Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  “No, pleased we’d have some help. You’d have some help.” He fingered a diaper, patterned in red squares. “With the children. And the laundry.” He leaned down to peer into her face.

  Agnes crumpled the soiled cloth and dropped it into its bucket. “Stand here,” she said. “Don’t let her wiggle off.” She fetched the kettle from the stove and filled the basin. “Where did they come from?”

  “They’re Maggie O’Day’s, from the hotel in Kansas City.” Jabez stroked Sarah’s scalp, fuzzy with a hint of black hair. “She’s selling up, moving to St. Joe.”

  Agnes set the kettle on the floor and whirled to study the couple. Neither looked the least familiar, but it had been seven years, and she hadn’t paid much attention at the time. The girl was slightly built, her wrists protruding from blue calico sleeves, head wrapped in a brown kerchief. The man stood no taller than Agnes, but his ropy forearms and thick neck hinted at strength. He straightened under her gaze, his eyes on hers. Agnes thought she caught a glint of amusement in them.

  “What are your names?” she asked.

  The man stepped forward and bobbed his head. “Dick McDonald, ma’am, and this is Rose. My wife,” he added. Agnes noted the emphasis he placed on those two words, as marriages between slaves weren’t recognized in Missouri and many people simply disregarded the idea. Rose dipped a curtsy, and her husband placed his hand on the small of her back.

  Agnes flushed and turned back to Sarah Belle. “What did you pay?” She realized they were talking about them as if they were two new plow mules.

  “Sixteen hundred. A thousand for him and six hundred for her.”

  “Where do you propose they live?”

  “Out back. Dick and I’ll section off the stable, make a cabin.”

  “Jabez,” she said, sliding a pin through Sarah’s diaper and tucking the point into a fold. She turned to him. “I will not own people.”

  “She would have sold them south.”

  “So you’re telling me this was an act of charity?”

  A tinge of red bloomed on his cheeks. She knew well the signs of incipient vexation.

  “It seemed at the time, my dear, to be a winning solution for everyone.” He rapped his knuckles once on the stand, next to Sarah’s kicking legs. “We’ll discuss it later.” And he stalked to the door.

  “We must manumit,” she said.

  He glared at her, hand on the door jamb. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and disappeared into the yard.

  

  August melted into September, September slid toward winter. Jabez and Dick built a cabin attached to the stables behind the house, and as Jabez wielded the pen more skillfully than the hammer, he acted as general dogsbody to the Negro. Dick’s talents as a carpenter manifested themselves early. Maggie had hired him out over the years, just as she’d hired out Rose as a wet nurse following three stillbirths. Agnes’s heart ached for the girl at the same time she appreciated her natural felicity with the children. Often, as she watched Rose bathing or feeding Sarah Belle, she saw a mist across her eyes as if the girl were lost in the past.

  The presidential election approached, Sarah Belle smiled her first smile, and Jabez spent his time writing and speaking throughout the state in support of compromise, or in the last resort, peaceful disunion. But all for naught. On a dreary day in early November the election went to the Republicans, that strange, cadaverous man became president-elect, and South Carolina seceded from the Union. Gunshots and shouting shattered Lick Creek’s morning calm. At the time it all started, Agnes and Elizabeth were strolling down Main Street, their little ones wrapped in blankets, en route to a hen party at Mrs. Norman’s. Beyond the courthouse a crowd converged on a buckboard moving through the streets behind two raggedy mules, Jacob Bigelow at the reins, Willard wedged behind the seat, revolver pointed to the sky. Braced in the bed stood a structure that resembled a gallows, the effigy of a man dangling from the crosstree.

  The figure’s long legs flopped over the wagon’s side rails. Its flour-bag head, leaking straw and topped by a black shock of ropy hair, canted to one side like a broken-necked chicken. On its breast fluttered a sign lettered “Old Abe,” and tacked to the tailgate hung a banner scrawled with “Death to Black Republicans.”

  Laughter. Cheers

  “Secession is our watchword, our rights we will demand,” someone sang.

  “Traitors!”

  “Pukes!”

