“All the more reason to run these Free Staters out of this country,” he said. “I’m Chase.” He motioned to his partner. “That’s Randy.”
I howdied ’em.
“Where’s your Ma?”
“Dead.”
“Where is your Pa?”
“Dead. Dead, dead, dead. They all dead.” I boo-hooed again.
He stood there watching. That throwed him some more. “Quit crying for God’s sake, and I’ll give you a peppermint,” he said.
I stood sniffling while he reached in one of them bags on his horse and throwed me a candy. I throwed it down my little red lane without hesitation. It was my first time tasting one of them things, and by God, the explosion in my mouth gived me more pleasure than you can imagine. Candy was rare in them days.
He seed the effect of it and said, “I has plenty more of them, little missus. What’s your business in Lawrence?”
He had me there. I hadn’t no business in Lawrence, and wouldn’t know Lawrence from Adam. So I commenced to choking and fluttering on that candy to give me a minute to think, which made Chase leap off his horse and pound my back—but that didn’t work, neither, for he slammed me so hard, the candy got throwed out my mouth and hit the dust, and that gived me a reason to pretend to be sorry about that, which I was in a real way, so I bawled a little more, but this time it didn’t move him, for we both stared at the candy on the ground. I reckon we was both trying to decide a good way to get it up, clean, and eat it as it should be eaten. After a minute or so, I still hadn’t come up with nothing.
“Well?” he said.
I glanced at the thicket, hoping Owen would come back. Never had I wanted to see his sour face so much. But I heard shots from the woods where he and the brothers had departed, so I figured they’d had their own troubles. I was on my own.
I said, “My Pa left me this sorry nigger Bob here, and I told him to take me to Lawrence. But he got to giving me so much trouble—”
By God, why did I do that? Chase drawed out his heater again and stuck it in Bob’s face. “I’ll beat this nigger cockeyed if he’s giving you trouble.”
Bob’s eyes widened big as silver dollars.
“No, sir, that’s not it,” I said hurriedly. “This nigger’s actually been a help to me. It would do me great harm if you hurt him, for he is all I have in this world.”
“All right then,” Chase said, holstering his six-shooter. “But lemme ask you, honey. How can a part-way nigger own a full-way nigger?”
“He’s paid for fair and square,” I said. “They do that in Illinois all the time.”
“I thought you said you was from Palmyra,” Chase said.
“By way of Illinois.”
“Ain’t that a Free State?” Chase said.
“Not for us rebels,” I said.
“What town in Illinois?”
Well, that stumped me. I didn’t know Illinois from a mule’s ass. I couldn’t think of a town there to save my life, so I thunk of something I heard the Old Man say often. “Purgatory,” I said.
“Purgatory,” Chase laughed. He turned to Randy. “That’s the right name for a Yankee town, ain’t it, Randy?”
Randy stared at him and didn’t say a natural word. That man was dangerous.
Chase looked ’round and seen Frederick’s grave where we’d buried him.
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t know. We been hiding in this thicket while the Free Staters was scouting ’round here. I heard ’em say it was one of theirs.”
Chase pondered the grave thoughtfully. “It’s a fresh grave. We ought to see if who’sever in there got on boots,” he said.
That throwed me, for last thing I wanted to do was for them to dig up Frederick and pick all over his parts. I couldn’t bear the thought of it, so I said, “I heard ’em say he got his face blowed off and it was all mush.”
“Jesus,” Chase mumbled. He backed away from the grave. “Damn Yanks. Well, you ain’t got to fear them now, little angel. Chase Armstrong done drove ’em off! Wanna ride with us?”
“We is going to the Lawrence Hotel to get a job, and Bob is a help to me. We was waylaid, see, when you all whipped up on them darn Free Staters. But thanks to you, the danger is gone. So I reckon we’ll be off.”
I motioned to Bob to har up the mule, but Chase said, “Hold on now. We’re going to Pikesville, Missouri. That’s in your general direction. Why not come with us?”
