by Lois Ruby
A tear dropped to the page, and Dana quickly flicked it away so it wouldn’t soak into the ancient, thirsty paper. She wondered what it was like for the children, for James and Rebecca, to have to keep such a secret from their father, to live in the stifling atmosphere of the strain between their parents.
Maybe it was quickly resolved. Maybe in the next page. She made herself turn the page and flattened it to the left. The handwriting seemed different, as if a good many days or weeks had passed since Millicent Weaver had made an entry in the journal. Dana took a deep breath and read the cramped script.
But then the afternoon of May 21, the fire swept through the house and blew all our personal agonies aside… .
CHAPTER TEN
Thirty Cannonballs
May 21, 1856
There came a ferocious banging on the door, and it wasn’t even dawn yet. James jumped out of bed and yanked his britches on. He was down the ladder to the front door before his parents were out of their bedroom.
Jeremy, with his hair all wild, yelled, “James, something’s brewing out here.”
“What’s happening?” He thought of the men massing restlessly on Mount Oread last night. What were they up to?
“They’re fixin’ to come down from the mountain, hundreds of ’em, maybe thousands. My pa’s organizing the men. We ain’t letting ’em ride over us, you can bet on that.”
“Son?” James’s father came to the door, Ma right behind him, rolling her blond crimped hair into a knot.
“Morning, Mr. Weaver, ma’am. My pa says to get all the women and children out to the ravine at the edge of town, and all able-bodied men’s to come to the Free-State Hotel. Armed.”
Pa ignored Jeremy and turned to James. “Tell us what thee knows, son.”
“There were these men up on the mountain, Pa, the marshal’s posse I told you about, took the prisoners yesterday? The marshal left, but the men camped there all night.”
“More of ’em than yesterday. Hundreds of ’em, sir. Proslavers, Border Ruffians from Missouri.”
“But have they caused any trouble?” Pa asked.
“Well sir, they’ve taken over Governor Robinson’s house for their headquarters. We ain’t waitin’ to be trampled by their horses, sir, all due respect.” Jeremy tipped his cap toward Pa, but it seemed like an empty gesture.
“Have they made any threats, Jeremy?”
“Well sir, in the night they rolled this cannon into town. Old Sacramento, it’s called, sir. Pa says it’s left over from the war with Mexico. They brought it up from Georgia.”
Pa thought about that a minute, while Ma went to start the stove warming.
Jeremy shifted from foot to foot, impatient with Pa’s silence. “Sir, Old Sacramento’s fixed square at the mouth of the Free-State Hotel. They aim to blow it to pieces. You might call that a threat. Sir.”
Pa nodded. “Thank you, son. Thee must go on to the next house, as thy father told thee to, and we’ll do what we have to.”
With Jeremy gone, Ma began packing a basket of food. “James, wake thy sister and tell her to come down with a warm shawl and her favorite plaything, and not to dawdle a minute.”
“Yes, Ma.”
Pa said, “I’ll wake thy sister, James. Thee must go out back and dig a hole. We’ll bury whatever’s dearest to us. But be quick, son.”
The hole was easy; the ground was soft with spring rain, and when he was done he came in to find Rebecca, dwarfed in Pa’s rocker, rubbing her eyes and clutching her baby doll. Ma put a small crate in the middle of the room, and they each dropped in a few objects—some books and notebooks, a pen and a jar of ink, Ma’s ruby brooch from Great-Grandma Baylor, Pa’s law certificate, Rebecca’s yellow hair ribbons and a red bucket and shovel she prized. James took far too long deciding what to save, and finally he tossed in entirely unimportant things—a rabbit’s tail and a puny sketch he’d made of their house in Boston.
Suddenly they heard a clap of thunder, but it wasn’t gone in seconds as it should have been.
“Thundering horses,” Pa said. “Millicent, thee and Rebecca take the food and go on over and find the other women gathering in the ravine.” Ma nodded, and tied her bonnet under her chin. She crooked her finger, which was a sure sign that Rebecca wasn’t to delay a single instant.