  “Nigger lover!” A big man Agnes didn’t recognize pushed Mr. Baxter, the tailor, and someone else took a swing at the stranger and missed. Hands reached up and clutched at Willard who landed a telling kick, which Agnes later learned broke Earl Kunkel’s nose. Jake slapped the reins against the mules’ rumps, and they broke into a trot, then a run, wild-eyed, scattering bodies in their path. Agnes and Elizabeth retreated to the steps of the Presbyterian church as the buckboard rushed by, Jake grinning and Willard whooping like a crazed bullfrog. Down the street Aldo Beaton clutched a fistful of Galen Crow’s coat, elbow pulled back to deliver a punch. Levi Zook gave Beaton a shove, and he toppled. Zook took Mr. Irvine by the arm and yanked him away from Mr. Cayton. The two continued to shout insults at each other as their friends dragged them to opposite sides of the street.

  By the time Agnes and Elizabeth arrived, the ladies at Mrs. Norman’s were clustered on her front porch prattling like a flock of geese, as fierce, though less physical, as their men. Agnes noticed several women missing who should have been there—Sarah Hill and Mrs. Cayton were normally of their circle, and Mrs. Foster, the attorney’s wife. Women whose husbands supported secession and opposed Lincoln’s election. Several ladies refused to acknowledge Agnes, and the party dissolved before it began under a cloud of tension and distress. That was to be Agnes’s last visit to Mrs. Norman’s home.

  

  In the outside world, states continued to secede: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia withdrew soon after Christmas, and the bombast ratcheted up to fever pitch. One sleepy afternoon in February, Agnes sat at the kitchen table with Rose, Sarah Belle napping in her basket by the warmth of the stove. Charlie stood on a chair next to her, his sturdy forearms on the table, the wooden alphabet his father had carved for him spread out in front of him. Agnes spelled out “Charlie” and looked to Rose. “Kar?” she asked, wrinkling her forehead.

  “No,” Agnes said, pointing to the H. “Remember C and H together say ch.”

  “Char? Charlie?” She flashed a bright smile.

  “Me!” Charlie squealed, beaming. “I try.” He scooped up the letters, knocking the L to the floor.

  Agnes bent to retrieve it. “I suppose I could be arrested for teaching you to read.” She tilted her head at Rose. “What was it like? You know, I mean how you grew up.”

  Rose pushed aside the C and the A, roamed through the other letters. “Didn’t know nothing else, Missus,” she said.

  “But now you do,” Agnes said, leaning an elbow on the table, cheek in her hand.

  “Yes ma’am.” She picked out the T, added it to her word and smiled.

  “Excellent,” Agnes murmured. “Now do BAT.”

  “I can!” Charlie shouted and reached for the B.

  “Isn’t there a difference?” Rose looked at Agnes, liquid eyes holding a question. “I mean, there must be something that says to you, inside, you’re safe from … well, from beatings. Or worse.”

  Rose took the B from Charlie and replaced the C. “Don’t know that we be safe, Missus. Mostly I just scared of the slave catchers.”

  “Well, that’s understandable.” Agnes sat up and pulled Charlie onto her lap. “As long as you stay with us, you’re safe.”

  “But that means we ain’t free, whether we got papers or no.” She smiled a small smile at Agnes who nodded in return.

  “My man feels it more than me,” Rose said. “He say it in your head and in your soul, being free.”
The stew pot on the stove hissed, and Rose stood to give it a stir.

  “In your soul.” Something Maggie O’Day said, a long time ago, another kitchen. They tried to make a slave out of me and I wouldn’t let them. And Agnes thought of the Irish boy who sang at the barn dance years past. He’s chattel, Jabez had said.

  “Main thing,” Rose continued, sitting back down and jabbing at the letters, “when you free can nobody sell us away from one another. My momma was sold south. I was only a child, about big as Charlie.” The mask had lifted from her face, her eyes deep with generations of pain. “That’s why I don’t want no babies of my own, not ’til we get to a place where they can’t be sold.”

  Not Maggie nor the Irish boy nor any white man or woman can be free, Agnes thought, until this abomination is ended. She clutched Charlie so tightly he whimpered and pushed her away.

  The back door opened onto a rush of cold air and a gentle snowfall, and Jabez came in, shedding hat, coat, muffler and gloves in the back alcove. Rose stood and poured him coffee from the pot simmering at the back of the stove, and he sat with them, warming his hands on the mug.

