Steal Away Home

by Lois Ruby

  “I’m impressed,” Mike said. “Next idea?”

  “The mall?” Sally offered.

  “No money.”

  “No ride.”

  “No way.”

  Derek said, “How can summer be so short and so long at the same time?”

  “Might as well enjoy it,” Sally said. “Next year we’ll all have to have jobs.”

  Ahn reminded them, “I already have a job. I cook for all my brothers and sisters, and that doesn’t mean putting hot dogs in the microwave. Lots of chop-chopping.”

  “Do you get paid?”

  “Of course I get paid. I get free room and board.”

  “We all do.”

  “But you have parents,” Ahn said.

  Finally, Jeep’s dad let him out in front of the hotel, with his two little brothers who were about six and eight. “I had to baby-sit,” he grumbled.

  “We’re not babies.”

  “They can’t even zip their own pants,” Jeep said, at which point, of course, all the guys checked their flies.

  “Why is it girls never forget to zip up, and guys always do?” Dana asked.

  “That’s a sexist remark.”

  “Derek takes offense, tsk tsk,” Dana clucked. “We sure haven’t seen you around much, Jeep.”

  “Hey, you’re just my white friends,” he said, grinning. “Most of the time I hang out with the brothers.”

  “That’s us!” Calvin and Luther cried.

  “Not you, armpits. I mean the guys from church. And besides, I’ve been over at the KU library a lot.”

  “You go to the library during summer vacation?” Derek said. “Geez.”

  “Calvin, jump on his face, will you?” Jeep’s brother was only too glad to accommodate, leaping and glomming onto Derek’s neck like a chimp.

  “I can’t breathe!”

  Jeep peeled the kid off and threw his arm around Calvin’s neck as if he were holding him hostage. “I’ve been studying up on things. I might just end up smart, or an FBI man.”

  “Let’s not stand here like idiots,” Mike suggested. “Let’s go eat.”

  “Yeah, because what I’ve got to tell you needs to be heard when you’re stuffing your faces.” Jeep glanced up and down the street. “How about Long John Silver’s? Oh yeah!” he added, under his breath.

  Whoever had money kicked in two or three dollars so they could order a family-sized Fish ’n More, and all six of them crowded into one booth. Naturally Calvin and Luther were banished to another table, where the first thing they did was loosen the lids on all the salt-and-pepper and sugar shakers and the malt vinegar bottle.

  When the order came, Jeep waited until Derek’s mouth was stuffed.

  “What’s that you’re eating, man?”

  “This?” He pulled the whole ball out of his mouth and studied it.

  “You’re a pig!” Sally said.

  “It’s a hush puppy,” Derek said, popping it back in his mouth.

  “That’s what I thought. Okay, this man up in Iowa? Long time ago? He was a church deacon, named Theron Trowbridge. Calvin, stop tearing open all those straws, unless you’re planning to have ’em all stuffed up your nose. Anyway, this guy Theron used to let runaway slaves stay at his house all the time. See, the poor fools would run off with no particular place to go, just following the drinking gourd—”

  “The North Star,” Dana translated.

  “—and those slave hunters who got money for bringing back the runaways? They’d get bloodhounds on the trail, see. Well, sometimes the runaways would just jump in a river to put the dogs off their scent. But up near old Theron’s place, there wasn’t even a creek. It was as dry as your bathtub, Derek.”

  “Get to the point.” Derek was growing impatient, and besides, he reminded them that the $1.50 movie would be starting in twenty minutes.

  “Okay, okay. Anyway, old Theron—Luther, don’t you pull that life preserver off the wall, or I’m throwing you to the sharks—Theron used to feed those bloodhounds.”

  “What a traitor!” cried Ahn.

  “But wait. He fed them corn dodgers.”

  Sally asked, “What are those?”

  “Well, they’re like, sort of like balls of fried cornmeal.”

  “Like we’re eating,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, right. Only Theron spiced them up good—with strychnine. In a minute, those dogs were dead meat. And you know what Theron called the corn dodgers?”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Dana said. “Hush puppies?”

