Shortgrass Song Read online

  He turned his wagon around so the tongue pointed eastward; he knew how to sail only with his rudder astern. He moved the crate to the center of the wagon. It had a convenient knothole on top. He took the strap off the peg at the rounded end of the guitar. The peg fit easily into the knothole on the crate, and there he stepped his mast.

  Now he needed shrouds to hold it erect. He didn’t own any rope or cord, so he began taking the catgut strings off the guitar. He spliced four of the strings together in pairs, giving him two long shrouds to reach fore and aft. The other two guitar strings would reach the sides of the wagon box to the starboard and port. He threaded the catgut through cracks between the sideboards and wound them around the tuning keys on the guitar neck. To tighten them, he simply turned the keys as if tuning up for a dance. He thumped the shrouds, listening for the tone that would tell him when his mast stood firm.

  He paused to look around the prairie. “Don’t worry, Buster, there ain’t a soul in thirty miles,” he said to himself. He could only hope he was right. Some frontiersman might mistake a black man sailing a milk wagon across the plains for a lunatic and shoot him for the common good, as there were no asylums this far from civilization.

  The boom proved much easier to rig than the mast. He simply stuck the neck of the banjo into the sound hole of the guitar. The drumlike head of the banjo would swing on the end of the boom, providing just that much more surface for the wind to push against. To suspend the boom, he ran the guitar strap from the neck of the guitar to the head of the banjo. The boom could only travel ninety degrees between the aft and starboard shrouds, but he would not have to jibe. The steady south wind would come across his port gunnel, and he could make the whole downhill run on a close beam reach with the boom over the starboard sideboards of the milk wagon.

  The piece of wagon sheet already had dozens of holes in it, so Buster didn’t mind cutting a few more to hitch his sail onto the mast and the boom. He would use the shoulder strap from the banjo as a sheet to hold his sail to the wind.

  The canvas was popping like a flag in the wind as he climbed into the stern of his craft and sat down on the buffalo chips. Steering was going to be limited. The wagon tongue, sticking straight up now, had a crosspiece on the end of it that Buster had used to pull against for twenty-eight days. As a tiller, it wouldn’t allow him much leverage to turn. However, since he had just one course in mind—west—steering concerned him little.

  He drew the banjo-strap sheet in, and his dusty little triangular sail billowed with the crosswind from the south. The guitar-string shrouds sang with new tension. The wagon strained westward. Buster jerked his weight forward in the vessel, rocking it, but it refused to roll. He reached over the port gunnel, grabbed the rim of the wagon wheel, turned it, and shoved his craft off down the gentle grade to the west. She crept tentatively over the rough ground as Buster adjusted the sheet to take highest advantage of the wind. He was under way, sailing the shortgrass plains of western Kansas Territory.

  “You’re a crazy man, Buster Thompson,” he muttered, an involuntary grin tearing at the cracks in his parched lips.

  He had called himself by his new name often in the past weeks, to familiarize himself with it. He didn’t want to mistakenly call himself by his old name and risk getting sent back to the Chesapeake. There he was known as Jack Arbuckle or—to the slave owners of the Eastern Shore—“Arbuckle’s Jack.” It was there he had learned to sail, but never had he dreamed he would lift canvas to the wind on dry ground, and sail among buffalo chips in a milk wagon.

  Arbuckle’s Jack had plied the Chesapeake so often that it must have come as a surprise to the bay people when he drowned. As the best fiddler on the Eastern Shore, Jack had spent almost every Friday and Saturday night playing at balls on the bay estates. His master, Hugh Arbuckle, let him keep the money he earned from fiddling and often sailed with him to hear his bow stroke music. Jack would cleat the boom sheet, sit on the transom of Master Hugh’s sloop, steer with his foot, and play his fiddle as master and slave sailed across the bay. Master Hugh usually sat amidships and drank.

  “Jack, you’ll fall off and drown some night coming home from one of these bloody cotillions,” he said once.

  “I swim good,” Jack replied.

  He was Master Hugh’s boyhood playmate, and Hugh had never learned to distance himself. The plantation owner gave Jack his choice of jobs, and Jack enjoyed a change every few months. He had tended fields and gardens where he experimented with new crops and methods of cultivation. He enjoyed building things in the blacksmith shop. He had worked in the mansion, where he cooked, made Hugh’s juleps, and played while his master drank. Master Hugh had even taught him reading and writing, and given him unlimited access to the library.

