The Widow's War (35 page)

Carrie wipes away her tears and goes back to hollowing out the stick. She cries a lot now that there is no one to see her do it: cries when she remembers finding Mrs. Hulett lying in the ashes; cries when she thinks of the men, women, and children Henry Clark kidnapped, all of whom he will undoubtedly sell into slavery if she can’t rescue them.

She does not cry about William and Teddy—at least not in the daytime. At night when she lies in the tall grass shivering and not daring to light a fire, she sobs herself to sleep. But in the daytime when she thinks of William and Teddy, she only feels anger. She never knew she could be so full of rage. She will never forgive Henry Clark. She wants him dead for what he has done, and if she goes to hell for killing him and those bastards who ride with him, it will be worth the price.

Clark should have shot her when he had the chance. Instead he left her alive to suffer. He thought that was all she would do. After all, she was only a woman. He has no idea how straight she can shoot, how ingenious she is, what a deadly adversary she can be.

“I’m leaving you Deacon’s horse,” Clark said as he and his gang rode off. “Go to what’s left of Osawatomie and tell your New England friends what happens to abolitionists. Tell them to get out of Kansas or we’ll shoot them down like dogs, hang them, chop them into mincemeat.” He smiled when he said this as if he were merely informing her that tomorrow was likely to be exceptionally warm. Carrie will never forgive Clark for that smile.

His men had brought chains with them to shackle the black residents of Two Rivers. As they left, they drove their captives down the road moaning and crying. Carrie will never forget the sight of Jane’s little girls stumbling and being whipped for falling.

The bucktoothed raider had held Teddy in front of him, trussed up to the neck in a pillow case like a kitten about to be drowned. Clark bound and gagged William, tied him to his horse, slipped a noose around his neck, stood back, and mocked him.

“Hemp,” Clark said pointing to the rope. “Highest quality.” He turned to Carrie. “You can ride out and cut your paramour down when we’re finished, but not until we’re finished. If you follow us—” Clark had a habit of not finishing his sentences.

He and his men had ridden off leaving Carrie behind. As William rode past, he gave her a look that could have meant
Don’t come after me. Be careful. Save yourself. Go for help.
It could have even meant
Good-bye. I love you.
In fact, that’s what Carrie is afraid it meant.

She spent almost no time grieving. If she didn’t follow them at once, she might lose the trail, so as soon as Clark and his men were out of sight, she ran to where the main house had stood and started digging in the ashes. They were still hot, but she didn’t have time to wait for them to cool. She needed a weapon because Clark’s men had taken all the guns.
Knives don’t burn,
she thought; and sure enough, where the kitchen had been, she found a knife blade. A few moments later, she also found the ice pick. A gift, perhaps even a good sign.

As soon as she located the knife and the pick, she ran to her cabin. The raiders had looted it but had not bothered to burn it. Inside, she found her sewing basket, a feather pillow, a bottle of glue, the
buzios,
some dried meat, and the tin box that contained the plants she’d brought from Brazil. She took a moment to stuff a dozen packets of dried herbs into a saddlebag that had once contained Deacon’s socks and cigars, but what she was really after was a small gourd that contained a sticky, black substance used by the Indians of the Upper Amazon to tip their hunting arrows. There were all sorts of things in that black mixture, including the secretions of poisonous frogs, but the main ingredient was the sap of a pretty, white-flowered plant called
Strychnos toxifera
, commonly known as
curare.

Now that gourd sits at her feet next to the ball of twine. As soon as she has hollowed out the stick properly, she will bind the halves back together with the twine. Then she will take her sewing needles and glue feathers to them. The needles will become tiny darts which she will dip in the curare. Curare kills slowly but effectively. In fact, if she pricks herself with one of her own needles she will die within ten or fifteen minutes. It won’t be a pretty death. Her lungs will stop working, and she will suffocate. But she doesn’t intend to die.

For three days, she has been tracking Clark and his men, and every hour of those three days she has feared she will find William’s body dangling from the rope Clark threw around his neck.

