Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  Jake jammed a sharpened stick through the rabbit carcass he’d gutted and propped it between two rocks. He knew Willard spoiled for a fight, and the longer his brother cooled his heels the more squirrelly he got. So when Joe Reilly rode into camp a few days ago and said he’d heard from the blacksmith at Helesburg that marauders marched north out of Liberty with the intent of subduing the secesh along the Missouri River, Willard corralled the two Little brothers, Dave Powers, Ora Juwitt, and Alfred Zerbin and took off south to see what was up.

  The rabbit wasn’t going to be enough. Jake’s belly had growled ever since he left the farm. Not that he fed good there, either. Why his pa’s farm skimped along while all the farms around grew fat as a rich man’s wife, he never could fathom. Too many mouths to feed, for one. Even with the money he brought in hiring out to Sam Canon and some of the others, there was never enough. He watched Hank Jansen pluck a chicken he stole from a farm up north on the river. No way Hank’d share. Every man scrounged his own meals in this outfit. Willard set down the rule at the beginning. Jake thought that just pit them all against each other, but Willard was the boss, so what the hell. Jake and Willard, at least, watched out for each other.

  The sucking sound of hooves in the sticky sludge of the path signaled new arrivals, and the four men in the clearing jumped for their guns. But Willard’s voice called out “Hullo the camp” and they relaxed. Willard and two other horsemen showed dim in the last light, silhouetted through the trees against the open sky over the river. Wil tethered and unsaddled the big black he stole from Sam Canon on their way out of town last month. Jake didn’t think it right to take from Sam. The man was friend to their pa, but Wil said he was a stinking abolitionist and a northern invader, and duty called them to take what they could from him. Jake rode the mare his pa used for the buckboard. The old nag wasn’t good for too many more seasons, anyway. He needed to find something else pretty soon before she dropped dead under him.

  Jake squinted at his brother hunkered next to him. “Only got one rabbit,” he said. “You can have some, but we got to get something else or I’m going to die right here of hunger.” Wil grinned, reached into his knapsack and dragged out two chickens, tied by the legs, heads hanging limp. “Had to kill them already, but they’re still fresh enough,” he said, and tossed them at Jake. “Got them from a place down to Easton, long side the railroad. Old lady there all by herself, man gone to fight.” He produced a bottle. “Got this, too.” He drank, and the sweet smell of whiskey rolled off him.

  “What side?” Jake asked.

  “What you mean, what side?”

  “What side is her man fighting on?”

  “Don’t know don’t care,” Wil said, settling back on his elbows. “Everyone contributes.”

  “Any sign of Jennison?”

  “Naw, nothing. We got all the way to Plattesburg. But he’d been there all right. There was two farms along the Barnesville road that was burning. And two dead men, shot down by jayhawkers their women says.” He rolled up on an elbow to face Jake and watch him pluck. “One of them was kin to the Stringfellows. Their sister’s kid.” He scowled. “Someone’s got to pay for that.”

  He took a chicken from Jake, held it over the fire to singe the pinfeathers. “I’m thinking about taking a little revenge for him, over along Barnesville way. Idea come to me when we was riding back. They’re some Union families down there.” Wil pulled out his knife and cut the chicken into pieces, dropping them into the fry pan Jake dredged up from their gear.

  The light dimmed under the trees, and Jake couldn’t make out Wil’s eyes in the shadow of his hat. Good. He knew that look and hated it. He remembered that look from when they were kids, and Wil threw a rope over a stallion Pa’d bought to stud. He scrambled up on the beast’s back and tore over the pasture and the stallion stepped in a rabbit hole and broke a leg and Pa had to shoot it. Or when they broke the lock on Zook’s store in the middle of the night and stole cigars and the little bit of cash left in the drawer. Wil never seemed bothered by what happened after those tricks. No one knew about the Zook thing, but Pa nearly killed them both with his horsewhip after the thing with the stallion. No botheration to Wil. And here Jake was now, following his big brother into what promised more trouble than a sack of swamp rattlers. But he’d do it, because he always had.

