The Curse of the Buttons (9 page)

“Hello?” he called. “Who’s there? Milton! Morris!” Nothing. “Guys?” Maybe they were going to leap out at him.

Ike grasped his slingshot and took in his surroundings. Trees, logs, a discarded barrel. They were going to surround him and take him prisoner. He leaped to another log, then dove to the ground and crouched behind the barrel. Still nothing.

He dug a stone out of the ground with his thumb. Too heavy for his slingshot. He was a cannon and this was his cannonball. “Ike Button attacks Colonel Oak!” He tucked the stone under his chin, then launched it, aiming for a low knot in the trunk, but it went left.

“Ow!”

Ike spotted blue calico behind a bush. He crept closer and pulled a branch aside.

It was a woman.

A colored woman.

Crouching on the ground with a tattered bonnet in her hand, rubbing her forehead.

Ike froze.

Slowly, she put the bonnet on her head, then stood, looking down at him.

Like his mother, she wasn’t young or old. Her narrow feet were wrapped in strips of cloth instead of shoes, and the hem of her dress was torn and dirty. A wisp of recognition and alarm nudged at the edge of his mind.

There was an angry welt on her forehead, where the stone had struck her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shook her head, putting a finger to her lips and looking past him.

Ike glanced behind him. He was alone. Alone in the woods with a colored woman. He wished for Milton and Morris to spring out at him, or even for the men on horses to come back. He wanted to turn and run, but his legs wouldn’t obey.

She pulled a small satchel from behind the tree and backed up, waving him away.

Then Ike remembered. The poster.

Runaway from the subscriber . . .

“Mary?” Ike said softly. It felt wrong to address a grown woman by her first name, but the bold letters on the poster had offered no surname. He looked at his feet.

She gasped.

Illegal to harbor contraband.
Cutts and Simms’s words came back to Ike.
We got friends . . .
Could the riders be Cutts and Simms’s bounty hunter friends?

“Please, son,” she said slowly.

Her voice was thin like his mother’s, and weary.

“Yours is a kind face. If there is a kind heart behind it, walk away and forget what you saw here.”

Ike couldn’t look at her. His stomach felt sick. He wished he had not come here. But if this were the Mary from the poster, she would have two boys with her. Maybe it wasn’t her.

“Do you have two boys?” he asked.

She straightened abruptly and fixed her gaze on him, stepping toward him, twigs snapping under her feet like the pops of a distant gun.

She reached out and touched his arm.

Ike flinched.

“You hurt yourself,” she said. He looked down and saw a trickle of blood on his arm. The brambles. She took off her bonnet. There was a wide cloth strap. She pressed one end of it on his arm, dabbing off the blood.

The weight of her hand was rough and warm. “There,” she said softly. She looked into his eyes. Her face was startlingly smooth, like a girl’s, but her eyes were old and tired. “I do have two boys. We got separated. They’ll find a way here. I’m sure of it. My boys are like you. Quick, bad aim. They can’t keep a secret for sweets or silver. I don’t expect you will, either. But if you could just give me time. Silence. A day. Two. Time for my boys to catch up. And if you have to tell, tell a friend.”

Was silence
aid
? He looked up at the woman, then over his shoulder for Barfoot. Was he supposed to call for help? Ask her to come with him? Turn her in to the sheriff before the bounty hunters found out she was here?

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. He spun around and ran. He stumbled over tree roots and snagged his pants on a bramble. He looked back and saw Mary watching. Then she turned and disappeared into the thick.

“Barfoot!” Ike pulled Barfoot’s snout out of the daisy patch at the boardinghouse on Water Street. He leaned his forehead into his horse’s neck and took a deep breath, then another. He wished he could unsee what he’d seen. A carriage clattered by and Ike ducked under Barfoot’s belly and stood out of sight of the street.

“You there!”

Ike jumped. Mrs. Kraft burst out of the boardinghouse door and waved a rolling pin at him. Did she know? Was she going to turn him in?

“Your nag is blocking my view of the street, young man. Skedaddle!”

A bee buzzed up out of the flowers just then and landed on Barfoot’s nose. Barfoot snorted in alarm, shook his head back and forth, then took off at a near trot. Ike ran after him, shouting over his shoulder, “He’s a he!”

Barfoot slowed back to his usual walk after a block and a half and stopped to drink out of the birdbath at the McGoverns’.

“We need to find Milton and Morris, Barfoot. Come on, boy, come on.”

They trudged up Morgan and into the alley, then circled the Hinman house. “Milton! Morris!” Ike hollered up at their window, but there was no response. Goldenrod and Marigold were inside barking, and the yard was empty.

The windows at Ike’s own house were open and there was a jumble of women’s voices, and Albirdie was walking briskly down the alley and into his yard.

She didn’t look like herself. She had on a clean calico dress and her hair was neatly pulled back. The story of Mary nearly fell right out of his mouth, but she jumped in first.

“Aren’t you coming?” She turned and marched toward the porch, and despite his resolve to maintain his distance from Albirdie, Ike found himself following her.

“Where? Why are you dressed up? Did something happen to the men?”

But before she could answer, they’d reached his house, the house he’d been consolidated out of, from which came a great racket of voices, and Albirdie Woolley walked right in as if she’d been invited.

The front room was full of women. Dining chairs were interspersed with parlor chairs, and Mrs. Hinman stood in the center of it all, Ike’s mother at her side, her eyes weary, but wearing her company smile.
Mary.

Milton and Morris were in the dining room, serving themselves wide wedges of pie. Ike backed toward the door.

“. . . each responsible for . . .” Mrs. Hinman was saying, but Ike interrupted.

“Is there news?”

“No, young man, there is no news, and
you
”— she pointed her finger at Albirdie —​“Albirdie Woolley. Why, I never.”

“You called for the women of the neighborhood, so my father sent me, since we have no other woman in our household.” She stepped over the little girls and wedged herself a spot on the sofa between Susannah and Mrs. Gorman. “Come on, Ike.” She pointed to the footstool in front of Mrs. Gorman, who moved her feet obligingly.

“Well. I . . .
All right
,
” said Mrs. Hinman with an air of resignation. “But, Miss Woolley, keep in mind that we are a Soldiers’ Aid Society, gathered in an effort to help our men at war. We are not going to get mixed up in any of that abolitionist talk of your father’s. I dare say, we are women of varied notions that may otherwise separate us, but the notion that brings us together here is
service.
” She looked around the room, slowly, taking in each face as she spoke solemnly. “We are not here to discuss politics.”

“OK, OK, now, Myrtle,” said Aunt Betsy. “Let’s get back to business, shall we?”

“Ike!” Morris said loudly.

“Hush, now, pet, and eat your pie,” said Mrs. Hinman.

Albirdie grabbed Ike’s arm as he stood to go, but he brushed her away and picked his way over shoes and skirt hems to the dining room.

“Just the man we’re looking for,” said Milton. “Let’s get out of here.”

Ike looked at Albirdie. She shook her head furiously.

“Come on,” Morris said. Milton held out a deck of cards.

Ike avoided Albirdie’s angry stare and followed the boys out to the yard table.

“Has your dad come back?” Ike asked in a low voice. “When will we leave?”

“Do you have the compass?”

“No.”

“There you go, then,” said Milton. “We’ll take care of the boat once you have the compass.”

“But I said a map.”

“Do you have a map?”

“My aunt Betsy has a map on the wall in her house. I’ll get that.”

“A wall map?” said Morris. “That’s too big. What you don’t know about boat travel is that everything needs to be compact. What we need is a map about this big.” He held out his hands in a small rectangle.

“I can make one,” said Ike. “I’ll do it now.”

“Just make it right,” said Morris.

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” Ike said. “Agreed?”

“Tomorrow, the next day . . .”

“Tomorrow,” said Ike, and then repeated it. “ Tomorrow.”

“Ike!” Jane hollered. “Mother says Barfoot needs food!”

“Barfoot needs food!” LouLou echoed. Jane was teaching LouLou and the little cousins to skip. An army of hard-soled shoes ricocheted like bullets off the porch boards, while Ike sat on the floor in his old room, pencil poised over the Mississippi. The floor was heaped with linens donated for the war effort. A bolt of yellow calico, a jumble of pillow slips, a stack of threadbare but freshly washed sheets, waiting to be made into handkerchiefs.

“And water!” Jane called.

“And water!” LouLou echoed.

“I know!” he hollered back. He had Aunt Betsy’s map spread out and was copying it — with great attention to detail and scale — onto a small sheet of paper. It was hard to concentrate, and if he could think of any other way to get a boat, he would leave Milton and Morris out of the whole plan.

Drawing the river coming north made Ike think about Mary, and he set down his pencil. The longest he’d ever kept a secret was . . . never. And something like this? It filled his stomach with dread. He hadn’t been able to manage a whole boiled egg for breakfast, much less a biscuit. Usually, the ritual of puzzling out his men on a checkerboard with Albirdie settled his insides. But that was before. He went to the window, hoping to see Milton and Morris coming to get him.

Ike studied what he’d drawn. It didn’t look as though it could keep them from getting lost, but it would have to do. This is how Palmer must have felt as he set out for the west: like there was no steady ground under his feet, yet a whole new world was before him. No more home problems; no more waiting.

He had one thing left to do. Mary had said if he did tell, to make sure it was a friend. If he passed it on to someone else, would his secret stop gnawing at him? That was it. Susannah. Susannah was more than a friend. She was family.

He ventured past the skipping girls into Aunt Sue’s empty kitchen.

“Susannah!” he called. There was no answer.

LouLou and Jane and the little girls clamored in.

“Did you feed Barfoot?” they said. “Let us ride him!”

“Later.” Ike grabbed the pail from the porch, dodged skipping Jane, and pumped water from the well. He carried the bucket to the lean-to. There was Susannah, nestled between two straw bales, a mug of water in her hand and a book open on her lap.

“Shhh!” she hissed.

“What are you —?”

“Shhh!” she said again.

Ike sat down beside her.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered. She held up her nursing book. “Avoiding them,” she said. “Listen to this.
A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house. . . . Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children.
”

“Susannah, I’ve got to tell you something.”

“Not now. Quiz me,” she said. “I’ve got nearly this whole section memorized. She held the book out to Ike. “Just sit down! Don’t let my mother see that you’re talking to someone.”

Ike sat on the ground, out of sight of the house.

“Kate heard from Mrs. Hinman that they’ll be taking women as nurses in the field, and I promised not to tell, because her mother and my mother would have fits, but if I learn this, we can join up.”

Ike studied his cousin warily. He had to tell someone or he’d explode. Someone he could trust. And maybe Albirdie would lend him the compass.

“I’ll be back,” said Ike. “I’ve got somewhere to be.”

“Wait!” said Susannah. “Ike!”