“We’ll be fine.”
“These trails is dangerous.”
“They ain’t that bad.”
“I think they is bad enough that you ought not ride alone,” he said. It weren’t no invitation the way he said it.
“Bob here is sick,” I said. “He got the ague. It’s catching.”
“All the more reason to roll with us. I know a couple of nigger traders in Pikesville. Big nigger like that would draw some good money, sick or not. A couple thousand dollars, maybe. Give you a good start.”
Bob shot a wild look at me.
“I can’t do that,” I said, “for I promised my Pa never to sell him.”
I motioned for him again to har up the mules, but Chase grabbed the traces this time and held them tight. “What’s waiting for you in Lawrence? Ain’t nothing but Free Staters there.”
“There is?”
“Surely.”
“We’ll go to the next town, then.”
Chase chuckled. “Ride our way.”
“I weren’t going that way. Plus Old John Brown’s riding these woods. They’re still dangerous.”
I motioned Bob to har up the mule one more time, but Chase held ’em tight, looking at me out the corner of his eye. He was serious now.
“Brown is done. The redshirts is shooting up what’s left of his boys in the woods yonder. And he’s dead. I seen him with my own eyes.”
“That can’t be!”
“Yep. Deader than yesterday’s beer.”
That floored me. “That’s a low-down, rotten, dirty piece of luck!” I said.
“How’s that?”
“I mean it’s rotten luck that . . . I ain’t never seen him dead, him being a famous outlaw and all. You seen him surely?”
“He’s stinking to high heaven right now, the nigger-stealing thief. I seen him hit at the bank and fall into the Marais des Cygnes myself. I would’a run down there and chopped his head off myself but”—he cleared his throat—“me and Randy had to run ’round to protect the flank. Plus there was a hardware store on the back end of town that needed cleaning out, if you get my drift, being that them Free Staters won’t be needin’ this stuff . . .”
I knowed he was wrong about the Old Man’s whereabouts then, and I was relieved. But I had to take care of myself too, so I said, “I am so glad he is gone, for this territory is now safe for good white folks to live free and clear.”
“But you ain’t white.”
“Half-white. Plus we got to take care of the coloreds here, for they needs us. Right, Bob?”
Bob looked away. I knowed he was mad.
I reckoned Chase decided I was close enough to white for him, for Bob’s manner sullied him. “You’s a sour-faced coon,” he muttered, “and I ought to bust you ’cross the jibs for attitude.” He turned to me. “What kind of work you seeking in Lawrence that you carry ’round such a sour nigger?”
“Trim’s my business,” I said proudly, for I could cut hair.
He perked up. “Trim?”
Now, having growed up with whores and squaws at Dutch’s, I should’a knowed what that word “trim” meant. But the truth is, I didn’t.
“I sell the best trim a man can get. Can do two or three men in an hour.”
“That many?”
“Surely.”
“Ain’t you a little young to be selling trim?”
His manner changed altogether. He polited up, wiping his face clean with his neckerchief, fluffing his clothes, and straightening out his ragged shirt. “Wouldn’t you rather have a job waiting or washing?”
“Why wash dishes when you can do ten men in an hour?”
Chase’s face got ripe red. He reached in his sack and drawed out a whiskey bottle. He sipped it and passed it to Randy. “That must be some kind of record,” he said. He looked at me out the corner of his eye. “You want to do me one?”
“Out here? On the trail? It’s better to be in a warm tavern, with a stove cooking and heating your victuals, while you enjoys a toot and a tear. Plus I can clip your toenails and soak your corns at the same time. Feet’s my specialty.”
“Ooh, that stirs my britches,” he said. “Listen, I know a place there that’s perfect for you. I know a lady who’ll give you a job. It’s in Pikesville, not Lawrence.”
“That ain’t in our direction.”
For the first time, Randy opened his talking hole. “Sure it is,” he said. “Unless you playing us for a fool. You all could be lying. ’Cause you ain’t showed us no papers—’bout you or him.”
