James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

Owen stepped forward. “Let me pray, Pa,” he said, for the men looked to be starving, and I reckoned they couldn’t stand an hour of the Captain doodling at the Almighty. The Old Man grumbled but agreed, and after we prayed and ate, he huddled with the others around his map, while Fred and I stayed away from them and cleaned up.

Fred, short as he was in his head, was terrific glad to see me. But he seemed worried. “We done a bad thing,” he said.

“I know it,” I said.

“My brother John who run off, we never found him. My brother Jason, too. We can’t find neither.”

“Where you think they gone?”

“Wherever they are,” he said glumly. “We gonna fetch ’em.”

“Do we got to?”

He glanced furtively at his Pa, then sighed and looked away. “I missed you, Little Onion. Where’d you run off to?”

I was about to tell him when a horse and rider charged into camp. The rider cornered the Old Man and spoke to him, and a few moments later, the Captain called us to order, standing in the middle of the camp by the fire while the men gathered around.

“Good news, men. My old enemy Captain Pate has a posse raiding homes on the Santa Fe Road and planning to attack Lawrence. He got Jason and John with him. They are likely to drop ’em at Fort Leavenworth for imprisonment. We going after them.”

“How big is his army?” Owen asked.

“A hundred fifty to two hundred, I’m told,” Old Man Brown said.

I looked around. I counted twenty-three among us, including me.

“We only got ammo for a day’s fight,” Owen said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What we gonna use when we run out? Harsh language?”

But the Old Man was already movin’, grabbing his saddlebags. “Lord’s riding on high, men! Remember the army of Zion! Mount up!”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, Father,” Owen said.

“So what?”

“What say we wait till Monday and catch Pate then. He’s likely headed to Lawrence. He won’t attack Lawrence on a Sunday.”

“In fact, that’s exactly when he’ll attack,” the Old Man said, “knowing I’m a God-fearing man and likely to rest on the Lord’s day. We’ll ride up by way of Prairie City and cut him off at Black Jack. Let’s pray, men.”

Well, there weren’t no stopping him. The men gathered around him in a circle. The Old Man dropped to his knees, stretched out his hands, palms toward the sky, looking like Moses of old, his beard angling down like a bird’s nest. He commenced to praying.

Thirty minutes later Fred lay on the ground snoring, Owen stared into space, and the others milled about, smoking and doodling with saddlebags and scrawling letters home while the Old Man carried on, hollering up to the Anointed One with his eyes closed, till Owen finally piped out, “Pa, we got to ride! Jason and John is prisoner and headed to Fort Leavenworth, remember?”

That broke the spell. The Old Man, still on his knees, opened his eyes, irritated. “Every time I gets to the balance of my words of thanks to my Savior, I gets interrupted,” he grumbled, getting to his feet. “But I expect the God of Gods has understanding about the patience of the young, who don’t favors Him to the necessary ends so as to give Him proper thanks for blessings which He giveth so freely.”

With that, we saddled up and rode due north, to meet Captain Pate and his posse, and I was full-blown back in his army and the business of being a girl again.

Like most things the Old Man planned out, the attack against Captain Pate’s Sharpshooters didn’t work out the way he drawed it up. For one thing, the Old Man always got bad information. We rode out against Captain Pate on a Saturday in October. Come December, we still hadn’t found him ... Everywhere we went, the story changed. We’d roll toward Palmyra and a settler on the trail would holler, “There’s a fight with the rebels yonder in Lawrence,” and off we’d go toward Lawrence, only to find the fight two days past and the rebels gone. A few days later a woman on her porch would exclaim, “I seen Captain Pate over near Fort Leavenworth,” and the Old Man would say, “We have him now! Go men!” and off we’d bust out again, full of pluck, riding two days, only to find out it weren’t true. Back and forth we went, till the men was plumb wore out. We went like that all the way into February, the Old Man spoiling for a fight, and getting none.

We picked up another dozen or so Free Staters this way though, wandering around southern Kansas near the Missouri border, till we growed to about thirty men. We was feared, but the truth is, the Pottawatomie Rifles weren’t nothing but a bunch of hungry boys with big ideas running ’round looking for boiled grits and sour bread to stuff their faces with in late February. Winter come full on then, and it growed too cold to fight. Snow blanketed the prairie. Ice formed eighteen inches deep. Water froze in pitchers overnight. Huge trees, covered with icicles, crackled like giant skeletons. Those in the Old Man’s army who could stand it stayed in camp, huddled under the tent. The rest, including me and the Old Man and his sons, spent the winter keeping warm wherever we could. It’s one thing to say you’s an abolitionist, but riding for weeks on the plains in winter, with no spare victuals, you weeding a bad hoe for satisfaction to test a man’s principles that way. Some of the Old Man’s men was turned toward slavery by the time winter was over.

But truth be to tell it, it weren’t killing me to be with the Old Man. Lazy slob that I was, I growed used to being outside, riding the plains looking for ruffians, stealing from Pro Slavers, and not having no exact job, for the Old Man changed the rules for girls in his army after he seen how I’d been put to scrubbing back and forth. He announced, “Henceforth every man in his company has to shift for himself. Wash your own shirts. Do your own mending. Fix your own plate.” He made it clear that every man was there to fight slavery, not get his washing done by the only girl in the outfit who happened to be colored. Fighting slavery is easy when you ain’t got that load. Fact is, it was pretty easy altogether, unless you was the slave, course, for you mostly rode around and talked up how wrong the whole deal was, then you stole whatever you could from the Pro Slavers, and off you went. You weren’t waking up regular to cart the same water, chop the same wood, shine the same boots, and hear the same stories every day. Slave fighting makes you a hero, a legend in your own mind, and after a while the thought of going back to Dutch’s to be sold down to New Orleans, and barbering and shining shoes and my skin smacking against that rough old potato sack I wore versus the nice soft, warm wool dress I had begun to favor, not to mention the various buffalo hides I covered myself with, growed less and less sweet. I weren’t for being a girl, mind you. But there was certain advantages, like not having to lift nothing heavy, and not having to carry a pistol or rifle, and fellers admiring you for being tough as a boy, and figuring you is tired when you is not, and just general niceness in the way folks render you. Course in them days colored girls had to work harder than white girls, but that was by normal white folks’ standards. In Old Brown’s camp, everyone around him worked, colored or white, and fact is, he busied all of us so much that at times slavery seemed no different than being free, for we was all on a schedule: The Old Man woke everyone at four a.m. to pray and mumble and blubber over the Bible for an hour. Then he put Owen on me to teach me letters. Then he throwed Fred on me to teach me the way of the woods, then he throwed me back to Owen again, who showed me how to throw a bullet into a breechloader and fire it. “Every soul has got to learn to defend God’s word,” the Old Man said. “And these is all defenses of it. Letters, defense, survival. Man, woman, girl, boy, colored or white, and Indians, needs to know these things.” He teached me himself how to make baskets and bottom chairs. How you do it is simple: You take white oak, split it, and then it’s just a manner of folding. Inside a month I could make any kind of basket you wanted: musket basket, clothes basket, feed basket, fish basket—I caught catfish big and wide across as your hand. On long afternoons while we waited for the enemy to cross the trail, Fred and I went and made sorghum syrup from sugar maple trees. There weren’t nothing to it. You sap it out the tree, pour it in a pan, fire it over a fire, skim them skimmings off the top with a stick or fork, and you done. Most of your job is to put the syrup away from the skimmings on the top. When you cook it right, you got the best sugar there is.