Shortgrass Song (3 page)

The fugitives ran over forest trails for hours and finally came to a farmhouse where they slept. The examining committee, made up of white and black abolitionists, woke Jack before morning and interrogated him.

“Where did you come from?… How did your master come by you?… Did you have a wife or family?… Why did you escape?”

When Jack had answered all the questions to the satisfaction of the committee, the members explained that they had to interrogate fugitives to keep black spies from infiltrating the Underground Railroad.

“Where do you want to go?” asked a bearded white man.

“Canada, I guess,” Jack said.

“Then you will go to Canada. Your name now is Buster Thompson. You must never mention your old name again. Never. Tell everyone you meet you were born a free Negro in Philadelphia and have never been a slave. There are slave hunters who will kidnap you to sell in the South.

“At dawn you will set across the mountains to Lewistown. The trip will take two days. At Lewistown you will buy a ticket and ride the jim crow car to Meadville. There is a farm south of Meadville owned by Absalom Holcomb. Everybody calls him Ab. He's a conductor for the Underground Railroad. He will get you to Canada. Ask for no one but Ab Holcomb. Say you are going to his farm to work as a blacksmith. Trust no one but him. Do not let anyone else take you to Canada. You must find Ab Holcomb.”

With those orders, Arbuckle's Jack became Buster Thompson and started his solitary trek to Meadville, carrying his guitar and banjo on his back, and his mandolin and fiddle under his arm. South of Meadville, he asked a farmwife for directions to Ab Holcomb's farm.

“It was up the road two miles,” she replied. “But Ab and Ella don't live here anymore.”

Buster leaned against the porch columns to steady himself. “Where'd they go?” he asked.

“They went to the Cherry Creek diggin's in the Pikes Peak country. Sold everything and went west. Are you a fugitive slave?”

“No, ma'am,” Buster said. “I was born free in Philadelphia. I came to work for Mister Ab.”

“You can tell me if you're a fugitive. I'll help you find a way to Canada. I've helped Ella many times to cook for the slaves and send them north.”

“I never was a slave,” Buster said. “I'm supposed to work for Mister Ab.” He stood on the front porch of the farmhouse, burdened with musical instruments, lost for words and lost in the world. He had already traveled farther than he ever dreamed he would have to go. And now—Cherry Creek, Pikes Peak, the Great American Desert. He trusted no one. He had no friends in his freedom. Only a name: Absalom Holcomb.

“Ella sent a letter to the Abolition Society. She told them not to send any more fugitives. Didn't they get it?”

“I don't know. I ain't no fugitive. How do I find Mister Ab? I came to work for him.”

The farmwife went into her house and came out with a letter from Ella Holcomb. “This came last week. First time I've heard from her. Do you read?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Maybe you are a free Negro at that, then. Here, read it. It tells where they live now. I don't think you'll want to go there.”

Buster stepped into the sunshine and read:

Dear Irene,

Cherry Creek was the vilest place I have ever seen. I would not allow Ab to settle us there. We went south and now have a ranch on Monument Creek, at the foot of the Rampart Range. No neighbors. We have no house yet. Living in a hole. There is much work to do and yet I am glad I made Ab move us here. Caleb is better. He coughs less of the time. Pete is a good boy as always and Matthew has no trouble to get into. Pray for us.

Ella

“What's your name?” Irene asked.

“Buster Thompson.”

“Do you play all those instruments?”

He nodded. Irene took the letter into her house, telling him to wait. She came out and gave the letter back to him. “Here. What do you think? Will it pass for her writing?”

At the end of the page, Irene had added a postscript:

Send Buster now. We need his help and some music.

Her hand passed adequately for Ella Holcomb's.

“I'll get you to Canada if you'll trust me,” she said. “That is, if you are a fugitive. But if you must go after Ab, this letter will help you get through Missouri. There are slave hunters in Missouri.”

Buster rode the colored cars to Independence and asked about the best route to Monument Creek. He was told to take the Smoky Hill Road across Kansas with the next bull train. The letter from Ella Holcomb got him past two groups of slave hunters looking for fugitives to sell in the South. He spent his last few dollars on a change of clothes, a horse pistol, a few tools to bolster his story about working for Ab Holcomb, the canteens, and the little milk wagon to carry it all in.

