Soon Be Free (25 page)

Mike said, “Yeah, we know the whole story.” I kicked his shin, and he blurted out, “But we wouldn't mind hearing it again.”

Mr. Donnelly popped a stuffed olive in his mouth and delicately spit the pimiento into his hand. “Well, it was the year James Baylor Weaver made that trip to Kentucky to bring back the runaway slaves.”

I knew it!
That was the last spoke in the wheel, the final connection with Miz Lizbet.

Mr. Donnelly continued, “We know it was 1857,
because that's the date on the lost treaty. Young Weaver couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen, not even shaving yet. He and another fellow, nobody remembers his name—a boy who lost a leg in one of John Brown's raids—and a free black man named Solomon, all of them shepherded a handful of black farmhands, a family, I believe, all the way back across the Ohio River, through Indiana and Illinois, up to St. Louis, and on into Kansas. It was right there that it happened.”

“WHAT DID?” we all shouted at once.

“Why, James Baylor Weaver, the selfsame famous architect, he was faced with a tough choice, a Hobson's choice, you might say, a Sophie's choice.”

Not knowing who either Hobson or Sophie was, I tapped my foot impatiently.

The pimiento dropped from Mr. Donnelly's hand, and he kicked it under the table. “Who's to say any one of us wouldn't make the same decision in his shoes, which incidentally must have been worn pretty thin after all that time walking across the rugged country. This was long before turnpikes and freeways, you understand. Young folks like you can't imagine such a primitive time.”

Mike prodded him. “What did James Weaver
do,
Mr. Donnelly?”

“The choice, yes. It was either the runaways or the Delaware. He had to sell out one for the other. An eyewitness saw it all. Well, that's what
an eyewitness is, isn't it, someone who sees things?”

“Saw what?” I asked.

“Saw that boy, Weaver, accept the unratified treaty, which he agreed to hide for a time, in exchange for money to free those black people from the hands of a greedy slave catcher who would have sent them back to Kentucky. Well, by George, I guess that's why he named that stately building Kentucky House. I never put those two together before.”

“Mr. Donnelly!” Sally cried.

“I digress. Yes, well. The eyewitness was one of the runaways, believe it or not, who came forward and told the story to an itinerant preacher, an unimpeachable source, I'll have you know. This was some ten or fifteen years after the fact. Well, by then nobody knew where the document was, and no one could quite remember what the terms were for sure, and, well, that's how Indian affairs sometimes come to ruin. But we're making reparations today, you can rest assured. Although they're not a
recognized
tribe, you understand. But we'll do what we can.”

Jeep said, “I wonder who it was who told the story.”

“I've got the name right here in my notes.” Mr. Donnelly pulled a small spiral notebook out of his inside pocket and flipped through a few pages. “Ah, here it is. A man by the name of Biggers. Homer Biggers.”

Jeep's brothers had been listening to the whole conversation, and now Luther said, “Hey, Calvin, who's bigger, Mrs. Bigger or Mrs. Bigger's baby?”

Calvin pushed a mush of cookies to the side of his mouth like a wad of tobacco and answered, “Mrs. Bigger's baby. He's just a
little
Bigger.” Luther and Calvin high-fived each other, then Luther said, “Me and Calvin always tell that joke, because we've got Biggerses in our family.”

Jeep nodded, holding on to a floor lamp like it was a post in a speeding bus. He looked pale enough to faint. “Momma always talks about a Callie Biggers, about how she was the first black woman doctor in Kansas.”

I raised a cup of slushy cranberry punch in a toast to all those amazing people who lived before microwaves and E-mail and sticky-notes and Caller ID. “To Dr. Callie Biggers.”

“To James Baylor Weaver,” Mr. Donnelly said, waving another green olive. “An American treasure, sure enough.”

And to Miz Lizbet,
I added silently. Finally her bones could stop rattling in my brain.

Somehow I knew there was still more I had to settle—somebody else's bones, but I didn't know whose.

James had been set to leave for Boston right after the winter thaw, but war was a fiery glow on the horizon.

“Best go today, son,” Pa warned. “This land will be riddled with bullets too soon, too soon.”

