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  Ahn asked, “Do you think Jeep really knows something?”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know anything for sure about Lizbet Charles.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Like a Real Son

  July 1856

  Pa was gone to Missouri with legal papers to try to get Solomon back, and so Miz Lizbet had free rein of the house. She made James nervous as a rat, and besides, Rebecca was down with some fever, and Ma doctored and fretted over her until James thought he’d jump right out of his skin if he didn’t get out of the house.

  Outside, under the noonday sun, he thought he felt blisters raising on his skin, like dough frying in hot oil. In Boston there was the harbor and the brooding shade of gray buildings. There, your skin didn’t sizzle in the sun like it did here.

  James heard something sliding through the tall grass. A rattler! His eyes darted around until he spotted the axe. Two giant leaps back, and he’d have it in his hand, and whop! There’d be two ends of that snake grabbing for each other.

  But it wasn’t a rattler. It was only a prairie wolf, small as a househound. The bloody carcass of a rabbit hung from its mouth, and it threw its head this way and that as it tore at the meat. Spotting James, the coward dropped its prey and took off.

  “James Weaver!” It was Ma calling from the porch. He pretended to be too far away to hear. But Ma banged a rain bucket with the butter clapper. “James Weaver!”

  He came back around the house, not too fast.

  “Oh, thank the Lord thee’s here. James, go over to the field and bring me back some wild indigo. Little droopy clusters of yellow petals. Thee will spot them right away.”

  “Aw, Ma, picking flowers?”

  “James, I don’t believe I’ve seen it written in Scripture that men can’t pick a posy now and then.”

  “But, Ma—”

  “And pull them out by the roots, son, because we’ll brew a tea of the roots for Rebecca.”

  “What in heaven’s name for?”

  “It cures fever, son. Lizbet swears by it.”

  Miz Lizbet. Somehow she’d been crowned queen. Knew everything. Last week she’d caught him in front of the looking glass, rubbing his fingers over the fifty thousand freckles that had burst out on his face since they’d come to Kansas.

  “Would you like to know what to do for it?”

  “For what?” He’d spun around, and she stood behind him with her arms folded across her waist.

  “Freckles. Back where I’ve been, white ladies just hate it when those ugly spots pop out on their faces. They rub a cut lemon over their cheeks, or buttermilk with fresh green mint crushed in it.”

  “Disgusting.” James savagely wiped at his face, as if to tear the freckles—or buttermilk—off.

  “But I’ve got another idea, Mr. James Weaver, something that never fails, ever.”

  “Something that’s not either lemons or buttermilk?”

  “Oh yes, very different.” She started busying herself, as if she’d forgotten what she was about to say, sweeping the infernal dust that always blew into the house.

  “What is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That never fails, Miz Lizbet.”

  “Oh, that.” She pointed the handle of the broom at him, like Miss Malone’s hickory stick. “I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to do it once a week. You won’t notice a big change the first week or two.”

  “What do I do?” James turned back to the looking glass, imagining his face white again, or better still, covered with a beard the color of an Irish setter. Then her face loomed in the glass from behind him.

  “You take a nice thin layer of fresh cow manure—”

  “Oh,” James cried, running out of the house. But she called after him, “Put that on every week, and in two or three months, your face will be as clear as a baby’s behind.”

  And now he was off to the field on another one of Miz Lizbet’s harebrained schemes.

  • • •

  Ma brewed the wild indigo tea, which stunk something awful, while Miz Lizbet washed Rebecca in cool springwater. She’d do one arm, dry it, lay it gently under the sheet, then the other arm; one foot, the other foot. Rebecca shivered, even as hot as it was in the house. The clattering of her teeth unnerved James as he tried to do his numbers. Algebra, they called it. Well, they might as well have called it gibberish. By fall, he’d have to be up with Jeremy and them on this mysterious stuff, but Lord only knew how. Maybe he’d make it if he worked enough of these wretched problems on his own over the summer.

  Now Ma was blowing on the tea to cool it. She poured spoonfuls into Rebecca’s mouth, while Miz Lizbet dabbed at the dribbles.