  Jake set his chicken to fry and pulled a haunch off the rabbit. He offered it to his brother, then cut himself a piece. “When you planning on doing that?” he said through a mouthful. He reached for Wil’s bottle and took a pull.

  “Tomorrow we ought to get on down there. I want them feds to know why they been hit. I sent the Little boys and Powers back to Easton to find us some horses. We meet them there tomorrow night. Maybe we can stop by the old war widow’s place again.” He snickered.

  “So you want me to go with you?” Jake wiped greasy fingers on his pants, picked up a chicken leg. “Who else you taking?”

  “Everyone.” Wil waved a hand toward the campfires. He’d come back with Juwitt and Zerbin, and with the other three, Irving, Jansen and Godsey, that made five, plus the Bigelows. And the Little brothers and Dave Powers. None of the men was more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, except that stupid Alfred Zerbin who took orders and smiled and nodded all the time. There wasn’t much up there between those two jug ears of his. They all followed Wil without question, Jake thought. Wil always had ideas.

  Next morning, Willard kicked the whole bunch of them out of soggy bedrolls and hurried them through a quick meal of cold meat and leftover coffee. The rain tapered off during the night, but the trees dripped and clouds tumbled across the sky. The trail along the Noddaway grew thick with beech and maple and twiggy ash, and sodden branches slapped at horses’ flanks. The men’s heavy canvas leggings were soaked through within the hour.

  At noon, when they dismounted on the west bank of the Prairie River to finish off the last of the meat and rest the horses, Irving and Jansen were grumbling, and Carl Godsey openly rebelled. Willard, squatting by the river filling a canteen, paid him no mind for a couple minutes. Then he stood, fitted the plug back in and swung the strap onto his saddle horn before he turned to Godsey. Hands on his hips, he strolled over to the boy—Carl was no more than seventeen, if that much, slight of build with a downy jaw—and before the kid saw what was coming, took a swing. Godsey sprawled on his back with a yelp. Blood gushed from his nose, which was cranked over to the side and plainly broken.

  “So don’t go,” Willard said and give him a half-hearted kick in the shin. “Get on your horse and head back to your mama.” He turned his back on the boy and mounted the black. “Anybody else want to back out?” He stared around the group. Most of them had amused looks on their faces. Jansen and Irving no longer grumbled.

  “All right, then, let’s move out.” Willard swung his horse around and headed for the ford in the river. The other men followed while Godsey pulled himself to his feet. Jake never saw the boy again.

  By nightfall the boys stumbled onto the railroad tracks and turned toward Easton, the first stop on the Hannibal and St. Joseph line. The tracks ran south of town, right off the main street, which boasted half a dozen newly built establishments. Livestock corrals huddled at the west end where farmers brought their beef cows to be shipped to slaughterhouses in St. Louis. The war widow’s farm sat outside town, in the middle of fields newly plowed for spring planting. It boasted a two-story brick farmhouse and a cluster of outbuildings, all dark and silent. Willard sent Juwitt ahead to see if the Little brothers and Dave Powers made it through, or if, since his visit the other day, the woman had set up a guard.

  Juwitt returned quick enough. The men hid out in the barn with six new mounts. The old lady had disappeared, leaving her place unprotected. Willard grinned. He intended to clean the place out. The barn hulked big and drafty in the dark, empty of livestock, but chickens and ducks ran wild, and the boys helped themselves. Dick and Harlan Lit
tle broke in the back door and hauled out jars of pickles and preserves from the kitchen, and a jug of beer. They stuffed themselves, their cook fires hidden inside the cavernous barn. Then they were ready for fun.

  They emptied out the house first. They loaded up on all the tinned goods and fresh early vegetables and dried fruit. They stuffed bacon and smoked hams into their saddlebags and stashed away all the coffee and flour and sugar they could carry. They poked under mattresses and dumped out drawers. No money or jewelry, but Jake found a Colt stuck behind the flour bin in the pantry and an old squirrel musket by the back door.

