So went an ordinary Sabbath morning. Matters changed that Sunday in early January when Kate and John Junior first came for services. They arrived late, driving through a light snow in their army wagon; they took seats at the very back, picking up their hymnals and joining the singing as if they’d attended Harmony Grove Church all their lives. Junior was in a clean black suit, his hair parted and shining with French pomade. Kate wore a dress of buttercup yellow, lace gloves on her hands, hair demurely pinned under a hat that matched her dress, but with select strands allowed to escape and play around the nape of her neck. When other parishioners turned to look over their shoulders at her, or peek over the edges of their hymnals, she would fearlessly meet their eyes. Minister Dienst lost his train of thought in mid-preach as he became ensnared in her gaze.
After services the new pair was welcomed to the area by each and every member of the community. The men—who didn’t withdraw to chew and talk this time—seemed anxious for the opportunity to shake Junior’s hand, albeit only when his sister was standing beside him. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance! Dee-lighted!” Junior proclaimed, pumping their fists. Kate stood by with a polite smile on her face, her eyes lightly lidded, as if—all of the sudden—she was shy.
Rudolph Brockman came up to reintroduce himself, having not bothered to visit the Benders since the men had first appeared at his cabin months before. Now he behaved as if no subject in the world was more important to him than the welfare of his new neighbors. “Come by sometime and I’ll lend ye a proper post driver!” he said, eyes flitting toward Kate. She seemed not to focus on anything, but allowed a slight smile to curl the edges of her lips. Brockman’s cabin mate Augustus Ern, meanwhile, bid Junior only the most cursory of welcomes, and pointedly failed to acknowledge Kate at all.
For their part, the ladies of Harmony Grove spread their goodwill more evenly. Junior seemed like a decent sort of young man to them, showing the proper respect for the matrons. The girl was pretty, and seemed not to notice the clumsy flirtations of their husbands and sons. Yet she also showed a certain semibored blandness before the sisterhood of frontier women. After all, these were lifelines of practical wisdom to a newcomer on the plains; anyone beginning the rest of her life there would be wise to cultivate their favor. Kate, instead, seemed to show only as much enthusiasm as absolutely necessary, as if she were playing for a draw right from the start.
When Mary Ann Dick approached her, armed with a pumpkin pie, Kate hesitated before accepting it. Mrs. Dick, a tall, wide-faced woman, was neither threatened nor hostile to Kate’s beauty. She had, after all, outsmarted and outcompeted more conventionally pretty women all her life—most famously for the hand of her husband. Instead, she thought she detected in Kate a heart with a wide-open hole in it. A hole that, at least at that moment, only a fresh pumpkin pie could fill.
“Did you find your stock?” she asked. When Kate and Junior looked at her blankly, she explained, “That was the devil’s own tempest the other day, but I happened to be at my window around noon, and thought I saw your rig out on the road.” She indicated the Benders’ wagon with the mismatched wheels parked thereby. “I asked Leroy about it, and he said you must be out looking for some lost animal.”
“Terrible blow to be out and about in,” opined Mrs. Dienst.
“The calf . . . in the snow . . . yes!” stammered Junior, who had indeed accompanied the old man out in the blizzard.
The storm was supposed to give them cover as they dumped the body of John Jesperson in Drum Creek, at what they thought was a safe distance from the cabin. They hadn’t counted on anyone seeing them in such a storm.
“It was hard, yes. Tracks got filled in right away in that snowfall. Couldn’t tell you how long it took to bring it to heel.”
“It can’t be helped,” Mrs. Dick said. “A calf parted from the herd is as good as lost in these parts, with all these beasts.” And she gestured broadly, as if the vicinity was that very moment crowded with hungry wolves.
“So we understand,” replied Junior, looking sidelong to Kate for her interjection. For she always seemed to be dissatisfied with the way he handled these situations. Sure enough, she spoke:
“They went out in that storm for me. She was my favorite . . . the calf,” she said, keeping her eyes averted.
