The Widow's War

The night is moonless and cloudy. Up ahead, dozens of campfires surround Lawrence in a siege of flame. Every now and then the silhouette of a man passes in front of one of the fires casting a long, distorted shadow. Suddenly, there is a burst of light as if someone has tossed whiskey on the flames. The light runs through the grass, exposing every seedpod and stem. William ducks down, puts his face to the ground, and smells the cold odor of winter soil waiting for snow. “Elizabeth,” he whispers.

Elizabeth’s hand emerges from the grass and motions for him to be quiet. Falling silent, he lies there listening to the drunken singing and the crack of pistols. Elizabeth is leading this expedition, and he figures she knows what she’s doing. She and the Adairs have established their Underground Railroad line and are running slaves to freedom from Osawatomie, which is closer to the Missouri border than Lawrence and—more important—not under constant siege; but tonight an emergency has brought her west along roads patrolled by gangs of bushwhackers.

It’s November twenty-eighth, and Kansas is about to elect its first territorial delegate to Congress. Bennett Presgrove has raised his army, and Senator Atchison of Missouri has strapped on his Bowie knife and pistols and led the army across the border. The pro-slavers have surrounded Lawrence. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, they will ride into town to vote as permanent residents of Kansas even though most of them have been in the territory less than a week and will be returning to Missouri and other Southern states before the final votes are counted.

Go! Go! Go! Harriet Beecher Stowe!

the pro-slavers sing,

Go to hell and don’t come back no more!

Although they’re damning the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to hell, this song is a considerable improvement on the one they were singing a few minutes ago.

Crawling back through the grass until she’s even with William, Elizabeth points to a fire on the outermost ring of the encampment. They crawl silently toward it, moving a few feet at a time, then lying still until they’re sure they haven’t been spotted. The pro-slavers should have posted sentries, but the only man they see is sprawled facedown in a drunken stupor. Elizabeth gestures at him, and William nods. Good. It looks as if this is going to be easier than they anticipated.

When they reach the last stand of grass, they lie concealed for a long time, watching and waiting. Five men are sitting around the fire. The closest two are white Missourians dressed in wool coats, wool caps, leather gloves, and the kind of canvas britches sold in Westport to emigrants heading west. Heavily bearded and bristling with Bowie knives, rifles, and pistols, they are sharing a jug of whiskey in sullen silence punctuated by an occasional oath.

The three remaining men are dark-skinned. One is perhaps forty years old with a creased face and graying hair. He wears wool trousers and a patched jacket. The other two, dressed in the coarse, lightweight clothing of slaves, are no more than twenty at most. They are not wearing jackets, gloves, or hats, and despite the chill of the evening, they have on open-toed shoes made of hemp.

Hemp is one of the main exports of Missouri, and the slaves are bound hand and foot with a rope woven of it. The loose end has been knotted into a hangman’s noose and tomorrow, after the pro-slavers have voted and their votes have been tallied, they plan to hang the slaves to celebrate the victory of their candidate, J. W. Whitfield. The ostensible reason for the hanging is that the slaves were plotting to murder their master, but as far as William and Elizabeth are concerned, this is a human sacrifice waiting to take place.

Less than three hours ago, Elizabeth had appeared at William and Carrie’s door, dripping wet and shaking with cold. She told them she was rowing a boat across the Kaw to avoid being seen by the pro-slavers when the boat had hit a snag and overturned. She asked for dry clothing, hot food, and a gun. William and Carrie supplied her with all that, and after she told them about the slaves who were about to be hanged, William supplied her with himself as well.

Before they left, they sat down at a table so new they could smell the freshly milled boards, joined hands, and prayed for success. Then Carrie took out her shells and cast them. Recently she had begun to believe she could read the patterns they made, although she wasn’t sure how. Tonight the shells said: Trouble, fraud, death, fire. So far this evening, William has seen trouble and fire. Tomorrow at the polls there will certainly be fraud. That leaves death.

Lifting his head, he peers through the grass at the slaves and wonders whose death. Theirs? His? Elizabeth’s? Carrie’s? The problem with the shells is they have no sense of time. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday are all the same to them, which means Carrie can never tell whether an event is hours, days, or a whole lifetime in the future. It’s a sure bet they’ll all die someday, but William hopes it will be a good sixty years from now.

