The Healer's Daughter

by Charlotte Hinger

  “Well now, boys, these here aren’t hardly worth messing with. Always wanted to see those huge black balls folks keep talking about, but these here is no bigger than teensy little old shriveled up black walnuts.”

  “Don’t do that,” a man said abruptly. “Don’t want no part of this.”

  “Turning nigger lover on us? Getting soft?”

  “Not getting soft. The coon needs killing, all right. We’ve got to stop these letters. But I won’t go along with the other. It’s not right.”

  “But hanging is?”

  “Hanging is understandable. This other isn’t. Makes us look like perverts. Makes people too mad.”

  “He’s got a point.”

  “No, he ain’t.” Another man stepped forward, pulled out his knife, and ran the blade across his thumb. It was plenty sharp enough to cut two swift slits in an old man’s scrotum.

  Plenty sharp enough for old, thin black skin. Plenty sharp enough.

  Teddy cried to heaven, but there was no one around to hear on earth who really gave a damn about an ancient black man whose days were numbered anyway.

  The man who had lobbied for a simple hanging and not the other wanted to leave him decent. The debate was short and swift, but he won, so they clumsily tried to pull the pants back up while holding Teddy in the air. They knotted the frayed rope back around his waist. Teddy’s eyes dulled with pain. They kept holding him. Not a single person wanted to be the first to let him go.

  Sensing this, the man who had done the cutting decided it was just his luck that he had to take charge of everything. He stepped forward. “Do you have any last words, nigger?”

  “Yes.” Pain closed over Teddy like a curtain. His life was ebbing so fast that in a few minutes a hanging wouldn’t be necessary. But he managed to force out the words that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. “Yes. You can kill me, but you can’t kill all of us.”

  Enraged, the man who had done the cutting knocked the others away. He watched with satisfaction as Teddy Sommers’s neck snapped.

  Then they started toward the saddlebag lying beside his bedroll.

  “Might as well take all this with us. Let Potroff decide what he needs. Hard telling what all is in here.”

  “Just leave the note on that fancy sheet of paper and the other one with all the scribbling like we were supposed to. Tuck them in his pocket, so the wind won’t get them. Soon as we’re finished here I’ll take the other note on to that nigger-loving editor’s place.”

  The man holding the saddlebag opened the flap. “There’s a letter in here. Might be some cash in it.”

  “Leave the letter. Leave the saddlebag.”

  They turned and looked at the man who had tried to stop the castration.

  “Folks don’t take kindly to messing with the mail.”

  Norvin Meissner discovered Teddy’s body. No one saw the person who tacked the note to his door sometime during the night.

  He read: Go to the south bend of the Solomon. There’s a surprise waiting for you. What a waste of quality stationary!

  Curious, he rode out at once.

  At first, he didn’t recognize the old man swaying from the branch of the cottonwood tree. Silver leaves dipped and rippled in the breeze. His eyes played tricks. He thought Teddy Sommers’s slight black body was a dead, withered branch that had been broken off and set to dangling by the vicious prairie wind.

  He rode closer, and his horrified eyes were telling him true now. He stopped, paralyzed like he had been struck by a rattler. Then he moved forward because he had to. His hands trembled as he reached for papers protruding from his friend’s shirt pocket. There were two sheets. One, of creamy vellum contained the following note:

  Tell the nigger bitch this is what comes of troublemakers and friends of troublemakers. Sunflower will soon be as dead as he is.

  Stunned, he unfolded the other piece of paper and recognized one of his misprinted pages. He was still sending ruined paper to the children of Nicodemus so they could practice math problems. He recognized Bethany Herbert’s elegant hand. Slowly he read the draft of a letter addressed to the editor of the Topeka Daily Capital. There were cross-outs and corrections, but there was no doubt about the content.

  Bethany was the mysterious Sunflower. They had all assumed it was a man, but it wasn’t.

  He cut down Teddy’s body, easing the fall, and draped the old man across the back of his mule. He placed Teddy’s bedroll and saddlebag on the back of his own horse and went back to Millbrook. Reverently, he laid Teddy on his bed, then set off to tell the people of Nicodemus.

