Pie
We followed the trail half a day northeast, dead into Missouri slave territory. I sat behind Bob in the wagon while Chase and Randy followed on horseback. On the trail, Chase did all the talking. He talked about his Ma. Talked about his Pa. Talked about his kids. His wife was half cousin to his Pa and he
I let him go on, for I was more concerned with the subject of trim, and what my doings was gonna be in that department. After a while them two climbed in the back of the wagon and opened a bottle of rye, which helped commence me to singing right away, just to keep them two off the subject. There ain’t nothing a rebel loves more than a good old song, and I knowed several from my days at Dutch’s. They rode happily back there, sipping moral suasion while I sang “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Please, Ma, I Ain’t Coming Home,” and “Grandpa, Your Horse Is in My Barn.” That cooled them for a while, but dark was coming. Thankfully, just before true night swallowed the big prairie sky, the rolling plains and mosquitoes gived way to log cabins and squatters’ homes, and we hit Pikesville.
Pikesville was rude business back in them days, just a collection of run-down cabins, shacks, and hen coops. The streets were mud, with rocks, tree stumps, and gullies lying about the main road. Pigs roamed the alleyways. Ox, mules, and horses strained to pull carts full of junk. Piles of freight sat about uncollected. Most of the cabins was unfinished, some without roofs. Others looked like they were on the verge of collapse altogether, with rattlesnake skins, buffalo hide, and animal skins drying out nearby. There were three grog houses in town, built one on top of the other practically, and every porch railing on ’em was thick with tobacco spit. That town was altogether a mess. Still, it was the grandest town I’d ever seen to that point.
We hit the town to a great hubbub, for they’d heard rumors about the big gunfight at Osawatomie. No sooner had we pulled up than the wagon was surrounded. An old feller asked Chase, “Is it true? Is Old John Brown dead?”
“Yes, sir,” Chase crowed.
“You killed him?”
“Why, I throwed every bullet I had at him sure as you standing there—”
“Hoorah!” they hollered. He was pulled off the wagon and clapped and pounded on the back. Randy got sullen and didn’t say a word. I reckon he was wanted and there was a reward for him somewhere, for the minute they pulled Chase off the wagon howling, Randy slipped on his horse, grabbed his pack mule, and slipped off. I never seen him again. But Chase was riding high. They drug him to the nearest grog house, sat him down, pumped him full of whiskey, and surrounded him, drunks, jackals, gamblers, and pickpockets, shouting, “How’d you do it?”
“Tell us the whole thing.”
“Who shot first?”
Chase cleared his throat. “Like I said, there was a lotta shooting—”
“Course there was! He was a murdering fool!”
“A jackal!”
“Horse thief, too! Yellow Yank!”
More laughter. They just throwed the lie on him. He weren’t aiming to lie. But they pumped him full of rotgut as he could stand it. They bought every bit of his stolen booty, and he got soused, and after a while he couldn’t help but to pump the thing up and go along with it. His story changed from one drink to the next. It growed in the tellin’ of it. First he allowed that he shot the Old Man hisself. Then he killed him with his bare hands. Then he shot him twice. Then he stabbed and dismembered him. Then he throwed his body into the river, where the alligators lunched on what was left. Up and down he went, back and forth, this way and that, till the thing stretched to the sky. You’d a thunk it would’a dawned on some of them that he was cooking it all up, the way his story growed legs. But they was as liquored up as him, when folks wanna believe something, the truth ain’t got no place in that compartment. It come to me then that they feared Old John Brown something terrible; feared the idea of him as much as they feared the Old Man hisself, and thus they was happy to believe he was dead, even if that knowledge was just five minutes long before the truth would come about to it and kill it dead.
Bob and I set quiet while this was going on, for they weren’t paying us no mind, but each time I stood up to step toward the door and slip away, catcalling and whistling drove me back to my chair. Women or girls of any type was scarce out on the prairie, and even though I was a mess—my dress was flattened out, my bonnet torn, and my hair underneath it was a wooly mess—the men offered me every kind of pleasure. They outworked a cooter in the nasty chattering department. Their comments come as a surprise to me, for the Old Man’s troops didn’t cuss nor drink and was generally respecters of the woman race. As the night wore on, the hooting and howling toward me growed worse, and it waked Chase, who ended up with his head on the bar, lubricated and stewed past reason, out his stupor.
He rose from the bar and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. I am tired after killing the most dastardly criminal of the last hundred years. I aim to take this little lady across the road to the Pikesville Hotel, where Miss Abby is no doubt holding my room for me on the Hot Floor, on account of having heard of my late rasslings with that demon who I wrestled the breath from and fed him to the wolves in the name of the free living state of Missoura! God bless America.” He pushed me and Bob out the door and staggered across the street to the Pikesville Hotel.
The Pikesville was a high-class hotel and saloon compared to the previous two shitholes that I aforementioned, but I ought to say here that looking back, it weren’t much better. Only after I seen dwellings in the East did I learn that the finest hotel in Pikesville was a pigsty compared to the lowliest flophouse in Boston. The first floor of the Pikesville Hotel was a dark, candlelit drinking room, with tables and a bar. Behind it was a small middle room with a long dining table for eating. On the side of that room was a door that led to a hall leading to a back alley. At the back of the room was a set of stairs leading to the second floor.
There was a great hubbub when Chase came in, for word had proceeded him. He was pounded on the back and hailed from one corner of the room to the other, drinks shoved into his hands. He hailed everyone with a great big howdy, then proceeded to the back room, where several men seated at the dining table howdied him and offered to give him their seats and more drinks. He waved them off. “Not now, fellers,” he said. “I got business on the Hot Floor.”
On the stairs at the back of the room, several women of the type that frequented Dutch’s place sat along the bottom rungs. A couple were smoking pipes, shoving the black tobacco down into the cups with wrinkled fingers and shoving the pipes into their mouths, clamping down with teeth so yellow they looked like clumps of butter. Chase staggered past them and stood at the bottom of the stairs, hollering up, “Pie! Pie darling! C’mon down. Guess who’s back.”
There was a commotion at the top of the stairs, and a woman made her way from the darkness and stepped halfway down the stairs into the dim candlelight of the room.
I once pulled a ball from the ham of a rebel stuck out near Council Bluffs after he got into a hank out there and someone throwed their pistol on him and left him bleeding and stuck. I cleared him, and he was so grateful, he drove me to town afterward and gived me a bowl of ice cream. That was something I never had before. Best thing I ever tasted in my life.
But the feeling of that ice cream running down my little red lane in summertime weren’t nothing compared to seeing that bundle of beauty coming down them stairs that first time. She would blow the hat off your head.
She was a mulatto woman. Skin as brown as a deer’s hide, with high cheekbones and big brown dewy eyes as big as silver dollars. She was a head taller than me but seemed taller. She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of smoke. I weren’t no stranger to nature’s ways then, coming on the age of twelve as I believe I was more or less that age, and having accidentally on purpose peeked into a room or three at Dutch’s place, but the knowing of a thing is different from the doing of it, and them whores at Dutch’s was generally so ugly, they’d make the train leave the track. This woman had the kind of rhythm that you
