The Widow's War

That night Clark’s men begin to die. The first walks away from the campfire to relieve himself. In the morning, the others find him facedown in a patch of poison ivy. Clark strolls up to the body and kicks it over with the toe of his boot.

“Dick must have died of natural causes,” he says. “There’s not a mark on him.” He nudges the body again. “Blue lips. That’s odd.” He stands there for a few seconds trying to figure out what might turn a man’s lips blue. Poisonous mushrooms? Apoplexy? In the end it doesn’t much matter. A dead man is useless. “Strip him,” he commands.

Clark’s men strip the dead raider of his guns, knives, tobacco, money, and ammunition and leave his body for the vultures. By seven, they are on their way again, driving their captives in front of them, and by seven-twenty Carrie is riding after them wearing Dick’s hat and boots, all too big for her but better than no hat and no boots, which was what she had before.

Clark’s band originally consisted of Clark and thirteen men. Clark killed Deacon; now she has killed Dick. That leaves a total of twelve armed men between her and the prisoners. Given enough time, she can probably eliminate all twelve, but does she have time? She has to take them out one by one, and they are obviously headed somewhere specific.

Yesterday they crossed into Missouri. When they reach their destination, more pro-slavers may join them. Twelve men could easily turn into twenty, thirty, even a hundred. The best she can hope for between now and then is to spread terror. If Clark’s men panic, they may desert before he gets reinforcements.

She lists her advantages. The blowgun is silent and the darts small and hard to notice. It’s unlikely that Clark or any of his men are acquainted with the effects of curare. Since the slaves are not only on foot but chained together in a coffle, the raiders are forced to travel slowly. Unaware that they are being followed, they are making no attempt to hide their tracks. Still, she needs to be extremely cautious. Although she aches to catch a glimpse of William or Teddy, she must keep her distance.

Actually, the hardest part may prove to be not catching up with Clark’s men by accident. The chains are heavy and the captives often stumble, bringing the entire coffle to a halt. Sometimes no amount of whipping can make them go on—at least no amount that won’t permanently hurt Clark’s chances of getting a good price for them. So from time to time, the raiders are obliged to halt and let their human cargo rest.

Once Carrie nearly rides straight into them. She’s only saved by the sound of metal hitting rock. Dismounting, she crawls up, peers through the grass, and sees that the sound is being made by the prisoners’ chains. They are leaning their heads on one another’s shoulders, perhaps for comfort, perhaps because they are so tired they can no longer sit upright. They don’t speak. Maybe Clark has forbidden them to. A skinny raider with a sunken chest passes down the line distributing water from a folding leather bucket. Jane refuses it. She once told Carrie she would rather die than be a slave.

Drink the water, Carrie thinks. Don’t despair. Hang on. I’m going to rescue you and the girls. But Jane can’t hear her. Reaching out, Jane tries to touch six-year-old Franny, but the chain is too short. For a little while, Jane’s fingers grope at the empty space that separates her from her daughter. Then she lets her arm drop.

Carrie feels her eyes filling with tears again. Oh, Jane! she thinks. She puts her hand over her mouth to keep from making a sound that will give her away. The tears choke her, and she comes within a second of sneezing. She is far too close to the raider with the bucket. She should not have been tempted to draw so near.

Silently, she inches her way back to a safer distance. She had hoped to at least catch a glimpse of William and Teddy, but she doesn’t dare linger, so for another day she goes without seeing them.

That evening just after dusk, she puts a dart into the neck of Zeb, the burly raider who dragged William over to Deacon. Zeb swears and slaps at the needle as if it were a mosquito bite. He must knock it loose, because fifteen minutes later when he drops dead, the raiders can find no indication of what killed him.

Now they begin to panic. Carrie has decided that she can no longer risk getting close enough to watch, but what she hears tells her the tide is beginning to turn.

More yelling, more cursing, Clark bellowing threats, the sound of Teddy crying. Again Carrie wants to run to Teddy and get him out of there, but she can’t; so she bites her lips, grabs at the ground, digs in, and waits. William must still be gagged because she doesn’t hear his voice. Instead, she hears Clark’s men fighting, and then the sound of a pistol going off.

Suddenly the raiders are rounding up their horses, throwing dirt over their fires, and breaking camp. One of them rides past her, so close she could reach out and touch him. He is followed by a second man, then a third. The others take off in the opposite direction, driving their prisoners in front of them with oaths and curses. They’ve never traveled at night before, so they must be running scared.

Carrie forces herself to wait until Clark and his remaining men are out of earshot. When she rides into the abandoned camp, she finds two bodies. One belongs to Zeb. The second is that of a large, black-bearded raider whose name she never learns. Cause of death: gunshot wound to the chest.

She gets one more raider before they panic completely. His name is either Mike or Mark—she only hears it once and not clearly even then. Unfortunately this time the needle stays in his neck, the raiders find it, and Henry Clark, who may be many things but who is no fool, figures out what is going on.