Elizabeth points toward the guards who are rapidly drinking themselves into oblivion. Her meaning is clear: If they don’t spew out the whiskey, they should be unconscious soon. Until then, all she and William can do is wait.

An hour passes. It’s cold and uncomfortable lying in the grass, but William has on a buffalo robe coat, and Elizabeth is wearing a sheepskin jacket and a wool cap pulled down over her ears. Once one of the guards steps out of the firelight to relieve himself, but fortunately he chooses the opposite side of the fire. The slaves are awake, but they aren’t talking. They sit silently, staring into the flames, perhaps thinking about how their lives will end tomorrow. Maybe they’d be beaten if they spoke.

Finally, one of the Missourians goes over and checks the rope that bind their hands and feet. Satisfied that they can’t wriggle free, he reaches into his pocket, takes out a cowbell, and ties it to the hangman’s noose.

Returning to the opposite side of the fire, the bushwhacker rolls up in his blanket and goes to sleep. His companion sits beside him, drinking steadily. At last, he, too, lies down on the ground and begins to snore.

William and Elizabeth wait a quarter of an hour more to be sure the guards are asleep. It’s now time to make their presence known to the slaves, but if they do this too suddenly, they’re likely to startle them and set the cowbell ringing.

Sticking his knife between his teeth, William crawls through the grass, sneaks up behind the slaves, reaches out, and closes his hand around bell and clapper. Within seconds he has cut the bell off the noose and the clapper off the bell.

When Elizabeth is sure he’s silenced it, she rises to her feet with her finger over her lips. One of the younger slaves starts and begins to speak, but before he can make a sound, the older man slaps his hand over the younger man’s mouth. Keeping her finger over her lips, Elizabeth points silently to William and nods. As William stands, the men look alarmed, but they don’t make a sound.

Drawing out her pistols, Elizabeth approaches the sleeping Missourians, and stands over them. If they wake, she may have to shoot them before they can yell for help. On any other night, the sound of gunshots would bring men from the neighboring campfires but this evening so many bushwhacker guns are being discharged it’s unlikely anyone will pay attention to one more.

The slaves immediately see the wisdom of this. Falling to their hands and knees, they crawl away from the campfire into the tall grass. Elizabeth and William crawl after them. As soon as they’re outside the ring of light, they stand up and begin to run. When they finally stop running, Elizabeth takes the slaves aside and talks to them for a while. William has no idea what she says, but they seem to come to an understanding.

Half an hour later, they are all in Carrie and William’s house clustered around the stove, eating cheese and biscuits and drinking hot tea laced with sugar. The slaves introduce themselves as Ebenezer, Sam, and Peet. Ebenezer, who is the oldest, has a burn on his arm. William doesn’t have to ask him how he got it, but as he washes it off, puts salve on it, and binds it with gauze, he says: “That’s a cruel mark.”

Ebenezer shrugs. “It would have been crueler to be hanged. I’m a valet. I couldn’t get a stain out of my master’s coat this morning, so he took his cigar and gave me what he calls a ‘souvenir of his disapproval. ’ I got a lot of these marks. Master does it when he gets drunk and then apologizes when he sobers up.”

“Nah, we was just planning to run away,” says Sam. “Problem was, I had a kitchen knife on me when they found us. I wasn’t gonna slit his throat. I’m a cook. I could have poisoned him six ways to Sunday any time I had a mind to, but I didn’t figure it was gonna do much good to tell a passel of Missouri slave owners that. They hang you just for thinkin’ about it.”

Sam looks at Elizabeth. Elizabeth shakes her head, and William knows that he and Carrie will never hear whatever Sam was about to say. That’s just as well. The less they know, the better. But Peet must not get the message for he says: “I have a mind to go join John Brown. He’s better ’an Canada any day.”

The name John Brown means nothing to William and Carrie. Like most Americans, they have not heard of Brown’s plan to arm fugitive slaves and fight a guerilla war in the Allegheny Mountains.