“James, come outside. Thee and I will bury this box.” They lowered the box, as small as a baby’s coffin, and tamped the fresh earth over it. “Now we’ll head into town and see how we can be helpful to our neighbors.”
In town, people were shouting bulletins at one another and running everywhere, but Pa walked at his dignified, steady clip, his boots pulverizing clods of dirt in the road. James had to take deep breaths to keep going so slow when everyone was passing them by. After a time he looked back on their house, which seemed so singularly deserted out there. In a whirlwind of prairie vengeance, it could be so easily uprooted.
But there was no time for such thoughts, because now they were in the heart of town, and coming up behind a human chain of strangers outside the Free-State Hotel. Their line was broken only by the cannon in the middle of the square. The men’s heels dug into the dirt, their shoulders set, their necks stiff—ready warriors, against a handful of Lawrence men just digging the sting of sleep from their eyes. Some of their men with fighting spirits had spent their fight the day before. Now they slept in the Lecompton jailhouse. Who was left? Old men, young men of peace, and a few scrappy boys.
Sheriff Samuel Jones broke out of the battalion of men. He was the sheriff of Douglas County, but really a resident of Missouri. For a second James thought the sheriff would be doing his duty as a law officer, but he soon made his mission clear. He climbed up on a barrel and cast his booming voice into the crowd. “Listen, men of Lawrence, we’re through talking. My men’s giving you thirty minutes to get everybody out of the hotel, and then, I swear to God, we’ll fire on it.”
No one stopped to question his word. People scurried every which way, pouring out of every door of the hotel with suitcases and boxes. Women tossed tables and mirrors, even small children, out the window, into the arms of the men below, while the marshal’s posse swarmed into the hotel and ransacked the place. At the front door they manned a wagon where they loaded all the things they’d pilfered from the hotel—clothes and cans of food, sacks of potatoes, bedspreads, and anything they could lift in a dash.
Outside, children ran; women unaccustomed to running ran as fast as their cumbersome dresses would allow to the outskirts of the city, on the shouted orders of their fathers and husbands. Bethany Maxwell ran by, never even noticing James.
He stayed close to his father, waiting for a signal. What was a twelve-year-old expected to do? He wasn’t a baby to cower with the women and children in the ravine, but he wasn’t a man, either.
The posse raised their red flag over the Free-State Hotel.
“Smoke!” someone yelled. Behind them black ropes billowed toward the turquoise sky of the dawn. They captured puffs from the cottonwood trees in their wake. Then a giant flame stabbed the sky and turned it bright orange, as if the day had burst.
Sheriff Jones shouted, “I am determined to execute the law if it costs me my life!” and he gave the signal to fire the cannon at the hotel. A woman leaped from a third-floor window. James ran forward to soften her fall. He rolled to the ground and tasted dirt, then quickly helped the lady to her feet. Her thank-you was a scared smile as she ran off. Another cannonball. But the proud, stubborn walls of the hotel that harbored the free-state forces refused to crumble—even after thirty cannonballs were volleyed.
The proslavers, maddened by their failure, roared like taunted lions. They rushed toward the hotel with powder kegs. Jeremy and Will and their fathers and a handful of other men tried to stop them, but the Lawrence men were shoved aside by the vicious mob. Two kegs of powder made their way down to the basement of the hotel. That’s all it took. A spark of fire did what thirty cannonballs couldn’t. The Free-State Hotel exploded and
burned to the ground.
Sheriff Jones yelled, “I have done it, by God, I have done it! This is the happiest day of my life.”
Now the Border Ruffians were pumped with their glory. Shouting, “Slavery in Kansas, slavery in Kansas,” they rampaged through Lawrence. Burned both newspaper offices, but not before they took all the type out and threw it in the river. Robbed and terrorized the people in the streets and the few old folks who huddled in their homes.
Where were the Beecher’s Bibles now? James shouted to Jeremy, “Where are those Sharps rifles?”
“Couldn’t get any more ammo,” he shouted back. He’d covered his face with a kerchief, because the smoke was as thick as clouds. “Don’t breathe it, James!”