He looked rough enough to scratch a match off his face. I didn’t have no choice, really, for he had called me out so I said, “You is not a gentleman, sir, to accuse a young lady of my background of lying. But, being that it’s dangerous on this trail for a girl like myself, I reckon Pikesville is as good a place to go as any. And if I can make money there selling trims as you claims, why not?”
They ordered Bob to help unload their horses and mules, then spotted some knickknacks among the stolen goods the Old Man’s sons had left about. They jumped off their horses to gather that stuff.
The moment they was out of earshot, Bob leaned over from the driver’s seat and hissed, “Aim your lies in a different direction.”
“What I done?”
“Trim means ‘tail,’ Henry. Birds and the bees. All that.”
When they come back I seen the glint in their eyes, and I was tied in a knot. I’d have gived anything to see Owen’s sour face come charging, but he didn’t come. They tied their beasts to ours, throwed what they gathered up in the wagon, and we rolled off.
11
Pie
We followed the trail half a day northeast, dead into Missouri slave territory. I sat behind Bob in the wagon while Chase and Randy followed on horseback. On the trail, Chase did all the talking. He talked about his Ma. Talked about his Pa. Talked about his kids. His wife was half cousin to his Pa and he talked about that. There weren’t nothing about himself he didn’t seem to want to talk about, which gived me another lesson on being a girl. Men will spill their guts about horses and their new boots and their dreams to a woman. But if you put ’em in a room and turn ’em loose on themselves, it’s all guns, spit, and tobacco. And don’t let ’em get started on their Ma. Chase wouldn’t stop stretching his mouth about her and all the great things she done.
I let him go on, for I was more concerned with the subject of trim, and what my doings was gonna be in that department. After a while them two climbed in the back of the wagon and opened a bottle of rye, which helped commence me to singing right away, just to keep them two off the subject. There ain’t nothing a rebel loves more than a good old song, and I knowed several from my days at Dutch’s. They rode happily back there, sipping moral suasion while I sang “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Please, Ma, I Ain’t Coming Home,” and “Grandpa, Your Horse Is in My Barn.” That cooled them for a while, but dark was coming. Thankfully, just before true night swallowed the big prairie sky, the rolling plains and mosquitoes gived way to log cabins and squatters’ homes, and we hit Pikesville.
Pikesville was rude business back in them days, just a collection of run-down cabins, shacks, and hen coops. The streets were mud, with rocks, tree stumps, and gullies lying about the main road. Pigs roamed the alleyways. Ox, mules, and horses strained to pull carts full of junk. Piles of freight sat about uncollected. Most of the cabins was unfinished, some without roofs. Others looked like they were on the verge of collapse altogether, with rattlesnake skins, buffalo hide, and animal skins drying out nearby. There were three grog houses in town, built one on top of the other practically, and every porch railing on ’em was thick with tobacco spit. That town was altogether a mess. Still, it was the grandest town I’d ever seen to that point.
We hit the town to a great hubbub, for they’d heard rumors about the big gunfight at Osawatomie. No sooner had we pulled up than the wagon was surrounded. An old feller asked Chase, “Is it true? Is Old John Brown dead?”
“Yes, sir,” Chase crowed.
“You killed him?”
“Why, I throwed every bullet I had at him sure as you standing there—”
“Hoorah!” they hollered. He was pulled off the wagon and clapped and pounded on the back. Randy got sullen and didn’t say a word. I reckon he was wanted and there was a reward for him somewhere, for the minute they pulled Chase off the wagon howling, Randy slipped on his horse, grabbed his pack mule, and slipped off. I never seen him again. But Chase was riding high. They drug him to the nearest grog house, sat him down, pumped him full of whiskey, and surrounded him, drunks, jackals, gamblers, and pickpockets, shouting, “How’d you do it?”
“Tell us the whole thing.”
“Who shot first?”
Chase cleared his throat. “Like I said, there was a lotta shooting—”
“Course there was! He was a murdering fool!”
