Daughter of the Sword

by Jeanne Williams

  “Johnny!” Sara wailed and looked imploringly at Deborah.

  It wasn’t necessary. Deborah had washed her parents, then helped put them to rest the first time in earth near their home. And she’d rather keep Thos in her mind as she’d seen him last, riding away, intent on adventure. This way, he would never seem quite dead; it would lack the brutal finality of seeing him coffined and in the grave.

  Strange. Horrible as it was, she could not have believed her parents dead without seeing them so, would have remained joined to them. This way, cruel as it was, she’d have to come to terms with and finally accept their deaths. Even in her grief, she dimly sensed that remembering Thos as alive and simply gone was no serious threat to her sense of reality.

  He was her twin, as nearly herself as any human could ever be. In a physical sense he would survive in her, and that was comforting. But she’d never depended on Thos as she had on the man and woman who had made her with love and bodies, shaped her with their minds and hearts. She must manage now without them. To do that, she had to know she could no longer turn to them.

  “Thank you, Johnny,” she said now. “But I’ve buried them once. I don’t want to do it again, in front of a lot of people.”

  Searching her face, Johnny’s frown cleared. He gave his massive head a nod and turned his paint.

  Laddie had coffee ready and the household was soon settled around the table. To her surprise, Deborah was hungry. For the first time since the disaster, food smelled good, not disgusting. She had a fried egg and mush with milk and honey. She still wasn’t up to the crisped side meat everyone else devoured with relish, except for Sara, who had only a little mush.

  Now that there was a chance to study her friend, Deborah was worried. Sara’s usually warm, high color was dulled. Her eyes were deeply shadowed and her thin face, always angular, now looked bony. Of course, she’d only yesterday learned about Thos.

  A marvel that she’d been able to make plans, carry them out. We must watch out for her, Deborah thought. Push her to eat in a few days if her appetite doesn’t pick up.

  Johnny, too, was watching Sara, heavy brows knit. At last, as if discarding several things he wanted to say, he sighed and pushed back from the table. “Got to get at that busted wagon wheel,” he said. “We’re not goin’ to need dinner, so why don’t you gals have a rest? Tonight we’ll talk over what Deborah wants to do. I’ve got one idea that I think is pretty good.”

  He went out with Maccabee and Laddie. The three young women began clearing the table. “Why don’t you stay here and keep out of sight like I do?” asked Judith.

  “If Rolf comes back, this’ll be the first place he looks,” Deborah said. “He’s already warned me, and he has money to hire bushwackers. I can’t bring that down on you.”

  Sarah put her arms around Deborah and laid her cheek against hers. “What I have, from food to life, is yours. But I think we needn’t worry. If Johnny says his thought is good, it is.”

  Certainly it was unexpected. As they ate supper that night, stew with hot biscuits, in the kitchen warmed by the fireplace as well as the cookstove, Johnny passed his big bowl to Sara for another helping and looked across the table at Deborah. “Lass, you have a place under my roof. You know that.”

  Deborah nodded. “But Rolf—”

  “Reckon I can clean that young whelp’s plow any time he tries settin’ it down in my territory,” snorted Johnny. “I’ll be kiln-dried if I see how a man like Dane got a brother like that, but I guess it started with Cain!” He took a bite of stew so hot it burned his tongue, yelled, “Cesli tatanka!,” and then apologized. “Good stew,” he told Sara. “Rich and strong with onions and buffalo meat. But I better let it cool a mite.”

  His charcoal-colored eyes turned to Deborah and probed deep. “I want you to know you can come here any time. When I can’t defend my place against the likes of that gold-haired fooforraw, I’ll douse my forge and throw my hammer into the Kaw! I know you gals think a lot of one another, and that’s a consolation at times like this. But I’ve studied it hard, and it seems to me you’d do best for a while in a new place with new people, somewhere that you wouldn’t hear pro-slave or Free Soil every other word.”

  Deborah stiffened. “I won’t go back to New Hampshire.”

  “No, lass, for sure, not unless you want to.”

  “I have to stay in Kansas. There’s no place to get away from what’s going on.”