Mrs. Dick laid a hand on Kate’s forearm. “Of course, child. It can’t be helped.”
Later, Mrs. Dick whispered to Mrs. Dienst, who thought Kate haughty, “The poor girl, she was overwhelmed. You might give her another chance.”
“Showing up to church in that dress is all I needed to see.”
“They have queer ideas in Iowa,” replied Mrs. Dick, who had somehow gotten the impression the Benders were from the Hawkeye State.
It wasn’t until the magistrate and the pastor had finished putting the school back in order that they went out to greet the Benders formally. Minister Dienst paid his respects to the girl first, paternally taking both her hands in his as he bade her welcome. Kate continued to play the ingenue, looking up as if in awe before the very spectacle of him. But her fingers were cold in Dienst’s grasp, and if he’d had the insight to perceive her true feelings, he would have seen that she could barely contain an impulse to flee. For ever since she had begun her study of The Lesser Key of Solomon, she had a visceral reaction against priests, ministers—all those purpled hypocrites, those purported men of God. Where this aversion had come from, she could not say for sure, for the book itself taught nothing of the kind. It was something she just assumed she should feel.
But a different sensation came over her when Leroy Dick paid his respects. When he took her hand, the frigid fingertips abruptly thawed.
“Our little convocation is surely not as splendid as you are used to, but we think it godly enough.”
He spoke in the kind of gentle, unrushed tones one used with a child. Yet somehow, she seemed to taste his words with her tongue, not hear them with her ears. “I rejoiced in His presence,” she replied.
“That’s all we can ask. And are you in good voice, my dear? Can you join our little choir?”
“You will see me again.”
Chapter Ten
Being Right with the Goose
“It was not worthwhile to fix up a nice house to live in and then have it all burned by the border ruffians.”
—Francis H. Snow (1840–1908) Chancellor, University of Kansas
AUGUST, 1856
CORNELIUS DICK, LEROY’S father, staked his first 160-acre claim on the south bank of the Kansas River just after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The substance of the new law—that the disposition of the future state, slave or free, would be decided by plebiscite—brought many new settlers to the area, as eastern abolitionists and southern slaveholders rushed in to tilt the voting in their favor. But Cornelius and Florence Dick had not come to Kansas to make territorial policy. They came from upstate New Hampshire for cheap land and a shot at prosperity in a place where, they had heard, corn need not be cultivated, but sprung out of the soil by its own accord, like a weed.
The elder Dick had his opinions on the institution of slavery. As he broke his back on the rocky New England uplands, he considered the possibility of doing it with the additional disadvantage of competing against slave labor—and shuddered. Something about the institution of owning black men offended the dignity of the poor whites, whose sweat was cheapened by its discomfiting closeness to the occupations of the slave. Dick would declare to his startled sons: “Let the fat southern aristocrats sow their own fields! Let that codfish aristocracy pick that noxious crop with their own soft hands! Then let us then see the size of their spreads!” By his reckoning, slavery changed the very ground on which it was instituted, infesting and altering it in favor of the entitled slaveholder and his stock of bovine, dependent Negroes—and against independent free whites like Cornelius Dick.
These were his thoughts. If called upon to vote on the great burning question of the day, he would cast it to keep Kansas soil free. But this was far from his first concern as he drove his family over fifteen hundred miles from Concord to Lawrence. As they went west, he told those inquiring about their destination that they were going to the Territory, but “not because of that infernal business.” In Missouri, where the suspicions of proslavery men burned white hot, he was quizzed regularly on “how he stood on the Goose” (“the Goose” being how Missourians perceived the prospect of extending slavery into Kansas, like an unexpected prize). On a steamboat landing on the Missouri River, a man in a white suit and slouch hat, sporting a Louisiana drawl, tried to bait him into saying the word “cow” The logic was that if a newcomer pronounced it like a southerner, “kow,” he could be trusted to vote “correctly” in the great referendum. But if he said it like a New Englander, “keow,” he was most likely one of those “dogs of abolitionists,” and best rethink his intentions.
