A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  You find them, Pere Grandlouis, and we will come back to get them.

  Martin said: Back from where?

  Patton said: Got to make a living out here like anywhere else. Don’t worry. They’ll be buying supplies since the boat went down and after this trip we will have cash to share.

  To the old French Canadian papa the prairie was his skin. He’d come back to town after two years killing buffalo in order to see his Native bride before setting out again. He thought he might come along with his son, who was Patton’s guide. They might make a foray into Lawrence and he might watch an ensuing fight as there was said to be such a thing forthcoming, but the next morning, when Martin was almost awake, they put him on the white horse and rode off, leaving the French papa behind. There was nothing to see when they crossed the Kansas River but they went on for some miles to the Kickapoo reservation so Patton could sell his trinkets. Not the horse, just yet, laughed Patton, since I can’t have you weighing mine down. The horse will keep its value unless it gets shot out from under your skinny behind.

  The trading post was not far into the reservation. It was on a little stream that had log houses in ruin along its banks. Stray calves, pigs, and ponies wandered close to a path that led to the trader’s green-painted house. A crowd gathered at word of the Montreal cart. Wearing calico and wampum, the Kickapoo came on their ponies with faces painted red and green and black and white, and inside the green house, the trader’s Creole wife was offering Patton and his brother and the Frenchman coffee and cake and the trader told them about a gathering in Lawrence, where there was sure to be a showdown, a real one this time.

  Patton sold his treasures to the trader a little too fast since, if Lawrence was heating up, he did not want to miss any part of it. The cart man said it wasn’t his fight and he was going home, and Martin wished they could all go back to Missouri and find his mother because he was tired of being brave and he missed her more and more, thinking she must be close. They rode off, and Martin whispered to Patton, as if there were anyone who could hear or care: It was all my fault. We lost the whole farm because I let the workers run away after I heard their plan.

  Patton said: If you told, they would have been horse-whipped, Mary.

  The brothers set off at a bumpy trot – Martin clinging to tight reins. He had never been a good rider; he had never had the chance. They rode for some hours and he was sore all over and more and more angry because he thought they should be finding their parents and sisters and not looking for trouble.

  75

  Astride her swaybacked vehicle, Lavina took her sorry place in the line of wagons. All those white tops, the insides of which were lined with pockets full of necessities, and she without so much as a medicine box or a sewing basket and that headache that assailed her when she needed a draught for her leg and now, after weeks of traveling on water surrounded by trees, everything was bone-bare and hard of surface. Grass and more grass, flattened by constant wind. They had left the great eastern forest and the sun bore down on this world of horizon meeting sky.

  A nice town of well-built houses, Lavina was thinking. A church. A school. They might come upon lights in the distance, steeples set solid before mild hills. She pictured herself at a glazed window looking out at a field plowed up and ready. And beyond that a pretty, new town. She glanced back at her horse-riding husband, whose shape was as familiar from a distance as ever it was close by. She saw his isolation; he’d been abandoned by the other men.

  Mam! I got a rabbit!

  Good girl, Lecta! How in the world did you do it?

  A boy helped me. That boy over there.

  Climb up here, child, and keep me company.

  It makes too much weight, Mama. Will you stop so we can skin this fellow and eat? But she climbed up, holding the soft long body by its ears, and the cart took her weight.

  Again, Lavina looked back at her husband. She looked at his horse, his last possession, and glanced at the shabby, woebegone cart she was driving. Hold tight, my girls, she yelled, cracking the whip and pulling her cart out of the string of wagons that continued along without pausing, each wagon keeping another in view for lack of anything else in the world to see.

  John came up to Lavina at a gallop. You lost our place!

  We have no place.

  Mother! John was within reach of the reins and he grabbed for them.

  She lifted her whip.

  They were on a ridge with a broad valley on each side. There was a scattering of creeks running into the valleys, their various courses marked by timber growing sparsely along their banks like weeds. The tall grass reflected twilight like a silvered mirror and John put his fingers under his saddle for something that felt familiar. Alien beauty without a reference point. No animal. No bird. He brought his right leg over the saddle of his mare and slipped down to the brushing rustle of grass. It’s St. Jo we want, Mother. We won’t find it on our own. We go north to a decent crossing with these wagons.

  Let me go!

  John took off his hat as the wagon train passed. Later he sat on the endless ground and thought about the father on his way to Oregon without a child. He thought about the Native people who belonged to this place and how they must despise the sharing of any piece of it. The horse, grazing as if there could be a reason, was lumpen in the dark and he watched the cart driven by his wife for a long time as it receded and then was lost to sight.

  76

  They had come to the Detroit River, the last road to Canada, and they needed food before crossing. There was no knowing what they might find on the other side and they had nothing left but a little wild rice they had been given two days before that required arduous boiling. There were said to be catchers around Detroit so Bry would stay under the shelter of a pier and she would walk far enough to find help at a Black church near the river’s edge. Rumors and suppositions were part of the territory.

