Cornelius and Leroy’s elder brother Temple came home just before dark. Florence waited until they were at the supper table to tell them about their guest. As his father absorbed the news, it seemed to slow him down bodily, as if he were settling into a tub of molasses. This reaction annoyed her.
“You too? For what are we spending our Sundays in church, then, if this is the example you intend to set for your sons?”
“Now Fla, I never said that.”
“I think you’re saying a lot, by the way you are!”
“All I’m saying,” he went on, wearily, “is that these things can be more complicated than that, and that we need consider how we set before having the vanity to think we can help.”
“What vanity can there be in simple charity?”
“Much, I’d say.”
Temple, who was busy with geometric doodlings with the gravy at the bottom of his bowl, spoke up: “What kind of things could happen, Paw?”
Cornelius kept silent for a moment, as Florence cast an interrogative eye on him.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “We know nothing about him.”
“If you listened to him speak, you’d know he’s not what you’re thinking. There’s nothing about the plantation about him. He’s a gentle, free soul from back East.”
“So he says,” replied Cornelius, taking up his spoon and leaning over his bowl in a manner that said the conversation was finished. Until he added: “His free soul will be on its way tomorrow. That is the last of it.”
As typical on the plains, the day’s heat was the silent, tormenting harbinger of what was to come. Steel-gray clouds built up in the west, mounting up to the very vault of heaven. Their flanks caught the gleam of the setting sun as barbs of incandescence stabbed their bases. The Dicks knew to seal the shutters when they smelled that close odor approaching, that moist exhalation of foreign essences, as if air had been sucked off some distant swamp and expelled across the plains.
The breeze soon picked up, and then a steady wind. By midnight the rain came on, assaulting the roof, lashing the wooden shingles, then shifting around from the east to seek a fresh angle of attack. Listening to it from their bed, Cornelius jerked awake with every creak of the house, which was still in the process of settling on its foundations. He assumed Florence was asleep beside him. But she was awake and thinking too, of the misery of many a rainy night she had spent in the dugout, the roof inevitably leaking as it saturated.
“He’ll be soaked through,” she whispered.
“Better there than open ground.”
By morning the storm had passed. Rising to collect the morning’s eggs from the coop, Leroy found the world transformed. The heat had broken. The rain had refreshed the appearance of plants and out-buildings, as if some giant painter had come in the night, touching it all up with more vibrant colors. Redoubled in intensity were the smells of the grass and the soil and the manure stinking sweetly from the pastures. These impressions were impossible to ignore, making Leroy conscious of his sensual surrounds in a way he feared was unmanly. For other boys his age never smelled flowers from yards away, never knew when they were just about to drop from their stems, as he did.
He was absently pondering these things, this sensitivity and the imperative to hide it, when he rounded the barn—and saw riders approaching.
The four of them were coming from the east, at a trot and riding abreast. It was too far to see their faces, but Leroy could already discern their clothing: waistcoats of dingy blue, knee-length boots, red bandannas tied on their heads. The stocks of their guns, carbines, rose at their right hands from their cavalry holsters, and the hilts of their sabers shone in the dawn. The kits he had seen many times before, in Lecompton and elsewhere—the unofficial uniforms of proslavery bushwhackers.
“Paw,” he said, too low at first to be heard. Then he cried “Paw!” more loudly, and ran back to the house.
The visitors slowed as they approached the cabin, eyes sweeping. Stepping down, they left their long guns, but kept their right hands empty and resting in relaxed fashion close to their hips. Through a crack in the window curtain, Leroy and Temple watched them file up the front path—wary, but striving to step casually, as if they were on the most innocent of errands.
“You two, come out of there!” hissed their mother.
“They’re coming!”
“Boys, come away,” Cornelius ordered. “I’ll be answering . . .”
He opened up, and was face-to-face with a bushwhacker with a youthful face. He was perhaps no more than a couple of years older than Temple, with the kind of beard that a young man would envision and aspire and coax from his chin with each glance in the looking glass. It was still so thin his acne was visible through its fine hairs. He removed his hat, exposing the crimson of his bandanna, and laid it with all evident sincerity against his chest. The three behind him followed suit, but more slowly.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
“Good morning,” said Cornelius.
“Allow me to introduce myself: I am Captain Robert Givan Davis, representing the Third Kansas Brigade for the Preservation of Public Safety in Douglas County. And these gentlemen”—he gestured over his shoulder—“are my associates.”
“The Brigade of Public Safety is it? Would that be of Douglas County Kansas, or Douglas County Missouri, young man?”
“That would be of Kansas, sir,” replied Davis.
“And how might we help you today, Captain?”
“We’ve had word that a runaway has been seen hereabouts. We are checking all the farms on behalf of his lawful owners. The nigger goes by the name of Tubbs, but his real name is Trail.”
“His lawful owners, where?”
“Out of Territory, sir.”
“St. Louis? Gallatin?”
“Out of Territory.”