  James turned back to his books, but then he heard this faint little wail, “I want James.”

  Oh no! What would he say to her? It was woman’s work to tend to the sick, his to learn the infernal mathematics.

  “James, thy sister’s calling thee.” Ma jerked her head, summoning him.

  Rebecca’s voice was faint as a distant cowbell, and he put his ear up to her lips. “James, am I going to die?”

  Die? Only old people died. “Don’t be stupid—”

  But she cut him off. “Because if I am, I don’t want thee to move into my room. Thee’s far too messy.”

  “Well, in case no one’s told thee, thy hair looks like a rat’s nest right now.” He glanced at Ma and saw a smile break through her worry mask.

  “Does not, either.”

  “Does too!”

  “Here, child, a bit more tea.” Ma put the cooled cup to Rebecca’s lips.

  “Make James drink it first,” Rebecca said.

  “Not from thy cup.”

  Miz Lizbet jumped up and poured a steaming cup of the tea for James. She handed it to him with a smirk, as though it were a poisoned chalice. The tea roiled in the cup and smelled like wilted dandelions. Drink this? Not on his life!

  “It won’t hurt thee, son.”

  “If I hafta, he hasta,” Rebecca said weakly, and so he took a sip. Burned his tongue.

  Suddenly he reeled backward, tea sloshing everywhere. Miz Lizbet caught the china cup before it hit the floor. “Augggggh!” he wailed. “I’m dead.”

  “Not yet,” Ma said. “Not until thee mops up the spill.”

  But Rebecca was laughing. “Can I have some more please, Ma?”

  • • •

  James was itching to know more about Matthew Luke Charles, the man with three first names, but he was wise to Miz Lizbet’s game: You get more information if you act like you don’t want any.

  She was stirring a cauldron of water to boil Rebecca’s sickbed linens. She hummed a throaty tune, and James was sure she was ready to burst with the story, so he said, “I’m going outside. There’s a pile of logs that wants splitting.”

  “My Matthew Luke Charles, he could split a log faster than a bolt of lightning.”

  “Well, I don’t work as fast, and Pa will be looking for the woodpile to grow soon.”

  “It’s about 120 degrees out there. I don’t think Mr. Weaver’s going to be laying a fire before the week’s out. Down in Kentucky, we hardly ever needed a fire. Had a fireplace in our own house, too.”

  James opened the door, and Miz Lizbet came sailing across the room and slapped her hand down on his.

  “Didn’t your mama teach you not to walk out when somebody’s talking to you?”

  James affected a bored sigh and sank into Pa’s rocker. “Go on,” he said, as though she’d be reading to him from a seed catalog.

  Miz Lizbet returned to the cauldron, her back to James. “He had it good for a while. Mr. Charles Senior took my Matthew Luke into the house, treated him like a real son. He had no other sons, you see, just two pimply-faced daughters who didn’t have a mind for anything but their hoopskirts and their skin cremes. Anyway, Matthew Luke was his true son. He was smart, smart as a college man. He and his daddy ran the tobacco plantation. It got so Mr. Charles Senior didn’t eat his morning grits
without Matthew Luke telling him when to.”

  James rocked, pretending only mild interest. He fiddled with Ma’s copy of Godey’s magazine, half wondering what in blazes Ma found so fascinating.

  “Well, Matthew Luke fancied me; I don’t know why. I was just like every other field girl, with tobacco stains on my fingers from the picking. But somehow, it was me he liked.” She spun around. “Bet that surprises you, because you think I’m an ugly old woman.”

  “Thee’s not old,” James said.

  “Twenty-three,” Miz Lizbet said sadly, as though she were crying over lost years. But she snapped out of it. “Well, so we got married, and Mr. Charles Senior gave us the cottage out behind the plantation house. Guesthouse, he called it, only we were family, not guests. 1 lived there like a lady.” She dunked a limp sheet into the cauldron and stirred until it disappeared into the water.

  “But things turned around. Mr. Charles Senior, well, he died.”

  James leaned forward. “How?”

  “Strangled in his sleep.”