  At Willard’s order, Irving and Zerbin piled curtains and bedclothes in the front room, which was too fine anyway, with its horsehair settee and heavy carved tables and oil paintings of dark old men on the walls, and doused it all with kerosene. Dave Powers brought in a brand from the dinner fire, smashed in the porch window and threw the brand inside. The fire caught with a whoosh and heavy black smoke boiled up and out the broken window, flames licked up the inside walls, and the sound of breaking glass and exploding windows set the boys to whooping and cheering. Dick Little ran out of the barn laughing, followed by a wisp of smoke that soon exploded in an eruption of flames eating hungrily at the dried straw and duff.

  Jake sat his horse and watched, stomach churning, but feeling good about it. This was war, Willard had told him, and this is what you do. It wasn’t just sneaking into Zook’s and stealing a handful of peppermint drops. He’d never had this sense of power before, power to cause other people, total strangers, to sit up and take notice. Even if they never knew who did this to them. Agents in the night, they swooped in and disappeared without a trace, their victims even more terrified because they were the unknown. Bigger than life. Grand. Really grand. He let out a sudden whoop and pounded his fist overhead, and the new mare he rode, already dancing at the flames, reared at Jake’s sudden movement. He dug his heels into her side and raced down the road after his brother.

  28

  June 1861

  Holt CountyCourier & News, June 6, 1861— “Sign anything, ratify anything, pay anything … There never was a good war or a bad peace.” That was the advice of Mr. Horace Greeley. That he penned it in 1848, on the eve of the war with Mexico, makes no difference. Its sentiment holds today, on the eve of an even more vicious, more costly, more deadly war, a war that threatens the American experiment in democracy. That experiment was built upon revolution, the casting off of a tyranny of foreign powers. Our founding fathers rejoiced in their separation from the “Mother Country,” an unnatural mother surely, one who subjected her children to laws legislated from afar, to armies quartered on her citizens, to taxes imposed without consent. And so the founding fathers declared that it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which connected them with another.

  Now the states of the south have declared those bands null and void, and are attempting to assume a “separate and equal station,” as did those thirteen colonies eighty-five years ago.

  But what is the response? The northern tyrant resists lawful secession and seeks to impose by force its will on the new nation. Is this Union of ours a confederacy of states able to be dissolved when oppression demands? Or is it subject to a general government with the ability to enforce laws contrary to the needs, the desires and the traditions of a vast section of its territory?

  Mr. Greeley also wrote, in that same year of 1848: “Our country right or wrong is an evil motto—what if your country be in the wrong?” Mr. Lincoln, your country is in the wrong. Let the southern states go, peacefully, quietly, without the hideous bloodshed and massive cost in lives and property that will accompany a war. Let lawful, peaceable secession take place.

  - Jabez Robinson, ed.

  The morning bloomed cool and fresh, June’s warmth and humidity at bay, the breeze gentle and redolent of fresh-turned earth and fruit blossoms. Agnes and Charlie were on their way to church. Charlie, not quite three years, walked alongside her, tall for his age, and important with his hair slicked back and in his dress-up coat. Jabez, not a church-goer, remained in his study writing, always writing.

  Not long before, the Reverend Mr. Rozell, whose church now dwelt in its own brick building complete with steeple and bell, broke with the Methodist South conference and joined the North conference, leaving his south-supporting parishioners without minister or sanctuary. Sectionalism spread like contagion among the town’s congregations: the Presbyterians separated into New and Old School factions, and a small knot of Baptists withdrew from the Southern Baptist Convention. The Reverend Rozell displayed no qualm about preaching politics from the pulpit.

  Since the April battle in South Carolina, tension in Lick Creek mounted daily. Governor Jackson raised a pro-south army under Sterling Price, while the federals awarded a general’s commission to Nathaniel Lyon, who had slaughtered civilians in St. Louis. Jabez’s most recent article instigated a mob in front of the offices of the Courier just three days earlier, and his visibility made him the focus of the town’s resentments. But Agnes continued to hope for as normal a life as possible for their children, and so she maintained her usual Sunday morning ritual.

  On the steps of the church they met Nancy, who knelt and cooed to Charlie, and John, who shook her hand. “Agnes, do you think you should be here?” he asked without preamble.

  “This is my church too, John.”

