I Was a Revolutionary (7 page)

“Figure we can work some and come up with the fare for passage ourselves. Might take a little while,” CK said. “You don't have to come, Dulcet. You didn't sign on for no Nicodemus. You can settle yourself anywhere. Bring your family up once you got a place.” Dulcet considered this as Mil nursed Rachel, her back to them, nodding at her husband's words.

“You all kin to me now,” he said. “Course I coming with.”

“All right, then,” CK said with a force that betrayed the relief he felt that his friend would join them.

During the days, Mil would rest in the depot's shade with Rachel, listening to the footsteps of expectant travelers scuttling above them every time a train rumbled into town, and CK and Dulcet would set out early in the morning to look for work. CK had some luck at a nearby farm, and Dulcet would try his hand across the water in Kansas City, and they would come back at night tired, crawling under the train depot for supper. Sometimes Dulcet would regale them with stories of the things he'd seen that day in the city, and other times he'd tell them about his family, missing them so. Often he'd blow on his cane late into the night, a dirge or a dance, as his mood dictated. While Mil brought food from the fire, CK and Dulcet would pool their earnings, placing the coins inside the leaves of CK's Bible.

“Tell me about Nicodemus,” Dulcet said one night after dinner. He lay back and stretched out, folding his arms behind his head. The smoke from the dying fire snaked lazily in the darkening night. CK turned to Dulcet, tucking his legs under himself.

“I'll tell you bout Nicodemus,” CK said, raising his hands. “It's a colored town, course you know. Started a short while ago by folk from Kentuck.”

“That's fine and good, but is there work?”

“Plenty that.”

“Worked for a colored man for a spell,” said Dulcet. “Had a plantation outside Holly Springs. Weren't much different than working for the white man.”

“Not this,” CK said, sitting up so that he was kneeling now. Mil had set Rachel to bed and was clearing the plates, running river water over them before drying and placing them in the pack. “Every man has a home and a farm to hisself,” said CK. “No landlords, no bosses.”

“Run by us?”

“It's the truth,” he said. “You work your fields for yourself.”

“That don't sound half bad.”

“Half bad?” CK said, tossing a piece of tinder at his friend. “You hear what I say, Dulcet? You gon have a home. Your own farm. To bring your family back to.”

“Now you're talking,” Dulcet said, bracing himself on his elbows. “And we gon be neighbors?”

“Right next door,” CK said. “We supper together each—”

“What you know about Nicodemus?” Mil said as she took a seat by the fire. “You never been.”

It was true; beyond his vision he knew little else but what he'd seen on the handbill he still carried in his pocket.

“I seen it,” CK said. “Through my God's eye. He show me.”

Mil looked away.

Dulcet lay back down, laughing a single, satisfied laugh. “I gotta give it you, CK,” he said. “You ain't know nothing about this town and you act like you fit to be mayor.” He laughed again, but quieted quickly. After a moment's pause, he asked, “Tell me what else about Nicodemus.”

CK moved his hand slowly before him as if making a careful brushstroke: “It's a beauty like never you saw.” Dulcet was starting to believe, he could tell.

“What else?”

“Well, now, you listen,” CK began and told Dulcet of the song about Nicodemus, the slave who prophesied freedom and spoke that truth to others. They talked a long time that night, and their excitement carried them out of bed early in the predawn and for several days after, anxious as they were to raise enough money for train fare. They continued to do so until the morning CK woke to find Dulcet gone. He put on his shoes and hustled through town, checking saloons he was too timid to enter and other debauched places where one could lose money so quickly. Nothing. Later CK returned to the depot,
ducking under the platform, and met Mil's eyes. Neither said a word. She was holding the Bible and opened the cover. The money was gone. Inside lay the fife. It was light out now, and in the spot of dirt where Dulcet had lain, CK noticed something: a one-word apology, written in the shaky script of a finger dragged through dirt.

The axe had been his father's, but Talmen borrowed the wagon from a neighbor. With Rawl driving, they set out, and when he asked where they were headed, Talmen told him to keep on, saying only, “Outside town a ways.”

