Shortgrass Song (2 page)

While he was trying to calculate the distance, something unknown caught his eye. It passed over the treeless hill: maybe a wind ripple on the blade tips of the grasses, or the lingering dust from a dying whirlwind. It seemed to spell an invitation on the side of the mountain until his eyes focused, darting everywhere, finding nothing. The long sounds of his name moaned once on the wind, and then were lost. Something up there had called to him.

He crawled to the door and peeked out. No one watched. He clawed his way to the brink of the dirt bank and found his mother on her knees, tending her flower garden. His father was plowing behind the oxen. The boy waited until his father reached the end of the turnrow and started plowing away from the dugout. He glanced at his mother again, then slid down the bank on his rear. He planted his heels, sprang to his feet, and hurtled down toward the creek.

At the water's edge he glanced back but still couldn't see either of his parents over the bank. The stepping-stones stood too far apart to suit his stride, so he leapt from one to the other. The water ran shallow but swift around him like a gale in the treetops. At the far shore he slipped and landed on his back in the cold water. He floundered for a second, found his footing, splashed to the far bank, and pulled at the clothes plastered cold against his skin.

He collapsed and heaved under the cottonwoods lining the shore opposite his dugout. When he had caught his breath, he scurried uphill, weaving among the trunks. The bald hill above the cottonwoods was like a hump of the prairie that had broken free and crossed the creek. It was covered with the same short brown grass that bristled from the roof of his house. He left the trees behind and trudged up the grassy slope.

Suddenly, the mountains appeared over the bald pate of the hill. Caleb couldn't believe it. They seemed no closer here than from the dugout. The great peaks rose higher as the boy mounted the crest. He knelt and stared with his mouth open. He couldn't count the ridges between his bald hill and the mountains—some growing trees; some bare rock. They meshed and angled toward the peaks.

A bare and narrow trail passed in front of him and snaked into the foothills. He saw its curves passing over the high places. It looked like a very old trail, but it wasn't wide enough for a wagon. It might have been wide enough for two horses walking abreast, but Caleb wasn't sure. He didn't know much about riding horses.

He turned back to the plains. The dream of dead grass had grown larger and all but swallowed his stick-figure parents. Even the oxen looked no bigger than bugs. The furrows his father plowed were mere scratches on the world; the doorway to his house was nothing but a freckle on the face of a giant. Way beyond his parents the boy saw one of his brothers riding the horse around the cows. It was so far away he couldn't even tell which brother it was.

The mountains held for him a far greater appeal. He let the sun and the south wind dry him as he dreamed of riding the trail into the mountains someday when his mother let him get well—some distant day after his father gave him his pocketknife back.

TWO

Buster figured he could use the guitar for a mast and the banjo for a boom. He hated to waste all this wind. An intermittent breeze had blown from the south since he left Independence, twenty-eight days before. But today it had grown to a fair wind—a sailor's wind—the kind of blow Buster had loved to fill a canvas with on Chesapeake Bay before he changed his name and headed west.

All morning he had pulled his little milk wagon up a steady grade, the wind whipping the brim of his hat first against its crown, then down against his face. The parching air of the High Plains had so dried his black skin that he seemed sprinkled with ashes. His sweat evaporated instantly on the lined curve of his forehead.

He was not an unusually big man, but he was young and strong, well proportioned, and rounded with muscle. He had the endurance to pull his milk wagon ten miles or more a day, though it was barely big enough to rate as a wagon at all. The box wasn't much bigger than a coffin; the wheels only knee-high at the hub.

He had come to a low ridge, and the slope pitched downhill in front of him for a change. The angle was not severe, but it was sufficient to make the little wagon favor the west. For most of the trip it had seemed to balk like a jackass wanting to turn back to the trees of Missouri. He stopped on the rolling crest to survey the surrounding terrain. Except for the dark, hazy outline of the mountains on the western horizon, he could see nothing but grass and sky in every direction—trackless reaches of unpeopled plains.