Dick, who had read of this ploy in the Illinois papers, refused to gratify the man but said “stock” instead. Thereafter, he instructed his two sons, Leroy and Temple, not to speak to strangers at all, but if they did, to declare their destination lay in Nebraska, not Kansas.
Crossing the border at Westport, they proceeded upriver to a spot about midway between Lawrence—then little more than a handful of log cabins—and Lecompton—which was even smaller. Their claim was on a rise south of the river, with good timber in the streambeds and sweet water less than twenty feet below the ground. The Dicks’ first house was a dugout excavated into a south-facing hillside. With the help of his two boys and his wife, he lined the one-room chamber with four-inch logs sealed with mud. Smoke from the cast-iron stove was let out through a pipe forged out of old coffee tins. The floor remained of beaten earth for as long as they lived there, covered only with straw at first, then with a rug as their fortunes improved. Their only privacy lay behind a wool curtain Florence had traded for in Lawrence against Leroy’s old cradle. She had no use for the latter because she had suffered much in the birth of her younger son and could have no further children.
Leroy hated the dugout, for it was a gloomy place whose structure was too delicate to contain two active boys. Any sort of rough-housing loosened the mud that kept water from seeping into the house during the spring rains. Running on the ground above tended to dust the furniture below with dirt, as the flimsy “ceiling” shook under their feet. Too often Cornelius would be inside in the early evenings, reading by lamplight, as one of the boys ran over the top of the dugout, soiling his newspaper with a clumps of fine Kansas loam. “Leroy!” he would cry, at which Leroy would know to make himself scarce, because if he went inside to answer for his misbehavior, his backside would be greeted by the sting of Cornelius’s belt.
It took two years for them to finish the first stage of a proper house. This was just a two-room structure, with door holes cut in the walls for wings that would be added later. Leroy and Temple got the loft above, which had a window and seemed like a palace compared to the dingy gopher lodge they were used to. Below, there was space at last for the furniture the family had brought from New Hampshire and kept stored under canvas for two long winters. When her husband brought in the heavy oak dining table she had inherited from her parents, Florence Dick wept.
The situation in his fields soon gave Dick his own reason to cry. The corn did not come up spontaneously after all. In his ignorance, he had plowed as if he were still farming in the East, turning up deep riverine soil. This gave him a good crop the first few years. After that, the precious loam washed into the river, stripping him down to sterile, sandy stuff that begrudged any decent yield. Cornelius was forced to experiment with various crop rotation schemes, dividing up his spread into test fields. He finally hit on planting cold-resistant rye (Secale cereale) after corn harvesting. This grew through the winter, even in the snow, and offered shelter for other winter crops like clover, turnips, and radishes, which restored the vitality of the soil. The rye he plowed under as mulch for his corn crop the next summer. The turnips, moreover, were good for fodder, and the radishes for sale to the burgeoning hotel trade in Lawrence and Lecompton. With this formula, Cornelius gradually prospered, enabling him to acquire another forty acres along the river, and a strip of forty more on the top of the ridge behind the farm.
Of equal benefit to their fortunes, he managed to avoid getting caught up one way or another in the increasingly bitter political divisions in the Territory. Calls came from Lawrence for free-soil partisans to gather for this or that worthy cause, but Dick usually found other matters to detain him. When a land dispute led to a fatal altercation between a squatter and a member of the Free State militia a train of events followed that culminated in the so-called Wakarusa War—the siege of Lawrence by two thousand proslavery Missourians. The proslavery men were soon opposed by a similar number of free-soilers, who poured into the town and turned it into an armed camp. Seven-foot-high redoubts were erected on Massachusetts Street, with enfilades devised to trap the “invaders.” Every household became a barracks, feeding and housing the defenders as the women and girls worked far into the night, making cartridges. When the women and children did sleep, their dreams were disturbed by tales of rape and plunder that would await them if the Border Ruffians broke into the town. The besiegers, meanwhile, lit cheery fires and drank until dawn, toasting the courage they would soon have occasion to display against the “damned slaves of the nigger.” A howitzer was dragged in from Westport and positioned in clear view of the defenders, with crates conspicuously marked as INCENDIARIES.
