Читать книгу In the Course of Human Events - Mike Harvkey - Страница 7

THE SACKING OF LICK SKILLET

Winter, 2012

That morning in Lick Skillet Jan took Clyde to the cemetery at the top of the hill to show him where she found her daughter’s name. With difficulty they walked in the open road, the snow thick and nearly unmarked, and along the High Street to a red gate draped with ice and frozen to the ground where it hung open. They took the narrow path that wound at sharp angles through the overgrown graves, low-leaning trees making it too narrow for Clyde and Jan to walk side by side. She went ahead, stopping at an old tomb half buried under snow. Some of the stones of the tomb were missing, leaving deep holes, and the roof, over years, had collapsed, making the Celtic cross at the top point not to God but Lick Skillet. The carving on the face was shallow; Jan dug a handful of grass from the snow and rubbed it against the stone, revealing words: Tina Louise, beloved daughter, born 18 Jn 1831. There was no date of death.

Jan took off her gloves with her teeth and got the cigarettes out of her pocket. She passed one to Clyde and burned four matches lighting them. “Tina Louise Birch. Her husband . . . ” Jan rubbed another stone. “The Reverend Wilhelm Birch. Killed in the Civil War. December 1862. The Sacking of Lick Skillet. Their two sons too. William and Gerhardt. Thirteen and fifteen. Tina had three other kids by the time she was twenty.” Jan ran her fingers over their names, delicately, as if they were her own kin. “None of ’em made it long. If we lose a goldfish now we cry like babies. In 1831 there weren’t nobody who hadn’t lost at least one kid to somethin. Wilhelm and Tina were the head of this community. People say Tina treated their slaves better than the reverend did.”

Jan pulled Clyde off the path to reach a higher vantage, her boots making deep impressions in the snow. She pointed to the last tree line before the distant gray horizon. “Napoleon Hudsputh had a farm over there in 1862,” Jan said, “a sorta meeting place for most of the Confederate guerrillas around. But one day late fall that year a bunch of Kansas Redlegs rode up to Hudsputh farm looking for a fight.” The standoff that followed became known as the Sacking of Lick Skillet ’cause, when all was said and done, that’s exactly what it was.

REDLEGS AND JAYHAWKERS HAD BEEN SHOOTING UP HUDSPUTH FARM LEFT and right for years trying to disrupt the Confederates in Missouri. But on this day, Hudsputh, along with Bloody Bill Anderson and William Quantrill, were minding their own business when the Redlegs rode in. The Redlegs weren’t alone either. They had Jayhawkers and half the First Kansas Colored Infantry with ’em and they’d met up with some of the Missouri militia. It was a powerful army and they ambushed the farm, pushed everybody into these woods.

Jan poked the glowing tip of her cigarette at the second ridge, marking Cass County line. “They came through there, right into Lick Skillet.”

Back then Kansas had an open-door policy for slaves. If you were a slave and you could get yourself across the state line, Kansas would give you a gun and pay you to kill whitey. When Hudsputh got pushed into Lick Skillet, Reverend Birch and Tina Louise got everybody ready to fight, including children, including slaves, though they most likely didn’t give the slaves guns. Tina Louise wasn’t that stupid. A lot of those slaves ended up fighting hand to hand with the First Kansas Colored Infantry. Slaves trying to strangle escaped slaves who were fighting to abolish slavery. Imagine it.

After about five weeks, Napoleon Hudsputh fled. But that didn’t end a thing. The Redlegs had surrounded Lick Skillet. In the falling snow—the first snow of the year, like this one—the people of Lick Skillet fought them off. Three more weeks passed and things weren’t looking good at all. Then Wilhelm was shot, in the middle of the road at the bottom of the hill not thirty feet from the corner cabin. Their boys died in the woods, most of the villagers along with them. But Tina Louise and the men and women she owned, at least the ones who weren’t clubbed to death by the Kansas Colored, kept fighting. This was around the end of the year, the earth frozen hard and the air cold and damp, but Tina held her ground. The whole time her husband’s body lay in the road, right in the open, a line of blood in the snow behind him marking how far he’d managed to crawl before finally dying. Word was he lasted two days. Back then bullets were less lethal, it could take a long time to die. Nobody had attempted to move his body since one black boy tried and ended up lying next to him. Tina desperately wanted to move him out of the open, so she finally armed her people. It would have been easy for any of them to cross over to the other side, or turn on Tina, kill her. The Kansas Colored were in the woods shouting, “We making seven dollar a month, all the food we can eat!” But not a one of ’em did. For another week Tina and her slaves held them off, with no food and little water, clothes falling off their backs, hard as burlap, rotten.

JAN PAUSED. “AND THEN,” SHE SAID, SPREADING HER HANDS IN FRONT OF Clyde in an imitation of magic.

Clyde said, “What?”

“Vanished. Nobody ever saw ’em again. That’s why there’s no date of death on that headstone. Some say they got away on the river, but it woulda been awful cold for that.” Jan shrugged. “Never know. Women were tougher back then. Maybe she sailed down to Jeff City and ran for office.”

“I can’t believe her slaves didn’t run off,” Clyde said.

“They was loyal,” Jan said. “More loyal to Tina Louise than their own skin. So loyal to the white woman who owned them that they fought against their own interests. Stranger things have happened.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Clyde repeated, following Jan out of the cemetery and into the road that curved downhill to the old High Street.

To anyone but the Smalls, Lick Skillet was a wild, overgrown place. What minor significance it may have ever held was now lost to all but a few. This was not strictly true, but it was the perception preferred by one fierce family. Aside from a single strand of cables bringing electricity over the mountain that stood against the clear eastern sky, there was nothing that placed Lick Skillet in any decade, any century.

Clyde shouldered his rifle and thought of all the blood that had been spilled on this hard patch of earth in the name of freedom.