The Good Lord Bird

Well, that done it. For I loved Pie. She was the mother I never had. The sister I loved. Course I had other ideas, too, ’bout who she was to me, and them ideas was full of stinkin’, down-low thoughts which weren’t all bad when I thunk them up, so that stopped me from thinking about Bob and Sibonia and the pen altogether. Just quit it altogether. Love blinded me. I was busy anyhow. Pie was the busiest whore on the Hot Floor. She had heaps of customers: Pro Slavers, Free Staters, farmers, gamblers, thieves, preachers, even Mexicans and Indians lined up outside her door. Me being her consort, I was privileged to line ’em up in order of importance. I come to know quite a few important people in this fashion, including a judge named Fuggett, who I’ll get to in a minute.

My days was generally the same. Every afternoon when Pie got up, I brung her coffee and biscuits and we would set and talk about the previous night’s events and so forth, and she’d laugh about some feller who’d made a fool of hisself on the Hot Floor one way or the other. Being that I cavorted all over the tavern and she spent the night working, she missed out on events in the saloon, which privileged me to give her the gossip on who done what and who shot John and the like downstairs. I didn’t mention the slave pen to her no more, but it was always on my mind, for I owed Sibonia, and she didn’t strike me as the type a body ought to owe something to. Every once in a while Sibonia would slip word for me through some colored or other to come out to see her and live up to my promise of teaching her letters. Problem was, getting out there was tough business. The pen could be seen from every window in the hotel, and the slavery question seemed to be putting Pikesville on edge. Even in normal times, fistfights was common out west on the prairie in them days. Kansas and Missouri drawed all types of adventurers—Irishman, German, Russian, land speculators, gold diggers. Between cheap whiskey, land claim disputes, the red man fighting for their land, and low women, your basic western settler was prone to a good dustup at any time. But nothing stirred up a row better than the slavery question, and that seemed to press in on Pikesville at that time. There was so much punching and stabbing and stealing and shouting on account of it, Miss Abby often wondered aloud if she ought to get out of the slave game altogether.

She often set up in the saloon smoking cigars and playing poker with the men, and one night, while she throwed cards at the table with a few of the more well-off fellers from town, she piped out, “Between the Free Staters and my niggers running off, slavery’s getting to be a bother. The real danger in this territory is there’s too many guns floating around. What if the nigger gets armed?”

The men at the table, sipping whiskey and holding their cards, laughed her off. “Your basic Negro is trustworthy,” one said.

“Why, I’d arm my slaves,” said another.

“I’d trust my slave with my life,” said another. But not long after that, one of his slaves drawed a knife on him, and he sold every single slave he had.

I was mulling these things in my head, course, for I was smelling a rat in all of it. Something was happening outside of town, but word on it was thin. Like most things in life, you don’t know nothing till you want to know it, and don’t see what you don’t want to see, but all that talk about slavery was drawing water for something, and not long after, I found out.

I was heading past the kitchen, drawing water, and heard a terrible hank coming from the saloon. I peeked in there to find the place packed with redshirts, three deep from the bar, armed to the teeth. Through the front window, I could see the road out front was full of armed men on horseback. The back door leading to the slave alley was shut tight. And before that stood several redshirts, and they was armed. The hotel bar was going full steam, packed tight with rebels bearing weapons of all kinds, and Miss Abby and Judge Fuggett—that same judge who was a good customer of Pie—them two was having a full-out fight.

Not a fistfight, but a real wrangle. I had to keep movin’ as I worked, lest somebody stop me for lingering, but they was so hot that nobody paid me no mind. Miss Abby was furious. I believe if that room wasn’t full of armed men surrounding Judge Fuggett, she’d’a drawed on him with the heater she carried around on her waistband, but she didn’t. From what I could gather, them two was arguing about money, lots of it. Miss Abby was burning up. “I declare I won’t go along with it,” she said. “That’s a loss of several thousand dollars for me!”