The freighters welcomed Buster when they saw his musical instruments. He played an hour or two every night in camp while the teamsters took turns dancing jigs on a buffalo hide. By day he pulled his little milk wagon and was sometimes allowed to hitch on behind a freight wagon for the steep upgrades. He saw no buffalo and no Indians.

After seventeen days on the trail, the captain told him to fall out of the train with his milk wagon. The train would follow a branch of the Smoky Hill Road that veered south to Bent's Fort. Monument Creek was due west.

“Go around the heads of all the creeks,” the captain said, “and you'll stay on the main divide between the Platte and the Arkansas. You'll find water about halfway there in the Big Sandy. In a week or so you'll see the mountains. Head north of Pikes Peak and you'll strike Monument Creek somewhere around Holcomb's Ranch. I ain't been there, but I hear that's about where he settled. If you run into Indians, hope they're Arapaho and not Cheyenne.”

After eleven lonely days traveling west, the mountains were growing ever taller, and Buster finally started dropping into the Monument Creek drainage. That was the day the wind picked up from the south, and he began thinking of dry-land sailing in his little milk wagon. He knew he was no more than a day or two away from Ab Holcomb's ranch. He predicted that when he arrived, he would find out Ab and Ella had moved on to Oregon.

THREE

Buster's wind wagon balked now and then between gusts, and in places where the slope leveled out, but for almost half an hour he kept sailing west, singing an old work shanty called “Haul on the Bowline” when the running was smoothest. He found a nailhead to hitch the banjo strap on so he didn't have to hold it against the wind. He got moving up to ten or fifteen miles an hour on one stretch.

The plains continued to pitch more severely toward the west, causing the milk wagon to run faster and Buster to sing louder:

Haul on the bowline, the ship she is a-rollin'

Haul on the bowline, the bowline, haul.

Chesapeake Bay had nothing on the shortgrass plains. There was no lighthouse like Pikes Peak.

Over the square bow of the wind wagon, he saw a wide swale dropping off before him. With the jolting of the craft over the rough prairie, he could see only enough of the terrain to tell that the swale would give him his highest speeds yet. He grinned, adjusted the sheet, and hitched it back on its nailhead. He hoped to get rolling as fast as he could into the swale so his momentum would take him as far as possible up the other side.

The fiddle and the mandolin jumped in the forecastle with every bump the wagon wheels met. Buster settled lower in the buffalo chips. He hung his left arm over the port gunnel to better see around the sail and to keep his vessel aright in case a powerful gust tried to heel her over to the starboard. The sheet slipped an inch on its nail, so he double hitched it and started singing again.

Haul on the bowline, the bosun is a-growlin'

Haul on the bowline, the bowline, haul.

The wind wagon reached the steepest pitch now, diving into the swale, running faster than a galloping horse. Buster held his hat down with one hand.

Something caught his eye over the top of the mast. A ragged black slash across the sky. Two, three, four of them—circling. Buzzards! Something dead? They soared and banked low on the southern wind over the swale. He watched one of them, its wing feathers splayed like fingers, as it swooped toward the ground and then—
into
the ground. It vanished like a prairie dog! Now it shot out of the plains fifty yards over!

Buster pulled himself higher in the rattling milk wagon. Down in the bowl of the swale ahead, he could just make out the rim of a sand bluff. He was sailing headlong toward a plains canyon!

“Turn her to the wind, Buster!” he said to himself, but the wagon tongue proved useless as a tiller. He pulled against it with everything he had, but it wouldn't change the cut of the wheels.

He glanced ahead, saw the near edge of the gully, closer than he could have imagined. He had ten seconds to stop! He yanked at the sheet, double hitched on the nailhead. Finally getting it loose, the sail slacked leeward, but momentum kept him rolling. “Heel her over!” He rocked side to side, but the wagon wouldn't tip, its center too low.

Three seconds to stop, or fly over the bluff! Buster let the wagon tongue drag astern. He leapt over the transom and landed with both feet on the tongue. It cut into the ground like a harrow, raising a plume of dust. The wagon slowed, but the leading wheels reached the bluff and rolled off. The running gear under the wagon box slammed against the precipice and slid. Buster saw something below—smoke-blackened cones bristling with lodge poles—ten or twelve of them.