  When the panic of 1857 came, the Arbuckle Plantation suffered its worst year. Hugh had never been much of a manager anyway, but now acres slipped away to pay debts, and he stayed drunk more than ever. There were agents for the Underground Railroad moving among the slaves, urging them to escape, and Jack began to listen. Master Hugh was going to lose the plantation, and all his slaves would go on the block for whiskey money. But Jack steeled himself against panic. He would make no ill-conceived scramble for freedom. He intended to plan a foolproof escape. The slave hunters’ hounds would never catch his scent.

  One day at dawn a burly black woman came to the blacksmith shop and told Jack that a fugitive slave boat would leave the Choptank River near Cambridge at dusk the coming Saturday. Jack knew his time to escape had come; he had been asked to fiddle at a dance up Tred Avon that same night, and Master Hugh had already said he wouldn’t attend.

  After loading all his instruments into the sloop, Jack sailed for the Choptank. When he tied up alongside the fugitive boat, he began removing the canvas from the halyard. The burly woman who had come to him in the blacksmith shop was there with four men and a mother with two children.

  “Hurry up!” the guide said. “What you doin’, fool?”

  “I’m drownin’ myself,” Jack said.

  “What?”

  He tied a rock to the sail and threw it overboard. “Master Hugh always said I’d fall out one night, fiddlin’ on the transom. That’s what he’ll think. And he’ll think somebody stole his sail and all my instruments after I fell out. He’s gonna think I’m drowned. That way no slave hunters are gonna come after me. They won’t advertise for me in the North, either.” Jack grinned, proud of his plan. He handed his fiddle to the fugitive guide.

  “You ain’t takin’ all them fiddles and things,” she said, refusing the instruments. “You can’t run with all that. Throw ’em over.”

  Jack scoffed. “If these things don’t go, I ain’t goin’ either.”

  The fugitive guide pulled a pistol from her waistband and pointed it at Jack’s head. “Just dead niggers go back, boy,” she said.

  Jack stood in the rocking sloop, clutching his fiddle case. “But, this here’s how I’ll make my way,” he said.

  “Throw ’em over.”

  Buster grunted, caught without words. The woman cocked the pistol.

  “I’ll carry one of ’em,” said the oldest son of the slave mother.

  “I’ll carry that little one, there,” a man grumbled, pointing to the mandolin Master Hugh had bought for Jack in Kentucky. “Don’t need no shootin’.”

  The guide lowered her pistol as Arbuckle’s Jack distributed his instruments among the fugitives.

  They sailed by night up Chesapeake Bay and into the Susquehanna River. Somewhere in Pennsylvania their guide ordered them out of the boat. When Jack took his first step as a free man he shook with a joy and a glory so full that tears came to his eyes. Then he took his second step and almost buckled under his fears. He was helpless in a strange land, at the mercy of fugitive guides rougher than his former slave master. He had no idea where he was going or what he would be required to do.

  The fugitives ran over forest trails for hours and finally came to a farmhouse where they slept. The e
xamining committee, made up of white and black abolitionists, woke Jack before morning and interrogated him.

  “Where did you come from?… How did your master come by you?… Did you have a wife or family?… Why did you escape?”

  When Jack had answered all the questions to the satisfaction of the committee, the members explained that they had to interrogate fugitives to keep black spies from infiltrating the Underground Railroad.

  “Where do you want to go?” asked a bearded white man.

  “Canada, I guess,” Jack said.

  “Then you will go to Canada. Your name now is Buster Thompson. You must never mention your old name again. Never. Tell everyone you meet you were born a free Negro in Philadelphia and have never been a slave. There are slave hunters who will kidnap you to sell in the South.

  “At dawn you will set across the mountains to Lewistown. The trip will take two days. At Lewistown you will buy a ticket and ride the jim crow car to Meadville. There is a farm south of Meadville owned by Absalom Holcomb. Everybody calls him Ab. He’s a conductor for the Underground Railroad. He will get you to Canada. Ask for no one but Ab Holcomb. Say you are going to his farm to work as a blacksmith. Trust no one but him. Do not let anyone else take you to Canada. You must find Ab Holcomb.”

