The Good Lord Bird (3 page)

I seen a chance to jump. My mind was on escape, so I said, “I got to toilet, but a girl needs a bit of privacy.” I near choked calling myself a member of the opposite nature, but lying come natural to me in them times. Truth is, lying come natural to all Negroes during slave time, for no man or woman in bondage ever prospered stating their true thoughts to the boss. Much of colored life was an act, and the Negroes that sawed wood and said nothing lived the longest. So I weren't going to tell him nothing about me being a boy. But everybody under God's sun, man or woman, white or colored, got to go to the toilet, and I really did have to answer nature's call. Since Fred was slow as gravy in his mind, I also seen a chance to jump.

“'Deed a girl does need her privacy, Little Onion,” he said. He tied our horses to a low-hanging tree branch.

“I hopes you is a gentleman,” I said, for I had seen white women from New England speak in that manner when their wagon trains stopped off at Dutch's and they had to use his outdoor privy, after which they usually come busting out the door coughing with their hair curled like fried bacon, for the odor of that thing could curdle cheese.

“I surely am,” he said, and walked off a little while I slipped behind a nearby tree to do my business. Being a gentleman, he walked off a good thirty yards or so, his back to me, staring off at the trees, smiling, for he never weren't nothing but pleasant in all the time I knowed him.

I ducked behind a tree, done my business, and busted out from behind that tree running. I come out flying. I leaped atop Dutch's cockeyed pinto and spurred her up, for that horse would know the way home.

Problem was, that beast didn't know me from Adam. Fred had led her by the reins, but once I was on her myself, the horse knowed I weren't a rider. She raised up and lunged hard as she could and sent me flying. I went airborne, struck my head on a rock, and got knocked cold.

When I come to, Fred was standing over me, and he weren't smiling no more neither. The fall had throwed my dress up around my head, and my new bonnet was turned 'round backward. I ought to mention here that I had never known nor worn undergarments as a child, having been raised in a tavern of lowlifes, elbow benders, and bullyboys. My privates was in plain sight. I quickly throwed the dress back down to my ankles and sat up.

Fred seemed confused. He weren't all the way there in his mind, thank God. His brains was muddy. His cheese had pretty much slid off his biscuit. He said, “Are you a sissy?”

“Why, if you have to ask,” I said, “I don't know.”

Fred blinked and said slowly, “Father says I ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and lots of things confuse me.”

“Me too,” I said.

“When we get back, maybe we can put the question to Father.”

“'Bout what?”

“'Bout sissies.”

“I wouldn't do that,” I said quickly, “being that he's got a lot on his mind, fighting a war and all.”

Fred considered it. “You're right. Plus, Pa don't suffer foolishness easily. What do the Bible say 'bout sissies?”

“I don't know. I can't read,” I said.

That cheered him. “Me neither!” he said brightly. “I'm the only one of my brothers and sisters who can't do that.” He seemed happy I was dumb as him. He said, “Follow me. I'mma show you something.”

We left the horses and I followed him through some dense thickets. After pushing in a ways, he shushed me with his finger and we crept forward silent. We followed a thick patch of bushes to a clearing and he froze. He stood silent like that, listening. I heard a tapping noise. We moved toward it till Fred spotted what he wanted and pointed.

Up at the top of a thick birch, a woodpecker hammered away. He was a good-sized feller. Black and white, with a touch of red around him.

“Ever seen one of them?” he asked.

“I wouldn't know one bird from the next.”

Fred stared up at it. “They call that a Good Lord Bird,” he said. “It's so pretty that when man sees it, he says, ‘Good Lord.'”

He watched it. That stupid thing darn near hypnotized him, and I had a mind to break for it then, but he was too close. “I can catch or trap just about any bird there is,” he said. “But that one there . . . that's an angel. They say a feather from a Good Lord Bird'll bring you understanding that'll last your whole life. Understanding is what I lacks, Onion. Memories and things.”

“Whyn't you catch it, then?”

He ignored me, watching through the thick forest as the bird hammered away. “Can't. Them things is shy. Plus, Father says you ought not to believe in baubles and heathen stuff.”

