The Good Lord Bird

think about heading north to your freedom where it is safer for a girl to be.”

Well doggone it I was ready to hit out hooting and hollering that minute. I was done with the smell of gunpowder and blood. Him and his men could pick fights and spur their horses into shoot-outs for the rest of their days as far as I was concerned. I was finished. But I tried not to show too much joy about the whole bit. I said, “Yes, Captain, I will honor your wishes.”

Osawatomie was a full day’s ride from Prairie City, and Owen decided to lead his men on the main California Trail, which was a little more risky for chance meetings with Pro Slave patrols, but he wanted to get back to his Pa in quick fashion. The Adairs who I was set to stay with lived off that trail too, in the same general direction as Osawatomie, so all the more reason to take the trail. It worked out well at first. As we rode, I gived a thought or two to where I’d slip off to once Owen and the Old Man’s men left. I had a few boy’s items I’d picked up in my travels, and a few little items. But where to go? North? What was that? I didn’t know north in any way, shape, fashion, or form in them days. I was considering this thought as I rode along with Fred, which always made me feel better about myself, for Fred didn’t require but a half a mind to talk to, being that he weren’t but half a glass, which made him a good talking partner, for I could think one thing to myself and chat to him about another, and he generally was agreeable to anything I said.

Me and him lingered in the rear of the column, with Weiner and Owen leading up front, and Bob in the middle. Fred seemed blue.

“I heard Owen say you know all your letters now,” he said.

“I do,” I said. I was proud of it.

“I’m wondering why I can’t hold a letter in my head,” he said drearily. “I learns one at a time and forgets ’em right off. Everybody else can hold their letters in their head except me. Even you.”

“Knowing letters ain’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I said. “I ain’t read but one book. It’s a Bible picture book I got from the Old Man.”

“You think you could read it to me?”

“Why, I’d be happy to,” I said.

When we stopped to water the horses and eat, I got my book out and throwed a few words at Fred. I gived him my version of it anyway, for while I knowed my letters, I didn’t know more than a few words, so I cooked up what I didn’t know. I gived him the book of John, and John’s tellin’ the people of Jesus’s coming and Jesus being so great that John weren’t even worthy to fasten his slippers. The story growed to the size of an elephant in my retelling of it, for when’s the last time you read in the Bible ’bout a horse named Cliff pulling his wagon ’round into the city of Jerusalem wearing slippers? But Fred never said a cross or contrary word as he listened. He liked it fine. “It’s the most dandy reading of the Bible I ever heard,” he declared.

We mounted up and followed the trail that crossed to the north side of the Marais des Cygnes River, which cuts through Osawatomie. We were passing close to the Brown settlement but not quite at it, when the smell of smoke and hollering suddenly drifted into the wind.

Owen rode ahead to look, then returned at full gallop. “The Missourians is having it out with a bunch of Free State Indians, looks like. Maybe we should run back and fetch Father.”

“No. Let’s join the Indians and attack the rebels,” Weiner said.

“We got orders from our Pa,” Owen said.

Them two argued about it, with Weiner favoring joining the Indians and attacking the redshirts, and Owen in favor of obeying the Old Man’s orders and movin’ on to check on Osawatomie, or at least run back and fetch the Old Man. “By the time we get anywhere, the redshirts will have burned them Indians out and moved into Osawatomie,” Weiner said.

“We got my orders to ride on,” Owen said.

Weiner was itching mad but kept quiet. He was a stout, stubborn man who loved a good fight, and you couldn’t tell him nothing. We rode closer and seen the Free State Indians and Missourians engaging through the thin pine trees of the wooded area in the clearing. It weren’t a big fight, but them Indians defending their free settlement was outnumbered, and when Weiner spied it, he couldn’t help hisself. He rode off, busting through the woods on his horse, leaning low. The other men followed him.

Owen watched them go, frowning. He turned on his horse and said, “Fred, you and Onion ride forward toward Osawatomie and wait outside the settlement while we chase off these Missourians. I’ll be back shortly.” And off he went.

Now, Bob was setting there on his mount and he watched them ride off. And nobody said nothing to him. And he rode off in another direction. Said, “I’m gone,” and took off. That nigger ran off a total of seven times, I believe, from John Brown. Never did get free from the Old Man right off. He had to run all the way back to slavery—to Missouri territory—to get free. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

That left me and Fred setting there on our stolen ponies. Fred looked itching for a fight, too, for he was a Brown, and them Browns liked a good gunfight. But no way in God’s kingdom was I gonna go over there and fight it out with the Missourians. I was done. So I said, just to distract him, “Gosh, this little girl is hungry.”

That snapped him right to me. “Ohhh, I will get you some eatings, Little Onion,” he said. “Nobody lets my Little Onion go hungry, for you is halfway to being growed now, and you needs your rest and victuals so you’ll grow into a great big sissy.” He didn’t mean nothing by it and I took no offense from it, for neither of us knowed what the word really meant, though the leanings of it from what I knowed weren’t flattering. Still, it was the first time he said the word sissy since he first come to knowing of my secret some time back. And I took note of it and was glad to be leaving him before he gived me away.

We rode forward into a patch of thick woods about a mile farther up the trail, then cut off it to follow an old logging trail. It was peaceful and quiet, once we drawed away from the shooting. We crossed a creek and come to where the old logging trail picked up again on the other side and tied our horses off there. Fred pulled off his hardware and got his blanket and hunting things out—beads, dried corn, dried yams. Took him several minutes to unstrap them guns, for he was loaded. Once he done that, he give me a squirrel rifle and took one for hisself. “Normally I wouldn’t use this,” he said, “but there’s enough shooting ’round here so it won’t draw no attention, not if we hurry.”

It weren’t dark yet but evening was coming. We walked about a half mile along the creek bank, with Fred showing me the markings and the likes of where a beaver family was busy making a dam. He said, “I’ll cross the creek and work him from the other side. You come up this way, and when he hears you coming, that’ll flush him out, and we’ll just meet yonder near where the creek bends to get him.”

He crept over on the other side and disappeared in the thickets, while I come up on the other side of it. I was about halfway to where we was to meet when I turned and seen a white man standing about five yards off, holding a rifle.

“What you doing with that rifle, missy?” he said.

“Nuthin’, sir,” I said.

“Put it down, then.”

I done like he said, and he come up on me, snatched my rifle from the ground, and, still holding his rifle on me, said, “Where’s your master?”

“Oh, he’s ’cross the creek.”

“Ain’t you got a sir in your mouth, nigger?”

I was out of practice, see. I hadn’t been ’round normal white folks in months, demanding you call ’em sir and what all. The Old Man didn’t allow none of that. But I righted up. I said, “Yes, sir.”

“What’s your marse’s name?”

I couldn’t think of nothing, so I said, “Fred.”

“What?”

“Just Fred.”

“You call your marse Fred or just Fred or Marse Fred or Fred sir?”

Well, that tied me in knots. I should’a named Dutch, but Dutch seemed a long way away, and I was confused.

“Come with me,” he said.

We started off through the woods away from the creek, and I followed on foot. We hadn’t gotten five steps when I heard Fred holler. “Where you going?”

The man stopped and turned. Fred was standing dead in the middle of the creek, his squirrel gun cocked to