Juliet's Moon (8 page)

M
ARTHA WAS
still ailing. But the day I got back from Quantrill's camp they had her out of bed and she was practicing walking around with crutches.

That was the nineteenth of August. The stitches held in her side, and she told me the doctor had said the wound lessened her chance of having children.

"I told Seth last night," she said. "He said never mind, we're going to make beautiful children."

Her voice trailed off. I dared not ask more.

"So, I hear you told our story to Quantrill," she said quietly.

I nodded. "Seth told me I'm not to talk about it to anyone."

"Of course. I'm sorry for asking. My, things are getting tangled between all of us, aren't they?" She gave a small smile. She still had that singsong quality to her voice, as if the fairy story was still going to have a happy ending to it after all. "Well, we can talk about where we're going when we get out of here, can't we?"

"Of course."

"Well, Seth wants you and me to go to his house in the holler. He believes it to be the safest place around. Only thing is the Yankees will want to escort us, so we have to lie and say the place belongs to Sue Mundy."

"But that's not fair."

"Nothing in the world is these days, Juliet. If the Yankees knew it was Seth's place, they'd burn it. Just like they did to your home."

I fell silent for a moment, then asked, "When do we go?"

"When the Yankee doctors let us out of here. Certain things have to happen first, I suppose."

The retaliation,
I thought. The vengeance from Quantrill and his men. The Yankees knew it was coming, but they didn't know where or when. And until they did know, they were going to keep us all where they could keep an eye on us. Just in case they needed to imprison us again, I supposed.

Martha gave me a look and a weak smile. I smiled back at her. We were likely thinking the same thing, but neither of us would acknowledge it. The worst had happened, we chose to believe. How could the Yankees do anything more to us?

W
E WERE
still in the hospital at Leavenworth on the twenty-first of August when Quantrill and his men closed in on the well-cared-for little town of Lawrence, Kansas, and attacked.

They expected, all four hundred of them, to be attacked along the way by Yankees. But they weren't.

First they sat on a hillock overlooking the handsome town of some hundred homes that boasted the largest grocery store in the state and the grandest hotel west of the Mississippi.

Then they went into the town like wolves, quietly and stealthily, only one order of Quantrill's ringing in their ears: "I will have no woman harmed."

They came right down Massachusetts Street screaming, "This is for the girls!"

They told us all this later, when they told us that Bill Anderson was the first one in, the first one to fire his gun at a helpless man who'd dropped his to the ground and raised his hands in surrender.

"This one is for Jenny!" Bill yelled. And on he went, with so many more for Jenny.

They killed, they burned, they attacked, they ransacked, they looted. They set fire until Lawrence lay in blackened, burning ruins like the underside of hell.

My brother and the other Quantrill Raiders, I thought, were riding through the dark side of their moons.

M
Y HEAD
still hurt when the doctor changed the bandage before we left the hospital.

"Do I still need a bandage?" I asked him.

"No," he said. "But it'll help, where you're going."

It was August 25. Sue Mundy was there, with me and Martha, having come back from her spy mission, which I suspected had something to do with Lawrence.

"Where are we going?" I asked him. His name was Dr. Powers and he was the one to tell us about Lawrence. He chose no sides, though a Yankee. He treated everyone with kindness and consideration.

"Well, General Order Number 11 came down this morning from headquarters."

"What does that mean?"

"Means all persons from Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties have to remove themselves from their present place of residence. They want to rid the border of all those who may have provided food, housing, clothing, or ammunition for Quantrill's men."

"It means," Sue Mundy put in, "that they couldn't kill all of you when the building fell so they've got to get rid of you another way."

Martha hobbled over on crutches. "It means us, Juliet," she told me. "And we're only allowed to bring the clothes on our backs and what we can carry."

"I have a nightgown on my back," I said, "and so do you."

"Doctor," Martha appealed, "can you get permission somehow for us to make a visit to our house and get some clothes? I know it's a big favor, sir, but we can't go like this."

