The Widow's War (29 page)

“That’s a hard question to answer. You know your Bible as well as I do. Were Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel sane? Was John the Revelator?”

“Frankly, I’ve never been sure.”

“I’ve never been sure either, particularly about John. Don’t bother asking me if I mean John the Revelator or John Brown. Both hear what the rest of us don’t hear and see what the rest of us don’t see, and both preach with the terrifying tongues of angels. One thing I’d say about Mr. Brown, though: You don’t ever want to cross him.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Carrie says. “So what’s the secret?”

T
he prairie is dappled with dim light, deeply shadowed, trackless, easy to get lost in. The only sound is the soft rustling of the wind, the creak of the saddles, and the clopping of the horses’ hooves. Carrie rides next to Elizabeth close enough to hear her whispered directions. No one guards them tonight, not the Browns, not Elizabeth’s sons, not even Mr. Trout.

Carrie has left Teddy back in Osawatomie with Prosser’s wife, Eulie. “Don’t worry about him for a minute,” Eulie said when Carrie handed him over. “I’m still nursing my youngest and have milk enough for two.” Eulie lowered her voice and bent forward so her mother-in-law couldn’t hear. “Besides, Keyhole Draw’s no place to take a child.”

“Describe it to me,” Carrie asked Elizabeth as they set out. “Give me some idea where we’re headed.”

“It’s better if you just see it,” Elizabeth said. “Then I’ll explain.” So the mystery continues. All Carrie knows is that she and Elizabeth are headed somewhere that makes grown women lower their voices and look around to make sure they aren’t being overheard when they speak of it. She has kept many secrets in her time, but this one appears to be buried deeper than all the rest put together.

Keyhole Draw
. She takes the words apart like a puzzle. Since a
draw
is a ravine and a
keyhole
is small and narrow, they are probably riding to a narrow ravine where fugitive slaves are hidden until they can be passed on to the next Underground Railroad station. But perhaps she’s wrong. According to Elizabeth, even the Adairs don’t know Keyhole Draw exists. That doesn’t make sense. The Adairs are the stationmasters at Osawatomie. They’ve been working with Elizabeth for two years. They built the secret room under their smokehouse where Carrie tended to Ni’s arm. How can Carrie have passed John Brown’s test when his own sister and brother-in-law have failed it?

“You’re the only white woman in Osawatomie Mr. Brown is letting in on the secret,” Elizabeth told her. “The only others who know about the draw are his own wife, Mary Ann, and his sons’ wives, and all of them are living up at Brown’s Station along North Middle Creek. To tell the truth, I’m not even sure Mrs. Brown and his sons’ wives know.”

Know what?
Carrie wonders.
What kind of secret do you keep from your wife and your sons’ wives, and how far away is this place? We’ve been riding for over an hour, doubling back and coming at the place from different angles. Who does Elizabeth think might follow us at this time of night? Osawatomie is an abolitionist town, and as for bushwhackers—why would they be out in the middle of nowhere at five in the morning? Those Missouri boys like their warm campfires and whiskey. Even if they were out looking for trouble, they’d follow the California Road or go someplace where they could find cabins to burn and stores to loot. There’s no glory in tar and feathering gophers.

She is just wondering if she might be able to persuade Elizabeth to stop taking evasive action and make a beeline for the place, when Elizabeth reigns in her horse and points to a dim line of low hills. The hills are forested most of the way up and so dark they appear only as silhouettes against the moonlit sky.

“We’re almost at the entrance. Before we draw any closer, we need to wait to make sure no one is following us. Also, I want you to see the place by daylight.”

By now, Carrie knows better than to ask questions. They ride toward a stand of bushes. The leaves are small this time of year, but the tangle is thick enough to provide cover. While they wait, Carrie picks a leaf and tries to figure out what kind of bush is sheltering them. The leaf has teeth. Hazelnut, perhaps, but it’s too dark to be sure. Gradually the darkness thins, and the eastern sky turns milky. Clouds drift in from the west and begin to take on a reddish tinge. Carrie looks down and sees she is holding a hazelnut leaf. Pleased with herself, she tosses it to the ground. “What now?” she asks.