  Indeed, she came upon the Methodist Episcopal church, which was known as a last stop of the Underground Railroad, where there was a group of black citizens who haled her in a friendly way, calling her sister. They invited her in to pray and when she demurred and explained her purpose, they told her about catchers in the area seeking a bunch of Virginia runaways. Keep him where he is until after midnight.

  She had hoped for food and she next walked along a street of darkened buildings, wood and brick. The Delaware woman had never been to school, but there were papers nailed or tacked to a board on the wall of a building that had an empty flagpole by its doorway. One piece of paper had a line of words going down and she stared at it, but what was the point? Why had she bothered to walk all this way? She backed up and moved across the cobbled street, then turned toward the river, where she once again entered the church, opening heavy doors that slammed behind her. Someone was preaching in there but the sermonizing stopped abruptly. Sister? The preacher came down off his perch while those who were listening turned to watch.

  My friend he want food…

  Ralph, you go with her to the tavern.

  A slim man stepped out of the small congregation and touched the woman’s shoulder. It had carried the canoe for so many portages over so many rocky miles that she barely felt the weight of the stranger’s hand, but he led her out of the church and they walked quickly to a small ill-lit room in a back alley where people of color could buy warm food. At the river they went down underneath the pier where she had left Bry. Gone! And they turned and ran back to the church, where the small congregation was still gathered and when they heard that Bry was missing they rushed for the door. Wait, wait! the preacher coached. He could be anywhere.

  The cellar under the abattoir?

  How would he know it?

  The lot behind the post office?

  Ralph, go have a look.

  The Delaware woman told Bry’s story using every important English word she knew. She said: He run from Kentucky. He save me from white man. He come for the mother in Canada.

  The church people assigned specific area
s to particular men and told the women to keep the church open. This was something they knew how to do and now the men fanned out like experts to find Bry before he was shipped south. All over again.

  77

  In Franklin, nearly a thousand men in red shirts and red-ribboned hats had assembled with various guns to outshoot the Sharps rifles and pitchforks of two hundred or so abolitionists hiding behind two big lumps of earth on the main street of Lawrence. It was going to be a lark, Patton said, and Martin was given an old red scarf full of spit and dirt and he put it around his neck. He had never thought about Kansas and he wondered what his father would think of this plan and told himself: So what? It was fine to be on a horse even if it hurt his backside but he thought about his mother with a hand on her brow looking eastward for him and wished she would turn around and face west. Crossing over the river to Kansas had felt like going the wrong way and now they’d met men who were shooting their guns off and yelling cuss words at the dusty air. There were those who wanted Kansas to be a club for Yankees, but it was no farther north than Missouri, which was part of the South. Martin thought about Bry, who got as far as St. Louis. I’m the reason he’s free, Martin thought, so what side am I on?

  As they galloped off toward Lawrence, the swarm was whooping, packing bullets and powder into guns, shouting and standing up in their stirrups and threatening to find John Brown and hang him or shoot him or skin him alive. That’s him, that’s him, some of the horsemen cried, as they got close to the center of town, pointing at a shape so distant it could not possibly be identified. Suddenly there were gunshots coming from every side and Martin was grabbed by his brother, who took hold of his horse. Out of here! he shouted. Now! This is too much! Martin wanted to look back but Patton screamed that this was no place for a boy, no place, no place, and when he slapped the white horse, they both galloped back the way they had come.

  78

  Bry was laid in a coffin on the back of a funeral cart. It was long and narrow and he folded his hands over his chest in the horrible dark. Draped in a blanket the coffin and cart rumbled to the graveyard and then it paused before it went down to the river, where Bry climbed out and got into the dugout with the help of the Delaware woman and his rescuers. The church people used the coffin for escapes. It got pulled down the street with a long line of silent mourners, its wheels clacking against paving stones and a frightened runaway slave lying still inside. They had found him under a porch after he’d walked a little way into town, where he saw the list tacked onto a wall.

  REWARD FOR MISSING VIRGINIA PROPERTY

  Tom – reddish complexion, age 30 +, bad eyes; Jule, stout yellow, 40, bald; Edward – birthmark on right side of his face; Sutter: crossed eyes, having some white marks on his lips; Rakel: Past bearing but strong; Young Jim: 20 +, round face. Bry, castrate, fifty-five, or six well spoken; Reuben: skilled carpenter, old; Nick: yellow; Josiah – large hands, scarred back; Billy – well muscled, five feet 3 inches; Abe – very black, thumb missing, middle age

