Steal Away Home Read online

  “Is anybody in there?” asked Dana’s father.

  She was tempted to whimper, “No.”

  Then her mother slipped into the room, in a flowing red kimono. “Jeffrey, don’t tell me the girls are in here with the roosters.”

  “I’m sure they’re not,” Dana’s father said, then he pronounced each word in a precise, menacing way, “because they know it would be against the law.”

  “And the police would nab them and ship them off to Leavenworth,” her mother said, picking up on the game. “And next thing you know, they’d be starring in the sequel to Women in Chains.”

  “Well, let’s close the door and go back to sleep,” Dr. Shannon said, and the girls heard a loud banging of the door and exaggerated tramping around in the hall, then another door slamming.

  “Don’t be fooled, they’re still out there,” Dana whispered.

  “I’m used to waiting in the dark,” Ahn replied. They barely breathed, in that absolute blackness of the room where Elvira had died. Time passed—at least twenty endless minutes. There wasn’t a sound in the hall.

  “I think it’s safe now,” Dana whispered. “Let’s sneak back to my room.” They slowly slid out from under the cots and shimmied under the plastic barricade. Tiptoed across the wine-spill carpet. Dana turned the doorknob ever so slowly—not a squeak. The hall was black as the Wakarusa River. Suddenly Ahn stumbled over something. A body! She gasped: “Dana!” Then Dana put her foot on something soft and squishy and pulled it back. She flipped on the penlight. Two bodies lay sprawled across the floor—her mom in the red kimono, and her dad in his Mickey Mouse boxers.

  “Wha? Wha’s?” Her father bolted up and groped for the lamp switch nearby. “Wha’s going on?”

  “It’s The Escape of the Women in Chains,” Dana said. And she and Ahn scurried into her room and locked the door. They heard Dana’s mother mutter, “We might as well go to bed, Jeffrey. We’ve been bamboozled.”

  Later, when they were through giggling and were debating about chancing it down to the kitchen for some Doritos and bean dip, Ahn turned serious. “I really wish we’d been able to find a clue in there.”

  “Ahn?”

  “Hmm?”

  Dana felt around under her bed for the little black journal. “Look what I have.”

  Ahn caught her breath as she read the title page. “You found this in there”

  “Last week.”

  “Who’s Millicent Weaver?”

  “The lady who owned this house, I think, when Elvira was here.”

  “The murderer?” Ahn asked, her eyes wide.

  “I don’t think so. She helped slaves escape. Listen to this.”

  “May 7, 1856—A man came to the door in the middle of the night. It’s a wonder I heard him. He was bent and old, I thought maybe 70, but these Negroes age fast what with the lives they have. He’d been walking for six nights and was half delirious, afraid to ask directions. He saw my flag and thought he knew what it meant, but by the time he’d found our door, he no longer cared if he’d be captured and sent back. I made a pallet for him on the floor in front of the dying embers of the fire. He hadn’t the energy to eat. I broke bread into little pieces and placed them on his tongue, as the Catholics do Communion wafers. I held his head so he could drink some warm camomile tea. And that’s when I saw the strange markings on his ears. They’d notched him like a hog, dear Lord, so his master could always claim him.”

  “Oh Dana,” Ahn cried. “Such a thing, even in this country?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!

  May 20, 1856

  They had school only three months of the year, but somehow they accomplished as much as James had covered in a whole year in Boston. Miss Malone was working them like beasts of the field.

  James had all of his books and a pen and ruler and his sketchbook in a canvas bag slung over his back. No telling where Jeremy Macon and Will Bowers had tossed their books. He walked between them, and they were boxing at his shoulders and ears in a playful way. “Just kidding, can’t you take a joke?” they said, but James thought they were doing their best to provoke him into punching back. Well, in a minute—

  They passed Bethany Maxwell’s house, and Jeremy jerked his shirt down so he’d look less like a rabble-rouser in case Bethany happened to be peeking out from behind those prissy blue lace curtains. James barely lifted his head, so Jeremy wouldn’t see him watching for Bethany, but he thought he saw her walk past an upstairs window, and his heart leaped.

