birds and gulls. But any crossing of land was a misery. The half-tree was heavy and had to be unloaded before it was carried. The two would get out, unpack the canoe completely, leave the woman’s bundle hanging on the branch of a tree, and take the canoe on their shoulders. The Delaware woman’s shoulders were padded with the blanket. She was supple while Bry was stiff in his legs and knees. The bundle would hang for an hour or two or three and when they returned to the site, it would have to be carried by means of a leather strap on her forehead. The woman seemed not to mind this task but there were long water detours in order not to carry the hollow tree. It was colder now and in the bright mornings the woods were full of creatures pattering and clicking over frosted leaves. Porcupines crept along bristling. Bears could be heard breaking boughs to line winter dens. Falcons. Eagles. Swans overhead. The waters were crusted with ducks and geese. Beaver and muskrats left wakes on the surface and sometimes there was ice to be broken, very thin, on cold mornings. On the fortieth day of their journey, they had their first sight of white pine wedded with maple and Bry looked down at the water where those pretty trees broke into ripples. Once, a bull moose stepped into the reflection and Bry was afraid until he remembered the running deer and thought of the duty of men and went on paddling.

  After so many days, the sight of an immense, unending sea made everything small again. It was an astonishment of water and how did they dare to bring their hollow log onto such an expanse with its high, splashing waves? They dragged the canoe over sand dunes, lost their footing on rocks at the shore, and Bry remembered that the promised land is to come after the parted water, and when they plunged in, they were swamped for a minute but they paddled on, finding a different beat. They paddled all day and slept in the log boat while it floated aimlessly toward the east. Then they paddled on for another long day and when they found the mouth of the St. Joseph River they were too tired and stiff to haul the boat up to land. They were too tired to unfold the tent. They were too tired to eat. The east side of the lake had a wide, sandy shore and they lay on it and scratched at bites made by fleas that lived in the sand and they wrapped themselves in the blanket and went to sleep folded together.

  Around them the next morning was a swamp and one or the other paddler had to stand in order to find leverage with a paddle as they moved through mist and heard toads sing their final songs. They passed the old landing place of Fort Miami. They passed through the town of St. Joseph as if they had business elsewhere. They passed like old voyageurs lifting their hands to signal friendship when they saw other boats. Bry had devised a hooded cape. No fear, the Delaware woman said, you are my slave.

  My woman, Bry said with his grin.

  They had been paddling for forty-five days and the rests at night were never adequate but the St. Joseph River was wide as it dipped south around Great Bend, which they avoided, lifting hands again in friendship and speeding on. They were not in the state of Indiana for more than four days but there was word of a sweep being made for runaway slaves. The Indiana River flows east as a tributary of the Maumee, which flows east into Lake Erie and, back in Michigan again, they paddled along a short railway line and the woman dared Bry to take his chances as a stowaway. They had jokes now that suited them.

  Then, on a clear and chilly day, after three weeks of peering and straining eastward, Bry saw the land of freedom across a divide of water. There was no way to avoid the city of Detroit where, unknown to Bry, the City Bank of New York had placed a team of three slave catchers to seek out the men and women John had illegally freed as well as the ones who had earlier escaped, slaves mortgaged in return for Benjamin’s loan. Those human beings were valued at seven thousand dollars, all proceeds of sale to go to the bank.

  72

  As they left Independence, John went into the gentlemen’s cabin of the John A Lucas. It would not take long to get to St. Jo, where he would be earthbound again and he was sure that Patton would be there because he had not been anywhere else. Or Patton may have joined the thieving, deadly bushwhackers and be wearing a hood and carrying out raids, but John could not believe such a thing of his son, who was only mischievous, never mean. John had slept two nights in the stable, terrified that the horse or pony or mule would be stolen by some unscrupulous Missouri thief. Now, in the men’s salon of the John A Lucas, he was offered a cheroot. The rules of the boat forbade smoking because of the boilers, but John sat down with two men who had arranged themselves on upholstered chairs. They were beyond rules now, these survivors. They were worn down and disillusioned, impoverished by the shipwreck, failing in any known version of themselves. They had been on the Arabia, had lost everything to the river they were riding so precariously, had got ears for the sound of a tree branch scraping and piercing the hull of a boat and, with their throats, uttered unmanly screams. John took a light and sat back to peer through the portholes at a line of healthy trees and sound buildings on the east side of the river and a treeless, desolate bank on the west side. Kansas. Territory of. Settlers on the Kansas side got burned out regularly, the fellow smoker said, when John coughed and expressed surprise. He told then of devils like Atchison, who brought ruffians in from Missouri to rid the land of Free Staters whenever there was an election. He said that John Brown himself had arrived in Kansas, bringing Missouri slaves through Lawrence and into Iowa and up to Canada. It riled the Missourians but it riled Free Staters as well.