  Reward to be paid by City Bank of New York

  —

  Back in the dugout, what the two paddlers could see through the dark that hung over the river was the distant line of promised ground some miles away. Bland it was, that far shore, having awaited these two immigrants for centuries, but the river was still swarming with barges and boats and ships transporting goods between Canada and the United States and there was a small rowboat following them closely, veering as they veered. A river belongs to everyone; and in the heavy dugout, they moved awkwardly through flagrant traffic and Bry pulled the makeshift hood around his face. After an hour of paddling, he heard the Delaware woman speak as they headed toward a landing downstream of the spot they wanted because she had not the strength and he had not the skill to beach the canoe in the better place. The woman was making that chant of hers while they rode into the sharp smell of pine and made a soft landing under a wall that rose up like a barricade black on black. Perhaps it had been erected during the war with the States, but it stood against the invasion of two renegades who scrambled out of a dugout and fell on dry ground, gratitude in each of them in spite of histories too separate to connect. Can you walk? They were stiff in back and arms and legs but they stood up and hobbled, groaning to prove what they had accomplished. Bry said: Free! It was all he could think. Free, safe, touching the arm of the Delaware woman because with that arm she had delivered him. Her dress was stained by grass and blood. Her hair had unfolded around her face. He knew she had lived on land that was whittled away by treaty or thieving and still she sowed every spring and reaped in the summers and autumns and there was much she could not describe but now in the dark, he and a Native woman walked out of their former travails. They walked the distance of the wall, sinking at times in soft ground until they came to a spot where the stones had tumbled into a formation of steps and they mounted them bent over and poorly balanced and put the wall behind them as one more overcome impediment. The woman was carrying those grains of rice and they ate them dry and uncooked, never slowing, finding a road that provided no welcome other than its surface. Bry talked to himself but also to the woman. It was coming back a little at a time, his belief in himself after the dark fright of the coffin. He was free except for a portion, left over, of antique fear.

  The whole journey from Missouri had taken nine or ten weeks and now there was mold underfoot, the leaves on the ground so moist there was no sound of walking, and they set up the tent they had slept in together all those nights of the past and on that final night she lay next to him and told him how the grandfathers were pushed out of the east by the Ojibwas, who had guns, of which she said: We never knew them. She told him that her people had never farmed until the years in Missouri, that they were hunters and warriors but never with guns. She could not now remember the hunting song but some of the words came out of her throat and Bry was polite because he did not recognize her mistakes. Long time before when grandfathers go west, some stop to Ontario, she said.

  The next morning, she put her strong hands on Bry’s shoulders and said: You to you I to I. And then she walked away from Bry, who was not one of the Lenape people and would not be welcome where she was going and at that moment, with the sun coming over the tops of the pines, he called after her, but she was running along the shore and would not look back.

  Bry paddled through the old Carolinian forest, with its broadleaf trees and squirrels he knew by sight. The dugout was difficult to manage alone but the river was placid at this time of year. He met whitetail deer, otters, and small creatures he could not name. Snakes. Turtles. Unfrightened birds. The river flowed through all these occasions, through trees on one side – a swell of trees, a thousand thousand trees with height enough to see every place he had been if he climbed to the top of one and, on the other side, the bowl of water that connected this new world to the world he remembered without longing.

  Chatham, his first stop, was a town of former slaves, runaways, black soldiers from the War of 1812 and another Methodist church. These people were nicely dressed and there were fields that belonged to none but themselves, private property for black settlers who had come up with Loyalist owners or who had run from owners loyal to the South. Now they each had one hundred acres. This he learned from the first person he met. He had pulled the canoe up to a stand of trees and walked a short way on a street, holding his head up and his shoulders down and trying to look each person he passed in the eye. It was harder than paddling the canoe to manage this face-to-face inspection. He felt in his bones that he might find Josiah or Nick walking the street. Rakel. Bry could dream of meeting them on a Chatham street.

  He chose a door and soon he was taking a cup of coffee in the house of a woman called Mammy Chad. She wanted to feed him and show him her house. In a frame hanging on one of her walls, this motto was cross-stitched in yellow and red: With pleasure let us own our errors past…And make each day a critic on the last. Bry read the motto with more contentment than he had expected to find in
words. He counted back his errors past but also the things he had done to get this far. He admired the old woman and took her hand and stroked it and she looked down as if it belonged to someone else. Afterward, when he was getting on his feet to leave, Bry said he meant to find his mother in the town of Cork and Mamma Chad covered her toothless mouth and explained that York was now called Toronto: It’s a ways to go, son, and God keep you on your feet. Bry wanted to joke that he walked on water, but he thought she would take offense. When she closed her door, he went down her path, which had flowers right and left, and he wandered through Chatham town for a while, seeing the children of his race playing, noticing a poster nailed to a tree about a circus that had come the year before with Clowns equestrians the intrepid maitress de cheval, and clutching the foreign dollar Mammy Chad had given him.

  A town of people like himself. He imagined the various reactions he would receive if he ever went back to the start of things and told what he had seen.

  79

  There were stands of box elders on the river flats, with their leaves turning yellow and the white pine lifting branches and cones under the autumn sky. There were places to get food when he came to a village and in one he spent some part of his dollar on bread and cheese. He did not like the cheese but it served his need.

  In London, he got out of the dugout canoe and left it behind. The river was impassable and he would have to walk the rest of the way so he was directed to Governor’s Road, which had taverns at intervals where he might eat a meal and shelter overnight except that he had no money left so he found a stable where he was allowed to sleep, although the smell of hay and horseflesh brought back memories he had put aside.