Cornelius turned to give his wife a glance—a glare, actually, of the kind that a spouse gives when he means to tell her that what he so clearly warned against has come to pass. “We haven’t seen any runaways round here,” Dick said.
“Trail was off in this direction, yesterday noon. He was seen.”
“I think we have answered your question, young man. Would you care for a drop before riding out?”
Captain Davis looked at him coolly, expression shading into bemused disbelief. He had, after all, been lied to before, especially in the abolitionist environs of Lawrence. But he would not come on a man’s property and declare him a liar—at least at first.
“All right, then,” he said. “We will take some water, if you don’t mind.”
Leroy went to the keg, just as he had for Tubbs (or Trail) when he first arrived. And as Davis and his men each took their dutiful sips, the Dick family stood and watched them, just as the bushwhacker regarded them back over the lip of the ladle.
“Just so’s you know, hiding a runaway is a crime against property in this Territory.”
To which Cornelius Dick replied, “By the lights at Shawnee Mission, that is true,” leaving perhaps too plain his contempt for the laws passed by the proslavery legislature meeting in that distant, minor place on the Missouri border.
When the visitors had gone, Cornelius and the boys went to the dugout to see if Tubbs was still there. They found the door shut and the contents exactly as they had been when their guest arrived. As Florence had feared, there was a puddle under the place where the roof leaked. But there were no unfamiliar belongings.
“He is gone, then,” said Cornelius, with some relief.
Soon Florence was calling him in the voice he knew meant that she had found something that wouldn’t please him. Coming out, he found her at the privy, arms akimbo. And then he knew.
“He hid in here when he heard their voices,” she explained, perceiving the suspicion in her husband’s face. Looking into the privy, Co
rnelius saw the thin figure standing by the commode, dressed for the road, the pale palms of hands turned toward him and a look of contrition on his face. The expression, though understandable, was maddening. Cornelius did not feel like exchanging pleasantries with him.
“Did they see you?”
“Most definitely not,” the Negro replied. “And let me say that I am most obliged that you sent them away, for whatever they told you about me is very certainly false.”
Cornelius stared at him, his face showing equal parts pity, contempt, and mistrust. But to Leroy, at his age, only the contempt showed through—a quality the boy duly emulated, casting repugnant looks. This seemed to redouble the Negro’s urge to defend himself.
“My name is Tubbs,” he declared. “I was born a free man in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August the twelfth, 1833. I was educated at Miss Stemple’s Free Colored Academy, where I not only learned my letters, but became conversant in the language of the Caesars. Accusare nemo se debit, nisi coram Deo, yes? Lex non distinguitur nos non distinguere debemus. Upon my graduation, I was privileged to use my education in business establishments in Hartford, Connecticut, and New York City. I am not a slave. No one in my family has ever been enslaved.”
“Do you know those men?”
“No! No, not personally . . . in fact, only by hearsay . . . rumors of Defensives are not unknown in this territory, as you must know.”
Cornelius, glowering, rumbled: “Don’t tell me what I know, boy.”
“He sure doesn’t sound the slave,” said Florence.
“That is nothing to do with us. They know about him somehow, and they know he’s here. Woman, your imprudence has put us all in danger.”
Like a jab to the gut, the declaration hit her physically. Her eyes flitted at the boys, who stared up at her in that half-disbelieving way children do at the transgressions of parents. But the granite foundation beneath her act did not shift.
“The Lord will judge me. Not you, Cornelius Dick,” she said.
Cornelius turned back to the Negro. “You—Tubbs, Trail, or whatever your name is: the Defensives have not left. They are over that hill, watching anyone who leaves this place. Go back to the dugout and stay there.”
Tubbs was about to give his thanks, and the next in a series of eloquent apologies. But Dick quashed them: “Stay away from the door. Stay away from the windows. And if you light a fire, I’ll turn you over to them myself!”
Then he turned to Leroy and Temple. “You boys. You can’t be seen running back and forth. Get the cart and load it with enough water and supplies for a week. Everything a body can need. Do it now. And don’t earn a whipping by forgetting something!”
The boys ran to fetch the market rig, and Florence, moving to follow, paused. “Thank you,” she said to Cornelius. “The Lord will bless you.”
“Can’t very well have him live in the privy until them boys get bored, can we?”
Captain Davis and Company were indeed watching the property. The glow of their fire showed over the hill the very first night, where their neighbor, the widow Crocker, allowed them to camp. The widow was a staunch abolitionist—sprung from one of the oldest Quaker families in Ohio—but on this part of the frontier, her politics did not entitle her to deny the privilege due to peaceable travelers. The Defensives revealed themselves sometimes up on the ridge, single and double figures spindly and black against the sky. Sometimes they would point and sweep the landscape with their arms, as if describing a military campaign that had happened in the past. Or was yet to come.
Tubbs, to his credit, was nothing more than a phantom, a rumor of a presence. Indeed, in the next few days Leroy would catch himself genuinely forgetting there was a man hiding in the dugout, running across the top of it as he did in those days when it was new, no doubt dislodging clumps of dirt on its occupant that he once did on his parents. But then he would catch a glimpse of his worried mother looking out toward the refuge—and he would remember.
