James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

I followed him back to the horses, whereupon he dumped his seven-shooters, his sword, gun belt, and rifles all on the ground. He pulled out from his saddlebag a blanket, a handful of dried corn, and an oak stick. He said, “We can’t shoot out here, for the enemy might hear. But I’ll show you how to catch pheasant without firing a shot.”

He led me to a hollowed-out tree stump. He laid the corn along the ground in a straight line leading into the stump. He throwed a few pieces inside, then chose a spot not too far from the stump to sit. With his knife, he cut two peepholes in the blanket—one for him and one for me—then throwed it over us. “Every game bird in the world is afraid of man,” he whispered. “But with a blanket over you, you ain’t a man anymore.”

I wanted to say I weren’t feeling like a man no matter how the cut came or went, but I kept my peace. We sat like that under the blanket, staring out, and after a while I growed tired and leaned on him and fell asleep.

I was awakened by Fred stirring. I peeked through my hole and, sure enough, a pheasant had dropped by to help himself to Fred’s corn. He followed that line of dried corn just as you please right into the tree hollow. When he stuck his head inside it, Fred snapped the oak twig he was holding. The pheasant froze at the sound, and quick as I can tell it, Fred throwed the blanket on him, grabbed him, and snapped his neck.

We caught two more pheasants in this manner and headed back to camp. When we arrived, Owen and the Old Man was busy arguing about the Old Man’s map, and sent us to ready our catch for dinner. As we readied the birds at the campfire, I got worried about Fred blabbing about what he seen and said, “Fred, you remembers our deal?”

“’Bout what?”

“’Bout nothing,” I said. “But you probably ought not tell nobody what I gived you,” I murmured.

He nodded. “Your gift’s giving me more understanding even as I speak it, Onion. I am grateful to you and won’t tell a soul.”

I felt bad for him, thin-headed as he was, and him trusting me, not knowing I was a boy and planned to jump. His Pa already gived that feather to me and told me not to tell it. And I gived that feather to his son and told him not to tell. They didn’t know what to believe, is how I figured it. Back in them days white folks told niggers more than they told each other, for they knowed Negroes couldn’t do nothing but say, “Uh-huh,” and “Ummmm,” and go on about their own troubled business. That made white folks subject to trickeration in my mind. Colored was always two steps ahead of white folks in that department, having thunk through every possibility of how to get along without being seen and making sure their lies match up with what white folks wanted. Your basic white man is a fool, is how I thought, and I held Fred in that number.

But I was wrong, for Fred weren’t a complete fool. Nor was his Pa. The bigger fool turned out to be yours truly, for thinking they was fools in the first place. That’s how it goes when you place another man to judgment. You get stretched out wrong to ruination, and that would cost me down the road.

No sooner had we roasted those pheasants than the rest of the Old Man’s men straggled in. Old John Brown’s fearsome army which I heard so much about weren’t nothing but a ragtag assortment of fifteen of the scrawniest, bummiest, saddest-looking individuals you ever saw. They were young, and to a man skinny as horsehair in a glass of milk. There was a Jew foreigner, an Indian, and a few other assorted no-gooders. They were downright ugly, poor men. They’d been on a raid of some sort, for they clattered into camp on a wagon that clanged like a dry-goods store, with pots, cups, saucers, furniture, card tables, spindles, leather strips, bits of this and that hanging off the sides.

They brung everything but food, and the aroma of the birds drawed them to the fire right off. They stood around it in a circle. One of ’em, the Jew named Weiner, a thin, taut, lean feller wearing suspenders, was bearing a newspaper which he gived to Owen. “Hold it till after we eat,” he said, staring at the fire. “Otherwise the Captain will want to ride off directly.”

But the Old Man come up and seen him and he snatched the newspaper. “Mr. Weiner, no doubt the news from Lawrence is pressing,” he said. “But worry not, for I has had a vision on it already.” He turned to the others and said, “Men, before you stuff your gullets, let us thank our Holy Provider for these victuals, since we is after all spreading freedom in His name.”

The men stood in a circle with their heads bowed while the Old Man stood in the center, hat in hand, bowing his wrinkled old face over the roasted birds and the fire.

Thirty minutes later the fire was out, the dinner as cold as Dick’s ice house, and he was still prattling on. I ought to give you a full sample of Old John Brown’s prayers, but I reckon they wouldn’t make sense to the dear reader who’s no doubt setting in a warm church basement a hundred years distant, reading these words wearing Stacy Adams shoes and a fake fur coat, and not having to do no more than waddle over to the wall and flick a button to warm his arse and heat his coffee. The Old Man’s prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt pheasant rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department. Just when he seemed to wrap up one thought, another come tumbling out and crashed up against the first, and then another crashed up against that one, and after a while they all bumped and crashed and commingled against one another till you didn’t know who was who and why he was praying it, for the whole thing come together like the tornadoes that whipped across the plains, gathering up the sagebrush and boll weevils and homesteads and tossing them about like dust. The effort of it drawed his sweat, which poured down his leathery neck and runned down his shirt, while he spouted about burnt offerings and blood from the lamp stand of Jesus and so forth; all the while that dress of mine itched to high heaven and the mosquitoes gnawed at my guts, eating me alive. Finally Owen murmured, “Pa! We got to get up the trail! There’s a posse riding!”

That brung the Old Man to his senses. He coughed, throwed out a couple more Hail Marys and Thank You Lords, then wound the whole business down. “I ought to give Thee a full prayer,” he grumbled, “rather than just a few bumbling words to our Great Redeemer Who hath paid in blood and to Whose service we is obliged.” He was given to saying “thees” and “thous” in his talks.

The men collapsed on their haunches and ate while the Old Man read the newspaper. As he done so, his face darkened, and after a few moments he balled the newspaper up in a large, wrinkled fist and shouted, “Why, they attacked our man!”

“Who’s that?” Owen asked.

“Our man in Congress!” He uncrinkled the newspaper and read it aloud to everyone. From what I could gather, two fellers got into a wrangle about slavery in the top hall of the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., and one of them knocked the other cold. Seemed like a feller from Massachusetts named Sumner got the worst end of it, being that a feller from South Carolina broke his cane over Sumner’s head and got a bunch of new canes in the mail from people that liked his side of the whole bit.

The Old Man throwed the newspaper down. “Roust up the horses and break down the tent. We shall strike back tonight. Hurry, men, we have work to do!”