He got one of his four canteens out of the wagon and took a swallow. The few maps he had studied before coming west had described this region as the Great American Desert, and the label had prompted him to carry plenty of water for his crossing to the mountains. Now he could see that it wasn't a desert at all, but a great wealth of grass. Some accounts he had read in the newspapers had described the plains as a sea, rolling in waves, devoid of landmarks, swept with storms maritime in nature; a sea of grass, a sea of loneliness, a sea of treelessness. Of course, now Buster saw that the plains had no more in common with a sea than an iceberg had with a lava flow. The ocean's surface lived and writhed. The waves and crests of the plains were corpses long covered with mats of grass.

But the winds did resemble the marine gusts Buster had sailed before on the Chesapeake. They lacked the spray and the smell of brine, but they begged for canvas.

A piece of old wagon sheet covered his musical instruments in the box of the milk wagon. He figured he could use it as a sail if he could build something to rig it on. He thought about removing the wagon tongue and stepping it as a mast, but he would need it to steer. That left only the instruments—the guitar, the banjo, the fiddle, and the mandolin. The guitar and the banjo were longest, so they would serve as mast and boom.

Buster put the stopper back in his canteen and got to work. He was not one to squander an idea. A crate in the wagon held his change of clothes, a few tools, some dried meat and apples, and a single-shot horse pistol. Besides the crate, the instruments, and the canteens, there was nothing in the wagon but the buffalo chips he used to build fires at night.

He turned his wagon around so the tongue pointed eastward; he knew how to sail only with his rudder astern. He moved the crate to the center of the wagon. It had a convenient knothole on top. He took the strap off the peg at the rounded end of the guitar. The peg fit easily into the knothole on the crate, and there he stepped his mast.

Now he needed shrouds to hold it erect. He didn't own any rope or cord, so he began taking the catgut strings off the guitar. He spliced four of the strings together in pairs, giving him two long shrouds to reach fore and aft. The other two guitar strings would reach the sides of the wagon box to the starboard and port. He threaded the catgut through cracks between the sideboards and wound them around the tuning keys on the guitar neck. To tighten them, he simply turned the keys as if tuning up for a dance. He thumped the shrouds, listening for the tone that would tell him when his mast stood firm.

He paused to look around the prairie. “Don't worry, Buster, there ain't a soul in thirty miles,” he said to himself. He could only hope he was right. Some frontiersman might mistake a black man sailing a milk wagon across the plains for a lunatic and shoot him for the common good, as there were no asylums this far from civilization.

The boom proved much easier to rig than the mast. He simply stuck the neck of the banjo into the sound hole of the guitar. The drumlike head of the banjo would swing on the end of the boom, providing just that much more surface for the wind to push against. To suspend the boom, he ran the guitar strap from the neck of the guitar to the head of the banjo. The boom could only travel ninety degrees between the aft and starboard shrouds, but he would not have to jibe. The steady south wind would come across his port gunnel, and he could make the whole downhill run on a close beam reach with the boom over the starboard sideboards of the milk wagon.

The piece of wagon sheet already had dozens of holes in it, so Buster didn't mind cutting a few more to hitch his sail onto the mast and the boom. He would use the shoulder strap from the banjo as a sheet to hold his sail to the wind.

The canvas was popping like a flag in the wind as he climbed into the stern of his craft and sat down on the buffalo chips. Steering was going to be limited. The wagon tongue, sticking straight up now, had a crosspiece on the end of it that Buster had used to pull against for twenty-eight days. As a tiller, it wouldn't allow him much leverage to turn. However, since he had just one course in mind—west—steering concerned him little.

He drew the banjo-strap sheet in, and his dusty little triangular sail billowed with the crosswind from the south. The guitar-string shrouds sang with new tension. The wagon strained westward. Buster jerked his weight forward in the vessel, rocking it, but it refused to roll. He reached over the port gunnel, grabbed the rim of the wagon wheel, turned it, and shoved his craft off down the gentle grade to the west. She crept tentatively over the rough ground as Buster adjusted the sheet to take highest advantage of the wind. He was under way, sailing the shortgrass plains of western Kansas Territory.

“You're a crazy man, Buster Thompson,” he muttered, an involuntary grin tearing at the cracks in his parched lips.