How do you like that? Stuffed in my pocket was the very sack his own Pa gived me with his own baubles and charms, including a feather that looked like it come off that very creature we was staring at.

I had my eye on jumping, and since he was loony, I figured to confound him further and keep his mind off seeing I was a boy, and also give me a better chance to get away. I rummaged through my small gunnysack and pulled out that very same feather his Pa gived me and offered it to him. That floored him.

“Where'd you get that?”

“I ain't allowed to say. But it's yours.”

Well, that just knocked him flat. Now, truth is, I didn't know whether that thing come from a Good Lord Bird or not. His Pa
said
it did, but I didn't know whether his Old Man told the truth or not, for he was a kidnapper, plus white folks was full of tricks in them days, and I was a liar myself, and one liar don't trust another. But it seemed close enough. It was black, had a bit of red and white in it. But it could'a come from an eagle or a plain hummingbird for all I know. Whatever it was, it pleased Fred something terrible and he aimed to return the favor. “Now I'mma show you something special,” he said. “Follow me.”

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.

The Old Man's Army

N
o 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!”

Well, them men was in no hurry to leave, being they'd just got there and was busy stuffing their faces. “What difference do it make,” one feller said. “It can wait a day.”

“The Negro has waited two hundred years,” the Old Man said.

The feller snorted. “Let 'em wait. There ain't enough food in this camp.” He was a raggedy-dressed feller like the rest, but he was a thick man, bearing a six-shooter and real riding pants. He had a thick, wrinkled neck of a turkey buzzard, and he kept his mouth movin' on that pheasant as he talked.

“We is not out here to eat, Rev. Martin,” the Old Man said.

“Just because two fools have a fight in Congress don't mean nothing,” he said. “We has our own fights out here.”

“Rev. Martin, you is on the wrong side of understanding,” the Captain said.

The Reverend munched away and said, “I aim to better my reading so I don't have to hear your interpretations of things, Captain, which I is no longer sure of. Every time I ride out and come back to your camp, you got another face rooting around, eating. We ain't got enough food for the men here already.” He nodded at me. “Who's that there?”

I was stuffing my face with bird fast as I could, for I had my own plan on escaping.

“Rev. Martin, that's Onion,” Frederick announced proudly.

“Where'd she come from?” he asked.

“Stolen from Dutch Henry's Tavern.”

The Reverend's eyes widened and he turned to the Old Man. “Of all the troublemakers in this country, why'd you pick a fight with him?”

“I didn't pick no fight,” the Old Man said. “I went to scout his territory.”

“Well, you done scouted trouble. I wouldn't pick a fight with Dutch for a box of crackers. I ain't come to this country to shoot it out with him.”

“Nobody's shooting nothing,” the Old Man said. “We are riding for redemption, and the Bible says it, ‘Hold truth to thine own man's face, and the Lord shall deliver.'”

“Don't pick no boil with me about the Bible,” the Reverend snorted. “I know more about it than any man here.”

He bit off the wrong end then, for in my 111 years on God's green earth, I never knowed a man who could spout the Bible off better than Old John Brown. The Old Man straightened up, reared back, and throwed off half a dozen Bible verses right in the Reverend's face, and when the Reverend tried to back-fire with a couple of his own, the Old Man drowned him out with half dozen more that was better than the first. Just mowed him down. The Rev was outgunned.

“All right already,” he snapped. “But you sporting trouble. Dutch got a mess of Missouri redshirts 'round his place. You just gived him a reason to set 'em loose. He'll come after us hard.”

“Let him come,” the Old Man said. “Onion's part of my family, and I aim to keep her free.”

“She ain't part of mine,” the Reverend said. He sucked a pheasant bone and tossed it down coolly, licking his fingers. “I'm fighting to free Kansas, not to steal oily-headed niggers like this one.”

The Old Man said icily, “I thought you was a Free State man, Reverend.”

“I
am
a Free State man,” the Reverend said. “That ain't got nothing to do with getting aired out for stealing somebody's nigger.”