  On the way, he saw Jed heading across the prairie on Gloriana. Meissner called to him, then kicked his horse into a canter.

  Jed’s face became corpse-still when Meissner told him about the murder.

  Meissner removed his hat and fanned his face, then told Jed that Teddy had been killed because of the letters he was carrying. “Bethany wrote them, Jed. She’s Sunflower. There’s a letter in Teddy’s saddlebag addressed to the editor of the Topeka Capital.”

  Jed gripped the pommel on his saddle so tightly the veins on his knuckles seemed about to pop out. “She can’t be.”

  “You had no idea? I didn’t, either. It’s true. It’s Miss Bethany, all right. I know her handwriting very well and so do you.” He reached down into his saddlebag. “Here’s the note that was on Teddy, written on fancy paper. Here’s a piece of my newsprint that she wrote on, too. You’ll recognize the words, Jed. There’s a letter from Bethany addressed to the Topeka Daily Capital in Teddy’s mail bag. What you do with all this is up to you, but I thought someone from Nicodemus should have it.”

  A vein throbbed in Jed’s jaw as he read the vicious note. His shoulders slumped. He nodded at Meissner and tugged at his hat in wordless thanks, then abruptly kicked his horse into a wild gallop and rode off to fetch a wagon to bring home the body of one of the finest men he had ever known.

  The day was cold and without color. Bethany wished for one tree, one bird singing, one flower, to honor Teddy’s life. But the prairie was bare and without sound.

  The women’s grief smashed their chests. As they washed Teddy’s body and prepared it for burial, tears flowed down their cheeks.

  “I’m going home,” Sister Liza Stover said when she heard of Teddy’s death. “Going home to Kentucky where at least we knows everyone hates us. We knows how to act to keep them from killing us. Can’t take this anymore of having folks pretend to be our friends, then laying in wait for us. What did this poor old man do to anyone?”

  Bethany stared at her with empty eyes. She had loved this man. This tiny wee elf of an old, shrunken black man who believed that life would be better in Kansas. Had honest to God believed he was leading them all to a land of milk and honey. Was just trying to help them.

  She tenderly reached for his eyelids again. There had been no one to close them after his death, and by the time they collected his body, his eyes just wanted to stay open. They had tried just about everything to keep them closed, but nothing worked.

  “Won’t be any better back there,” said LuAnne. “Folks hated us there, too.”

  “No, she’s right,” said Gertie Avery. “Back there we weren’t all the time trying to fool ourselves. We were smarter back there.”

  There was a stir at the back of the room. Queen Bess walked in. Her face a fierce, shiny ebony mask, her head covered by her snow-white turban, her dress protected by an impossibly white apron. Funeral clothes somehow, despite the connection to slavery. Honoring the dead with exquisite cleanliness.

  She held her hands quietly in front of her. Seeming to glide, she moved forward, saw Teddy’s terrified, open eyes, and swiftly reached into the bag hanging from her side.

  She closed one eye and rubbed a compound into it, then did the same to the other eye. Without speaking to any of the women gathered, she walked over to a collection of rags and clothes hanging from a small twig pounded into the dirt wall and tore off a strip. She went back a
nd lifted Teddy’s head and wrapped the cloth around the eyes.

  “They’ll stay if we leave them that way for a while. Won’t take long,” Bethany whispered to Gertie.

  Still Queen Bess did not speak. Then suddenly the air was rent with a wild keening as the old woman threw back her head, splitting the prairie with a new sound. Different even from the anguished cry of mothers forced to leave their dead children along a lonely trail. Different from the Indian women viewing their dying warriors killed in their last wild sallies to save their tribes from the incursion of white settlers.

  Different because it embodied the loss of hope of people everywhere. It pierced the hearts of all who heard it because they knew now how much better off they had been before.

  Before hope.

  Queen Bess’s wail canted off the walls. Even the sod was not enough to absorb the sound, which was close to madness. Their souls trembled with fear before the helpless rage of this strong, fine woman who had always known what to do before as surely as if she were God Almighty.