  Mike gasped and spit a mouthful of soggy mush across the table.

  “Eat hearty!” Jeep said merrily.

  After the movie, at Pennie Annie’s soda shop, Jeep told them about the typhoid fever. “Everybody in town had it in 1856 or ’57, because the whole place was like a pigsty, and they drank raw milk hot out of the cow, and as soon as one person picked up the bug, voom, he passed it right along.”

  Sally said, “Like the flu we all got last winter. I swear, I coughed for two months.”

  “Except for one little difference. You survived. This typhoid stuff killed people. It’s how Miz Lizbet Charles died,” Jeep said. “I’m so sure that I’d lay my brothers’ lives down for it.”

  “Hey!” Calvin yelled.

  “But I can’t figure out how she got walled into that room.”

  Mike jumped in with, “We can develop a bunch of grotesque theories, though. Starting with—savage Indians.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies,” Dana said. “Indians are never once mentioned in the journal, and anyway the Delawares around here were friendly and peaceful.”

  “No Indians. Okay. Murder! Let’s say, somebody’s dying of the typhoid thing, and he wants Miz Lizbet dead for some reason, so he opens a vein and squirts blood into Lizbet’s eye—”

  Sally sucked to the screechy part of her Coke. “You know how boring you guys are? That’s all you ever talk about anymore—slaves and dead bodies, and now dead dogs. I mean really, squirting blood into the poor woman’s eye?”

  “Sally’s right,” Mike said. “Let’s declare a truce. No more talking about the skeletal remains of any unknown parties, as found in Dana’s house, until school starts.”

  “Two months?” Ahn protested.

  “Okay, until the Fourth of July,” Mike conceded.

  That would give Dana a few more weeks—enough time to solve the mystery—and besides, she’d promised to give up the diary at the beginning of July. Suddenly she noticed that everyone was waiting for her to say something.

  Mike said, “We’ve all agreed except you. You’re the keeper of the bones.”

  “July Fourth,” Dana agreed, nodding.

  They all crisscrossed their straws on the table. A pact.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE

  Will’s Quest

  September 1856

  When James opened the door, he was surprised to see Will all geared up for who-knows-what. He was wearing those new Levi Strauss blue trousers, and red leggings, and around his waist—a leather belt with a gun pulling one side low. “Just came to say good-bye, James.”

  James stuffed his hands into his pockets, as if he could reach in and pull out the right words to say.

  “I’m heading over by Osawatomie, to see if I can find John Brown and his men, or else I’ll join up with Lane’s Army, whichever I get to first, or whichever’s got those proslavery ruffians in the crosshairs of their rifles.” Will shifted his feet, stared him down, no doubt waiting for James to praise either his getup or his valor.

  “Well, I wish thee luck,” James said lamely.

  Will seemed irked, as if saying “good luck” wasn’t enough. “I might not come back, you know. Or I might come back in a box.”

  James nodded.

  Will pulled the gun out of the holster and twirled it. James recoiled as he might if a rattlesnake actually lunged for him. But he recovered enough to say, “Go in peace, friend.”

  “Oh mercy, Weaver, have you got it all
wrong!”

  “I s’pose that’s possible.”

  But then Will grinned, flipped the gun to his left hand, and stuck his right one out for James to shake. James pulled his hand out of his pocket so slow, as if he were drawing it through quicksand.

  “I’ll see ya when the cows come home,” Will said, and he ran off down the road, his gun flapping against his hip.

  That night James asked, “Pa, what do you say to a violent man about nonviolence?” What he really meant was, what ought I to have said to Will?

  “Thy mother’s the preacher in the family. I’m just a God-fearing man practices the law.”

  “Yes, Pa.” James knew more was coming, because Pa never could resist summing up before the jury.

  “But I reckon I’d say to such a man, the good Lord tells us to love one another, to do unto others, and in plain black and white, not to kill another living being.”

  “Yes sir, but there’s this man John Brown everyone’s talking about.”

  “A barbarian,” Pa said with a sneer.

  “Yes sir, but Miss Malone says he’s a God-fearing man, dead set against slavery, because the Bible says to be.”

