The Widow's War (18 page)

Leaning forward, the bartender peers at the poster. “Could you describe him some more? There ain’t no picture of him on this poster, and that’s a tempting sum of money they’re offering.”

Carrie doesn’t reply. She’s staring at the poster and things are falling into place: William hasn’t joined a wagon train and gone to California. He’s living somewhere in the Kansas Territory. And where would he live? Why Lawrence, of course, because there’s only one thing he’d steal at gunpoint, only one thing both Southern ladies and a New England minister would refuse to talk about, and Lawrence is the only place he could live and go on stealing it without falling into the hands of the law.

Handing the poster back to the bartender, she tells him that the description is all wrong. William Saylor has no scar above his right eyebrow. His hair is coal black, his eyes green, and he often uses an alias.

“What does he call himself?” the bartender asks.

“Deacon Presgrove,” Carrie tells him. “You really should get a pencil and write this down.”

S
he returns to the Gilliss House feeling more hopeful than she has since William first arrived in Brazil and asked her to marry him. That night at dinner, she meets more emigrants headed for Kansas. One is a missionary named Samuel Adair who has come from Michigan to see about resettling his family near Osawatomie Creek and founding a Congregational church there. Reverend Adair sits next to Carrie, and as they eat, he engages her in conversation.

“Are you headed to Lawrence?” he inquires after he introduces himself. “Almost everyone staying at this hotel seems to be.”

“Yes,” Carrie says. It’s a relief to finally be able to tell someone where she’s going.

Adair helps himself to the mashed potatoes and passes the bowl to Carrie. “Florella, my wife, is reluctant to live so far from her family, but we both believe we are called by God to enter into the spiritual struggle against slavery.” He pauses, fork in hand. “My brother-in-law, John, is even more determined.”

“He, too, supports the cause of abolition?” Carrie inquires politely.

Reverend Adair puts down his fork. “‘Supports,’ is putting it mildly. John believes he is the right hand of God sent to free the slaves and punish the masters for their sins.” Adair lowers his voice. “He has consecrated himself to the destruction of slavery. He says most New England abolitionists are all talk and no action. He speaks of insurrection. When I remind him violence is unchristian, he quotes scripture at me:
Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel!”

“Psalm Two,” Carrie says.

“You know your Bible.”

“My mother taught me to read from it. When I was a child, it was the only book we had. The termites ate all the others.”

Adair nods and goes back to his meal. If he wonders why termites ate their books, he doesn’t ask. In fact, he stops speaking to her altogether even though she hasn’t mentioned William. She finds this peculiar, but a few years later, when the name John Brown becomes a household word, she remembers this conversation and realizes Reverend Adair feared he had already said far too much about his brother-in-law.

The next morning, she meets another person who is destined to play an important role in her life. It’s Sunday, and in honor of the Sabbath, the New Englanders hold a church service in the lobby of the hotel, presided over by Reverend Adair who takes as the text of his sermon Isaiah 58:6: “Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, and . . . let the oppressed go free.”

Except that it is given in a slave state in a hotel under siege, Reverend Adair’s sermon is not particularly memorable, but what is memorable is a brief speech given by a free black woman named Elizabeth Newberry who stands up at the end of the service just before the benediction. Mrs. Newberry is tall and thin with graying hair, piercing eyes, a square, stubborn jaw, and a voice that could fill a cathedral.

“I was a slave in Maryland,” she says, “and my mother was a slave before me, taken out of Africa and illegally smuggled into this country by slave traders who mocked the laws of the United States and cursed the federal government. When my master died, he freed me. As a condition of my freedom, I was forced to leave the state of Maryland immediately, thus abandoning my mother who had not been freed. When I told Mother I would give up my freedom in order to stay with her, she pleaded with me to leave, saying that no life was worse than that of a slave, and reminding me that a new master might sell me in which case she and I would never see each other again.