Grabbing William, he pulls him into the firelight and puts a knife to his throat. “If you kill another of my men, Carrie Vinton, I’ll cut off his balls and nose, flay him alive, and roast him over a slow fire. If I see another of your needles, he’s a dead man, and when I’ve finished with him, I’ll do the same to that little bastard of yours. Do you hear me, bitch?”

Carrie hears. She puts away the blowgun and waits until the raiders break camp. She continues to wait all night and all the next day. When night falls, she starts following them again. By now their trail is cold, but she has no trouble finding it.

The broken grasses, bent twigs, overturned rocks, and hoofprints lead her to the south bank of the Missouri River to a cotton plantation named Beau Rivage. The cotton is starting to mature and the fields look as if they have been sprinkled with snow.

Tethering her horse in a stand of willows, Carrie walks to the crest of a bluff that overlooks the plantation and climbs a tree. From it, she can see slaves crouching between the rows of cotton, chopping out weeds with short-handled hoes. She can’t make out their features, but at least one looks like a woman. A white man—probably an overseer—stands near them. He appears to be unarmed, but at this distance it’s hard to tell.

The prisoners from Two Rivers have been unchained and herded into a slave pen next to a horse corral. Two men are guarding them. Clark’s men? Again, she can’t tell. A least half a dozen other men appear to be living in the barn. She tries, without success, to figure out if they are part of Clark’s original gang or reinforcements. What she wouldn’t give right now for those folding opera glasses of Elizabeth’s.

William and Teddy are nowhere in sight. Maybe Clark has imprisoned William in the stable or in the windowless shed next to the barn. Of course, he could have done something else with him. If you killed a man and threw his body into the Missouri River—

She forces herself to stop borrowing trouble. William is down there somewhere and so is Teddy. The main house is built of yellow-gray limestone. It looks solid and cool. She hopes they are both inside out of the heat.

For the rest of the day she continues to spy on Beau Rivage, but nothing of importance happens. Clark does not put in an appearance. Perhaps he’s asleep or perhaps he’s ridden to a nearby town to make arrangements to sell his captives. Twice she sees a white woman emerge from the main house. The woman throws feed to the chickens and picks some roses. Around three in the afternoon, a heavyset, dark-skinned woman opens the back door, walks across the backyard to the woodshed, and returns with an armful of kindling. House slave? Cook?

Near sunset, two men approach the slave pens and dump mush into a wooden trough. As Carrie watches Jane’s little girls dip their hands into it, she feels sick with despair. She has wasted a whole day spying on the plantation. She needs to do something soon, but what? She’s desperate to know what fate Clark has in store for his captives, but Clark knows she’s still following him—or at least he must suspect she is. If she goes down there, she’s likely to get everyone killed including herself. She’s one woman against who knows how many armed men. Her only weapons are a knife blade, an ice pick, and a glorified pea shooter that has to be aimed ten times more slowly and carefully than a gun.

She sits in the tree until night falls and mist rises up off the river. The lights in the main house go out one by one. Overhead, a full moon rides through the sky, veiled and ominous.

Shutting her eyes against the moonlight, she leans her forehead against the trunk of the tree and looks into the dark places inside herself. She is afraid she has come to the end of her ability to do anything useful. She can’t attack the plantation single-handed. Clark’s men will kill her long before she gets to the slave pens, and her death won’t save William and Teddy and the people from Two Rivers.

Mae Seja, she whispers, come to me. Tell me what to do. But Mae Seja doesn’t come. Jesus, she prays, come to me, help me. But the mist settles in, the tree grows slippery, and Jesus doesn’t come either.

Around midnight, she climbs down from her perch, walks back to the thicket where she tethered her horse, and makes him lie down. Curling up against him for warmth, she buries her face in his mane. Around her, the forest has come alive. She hears the sound of frogs croaking, the hum of cicadas, the hoot of an owl. Restless, she turns over and the horse stirs, perhaps wondering why she’s so agitated.

She turns again and feels the buzios in her pocket. The pointed end of one of the shells presses into her side. Hellfire and damnation, she thinks. It’s hard enough to sleep without being stabbed by a cowry shell. Sitting up, she pulls the bag out of her pocket and prepares to toss it aside.

What causes her to hesitate? Why does she dump the buzios out into the palm of her hand, lean forward, and throw them into a patch of moonlight? Does she make the cast because she hopes magic will work where prayer has failed? Or does she do it because she has run out of hope so completely that only habit remains?

Later she is never able to understand what prompts her to impulsively cast the buzios that night instead of tossing them aside and going back to sleep, but in any event, she does and they come to rest on the ground: sixteen shiny, pearl-white half-moons, five upright, eleven upside down.

Do the shells speak to her? No, she doesn’t think they do. But somehow they allow her to speak to herself, not to her frightened self, but to the self that saw her through the death of Willa, her marriage to Deacon, the long trip to Kansas, the blizzard, the birth of Teddy, the sacking of Lawrence, and the pillaging of Two Rivers. It is her old self, her real self, the one that has been with her as long as she can remember.