  “Yes, there is.” Johnny grinned like an amiable bear at the puzzled stares centered on him. “The Landers’ settlement.”

  “But they—they don’t understand what’s going on in the Territory,” Sara objected.

  “Ain’t that exactly what we need?” demanded Johnny. “They don’t have no part in our quarrels and don’t want any. Conrad was tellin’ me how he got so sick of all those European wrangles that he decided to start fresh in a new country. He bought land for the colonists he brought with him, and they have a vote equal to his in runnin’ things.”

  “The men, maybe. I’ll bet the women don’t,” Sara guessed.

  From the way her eyes were swollen, she’d done more crying than sleeping that afternoon in spite of being up all night. Deborah, head still dully aching, hadn’t tried to nap but had minded the stew and darned socks out of the perpetually replenished basket by Sara’s chair.

  Her dry eyes felt pierced by thorns that held them open. She couldn’t cry anymore. Hollow, empty, she felt detached from her own body. She was grateful to sit in her friends’ home, do ordinary work that accumulated no matter what the griefs of a household. She had mourned to exhaustion, but Sara, refusing to give way till Deborah was rescued, must now go through disbelief, horror, rebellion, with sorrow flowing always under peaking, changing wild emotions like a sea powering waves that tower high, then crash back and vanish into the waiting depths.

  With her pert remark to Johnny, Sara wordlessly announced that though she would go with the swelling crests rather than be swept off her feet by trying to stand against them, she wanted to smile when she could, live each moment as it happened, rather than decreeing a week, a month, six months of mourning.

  Johnny gave her a relieved scowl. “Why do you want an equal vote, Wastewin, when around here you run the whole shebang?”

  “Sound good to me,” said Judith, casting Maccabee a provocative glance. “If women can’t vote and their husbands can boss ’em around, that’s close to bein’ slaves.”

  “That so?” retorted Maccabee. “Who totes the water and wood? Who takes off their shoes so’s your floor don’ get tracked up? Who—”

  “Thing is,” pursued Johnny, “Conrad’s not mixed up in our troubles, his sister, Ansjie, is about Deborah’s age, and Friedental’s a busy, happy place. Lives up to its name, Valley of Peace, except it isn’t much of a valley.”

  “Maybe they won’t want strangers,” Deborah suggested.

  “They’ll want you!” said Johnny heartily. “Why, that day you met here at the forge, Conrad asked about you, and again after the Fourth of July when they kept me from making a complete tarnation fool of myself. Guess they get lonesome. They’re well educated and would’ve been more at home in some big city if they hadn’t believed they should try living from the work of their hands.” Johnny shook his head. “Comes from readin’ too many books, frettin’ about what’s not fair. But you could talk to them. Main thing is, what with everyone in Friedental bein’ Proosian, it’s like another world, but you’re really only twenty miles southwest of here.”

  Sara put her hand over Deborah’s. “I’d love to have you here, meshemah, but I like the Landers very much. Their company would be good for you now. You can come back to us when you feel like it.”

  Instinctively wishing to stay with her friends, Deborah knew she mustn’t be at the smithy when Rolf came looking for her. If he found no trace of her, after a while he’d surely give up, leave Lawrence. But she insisted that the Landers be told about him and her whole situation before deciding whether to offe
r her shelter. He was unlikely to look for her in a small Prussian Utopia, but they had to know it was possible. So it was agreed that the next morning Laddie would ride to Friedental with a letter written by Sara.

  While Judith and Deborah did the dishes, Sara painstakingly composed the message, using a page from the account book she kept so accurately for Johnny.

  “There,” she said, leaning back, as if her strength were gone. And surely it must be.

  Johnny’s eyes rested on Sara, whom he loved but couldn’t comfort. “Just have to get through it. But I tell you what I’m goin’ to give all you women—a slug of good whisky in hot apple cider.”

  Rising, he got the cider jug from a bottom shelf and poured a generous amount into a kettle. “Comes to that,” he said heavily, “I can use a snort myself.”

