“You’ve got it looking right nice in here,” the soldier said. Then he plucked at the ripped knee of his trousers and said, “My dang horse bolted on me. An owl hooted or something, and off she went. You folks wouldn’t have a horse I could requisition. It would only be for a day or two.”
“You’d have to speak to my father.”
The soldier said, “Your father isn’t here. I’d guess he’s ridden off somewhere on the very horse I was hoping to borrow.” Then he said, “You heard of Osawatomie John Brown? Of course you have. Everybody has. I can see you’re a fine boy. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you go telling lies right here in a church, little brother. You know the kinds of things John Brown has been up to.”
My father said he had heard stories.
The soldier nodded. “There are decent folks around here who’d help him any chance they got. Ministers of the Gospel. They’d let him bring his old mule right into their church if he asked them to. They’d deem it an honor. I find that remarkable. Those fugitives would come in with their weapons and their wounds and their dirty boots, they’d come in bleeding on the floor, and that would be just fine. Then a soldier of the United States government comes along looking for them, as he is paid to do, and nobody even offers him a cup of coffee.”
My father said, “We have coffee. I’m pretty sure we do.” The soldier stood up. He said, “My platoon left me about two miles from here and took off east. They knew where those fellows would likely be off to next as soon as the moon was down. They didn’t have to find those road apples you left out there on the front step to get a general sense of the situation. So if your father’s gone with them, he might be seeing a world of trouble right about now.” He said, “I thought I should tell you that before I drank your coffee.”
My father said his lips were so numb he couldn’t move them to speak. The soldier said, “I’ll just get myself a drink at your well.” And he walked out of the church and got his drink and walked away up the road, favoring that one leg a little. My father hated to believe he was the man my grandfather shot, but he did believe it. I don’t mean to suggest that he killed him outright, but in those days in that place a man could die of a whole lot of things besides a bullet wound.
He had walked to the next farm and requisitioned their horse and taken off in the general direction he thought his platoon had gone, though, if it was the same man, he drifted somewhat to the south of it. Brown and the others had circled back and to the south, knowing they would be followed and making for the hills. And my grandfather was ambling along toward home with that big gun in his belt and those two bloody shirts under his arm, which was very foolish. And he was bare-chested under his coat, since he had swapped his own shirt for the two he had brought back with him. But he was never really a practical man again after that day, my father said. I would not have known where to find the origins of his impracticality, but I am certainly willing to vouch for the fact of it. In any case, a lone soldier did approach him and did hail him down, and he was indeed riding a chestnut horse that could have been the neighbor’s. The soldier began to question him, and my grandfather was caught without a lie. But he had that gun, and the gun was loaded.
“Well, I did, I winged him,” my grandfather said. “Then his horse bolted. He took quite a spill.” And he left him there on the ground. “Old Brown asked if I’d be willing to cover their retreat if occasion arose. I said I would, and I did.” He said, “What was I to do with him, bring him back here?” His point was that the congregation had put a lot of thought and effort into hollow walls and hidden cellars in their various cabins and outbuildings, tunnels that started from false-bottomed potato bins and opened up under haystacks a hundred yards away and so forth. There was a false-bottomed coffin they kept in the church, and an open grave with a floor of burlap stretched over a couple of boards and covered with dirt, opening on a tunnel that came up in the woodshed. All that effort was for freeing the captives, and it had to be protected for their sake. The soldier could only have concluded that my grandfather was in serious cahoots with John Brown, and attention of that kind could destroy everything.
The old man told my father what had happened only because my father told him about finding the soldier in the church. “Dark fellow, you say? Kind of a drawl to his speech?” He told my father that it was a mortally serious