A knife, an ice pick, a pack of needles, a handful of chicken feathers, sap from a tropical plant, and an ordinary bottle of glue. They are no use against men with guns—unless, of course, you know what to do with them.

T
hat night Clark’s men begin to die. The first walks away from the campfire to relieve himself. In the morning, the others find him facedown in a patch of poison ivy. Clark strolls up to the body and kicks it over with the toe of his boot.

“Dick must have died of natural causes,” he says. “There’s not a mark on him.” He nudges the body again. “Blue lips. That’s odd.” He stands there for a few seconds trying to figure out what might turn a man’s lips blue. Poisonous mushrooms? Apoplexy? In the end it doesn’t much matter. A dead man is useless. “Strip him,” he commands.

Clark’s men strip the dead raider of his guns, knives, tobacco, money, and ammunition and leave his body for the vultures. By seven, they are on their way again, driving their captives in front of them, and by seven-twenty Carrie is riding after them wearing Dick’s hat and boots, all too big for her but better than no hat and no boots, which was what she had before.

Clark’s band originally consisted of Clark and thirteen men. Clark killed Deacon; now she has killed Dick. That leaves a total of twelve armed men between her and the prisoners. Given enough time, she can probably eliminate all twelve, but does she have time? She has to take them out one by one, and they are obviously headed somewhere specific.

Yesterday they crossed into Missouri. When they reach their destination, more pro-slavers may join them. Twelve men could easily turn into twenty, thirty, even a hundred. The best she can hope for between now and then is to spread terror. If Clark’s men panic, they may desert before he gets reinforcements.

She lists her advantages. The blowgun is silent and the darts small and hard to notice. It’s unlikely that Clark or any of his men are acquainted with the effects of curare. Since the slaves are not only on foot but chained together in a coffle, the raiders are forced to travel slowly. Unaware that they are being followed, they are making no attempt to hide their tracks. Still, she needs to be extremely cautious. Although she aches to catch a glimpse of William or Teddy, she must keep her distance.

Actually, the hardest part may prove to be not catching up with Clark’s men by accident. The chains are heavy and the captives often stumble, bringing the entire coffle to a halt. Sometimes no amount of whipping can make them go on—at least no amount that won’t permanently hurt Clark’s chances of getting a good price for them. So from time to time, the raiders are obliged to halt and let their human cargo rest.

Once Carrie nearly rides straight into them. She’s only saved by the sound of metal hitting rock. Dismounting, she crawls up, peers through the grass, and sees that the sound is being made by the prisoners’ chains. They are leaning their heads on one another’s shoulders, perhaps for comfort, perhaps because they are so tired they can no longer sit upright. They don’t speak. Maybe Clark has forbidden them to. A skinny raider with a sunken chest passes down the line distributing water from a folding leather bucket. Jane refuses it. She once told Carrie she would rather die than be a slave.

Drink the water,
Carrie thinks.
Don’t despair. Hang on. I’m going to rescue you and the girls.
But Jane can’t hear her. Reaching out, Jane tries to touch six-year-old Franny, but the chain is too short. For a little while, Jane’s fingers grope at the empty space that separates her from her daughter. Then she lets her arm drop.

Carrie feels her eyes filling with tears again.
Oh, Jane!
she thinks. She puts her hand over her mouth to keep from making a sound that will give her away. The tears choke her, and she comes within a second of sneezing. She is far too close to the raider with the bucket. She should not have been tempted to draw so near.

Silently, she inches her way back to a safer distance. She had hoped to at least catch a glimpse of William and Teddy, but she doesn’t dare linger, so for another day she goes without seeing them.

That evening just after dusk, she puts a dart into the neck of Zeb, the burly raider who dragged William over to Deacon. Zeb swears and slaps at the needle as if it were a mosquito bite. He must knock it loose, because fifteen minutes later when he drops dead, the raiders can find no indication of what killed him.

Now they begin to panic. Carrie has decided that she can no longer risk getting close enough to watch, but what she hears tells her the tide is beginning to turn.

“Come quick! Zeb ain’t breathin’!”

“By God, his lips is blue just like Dick’s!”