“In Michigan I met and married a good man and had three sons with him. My sons and I are now on our way to Kansas to do what we can to help ensure the territory enters the Union as a free state. We cannot vote in the plebiscite. That goes without saying. But we can help defend those who are able to vote. Yet because of the color of our skins, we cannot travel openly through Missouri without risking death or re-enslavement. Instead, we must pretend to be Mrs. Elijah Hulett’s slaves.

“Mrs. Hulett, who sits quietly among us today, is a Quaker. I do not want you to think this good woman is actually a slave-owner, so I stand before you to thank her for providing my sons and me with her protection, and to urge you to do everything in your power to make sure that in future years when my grandchildren are grown, they will not be forced to choose between being murdered or traveling around their own country in disguise.”

She gestures toward the back of the room. “Mrs. Hulett, will you please stand.” There is a protest and some whispered urging. Finally an old woman rises to her feet. She looks frail, but when she speaks her voice is surprisingly strong.

“I am doing nothing except what my conscience dictates,” she says. “All men and women are equal in the sight of God. I am sixty-three. My children tell me I should be putting up preserves and quilting, but I tell them I am going to Kansas to fight. Yes, fight. Do not delude yourselves that the slavers will let us settle peacefully. War it will be. I would call it a holy war but no war is holy, so instead I will simply say that if you are not ready to fight with me to bring Kansas into the Union free, than you should turn around and go back to New England.”

No one turns around or goes back, or at least if they do they slink off quietly in the middle of the night. The next morning just before dawn, the emigrants board wagons headed for Lawrence. In preparation for what is likely to be a hot day, the women put on sunbonnets with flapping blinders that make it impossible for them to see anything not directly in front of them. Carrie, who intends to enjoy the scenery, wears a straw hat with a wide brim, which earns her stares of disapproval.

“‘Tisn’t very feminine,” a lady whispers. “Would you like to borrow a sunbonnet, Miss Vinton?”

“No, thank you,” Carrie says.

“Your hat looks like a Mexican sombrero,” confides another. “I can’t imagine why you wear it.”

“I wear it to keep my nose from falling off,” Carrie tells her, and reaching down she plucks a stem of blue sage and sticks it in the headband.

When she climbs into her wagon, she is pleased to discover she will be sharing it with Mrs. Newberry, Mrs. Newberry’s sons and their wives, and several other members of the Newberry family, including three children under the age of seven.

“Biscuit, Miss Vinton?” Mrs. Newberry asks, opening a large carpetbag. “Or would you rather have cold ham?” Carrie looks into the bag and sees that Mrs. Newberry has brought enough food to outlast a siege.

“Both, thank you.”

Mrs. Newberry pulls out a cold biscuit, tears it in half, slathers it with butter, and puts a slab of salt-cured ham between top and bottom. Carrie is just finishing the last crumb, when the teamster slaps the reigns against the backs of the oxen.

“Walk on!” he yells.

As the oxen begin to plod toward Lawrence, the wagon moves through a thin mist that rises off the river. For a little over half an hour, trees, bushes, and grass all look as if they have been draped in gauze. Then they put the river behind them and roll into sunshine so intense it makes Carrie wish the brim of her hat were even broader.

 

 

 

 

 

S
ince the city of Lawrence was founded beside the Kaw River less than two months ago, only about five hundred emigrants have settled there, but the road is as wide and well-worn as a turnpike. After a while, the teamster sits back, drapes the reigns around the whip holder, and explains why.

“Yer on the famous Santa Fe Trail,” he tells Carrie and the others. “Where it meets up with the Oregon Trail, also known as the California Road, we’ll be turnin’ north toward Lawrence. ’Bout a million mules and oxen done stomped both trails hard as rock. Then you got your horses and your shoe leather packing them down even more. Number of pour souls walked all the way to California thinkin’ they was gonna get rich. I don’t hold with walkin’. Give me an ox team any day.”

He points to the two beasts that draw their wagon. “The big one there goes by the name of Brock and the smaller by Whitehorn. As fer me, I’m what they call a
bullwhacker,
seeing as how it’s my job to whack my team down this trail if they shows signs of lingerin’. But I hardly ever have to whip ‘em. Brock and Whitehorn is fast fer oxen. I reckon we’re gonna move at a good clip. Two and a half miles an hour or more unless it rains. Then all bets is off, and Betty bar the door!”

Carrie scans the sky for clouds, but it’s blue and clear for as far as she can see. They are moving west across a rolling, open prairie of tall grasses broken by small creeks lined with oaks of all varieties, tall white-barked sycamores, willows that sway in the wind, red cedars, honey locusts whose dangling pods look like giant peas, ash, dog-wood, hickories, black walnuts, pecans, and cottonwoods. This is the timber that will supply the materials for cabins and fences, and the Newberrys are relieved to see it.

“I feared Kansas might be flat as a plate and bare as a tabletop,” Mrs. Newberry says. “But I see pies in those trees. Pecan, walnut, and—”

The wagon strikes a rut, gives a lurch, and she slides off the bench in slow-motion and tumbles to the floorboards. Prosser and Toussaint, her two oldest sons, grab her under the arms and put her back on the bench again. They are identical twins who must once have been hard to tell apart, but who now must rarely be mistaken for each other. Prosser sports a scalded place on his cheek that suggests someone once threw a pan of hot water at him, and Toussaint is missing an earlobe. Except for these differences, they are both handsome, tall, healthy men in their early twenties with dark skin and curly black hair: broad shouldered, good-natured, and not above teasing their mother who they clearly adore.

“You’re gonna break yourself, Mama,” Toussaint says.

“Gonna shatter like an old lantern shade,” Prosser agrees.

Mrs. Newberry settles back on the bench, arranges her skirts, and looks at them the way she probably looked at them when they were four years old and pilfered cookies out of the cookie jar.

“Sons, you may be grown men with wives and children of your own, and I may be an old woman, but I can still tan your bottoms when you get too big for your britches.”

“Sorry, Mama,” Toussaint says.

“Sorry,” says Prosser.

“Don’t whip ’em,” begs Spartacus, the youngest of the three, thirteen at most, with his mother’s high cheekbones and a chin already showing signs of stubbornness.

“I’ll spare ‘em this time,” Mrs. Newberry says. “You hear that, sons? Your baby brother has intervened for you.” She turns to Carrie. “Spare the rod and spoil the child. What do you think?”

“I think they’re too old to spank.”

“Wouldn’t do any good anyway. Like the time they told me they were going to go to California, strike gold, and become millionaires. You remember that, sons?”

“Yes, Mama,” Prosser and Toussaint say in chorus. Prosser’s wife, Eulie, laughs, and Toussaint’s five-year-old daughter giggles and buries her head in her mother’s apron.

“And what did I tell you?”

“You said we were damn fools, Mama.”

“I said
damn
?”

“Yes, ma’am, you did.”

“Toussaint Newberry, I got half a mind to wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Your words, Mama, not mine.”

“What did I say when you and your brother told me your fool plan?”

“You said we’d have to cross to Missouri if we wanted to join a wagon train, and that Missouri was a slave state, and sure as God is in Heaven, we’d be captured and sold South.”

“And was I right?”

“No, ma’am. We didn’t cross Missouri. We decided to take a boat instead, but it put in at Charleston, and we went ashore—”

“And got drunk,” Spartacus supplies eagerly.

“And perhaps had a drink or two beyond what we should have,” Prosser continues. “And while we were walking back to the docks, wham! Something hit me on the head and something hit Toussaint, and the next thing we knew, we were chopping cotton on the plantation of Mr. Horace Labrie for one pair of pants a year, and a peck of cornmeal, a pinch of salt, and three dried fish a week, and those fish stunk to high heaven.”

“But you were free men!” Carrie says. “Surely you had your papers on you!”

“Oh, we had our papers on us all right,” Prosser says, running his finger over the scald mark on his cheek. “But when we tried to show them to our kidnappers, they weren’t impressed. In retrospect, I suspect they could not read. In any event, they didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on the finer points of the laws governing free men of color.”