When they arrived at the oak grove, Talmen dismounted and stood silently a moment, taking in the sight of those tall hardwoods. “How many you figure we need?” said Rawl.

Talmen walked toward a tree, measured it up, and swung quickly, lodging the axe deep in the wood. “Just one.” Talmen spoke softly.

“Why ain't we taking more? Sure could use it.”

“Now move the wagon over yonder some. No telling which way this gon fall,” said Talmen, taking another swing. “When it do, you head that horse, hear? Don't let him spook.”

“But why ain't we take more?”

“Son, I need you to hush now.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Rawl was full of questions tonight. Nervous, Talmen figured. Maybe he sensed what his father was up to, that this was no unclaimed spot of land, and that the owner of the claim was white, and, further, that the owner was Ryer, a man who'd been nothing but pretty good to Talmen. And here he was stealing from him so brazenly. Talmen looked over at the house, certain any moment light from a kerosene lamp would illuminate a window.
I'll take what I need
, he imagined telling Ryer as he labored to bring down the tree,
whether you trade or not
.
You see
what you done to me
. Perhaps he would tell Rawl later, try and explain the things a desperate man will do, but for now he didn't care to account for himself. Right now he just needed silence, a demand Rawl met, so that the only sound that passed between them was the hollow crack of the axe. When the oak fell, Talmen chopped half of it into smaller lengths that could be loaded into the wagon and left the other half where it lay.

“But what about—” said Rawl, looking at the abandoned portion.

“Leave it be.” Talmen placed his axe in the bed of the wagon and climbed into the cab. “Let's go.”

That night, while everyone was asleep in the dugout, Talmen sat outside in the warm early-summer night, stripping bark. He worked late, using the axe and saw to secure enough wood to fashion the top, bottom, and sides that would be needed. It was green, unseasoned wood, but it would have to do. No time for a visit to the mill that might have no time for him. All those years of watching and helping his father build houses, fences, and floors, but never once something so small. He had to trust his eyeballed measurements to be correct. He sat alone on a stool in the starlight and hum of cicadae, his hands resting on the rough denim of his overalls. He wasn't finished, but it was quiet now, and the hammer-and-nails work he had left would wake his family. He would finish in the morning, but for now he just sat there a long time thinking, listening, being still.

Word later came that the mayor of Leavenworth himself had climbed aboard the
Joe Kinney
to stuff a wad of bills in the captain's hand, begging him not to leave any more of these wretched people in his town. “Take them on to Atchison, please,” the mayor was rumored to have entreated. Of course CK and Mil knew nothing of it at the time, lodged as they were with the others in the hull of the towing barge. They'd
pieced it together only later, when they exited the steamer and walked the banks of the Missouri, met by the cold stares of Atchison townsfolk who were not pleased to see Leavenworth's refuse on their shores.

“Morning, folks,” CK said, tipping his hat to the crowd as he and the others carried what was left of their belongings from the steamer.

“Go on back where you come from, why don't you,” a voice called out.

CK smiled pleasantly, a calculated gesture of obliviousness that he'd often used to deflect hostility. “Fine day here in Leavenworth,” he said, as he helped an old woman struggling to carry an armful of blankets from the ship.

“Ain't Leavenworth ground you standing on, nigger,” the voice in the crowd called again. “You's in Atchison here. They don't want you, and us neither.”

“Atchison?” CK said, and slowly the pieces started coming together.

Earlier that morning, after Dulcet disappeared with their money, Mil had fumed, cursing his name.

“I don't understand,” CK said in a monotone daze. How could a friend who called himself family just up and disappear from your life? Leave you in such a bad spot?

“That darn fool is drinking away our money and you know it.”

“No, ma'am,” CK said. “He went back for his kin, I'm sure it.”

“Believe what you will,” she said. “Fact is, that money's gone.”

“He'll meet us in Nicodemus,” he said, but his words failed to convince even himself.

“How
we
gon get to Nicodemus now?”

