“Future truths,” mumbled Meissner, his eyes alight with new understanding. “Future truths.”
“Before we launch our new campaign, we have to improve Millbrook,” said Jed. “My people will come over tomorrow morning and decide what needs to be done about your water, and the way the town is laid out and the businesses you must offer.”
Meissner’s smile died on his face. He slowly extended his hands and examined his fingers. “There’s a few Southerners living here, sir; if they think there’s a bunch of colored people moving in . . .”
“Tell them we’re hired niggers if you have to,” Jed snapped. “I really don’t care. We’ve got to get Millbrook on a solid footing. This town has got to offer better services and more services than Wade City.”
“But we don’t have more or better services. That’s the whole point.”
Jed’s scornful look was that of the doer, the planner; Meissner’s, that of the dreamer, the bumbler, men who were broken against the rock of reality.
“That’s right,” Jed said. “You don’t have more or better services right now, but you can have, and you will have. We’re going to see to it. I’ll send a team over Monday. We’re going to start with your water situation.”
“Why are you doing this, Mr. Talbot?” Meissner asked. He might not be a doer or a builder, but he could think. There had to be a reason behind all this. “Why me? Why Millbrook?”
“Why you?” Jed’s gaze softened. “Because you’re a good, decent man, that’s why. The people of Nicodemus are not naïve. You have a printing press, the almighty power of the press. You may have rubbed some people the wrong way, but they told me you gave us supplies to start our school. You’re the one who has our trust. That’s why you. Wade City would like to wipe us off the map.”
Meissner tucked his thumbs under his suspenders and gave them a snap. His eyelids fluttered as he blushed with appreciation. He turned and picked up the crumpled piece of paper and lightly tossed it into the air, then caught it before he turned back to Jed.
“I’m not a fool all the time, Mr. Talbot. I am more often than I care to admit, but not all the time. What do you people want from me in return for backing Millbrook as the county seat?”
“A lot,” Jed said softly. “Not only do we want you to be the official, if informal, mouthpiece for Nicodemus, we want a black person on every single political committee. We want you to back this idea from the beginning. This county is going to have to factor in our ideas, and our interests, not just our votes.”
“Of course, Mr. Talbot. Of course your ideas will be honored.” Meissner’s heart swelled with righteous fervor. His mind whirled. His paper would be a beacon, a wonder of literary excellence for this great state. Might he expect just a smidgeon of recognition for his stellar contributions to the noble black race?
Jed did not smile, nor did his eyes leave Meissner’s face. “We’re going to organize a school district. It’s going to be the first in this county. We already have the first school, but we’re going after state funding. The ultimate official stamp of approval. That’s going to mean that your people—and by your people I mean all the white folks around—are going to have to attend a school run by black folks.”
He waited. Meissner struggled to find words, and then they came at a gurgle, a whisper. “That’s never been done. Never. It’s impossible. People will leave this town and maybe even this county.”
“No, they won’t,” Jed said. “Some, perhaps. But not all. Besides, most of them can’t afford to leave. Nicodemus has the very best teacher,” he added. “The very best.”
“God, don’t I know. Don’t I know.”
“Build up Bethany Herbert. You’ve heard of Phillis Wheatley, the black poetess? Did you know the first patriot shot during the Revolution, Crispus Atticks, was black?”
“Yes.”
“Well, educate the people out here.”
Meissner listened. He watched Talbot’s face as he bragged about black intellectuals.
“Mr. Talbot, I know. I’m not the one who needs convincing. And God knows we agree on Miss Bethany. She’s got the finest mind I’ve come across in my lifetime. But she can’t be everywhere. And you can’t, either. How many adults in your town can read and write? Realistically, what you are proposing just isn’t possible.”
For the first time, he saw Talbot flinch. He’d hit a sore spot, that was clear. Also clear was the look on the man’s face when he’d mentioned Bethany Herbert.
