The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  I was aching for him to move, for the firing had ramped up even more. Bullets zinged high overhead and kicked around his boots and near my face, but he stood where he was a good five minutes, lecturing his thoughts on King Solomon and about me not reading the Good Book. Meanwhile, just behind him at the near end of the alley, which he couldn’t see, Broadnax and his band from the slave yard had made their return. They somehow got hold of the rebels’ cannon, which had been parked at the edge of town, and they plumb rolled that thing back to the end of the alley and swung the hot end to face the rebels. The barrel of that thing was just over the Old Man’s shoulder. He didn’t notice, course, for he was preaching. His sermon about the Holy Word and King Solomon and the two mothers with one baby was clearly important to him. He went on warbling about his sermon as one of Broadnax’s Negroes flared a light and set fire to the cannon’s fuse.

  The Old Man didn’t pay it a lick of mind. He was still bellowing on about King Solomon and the two mothers when Owen piped up, “Pa! We got to go. Captain Lane’s riding outta town and gonna leave us.”

  The Old Man looked down the alley as bullets whizzed past his head and at the lit cannon over his shoulder, then down at the rebels firing and cussing at the other end of the alley gathered behind the slave pen, trying to mount up the nerve to charge. Behind him, the fuse of Broadnax’s cannon was lit and was kicking out thick smoke as it headed home. The Negroes backed away from it in awe, watching the fuse burn. The Old Man, watching them, seemed straight-out irritated that they was taking the fight from him, for he wanted the glory.

  He stepped out in the clear, right in the middle of the alley, and shouted to the rebels who was shooting at us from the slave pen. “I’m Captain John Brown! Now in the name of the Holy Redeemer, the King of Kings, the Man of Trinity, I hereby orders you to git. Git in His holy name! Git! For He is always on the right side of justice!”

  Well, I don’t know if it was that lit cannon belching smoke over his shoulder that done it, or them rebels losing heart when they seen the Old Man hisself in person standing in the clear, untouched with their bullets zinging past his face, but they turned and took the tall timber. They took off. And with that cannon fuse lit and burning home to its maker, the Old Man stood right next to it and watched the fuse burn to nothing and fizzle out. It didn’t hit the hammer. The thing was dead.

  Looking back, I reckon cannon fuses blowed out all the time. But that cannon not firing only gived the Old Man more reason to believe in divine intrusions, beliefs of which he weren’t never short. He watched the fuse fizzle out and said, “Good Lord. God’s blessing is eternal and everlasting, and now I sees yet another sign that His ideas which has come to me lately is on the dot and that He is speaking to me directly.”

  He turned to Owen and said, “I don’t want to run behind Jim Lane no more. I come this far only to gather up Little Onion, who is a good-luck charm to me and this army and also a reminder of our dear Frederick, who lies sleeping in this territory. Now that I has got what I come for, our Redeemer has sprung forth yet another rain bucket of ideas for me to lead the way to freedom for the multitudes of His children, like Little Onion here. I have been making some hatchings of various sundry plans, with God’s help, and after we help ourselves to some of God’s gifts from the hardware and dry-goods stores of these heathen slave owners, we will gather our bees for hiving to a greater purpose. Kansas Territory don’t need me no more. We have great work. To the east, men! Onward!”

  And with that the Old Man plopped me on his horse, and we sped down that alley, right past that cannon, out of Pikesville, and into legend.

  PART III

  LEGEND

  (Virginia)

  17

  Rolling into History

  A blizzard set on top of us as we moved out of Pikesville with three men on horses and the rest on wagons. Snow fell for a straight day and covered the trail. It left snow nearly a foot high in every direction. A warm snap followed for a day, melting some of the snow, then a deep freeze came. Ice on trees was two inches thick. Water froze in canteens by morning. We lay out under canvases wrapped in roll blankets, with snow blowing over our faces and wolves howling nearby. The Old Man had a new army, a bigger one, and each man took turns keeping the fires going, though they didn’t help much. The outdoors never bothered the Old Man, of course. He could sense a change in the weather like an old farmer, walk through the dead of night through a dark woods without nary a light, and step through a thunderstorm like it weren’t there. But I was hitting the trail after two years of smooth, dry, easy living and shoving rotgut ale down my throat. The second day I come down with a bad case of the ague. Lucky for me, the Old Man fell ill with the ague, too, so he announced, during the middle of the third day when yet another snowstorm fell, “Men, I has word from on high that there is a slave or two that needs freeing here in Missouri. We is heading to Vernon County.”

  There weren’t no arguing with him in that weather. He had changed considerably since I seen him two years hence. He was a fearsome sight. His face was wrinkled like a raisin. His gnarled old hands looked like leather claws. His face was stern as a rock. His eyes were like gray granite. His speech changed some, too. He declared he had moved to the woods alone to study the works of some feller named Cromwell, and I reckon it moved him mightily, for he sprinkled his talk with more “thees” and “thous” and “thithers” than ever. Sitting atop his horse with snow falling off his flecked wool coat, sticking to his beard, he looked even more like Moses of old. “I ought to be a general,” he remarked one morning as we trudged through the freezing woods of Vernon County, “but our Redeemer of Trinity Who controlleth the weather and is Commander of all stations deems it fit to keep me at His feet. I was enjoined with nature for nearly a year, Onion, living in the woods on my own, studying my battle plans and commingling with our great King of Kings, I come away with the understanding that I serves His will as a Captain, Onion, that is the title He has charged me with. Nothing higher.”

  “Why don’t God’s Captain take us to warm shelter,” Owen grumbled.

  The Old Man snorted. “God protects us in winter, Owen. No Pro Slavers will be seen in this country till the grass grows green again. That allows us to do our work.”

  He was right about that, for no creature with a brain would venture out into that snow. We trudged along through southwest Missouri territory for four days that way, freezing, not finding no slaves to free, till finally the Old Man declared, “Slavery in Vernon County is vanquished. We will march east to Iowa by land.”

  “Whyn’t we take the ferry?” Owen asked. “That’s the fastest way east.”

  The Captain smirked. “The ferries are run by Pro Slavers, son. They don’t take Yanks.”

  Owen brandished his sword and pistols, nodding at the men behind us, three on horses and the rest on wagons, all armed. “They’ll take us.”

  The Old Man smirked. “Did Jesus take a chariot down Jericho Road from eight thousand feet to sea level? Did Moses circle the mountain with the scroll of the commandments on a horse? Or did he climb the swell with his own feet? We shall march to Iowa as cavalry, like David of old.” Truth is, though, he couldn’t take the ferry ’cause he was on the run. The price on the Old Man’s head had gone up considerable in the two years since I’d been in Pikesville. Owen told me both Missouri and Kansas Territory had different prices on his head, and the folks back east had been stirred up considerable by their hearing of the Old Man’s doings, which included removin’ the head of Doyle and them others, not to mention freeing slaves wherever he went. Each week the Old Man sent one of his men to the nearby town of Cuddyville to get newspapers from back east, and them accounts was filled with all kinds of debates about the slave fight, not to mention the various wonderings about the prices on his head from various pickets, both territories, and Washington, D.C. To make matters worse, a federal company picked up our trail outside Nebraska City and chased us nor
th, away from the ferry. They hung on through the snowstorm. We tried to ride away from them, but they hung back several miles, just out of sight. Each time we thought we’d lost them, the Old Man stopped and peered back through his looking glass and spotted them a few miles distant, struggling to keep up with us in the snow. This went on for days.

  “Whyn’t they just come on and make a fight of it,” Owen murmured.

  “They ain’t gonna do that,” the Captain said. “For Gideon told the people, ‘I will not rule over you. My son will not rule over you. The Lord will rule over you.’ Our Savior won’t let ’em fight us.”

  After another three days of snow and freezing weather, the federals got tired of the game. They sent a horseman over to our camp bearing a white flag to speak to the Old Man. He was a rangy feller, with his uniform tucked neatly into his boots and his face beet-red from the cold. “I’m Lieutenant Beers,” he announced. “I brings words from my commander, Captain Haywood. He says if you was to come in quietly and not resist, we will take you to Lawrence for a fair trial and leave your men alone.”

  The Old Man snorted. “Tell Captain Haywood to come and get me.”

  “He’ll have to arrest you.”

  “For what?”

  “I ain’t certain of the charges, Captain,” the lieutenant said, “but the governor of Kansas Territory throwed a three-thousand-dollar price for your capture. President Buchanan has offered another two hundred fifty. You’d be safer with us than riding these parts with all that money hanging on your head.”

  Sitting on his horse in the falling snow, the Old Man laughed. He had the oddest laugh of any man I ever saw. He didn’t make a sound, but rather crinkled his face and sucked in his breath. His shoulders heaved, he sucked in air, his face tightened up, and the wrinkles in his forehead would collapse around his eyes till they disappeared and all you could see was his yellow teeth, about to whoosh air out at you from what seemed like just about every hole in his head—his eyes, ears, and mouth. The overall effect was terrifying if you didn’t know him. The lieutenant got right unsettled watching it, and at that particular moment the Old Man sneezed, which flipped his body off his saddle for a moment and sent his frock coat tails flipping up, showing the handles of one of them great, big seven-shooters he carried in holsters on either side.

  “That’s an insult,” the Old Man finally snorted when he was done. “I am fighting the cause in the name of our Holy Redeemer, who can expunge the word of any nation with a mere cough. I ain’t ruled by him. Deuteronomy thirty-two, thirty-five, says, ‘Their foot shall slide in due time.’”

  He turned around and said to his men, “I herebys offer any man in this here army two dollars and fifty cents for President Buchanan’s head. He is presiding over a barbaric institution that does not answer to the throne of our most Holy Martyr.”

  The soldier turned around and rode back to his company in a hurry. After a day, the federals rode off, tumbling through the deep snowdrifts and long ridges of the prairie. “A wise move,” the Old Man murmured, watching them leave through his peering glass. “They knows I have friends in high places.”

  “Where?” snorted Owen.

  “Our most high God, son, whose call you’d do well to heed yourself.”

  Owen shrugged and didn’t pay him no mind. He and his brothers was used to the Old Man’s proclamations. Most weren’t nearly as religious as their Pa. In fact, when the Old Man was out of earshot, his sons gived full lip service to quitting the slave-fighting game altogether and returning to their homesteads. A couple of ’em, Jason and John, had already went and done it; they had enough living on the prairie the two years I was gone and quit and gone home, back to upstate New York, and most of his original crew from Kansas went home or was deadened. But he still had four sons with him, Watson, Oliver, Salmon, and Owen, plus he’d picked up some new men in his travels, and these fellers weren’t like his earlier crew, which was mostly Kansas farmers, homesteaders, and Indians. This new batch of fellers was young gunfighters, rough adventurers, teachers and scholars, serious business, and would shoot the hair off your head. The most serious of ’em was Kagi, a smooth-faced drummer out of Nebraska City who’d come to Pikesville with Owen. Kagi fought at Black Jack with the Old Man, but I hadn’t seen him there, being that my head was in the sand at the time. He was a schoolteacher by trade, and carried lectures and readings in a rolled-up paper bunch in his pocket, which he referred to from time to time. He seemed temperate enough, but he was wanted in Tecumseh for pulling out his Colt and throwing enough lead at a Pro Slavery judge to knock his face off and put the feller to sleep forever. The judge shot Kagi in the heart before Kagi deadened him. Kagi claimed the judge’s ball was stopped from piercing his heart by a notebook he carried in his breast pocket. He kept that ragged notebook on his person for the rest of his life, which it turned out weren’t very long. Next to him was John Cook, Richard Hinton, Richard Realf, a colored named Richard Richardson, and Aaron Stevens. The last was a tall, hulking grouse, a bad-tempered feller, well over six hands tall, dangerous business, always spoiling for a fight. He weren’t religious in the least. These fellers weren’t like the Old Man’s earlier crew of farmers fighting for their land. They didn’t smoke nor drink nor chew tobacco. They mostly read books and argued about politics and spiritual matters. The Old Man referred to ’em as “Mister This” and “Mister That,” and had the aim of converting ’em to the Holy Word. He overthrowed ’em with God every chance he got, saying, “Mister So and So, you’re doing the devil’s work making light of God’s salvation,” but they’d become used to ignoring him on that affair. Slavery was the question. That’s what bonded ’em. And they wasn’t fooling.