“You shouldn't'a rode with this company if you were planning to peck and hoot 'bout the colored being free,” Old Man Brown said.

“I rode with you out of common interest.”

“Well, my interest is freeing the colored in this territory. I'm an abolitionist through and through.”

Now as them two was wrangling, most of the men had finished up eating and sat on their haunches watching.

“That's Dutch's nigger. Bought and paid for!”

“He'll forget about it soon enough.”

“He won't forget that kind of wrong.”

“Then I'll clear his memory of it when he comes.”

The Indian, Ottawa Jones, stepped to the Captain and said, “Dutch ain't a bad sort, Captain. He done some work for me before he got his tavern. He weren't for slavery then. He should have the chance to change his mind.”

“You just defending him 'cause you had a slave or two yourself,” another man piped up.

“You're a liar,” Jones said.

That started more disruption, with several leaning this way and that, some with the Old Man, others with the Reverend. The Old Man listened in silence and finally waved 'em quiet.

“I aim to strike a blow at the slavers. We know what they done. They killed Charles Dow. They sent Joe Hamilton to our Maker right in front of his wife. They raped Willamena Tompkin. They're rapists. Pillagers. Sinners, all. Destroying this whole territory. The Good Book says, ‘Hold thine enemy to his own fire.' Dutch Henry is an enemy. But I'll allow if he don't get in the way, he won't suffer injury from me.”

“I ain't going up against Dutch,” Reverend Martin said. “I got no hank with him.”

“Me neither,” another man said. “Dutch gived me a horse on credit. Plus this here army's got too many angles to it. I didn't come all the way from Connecticut to ride with Jews.”

The Jew Weiner, standing next to Jones, stepped toward the man with his fists balled. “Peabody, you open your mouth sideways again, I'll bust you straddle-legged.”

“That's enough,” the Old Man said. “We riding on Osawatomie tomorrow night. That's where Pro Slavers are. Whoever wants to ride, come on. Whoever don't want to can go home. But go north by way of Lawrence. I don't want anyone riding south to warn Dutch.”

“You wanna ride against Dutch, go 'head,” the Reverend said. “I won't get in the way. But nobody tells me where to ride—especially not over a nappy-headed, bird-gobbling nigger.” He placed his hand on his shooter, which hung on his left side. Peabody and a couple of other men stepped aside with him, and suddenly, just like that, the Old Man's army split in half, one side standing with the Old Man, the other angling behind the Rev.

There was a rustle in the crowd behind the Old Man, and the Reverend's eyes growed to the size of silver dollars, for Fred came at him and he was hot, drawing his hardware as he come. He handled them big seven-shooters like twigs. Quick as you can tell it, he was on the Reverend and mashed both his seven-shooters on the Reverend's chest. I heard the cocks snap back on both of them.

“If you say another word about my friend Onion here, I'll bust a charge in your chest,” he said.

The sound of the Old Man's voice stopped him. “Frederick!”

Fred froze, pistols drawed out.

“Leave him be.”

Frederick stepped away. The Reverend huffed and glared, but he didn't pull his metal, and he was wise not to, for Owen had stepped out the crowd, and so had two of Brown's other sons. They was a rough bunch, them Browns. They was holy as Jesus to a man. They didn't swear, didn't drink. Didn't cuss. But God help you if you crossed 'em, for they didn't take no backwater off nobody. Once they decided something, it was done.

The Reverend gathered his rifle and things, got on his horse, and hit off without a word. Peabody and two others followed. They rode north out the campgrounds, the way the Captain told 'em to do.

The Old Man, Ottawa Jones the Indian, and the Jew Weiner stood together and watched Reverend Martin and his men leave.

“You ought to duck-hunt that Reverend in his back while you got the chance,” Weiner said. “He won't be out of sight five minutes before he turns south and heads to Dutch's Crossing. He'll hoot and holler to Dutch loud as he can.”

“Let him holler,” the Old Man said. “I want everyone to know what I aim to do.”

But he made a mistake letting the Reverend go that day, and it would cost him down the line.