"I agree with you, Mrs. Bradshaw, and I'll see to it this day. But you're in no condition to do it. Maybe the powers that be will allow Sue Mundy here to fetch some things for you. Why don't you make a list."

S
UE
M
UNDY
returned the next day with clothes and sturdy shoes for Martha and me. We were thankful to learn that so far the Anderson home had escaped the Yankees' torch. But Sue Mundy could not sweet-talk the Yankees on another matter.

"The girl and her sister-in-law are both casualties of that dreadful prison crashing to the ground," she told the corporal in charge. "They're going to be having hearings and investigations. This little girl can testify about the whole thing. She's a valuable witness. You oughtn't send her away. And her sister-in-law is a valuable witness, too."

"What do you want me to do with them?" the corporal asked. "Take them home to Mother?"

"No," Sue Mundy answered. "Let me take them to my house and keep them there. I'll stay and keep them under guard."

"Look, I've got my orders," he said. "They go on the caravan, out of state."

"C
ASS
C
OUNTY
had ten thousand residents on the day this order came down," a corporal told us. "As of today, only about six hundred remain."

We stood on a little rise on the plains, looking at the strange caravan winding along the narrow dirt trail that led out of Missouri. The caravan was made up of army wagons, oxcarts, even large crates with wheels imposed on them. Some were pulled by oxen, some by mules, some by old horses, and some by people.

Sue Mundy was gone. Back to rejoin Quantrill. The corporal had let her go, which proved what Seth had said to me about her claiming to be a double agent.

"Where are the wagons headed?" Martha asked. "Where will we be headed?"

"Don't know," the corporal said. "North, east, or south in Missouri, anywhere not affected by the proclamation. To the eastern states. Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, or Texas. Anywhere you want."

"But we don't know anyone in those places," I objected. "And our families won't know where we are."

"Don't matter. You brung it on yourselves."

"My brother, Seth. He's the only family I have. I have no one else."

"Then he should have kept a better rein on you than to let you go helping to supply the Raiders with shirts and food and the like."

I ignored that. Who had known it would come to this? "He's Martha's husband," I said. "And she's been hurt. You mean she'll never see him again?"

"If they'd told us they were married so we could keep record, instead of letting us find out through the grapevine, we'd have made other plans for them. And you."

"What is all that smoke on the horizon?" Martha asked.

"Wheat fields," he answered matter-of-factly, "cornfields. Houses and barns. Everything in the area is to be burned. Orders."

"Our home!" Martha cried, and bowed her head, leaning on her crutches.

"Here, ma'am," he said politely, for he was nothing if not polite. "Come along. You and the little girl had better get into this here wagon before you collapse." And he halted a wagon with a woman and a child in it. It was pulled by a young boy.

I still had the mumblefuddles as I climbed into the wagon. That is to say, my head was still dizzy and hurt and sometimes my eyes didn't focus right. But I didn't say anything to Martha. She had enough to spend her energy on.

The woman in the wagon said her name was Catherine. It was her child she was carrying, she told Martha. A boy, about three. A fine-looking boy at first sight, chubby and sleeping in her arms.

It took Martha only two minutes to see that he was dead.

The woman knew. Quiet tears were rolling down her face. "I don't know what to do," she told Martha. "I'll have to bury him. But I don't know where. John, my other son there, will have to dig a grave for me."

"There's an ash tree up ahead," Martha told her. "Will the soldiers let us stop?"

The caravan was being brought along and guarded by Yankee militia.

"They'll have to. Or they can shoot me, too. Does anybody think I care?"

Her son, about fourteen, pulled the wagon under the ash tree and immediately two Yankee soldiers on horseback came over to see what we were about. "You got trouble, ma'am?" one of them asked.

Catherine settled herself under the tree with the little fellow still in her lap as if she were at a garden party. "He needs to be buried," she told them. "Do either of you care to dig his grave?"

"He dead?" one of them asked.

"Well," she answered quietly, "I don't usually bury my children unless they are."

