The Good Lord Bird

Well, she fell on her knees and howled and pleaded and scratched some more, so much she throwed the Old Man out of his killing stupor for a minute, and he said, “All right. We’ll leave him. But I’m keeping a man with a muzzle trained on this door. If you or anybody else pokes their head outside it, they gonna chew a powder ball.”

He left a man to watch the door and split the rest, half taking Doyle to one part of the thickets, the other half a few yards off with Doyle’s two boys. I followed Fred, Owen, and the Old Man, who took Doyle a few steps into the thicket, stopped, and placed him standing with his back to a large tree. Doyle, barefoot, quaked like a knock-kneed chicken and begun moaning like a baby.

The Old Man ignored that. “Now, I’mma ask you for the last time. Is you Pro Slavery or Free State?” Brown said.

“It was just talk,” Doyle said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.” He commenced to shaking and crying and begging for his life. His sons, several feet away, couldn’t see him, but they heard him bellowing like a broke calf and begun to moan and howl as well.

The Old Man didn’t say nothing. Seem like he was hypnotized. He didn’t seem to see Doyle. I couldn’t stand it, so I moved out the thicket, but not fast enough, for Doyle seen me in the glint of the moonlight and suddenly recognized me. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “Tell ’em I’m all right! You know me! Tell ’em. I never done you no wrong.”

“Shush,” Brown said. “I’ll ask you for the last time. Is you a Pro Slaver or not!”

“Don’t hurt me, Captain,” Doyle said. “I’m just a man trying to make a living slinging wheat and growing butter beans.”

He might as well have been singing to a dead hog. “You didn’t say that to Lew Shavers, and them two Yankee women you ravaged outside Lawrence,” the Old Man said.

“That weren’t me,” Doyle murmured quietly. “Just those I knowed.”

“And you wasn’t there?”

“I was. But that ... was a mistake. It weren’t me that done that.”

“I’ll beg the Lord your forgiveness, then,” Brown said. He turned to Fred and Owen and said, “Make quick work of it.”

By God, them two raised their swords and planted them right in the poor man’s head, and down he went. Doyle wanted to live so bad he fell down and got up in the same motion, with Fred’s broadsword still planted in his skull, scrambling for life. Owen struck him again and knocked his head nearly clean off, and this time he went down and stayed there, still twitching as he lay on his side, legs running sideways, but even with his head half sheared off, Doyle hollered like a stuck hog long enough for his sons, not more than ten yards off in the thickets, to hear. The sound of their Pa’s getting murdered and bellowing spooked them to howling like coyotes, till the thud of swords striking their heads echoed out the thicket and they was quieted up. Then it was done.

They stood in the thicket, the whole bunch of ’em panting and exhausted for a minute, then a terrible howling emerged. I jumped in my skin, thinking it was from the dead themselves, till I saw a soul running off through the woods and seen it was one of Brown’s own sons, John. He ran toward the cabin clearing, squawking like a madman.

“John!” the Old Man hollered, and took off after him, the men following.

There weren’t going to be another chance. I turned into the thickets where the wagon and two horses were tethered. One of them, Dutch’s old pinto, had been ridden over by one of the Old Man’s men. I leaped atop it, turned it toward Dutch’s, and put it to work as fast as it would go. Only when I was clear of the thickets did I look behind me to see if I was clear, and I was. I’d left them all behind. I was gone.

5. Nigger Bob

I made it to the California Trail as fast as that horse could stand it, but after a while she tired down and moved to a trot, so I ditched her, for light was coming and me riding her would attract questions. Niggers couldn’t travel alone in them days without papers. I left her where she was and she trotted on ahead while I moved on foot, staying off the road. I was a mile from Dutch’s Tavern when I heard a wagon coming. I jumped into the thickets and waited.

The trail curved around and dipped before it hit an open wood area near where I was, and around the curve, up over the dip, came an open-back wagon driven by a Negro. I decided to take a chance and hail him down. I was about to jump out when, around the curve behind him, a posse of sixteen redshirts on horses in columns of twos appeared. They was Missourians, and traveling like an army.

Sunlight was laying across the plains now. I laid in the thickets, crouched behind a row of bramblers and thick trees, waiting for them to pass. Instead, they halted at the clearing just a few feet from me.