  With those orders, Arbuckle’s Jack became Buster Thompson and started his solitary trek to Meadville, carrying his guitar and banjo on his back, and his mandolin and fiddle under his arm. South of Meadville, he asked a farmwife for directions to Ab Holcomb’s farm.

  “It was up the road two miles,” she replied. “But Ab and Ella don’t live here anymore.”

  Buster leaned against the porch columns to steady himself. “Where’d they go?” he asked.

  “They went to the Cherry Creek diggin’s in the Pikes Peak country. Sold everything and went west. Are you a fugitive slave?”

  “No, ma’am,” Buster said. “I was born free in Philadelphia. I came to work for Mister Ab.”

  “You can tell me if you’re a fugitive. I’ll help you find a way to Canada. I’ve helped Ella many times to cook for the slaves and send them north.”

  “I never was a slave,” Buster said. “I’m supposed to work for Mister Ab.” He stood on the front porch of the farmhouse, burdened with musical instruments, lost for words and lost in the world. He had already traveled farther than he ever dreamed he would have to go. And now—Cherry Creek, Pikes Peak, the Great American Desert. He trusted no one. He had no friends in his freedom. Only a name: Absalom Holcomb.

  “Ella sent a letter to the Abolition Society. She told them not to send any more fugitives. Didn’t they get it?”

  “I don’t know. I ain’t no fugitive. How do I find Mister Ab? I came to work for him.”

  The farmwife went into her house and came out with a letter from Ella Holcomb. “This came last week. First time I’ve heard from her. Do you read?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Maybe you are a free Negro at that, then. Here, read it. It tells where they live now. I don’t think you’ll want to go there.”

  Buster stepped into the sunshine and read:

  Dear Irene,

  Cherry Creek was the vilest place I have ever seen. I would not allow Ab to settle us there. We went south and now have a ranch on Monument Creek, at the foot of the Rampart Range. No neighbors. We have no house yet. Living in a hole. There is much work to do and yet I am glad I made Ab move us here. Caleb is better. He coughs less of the time. Pete is a good boy as always and Matthew has no trouble to get into. Pray for us.

  Ella

  “What’s your name?” Irene asked.

  “Buster Thompson.”

  “Do you play all those instruments?”

  He nodded. Irene took the letter into her house, telling him to wait. She came out and gave the letter back to him. “Here. What do you think? Will it pass for her writing?”

  At the end of the page, Irene had added a postscript:

  Send Buster now. We need his help and some music.

  Her hand passed adequately for Ella Holcomb’s.

  “I’ll get you to Canada if you’ll trust me,” she said. “That is, if you are a fugitive. But if you must go after Ab, this letter will help you get through Missouri. There are slave hunters in Missouri.”

  Buster rode the colored cars to Independence and asked about the best route to Monument Creek. He was told to take the Smoky Hill Road across Kansas with the next bull train. The letter from Ella Holcomb got him past two groups of slave hunters looking for fugitives to sell in the South. He spent his last few dollars on a change of clothes, a horse pistol, a few tools to bolster his story about working for Ab Holcomb, the canteens, and the little milk wagon to carry it all in.

  The freighters welcomed Buster when they saw his musical instruments. He played an hour or two every night in camp while the teamsters took turns dancing jigs on a buffalo hide. By day he pulled his little milk wagon and was sometimes allowed to hitch on behind a freight wagon for the steep upgrades. He saw no buffalo and no Indians.

  After seventeen days on the trail, the captain told him to fall out of the train with his milk wagon. The train would follow a branch of the Smoky Hill Road that veered south to Bent’s Fort. Monument Creek was due west.

  “Go around the heads of all the creeks,” the captain said, “and you’ll stay on the main divide between the Platte and the Arkansas. You’ll find water about halfway there in the Big Sandy. In a week or so you’ll see the mountains. Head north of Pikes Peak and you’ll strike Monument Creek somewhere around Holcomb’s Ranch. I ain’t been there, but I hear that’s about where he settled. If you run into Indians, hope they’re Arapaho and not Cheyenne.”