Jed’s handsome face became a polite mask. “That is a problem. One I intend to work out. When the white folks are forced to attend our school, I want them to find one equal to the best in other counties around.”
“I don’t mean to throw cold water on you, but it will never happen, sir.”
“It will. I can promise you it will.” Jed rose abruptly and picked up his hat.
“All right, Mr. Talbot. It’s not like I have a choice. We’ve got a deal. I’ll promote your Nicodemus, and you, in turn, will back Millbrook.”
“Agreed.”
They went outside. Jed mounted Gloriana. “And another thing. Millbrook needs a doctor.”
“You don’t think I know that, Mr. Talbot?” the editor said bitterly. “We’ve looked high and low.”
“Soon as we get your sorghum mill started . . .”
“A sorghum mill! Who said anything about a sorghum mill?” Meissner blinked. “Never thought of that, but no one else has one out here.”
Jed laughed. “After we launch your mill, I intend to talk to Miss Bethany and her mother.”
“Queen Bess,” Meissner said dryly, as he swatted at the swarm of gnats around his face.
“Yes, Queen Bess. I believe the Herbert women can be approached about serving the medical needs of your community on a more official basis.”
“Miss Bethany, maybe. But her mother, never.”
“You’ve met, I see.”
“Have we ever.”
Jed laughed. “Good day, sir. I’ll see you Monday morning with the crew.”
Meissner went inside. Jubilant, he sat down, grabbed a piece of paper, and began composing the coming edition. From time to time he paused and warmed himself with Jed’s words. This fine colored man had judged him and found him worthy. Called him a decent man.
“A decent man.” He whispered the words to himself. They warmed his heart to the very depths of his soul and gave him courage later when his bones turned to water and his hands shook so badly he could hardly set type.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Teddy Sommers heard the commotion even before his team struggled up the short rise leading to Wade City. At first he had balked when Jed asked him to take a load of coal to the town on the day folks would be celebrating the launch of the Sinclairs’ new paper, the Wade City Chronicle. Then he relented. He had a credible excuse to do a little spying because he wanted to inspect the cache of genuine walnut Potroff had for sale.
There was nothing like walnut for fine coffins. He planned to trade a wagonload of coal the men of Nicodemus had chipped from the short vein they’d discovered. They hadn’t found enough coal to make a killing, but it helped with their own fuel situation, and there was enough to sell off a wagonload or two to white folks once in a blue moon.
And blue moon about got it, Teddy thought gloomily as he jolted along. Be a blue moon, all right, before anyone from Nicodemus feels easy about going to Wade City. He didn’t mind going to Stockton or Oberlin or Norton.
“You’re practically invisible,” Meissner had insisted. “No one can slip in and out like you. Folks simply don’t pay a lick of attention to you.”
It was hardly a compliment, but Teddy knew it was the truth. There was just something about a tiny, shriveled-up black man in a tattered suit that folks didn’t get too excited about. He blended with the prairie monotony like an old, worn-out gray cloud drifting across an uninspired sky that folks had given up scanning for rain.
“And you notice things,” Jed had said. “No one
else has your eye for details that wouldn’t mean a thing to someone else.” So he had given in and agreed to the trip.
Teddy stopped at the edge of town. He was close enough to hear the speakers on the platform. He stood by the wagon, knowing if he left it unattended, half the lumps of coal would disappear.
Josiah Sinclair was ending his speech. Behind him sat Potroff, Estelle Sinclair, and the new doctor, Winthrop Osborne, who had brushed his Prince Albert coat, sponged the spots, and looked quite respectable. Josiah introduced his wife amid an enthusiastic round of applause from the women.
A sudden breeze rippled Estelle’s skirts and cooled her small, strained face as she climbed up on a little block of wood, one hand firmly clamping her hat to her head. “Today,” she began, “marks the launch of the Wade City Chronicle, but I also wish to announce that the grand crusade to end all consumption of demon rum in this region will begin right here and now.”