  “What news now?” Agnes asked, standing Charlie on the floor.

  “The returns are final,” he said. “The state’s gone overwhelmingly for the Union.” He referred to a referendum to settle once and for all the question of Missouri secession. “Not a single secessionist elected. So we’ll continue as we are. Caught in the middle.” He slumped in his chair.

  Agnes was stunned. “But the Governor—that’s a tremendous defeat. Couldn’t he sway anyone?”

  “Claib Jackson’s a weasel. He’ll go whichever way the wind blows, as long as he’s in office and in power. Just like he did during the election.” He picked up the M and tapped it, brooding, on the table. Rose lifted a lid to stir, and the aroma of rich beef stew filled the room.

  “So now what happens?”

  “Hall was elected, which is good news. We can get our planks into the convention platform through him. I hope this sends a message that we don’t want war, and the legislature will quit trying to arm everybody and his brother.” He sat up, put the M down in front of Rose, who was refilling his coffee, added the I and the S, and lifted his eyebrows at her.

  “Mis?” she asked. He nodded, dug through the other letters until he found the O, then the U and the R and lined them up next to his first word.

  After a moment, she said, “Our.”

  “Right.” Charlie watched his papa keenly. Not much could keep the boy standing still, but his father always held him entranced.

  Jabez added the I at the end.

  “I?” Rose asked, perplexed.

  “Put them together,” Jabez said.

  Rose moved the three words together. “Mis. Our. I. Mis-sour-i.” She looked up. “MisourI?” She replaced the I with the A. “Misoura.” She grinned.

  Jabez laughed. “That’s the way it sounds.” He replaced the I. “But this is the way it’s spelled. Things are not always what they seem.”

  “He’ll teach you bad habits, Rose,” Agnes said. “There are two esses in Missouri, he’s just too lazy to whittle another set.”

  Jabez snorted, stood and patted Rose on the shoulder. “You’re coming along well, Rose. Keep it up. You’ll be teaching Sarah to read in no time.”

  Rose flushed and scraped the letters into her apron, to Charlie’s loud objections, depositing them in his toy box. “Hush, now, child, you be waking the little one,” she said and shooed us all out while she set the table for dinner.

  Jabez swung Charlie onto his shoulders, the little head dangerously close to the ceiling. Agnes picked up the coffee cups and trailed after them. “What else will you put to the convention?”

  “Stewart wants armed neutrality. Neutrality’s fine as long as the federals understand they have no sovereignty over us. They can’t tell a state what to do with its property rights, and that’s the crux of the argument for slave-holders.” He sat in his armchair, Charlie on his knee, and took a cigar from the box on the side table. “I don’t hold with slave men, but unless the north leaves property rights alone, we’ll be fighting them alongside Georgia and Alabama.”

  “And you think they’ll actually pay attention? Lincoln and his friends, I mean?” Agnes pulled a brand from the banked fire and lit his cigar.

  “No, love, I don’t think that. I think we sit on the road between the Union and the Confederacy, we control two of the rivers both sides need, there are free states all around us—the northern army will have to march through Missouri to get to the enemy, and that’s going to be interpreted as invasion. It’ll force us into the war whether we secede or not.” He took a long pull, blew smoke over Charlie’s head. “We don’t stand a chance.”

  Sarah whimpered in the kitchen, sleepy kitten noises that signaled the end of her nap. Charlie sat on his father’s lap, crooning to himself and watching the glowing tip of the cigar. “Do you think there’ll be fighting here?”

  “Probably not, not close to us. There’s nothing strategic here. You should be safe enough.”

  She turned her gaze on him. “Doesn’t that mean you should be safe enough, too?”

  “There will be a great need for doctors. I don’t know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing.”

  Rose carried the baby to Agnes. She settled onto her chair and unfastened her bodice, putting Sarah Belle to her breast. “What kind of world have we brought them into?” She murmured, not expecting an answer. Jabez stared moodily into the fire.

  

  Not long after Missouri voted against secession, Jabez found himself, much to Agnes’s chagrin, in possession of a newspaper.

