The Widow's War (28 page)

“Good evening, Mr. Brown. Are you by any chance related to the three Browns who saw me safely from Lawrence to Osawatomie?”

“Indeed I am. They are my sons.” As he speaks, he leans forward, the light catches his face, and Carrie sees the most startling eyes she has ever encountered. There is nothing unusual about their color—they are an ordinary shade of gray—but they are fierce, determined, and absolutely steady. For a moment she has the sense of having walked into the presence of a judging god. Then the old man catches sight of Teddy, and his gaze softens.

“A baby,” he says.

“My son, Edward. ‘Teddy,’ we call him.”

“How old is he?”

“Fourteen months.”

“Such a sweet child.” The old man stretches out both arms. “May I hold him?”

Carrie looks at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth nods. Reassured, Carrie hands the old man Teddy. He takes the cradleboard with sure hands, bends over it, and kisses Teddy on the forehead. “Cootchie-cootchie coo,” he croons. Teddy laughs and begins to babble happily. Mr. Brown looks up and smiles at Carrie. “I think Teddy and I are going to get along just fine.”

“My brother has always had a way with babies,” Mrs. Adair observes.

“How many children do you have?” Carrie asks him.

“Twenty,” he says. Later Carrie learns that nine of John Brown’s twenty children are dead, and that he mourns them so much he can hardly speak of them without weeping.

Brown brushes a strand of hair off Teddy’s forehead and looks at him fondly. “I’ll unbind him from the cradleboard and amuse him while you’re in the smokehouse.”

“The smokehouse?”

“Yes,” Reverend Adair says. “That’s where one of them is.”

“There’s more than one injured man?”

“Yes, two. One’s only slightly wounded. The other is suffering quite horribly. The wounded man is a fugitive. We’ve hidden him in the smokehouse. We’ve put the man who is dying in our own bed.”

“I take it the bushwhackers tarred and feathered the one who’s dying.”

Reverend Adair looks at her grimly, and Mrs. Adair makes a muffled, gasping sound. The old man rocks with his face bent over Teddy. For a few seconds the only sound in the cabin is the creaking of the rocking chair and the ticking of the clock over the mantel. Then Elizabeth speaks.

“No,” she says. “I wish it had been tar and feathers. You can pull off feathers by grabbing the quills. They used hot tar and cotton.”

 

 

 

 

 

T
he man who lies in the Adairs’ bed is white, but you cannot easily tell this by looking at him. The bushwhackers who attacked him smeared boiling tar on his body before they rolled him in the cotton. He’s blind and terribly burned and will no doubt die—perhaps be better off dead. The only mercy is that his burns are so deep, he can no longer feel pain. When he hears Carrie bend over him he gives her a smile so far away it seems to come from another world.

“Lie still,” she tells him, “and I’ll clean you up.” But when she starts to apply the kerosene, she realizes there’s no way to remove the tar without taking his skin along with it. Dropping the rag into the basin, she puts the basin back on the washstand and picks up the jug of whiskey. The whiskey gives off a warm scent that partially covers the singed odor that fills the sickroom, the same odor, Carrie realizes, she detected in Elizabeth’s hair.

“Here,” she says as she puts the jug to the man’s lips, “drink all you want.”

The man opens his lips, which have mostly escaped the tar, and gulps some of the whiskey. While Carrie waits for it to take effect, she tries to pick the cotton off him, but there’s no way to remove thousands of small strands embedded in tar, and even if she gets them off, he will not be any more comfortable or any more likely to live. Usually when men are tarred and feathered, the mob uses cooler tar. This is murder, plain and simple.

“Who did this to you?” The man makes a noise that sounds like “Cork” or perhaps “Clark.” Given the condition he’s in, it’s a miracle he understood her question. Maybe he didn’t. She wonders what he did to attract the attention of the bushwhackers.
The Herald of Freedom
recently ran a story about a lawyer up near Fort Leavenworth who was tarred and feathered for publicly observing that the pro-slave legislature had been elected illegally. Maybe this man made the same error. Or maybe one of his neighbors found out he was a free-soiler.

The man coughs and fumbles for the jug. His hand encounters Carrie’s arm, and he draws back with a murmur of what sounds like an apology. Carrie puts the jug to his lips again, lets him finish off most of the whiskey, and watches him fall asleep. There is cotton on his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids. He looks like a rag doll that has come unstuffed.

