Don't Hang My Friend

by Raffensperger, John;

  “Rachel, if we was to run away together, we could go to Kansas or even Californy and you could ride every day. Besides, we could be together all the time,” I said.

  “Oh, Tom, that would be so nice, but I just couldn’t leave Ma. She ain’t been feelin’so good and I got to help with the cookin’ and chores. Besides, you couldn’t be a doctor.”

  “I could be an Indian scout for the army or dig for gold. There are lots of other things besides doctoring if we were together.”

  “Now, Tom, don’t talk that way. I’d just love to be with you, but you got a callin’ to be a doctor and it wouldn’t be right if you gave that up. Besides, it must be real nice to get all that learning. I ‘spose you will be going away to school pretty soon.”

  “I’d rather go out west with you than anything,” I said.

  She looked at me with her blue eyes all shiny and bright and some color come in her cheeks. It made her all the more pretty. I couldn’t say nothin’.

  “Ma taught me to read and write. I went to school with the little ones for a while, but we ain’t got a teacher no more. I always thought it would be nice to teach school,” she said.

  We sifted dirt through our fingers and listened to the birds chirping. It was comfortable, just being so close together. The breeze turned cool and dark swirling clouds scudded right over the trees. All of a sudden, there was a crash of thunder and a bolt of lightning streaked out of the sky.

  “Oh, Tom, I’m scared of lightning.”

  “We should go back.”

  “No, not yet.”

  The sky opened and rain came pouring down and there was more thunder and lightning. We huddled closer, but I didn’t touch her until the next thundery crash and a bolt of lightning split the sky right over our heads. Rachel clutched my arm and buried her head on my chest. “Hold me, Tom.”

  I held her, so there wasn’t nothing separating us but her dress and my shirt. She was warm and soft. I pecked on her cheek with a little kiss. Then it was like an explosion because we were hugging and kissing and getting soaked with the rain all at the same time. We didn’t say nothing until the rain turned into a light drizzle and the sky lightened up.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stay like this forever? I think about you most all the time,” I said.

  “Oh Tom,” she said and burst out crying.

  “What’s wrong?

  “It’s Pa. He wants me to marry to a rich farmer.”

  “You are too young to get married.”

  “No I ain’t. Lots of girls get married at my age, mostly to older men.”

  It just goes to show that happiness never lasts as long as misery. There wasn’t no way I could marry her on account of I didn’t have no money and it would take years before I finished school. She rested her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes, sort of dreamy like. “We better git on back before Pa comes looking,” said she.

  We kissed again and she squeezed my hand when we got up and walked back, sort of twined around each other until we came out of the woods.

  Everyone was inside the meeting hall and all the ice cream was all et up. We were wet as dogs that been swimming in the river and most of the other folks were dry. Her pa and brothers came clompin’ over my way and stood in a circle with me in the middle.

  “How come you and Rachel come in all wet?” her Pa asked.

  “I don’t know about Rachel, I ‘spect she was out hiding. I went down to the creek to wash off the sawdust.” It was a fib, but I figured it was right to protect Rachel.

  “We were just fixin’ to leave,” I said.

  “Don’t you come this way no more,” old man Bontrager growled.

  Billy Malone was outside, layin’ down under the wagon and the tarpaulin.

  “That peach ice cream was the best, but I liked the kind with hickory nuts too,” he said.

  “Shut up, I ain’t had nothin’ to eat since morning.”

  We got up on the wagon and started the horses just about dark. The rain had passed, but tall black clouds scudded across the sky. No one came out to say good bye until we were a quarter mile down the road. About a half dozen of those fellows who had been makin’ google eyes at Rachel stepped from behind a clump of trees. They had black broad brimmed hats, black suits, and two had full beards. They didn’t strike me as the sort of people who meant us real harm.

  Billy stiffened and grabbed for the whip.

  “Hold on, the Amish are peace loving folks.” My hunch was right; they didn’t have weapons, but waved for us to stop.