“Wait a little longer.”

Birds begin to sing, and slowly the prairie emerges, lapping at the base of the hills and spreading out in three directions for as far as Carrie can see. Elizabeth produces a small pair of binoculars and scans the horizon. Satisfied they’re alone, she folds them up with a click and puts them back in her saddlebag.

“Collapsible opera glasses,” she says. “Very handy.”

Just before the sun tops the horizon, they ride on toward the hills. Carrie can see no sign of a draw or break of any kind. Just a low, forested rise as uniform as a wall.

“You can’t see the entrance from here,” Elizabeth remarks. As they draw closer, the ground grows marshy, and they come upon a small creek, which runs out of the forest only to disappear into the ground almost immediately. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d have a hard time finding it.

When they reach the trees, Elizabeth dismounts and motions for Carrie to do the same. “Come help me,” she says. They walk to a place where a tangle of dead underbrush has piled up over the creek. The brush does not block the flow of the creek, but it’s too thick to ride through.

Elizabeth grabs the nearest branch and tells Carrie to do the same. Together they begin to tug, but the brush doesn’t budge. “Lift,” Elizabeth orders. Carrie lifts her side, and suddenly the entire center section moves forward. Leaves, branches, twigs, and brambles have been woven into a mat. Where there was once an impassible tangle, there is now an opening that leads into a narrow rift between the hills.

“Think of it as a trapdoor,” Elizabeth says. “Weaving in the blackberry brambles was the hardest part. Prosser and Toussaint wanted to add poison ivy, but I drew the line.”

Remounting their horses, they ride up the creek through a steeply walled, narrow gully lined with willows and cottonwoods. Most of the year, the creek is probably dry, but it is running fairly high this morning, bottomed with slippery mud and stones, so they go slowly.

As they climb, the draw opens up and the cottonwoods give way to oaks, sycamores, and walnuts. They come to another draw that branches off to the left, steeper and even more narrow. No water flows through it. Elizabeth stops. Pursing her lips together, she produces the call of a blue jay. Another jay answers. Elizabeth grins. “You just heard the song of a jayhawk,” she says.

They ride up the smaller draw. Again they stop. Again Elizabeth makes the sound of a bird, this time an owl. Unlike jays, owls don’t fly about in the daytime, but an owl answers.

“Count to ten,” Elizabeth says.

Carrie starts to count. Before she gets to eight, two men slide out of the brush.

“Peet!” Carrie cries. “Ebenezer!”

“Welcome to Keyhole Draw,” Peet says and waves them on.

T
hey ride for another three minutes or so before they come to the top of the ridge. There they halt, and Carrie finds herself looking down on a small cluster of sod huts grouped around a pond. No smoke is coming from the huts, but people are moving around doing various things. One appears to be sharpening a knife on a grinding wheel. Another is hanging wash on a clothesline.

“Who are they?” she asks.

“Fugitive slaves.” Elizabeth points at the huts. “You’re looking at a small community of them hidden in the best natural fortress in the territory. Sentries posted on the crest can see almost to Osawatomie. Any attackers are forced to approach in single file. Ten men can hold off fifty if they have guns, are properly trained, and know what they’re doing.”

“It’s a
quilombo
! I didn’t know they existed in Kansas!”

“
Quilombo
? I’ve never heard the word. You can explain it to me some other time. The point is, Keyhole Draw has been almost two years in the making. At first it happened by accident. We ran three slaves out of Missouri. They’d fled their masters and were tired of running. They wanted to live together right here in Kansas. Bilander, Cush, and Marcellus. Remember? You saw them at Trout’s.”

“Yes. I remember. William helped them escape.”

