The Good Lord Bird

It begun when a chunky white feller come out to talk to the Old Man and try to smooth things. He seemed to be some kind of boss. He came into the armory a few times, said I’m coming in peace, and let’s work this out. But each time he came in, he didn’t venture too far in. Would stick his head in and scoot out. He weren’t armed, and after he poked his head and begged his way in a few times, the Old Man told his men, “Don’t shoot him,” and he hollered at the little feller, “Keep off. Keep back. We come to free the Negro.” But that feller kept fiddling with coming back and forth, sticking his head in, then going back out. He never come all the way in. I heard him out there trying to calm the men down outside the gate at one point, for they’d become a mob. Weren’t nobody in control of them. He tried that a couple of times and gave up on that and got to scooting a little farther into the armory again, just peeking in, then scampering back to safety like a little mouse. Finally he got his nerve up and come in too close. He runned behind a water tank in the yard, and when he got in there, he peeked his head out from behind that water tank, and one of the Old Man’s men in the other armory buildings—I believe Ed Coppoc done it—got a bead on him and fired twice and got him. Dropped his game. The man fell and stopped paying taxes right there. Done.

That feller’s death drove that mob outside into a frenzy. They was already spiked by then—them two saloons at the gate was doing big business—but that feller’s death drove them straight cross-eyed. Made ’em into a straight-out mob. Turns out he was the mayor of Harpers Ferry. Fontaine Beckham. Friend to the Rail Man and liked by all, white and colored. Coppoc couldn’t’a knowed it. There was a lot of confusion.

The mayor’s body lay there with the rest of the dead for a couple of hours, while the Virginians outside whooped and hollered and banged their drums and played the fife and promised the Old Man they was gonna come in there and cut him to pieces and make him eat his bloomers. They railed and promised to make his eyeballs into marshmallows. But nothing happened. Dusk come. It weren’t quite dark, but it got quiet out there, quiet as midnight. Something was happening out there in the dusk. They stopped hollering and quieted up. I couldn’t see them then, for it growed dark, but somebody must’a come there, a captain or somebody, and got them sorted out and better organized. They set there for ’bout ten minutes that way, murmuring quietly ’bout such and so and such and such, like little kids whispering, real quiet, not making a whole lot of noise.

The Old Man, watching through the window, drew back. He lit a lantern and shook his head. “That’s it,” he said. “We has them neutralized. Jesus’s grace is more powerful than what any man can do. Of that you can be certain, men.”

Just then they busted through that gate in a horde, four hundred men, the newspaper said later—so many you couldn’t see between ’em, a stampede, firing as they come, in a full-out, ass-and-hindquarters, band-beatin’, honest-to-goodness charge.

We couldn’t take it. We didn’t have the numbers and was spread too thin around the armory. Kagi and the two coloreds from Oberlin, Leary and Copeland, was at the far end in the rifle works building, and they was the first to fall. They was driven out the back windows of the building and fled into the banks of the Shenandoah, where they both got hit. Kagi took a ball to the head and dropped down dead. Leary got hit in the back and followed him. Copeland got farther into the river, managed to climb on a rock in the middle of the river, and was stranded there. A Virginian waded out there and climbed on the rock with him. Both men drawed revolvers and fired. Both guns snapped, too wet to fire. Copeland surrendered. He’d hang in a month.

Meantime, they overrun a man named Leeman in the armory. He dashed out the side door and jumped into the Potomac and tried to swim across. Militiamen spotted him from the bridges and fired. Wounded him but didn’t kill him. He drifted downstream a few feet and managed to pull himself up onto a rock. Another Virginian climbed out to him, holding his pistol out the water to keep it dry. He climbed onto the rock where Leeman lay sprawled on his back. Leeman hollered, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!” The feller smiled, leveled his gun, and blasted Leeman’s face off. Leeman lay sprawled on that rock for hours. He was used as target practice by them men. They got wasted on gut sauce and happily pumped him full of balls like he was a pillow.

One of the Thompson boys, Will, the younger one, got out the armory some kind of way and got trapped on the second floor of the Gault House hotel, across the road from the armory. They burst in on him, drug him downstairs, kept him prisoner for a few minutes, then took him to the B&O Bridge and made ready to shoot him. But a captain runned over and said, “Take this prisoner inside the hotel.”