“A jackal!”
“Horse thief, too! Yellow Yank!”
More laughter. They just throwed the lie on him. He weren’t aiming to lie. But they pumped him full of rotgut as he could stand it. They bought every bit of his stolen booty, and he got soused, and after a while he couldn’t help but to pump the thing up and go along with it. His story changed from one drink to the next. It growed in the tellin’ of it. First he allowed that he shot the Old Man hisself. Then he killed him with his bare hands. Then he shot him twice. Then he stabbed and dismembered him. Then he throwed his body into the river, where the alligators lunched on what was left. Up and down he went, back and forth, this way and that, till the thing stretched to the sky. You’d a thunk it would’a dawned on some of them that he was cooking it all up, the way his story growed legs. But they was as liquored up as him, when folks wanna believe something, the truth ain’t got no place in that compartment. It come to me then that they feared Old John Brown something terrible; feared the idea of him as much as they feared the Old Man hisself, and thus they was happy to believe he was dead, even if that knowledge was just five minutes long before the truth would come about to it and kill it dead.
Bob and I set quiet while this was going on, for they weren’t paying us no mind, but each time I stood up to step toward the door and slip away, catcalling and whistling drove me back to my chair. Women or girls of any type was scarce out on the prairie, and even though I was a mess—my dress was flattened out, my bonnet torn, and my hair underneath it was a wooly mess—the men offered me every kind of pleasure. They outworked a cooter in the nasty chattering department. Their comments come as a surprise to me, for the Old Man’s troops didn’t cuss nor drink and was generally respecters of the woman race. As the night wore on, the hooting and howling toward me growed worse, and it waked Chase, who ended up with his head on the bar, lubricated and stewed past reason, out his stupor.
He rose from the bar and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. I am tired after killing the most dastardly criminal of the last hundred years. I aim to take this little lady across the road to the Pikesville Hotel, where Miss Abby is no doubt holding my room for me on the Hot Floor, on account of having heard of my late rasslings with that demon who I wrestled the breath from and fed him to the wolves in the nam
e of the free living state of Missoura! God bless America.” He pushed me and Bob out the door and staggered across the street to the Pikesville Hotel.
The Pikesville was a high-class hotel and saloon compared to the previous two shitholes that I aforementioned, but I ought to say here that looking back, it weren’t much better. Only after I seen dwellings in the East did I learn that the finest hotel in Pikesville was a pigsty compared to the lowliest flophouse in Boston. The first floor of the Pikesville Hotel was a dark, candlelit drinking room, with tables and a bar. Behind it was a small middle room with a long dining table for eating. On the side of that room was a door that led to a hall leading to a back alley. At the back of the room was a set of stairs leading to the second floor.
There was a great hubbub when Chase came in, for word had proceeded him. He was pounded on the back and hailed from one corner of the room to the other, drinks shoved into his hands. He hailed everyone with a great big howdy, then proceeded to the back room, where several men seated at the dining table howdied him and offered to give him their seats and more drinks. He waved them off. “Not now, fellers,” he said. “I got business on the Hot Floor.”
On the stairs at the back of the room, several women of the type that frequented Dutch’s place sat along the bottom rungs. A couple were smoking pipes, shoving the black tobacco down into the cups with wrinkled fingers and shoving the pipes into their mouths, clamping down with teeth so yellow they looked like clumps of butter. Chase staggered past them and stood at the bottom of the stairs, hollering up, “Pie! Pie darling! C’mon down. Guess who’s back.”
There was a commotion at the top of the stairs, and a woman made her way from the darkness and stepped halfway down the stairs into the dim candlelight of the room.
I once pulled a ball from the ham of a rebel stuck out near Council Bluffs after he got into a hank out there and someone throwed their pistol on him and left him bleeding and stuck. I cleared him, and he was so grateful, he drove me to town afterward and gived me a bowl of ice cream. That was something I never had before. Best thing I ever tasted in my life.
The Good Lord Bird Page 12