“That he did. He and his band of Jayhawkers left them at Trout’s Hotel, and Mr. Trout turned them over to me. At first they lived in Osawatomie with Prosser’s family, but there was a price on their heads, so we decided they needed a safer place. Without telling the Adairs, Prosser, Toussaint, and I scouted around and found Keyhole Draw.

“For a while that’s how new people came to us. They’d run away, decide they wanted to stay in Kansas, and we’d take them here. Then I showed Mr. Brown the place and before I knew it, he was running fugitive slaves to Keyhole Draw instead of Canada.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s training up an army. Right now there are fourteen men down there. Some arrived with wives and children or elderly male relatives. We’re hiding them with Mrs. Hulett. You remember her? The white woman who pretended to be our mistress so me and mine could get through Missouri without being taken by slavers? She’s living at a place called Two Rivers on the bank of the Marais des Cygnes not far from Osawatomie. Grows rope hemp mostly, plus a little corn and tobacco.

“When any of the slavers ask her why she has such an odd collection of field hands, she tells them she divided an inheritance with her brother, and he got all the able-bodied men. She’s very convincing, has ladylike airs, and can speak with a Southern accent that makes her sound as if she were born and raised in Tennessee, which is where she claims to be from. Since there are real slave owners living only a few miles from her, no one thinks it odd that she’s working slaves so close to an abolitionist town like Osawatomie.

“There are no women in Keyhole Draw. It’s strictly a military camp, or at least it would be if the men had enough weapons and horses. The Browns have been trying to turn them into a cavalry unit since last October.”

“I’d like to get a closer look.” Carrie starts to kick her horse forward, but Elizabeth grabs the bridle.

“You can’t go down there. Mr. Brown said you were to be like Moses on the mountain: You get to look at the Promised Land but you don’t get to enter it.”

“Why not?”

“No one, man or woman, black or white, gets to visit Keyhole Draw. There are too many secrets.”

“What sort of secrets?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, would they?”

“No, I suppose they wouldn’t, but if I can only gaze at this place from afar, what was the point of bringing me here?”

“Mr. Brown’s orders. He wanted you to see that he was training up an army of fugitive slaves to liberate other slaves. When they drill, the men sometimes get hurt. There are no doctors closer than Westport and they’re all pro-slavers. Mr. Brown wants you and William to move to Osawatomie and set up a clinic.

“And there’s something else, something I’m not supposed to tell you, but I don’t see how I can ask you to move to Osawatomie if I don’t. Mr. Brown and I don’t see eye to eye about this. When the bushwhacker legislature started passing pro-slavery laws that carried the death penalty for anyone who defied them, I wanted the blacks in Osawatomie to have guns so we could defend ourselves, but Mr. Brown had a different notion. He’s training those men down there to attack.”

“You mean raid?”

“No, ride in like a real cavalry, free slaves, and start an insurrection.”

“But there are only a few plantations in Kansas and not many slaves to free except the ones along the Missouri border.”

“Mr. Brown doesn’t intend to use these men in Kansas. His plan is to smuggle them into the South and start a slave revolt. He wants general civil war.”

“Into the South! They’ll all be massacred!”

“That’s what I think. I tried to tell Mr. Brown that, but he said I needed to ‘gird my loins and take up the sword.’ Carrie, I don’t know what to do. Mr. Brown is the greatest man I’ve ever met. No one has ever treated me and my family with more love and respect, but I also fear he may lead all who follow him to destruction.

“Sometimes I think: So be it. If it takes martyrdom to free my people, let us be martyrs. But then I look at my grandbabies and think how much I would like to see them grow up, and I wake in the middle of the night afraid that if I die and my sons and their families die and all those men down there die, nothing will change, and our lives will have been wasted.”

Carrie thinks of fourteen men sent into the heart of the South to start a revolution. No matter how brave they are, no matter how well-armed, no matter how well-trained or how determined . . . Does John Brown understand something she doesn’t? Does he really hear the voice of God?