  After eleven lonely days traveling west, the mountains were growing ever taller, and Buster finally started dropping into the Monument Creek drainage. That was the day the wind picked up from the south, and he began thinking of dry-land sailing in his little milk wagon. He knew he was no more than a day or two away from Ab Holcomb’s ranch. He predicted that when he arrived, he would find out Ab and Ella had moved on to Oregon.

  THREE

  Buster’s wind wagon balked now and then between gusts, and in places where the slope leveled out, but for almost half an hour he kept sailing west, singing an old work shanty called “Haul on the Bowline” when the running was smoothest. He found a nailhead to hitch the banjo strap on so he didn’t have to hold it against the wind. He got moving up to ten or fifteen miles an hour on one stretch.

  The plains continued to pitch more severely toward the west, causing the milk wagon to run faster and Buster to sing louder:

  Haul on the bowline, the ship she is a-rollin’

  Haul on the bowline, the bowline, haul.

  Chesapeake Bay had nothing on the shortgrass plains. There was no lighthouse like Pikes Peak.

  Over the square bow of the wind wagon, he saw a wide swale dropping off before him. With the jolting of the craft over the rough prairie, he could see only enough of the terrain to tell that the swale would give him his highest speeds yet. He grinned, adjusted the sheet, and hitched it back on its nailhead. He hoped to get rolling as fast as he could into the swale so his momentum would take him as far as possible up the other side.

  The fiddle and the mandolin jumped in the forecastle with every bump the wagon wheels met. Buster settled lower in the buffalo chips. He hung his left arm over the port gunnel to better see around the sail and to keep his vessel aright in case a powerful gust tried to heel her over to the starboard. The sheet slipped an inch on its nail, so he double hitched it and started singing again.

  Haul on the bowline, the bosun is a-growlin’

  Haul on the bowline, the bowline, haul.

  The wind wagon reached the steepest pitch now, diving into the swale, running faster than a galloping horse. Buster held his hat down with one hand.

  Something caught his eye over the top of the mast. A ragged black slash across the sky. Two, three, four of them—circling. Buzzards! S
omething dead? They soared and banked low on the southern wind over the swale. He watched one of them, its wing feathers splayed like fingers, as it swooped toward the ground and then—into the ground. It vanished like a prairie dog! Now it shot out of the plains fifty yards over!

  Buster pulled himself higher in the rattling milk wagon. Down in the bowl of the swale ahead, he could just make out the rim of a sand bluff. He was sailing headlong toward a plains canyon!

  “Turn her to the wind, Buster!” he said to himself, but the wagon tongue proved useless as a tiller. He pulled against it with everything he had, but it wouldn’t change the cut of the wheels.

  He glanced ahead, saw the near edge of the gully, closer than he could have imagined. He had ten seconds to stop! He yanked at the sheet, double hitched on the nailhead. Finally getting it loose, the sail slacked leeward, but momentum kept him rolling. “Heel her over!” He rocked side to side, but the wagon wouldn’t tip, its center too low.

  Three seconds to stop, or fly over the bluff! Buster let the wagon tongue drag astern. He leapt over the transom and landed with both feet on the tongue. It cut into the ground like a harrow, raising a plume of dust. The wagon slowed, but the leading wheels reached the bluff and rolled off. The running gear under the wagon box slammed against the precipice and slid. Buster saw something below—smoke-blackened cones bristling with lodge poles—ten or twelve of them.

  When the trailing wheels hit the ledge, the wagon bucked Buster off the tongue and back into the box as it plummeted down the steep bank of the gully. Children screamed and dogs barked as he pulled himself high enough to peer over the lurching sideboards. He was racing toward the tallest tepee in the camp. He would flatten it, killing its inhabitants, prompting the rest of the villagers to roast him alive over his own buffalo chips.

  When his wind wagon hit, the leading wheels straddled a lodge pole and drove straight up toward the smoke hole. The vehicle died like a rock flung to its zenith, then fell back on its tongue. It bounced on its end and pitched everything out. Buster’s fiddle and mandolin landed five feet away. The crate slid out from under the mast, and the boom swung down to slap him across the head with a discordant twanging of banjo strings, sprawling him among the scattered buffalo chips.