She was right, and as he thought about that money—nearly
enough to secure rail tickets—CK's befuddlement dissipated, stoking a slow-burning resentment he struggled neither to voice nor to dwell upon, if only for Mil's sake. Instead he'd made like such a thing could just be shrugged off, saying with new resolution: “We move on.” Having little desire to stay in a place that now seemed haunted by Dulcet's betrayal, CK went to the relief board and looked into their options. One of the last free-passage boats, the
Joe Kinney
, was set to leave for Leavenworth later that very morning, and a man on the board said it was a town where one could find steady work. And so he boarded the boat with his family and a new optimism that was almost convincing until now, when they'd arrived in a town that hadn't been their destination.

Those first few days in Atchison were long and without prospect. Just summer heat and hunger. Here there were no relief boards or wealthy donors, and local blacks seemed consumed by a growing indifference to the boatloads of needy refugees who so regularly appeared. CK and Mil had arrived with nearly three hundred others, and many were in a bad way. The hard travel had taken its toll in pneumonia and measles, and their clothes had become little more than rags. There was worry they might even carry yellow fever, so the local authorities concerned themselves with quarantine followed by expulsion, arranging for ships and trains to take the indigents elsewhere. They'd been so overrun with exodusters the last month, they were losing all patience and goodwill. This was not a matter of skin color, the mayor said repeatedly. This was a matter of economics, and Atchison simply couldn't afford to keep giving away food and the like. So it was back to the basement of another crowded church, hoping the hostility would fade, and eventually, as more and more people were transferred, it did, dissolving into mean disregard. CK and Mil took turns ministering to the sick and elderly, praying, listening as they spoke.
“Ain't no Kansas I heard about,” said a bone-thin older man, too sick to travel, one night as he lay on his pallet by the fire. CK sat beside him, Bible open on his lap. “Jayhawkers and John the Brown ain't even a memory. ‘Eden on the Prairie' ain't even a dream no more.” CK raised a tin cup to the man's lips but he shook it off. He was in pain, knew he would soon die, and said he wasn't scared. O Death, be kind to him, thought CK. He'd seen men unafraid of the end and he hoped he could muster the same resolve when Death came for him. But while that would not be the end, lying in the arms of his Savior was something he wasn't yet ready to court.

While most accepted transportation back to Wyandotte or Topeka, CK looked into passage to Nicodemus. The steamer to Atchison had brought them north of Wyandotte but no farther west, leaving them three hundred miles from their destination. A railway would suffice but was costly. He thought of Dulcet, imagined him in a bar, smiling over a bottle of brown liquor, as he captivated others with stories of his journey out of the South. CK carried on an imagined conversation with him as, again, he looked for work. Maybe now Dulcet would stop his scoffing and understand how hard it was to live in a godly way. The lost company of his friend, however, paled now beside the loss of that money. In these times the only salve for CK was Nicodemus. When he felt that wrath come upon him, he'd start to sing “Wake Nicodemus,” but now the song was less affirmation of his vision than a guard against succumbing to disillusioned anger.

Defying CK, Mil sought work as well, determined as she was to get out of Atchison. She took up washing and laundering linens for a few families, carrying out the tasks with Rachel on her hip or at her feet. After a few days, CK found steady work in a grain elevator from a man named Roberts, who lived outside of town. Roberts worked right alongside
his hired men, putting in a full day, too. He seemed to like CK, and one day as they descended the steps of that towering elevator, along with another man Roberts referred to as “Germany,” he offered to let CK stay on as long as he wanted. “You're the hard kind of worker I could use around here,” he said. “Ain't that right, Germany? We could use us another two, three like CK.”

“They take our jobs,” Germany said, his voice heavy with the accent of his home. They were the first words CK had heard him speak beyond the
uh-huh
grunting that shoveling grain necessitated. He was older than CK, bespectacled, and did everything with an air of agitation, whether hauling heavy grain sacks into storage or wiping a smudge from the lens of his glasses with a handkerchief from his back pocket. He repeated himself, Germany did, and set out in the opposite direction, before turning back to say he would see Roberts tomorrow morning, nodding curtly.