“Caleb Weaver!” Ma scolded him even as she packed the picnic hamper for James to take on his travels.

“Mrs. Weaver, thee mustn't bury thy fair head in the sand. Kansas is a state now, but at the same time, seven of her older sisters have pulled out of the Union. War, mark my words.”

Ma furiously stuffed two loaves of bread into the hamper, along with a flour sack full of dried apples and sunflower seeds and a basket of fried chicken and half a dozen molasses cookies.

James snapped the lock on his trunk. There was nothing else to do but leave. Sliding the trunk toward the door, he was reminded of that basket in Kentucky and hauling it upstairs loaded with hay and stones, and downstairs loaded with Callie.
How close they'd come to being discovered! But that was nearly four years ago, and now Solomon and Miz Lizbet's family was safe in the brand-new State of Kansas.

Buttoning the coat of his first grown-up suit, he wondered how he could bring himself to say good-bye to these people he'd been among all his life.

Rebecca, grown shapely overnight, hung back shyly. When she thought he wasn't looking, she poked some trinket into the hamper. It was a surprise he'd save for the lonely, icy-track train ride to Boston.

Ma handed James a Bible. The soft, worn leather and flaking gold leaf made his throat tight with longing for his family before he was even out the door.

Pa tried to ease up the solemn mood. “A Bible, Millicent? Does thee think the boy needs a thick pillow on his journey?”

Ma snapped back, “Thee might rest thy
own
world-weary eyes on such a pillow, Caleb.”

And then they all heard the
clop-clop
of a horse out front—Solomon come to drive James to Kansas City.

Ma wound a red wool muffler around James's neck and hung the picnic hamper over his arm. “We shall be watching the mail, son,” she said, then turned away before her tears embarrassed them both.

Pa and Rebecca walked him to the coach. “Morning, Solomon,” Pa said. Solomon nodded, but James noticed him trying to be invisible through these impossible good-byes. It stabbed his heart to realize that Solomon's would be the last face he'd see as he boarded the train.

Rebecca clung to him like moss to a rock. Three years earlier he'd have pried her off and chased her back into the house. “Thee's the best brother,” she stammered through her tears.

“There's not been much competition, Rebecca,” James said, forcing a smile.

“Daughter, go on in. It's way below freezing.”

Reluctantly, she waved all the way into the house, and in a minute, James saw her in the window, waving still.

Pa said, “Thee's seventeen now, James, a man off to learn his trade.”

He didn't
feel
like a man right now.

Pa hoisted the trunk up into the coach. Puffing warm clouds into the frigid air, Pa said, “Thy mother is a woman of few words—”

“Few words, Pa?” What a relief when they both laughed.

“Well, few
gentling
words. But I've known this woman the better part of two decades, and I believe I know her heart. Thy mother and I, we're both immensely proud of thee, son. We look for great things from thee in the years ahead.”

Beautiful buildings,
James thought, monuments to the good, peace-loving family who'd brought him up and now generously sent him away to his future.

Then Pa half hugged him and half shook his hand, and James climbed up into the coach. “Take care of my boy, Solomon.”

“Yes, sir, I always have,” Solomon replied, “except when he was taking care of me and mine.”

The mare shifted from foot to foot to keep warm. Pa gently slapped her rear and turned back to James. “Come home to us with a good woman, son. That would please thy mother.”

“One just like Ma?” James teased.

“Well, a mite less stubborn, I reckon. Godspeed, son.”

Here in Kansas, our summers sizzle, and we get out of school before Memorial Day. The official reason is that lots of kids have to work the family farm, but I live in a city, and I've never met a single farmer. I think the real reason is that nobody wants to pay to air-condition the schools.

Anyway, by the middle of June, summer's already peeking over the fence between
Wow, school's out!
and
Phew, I'm bored.
One hot, sticky Sunday in June, my parents proposed their deadly cure-all for boredom, the Family Outing.

“Wonderful idea, Jeffrey! Where to?”

Dad was reading the What's Doing? section of the newspaper. “Hey, this looks good. Council Grove's having their annual Wah-shun-gah Days.”