  “Does thee know who did it?”

  “Yes.”

  Well? Only silence. What a maddening woman! Was it time to threaten to go outside again? Then, suddenly Miz Lizbet seemed eager to finish the story, and she raced downhill through the rest.

  “People said Matthew Luke strangled his daddy, for the money. It wasn’t Matthew Luke. It was a dumb, half-blind old slave who got crazy on blackberry wine and squeezed the life out of Mr. Charles Senior on a dare.”

  James stilled the rocker, so as not to miss a single word.

  “But Mrs. Charles Senior just had to believe Matthew Luke did it. She always hated him, because of who his mama was. She waited a decent time, then told the slaves that Matthew Luke had been tried and convicted in a court of law, and that it’d been left to her to see that justice was done. She called up three slaves who had a good eye for shooting ducks, and she gave them each a rifle, and she said they were a firing squad, duly appointed by the United States government.”

  James held his breath.

  “And I didn’t know it until I heard three gunshots all at once. After that, I took off running, and I’ve been running ever since. But not alone, no sir, James Weaver, I always take somebody with me, somebody who’s wanting to make free.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Plumb Crazy

  July 1856

  There was word of cattle coming through again, a herd of some two thousand longhorns driven up from Texas to the stockyards in Kansas City. Dairy farmers weren’t too happy about it. They said, “Sure, the livestock will sell a lot dearer after they’ve had a few weeks of fattening up on our Kansas grass, free of charge. Gnaw it down until there’s nothing left for our cows.”

  “Wait until you see these critters,” Will said. “Big huge beasts, weigh about a ton, horns here to here, maybe four foot across. They’re too sturdy to ever die, at least till they hit the slaughterhouse, and then, bam.” He made a throat-slitting motion.

  Jeremy added, “But they carry ticks that cause Texas fever. Our poor little old lonely cows out here, they pick up the Texas fever, and Lordy it’s a sight to see ’em. Before long you’ll see a cow or a bull going plumb crazy.”

  “That’s something to look forward to,” James said. He and Will and Jeremy perched on a fence at the south end of town, watching the cowboys drive the hundreds of cattle over the dusty trail.

  Waving to them, Will asked, “Wouldn’t you just die to be a cowboy?”

  “Bet they never have freckles,” James muttered, wrinkling up his nose.

  The cowhands herded the cattle through a field where a few sleepy cows watched the parade. In the middle of the pasture, they were let to graze and slurp from the stream that greened the field.

  “Except for the cow slobber, I could be a cowboy tomorrow,” Will said dreamily.

  “You’d be trampled in a mad stampede before morning,” Jeremy said. “We’d pick you up flat as a buffalo chip. The Injuns could use you to light a fire. How about you, what do you want to be, James?”

  Well, what could he say? The only thing he absolutely loved with a passion was drawing pictures of buildings. But boys didn’t grow up into men who drew houses. “I expect I’ll turn out a farmer.”

  “You going to grow Boston beans?”

  “A doctor, then.” He thought of the runt Dr. Olney, and then of Solomon and Thunder being led behind that slave catcher.

  Will said, “At least being a doctor you’d get to see lots of ladies without their clothes on.”

  Jeremy asked, “But could you cut anybody open and pull out his guts?”

  James’s stomach flip-flopped. “An architect. I could build houses and hotels. They’re going to need people to build up this big old prairie.” And then he knew he’d accidentally hit on the right answer. He scanned the flat prairie all around them, the field hosting the snarling cattle, and he imagined buildings gently rising from the grass, not like in Boston—all those cold, gray towers, like the Howard Atheneum Theatre with its peaked roof jutting into the sky. No, the buildings he saw in his mind’s eye now almost hovered over the flat land, with long, low windows stretching end to end, and porches ringing the house to capture the morning breeze on the south, the evening breeze from the north. What he saw were houses no one had ever seen before. Did he need algebra to build such wonders?

  “Cowboy’s better,” Jeremy said, and Will added, “Me, as soon as my Pa’ll let me, I’m going off to be a Jayhawker. I’ll get me some of them red leggings and a musket to sling over my shoulder, and I’ll kill me a hundred Border Ruffians. Look for me in the history books someday, hey?”