  “Will you look at that,” Jeremy said, pointing to Mount Oread. A mere bump on the face of the earth, it nevertheless towered over the city of Lawrence, and now it seemed to be crawling with men.

  James took advantage of the diversion to slip away from his friends. Friends, hah! Not like the boys back home, but better than no one.

  Will said, “What do you think they’re doing up there? Ain’t no picnic.”

  “Looks like they’re fixin’ to go to war,” Jeremy said, and he and Will gleefully rubbed their hands together as if they were warming them over a potbellied stove.

  James studied the hill. There were not just men up there, but horses and tents. Looked like they’d be camping there for a good long time. Smoke swirled up from a campfire as if it’d been called out by a snake charmer.

  “Want to climb up and investigate?” Will asked.

  “Not on your life, moron,” Jeremy answered. “Those men look mean and evil as weevils.”

  Mean? How could Jeremy tell from so far away? And evil, well, that was something altogether different. But just the same, James thought they should head home. “Well, my pa’s expecting me to help him butcher a hog,” he said, though it wasn’t true, and his father wouldn’t have the first inkling about which end to butcher, and which end to kiss.

  “We butcher hogs in the wintertime, city boy.”

  Just then they noticed a few horses trailing down the mountain. Three, four? The horses got closer, and James’s heart began to synchronize with the cloppity sound of their hooves. Looked like trouble.

  But it was just three men on not very spectacular horses—a patchy-looking bay and two dapples that sure weren’t thoroughbreds. The lead rider nosed up to James.

  “I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal William Fain, here on Federal business.” James stepped aside to let the horses pass. “These boys is my posse.” The posse looked newly deputized and not too fearsome. James’s heart slowed down.

  Will asked, “What you in town for, Marshal Fain?”

  “Looking for slave stealers.”

  “You ain’t gonna find none here,” Jeremy said. “We’re every one of us law-abiding citizens. James Weaver’s pa, he’s even a lawyer.”

  But Marshal Fain wasn’t about to be put off by a mangy flock of boys. “There’s people been stealing the Nigras, and there’s people been hiding ’em out.”

  James’s chest tightened. Should he run for home? But what if the marshal got suspicious and followed him home and went after Ma? What if he asked had they seen any runaway slaves, and Rebecca blabbed it all out about the ones that had been sleeping in their bedrooms and attic, sometimes so many of them that they put bedrolls all over the floor and had to eat in shifts. Too risky. So James stayed put.

  People came out of the Round Corner Drug Store to see what was going on. Mr. Bonds, who had a seed store, left it unattended, and some mourners streamed out of the funeral parlor, and a ladies’ sewing circle broke up from the Unitarian Church, and suddenly the streets were swarming with Lawrence folks.

  James saw Mrs. Bonds sidle up to her husband. A big elephant of a woman, she held a rifle flat against her flank.

  Marshal Fain slid off his horse and shouted for everyone to be quiet. He showed his badge around in a wide circle. The sun caught it just so, and James winced. Everyone got quiet. Marshal Fain parked himself in the doorway of the Free-State Hotel, and he made a little speech that no one much admired.

  “We aim to clear Nig
ra stealers out of this town, authority of the government of the U-nited States of America.”

  The Lawrence people booed and yelled. “Run him out of town!” one cried. “Out of the country!” another said. “Kansas Territory is free soil!”

  One woman elbowed her way through the throng and spit at the marshal.

  He wiped the spit off with the back of his hand and yelled, “Once a slave, always a slave, even on so-called free soil. I want every one of them Nigras back, and every slave stealer behind bars.”

  “Go jump in the Wakarusa!” Mrs. Bonds yelled, while her husband tried to shush her.

  A member of the posse motioned to the marshal for attention. “I’m General Atchison,” he bellowed, upstaging the marshal. His voice boomed above the din of the crowd: “My mama taught me every lady was to be respected. But if she’s carryin’ a Sharps rifle, she’s no longer worthy of respect. I say, by God, trample her under your feet as you would a snake!”