The standoff went on for four more days until Davis reappeared at their door. This time he had only one other man with him, with the others posted some distance back on horseback, their rifles resting in the crooks of their arms.
“How may I help you this morning, Captain?” said Cornelius, coffee mug in hand.
“Good morning, sir. I am here, alas, on the same business. Perhaps you would be willing to assist us now?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, son.”
Davis lifted his cap on his head and reset it. “I mean, sir, that there is someone living in the dugout behind your house. We’ve seen evidence of it. So I ask again—are you prepared to fulfill your duty under territorial law? Or do you oblige me to take direct action?”
Florence and the boys, listening from their places at the table, neither moved nor breathed. In an attempt to appear indifferent, Cornelius took a sip from his cup—but he pulled at it a little too hard, gulping the scalding liquid. The Defensive eyed his discomfort without speaking or blinking, while the man behind him, as if in delayed emulation, doffed and reset his cap too.
“What evidence have you seen, Captain, that would make you believe such a thing?”
“Trail is here. That is the only fact we need agree upon.”
“I do not agree.”
“Then, sir, I am obliged to call you a liar.”
So there it was. Cornelius searched the eyes of the other, plumbing the depth of his resolve. Then he shrugged. “That much is obvious! But it alters nothing—the body you seek is not here. And so I bid you a good morning, and ask you to remove yourself and your men from my property.”
Davis smiled, shook his head. “I don’t know what possesses good white folk in these circumstances to play the nigger-lover,” he said, and drew out the last two words as if he were unsheathing a dagger. “I warn you, sir, we need no further authorization to secure the property rights of your neighbors.”
“And I warn you, Captain, that this kind of talk might impress the pukes, but will not stand here.”
With that, he shut the door in the Defensive’s face. He turned and went back to his porridge without further comment, wearing the kind of expression one had after some dull obligation had been discharged, like spreading slop for the hogs. And yet, Leroy perceived a stiffness in his father’s step—a stiffness that belied an awareness of imminent consequences, such as the door being kicked in, or a hail of bullets plunging through it. But as the minutes crept by, and it became clear that Davis had not yet decided to take “direct action,” something like normalcy resumed at their breakfast table. Then Cornelius, as he spooned more molasses into his bowl, cleared his throat as if he intended to speak. The others watched him as the words seemed to wander together in his head, linking up at their own deliberate pace.
“Temple, I will need you to be watchful today. Do you remember what I taught you about the Sharps?”
“Yes, paw.”
“I want you to give Leroy a lesson today. And be sure to clean and oil the action, like I showed you.”
“Yes, Paw.”
“Where are you going?” Florence asked.
“I’ll go to town as I always do. I’ll be damned if that bunch keeps me from my business.”
Cornelius did go to Lawrence later that morning, and as he drove the wagon past Davis’s camp he took the opportunity to stare long and hard at the bushwhackers. The latter attempted to stare back with matching determination, but were in fact temporarily stymied by Cornelius’s departure. While their peculiar sense of honor entitled them to any sort of mischief, from torchings to lynchings to draggings, it would not allow them to invade a farm defended only by a white woman and two young boys.
Cornelius returned half an hour before sunset, wagon empty, a frown on his face. He said nothing to Florence until after she’d fed him and he leaned back in his chair with his pipe.
&nb
sp; “I couldn’t find a single body in Lawrence to come out here,” he said. “They don’t see us as good enough allies in the cause . . .” And he laugh a little bit at that, at his threadbare reputation as an abolitionist, even as he hid what was reputed to be a runaway slave in his dugout.
“We could look further off,” she said. “There are good people farther east, or in Iowa.”
“There won’t be time for that,” he said. “You and the boys need to understand. We may need to give him up.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Without help, there’s nothing for it.”
Florence bristled. “We won’t. I won’t.” And when he laid down his pipe in that way he did when he was able to give her a lecturing, she got up and left before he could speak. Alone, he picked it up again and declared “We may!” before putting the stem back in his mouth.
Their situation looked worse the next morning. When Leroy ran in from feeding the hogs, he found that one of their draught horses had escaped its paddock. Upon examining the fence, Cornelius could see the damage was no act of God— the posts and beams had been deliberately hacked with a sharp implement. The horse, alas, had not strayed far; as Leroy held the lead rope and Cornelius trudged behind with the rifle, the Defensives watched in attitudes of deliberate repose. Davis had a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Good morning, Mr. Dick! Trouble with your stock today?” he asked, smiling, as the rest of them lay about and sniggered.
Cornelius did not answer because he knew whatever came out of his mouth might worsen matters.
“Should you ever find yourself in need again, call on us!” the Defensive said, tipping his cap. And then he added, “Should it ever happen again.”
Back at the house, Leroy went up to the loft to lie in his bed and listen to his parents’ inevitable confrontation.
“They have given notice of their intentions,” said his father below. “And this is only the beginning of the mischief they can do.”
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