“You reckon it’s the cholera?”

“You damn fool, a man don’t die that quick of cholera.”

“Well then what the hell killed him?”

“Snakebite.”

“I ain’t seein’ no signs of no snakebite.”

“First Dick, now Zeb!”

“Maybe it’s the smallpox.”

“Them slaves musta brought it with ’em.”

“We should kill ’em all before we all die of it.”

“They ain’t sick.”

Suddenly she hears Clark’s voice, scared, screaming: “Shut up! Shut up all of you!”

More yelling, more cursing, Clark bellowing threats, the sound of Teddy crying. Again Carrie wants to run to Teddy and get him out of there, but she can’t; so she bites her lips, grabs at the ground, digs in, and waits. William must still be gagged because she doesn’t hear his voice. Instead, she hears Clark’s men fighting, and then the sound of a pistol going off.

Suddenly the raiders are rounding up their horses, throwing dirt over their fires, and breaking camp. One of them rides past her, so close she could reach out and touch him. He is followed by a second man, then a third. The others take off in the opposite direction, driving their prisoners in front of them with oaths and curses. They’ve never traveled at night before, so they must be running scared.

Carrie forces herself to wait until Clark and his remaining men are out of earshot. When she rides into the abandoned camp, she finds two bodies. One belongs to Zeb. The second is that of a large, black-bearded raider whose name she never learns. Cause of death: gunshot wound to the chest.

Seven left
, she thinks. Henry Clark is almost as efficient a killer as curare.

 

 

 

 

 

S
he gets one more raider before they panic completely. His name is either Mike or Mark—she only hears it once and not clearly even then. Unfortunately this time the needle stays in his neck, the raiders find it, and Henry Clark, who may be many things but who is no fool, figures out what is going on.

Grabbing William, he pulls him into the firelight and puts a knife to his throat. “If you kill another of my men, Carrie Vinton, I’ll cut off his balls and nose, flay him alive, and roast him over a slow fire. If I see another of your needles, he’s a dead man, and when I’ve finished with him, I’ll do the same to that little bastard of yours. Do you hear me, bitch?”

Carrie hears. She puts away the blowgun and waits until the raiders break camp. She continues to wait all night and all the next day. When night falls, she starts following them again. By now their trail is cold, but she has no trouble finding it.

The broken grasses, bent twigs, overturned rocks, and hoofprints lead her to the south bank of the Missouri River to a cotton plantation named Beau Rivage. The cotton is starting to mature and the fields look as if they have been sprinkled with snow.

Tethering her horse in a stand of willows, Carrie walks to the crest of a bluff that overlooks the plantation and climbs a tree. From it, she can see slaves crouching between the rows of cotton, chopping out weeds with short-handled hoes. She can’t make out their features, but at least one looks like a woman. A white man—probably an overseer—stands near them. He appears to be unarmed, but at this distance it’s hard to tell.

The prisoners from Two Rivers have been unchained and herded into a slave pen next to a horse corral. Two men are guarding them. Clark’s men? Again, she can’t tell. A least half a dozen other men appear to be living in the barn. She tries, without success, to figure out if they are part of Clark’s original gang or reinforcements. What she wouldn’t give right now for those folding opera glasses of Elizabeth’s.

William and Teddy are nowhere in sight. Maybe Clark has imprisoned William in the stable or in the windowless shed next to the barn. Of course, he could have done something else with him. If you killed a man and threw his body into the Missouri River—

She forces herself to stop borrowing trouble. William is down there somewhere and so is Teddy. The main house is built of yellow-gray limestone. It looks solid and cool. She hopes they are both inside out of the heat.

For the rest of the day she continues to spy on Beau Rivage, but nothing of importance happens. Clark does not put in an appearance. Perhaps he’s asleep or perhaps he’s ridden to a nearby town to make arrangements to sell his captives. Twice she sees a white woman emerge from the main house. The woman throws feed to the chickens and picks some roses. Around three in the afternoon, a heavyset, dark-skinned woman opens the back door, walks across the backyard to the woodshed, and returns with an armful of kindling. House slave? Cook?