Alas, the “war” ended without a shot fired, in a settlement brokered by the governor. But nobody was content with this outcome, which only seemed to swell the stock of venom accumulating on both sides. And in the general indignation, few noticed Cornelius Dick had arrived too late, with his son Leroy at his side and his shotgun across his lap—unloaded.
The conflict soon arrived at the Dick claim in a form that could not be so easily avoided. Leroy remembered the late summer day in ’56, with the air over the cornstalks fluttering with the heat of a true plains scorcher, and the atmosphere in the house so heavy it seemed to droop like a wet curtain. It was one of those days when the crickets were so calamitously loud one despaired of opening the windows. Leroy was alone with his mother, bored enough to be diverted by watching her fold laundry, when there came a knock on the back door.
Opening up, the boy found a tall, thin figure waiting there.
“Hello there, young sir,” the Negro said.
As those of his kind were expected to, he stood a few feet back, off the doorstep, and had adopted the usual posture of deliberate inoffensiveness, with head down and hands empty and plainly visible at his belt. A portmanteau thick with contents lay on the grass beside him. He appeared very young, no more than twenty, with hair cropped very close. On his broad, smooth face a spray of black freckles—and a smile.
“My name is Ernest Calvin Tubbs Junior. May I ask yours?”
“What do you want? And hello,” replied Leroy, who had little experience talking with Negroes, and didn’t quite know what manner to adopt.
“Would it be a terrible imposition for me to speak with your father?”
“He’s away. But my maw’s here.”
“Alone? Hmm,” he said, evidently troubled by the prospect of having to importune a white woman.
“Who is it, Leroy? Don’t just let him stand out there in the sun . . .” Florence Dick approached from behind. For it was her practice to show nothing but indiscriminate hospitality to anyone who knocked on her door. And when she laid eyes on their visitor, her expression did not waver, though her eyes did sweep over him, and noting his scrupulous neatness, seemed satisfied.
“Would you like something to drink, young man?”
“To that I would be most obliged.�
�
She sent Leroy to fetch a ladle from the keg of good water they kept by the stove. As he came back, striding carefully lest it spill, he heard his mother and Tubbs conversing with an ease that worried him. For their words struck his ears as somehow transgressive, as something that naturally called for watchfulness, like the tracks of one of those big cats not seen in twenty years but looming large in prairie legend. This vigilance was not something he had been taught by anyone. It was something he learned from the subtle stiffness in his father’s back whenever a black man approached his family—a wariness, like any other sort of parental fear, that was more powerful for never being acknowledged.
“ . . . then I thank you kindly, ma’am, and wish you a good evening,” the Negro was saying, to which his mother said, “I will send the boy with beddings and something to eat.”
Mr. Tubbs took the dipper, and with a wink at Leroy, drank. Then he picked up his portmanteau and headed in the direction of the old dugout.
“He will be staying the night out there,” his mother told him after she closed the door.
“Staying? You mean, for the night?”
“Yes! What’s wrong with you, Leroy? Since when do when turn away a traveler in need?”
“Don’t you think we should ask Paw?”
“Your father would do no different,” she snapped as she retrieved two heavy blankets from the linens chest. “The poor man has been walking for a week. Would we have him spend the night on the ground, with a storm coming?”
“No ma’am. But—”
“Take these to him,” she ordered. “Tell him you’ll bring him his supper presently. And never begrudge proper Christian charity again—or else your father will hear about it.”
Hell's Half-Acre Page 8