He had called himself by his new name often in the past weeks, to familiarize himself with it. He didn't want to mistakenly call himself by his old name and risk getting sent back to the Chesapeake. There he was known as Jack Arbuckle or—to the slave owners of the Eastern Shore—“Arbuckle's Jack.” It was there he had learned to sail, but never had he dreamed he would lift canvas to the wind on dry ground, and sail among buffalo chips in a milk wagon.

Arbuckle's Jack had plied the Chesapeake so often that it must have come as a surprise to the bay people when he drowned. As the best fiddler on the Eastern Shore, Jack had spent almost every Friday and Saturday night playing at balls on the bay estates. His master, Hugh Arbuckle, let him keep the money he earned from fiddling and often sailed with him to hear his bow stroke music. Jack would cleat the boom sheet, sit on the transom of Master Hugh's sloop, steer with his foot, and play his fiddle as master and slave sailed across the bay. Master Hugh usually sat amidships and drank.

“Jack, you'll fall off and drown some night coming home from one of these bloody cotillions,” he said once.

“I swim good,” Jack replied.

He was Master Hugh's boyhood playmate, and Hugh had never learned to distance himself. The plantation owner gave Jack his choice of jobs, and Jack enjoyed a change every few months. He had tended fields and gardens where he experimented with new crops and methods of cultivation. He enjoyed building things in the blacksmith shop. He had worked in the mansion, where he cooked, made Hugh's juleps, and played while his master drank. Master Hugh had even taught him reading and writing, and given him unlimited access to the library.

When the panic of 1857 came, the Arbuckle Plantation suffered its worst year. Hugh had never been much of a manager anyway, but now acres slipped away to pay debts, and he stayed drunk more than ever. There were agents for the Underground Railroad moving among the slaves, urging them to escape, and Jack began to listen. Master Hugh was going to lose the plantation, and all his slaves would go on the block for whiskey money. But Jack steeled himself against panic. He would make no ill-conceived scramble for freedom. He intended to plan a foolproof escape. The slave hunters' hounds would never catch his scent.

One day at dawn a burly black woman came to the blacksmith shop and told Jack that a fugitive slave boat would leave the Choptank River near Cambridge at dusk the coming Saturday. Jack knew his time to escape had come; he had been asked to fiddle at a dance up Tred Avon that same night, and Master Hugh had already said he wouldn't attend.

After loading all his instruments into the sloop, Jack sailed for the Choptank. When he tied up alongside the fugitive boat, he began removing the canvas from the halyard. The burly woman who had come to him in the blacksmith shop was there with four men and a mother with two children.

“Hurry up!” the guide said. “What you doin', fool?”

“I'm drownin' myself,” Jack said.

“What?”

He tied a rock to the sail and threw it overboard. “Master Hugh always said I'd fall out one night, fiddlin' on the transom. That's what he'll think. And he'll think somebody stole his sail and all my instruments after I fell out. He's gonna think I'm drowned. That way no slave hunters are gonna come after me. They won't advertise for me in the North, either.” Jack grinned, proud of his plan. He handed his fiddle to the fugitive guide.

“You ain't takin' all them fiddles and things,” she said, refusing the instruments. “You can't run with all that. Throw 'em over.”

Jack scoffed. “If these things don't go, I ain't goin' either.”

The fugitive guide pulled a pistol from her waistband and pointed it at Jack's head. “Just dead niggers go back, boy,” she said.

Jack stood in the rocking sloop, clutching his fiddle case. “But, this here's how I'll make my way,” he said.

“Throw 'em over.”

Buster grunted, caught without words. The woman cocked the pistol.

“I'll carry one of 'em,” said the oldest son of the slave mother.

“I'll carry that little one, there,” a man grumbled, pointing to the mandolin Master Hugh had bought for Jack in Kentucky. “Don't need no shootin'.”

The guide lowered her pistol as Arbuckle's Jack distributed his instruments among the fugitives.

They sailed by night up Chesapeake Bay and into the Susquehanna River. Somewhere in Pennsylvania their guide ordered them out of the boat. When Jack took his first step as a free man he shook with a joy and a glory so full that tears came to his eyes. Then he took his second step and almost buckled under his fears. He was helpless in a strange land, at the mercy of fugitive guides rougher than his former slave master. He had no idea where he was going or what he would be required to do.