  “We don’t aim to hurt you boys, but it wouldn’t be wise for you to come back and bother our women. Our ways are different and it’s best for you to leave us alone.”

  I didn’t say nothin’, but hung my head and suffered. It hurt even more, now that I knew Rachel had feelings for me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The summer went by without much happening in the medical line and I slacked off studying. Doc said I should cut open a cat to study the organs. There were plenty of cats in the barn, but Aunt Alice wouldn’t hear of hurting one. She always set out food for those critters. I did a little swimmin’ and fishin’ and just tom-foolin’ on the river.

  A steamboat with a minstrel show and a band stayed for a whole week over the fourth of July. We sneaked in to see the show. Gosh, it sure was fine. A pretty girl who sang about every song ever written and a man with painted on blackface told a lot of jokes, mostly about farmer’s daughters. People laughed until the tears came. Nothin’ much cheered me up for very long. On Saturdays I moped around downtown, hopin’ to see Rachel, but she never came to town.

  I had gone to the Sandy Ford school every term since I was six years old and lerned to read, write and do numbers. The teachers taught a little history, geography and we read McGuffey’s Readers. Mostly, the teachers thought we should learn to write a good hand but my handwriting looked like chicken tracks. The terms were for six months, so farm boys could get in the harvest before school started. There wasn’t any high school to speak of, but the girls kept on for another year or so to learn how to teach school. What with studying Doc’s books and the work I had to do around the house, there wouldn’t be no time for more school, until I was ready for medical college. I got up at five o’clock every morning to get the fires lit and chop enough kindling for the day. After that, I fed and watered the horses, then came back to the house and washed up for breakfast. If Doc had to go out on a call, I hitched one of the horses to the trap and if he needed help, I went along out in the country. It seemed like I learned the most when I watched Doc and listened to what he told the patients. From what I had learned from Pa, most of it sounded like ordinary common sense.

  Doc taught me how to give ether when he set bones or dislocated joints. One day, he said I did a fine job and I felt real good for a while. On other days, I filled medicine bottles, made flaxseed poultices and cleaned the instruments. When there was time, I read his books and tried to unravel the fine points of human architecture.

  Toward the end of summer, Doc and Mr. Birt decided that I needed more formal education before medical college. I didn’t have no say in the matter, when they decided on the Christian Missionary Academy. Mr. Philip Cooper, a rich Easterner, had made a bundle of money from railroads and decided to educate boys who would Christianize the Indians instead of ‘sterminating them. He built schools for ordinary boys, like the sons of farmers and preachers so they could get into regular colleges and learn to convert the heathen. Two men from Yale College started the Academy on a piece of property at the edge of town. The main building had two whole stories for classrooms, a basement and a bell tower on top. It was about the finest brick building in the whole county. There were lots of windows, so each room had plenty of light. Right next door was a hall with a kitchen and dining room for students from out of town. On the other side of the school building were houses for the professors. The students were ‘young gentlemen’ who weren’t allowed off the grounds for fear they would fall in with
bad company in the town. I guess they figured that people like me and Billy Malone would be a bad influence. There wouldn’t be much fun in that place.

  Doc explained to the headmaster that I wanted to be a doctor and didn’t care for missionary work. They weren’t going to let me in until Doc agreed to take care of the teachers and students for free. I would take classes in the morning and wouldn’t have to pay tuition and do Bible study. They agreed I could take Latin and science but had to attend chapel at seven o’clock in the morning. The professor hoped that after listening to his sermons, I would give up medicine and go convert the heathen.

  The next morning, after chores, I slipped into the back row of the chapel a minute or so late. I had on the same rough clothes I wore to muck out the stable and might have smelled a little ripe. The professor stopped his sermon in mid-sentence and gave me a mean look; some of the boys snickered and one held his nose. There were about twenty boys from twelve to twenty years of age and every single one wore a necktie and a coat. It wasn’t a good start. Instead of slinking out like a beat dog, I stuck it out and went to Professor Wilson’s Latin class right after chapel.