  Deborah never knew when Judith joined her and Sara in the room Sara usually shared with Laddie, who was sleeping in the main cabin with Johnny. Before going to bed, Johnny had brought in a couple of shuck pallets he kept for wayfarers and an armload of quilts and buffalo robes. Deborah slept soundly on this couch once she lay down, but first she and Sara, heedless of the cold, sat for a long time on Sara’s bed and held each other.

  Sometimes they wept softly, sometimes they sobbed, sometimes their hands locked in rebellious protest, but they used no words. They mourned the same man, brother of one, sweetheart of the other.

  As Deborah, who’d earlier believed all her tears were gone, finally kissed Sara and went to her own bed, it seemed there was only sadness and loss. She wondered if life would ever seem bright again, and she felt that even if it did, it would be a disloyalty to the dead.

  Fortunately, there was work. Deborah and Sara awoke before the faintest gray. It was torment to lie wakeful with their memories, so they dressed quickly and left Judith sleeping.

  “I need to bake today,” Sara said. “Might as well get the bread rising before breakfast.”

  “You must have quite a washing piled up after the bad weather,” Deborah said. “Let’s do that, too.” She wanted to keep busy, exhaust herself physically so she could sleep that night. Sara and Judith must feel the same way.

  Early as it was, Johnny was up and had fires going in the fireplace and cookstove. A smell of coffee filled the air. Deborah made biscuits and cooked mush and fried side meat while Sara got the bread dough ready and set it for its first rising, covered with a clean cloth, over by the hearth. Informed that this was wash day, Johnny set the tub on the stove, pressed against the skillet and mush pan, and filled it half-full of water he fetched in from the well.

  “Don’t know why you women have to wash in the middle of winter,” he grumbled, fetching in the rinse tubs. “If it were me, I’d let everything pile up from first snow to last one.”

  “A good thing it’s not you,” returned Sara. “Now be sure you’ve brought in all your drawers and undershirts and socks. I want that shirt, too; you’ve been wearing it a week!”

  “A week!” cried Johnny. “Why, I used to wear the same clothes from frost to thaw!”

  “And you had to burn them!” Sara scolded. She went to the passageway and shouted down it. “Laddie, you gather up all your clothes and bring them when you come to breakfast!”

  Maccabee got the same instructions when he came in from milking. Judith had come in and set the table. By the time they pulled up chairs and benches for breakfast, heaps of washing lay in different-colored heaps, and the yeasty smell of dough mingled with that of biscuits, pork, and coffee.

  Right after breakfast Laddie set off for Friedental, admonished to stay overnight if he didn’t get started back by early afternoon. Maccabee and Johnny put the tubs on benches, including the one containing soft soap and white things which had been boiling on the stove.

  Sara poked and stirred these vigorously with a stick, then set to kneading the bread dough. Deborah and Judith did the dishes and then all three gathered at the tub, rubbing and scrubbing each sheet, towel, or garment till it could go into the first rinse after being wrung as thoroughly as possible.

  After the whites were out of the soapy water, coloreds went to soak, and each woman took a tub, though when a sheet or heavy trousers had to be wrung out, two of them did it.

  Sara had a real clothesline and pins Maccabee had carved. The sun was bright in spite of a razor-edged wind that numbed fingers and made them clumsy on the washing, which froze almost as quickly as it was pinned up. By the time Maccabee and Johnny came in for dinner, the heaps of laundry were transformed into stiff shards hanging from the line, and the smell of baking bread filled the main cabin.

  The men dumped the wash water and turned the tubs upside down behind the well-house, except for the cleanest rinse, which would be used to scrub the floor. As soon as the bread had cooled enough to cut, a golden, crusty loaf was placed on a board on the table beside a crock of butter and Johnny sliced off generous hunks with his Bowie while Sara served big bowls of leftover stew.

  Tired but with a sense of having worked well, Deborah was glad to sit down and felt hungry for the first time since she’d eaten here last, right before she left to discover the ruins of her home.

  All three friends had wept that morning, tears spilling into the wash tubs or freezing as they hung out washing. Work had been a relief, a way to use up some of their feelings. They hadn’t talked, except about their chores, the brightness of the sun, the piercing breeze.

  Speaking brought a choking lump to the throat. Deborah was glad that Johnny and Maccabee talked at the meal and filled the silence with their comfortingly deep male voices, discussing the news brought by a traveler who’d stopped to get his horse shod.