  “Mark my words, the man’s a fanatic. No good will come of his swashbuckling.”

  “But Pa, at least he’s on the right side.”

  Pa came the closest to exploding that James had ever witnessed. He slammed a book down on the table, knocking the lantern to the floor. James watched in horror as a vein at Pa’s temple throbbed like a heartbeat. “How can you be on the right side, if you do violence to another human being? Some do God’s work in silent dignity.”

  Ma! Did he know?

  A long time passed, James sitting absolutely still. Then Ma came in with Rebecca, and each had a handful of sunflowers taller than Rebecca.

  “You mean to thatch our roof with those?” Pa asked—a joke without a hint of humor in his tone.

  “No, Mr. Weaver, I aim to get sunflower oil from these.”

  “And we’re going to pull out the seeds and dry them and eat them like nutmeats all winter,” Rebecca said. “If we have too much food, we’ll put them out for the squirrels.”

  Ma must have noticed the strain on James’s face, and she flashed him a question: Miz Lizbet?

  He quickly responded. “Will’s gone off to fight with John Brown or Jim Lane, one.”

  “I see.” Ma’s voice was as hard as a kernel of com. “Rebecca, take these sunflowers down to the cellar for now. Run along.”

  “How come I always have to run along whenever Ma says ‘I see’ just that way?”

  Pa pointed straight toward the cellar door. Rebecca made a point of tripping over his feet on her way to the cellar, but Pa didn’t even reach out to steady her.

  “Well, I guess I’d best sit down,” Ma said, backing into her rocker.

  “The boy’s asking about how we should act in the face of violence.”

  “I didn’t know what to say to Will, Ma.” Ma reached out and patted his neck, and he felt himself blush. He couldn’t wait until he had a beard so no one could see his blushing.

  “Back in Worcester, Massachusetts,” Pa began, “there came a slave catcher to town one day. I was there working on a case involving a Friend, an abolitionist who’d been brought up on charges for harboring runaway slaves.” He fixed his eyes on Ma, who turned away.

  He knows, James thought.

  “Well, what to do, what to do? This man was a filthy, immoral outhouse rat. He didn’t care about human beings, only about the bounty on the heads of the freed men. Well, half the men in Worcester wanted to rip this scoundrel apart, throw him into the river in a thousand pieces.”

  “Oh Lord,” Ma cried, her hand clapped to her mouth.

  “But the Good Book says we must do what God expects of us. We called a gathering at the Meeting House.”

  A bunch of Quakers, deciding the whole thing in silence, James thought to himself, and a smile stole out of the comers of his mouth.

  “No need to smirk, James, listen to thy father.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Talked it all out, we did, and it was decided how we’d respond. A swarm of us surrounded the man, fastened our indignation on his face, followed him around every minute of the day. He didn’t have a minute to relieve himself, without we were right there beside him. And we never made a threat.”

  “So what happened?” asked James.

  “Well, on the third night we let our guard down, and some men of a different persuasion—I’m not talking proslavers, son, I’m talking ‘godly’ men, like your John Brown—they pulled this vermin up out of his bed, and beat him up until he could hardly stand on his two feet.”

  Something inside James yearned to cheer, before he felt a lump of supper rise in his throat.

  “And then, Mr. Weaver?” Ma asked quietly. Not even her knitting needles clicked.

  “Well, we took the man over to the Meeting House, and we nursed him back to health, and when he could walk on his own, why the whole band of us Friends, we surrounded him again and got him safely on the train out of town. Do you understand, son?”

  “Yes sir,” he said, then, “No sir,” with a twinge of fear in his heart.

  “Well, thy mother and I pray that thee will, if thee’s tested.”

  • • •

  Light flooded James’s bedroom, so bright it woke him in the middle of a wondrous dream. There was enough light for it to be high noon, and yet James saw midnight black at the edges of the light.

  Fire!

  He jumped out of bed, yelling, “Pa, Pa, it’s burning out there!”

  Pa had already pulled on his trousers by the time James got downstairs. Ma, her hair flying around her face, was collecting buckets and kettles.