  Then Mr. Bonds picked up a sizable stone and hurled it at the general. All hell broke loose. The men swarmed Marshal Fain and the posse. Mrs. Bonds fired her rifle into the air. Will and Jeremy couldn’t wait to get into the fracas, and they pushed forward with their fists swinging. Marshal Fain grabbed them both with his beefy arms.

  “Get your hands off those boys!” cried Mrs. Bonds. “Somebody, run get their daddies.”

  That’s what James could have done to help, but he was locked in place, sure as if his feet were nailed to the ground. Anyway, Will and Jeremy broke loose, just as a troop of men rushed toward the marshal again, their arms raised viciously.

  “Hold it, hold it,” yelled the editor of one of the Lawrence papers. “He’s a Federal official.”

  “Better believe it,” the general muttered.

  “Look out!” someone yelled. Jeremy and Will backed off toward James. In a minute, quick as a calf is roped, Mr. Bonds was handcuffed behind his back, and so was his missus. The marshal grabbed up her rifle before a Lawrence man could scramble for it.

  Then a larger posse rode down from Mount Oread, some dozen men with muskets and bayonets. Each led a barebacked horse. Suddenly it seemed like half the men in town were under arrest, though Lord knew where the marshal would keep all the prisoners, because the Lawrence jail only held three drunks, at best.

  Somehow Marshal Fain got their attention again and shouted, “I’m confident we’ve got all the trouble-causers and Nigra stealers, and if you’ll just clear a path for us, we’ll be on our way to Lecompton.”

  The posse loaded the prisoners onto the horses—not necessarily one to a horse, and they rode off. A fierce-looking tiger of a man, a Missouri Border Ruffian for sure, was bringing up the rear. He turned back to the women and children, frozen like trees in the street, and he roared, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Then, instead of following the marshal’s parade to Lecompton, he yanked his horse around and galloped back up to the men watching from Mount Oread.

  It was turning dusk. James picked up his book bag and felt a wrenching certainty, like something being tugged out of his gut: Come morning, those men would be down here.

  But not in threes and fours. In the hundreds.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Edmund Wolcott’s Castle

  “Caleb Weaver, he’s the man who built the house, or had it built.” Dana’s father read from a library Xerox copy. “Built it in 1856, which is when the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company sent his family to homestead out here.”

  Dana’s mother was driving their rattly 1978 Honda, on their way to the Thoreau Middle School Spring Musicale, the last blast of the school year before they were sprung for the summer.

  Dana asked, “And what about Mrs. Weaver?”

  Her father scanned the paper. “Nothing on her. Mister was a lawyer, though.”

  Dana’s mother said, “Missus was—what else?—a wife, a mother, a cook, and a maid. Things were pretty set in their day. Women weren’t blessed with two full-time jobs like we are now.” She was a speech clinician at the Kansas School for the Deaf, and she could sign as well as she spoke. Now she flashed a few heated signs at a driver who was turning left without a signal.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to translate that to the listening audience. Val, you’re crawling up his back!”

  “He’s a creep, and a terrible road hog.”

  “Dad, do you know if the little room was in the original house plans?”

  “Can’t tell, but I doubt it. It sounds like the house was a lot smaller. It had just two bedrooms upstairs, or one bedroom and a loft, and another bedroom downstairs. No third floor, no rooms in the attic like we have now. And, no indoor plumbing.”

  “Of course not,” Dana’s mother said. “Mrs. Weaver hauled raw sewage outside in buckets every day. Gave her a hard body. Women didn’t need to work out at health clubs back then.”

  Dana’s dad laughed and jiggled a bit of his wife’s extra padding. “They were solid religious types, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Quakers.”

  “Does it say that in the diary?” Dana’s father was dying to see it, but the time still wasn’t right.

  “I haven’t gotten through the whole thing yet, because the writing’s really hard to read. It’s small and close together, like Mrs. Weaver only had one little notebook, and she had to make it last.”

  “Oh look, Jeffrey, that’s the Edmund Wolcott house you were telling me about. I can’t believe they’re going to tear it down.”