  Phineas Wilson, the headmaster was a big man with a totally bald head. He wore eye glasses that set on his nose and were attached by a string around his neck. With the eyeglasses and a long brown tweed frock coat and a gold watch chain around his middle, he looked like a professor. He was portly and must have been fifty years old. You might have thought that he had been a working man on account of he had gnarly hands like a pair of hams. He had gone right from Yale College to convert the Musselmen in the Holy Land. When they burned his house and killed his wife and child, he tried his hand at converting the Egyptians, but that didn’t work either. He must have decided that front line missionary work was too hot and it would be safer to teach someone else to do the dirty work. He taught us boys with religious fervor as if an education could turn a red savage into a regular American, an African into a saint or a drunkard into a Sunday school teacher.

  There were ten other boys, all younger than me, in the beginning Latin class. We set on hard chairs at a long table, facing the professor. At first, it was pretty interesting. He put up a big map and showed how a thousand or so years ago, the old Romans had spread the Latin language to Africa and all over Europe as far away as England. It looked like it would be pretty easy if all we had to do was memorize a string of Latin words. Instead, he went off about how it was so important to learn grammar. Right away, he began using Latin words like nomen and pronomen and verbum and how to tack on endings, so we could tell if the word was masculine or feminine or something in between. It didn’t make no sense on account of any dumb fool shouldn’t have any trouble telling males from females. About all I got out of that first lesson was that a puella was a girl. The other young gentlemen hung onto every word and furiously wrote in their notebooks. I sorta drowsed off and was thinking of Rachel until the professor whacked my knuckles with a birch switch. When he asked me to decline the verb “to love” in the present tense I turned every shade of red but decided right then and there to buckle down and learn Latin.

  Things didn’t get much better in the next class, which was about trigonometry.

  Thaddeus Cromwell, a little Englishman who taught Mathematics and Science had a violent temper, but never laid a hand on a boy. He used sarcasm, ridicule and hard words to flay the skin off anyone who didn’t know about angles and cosines or sines. He wasn’t as high on religion as the professor and wore a bright yellow vest, like he was a riverboat gambler. When two big old farm boys got to making fun of the English Queen, Mr. Cromwell took them outside and stripped down to his long underwear. He straightened his back and put up his fists up next to his chest and invited the boys to take him down. He laid out the first one with an uppercut to the chin and the second with a straight punch to the gut. After that we were real respectful and learned that the sum of the angles of the hypotenuse equals a right angle. I never did figure out what difference it made.

  After a while, I got more comfortable with school, but couldn’t spend as much time with Gray’s Anatomy or the other medical books.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Things were going along pretty good. I almost forgot Murphy and his gang. Folks said they had run off to Missouri. One Saturday, Aunt Alice gave me a nickel to buy a spool of thread from Otto’s store. I ran most of the way and was out of breath when I saw that black horse with a white patch on its face hitched to the post in front of the bank. I slipped into Otto’s store and ducked behind a counter close to the front window. Murphy came out of the bank and talked with a dozen men on horses The window was open and I could hear everything they said. “He says to run em offen the land or we don’t get paid,” Murphy said.

  “Why’nt we jes kill ‘em?” A fellow on a sorrel horse said. “The old lady protects the darkies and she’s got friends,” said Murphy. “Them friends ain’t no count,” another fellow said. Murphy put a foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. “Boys, I got an idée how we kin handle this. First, let’s have a drink then we go to the Camp House and roust out that old darky,” said he.

  “Mr. Otto, please, something terrible is going to happen at the Camp House. Tell Mr. Birt and Mr. Malone,” said I “Why for?” he asked.

  “Oh please, hurry, those men aim to kill Isaiah.” I ran out the back door and down the alley, then across the park and into the back door of the hotel. Isaiah was behind the bar polishing glasses.

  He looked older and was more stooped but was elegant in his black suit and string tie. “Isaiah, you got to hide, they is comin’ after you,” said I. “Who is comin’?