  • • •

  All his chores done, James walked into town to see how the new Free-State Hotel was coming along. They said it would cost $80,000 to rebuild it. They said the Eldridge brothers were putting up the money, and after it was done, the town would rechristen it the Eldridge Hotel, which was only fair. He watched a man hauling barrels of hot tar up to the roof, the acrid smell reminding him of Boston. Now, if he were designing this building, he’d put a little balcony off of each street-side room, and the front door would be as huge as the gateway to a palace. Or would that be out of proportion? He still had lots to learn since he’d made up his mind to be an architect.

  Now he started for home, because Ma was planning an early dinner before she went off to the literary society meeting where they were discussing that new book of poetry she was always quoting from, something called Leaves of Grass. Pa would tease, “Why, Mrs. Weaver, that’s a right secular book,” but Ma would be ready with a comeback:

  “Yes, Mr. Weaver, but it’s full of the spirit God has emplanted within each of us. And when’s the last time thee read a book?”

  Two blocks from the hotel, James ran into Jeremy, bounding down the stairs from Bethany Maxwell’s house.

  “Oh, James, I was just stopping by to—to—”

  “Knock her over with thy slobbery kisses?”

  “Get my speller back.”

  “Um hm.” James pantomimed looking high and low. “I don’t see that blue-black speller in thy hand, friend.”

  “Well, I—”

  And then, thank heaven, a glorious distraction! Staggering like a drunk came a boney old bull, weaving right down the main street.

  “Didn’t I warn you?” Jeremy said. “Texas fever, for sure.”

  The bull seemed delirious, panting and thrashing to and fro, its back arched, its head drooping nearly into the dust. Then the poor bull threw its head back, and James saw its glassy stare, its pain and confusion. It threw a fit and tossed its head so violently that it cracked its horn on the side of a wagon. A scream came out of the beast that sounded like the trumpeting of an elephant, which James had once heard in a circus.

  By now a crowd was gathering—women wanting to help, children clinging to their mothers’ skirts, dogs sniffing the dirt where the bull had been.

  Then Bethany’s father came out, pointing a rifl
e. “Stand back, y’all,” he said, and lining himself up just so, he shot the bull right between the eyes.

  As the bull fell to the ground, James wondered whether he would have had the courage to do the same thing, if he’d had the gun. Would he have been kind enough to put that bull out of its misery? Or courageous enough to protect his neighbors from that wild animal?

  Or did it take more courage not to shoot?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tornado!

  The steady clip … clip … clip unnerved Dana, as the giant drops of thick summer rain hit the roof. The drops splashed into circles on the thirsty sidewalks. In a minute there would be a ferocious rumble as the rain gathered strength for its marathon. The radio was talking tornado.

  “… Right now, we’re just under a watch, folks, but stay with us for updates… .”

  Dana hated tornados, and not just because they were scary. She’d never lost a house or even so much as a bottle of nail polish in a tornado. Mostly she hated these storms because people in the Outside World thought of Kansas and tornado as interchangeable, as though all Kansans were extras from The Wizard of Oz.

  The rain picked up now, cascading down the kitchen window like a waterfall. “Oh Auntie Em!” her cousin Tonie always said when Dana visited her in California. “Oh Auntie Em, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!”

  Then pellets fell from the sky, and in the ghoulish dark-in-the-day she saw balls of frozen rain ricochet off the cars parked on the street.

  “Dingdong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead, the witch is dead,” Tonie would sing in her obnoxious Munchkin voice. Dana turned up the radio.

  “… We’re out here on the turnpike,” the Voice of Weather crackled. “Can’t see much for the blinding rain, but we sure can feel the hailstones bouncing off our van—wait a minute—there’s an unconfirmed sighting … funnel cloud … the telltale hook … folks, this is the real thing!”

  Dana switched stations. “… winds blowing at ninety-five miles per hour. If you don’t have a basement, take cover in an inside hall, away from windows and any possible flying objects… .”