“Wah who?” I asked. I was definitely
not
going, no matter what they bribed me with.

Dad picked tantalizing details out of the paper. “Festival, parade, rafting, Indian powwow.”

“Not interested.” I had control of the remote, and I was scrolling through the sound bites of fifty-three channels.

“You can bring a friend,” Mom said. She was already setting tea out on the porch to brew in the sun and was dragging Genoa salami and provolone out of the fridge for sandwiches. A Family Outing required a picnic and ants and mosquitoes and salami sandwiches. “How about Ahn, or Sally?”

I hit on an old Mary Tyler Moore rerun—“Oh, Mr. Gr-a-a-ant!”—and flew past it to land on a black-and-white sci-fi movie featuring a hokey monster with bugging eyes and tentacles way out of control. That reminded me of Mike. “Can I bring Mike?”

“A
boy?”

“You were a boy once, Dad.”

“I know, that's what worries me.”

“Oh, Jeffrey, they're just friends. Sure, honey, ask Mike.”

Council Grove is this little town about a hundred miles from Lawrence. It used to be a way station along the Santa Fe Trail. A bunch of Indians signed a treaty with the U.S. government to make it safe for whites to travel along the trail. Was I
never
going to be free of old Indian treaties? But I agreed to go. And that's how Mike and I had our second nondate, which practically meant we were engaged.

• • •

The town was swarming with people walking and dragging babies in wagons, and dogs trotting down the center of the street like they owned the town. I'm sure all two thousand residents were out for
Wah-shun-gah Days, plus about twenty thousand of their closest friends.

Mike and I ditched Mom and Dad for a couple of hours and went exploring on our own. Across the street was a sign over a building:

HAYS HOUSE
1857

I said, “Hey, isn't that the date on the treaty James Weaver buried?”

We bounded across the street to read the small print:
OLDEST CONTINUOUS RESTAURANT WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

Mike, who was definitely sick of hearing about James Weaver, said, “Bet they've got fossilized food left over from 1857. Your boyfriend James probably had a prairie dog steak here, and they saved the bones in a glass case. Let's go over to the parade.”

We elbowed our way through the three-deep crowd. The 4-H float passed in front of us now, with kids our age trying to keep actual goats and sheep from leaping off the float. A battalion of kiddie majorettes in embarrassing semimilitary uniforms occasionally caught the batons they tossed toward the clear blue sky.

“Check out the fifties Cadillac!” Mike shouted. Shriners in weird little hats that looked like upside-down sand pails sat in the convertible zooming down Main Street at speeds exceeding two miles per hour.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” a huge voice boomed out at us from speakers up and down the street. “Presenting Suzanne Yaeger, our newly crowned Miss Kansas!” The big-haired queen sat in the back of the Caddy in a hot pink strapless gown. She did the Queen Elizabeth wave Faith Cloud talked about and flashed her orthodontist's handiwork. Mike, of course, was panting like a dog.

I swear, it wasn't just an effort to distract him, but that's when I noticed the building across the street that definitely didn't fit with this town. It was two big stories of red brick, with stone trim, little turrety things, and a dome and Roman arches. It looked like half the ancient world had been cobbled right here in downtown Council Grove, Kansas. I yanked Mike across the street, tearing in front of the high school band in its brassy rendition of “Hello, Dolly.”

The building was called the Farmers and Drovers Bank. Mike proclaimed it “ug-LEE,” and “even worse up close than from across the street.”

“No, I think it's gorgeous. Who would build such a thing in a dinky town like this, Mike?” I studied the cornerstone: built in 1892.

“You don't suppose—”

Mike and I said it at the same time: “James Weaver!”

We walked all around the building and couldn't
find the architect's name. It could have been built by Popeye or Steven Spielberg, for all we knew, but I was convinced that it was James's work. I snapped pictures from every angle for Ahn and Sally and Jeep. I ran across the intersection and climbed onto the hood of a truck to capture the second-floor arches. Inside, someone was working right through the parade, her face green in the glow of her computer.

A computer in one of James Weaver's buildings? Wouldn't he go nuts seeing all that had happened in the century and a half since he'd moved to Kansas Territory?