  A woman who didn’t know nothing now. Same as they didn’t.

  This anger was a new feeling and threatened to send them spiraling toward the sun or to grab knives and axes and charge across the prairie in search of the terrible men who had done this ghastly thing to this wee, gentle little man, who was as innocent as a cricket.

  No one tried to quiet her. The menfolk rushed into the soddy. Seeing Teddy all laid out, Jed sobbed openly. All the men’s despair went beyond their grief for a man. It was their dashed hopes for the Promised Land, the victory forever to be denied.

  Reverend Brown’s shoulders shook, and no one could tolerate the smell already coming from the body.

  “It’s time,” Jim Black said abruptly.

  “His eyes,” Bethany protested. “We want to wait till his eyes stay closed. Like they’re supposed to.”

  Reverend Brown nodded.

  An hour later, they loaded Teddy onto a single board, an old elm plank that had been used to make one of the benches in the schoolhouse, for he was even to be denied the use of one of his own coffins. Every one he ever made had sold at once. To the white folks.

  Teddy’s suit had been sponged off, his shirt washed. Bethany used strips of bandages to tie him onto the plank. She neatly arranged his hands and combed his hair. When they removed the cloth from his eyes, the lids stayed shut.

  They trudged out singing. Gertie Avery’s voice rose in supplication. The wailing mourners called the death dirge from one person to another.

  A sweet breeze blew, rippling the grass, sending little showers of insects fleeing before their feet.

  Reverend Brown opened his worn Bible and proceeded to read the black, grief-filled words from Psalm 22, “ ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ ”

  He had just reached the part about packs of dogs closing in and being surrounded by gangs of evildoers, when he saw people in the distance.

  Two wagons were coming across the prairie. Reverend Brown stopped his sermon as they pulled up. The occupants were all white people, and he watched solemnly as Meissner hopped down. Cedric Berlin followed, then Betty and Donald Hays. There were others following on foot. Bethany recognized most of them as people she had helped.

  The people of Nicodemus stood silent and unyielding. Reverend Brown’s face was still and harsh as he looked at them hard. “This is a private ceremony,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Norvin Meissner paused in the midst of the editorial he was writing. The mid-day sun scalded the parched earth, and the hot air pushed ahead by the dry, restless wind knocked a tumbleweed down what passed for a street in Millbrook. It caught against the base of the town well and hung there a moment before ricocheting on toward nowhere.

  He glanced outside, then closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the timbers supporting the pulley that lowered the bucket. For the past week now, his stomach churned whenever he noticed any limb, crosspiece, beam in a house—anything at all—that would support the weight of a hanged man.

  Anger was not new to him. But rage was. Cold fury was. A hundred times a day he saw Teddy Sommers’s face before him.

  The prowling wind shut out sounds, so he didn’t hear the three men approach. Jed, Kulp, and McBane appeared in the doorway like apparitions from a bad dream. None of them wore their lawyering suits. They all had pistols strapped to their sides. Kulp and McBane now rode horses they had acquired in Eastern Kansas. Not the equal of Jed’s Gloriana, of course, but right decent horseflesh for these parts.

  Jed nodded curtly as they walked inside. Meissner’s freckles darkened against his bleached skin.

  He didn’t speak, didn’t move. Wished he didn’t have to breathe.

  The black men did not even bother to greet him. They just stood there silently; a whole world and a whole race apart.

  He waited.

  “We’ve come to ask for your help, Norvin,” Jed said.

  “Of course, whatever I can do.” He expelled his breath in a gush, then trembled with eagerness.

  Jed walked over and picked up the editorial, read it, then looked at him soberly. “This was going to be the first step. I see you’ve already taken it.”

  He nodded, his eyes wet with sympathy. “I mean every word of it.”

  “Here’s the second step. Brother Kulp here is going to finish this census. And we’re going with him to every single house—black and white—until he gets his work done. I want you to round up three white men from Millbrook to go with us. There’s going to be a little delegation accompanying A.T. every step of the way.”

  “Three?” Meissner smiled for the first time since the men had walked through the door. “Three? I can assure you that half the town would go if you’d just ask.”