  He hesitated. “Feelings are running high. Jabez’s last piece stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

  Nancy stood. “Oh, pshaw, John. It’s Jabez they target, not Agnes. No one can be so uncivilized as to plague her.” Nancy had grown plump, her hair dulled with gray, but her complexion was still smooth and creamy, her blue eyes gentle and complaisant. Politics passed her by. She lived one step removed from the animus seething through town. She slid her arm through Agnes's and steered her through the door.

  “I’m just saying the mood in town is dangerous. You must be prepared, cousin,” John said.

  “A few snubs won’t inconvenience me,” Agnes said, guiding Charlie down a side aisle. She stepped into a pew, moved along to make room for Nancy and John, and nodded to the Irvines, seated at the other end.

  They refused to smile back. In truth, they made no pretense of civility. Their daughter Annie, long a student of Agnes's, leaned forward, and Agnes thought she meant to say hello. Instead she whispered to her mother, and her mother shifted to block Agnes from her sight. And then Mr. and Mrs. Irvine and Annie stood and left the pew. A buzz circulated among the congregation as the Irvines made a show of the business, quite unnecessary, Agnes thought. She settled Charlie into her lap, doing her best to pay no mind. But the murmurs continued, and as she looked about the room, she caught furtive glances and quickly averted eyes, heard a few audible sniffs, and someone behind her muttered “The nerve!”

  One family after another bypassed their pew once they realized who sat there. Then Sam and Rachel paused, and Sam grasped Rachel’s elbow and propelled her up the aisle. Agnes’s eyes blurred, and she ducked her head, nuzzling Charlie’s hair. Rachel cast back a look of deep sadness, but Sam stared straight ahead. Charlie said, loud enough to be heard in the painful silence of the tiny church, “Auntie Rachel?” Finally, to her vast relief, Elizabeth and Tom slipped in next to her, and Elizabeth squeezed her arm.

  The Reverend Mr. Rozell entered from his tiny office and stepped to the pulpit, but the murmurs continued. He said nothing, looked puzzled, finally caught the direction of the black looks. And then he did a most cowardly thing. He stepped back from the pulpit and nodded to J.W. Moodie, the most prominent lay leader, in the front pew. Mr. Moodie understood and rose slowly, turning to face Agnes.

  “Miz Robinson,” he said in a voice that carried across the sanctuary. “You are not welcome here, and you must leave.”

  She stared at him and refused to move. No one stirred. Charlie shrank against her, his eyes wide. Moodie turned to Sam.
“Sam, you tell her.”

  Agnes stood, holding Charlie to her shoulder. “J.W. Moodie, what in the name of God can you mean? Reverend Rozell, I’ve been a member of this church for nine years.”

  A voice called out from behind her. “We’ll have no secesh here!”

  She considered the friends and neighbors she’d known for so long. No one met her eye. Sam rose and said, “Agnes, you’d best go on back home.” Rachel clutched his sleeve. He shook her off. He scowled, at himself or at Agnes, she didn’t know.

  John growled, Nancy’s face paled. Elizabeth, though, would not be still. Features twisted with disdain, she jumped to her feet, hands on hips, and fairly spit. “Sam Canon, how can you?” She skewered the minister with a look. “Mr. Rozell, is this your Christian charity?” She turned slowly and glared around the sanctuary. “For shame, all of you!” Then she grabbed Agnes’s arm, and tugged her into the center aisle and out of the church. Tom followed, then Nancy and John. Charlie cried against her shoulder. Agnes trembled so with rage that she threatened to drop Charlie, and John eased him from her arms. They walked back to her home in silence.

  

  The Bigelow brothers, Buck Sypes and the Pugsley’s eldest boy disappeared into the bush. The Moodies’ son and Earl Kunkel marched off to join the federals. The county emptied out. Throughout that muggy, sultry summer the news of skirmishes and depredations flowed into Lick Creek by dispatch and rumor. Doc Jennison from Kansas marauded up and down the western counties, murdering and plundering. In Cass County, he captured seven men, blindfolded them next to their grave, and shot them, then burned the town. Union cavalry burned homes, federal soldiers shot southern sympathizers in front of their wives and children.