  Jace Biggers, the banker, turned up at their door one evening after dinner with a business proposition for Jabez. The editor of the Holt County Courier & News, Mr. Conklin, after a three-month tenure in which his customers smeared his office with old eggs and offal following the printing of a pro-Unionist piece, was ready to sell. Biggers wanted to buy, and he wanted Jabez to buy in with him.

  Agnes thought Mr. Biggers’ proposal a parlous idea, and firmly believed that no other instrument advanced strife in their community so forcefully as that paper. Whenever an editorial appeared to be slanted toward one faction or another, fistfights erupted outside its offices like mushrooms in manure. “You can bludgeon everyone in town at once with your ideas, now,” she said, jabbing her needle into the hem of a new diaper. She knew he wanted to do it. “No more begging someone to publish you. You can sneer back at old Conklin and his friend, and we’ll have rotten eggs thrown at our house, thank you very much.”

  Jabez laughed. “You do carry grudges, my dear. I don’t much want to bludgeon anyone. But I don’t mind saying it would be useful to have a forum.” He turned to Mr. Biggers. “Price and Stewart are trying to get control of papers across the state. If we can control the press, we can guide what people think. And maybe keep us out of this war.”

  “Or bring the war into our home,” Agnes said, but the men ignored her.

  “That’s why I came to you, Doctor,” the banker said, rolling his whiskey glass between his white palms. “I’m truly tired of what this paper’s been putting out these two years. There’s just no sense in keeping folks constantly in turmoil. I like what you have to say, and I’m ready to put my money behind it.”

  “We’ll offend someone sometime,” Jabez said. “What do you think, Agnes?”

  Biggers didn’t give her time to answer. “It’s your opportunity. You have things to say, and they’re the right things. It’s worth a little risk to get them said.”

  Jabez turned away from her, and she soon removed herself, leaving them to talk costs and equipment and editorial points of view late into the night. The next morning Jabez accompanied Biggers to the bank to draw up papers, after which they owned half of the Holt County Courier & News.

  Trouble started imm
ediately. First, the printer’s boy quit, and Jabez and his partner searched all the way to St. Joseph before finding an employee who knew the workings of the press machinery. Then he penned a long opinion piece on the legality of secession and supported Missouri’s neutrality, which served to antagonize those factions holding radical opinions in either direction, to satisfy but a few centrists, and to alienate his friend Mr. Stewart, the former governor.

  The Robinsons became pariahs. No one spoke to Agnes on the streets. Levi Zook refused to take her money at his general store and sent her to his competitor, Mr. McIntosh, who sold to her most unwillingly. And Sam and Rachel avoided them, hiding behind the excuse that the weather kept them on the farm and out of town. Elizabeth, bless her heart, continued to visit Agnes at every opportunity.

  In March, a Missouri convention asserted the state’s autonomy and demanded the federals withdraw their troops from the state, a timely and gratifying statement of Jabez’s position. The hostility towards them tapered off some, but Jabez continued to voice his opinion on the wisdom of allowing peaceful separation.

  And then everything changed.

  Book Three

  27

  May 1861

  Jake Bigelow poked the fire tentatively, stirring the coals and sending sparks spiraling into the treetops on a soggy spring breeze. Late May and the nights continued chill, the Noddaway River running heavy with snow melt, the broken land that rolled away from the river’s canyon harboring patches of frost in the early mornings. Stinging rain spit down, stabbing at his face and the backs of his hands, running off the brim of his slouch hat, seeping inside his collar. A mosquito whined past his ear. He wished he’d brought his old work gloves from home, but his kid brother used them for plowing, and he surely needed them more. The camp lay quiet this evening. Two days ago Willard rode off with some of the men on the rumor that the jayhawker Jennison headed north from Liberty toward St. Joe, leaving a trail of burning farms and hanged men in his wake. Jake figured the rumor to be bogus. Most of them turned out so, ever since he’d joined up with this crew. The boys had yet to light on any of the nigger-stealers who invaded Missouri down along the river, and Jake didn’t expect them to show up now. They never got this far north. Jennison and his pack of abolitionists hit Independence and Blue Springs. They didn’t cross the Missouri and didn’t give a shit about the northern counties.