Soon Be Free (19 page)

Miz Pru insisted they wait along the riverbank until
it
happened, and it happened only minutes after leaving port. A cosmic burst of fireworks lit up the sky like the most spectacular Fourth of July James had ever witnessed. At the same time, the ground moved as if some huge dragon had burrowed through the earth just beneath James's body.

Someone yelled, “Holy Jesus God, the boiler must have blown!”

Screams from the river chilled James to the marrow as pillars of fire darted into the air. The night sky turned midday bright. No one on the boat survived the fire.

Mike in a tie! It must have been one of his father's, because it hung just below his belt. He's at that awkward age: too tall for clip-ons and too short for normal ties. But I have to admit, he looked kind of cute.

In all modesty, I have to say I knocked his socks off. His
white
socks. My hair looked very chic and straight, for a change, because it was too short to spring into clown curls. And I wore a new black dress, one that fit. My dad just shook his head when he saw how closely it fit and how much skin showed above and below the dress.

My mom said, “Don't get nervous, Jeffrey. The dress is long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.”

“A little
too
interesting,” Dad said.

Mike, of course, nearly lost his lunch when he saw me, because until that night he'd thought of me as a genetically impaired boy. He swallowed a few times and stammered something about Howie and the Bubble-Head waiting in the car.

Mom and Dad gave me the usual pep talk:
“Make sure you've got a flashlight in the car and the spare's in good shape,” Dad said, to which Mom added, “Don't eat meat or fish that's not cooked through.”

“Absolutely no alcohol.”

“Remember, don't dance too vigorously on a full stomach; let your food settle.”

“Honey, don't forget you're allergic to geraniums.”

Finally they ran out of warnings and said, “Have a good time.” Oh, right. It was like going out on leave from the army. Just as we were getting into Howie's car, Mom called from the porch, “Oh, and Mike, see that she doesn't eat any fire, okay?”

• • •

The party was a Hollywood extravaganza. Mike's cousin Sarah, the guest of honor, was an old-movie freak, so we had blown-up pictures of Humphrey Bogart and Claudette Colbert and Cary Grant and Lauren Bacall staring at us from three walls, with black-and-white movie scenes flickering along the fourth. It was like an unending episode of
Dream On.

We had to present a ticket outside the Doubletree ballroom at this fake box office made out of cardboard, probably a refrigerator box. I pictured Bo Prairie Fire trying to stay warm living in a box like this. Maybe that's why he got so sick.

Then a guy showed us to our assigned table. They had him done up in one of those old Philip Morris usher uniforms with the dorky flat caps held
in place by an elastic band under the chin. He looked so miserable in that getup that Mike and I felt sorry for him and snuck fancy morsels out to him from the dessert table.

There were yards of sprocketed film scattered on the tables, and old movie cans held pots of—you guessed it—geraniums. “I'm allergic to geraniums,” I reminded Mike as a sneeze crept up on me.

A DJ played tunes from the '30s and '40s for the first hour while we all stuffed our faces on foods from at least six major world cultures, if you count hamburgers and French fries and pizza as cultural experiences.

Everyone seemed to be having a great time, except Sarah. Her red satin dress was so froufrou that she could barely move, and she'd already dropped a hunk of smoked salmon on her chest and had a grease spot that looked like an eye socket.

The DJ began playing music we'd at least heard before—stuff from the 70s and '80s—and it was pretty lively, so everybody just got up and danced in one big mob. Then suddenly the pace slowed, and “Unchained Melody” came blasting over the loudspeaker while James Cagney flickered against the wall in some old prison movie. Mike put his arms around my waist, and I put my arms around his neck, and we sort of rocked from foot to foot in sync while the guy sang, “Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch, a long, lonely time.”

It was one of those gripping, defining moments that can make or break a relationship. Mike and I were exactly the same height. He smelled so good, and his ears were red the way they get around Celina, the cheerleader, and we swayed to the same rhythm with our arms around each other, and our knees gently knocked every so often, which was thrilling, and what could I do?

I leaned forward and whispered into one of his red ears, “Bo Prairie Fire is a Turkey, you know.”

“Will it be mutton, young sir, or would you prefer the poached salmon?” The waiter stood over James, who suspected this was not the first time he'd been asked for his choice. Mutton or salmon—it made no difference. Solomon and the others were in the Negro section of the boat, and James was alone aboard the
Wilmington,
here at this fancy table among seven passengers giddy with wine.

How would he
ever
tell Will's ma? Why hadn't he stopped Will? He could have; he was strong enough now. But his friend was dead, and James could never forgive himself.

He thought back to that first day when he'd seen Will with the empty sack of trousers that a strong leg had once filled. In Will's place, he'd wondered, would he want to live with one good leg and one throbbing phantom limb to remind him of what he'd lost?

But Will
had
wanted to live, and live fiercely.

“The fish is excellent, young sir. Shall I bring the salmon?”

James nodded while the conversation buzzed
around his head like mosquitoes, and the tinkling of glasses made his ears stop up as if he were swimming in deep water.

• • •

James was the first one off the boat in Wyandotte, but it was a long wait until the
Wilmington
disgorged its Negro passengers.

Callie joined him on the shore, carrying her shoes. He was so glad to see her, he could have spit into the wind! Homer walked in small circles like a dog marking his territory.

Miz Pru sniffed the fragrant April air and said, “Kansas ain't no Garden of Eden.”

“No, ma'am, but it's home,” James told her, realizing that Kansas truly was his home now, more so than Boston, where he'd spent the first twelve years of his life.

Solomon herded their group together while James went to hire a coach to carry them to Lawrence. Suddenly he heard Solomon's voice rise above the milling crowd. “Mr. James, you'd best come back.”