James pulled his collar over his nose and mouth. All around him, men were gasping for breath, coughing; black spit shot from their mouths. He lost Pa. Where was Jeremy? He spotted him now, throwing punches at one of the proslavers. And Will, who was bigger than all the boys their age, had wrestled another proslaver to the ground and was pummeling his face with the mallet of his fist.
Blood flew everywhere, turned the rich earth to mud. A shot rang out, another and another. A piece of someone’s hand flew by James’s face. Proslavery, antislavery? He only knew he was splattered with its blood. His stomach heaved at the rusty, visceral stench.
Now he was scared. Scared he’d get hurt, and scared he’d run. Scared he’d bloody someone if he got in there like Will and Jeremy, and scared he’d kill someone, and scared he’d be glad he did it. He wanted to rush forward; his knees locked. Then he felt a tug at his arm. Pa.
“This is no place for men of God to be.” His father yanked him so hard that he staggered and fell to the ground where he’d be trampled by the ugly mob. Pa pulled him back up, carried him like dead game, until they were in a clearing. He put James down, but pulled him close to his own chest.
“Thee must never harden thy heart to what thee’s seen today.”
James spoke through hot tears, his words thick and bitter as castor oil. “But we did nothing to help, Pa. They destroyed our whole town, and we watched.”
“God requires us to be witnesses, son, not murderers. Come, we’ll go home.”
But there was no home, only the stones of the cellar, the broken skeleton of the second story, the heap of crumbled sod; burning earth stung their noses and throats. And all their worldly possessions lay smoldering.
Except for the few things they’d buried in the yard.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Sack of Lawrence
The movie was one of the Freddies, and it felt really good to scream and dig her nails into Mike Gruber’s arm. Mike pumped popcorn into his mouth in steady rhythm. “It’s not that scary,” he said, with his eyes glued to the screen. In the flickery light, he looked green. Sally, Derek, everyone looked ghoulish. Only Ahn seemed unaffected. She watched the movie as if it were a video on photosynthesis.
Afterward, they all went to a frozen-yogurt shop where Dana’s dad was to pick them up at eleven o’clock—but discreetly, invisibly.
“Cool movie,” Derek said. “I liked Part Two better, though.” Derek didn’t bother ordering a sundae, just a long spoon so he could eat everybody else’s.
They had a juicy argument over whether Part 2 or Part 3 was scarier, with gruesome evidence from each, as compared to Part 4 and Part 5. “The thing is, those were more violent, but less psychologically terrifying,” Mike said.
“I’d have been happy to stop with the original,” said Sally, swirling her white-chocolate sundae into mush.
“Nobody asked me, but I think the movies are stupid,” Ahn told them. “Not like real.”
Derek dared her: “Name one thing scarier you’ve ever seen.”
“The bones in Dana’s upstairs,” she said quietly. “It’s really scary to think what happened to that girl. Scarier to think we might not ever know. Tell them about the fire, Dana.”
“My house burned down.”
“What!” Mike yelled, and a gray-haired pair of dumplings across the room gave him a searing look.
“Well, it was 135 years ago.”
“Oh, I see, it spontaneously regenerated. Did you know you can chop off a piece of a flatworm anywhere, and it’ll grow itself back?”
“Very interesting, Mike.”
“Gross,” Sally wailed.
“Hey, I just presented the example to explain how Dana’s house grew back.”
“Drop it, Gruber,” Derek said. “Tell us what happened with the fire.”
“My house was sacked. Remember last year on Kansas Day Paul Cardenas did that oral report on the Sack of Lawrence?”
“I don’t remember. I must have been home in the sack that day,” Mike quipped.
“Or sacked out in the back of the room.”
“Not bad, Derek. Or ransacking someone’s locker.”
“I don’t get it,” Ahn said.
“Subtleties of the language, kid. Idioms,” said Mike.
“Idiot,” Derek muttered.
“Dana, what are they talking about?”
“Well, Ahn, it’s hard to explain, guys being so immature and all.”
Mike sat up straight as a piccolo and said, “Tell us about the Sack of Lawrence, oh, please, please?”
“Not because you asked.” Dana deliberately turned her back on Mike. “They practically burned the whole town down in 1856.”