  John Brown had come out of Missouri with eleven slaves, some fine horses, and other valuables. One slave-owner had been killed, and the governor of Missouri had called for Brown’s punishment both to President Buchanan and Governor Denver of Kansas Territory.

  The Governor of Missouri offered a three-thousand-dollar reward for Brown. President Buchanan offered two hundred fifty dollars. “Got to hand it to old Brown for nerve,” said Johnny. “He’s put out handbills advertisin’ a twenty-five-cent reward for Buchanan, and he’s headed north in an ox wagon with the slaves he rescued.”

  “While gangs of Missourians hunt around for him in Kansas,” said Deborah bitterly. “I think he’d like to stir up a war!”

  “He’d sacrifice anyone, includin’ himself, to put an end to slavery,” Johnny said: “And now Kansans are as riled up as Missourians were about the Brown raid. Dr. John Doy—him who came with Dan Anthony and the first bunch of New England Emigrant Aid Society folks—he was back into Kansas with thirteen slaves when Missourians captured the whole ‘train.’ They took the whole shebang across the line into Missouri, put the blacks back in slavery, and jailed Doy and his men for trial. They’ll be sentenced sure as shootin’.”

  “Bet somebody tries to break ’em out of jail,” rumbled Maccabee. “Them Missouri fellers comin’ on Kansas soil to arrest Kansans and take ’em to Missouri—people don’ like that.”

  No more than Missourians liked for Brown and Doy to cross the line to steal out slaves. That looked different to those who believed slavery was wrong, but to slave-holders it was plain robbery. It didn’t lessen her grief and anger, but Deborah knew that Thos had been killed by men who considered him as guilty of theft as if he’d been stealing horses or cattle. And, of course, John Brown would sell the stolen horses and plunder to pay for the escaped, slaves’ passage north.

  She believed in Brown’s cause but not in his methods. “I wish he’d get himself martyred since that’s what he seems to want!” she breathed. “He got my parents and Thos killed, he’s murdered helpless men himself, but nothing happens to him!”

  Judith gave Deborah a long, level look. “Brown be God’s man, Deborah. Slavers cain’t touch him ’cause his hour not yet come. But God has a time for him. When it comes, it’ll be God’s sword waved in the sky. Everbody’ll see it. Brown will die, but not what he’
s done. Your family’s dead, but not what they believed in.”

  Shaking her head wordlessly, Deborah turned away from her friends. She would think her tears were used up, but then they’d collect and force themselves out again. She was glad that Johnny went on to tell what he’d heard about the legislature’s meeting in Lawrence. Not only had they repealed the “bogus” laws, but they’d collected all the copies they could find and made a bonfire of them on Massachusetts Street.

  “And someone sent a copy by express to the Missouri officials at Jefferson City. Wrote on the parcel, ‘Returned with thanks.’ Don’t that beat all?”

  Deborah managed to nod, though her throat ached to remember how eager Josiah had been to report on that triumphant legislative session.

  After the men went to work, the women did the dishes. Sara put a ham in the oven and poured more water in the beans, which had been cooking since morning.

  “Dried apple pie or peach pie?” she asked. “Let’s make two of each.”

  They did. Then they scrubbed the splintery floor, put clean sheets on the beds, and brought in the frozen laundry, draping it around to finish drying. As winter twilight darkened the cabin, Sara lit two iron Phoebe lamps Johnny had made, hung them by chains on their handles to hooks above the table, and went to gaze out the window.

  “I hope Laddie comes tonight,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind his staying the night if we could be sure he was at Friedental, but—”

  She didn’t need to finish. It was hard to feel sure about anything after what had happened. However, Johnny and Maccabee had just come in and were washing when hooves sounded. Johnny pulled on his horsehide jacket and hurried out His booming voice carried back, plus Laddie’s treble, and a strange, deep one. Sara, relieved, hurried to put on another plate. Deborah put the cornbread and beans in the warming oven and wondered who the third voice belonged to. Maccabee slipped his jacket around Judith and took her to the door of the passage to the women’s cabin.