When the trailing wheels hit the ledge, the wagon bucked Buster off the tongue and back into the box as it plummeted down the steep bank of the gully. Children screamed and dogs barked as he pulled himself high enough to peer over the lurching sideboards. He was racing toward the tallest tepee in the camp. He would flatten it, killing its inhabitants, prompting the rest of the villagers to roast him alive over his own buffalo chips.

When his wind wagon hit, the leading wheels straddled a lodge pole and drove straight up toward the smoke hole. The vehicle died like a rock flung to its zenith, then fell back on its tongue. It bounced on its end and pitched everything out. Buster's fiddle and mandolin landed five feet away. The crate slid out from under the mast, and the boom swung down to slap him across the head with a discordant twanging of banjo strings, sprawling him among the scattered buffalo chips.

A dog snarled at his heels as buzzards circled overhead. A rank odor filled his nostrils, and he willed his eyes to focus. Strange people moved around him—men crouching low for a fight, women yanking naked children away. Through them rushed a lean warrior in breechcloth and leggings, his long, flying braids wrapped in spirals of fur, his eyes hot with love of battle. He drew a lance over his shoulder as he charged, turned sideways, and skipped, gathering his weight for the thrust.

A sharp voice barked, and the warrior with the spear loosened his grip, his palm sliding harmlessly along the shaft as his arm whipped toward his target. His startled eyes cut away from Buster, and Buster followed them.

From the lodge against which the wind wagon lay, a dark man emerged, holding back the bearskin that covered the entrance hole. Hair fell long and loose around his broad face, and a single black-tipped feather protruded sideways from behind his head. The breadth of his jaw was severe, his mouth straight and thin lipped, his nose like an eagle's beak. He wore a tawny suit of tanned skins, colored with beads, porcupine quills, and strips of fur. His voice knifed again toward the brave with the spear, and his eyes landed on the intruder.

The black man forced a grin. As the dark chief came to stand over him, Buster reached for his shirt pocket. Several warriors had gathered with spears or bows—one with a flintlock rifle—but only the brave with the fur-spiraled braids seemed ready to kill and brandished his lance again when the black man reached for his pocket. Buster produced only a harmonica.

He put the instrument in his mouth, blew a single note, and scanned his audience. He tripped up the scale. The chief smiled. Buster began playing “Old Dan Tucker,” shuffling his feet in time among the buffalo chips. He stopped on a sour note when the chief grabbed his wrist and lifted him.

“Do you speak the English?” the chief asked.

Buster nodded, felt his knees wobble under him.

“I am Long Fingers. What are you called?”

“Buster.”

“Buster,” Long Fingers repeated, amused at the sound of the thing. “You make music like I hear at Cherry Creek. You have a fiddle?”

“Yes, sir,” Buster said.

“You will make music with that and eat some meat with us.” Long Fingers turned to speak to his braves, then shouted at some squaws, who scattered.

The brave with the spear finally lowered it, growling with obvious disdain.

Long Fingers grunted at him. “Kicking Dog wants to kill you, but I will not let him,” he said, turning to Buster.

“I tell him your scalp is no good.” He put his hand on Buster's head and felt his hair. “He calls you Buffalo Head, but I think the hair is not the same as tike buffalo.”

“I wouldn't know,” Buster said. “I ain't seen no buffalo yet.” He scratched the curly growth of his ragged beard. “Sorry about your tent,” he said, pointing stiffly.

“It is your wagon turned over, not my lodge.”

Men began reaching for Buster's belongings, showing particular interest in the sail on the guitar and banjo rigging.

“You have a strange way with your wagon,” Long Fingers said. “Where is your horse to pull it?”

“I don't have one,” Buster admitted. “Been pullin' it myself.” He watched nervously as the braves rifled through his property.

“You say you pull it, but I see it going the wrong way. The back of it comes down on my lodge. And you cannot pull it from inside. Kicking Dog says he saw you inside. How do you pull it, then? Why do you fly the white flag?”