Elizabeth coughs pointedly, and Peet falls silent. Later William and Carrie will realize Peet told them something they had no business knowing, but at the moment all they can think about is how to send Elizabeth and the fugitives safely on their way before the Missourians discover they’re missing and sound the alarm. There are no more boats to be had, the only way to get out of Lawrence is to cross the river, and Sam and Ebenezer can’t swim.

They discuss the problem and decide that Elizabeth and the slaves will sleep in the root cellar tonight and hide out there tomorrow until the election is over. Once the stove goes out, the cellar will be warmer than the rest of the house, and although sleeping on a dirt floor may not be as comfortable as sleeping on one made of planks, it’s a great deal safer.

William and Carrie provide them with blankets and a lantern. When they’re safely hidden, William straps on his pistols, kisses Carrie good-bye, and goes out to patrol the streets of Lawrence. He hasn’t been gone more than fifteen minutes when Elizabeth reemerges from the cellar. Brushing off her skirts, she looks around the room.

“Fire. That’s what those shells of yours predicted. Do we believe them? I don’t know. But what they foretell worries me. They remind me of those knucklebones my mama used to throw when she had to decide something important. I’d say shells and bones don’t so much speak to a person as help a person concentrate her mind, and at the moment I’m concentrated on one bothersome fact: If those bushwhackers burn the town, Ebenezer, Peet, Sam, and I will be trapped.”

For an instant Carrie imagines Lawrence in flames. Then she casts off the fear, which after all is no worse than half a dozen others she has had to deal with tonight. If Lawrence burns, it burns. She and William can build another house. They can live in a tent for that matter. Or a sod lean-to. You can’t burn sod.

“Fine,” she says. “How do we get you out of here? You can’t ride through an army of drunken bushwhackers, and at least two of you can’t swim.”

The next evening, after the polls close, William comes home from patrolling the streets to find Carrie sitting in front of the stove drinking tea and reading A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds. Her hair is freshly washed, and she is wearing a clean dress and apron. At her feet lie four table legs.

William sits down across from her, takes off his hat, and hangs it on the back of the chair. “Sweetheart, I don’t know what you’ve been up to, but please don’t tell me you’ve been out rafting on the Kaw in the middle of November.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. I only went in up to my ankles when I was giving the raft a push. I was more worried about Elizabeth and the slaves. I thought they might make the crossing safely, and then come out of the river wet and freeze to death; but Elizabeth told me she had mules and dry clothing waiting for them on the other side.” Carrie puts her book down on the floor beside the table legs. “So who won the election?”

“Considerably more than there are eligible voters in Lawrence. The pro-slavers showed up with premarked ballots and stuffed them in the boxes.” He leans down and kisses her on the forehead and then kneels beside her and puts his arms around her. “Carrie—”

“Wild? Reckless? Pigheadedly stubborn?” She laughs. “That’s what Elizabeth called me. Before she left, she sat me down and told me that I’d been a fool to work so hard building this house. She said you could have done it by yourself, and that I should have let you. She said what I was doing was understandable and that she’d seen it before in women who were carrying a child, but that I needed to recognize that the way I’ve been acting is a danger to me and my baby. She got me to confess that I feel that if I coddle myself, I’m admitting I may be in danger of losing this baby like I lost Willa.

“‘You’re not immortal,’ she told me. ‘No one is. But sometimes we feel that we have to act as if we are.’ She said that if I go on pushing myself and not resting, I may regret it for the rest of my life, but if I take good care of myself, I’ll give birth to a healthy baby.”

“Elizabeth can be terrifying when she’s a mind to be. She’s helped hundreds of babies come into the world. She told me some stories I don’t want to repeat. Her lecture sobered me up considerably. Before she left, I promised her I’d stop splitting kindling and carrying water up from the river and do more sitting in front of the fire. Then we sat down together and threw the buzios to see if I was going to have a boy or a girl.”

In the stove, the fire burns with a low hiss. Gradually the hiss of sleet joins in, slapping against roof and windows like loose gravel. That night William and Carrie sleep in each other’s arms. When they wake the next morning, every blade of grass is coated with ice, and the prairie looks as if it has been strewn with diamonds.