Sally asked, “Even the university?”
“This was before it was built,” explained Dana. “And here’s the weird part. Lawrence wasn’t burned just once. Twice. After the first time, they rebuilt everything super-fast because everyone was so mad and so determined to outsmart those proslavery guys. Then, seven years later some crazy named Quantrill bops into town in a Confederate uniform with a few other lunatics, and they go on this orgy of murder and mayhem. Oh, but they’re chivalrous knights. They spare all the women and children. Shoot about 140 men, though, and burn down a couple of hundred businesses and homes. Nice guys.”
Mike asked, “Your house got hit a second time?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?” asked Sally.
“Tell them how we know, Ahn.”
Ahn’s elfin face clouded over with sadness. “Because Elvira was already dead. She was already sealed in that room.”
• • •
Dana’s father dropped everybody off, and at the last minute Ahn invited Dana to spend the night at her house, if she brought the journal. Staying at Ahn’s was always an adventure. Where Dana’s house had eleven rooms, twelve counting Elvira’s tomb, Ahn’s had three rooms. There was one for the brothers, one for the sisters, and one for cooking, eating, and watching TV. But because all the brothers and sisters were older than Ahn, and went to high school or college and also worked at all the 7-Elevens in town, there was never a time when everyone was home. Also, there was never a time when no one was home. So Ahn and Dana got into their giant sleeping Ts and piled their pillows in a corner of the sisters’ room, to read some more of the journal. Since the fire, they’d promised they’d only read it together. Ahn found the page quickly.
“May 31, 1856—There is good in all Thy works. With our house destroyed, I have left this slave-escape enterprise behind me. James and Rebecca are overjoyed. We have taken refuge with the Macons. Their house miraculously escaped the ravages of flame. It’s quite crowded, all of us together, but the Macons are fine Christian folk and we are all making do. Caleb’s gone to Topeka for a few days. When he returns, we’ll set about rebuilding.
“Some of the men had a wood sawyers’ tournament, so there would be logs aplenty for all the building. Young Will Bowers’s father won by a count of three logs. His back wall went up first, as his prize.
“We’re fortunate that we’ve money to buy lumber from the mill. Thy kindness is ever-bountiful.”
Ahn said, “Here Millicent just tells about how they rebuilt your house. All the neighbors helped. Very nice.” She sk
immed a few pages. “This entry is dated June 14, 1856.”
“The United States Congress has refused to accept Caleb’s constitution. Oh, Lord, all his work on the side of right. Caleb laments that we shall not become a state this year, and not without more bloodshed.”
“June 18, 1856—I am weary to the bones, for we’ve moved into the first floor of our house today, the hottest day yet of the summer. There’s still the upstairs to finish, and Mr. Madison and his apprentice are working at that. There are so many houses to build since that horrid day. James is too old to sleep in a loft. Mr. Madison’s building him a proper room.”
“How old do you think James was?” Ahn asked.
“Our age?”
“Maybe a little older.”
“Maybe he was shaving already.”
“How old is that? My brothers are in college and they don’t shave much.”
“Asian men are different. I think James was extremely hairy.”
“If you like them that way,” Ahn said skeptically.
“Okay, go on.”
Ahn skimmed the page. “This is just dull things about wood, the split logs for the floor, how they quarried the stone for the fireplace. Oh, look at this—”
“I’ve asked Mr. Madison to build a good-sized closet in the north bedroom. It would be a place where James could play his violin without making us all grind our teeth. Thou knowest, Lord, that James is a sincere musician, but not a gifted one.”
“He played the violin? How romantic!” Dana cried.
Ahn read on. “June 20, nothing much. June 22, oh, this is sweet.”
“I do believe these are the happiest days Caleb and I have shared. What with the constitution business temporarily put aside, we’ve been like a bride and groom feathering our new nest. I blush to write, he’s been courting me! James watches out the comer of his eye. I believe he’s of an age.”
“At least puberty,” Dana said. “At least we’re in the right ballpark.” But Ahn was deeply engrossed in the journal and didn’t answer.