  “Murphy and his gang.” Isaiah held a sparkling glass to the light and gave it one more swipe. “Oh Lordy, won’t it ever stop? Captain Trimmer gave all his slaves freedom even before the war and came here all the way from Virginny so we could be safe. He done given us house slaves a piece of land for our very own.” Isaiah covered his eyes with both hands and sobbed as if his heart was broken. “I thought we had freedom, but those bad men won’t leave us alone. I ain’t runin’ no more. Iffen they kills me, dat’s alright. I got the promise of a better place.” “Is it because of the mules? Murphy says you stole those mules from the army during the war.” “Tom, you is too good a boy to believe I stole those mules. Colonel Edwards give me mules to take the Captain’s body home from the war. He paid for the mules that I druv all the way from Gettysburg so we could bury him at home.”

  I heard horses comin’ down the street with spurs jingling. They stopped in front of the Camp House. There was drunken laughter and boom, boom, boom as if someone had emptied a pistol, firing into the air. “Isaiah, get your sorry ass out here right now.” It was Murphy’s whisky voice. “Please, Isaiah, hide in the cellar. I’ll go out and tell them you ain’t here,” said I. “No, don’t want you gittin hurt.” Isaiah walked slow, like it hurt to put one foot in front of another but he went across the room, then through the door and stood on the porch.

  “Here I is. Do what you want,” said he. The men were quiet for a full minute, as if they were struck dumb by that elegant old man. Murphy slowly pulled his Henry rifle from its scabbard and leveled it on Isaiah. “You come on with us to the jail. The sheriff says you stole mules and are a squattin’ on land that don’t belong to you,” he said. Isaiah stood firm with his hands tented in front of his chest. His lips moved but he made no sound while Murphy worked the rifle’s lever.

  “Boom”; the noise from down the street sounded like cannon but it was a shotgun. Mr. Birt was drivin’ the bright yellow buckboard that Mr. Malone used to deliver ice. The wagon bounce into a pot hole but Mr. Birt, with his one hand slapped the reins on the two horses so they came down the street at a gallop. Mr. Malone opened a sawed off double barreled shotgun and dropped another shell into the breech. Mr. Birt sawed on the reins to stop the wagon twenty feet from Murphy’s men that were drawn up in a bunch. Mr. Malone pulled back both hammers and took aim. “Both barrels are lo
aded with buckshot. I wouldn’t mind killing every one of you bastards. Turn around and go on home or I’ll fill your hides with buckshot,” said Mr. Malone. Murphy twisted around as if he was going to aim his rifle at Mr. Malone, but one look at that the big black muzzle convinced him to put the Henry back in the scabbard. His men slumped in their saddles and turned their horses. “We gonna nail that darkies hide to a wall by damn,” Murphy said.

  “Tom, Your quick thinking saved a life,” said Mr. Birt. I walked Isaiah back into the hotel, where he polished glasses as if nothing had happened.

  That night, I woke up out of a sound sleep to the ringing school bell, the fire alarm. I pulled on my pants, went out the front door and saw flames downtown. I ran all the way but when I got there the firemen were pumping water on Mr. Birt’s newspaper office. Billy Malone’s pa organized bucket carriers to throw water on stacks of smoldering paper. We saved the printing press and almost all the front office. It is a good thing the night watchman was awake and saw the blaze when it first started. Mr. Malone said he smelled coal oil at the back when he first got there. “The Murphy gang did this,” he said.

  Billy and I went to the horse trough to wash off the soot. “They did it to get even,” I said. “You watch out, they will come for you next,” said Billy

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was about a week later and an hour after supper when Aunt Alice screamed so loud, you coulda heard her across the river. She come a runnin’ out of the kitchen with her eyes bugged clear out of her head. “He’s gonna scalp every one of us.”

  A tall Red Indian, wearing nothing but buckskin breeches and an old blue shirt that didn’t have no buttons, was at the back door. He was dark-skinned and had a big beak of a nose, a black feather in his hair and a sheath knife on his belt. His face wasn’t mean or nothing, but his mouth was clenched shut. He didn’t say nothin’, but handed over a crumpled piece of paper. It read: