The Good Lord Bird (12 page)

“That can't be!”

“Yep. Deader than yesterday's beer.”

That floored me. “That's a low-down, rotten, dirty piece of luck!” I said.

“How's that?”

“I mean it's rotten luck that . . . I ain't never seen him dead, him being a famous outlaw and all. You seen him surely?”

“He's stinking to high heaven right now, the nigger-stealing thief. I seen him hit at the bank and fall into the Marais des Cygnes myself. I would'a run down there and chopped his head off myself but”—he cleared his throat—“me and Randy had to run 'round to protect the flank. Plus there was a hardware store on the back end of town that needed cleaning out, if you get my drift, being that them Free Staters won't be needin' this stuff . . .”

I knowed he was wrong about the Old Man's whereabouts then, and I was relieved. But I had to take care of myself too, so I said, “I am so glad he is gone, for this territory is now safe for good white folks to live free and clear.”

“But you ain't white.”

“Half-white. Plus we got to take care of the coloreds here, for they needs us. Right, Bob?”

Bob looked away. I knowed he was mad.

I reckoned Chase decided I was close enough to white for him, for Bob's manner sullied him. “You's a sour-faced coon,” he muttered, “and I ought to bust you 'cross the jibs for attitude.” He turned to me. “What kind of work you seeking in Lawrence that you carry 'round such a sour nigger?”

“Trim's my business,” I said proudly, for I could cut hair.

He perked up. “Trim?”

Now, having growed up with whores and squaws at Dutch's, I should'a knowed what that word “trim” meant. But the truth is, I didn't.

“I sell the best trim a man can get. Can do two or three men in an hour.”

“That many?”

“Surely.”

“Ain't you a little young to be selling trim?”

“Why, I'm twelve near as I can tell it, and can sell trims just as good as the next person,” I said.

His manner changed altogether. He polited up, wiping his face clean with his neckerchief, fluffing his clothes, and straightening out his ragged shirt. “Wouldn't you rather have a job waiting or washing?”

“Why wash dishes when you can do ten men in an hour?”

Chase's face got ripe red. He reached in his sack and drawed out a whiskey bottle. He sipped it and passed it to Randy. “That must be some kind of record,” he said. He looked at me out the corner of his eye. “You want to do me one?”

“Out here? On the trail? It's better to be in a warm tavern, with a stove cooking and heating your victuals, while you enjoys a toot and a tear. Plus I can clip your toenails and soak your corns at the same time. Feet's my specialty.”

“Ooh, that stirs my britches,” he said. “Listen, I know a place there that's perfect for you. I know a lady who'll give you a job. It's in Pikesville, not Lawrence.”

“That ain't in our direction.”

For the first time, Randy opened his talking hole. “Sure it is,” he said. “Unless you playing us for a fool. You all could be lying. 'Cause you ain't showed us no papers—'bout you or him.”

He looked rough enough to scratch a match off his face. I didn't have no choice, really, for he had called me out so I said, “You is not a gentleman, sir, to accuse a young lady of my background of lying. But, being that it's dangerous on this trail for a girl like myself, I reckon Pikesville is as good a place to go as any. And if I can make money there selling trims as you claims, why not?”

They ordered Bob to help unload their horses and mules, then spotted some knickknacks among the stolen goods the Old Man's sons had left about. They jumped off their horses to gather that stuff.

The moment they was out of earshot, Bob leaned over from the driver's seat and hissed, “Aim your lies in a different direction.”

“What I done?”

“Trim means ‘tail,' Henry. Birds and the bees. All that.”

When they come back I seen the glint in their eyes, and I was tied in a knot. I'd have gived anything to see Owen's sour face come charging, but he didn't come. They tied their beasts to ours, throwed what they gathered up in the wagon, and we rolled off.

Pie

W
e 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
talked about that
. There weren't nothing about himself he didn't seem to want to talk about, which gived me another lesson on being a girl. Men will spill their guts about horses and their new boots and their dreams to a woman. But if you put 'em in a room and turn 'em loose on themselves, it's all guns, spit, and tobacco. And don't let 'em get started on their Ma. Chase wouldn't stop stretching his mouth about her and all the great things she done.

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 could hear a thousand miles down the Missouri. I wouldn't throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.

She surveyed the room slowly like a priestess, and when she seen Chase, her expression changed. She quick-timed to the bottom of the stairs and kicked him. He toppled off the stair like a rag doll as the men laughed. She came down to the bottom landing and stood over him, her hands on her hips. “Where's my money?”