Teddy splayed his fingers across his face, closed his eyes for an instant, and cursed the day he lured his people to this crazy murderous state—free land or not. It seethed with passion over one no-count issue after another.
Liquor again.
Kansas wanted to amend the state constitution to keep folks from drinking or selling booze. If it passed, the state would be the first to take such a step. Jed had read an article to him just last week saying that the governor of Kansas, John Pierce St. John, had said, “The eyes of the whole people are turned toward Kansas.”
Seemed like the whole country was always poking fun at the state, and women like Estelle weren’t helping.
“Crazy damn bunch of wild-eyed women,” Teddy muttered as he watched the females clap for their leader. “Too tough to die and too shriveled up to live. Smashing women. They just can’t figure out what to do with themselves out here, same as the rest of us. So they goes out and smashes something.”
“And we will unite with the fine, noble ladies of Stockton,” crooned Estelle, “to make this region and our paper, the Wade City Chronicle, a guiding light for all the women in the United States.”
Her voice trembled with importance as she called for people to sign the temperance pledge. Mostly women came forward. Teddy jolted into a new alertness. Dolly Redgrave was among those climbing onto the platform. Right off, he couldn’t think of any meaner two women than Estelle Sinclair and Dolly Redgrave.
He wished he had a bottle of whisky. It was the only sure-fire way for getting through the day. A band started up, but it didn’t cheer him.
Had to be a ton of money in back of this paper. Potroff had ordered in oysters, and they were giving away little sacks of flour inscribed with the motto Wade City will rise like good yeast bread. There was a slew of foot races lined up. A baseball game was scheduled for later in the afternoon, and there would be a dance that evening.
Teddy looked around at all the hopeful faces. He could see them brighten right before his eyes. They were starting to believe the lies they heard. The rains would come. Wheat would spring up like a miracle. The Lord would actually notice them.
Teddy picked up one of the free issues of the paper someone had dropped on the street. He glanced back at the podium, where Estelle was introducing the “fine lady from Nicodemus.”
He climbed back onto the wagon seat. He still had his load of coal. Hadn’t looked at the walnut. He drove the team back over the rise toward Nicodemus, his business unfinished. He didn’t have no more heart for it no how.
Didn’t need a special kind of mind to see this town was turning meaner than a snake. Crusades did that to people, whether they wore hoods or carried temperance cards for folks to sign. Worked out the same, either way.
He was going to tell Jed to stay away from Wade City. Just don’t go there. Not that Jed would pay a bit of attention to what he had to say. Sometimes Teddy thought he was as invisible to blacks as he was to white folks.
Exhausted, Bethany sat by the window in her schoolhouse. Her practice was growing to the extent that she no longer could do right by the children. When she was called away, it was often so sudden that she had to leave in the middle of a lesson. Then, too, she was being summoned to greater distances and couldn’t say for sure when she would be back.
She’d had another fight with her mother just last week. Queen Bess had scolded her for dragging herself out of bed to start the school day, saying she ought to have slept when she had a chance so she would be fresh to tend to her natural business, which was doctoring, instead of trying to make white children out of little black ones.
Bethany had bitten her lip hard to keep from blurting out what she shouldn’t say to her own mother, then lost her temper five minutes later and said it all anyway—that the children wanted to learn. It was their right. Their fights were of no use; neither of them would give an inch, but Queen Bess was right about one thing. Bethany did not have the physical strength to keep up both. It was just about to kill her.
The wind was coming up. She knew she should get up from the chair, go home, and rescue her drying clothes before they blew off the elk horn in front of the dugout. But just thinking about her mother managed to drain the little bit of energy she had left.
Her thoughts strayed to Jed Talbot again. She tried to push him out of her mind. She had thought she was invulnerable and trusted the madness would pass. She trembled, and her cheeks burned. Whenever he walked into a room, she did not know where to put her slim, capable hands. One look from him and she felt the air move, the cloth against her breasts. And her hands, her hands. She had never given her hands a moment’s thought before.