  “Take ’em outside to the pump,” Pa yelled, “and pump for all thee’s worth.”

  James looked up to see Rebecca at the top of the stairs, trailing her blanket.

  Ma snapped, “Child, wrap up in thy blanket and get thee out behind the house.”

  “Oh no, another fire?” Rebecca whined.

  “It’s a prairie fire,” Pa explained, fastening his boots. “It’ll not touch our house, if all the neighbors work quickly, and the wind’s kind. Do as thy mother says.”

  Out back, James pumped water as fast as he could, watching the flames on the horizon leap toward the moon. He saw their neighbors in the distance, silhouetted against the flames, human chains tossing buckets of water on the fury of the fire. The ones in front rotated to the back when the heat got too intense.

  The night was bursting with noise: The crackling of the dry autumn grass; the frantic yells—“Faster! More water”; howling flames sucking the air around them; cattle stampeding right into the flames; crying babies, wailing men who’d become pillars of fire.

  No time to think, no time to react. Just keep the water coming. James ran toward the flame, with six buckets slung across a shoulder pole. The water sloshed out, and he was drenched. Next trip, he’d carry only four buckets. He could run faster and not lose as much water.

  “Hurry!” the men yelled, and James sped up.

  Now Ma and Pa and all the able-bodied people of Lawrence were running with buckets and kettles. The women soaked blankets in washtubs and passed them to the men up close to beat out the flames. Some were overcome with smoke or plain exhaustion, and the women and children dragged their menfolk away to safety.

  An old hand on the prairie recommended that they build a backfire, which made no sense at all to James until he remembered Grampa Baylor saying, “Thee must fight fire with fire, James.” It took forever until the two fires met and leaped twenty, thirty feet into the air. Another hour or two passed before it was all under control, just about the time the sun was beginning to turn the sky the color of flame again.

  But the air was black with smoke and soot from the two houses that had been in the path when the flames jumped Quail Feather Creek. The air was thick enough to grab by the handful. People began to s
tumble home, murmuring reassuring words to one another. In the morning, after some rest, they’d assess the damages, clean up, count their cattle.

  James tumbled back into bed with his boots still on. He turned his sheets wet and black, but he was asleep in a minute and barely noticed when Rebecca slid in beside him.

  “James?”

  “Phmph?”

  “Was thee a hero out there?”

  “Hush up and let me sleep.” He drifted peacefully downward—and heard a small voice, as though it came from the far reaches of the open prairie.

  “Was thee scared?”

  James could make his voice say these words, without opening his eyes, almost without moving his lips. “Rebecca, thee must learn to fight fire with fire. That’s all there is to it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR

  I’m Melting, I’m Melting!

  Dana’s summer was twirling away like smoke from a chimney, wasted and directionless. She and her mother peeled wallpaper from another room (no bodies hidden there), and Dana helped with mailings for the Save Wolcott Castle campaign, which her father had taken up with a driving vengeance.

  But with the kids, it just wasn’t the same. When she saw Mike or Derek or Ahn, this thing about not mentioning Lizbet Charles grew and grew and filled the space with unspeakable emptiness. She remembered someone on TV once saying, “Whatever you do, don’t think of pink elephants,” and then, of course, that’s all you could think of.

  Dana’s house was headquarters for Save Wolcott Castle. Each spare room was filled with posters, computer printouts, stamps, envelopes, and government documents.

  “Aw, Dad, why can’t I sneak in and see the house?” Dana asked.

  Her father’s answer was firm: “No way. It’s too dangerous.”

  “But you’ve been in it.”

  “I have life insurance. Don’t ask me again; it’s out of the question until the restoration is well under way. If we raise the money.”

  With the big July Fourth fund-raiser coming up, no one really wanted to make the annual visit to the Shannon side of the family, but they had nonrefundable tickets, and so Dana and her parents went to southern California.

  Her least favorite relative was her cousin Tonie, the snob, who’d be a freshman in the fall. Tonie thought Kansas was a laugh riot (“People really live there?”), and she had her usual Wizard of Oz stuff to goad Dana with.