  Dana ducked to get a better look. The house was a limestone castle, looming three stories above the jungle of a yard. A lot of the windows were broken, and whole chunks of the limestone were eaten away by wind and rain. From the back, a tower jutted up, like the kind Rapunzel would have flopped her golden hair down from. Each of the upstairs bedrooms had a balcony, big enough for two persons only, with tattered awnings sheltering it.

  “Check out the front door,” Dana’s father told them. It was two levels high, triple-wide, and knobby with intricate carvings. “This guy was loaded. A cattle baron, I read.”

  Dana said, “I’m surprised you didn’t make us buy this monstrosity and turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

  “I really hate to see it torn down—”

  “Don’t get any ideas, Jeffrey.” Mrs. Shannon gunned the engine as the light changed to green.

  “Was this house around in Elvira’s time?”

  “Who?” her mother asked.

  “Our dead body. Ahn and I call her Elvira.”

  “Doubtful,” her father replied. “It looks like 1870s vintage to me, not 1850s. And besides, Edmund Wolcott didn’t move here with the first wave of settlers.”

  “So he never hid slaves?”

  “Or owned them.”

  “Dad, do you think our house was a station on the Underground Railroad?”

  Her father wriggled his grayish beard and settled into his History Professor mode—eyes a hundred years away, finger stroking his forehead. “Well, it’s unlikely. Both the known stations in the Lawrence area were outside the city. There was one over near Lone Star, just southwest of here, and some Major Abbott person ran a hot stop about five miles south of what used to be the southern edge of Lawrence. Most of the activity was in Topeka and Leavenworth, though.”

  “But suppose Elvira came to the house on her way north. Say she ran away from a plantation.”

  “More likely she was the Weavers’ servant.”

  Dana shook her head. “Not a chance.”

  “Well, what makes you so sure, Miss Expert on Pre–Civil War Conditions?” her mother asked. “Oops!” She just missed clipping a station wagon, on her way into a tight-shoe parking place a good half mile away from Thoreau.

  “Why do I ever let her drive?”

  “Because you have two speeding tickets?” Dana’s mom sweetly replied.

  Dana said, “I’m just sure Millicent Weaver wouldn’t have a black servant. I think she got sealed into the room.”

  “Dana, that’s horrible!” cried
her mother.

  “Go with the theory. Why?”

  “I don’t know yet. See what you can find out at the library, Dad, and I’ll sort of do my own research.”

  She watched her parents exchange glances. It was the ‘she’s-following-in-your-footsteps, Jeffrey’ look, oozing into the ‘haven’t-we-done-a-fine-job-of-parenting!’ look.

  Her mom and dad communicated so well, with a click of the tongue, a shorthand language undecodable to outsiders, a simple tap of the finger that signaled annoyance, a burst of laughter when everyone else was wallowing in misery. This was how marriage was supposed to be, wasn’t it?

  So how on earth did Millicent Weaver keep such a big secret from her husband?

  Later that night Dana turned to a page in the journal that troubled her so much every time she read it that she’d not been able to read past it yet.

  May 14, 1856—Caleb’s representing Barnaby Watts, who’s been charged with helping a Negro escape. But Thou knowest full well what Mr. Weaver’s saying outside the courtroom.

  “The man’s in flagrant disregard for the law, Millicent. The law’s clear: The slave owner has every right to get up a posse, ride into free territory, and if he can prove it’s his slave, take him right back to the South. Every right.”

  “Deuteronomy, Caleb. ‘Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master to thee.’ ”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And Isaiah 16:3. ‘Hide the outcast; betray not him that wandereth.’ ”

  “Yes, yes.”

  His eyes filled with such agony that I wanted to pull him to me. But I didn’t. Oh Lord, I didn’t. I despised the sound of my own voice. I said, “Well then, Mr. Weaver, how can thee possibly represent Barnaby Watts in the courtroom?”

  “Millicent, thee knows I’m torn. On one side there’s God’s law, and on the other side, man’s law.”

  “And thee’s pulled on thy reins and backed away from God’s law.” As soon as the words were out, my face was hot with fury.

  For fourteen years this man and I have shared bed and board, and how little we know one another this night.