  They stopped a couple of miles west of Nicodemus.

  “You two go on,” Jed said, with a sad glance in the direction of Queen Bess’s soddy. “I’m going to see how Bethany’s mother is doing.”

  “Hate to see you go off by yourself, Jed.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Kulp and McBane looked at each other, uneasy over leaving Jed unprotected, then nodded and rode in silence toward Nicodemus. Even Kulp, who normally talked everyone’s leg off, had been knocked voiceless by Teddy’s death.

  If the nightriders had killed anyone else, the colonists’ response would have been pure undiluted anger. But by killing Teddy, the devils had tamped down their rage with a blanket of grief so heavy the whole community had nearly stopped breathing. Like a widower who has lost his beloved after a brief, wild marriage, it was as though the town had lost its will to live.

  Queen Bess sat outside. Listlessly she watched Jed dismount from his fancy horse. She stared at the prairie. He waited. She finally favored him with a look.

  “Miss Regina Marie. I’ve come to ask your permission to court your daughter.”

  “She no good to you now. She dead.” Her voice was hollow. Hard.

  Jed flinched. “No, she’s not. I’m not going to let that happen.”

  “Huh. She don’t move. Won’t talk. It done.”

  He removed his hat and ran his hand over his hair. He looked away in despair but made no attempt to hide the moistness gathering in his eyes.

  Queen Bess’s voice was thick, fog heavy. “She was just barely here anyway, you know. Before, I mean. Just barely. Not no good for nobody now. Tried to fool me into thinking she was a doctoring woman. Tried to fool herself. But I knowed better. She ain’t had the call. She just smart. Took her a long ways, though. A right far piece, her being so smart,” she said wistfully.

  “Do I have your permission?” Jed asked again, sharper this time. His mouth tightened with reproach. He couldn’t stand to hear another word against his beloved. And from Bethany’s own mother, at that. “Your permission to court her is all I want from you right now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because having your blessing is important to your daughter. Your daughter, Mama.”

 
Queen Bess sorrowfully gazed at the horizon, trying to make sense of the emptiness all around her. “She dead, I tell you. Same as. Warn’t like she was going to make you no decent wife, no how. Filled with fancy ideas that warn’t never going to do nobody no good. What you want with her anyway?”

  Jed knelt down and reached for Queen Bess’s hands. He gripped them tightly and forced the old woman to look at him. “I’m begging you, Regina Marie. Begging you. I want your permission to marry your daughter, and I want you to help me get her back.” His voice broke. “She’s the only woman I’ll ever love.”

  “Well now, ain’t that sweet?” Queen Bess absently shooed a fly away from the cloth covering her latest batch of vinegar. Clearly put out at being subjected to such nonsense from this fancy-mouthed colored man.

  But her lip quivered. “Court her! Like she some fine white lady with slaves gathered around fanning her to keep off the flies.”

  He stared up at her mutely. Then Queen Bess began to sob. She pulled her hands away from Jed’s and pressed them against her face. Jed put his arms around her. She cried against his shoulder until she was overcome with dry heaves.

  “Help me, Mama. Help me. We can’t afford to lose her. Neither one of us.”

  “She quality folk, sure enough.” Queen Bess sniffed. “Yes, Mr. Jed, you can go a-courting. If you going to act like she’s quality. She real special, you know.”

  Jed stood. “I know, Mama. God, yes, I know that.”

  Queen Bess sat up straighter.

  “Then I also want you to trust me one last time with something else.”

  “To do what?”

  “To obtain justice, by God.”

  She shivered when she looked at his steely, gray eyes, the blood of his warrior ancestors coursing through his veins. Done with words. Spear-ready to do whatever it would take.

  “You going to go off and hang someone?”

  “Yes and no,” Jed said. “Not personally, I’m not. But we’re going to see to it that Kulp completes his census so we can organize this county. Then we’re going to track down every single man that was involved in Teddy’s murder and hang them legally by Graham County’s own laws. We’re going to show people that the law will apply to everyone. Black and white.”