 

 

 

 

 

E
lizabeth and the Adairs have not put the second man in the smokehouse proper but in a secret room under the smokehouse floor designed to conceal fugitive slaves. His skin is black, but he wears the buckskin leggings and moccasins of a Kaw warrior. He is in his early twenties, his head is partly shaved, and his right arm is in a hastily cobbled-together sling made from two knotted bandannas.

“Ni,” Elizabeth says, “this is Miss Vinton. She’s going to tend to your arm.”

“How do you do, Ni,” Carrie says. “How did you hurt your arm?” The man remains silent, looking at her in a way she can’t decipher.

“Best not to ask questions,” Elizabeth says. “He’s taken a vow.”

“A vow not to talk to me, not to talk to white people, or not to talk to women?”

“Not to talk to anyone about where he’s been or what’s happened to him.”

“I realize that when you’re running an Underground Railroad station, there are secrets you can’t share, but he has to speak to me or I can’t help him.” Carrie turns back to the injured man.

“It won’t do any good for you to remain silent, sir, and it may do a great deal of harm. I’ll never breathe a word that might help your owners recapture you. Besides, I can tell a lot about you just by looking at you. For example, I can tell you’ve been living with the Kaw or at least bought clothing from them. That’s Kaw beadwork on your leggings. I have a cradleboard with Kaw beadwork on it. Your moccasins are badly worn, which leads me to believe you’ve been walking for a long time. Since the Kaw have recently been driven off their land, I imagine you’ve been trying to get to Canada before the bushwhackers get hold of you and return you to your master or sell you south. Reverend Adair and his wife have already told me you’re a fugitive, and there’s no other possible explanation for your presence in this room.

“I am not a doctor, but I am as close to one as you’re likely to get, and from what little I can see of your arm, I’d say you might lose it unless you let me fix your injury. To treat you, I need to examine you, and to do that, I need you to talk to me. Please trust me.”

“Y’all sure you need me to talk?” Ni says. Carrie is surprised. She had not expected him to reply. He speaks with a Southern accent tempered by some other influence.

“Yes. You’re the only person who can tell me about yourself.”

“That makes sense.” Ni pushes his injured arm toward her. “Have at it.”

Carrie carefully unties the sling, exposing a bloody shirt sleeve. Selecting a pair of sharp scissors, she cuts away the sleeve to reveal a wound that could only have been made by a bullet.

“Who shot you?”

“Shot myself.”

“How?”

“Foolin’ around.”

Carrie sighs and sits back. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Then I find it very hard to believe that you could have shot yourself in your right forearm. But you’re going to stick to that story, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re lucky. The bullet has gone in, missed the bone, and come out the other side. The wound appears to be clean. Do you know what gangrene is?”

“I’ve seen men die of it.”

“Well then, you’ll be happy to know you don’t show any signs of it. However, even though your wound is only slightly infected, most doctors would consider taking off your arm just to make sure. I’m not going to do that.”

“I’m pleased to hear that.”

“I’m going to poke around a bit to make sure there are no bone fragments in there. Then I’m going to wash that wound with soap and water until it hurts so much you’ll wish I
had
taken your arm off. Then I’m going to sew it up. Then we’ll see what happens. If the wound festers, you’ll need to have Elizabeth send for me immediately, and when I say
immediately
, I don’t mean the next day.”

“You remind me of my mama. No bossier woman ever lived. My wife, Jane, is bossy, too, but—no offense intended, ma’am—you and Mama take the cake.”

“No offense taken. I am going to consider being compared to your mother a compliment.” Carrie opens her satchel and takes out a jar of liquid soap. She pours some into a basin of hot water, dips a cloth into the foaming mixture, and begins to clean Ni’s wound. The scrubbing must hurt, but he doesn’t flinch. When she has the wound as clean as soap and water can get it, she puts the basin and cloth aside.

“In about two seconds, I’m going to start poking around in your arm with a metal hook. You want something to bite down on?”

“Nah,” Ni says. “Not for a little thing like that.”

 

 

 

 

 

W
hen she returns to the Adairs’ cabin, Carrie finds Mr. Brown holding Teddy in his arms, rocking him gently and crooning a lullaby. When he sees Carrie, he stops singing. “How are they?” he asks.

“The one they tarred will probably die.”

“The man is a martyr. His suffering has been great, but God will welcome him into heaven with trumpets and hosannas. And the wounded man?”

“He’ll live to shoot again. Let’s just hope that next time he doesn’t practice contortionism.”

“I do not take your meaning.”

“He tells me he shot himself in the right forearm. This is clearly impossible. Obviously someone else shot him. Do you happen to know who that someone might be?”

The old man does not answer. Kissing Teddy on the forehead, he hands him to Carrie. “Teddy is your husband’s child,” he says, “is he not? And yet, I hear you do not live with your husband, but with another man.”

Carrie stiffens. “What business is it of yours whose son Teddy is or whom I live with?”

“You mistake my meaning. You see, you, too, are a martyr, Mrs. Presgrove.”

Carrie is so shocked to hear him say
Mrs. Presgrove
that she’s rendered speechless. Bending forward, Mr. Brown stares at her intently. She sees gray eyes, wild and deep, love and hatred mixed together, rage and peace—nothing simple or unmixed. “You are Carrie Vinton Presgrove.”

She nods.

“Your husband is Deacon Presgrove, son of Kentucky Senator Bennett Presgrove.”

Again she nods.

“You wonder how I know all this? I cannot tell you. I hear you left your husband despite the fact that you were with child by him because he believes in slavery and you abhor it. Is this true?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Marriage is sacred. I never urge wives to leave their husbands even if those husbands are slave owners, but in your case, I approve. Deacon Presgrove and his father are tools of Satan. They smuggle slaves into this country against the laws of God and man. Thus you are like unto the slave who flees an evil master: blameless and righteous.

“No matter how harshly other people judge you, Mrs. Presgrove, my sons and I will stand with you. You have the courage of Jael, who put her hand to the nail and her right hand to the workman’s hammer, drove that nail into Sisera’s head, and for this deed God gave victory to Israel. There is no sin in your abandonment of a wicked man who is an enemy of human freedom, and there is no sin in protecting an innocent child from an evil father. The sin is slavery, and all those who struggle against it are loved by the Lord.”

Carrie finally finds her voice. “Who are you?”

The old man’s eyes glitter with something bright she has no name for.
“
I am merely Mrs. Adair’s brother. I have been many things in my time: a farmer, a shepherd, a surveyor. When I was a child, I saw a boy my own age brutally beaten with an iron fire shovel. The boy was a slave; the man who wielded the shovel was his master. That boy’s screams still haunt me. On the day I saw him suffer, I became a determined foe of slavery. I have come to Kansas to help defeat Satan and his legions, and I have heard the thundering voice of Jehovah exhorting me to slaughter the border ruffians as He called Gideon to slay the Midianites.” He pauses and sits back. “Am I frightening you?”

“Yes.”

“I apologize. Sometimes I speak the truth more forcefully than people are prepared to hear it. Your boy is sleeping peacefully. I am no danger to you or to him. Please go outside and ask Mrs. Newberry to come to me. I have something to tell her.”

 

 

 

 

 

F
ive minutes after Elizabeth enters the Adairs’ cabin, she comes out, folds her arms across her chest, and looks at Carrie thoughtfully. “Congratulations,” she says. “It appears you passed the test.”

“What test? I didn’t know I was being tested?”

“Mr. Brown has given me permission to show you something.”

“Mr. Brown is in charge around here?”

“Yes. Can you imagine him not being in charge of whatever he puts his hand to?”

Carrie peers into the cabin. Brown is still sitting by the fire. All she can see is the back of his head and his long-fingered hands spread out on the arms of the rocker. She motions to Elizabeth to follow her to a place where they can’t be overheard.

They walk out into the night and down toward the river. When they reach the riverbank, Carrie shifts Teddy to her other hip and turns to Elizabeth. “Before you show me whatever Mr. Brown gave you permission to show me, I need to ask you a question: He just said some very kind things to me, but he said them in a way I find unsettling. He knows things I thought no one but William and I knew. I’m not sure I want to share his secrets. I’m impressed by how dedicated he is to ending slavery, but he quotes the Old Testament constantly and speaks so violently that I’m not sure he’s entirely sane. Is he, Elizabeth?”