The Widow's War

Limestone bluffs, gold and gray in the early morning light; wooded banks without a sign of human habitation; bottomlands filled with reeds that shine as they sway in the wind; mudflats, sandbars, unpredictable currents, the sound of the hull scraping something, the laboring of the engine. Smoke from the stacks drifting downriver like long gray scarves; more bluffs, more woods, more bottomlands, another steamer stuck fast in the mud.

Soldiers stand on the deck of the beached ship and wave to the Magnolia Queen as it steams by, and Carrie and her fellow passengers wave back. She thinks of the times she has gone up the Amazon, how different this river looks, how much broader the sky is, how much bluer; how the water is a clean green instead of a muddy brown. Below the hull, large fish flit like dark shadows over the white skeletons of sunken trees. Instead of tropical frogs, locusts sing in the underbrush; instead of parrots and macaws, hawks and eagles soar overhead.

Yet this trip up the Missouri to Westport is as hot as anything she ever experienced in the tropics. The wind has died down; not a leaf moves. The air is as wet and heavy as a boiled sheet. Gasping and fanning themselves, the other passengers seek shade, but it is even hotter inside than on deck, so Carrie holds her ground as the land speculators retreat to the main salon and order iced wine, and a plump, pretty woman from Worcester faints and has to be carried to the ladies’ lounge, unlaced, and revived with smelling salts.

I should be fainting, too. Carrie thinks. After all, I’m with child. Fortunately, all the nausea of the first few weeks has disappeared, and after days of being fed nothing but salt pork and biscuits, her fantasies at the moment are equally divided between ice, William, and ripe mangos.

Suddenly the western sky turns black. Clouds boil up out of nowhere, and Carrie hears the rushing of wind. On shore, trees and bushes suddenly show the silver undersides of their leaves. Branches crack off and fly through the air. The wind hits the Magnolia Queen, and everything goes rocking. Wine bottles fly off tables, cargo slides across the deck; the sky opens up. Rain falls in torrents, blowing sideways, soaking everyone. In the Amazon, it would have been a warm rain, but here it is cold as ice. As lightning races across the sky in long jagged lines, the thunder is deafening.

Carrie hangs onto the rail, continues to stand her ground, and waits it out. Within seconds she is soaked to the skin and her skirts are plastered to her legs. Then as suddenly as it began, the rain stops, the sun comes out, and except for a wet deck, wet passengers, and soaked cargo, it’s as if nothing has happened.

“That weren’t so bad,” the mountain man in buckskins says. He takes off his cap and beats the water off it. “You ever seen a twister?”

He smiles at her, exposing three missing teeth and two black ones. “Whirlwind.” He makes a spiraling motion with his index finger. “Whoosh. And there goes a buffalo, miss. Up in the air to be dropped like a rock.”

He shakes his head in amazement and spits a mouthful of tobacco juice over the rail. “Welcome to the prairie, miss. You look like you got some grit, but most of them other dudes look like they’re runnin’ blind toward a cliff with a band of Sioux warriors shooting arrows into their butts.” His face suddenly turns bright red. “Excuse me, miss. I been away from cities too long. I need to recollect to temper my language in front of ladies.”

Reassuring him that she’s not offended, Carrie excuses herself and goes back to her stateroom to change into dry clothing. I may die in Kansas from fever, disease, weather, starvation, gunshot wounds, or—if I’m lucky—old age, she thinks, but apparently I’m not likely to die of boredom.

Three hours later they reach Westport. The town sits on a high clay bluff above the Kansas Landing. Thanks to the rain, the mud is ankle-deep, so while the Southern ladies strap small metal rings onto the bottoms of their shoes, Carrie and the New Englanders pull on sturdy rubber boots and make their way to an oxcart, which takes them up to the city.

She stays at the Gilliss House, a hotel recently purchased by the Emigrant Aid Company. Above the front desk is a banner that proclaims: KANSAS MUST BE FREE! and another, smaller sign that warns that anyone who draws a gun on the premises will be “Summarily Evicted and Possibly Shot Dead.”

“This is Missouri, miss. Slavery is legal here. You walk out on the street around the time the saloons are filling up—which I wouldn’t advise—and proclaim yourself an abolitionist, and well, I imagine a lady would still be safe, but a man might just up and disappear.”

“Or worse,” the desk clerk says cheerfully as he checks her into a room with a view of the river. “That will be one dollar and fifty cents, unless you are staying for a week, in which case we have a special rate of ten dollars, all meals included.

“By the way, if you do decide to step outside the hotel after you unpack your trunk, you will see notices offering a reward of two hundred dollars to anyone who will deliver Eli Thayer up to the pro-slavers. Reportedly, the original wording of the posters was ‘de liver up Eli Thayer, founder of the Emigrant Aid Company, dead or alive,’ but the moderates appear to have prevailed, for which we can all be thankful. Since Mr. Thayer remains in Massachusetts, he is in no great danger, but the existence of such posters is one of the reasons I keep a loaded shotgun behind the front desk.”

“Yes, miss. Excuse me for asking, but you aren’t thinking of going into any of them and preaching temperance, are you? We had a very unfortunate incident with an elderly lady a few weeks ago. She went into the Black Dog and tried to break some whiskey bottles with her umbrella and a drunken bushwhacker shot at her. Fortunately, he missed.”

Reassuring the desk clerk that she will not attempt to save bushwhackers from the evils of alcohol, Carrie pays for one night and accepts the key to her room.