She stared dully at the dying embers of coal in the stove, grateful that the men delivered it to the school now, so at least she didn’t have to waste precious time and energy gathering cow chips. But her classroom was dirtier because of the coal soot, and she missed the grassy smell of the dried dung. Her eyelids grew heavier; her head drooped. She dozed off, then jumped to her feet fully awake when she heard a sound.
“Miss Bethany!” LuAnne Brown stood in the doorway. “I come to tell you the little Turner boy is breathing just fine again.”
Disoriented, she reached for the back of the chair to steady herself.
“Miss Bethany,” LuAnne said softly, “you know Silas and I ain’t seen you around the campfire lately, so you don’t know what he preached about last Sunday.”
“I’m sorry,” Bethany said. She had been off doctoring for the last three Sundays and was too exhausted to go to church midweek.
“He preached from Exodus,” LuAnne said, “the eighteen chapter, when Brother Jethro has a little talk with Moses, same as I’m trying to have with you right now.”
“I’m not familiar with that scripture,” Bethany said. “I’m sorry.”
“You knows about everything else that won’t do you a speck of good. ’Bout those Greeks. ’Bout lots of fancy things. But don’t know nothing about what’s helped keep our people’s heads together, and that is the word of the Almighty God. In fact, sometimes I think you know the least about what you should know of anyone here.”
Hot blood surged to Bethany’s temples. Someone was always pecking at her. Her mother was bad enough, but to have Lu-Anne turn on her too was more than she could bear.
“You may be right,” she said evenly. At least she was still capable of controlling what she said. “What was that scripture?”
“Look it up,” LuAnne said. “If you own a Bible, and I’m beginning to wonder if you do. Look it up. What else you might come across might surprise you. Exodus 18.”
LuAnne left, and Bethany trembled with fatigue. Then she walked over to her stack of books, dug out her Bible, and located the eighteenth chapter of Exodus. She read about a tired man, a man pushed to the brink of exhaustion, as she was. A man who tried to do everything by himself. Then Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, nailed him, told Moses bluntly that what he was doing was not good, and he could not keep on alone, for he was trying to act as a judge of all the disputes between the people of Israe
l whom he had led into the wilderness.
Bethany closed her eyes, imagining the heat, the animals, the swarms of exhausted people trying to make their way across the Sinai desert. A burning land where there were no people. The Hebrew children had been scared, worn down, and, like most people under severe deprivation, not knowing what they were doing, they fought. Over big things, little things. She could just imagine it.
Bethany read on. Jethro had instructed Moses to only represent the people before God and to seek out other able God-fearing men to take over his earthly responsibilities. It was the beginning of the judicial system, thought Bethany. Judges over judges over judges. She no longer tried to settle disputes, and no one could take over her doctoring. Then she laughed as she realized LuAnne was talking about the schooling. How like the woman to make her discover it on her own, instead of telling her straight out.
There was not a soul here who could match her book learning. Unless it was Jed Talbot, she thought. He might not know as much as she did about philosophy or the classics, but he knew more about government.
She had to find other people to help teach. She could see the disappointment on the students’ faces every time she had to leave in the middle of a lesson. She had heard of other ways to run schools. She knew a little bit about how colleges were run. Different teachers for different subjects. Why not try that?
She straightened her schoolroom, then walked home to her dugout. At the edge of town, men were clustered around the second well. The sides had collapsed again, and they were trying to figure out what to do. She smiled. The men again; planning, organizing, starting to boss their womenfolk around like white men. Like ancient beasts waking up from a deep sleep.
“Evening, Miss Bethany.”
She turned. The banjo man, Tom Jenkins, called to her from across the street. She smiled and waved back. Tom had been one of the first September colonists forced to hunker into little ravines like rabbits, wherever they could find rises to create burrows. They hadn’t time to plan or think—they just wanted to survive. A majority of the families still cooked outside. The settlers had ended up scattered along the Solomon for about twelve miles by the time they found enough places for them all.
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