  They followed him like sheep, though. Smart as they was, nary a one of ’em challenged him on his orders or even knowed where we was going from day to day. The Old Man was stone-cold silent on his plans, and they trusted his word. Only thing he allowed was, “We going east, men. We are going east to fight the war against slavery.”

  Well, there is a lot of east. And there is a lot of slavery. And it is one thing to say you is gonna fight slavery and ride east to do it and take the war all the way to Africa and so forth. It is another to keep riding day after day in the cold to do it.

  We drug and slung along one hundred fifty miles toward Tabor, Iowa—it took two months—freeing coloreds as we went. Tabor was free country in them days, but it was winter and tough going, in twelve degree weather, on a trail caked with six inches of ice, and the Old Man praying over burnt squirrel and old johnnycake the whole time. Luckily we had stolen a bunch of booty from Pikesville and a few slave owners along the way: ammo, guns, two Conestoga wagons, four horses, two mules, one ox, bedding, frying pans, tins, some trousers and hats, coats, even a sewing table and apple barrel, but game on the prairie in winter is scarce, and we was plumb out of food in no time, so we traded with whomever we come across as we plodded along, and survived that way. In that manner I was also able to secret me a pair of trousers and a hat and underwear with nobody giving a hoot’s notice, for it was too cold to care what a person wore out there. By the time we hit Tabor, Iowa, we was exhausted and hungry—except for the Captain, who sprang up every morning bright as a bird, ready to go. It seemed like he didn’t need sleep. And food didn’t interest him in the least, ’specially anything revolving around butter. He’d quit the living game altogether if it meant eating butter. Something about that delicacy just throwed him. But if it was turtle soup or roasted bear, why, he’d rustle through a pigsty in his drawers in the dead of winter just to get a whiff of that kind of game. He was queer that way. An outdoor man to the limit.

  He was all but enthusiastic the moment we hit town, which was strangely quiet when we plodded into the village square. He looked about and breathed deeply. “I am thankful we is in abolitionist territory,” he crowed as he sat atop his horse, gazing about. “Even the air seems clearer. Freedom lives here, men. We are home. We shall
rest here through the winter months.”

  We stood there for an hour and that town stayed quiet as a mouse fart. Not a door opened. Not a shutter moved. The town folks was panicked. They wouldn’t have nothing to do with us. After a while we was so cold we knocked on doors looking for shelter, but no homestead nor tavern wanted us. “Murderer,” a woman chirped, slamming the door. “Crazy old man,” said another. “Keep out.” One man told him, “I am against slavery, Captain, but I’m against killing. You and your men can’t stay here.” It went like that all through town. Tabor was free country in them days, and he was known to every abolitionist east of Missouri, but they was just stone chickenhearted about the whole business. Course the Old Man was hot, too, a wanted man with a price on his head. Every newspaper in the country crowed about how he knocked a few heads off back in Kansas Territory, so I guess that made ’em shy, too.

  We went to just about every door in town, a parade of freezing, ragged men, beaten mules and starving horses, and when the last was slammed in his face, the Old Man was irritated but not downtrodden. “Talk, talk, talk,” he muttered. “All the Christian can do is talk. And that, men,” he said, as he stood in the middle of the deserted town, wiping the snow off his whiskers, “is our true battle. Your basic slave needs freedom, not talk. The Negro has listened to talk of moral suasion for two hundred years. We can’t wait. Did Toussaint-Louverture, wait for the French in Haiti? Did Spartacus wait on the Roman government? Did Garibaldi wait on the Genovese?”

  Owen said, “I am sure they are good people of whom you speak, Father. But it is cold out here.”

  “We ought to be like David of old,” the Old Man grumbled, “living off the grace and nurturing of our King of Kings, who provides for all our needs and wants. I myself am not cold. But for your sakes I do have a few friends left in this world.” He ordered the men to saddle up again and led us out to a few farmers in nearby Pee Dee who agreed to take us on—after the Old Man sold them most of his horses and wagons and made arrangements for us to help them shuck corn and tend their homesteads through the rest of the winter months. There was some grumbling, but the men was grateful to have food and shelter.