Solomon had an arm around each of the women, and Homer clutched Callie's hand while a man with a gravelly voice demanded to see their papers. Sabetha's face flushed. Miz Pru had her feet planted wide, and James saw her dress ripple over shaking knees.

He stepped forward. “Pardon me, sir. Is thee an official?”

“What's it to you?”

“These are my friends, sir.”

The man glowered at James.
“Thee
are a snotty little kid. Leave me to my business, boy.”

James mustered a cordial smile and looked the man full in the eyes. “Might I see thy badge, sir?”

The man's breathing was loose and wheezy as he yanked a leather billfold out of his back pocket. He flipped it open and shoved it up under James's nose. His name was Lonny Brill, from St. Joseph, Missouri.

“I thank thee kindly, sir, but thee is not a U.S. marshal.”

James saw a flicker of a smile in Solomon's eyes.

“What I am is a citizen sworn to uphold the law, which says loud and clear that a man has a right to have his stolen property returned. Call me a wild dreamer, but I suspect these folks are runaways. Unless you can prove otherwise,” he added, daring Solomon.

Solomon presented his own papers first.

“Uh-huh, sure enough you're a free Negro, in the hire of a Dr. Olney, says here.”

“Yes, sir.” Solomon sounded calm, but James heard a tremor in his voice.

Lonny Brill slid the other papers on top of Solomon's. Now Sabetha stood behind Miz Pru, locking both the woman's arms in place. Homer tossed his rubber ball from hand to hand; pieces of
rubber flaked off onto his scuffed boots. Callie jammed her feet in her shoes and stared straight ahead.

Lonny Brill's eyes flitted across the words. “This doesn't do it, friends.”

“But they're
free
papers,” Callie cried, before Sabetha could clap her hand across Callie's mouth.

“I suppose you're the girl mentioned here? Callie Biggers?”

“Yes, sir,” she mumbled.

“Well, I've got news for you, Callie Biggers. This paper's not worth the ink spilled on it. It's a dang good forgery, that I'll grant you, but it's not the genuine article. You know how I can tell? There's no official seal on this document. There's got to be an official seal. Looks like my buddies and I will just have to return you folks to your owner.”

If Mike and I had spent half as much time on schoolwork as we were spending on the Delaware Project, we'd be brilliant. Well, we're already brilliant, but not in ways that get you on the honor roll.

Ahn had wanted to come to the University of Kansas library with me and work on this project just as we'd worked together on the mystery of Miz Lizbet's skeleton. I'd wheedled out of it so I could work with Mike. It's true that he has never been a hotshot researcher before, but after we'd had our arms around each other at that party and clunked knees, it was kind of nice to sit in the dark at a blue-screened microfilm reader and exchange Significant Grimaces and Grunts. Love blooms in weird gardens, you know what I mean? That is, if you don't mind a few weeds.

We piled all kinds of Kansas history tomes on the table and rolled over to a microfilm reader to scan the old Lawrence city directories. Next to us was a serious student, a guy in a Kansas City Chiefs ball cap, who fast-forwarded through about thirty rolls while we were figuring out how to load the first one.

Eventually we got it, and rolled and rolled until we found Jedediah Morrison, living on Vermont Avenue, in 1857. Occupation: oculist.

Mike dashed over to the monster dictionary to look up
oculist:
Jedediah made spectacles—eyeglasses, that is—and spyglasses and magnifying lenses. He was listed as a widower with one son, Flint, age thirteen. The same age as James Weaver.

Mike said, “Old Jedediah's not listed in the 1858 directory. Think he died?”

“Or moved suddenly.” I dropped three rolls of microfilm, and Chiefs Cap glared at us.

“Bo Prairie Fire had mentioned land up near Leavenworth. I'll check.” I scouted out the Leavenworth city directory for 1858. “Here he is.” Jedediah Morrison turned out to be on the Leavenworth County tax rolls for the next six years, but in his last year he'd had a walloping increase in his taxes.

“He made a pile of money in 1863, Mike. Maybe he sold his land.”

“What land?”

“Good question,” I conceded.

“And why in the middle of the Civil War?”

“We've got loads of questions, just no answers,” I said with a sigh.

Mike flipped through pages of a pictorial history of Kansas. He kept muttering, “1863 . . . 1863 . . . Nothing special happened.”

The man in the Chiefs cap said, “Wrong, kid. That's the year Congress turned over land to build the railroad in Kansas. Right across the Delaware Strip.”

I looked at him curiously. Since when was this
his
project? But three heads are better than two, as the saying goes.

Mike began doodling in his notebook. He drew a really awful Conestoga covered wagon with huge wheels. He has this theory that if you scribble swirly circles long enough, something important will start to appear on the paper out of your sheer boredom, so his pencil kept tracing around and around one of those wheels until it cut through the paper, which gave me an idea.

“Look at it this way.” I drew an enormous wheel and printed
JAMES WEAVER
at the hub. “Let's label all the spokes.” We came up with ten of them:

“Who's Bo Prairie Fire?” asked Chiefs Cap.

“An old croupy Indian,” Mike explained.

“Delaware?”

“What else?”

I yellow-highlighted each spoke as it fed to the center of our wheel. “Now all we have to do is figure out how each of these is connected to the hub.”

“Which is James Weaver, of course,” Mike said with a sneer.

I thought about it a minute. “Here's what we know for sure: James knows Flint, and Bo Prairie Fire knows
about
Flint's father, Jedediah Morrison. Also, Straightfeather and Bo and Faith are somehow related.”

“Same clan, maybe?”

“Faith tells her dear old neighbor Mattie about a treaty that was written but never ratified, or maybe it was ratified, then lost.”