Chase got up sheepishly, dusting himself off. “That's a hell of a way to treat the man who just killed Old John Brown with his bare hands.”

“Right. And I quit buying gold claims last year. I don't care who you killed. You owe me nine dollars.”

“That much?” he said.

“Where is it?”

“Pie, I got something better than nine dollars. Look.” He pointed at me and Bob.

Pie looked right past Bob. Ignored him. Then she glared at me.

White fellers on the prairie, even white women, didn't pay two cents' worth of attention to a simple colored girl. But Pie was the first colored woman I seen in the two years since I started wearing that getup, and she smelled a rat right off.

She blew through her lips. “Shit. Whatever that ugly thing is, it sure needs pressing.” She turned to Chase. “You got my money?”

“What about the girl?” Chase said. “Miss Abby could use her. Wouldn't that square us?”

“You got to talk to Miss Abby about that.”

“But I carried her all the way from Kansas!”

“Must'a been some party, ya cow head. Kansas ain't but half a day's ride. You got my money or not?”

Chase got up, brushing himself off. “Course I do,” he muttered. “But Abby'll be hot if she finds out you let this tight little thing shimmy across the road and work for the competition.”

Pie frowned. He had her there.

“And I ought to get special favor,” he throwed in, “on account of I had to kill John Brown and save the whole territory and all, just to get back to you. So can we go upstairs?”

Pie smirked. “I'll give you five minutes,” she said.

“I take ten minutes to whiz,” he protested.

“Whizzes is extra,” she said. “Come on. Bring her, too.” She moved upstairs, then stopped, glaring at Bob, who had started up the stairs behind me. She turned to Chase.

“You can't bring that nigger up here. Put him in the nigger pen out back, where everybody parks their niggers.” She pointed to the side door of the dining hall. “Miss Abby'll give him some work tomorrow.”

Bob looked at me wild eyed.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but he belongs to me.”

It was the first thing I said to her, and when she throwed them gorgeous brown eyes on me, I like to have melted like ice in the sun. Pie was something.

“You can sleep out there with him, too, then, you high-yellow, cornlooking ugler-ation.”

“Wait a second,” Chase said. “I drug her all this way.”

“For what?”

“For the men.”

“She's so ugly, she'd curdle a cow. Look, you want me to job you or not?”

“You can't leave her in the pen,” Chase said. “She said she ain't a nigger.”

Pie laughed. “She's close enough!”

“Miss Abby wouldn't like that. What if she gets hurt out there? Let her come upstairs and send the nigger to the pen. I got a stake in this, too,” he said.

Pie considered it. She looked at Bob and said, “G'wan to the back door out there. They'll fetch you some eatings in the yard. You.” She pointed to me. “C'mon up.”

There weren't nothing to do. It was late and I was exhausted. I turned to Bob, who looked downright objectable. “Sleepin' here's better'n the prairie, Bob,” I said. “I'll come get you later.”

I was good to my word, too. I did come for him later, but he never forgave me for sending him out the door that day. That was the end of whatever closeness was between us. Just the way of things.

—

We followed Pie upstairs. She stopped at a room, throwed open the door, and pushed Chase inside. Then she turned to me and pointed to a room two doors down. “Go in there. Tell Miss Abby I sent you, and that you come to work. She'll see you get a hot bath first. You smell like buffalo dung.”

“I don't need no bath!”

She grabbed my hand, stomped down the hall, knocked on a door, flung it open, throwed me into the room, and closed the door behind me.

I found myself staring at the back of a husky, well-dressed white woman setting at a vanity. She turned away from the vanity and rose up to face me. She was wearing a long white fancy scarf 'round her neck. Atop that neck was a face with enough powder on it to pack the barrel of a cannon. Her lips was thick and painted red and clamped a cigar between them. Her forehead was high, and her face was flushed red and curdled in anger like old cheese. That woman was so ugly, she looked like a death threat. Behind her, the room was dimly lit by candles. The smell of the place was downright infernal. Come to think of it, I have never been in a hotel room in Kansas but that didn't smell worse than the lowliest flophouse you could find in all of New England. The odor in that place was ripe enough to peel the wallpaper off the worst sitting room in Boston. The sole window in the room hadn't been disturbed by water for years. It was dotted with specks of dead flies that clung to it like black dots. Along the far wall, which was lit up by two burning candles, two figures lounged on two beds that set side by side. Between the beds sat a tin bathtub that, to my reckoning, in the dim light, appeared to be filled with water and what looked to be a naked woman.