  Why’s that?

  We came out here to build up towns and churches and schools. The proslavers take our quiet disposition for cowardice and Captain Brown and his hooligans feel the same way. He’s determined to start a war out here whether we like it or not.

  It ain’t as if the Negro cun survive without us or us without them, another gentleman, sitting with his feet up on a stool, said philosophically. The last outpost of civilization has been passed, he added. I believe we will look back on it with regret.

  So they were a mixed lot of men, but the topic of regret had begun to bore John, who did not think he could add to his store of it. In the Tennessee forest, he had pondered his sorrows with a whole heart. He had wondered if he’d been wrong to release his workers unprotected into a battling world. He had left Emly defenseless to predation in spite of his vow to protect her. His sincerest promise. He’d sent his eldest son into the unknown without guidance of any kind. In St. Louis he’d frightened away and lost his younger son. On the Missouri he had lost everything else, every hammer and nail, every plate and cup. His wife was now a stranger to him and he shifted in his chair and looked out at the burned riverbank, black in the twilight, a world without a speck of color in it. What do you know of St. Jo? he asked.

  The smoker looked glum. Home of the ruffians plaguing us on the K.T. side is what. Proslavers one and all. Stay out of it.

  John wondered if the speaker had detected his Virginia accent. He thought not and was glad.

  The other man said: John Brown and his boys hacked to death s
ome folks down at Pottawatomie Creek. Or Osawatomie. I forget. One of them places. Killed em over nothin but sittin where they sat. The whole area’s runnin blood. Folks ain’t got the sense God gave em out here.

  We got knocked down in Lawrence, said the smoker. Near wiped off the map. Before every election, thousands of bushwhackers cross the border stuffing ballot boxes for slavery. Then the government approves the election and they make it illegal to even speak out a word against slavery, with the threat of death if we disobey. We plow with a gun in one hand, I swear, in case of a sudden militia or gang of hooligans round the bend. We bring our cows inside at night for their safety or we find nothin but ground beef the next day.

  I heard is, there wasn’t a mite of resistance on that occasion in Lawrence. From your Emigrant Aid Society, said the second man.

  The Lawrence resident muttered: I think we disproved that bit of bull when we took Fort Franklin and got our cannon back. Meanwhile bands of idiots ride across Kansas burning our cabins to the ground and they’ve blockaded this very river, sir! Were you informed of that? In Lawrence we have two thousand hungry settlers with not so much as a sack of flour and we mean to put an end to it! The Missouri boys are starving us. Look what they did to Palmyra! You’ll see its burned-down ruins when we pass.

  John looked through the westside porthole again, wondering about Patton, who might have got caught up in dangerous shenanigans like fighting John Brown. He listened to the story of the proslavers’ raid on Palmyra, Kansas, and remembered that Patton had instructions to stay on the Missouri side, but his eldest could be hot-headed to such a degree that he might well have joined other young men of like temperament and where would that take him? John decided he had been worse than foolish to send his son out here to buy land on a battleground.

  When the dinner bell rang, he stubbed out his cigar and joined his family in the galley, but he pondered what he had heard. He must get to St. Jo and stay there until he found Patton. The engines had been cut and the small side wheels slowed. A group had gathered at the captain’s table and John and his family joined them. Would they spend the night aboard? Lavina asked the captain. Weren’t they close to St. Jo by now?