Ashamedly they took small shovels from their supplies on their horses' backs and proceeded to dig, while Catherine held the child close and sobbed quietly. Martha was crying quietly now, too. Tears were coming down my own face.

At first they couldn't get the little fellow out of Catherine's arms. But Martha set her crutches aside and held her while they did, then picked up the crutches, and with one of us on either side we walked away while they put the child in the ground.

When it was over, the soldiers asked Catherine if there was anything they could do for her.

"She needs a decent wagon. And a horse to pull it. Her other son is exhausted," Martha said, speaking up like she did back on Grand Avenue in the prison.

One of them went to find such a vehicle, and the other looked at me and Martha. "Where'd you two get hurt?" he asked.

"We were in the Grand Avenue prison when it fell," I told him.

"Oh, god," he said. "Well, don't worry, we'll get you a good wagon of your own. We'll take care of you."

W
HAT WITH
all the movement and the uneasy moments of that morning, by the time a horse and wagon was acquired for us my head was bleeding again. I was not supposed to be so active, Dr. Powers had told me back at Leavenworth. But I had not paid mind to what he had said.

Of course, our Yankee soldier now had to see to my bleeding head. It would not look good to see this caravan rolling along with people sitting in the wagons and bleeding, would it?

He said something about stopping to visit the doctor who had his own traveling surgery up ahead. I tried to tell him I did not need a doctor, just a new bandage.

"Only place you'll get that is in the doctor's surgery," he told me. "So let's go."

"Well, then, I want Martha with me."

"You're a sassy little piece." He sounded a lot like Seth, so I forgave him and went along, leaving Martha to the reins of the horse and our place in the caravan.

I do believe that the doctor was in his cups. I had never really seen Seth in his cups, but of course it is general knowledge in these parts that the measure of a man can be taken by the way he holds his liquor. They say Seth can hold his like a first-rate gentleman. This doctor could not. But what can you expect from anybody from the North?

That is to say, he was not totally drunk. He could function as a physician, I will not dispute that, but still his hands shook and his words were somewhat slurred as he unwound the bandage from my head.

"Damned nasty business, the collapse of that building," he told me, as if I didn't already know. "And as for Quantrill's response, the burning of Lawrence, why the
New York Daily Times
called all of them 'fiends incarnate.'"

Then, "You're going to have a scar on your forehead the rest of your life, girl. Do you still get dizzy?"

"I get the mumblefuddles," I told him.

He sighed. "That's good enough for me." He rewrapped my head, gave me some clean bandages, then some powders to take, and sent me on my way.

I suppose the mumblefuddles are the same in the North as well as the South.
We speak a common language,
I thought.
It's really unfair to be killing each other.

M
ARTHA AND I
traveled for two days in our new wagon. The horse, named Precious, was middling passable. The roads were rutted. Sometimes the dust from all those wagon wheels choked us. Sometimes what choked us was the smoky haze that hung in the air from the landscape that still burned as we went along. At night, when the caravan stopped, it got almost cold and we huddled together in our cloaks. September days were still hot. Skies were still a hard blue and the landscape all around us was aglow with colorful wildflowers, but I saw none of it.

I only knew that I wanted to go home, to stop playing this childish game now, to call it quits. I would have given an arm to see Seth come casually riding over the horizon, and on pulling up to where I was sleeping say, "Hey, Juliet, you up? Come on, I've got something to show you."

I cried at night. I couldn't help it. I was mindful of Martha trying to shush me, of her enfolding me in her arms, of the terrible cuts and sores inside my soul. Finally on the second night, I asked her, "Martha, where are we going? Where are we going to go?"

She had no answer for me except "Something will come up, Juliet. Something will happen to save us. Have faith."

On that second night as I went back to sleep, tears staining my face, something did happen.

We were kidnapped.

I
WAS SLEEPING
fitfully when a hand came over my mouth and I heard a man's voice in my ear. "Don't be afraid. Don't scream. We're going to take you away from here."