“Did what?”
“Richmond police come. Say Jimson been kilt. Then they go.”
“But how?”
“Say he try to rob a white man, so white man shot him dead!”
“But, but . . . how?” Jesse repeated stupidly.
“Pray with me, Jesse,” Fields Cook said.
“Said Jimson was with that gang of his.”
“Where is the boy? Where is Jimson now?”
She blinked. Her eyes focused. “Jesse, I don’t know. Police never said. Just knock on the door and when I come they say Jimson shot dead. Oh, Jesse. They didn’t care nothin’ ’bout my boy. They like they postmen bringin’ a letter. When I asked where was my boy, they gets in their buggy and drives away.”
“I take you to the police, Mr. Burns,” a familiar voice at Jesse’s shoulder.
Deacon Hanley owned a dozen cabs and thirty freight wagons. He’d been an influential supporter.
“Hanley’s Livery” was in gold script on the carriage’s black varnished door.
When Jesse started to climb into the driver’s box beside the Deacon, the rich old man refused. “No, sir. No, sir. You rides inside. Might be you ain’t payin’ tonight, but you rides inside.”
Jesse paused on the step. “Deacon. The Knockabouts. Do you know them?”
“Just your boy and that scamp Jelly Jones. He hitch onto my freighters and hangs there like a darn monkey.” He paused. “I am tolerably sure Jelly Jones and his mother live in one of them canal boats.”
“Take me, please. I must know . . .”
“Please step inside, Mr. Burns. We be there directly.”
The leather seats smelled faintly of saddle soap.
It began snowing as the Deacon’s cab descended narrow cobblestone streets toward the river. Lazy, wet flakes drifted in the beam of the carriage lamps.
By 1850, the James and Kanawha Canal Company was transporting goods and passengers up the James River to the Allegheny Mountains. In ’63, Stonewall Jackson’s body was brought to Lexington by canal boat. Two years later, Sheridan’s cavalry destroyed its locks, bridges, and towpaths and the James and Kanawha died with the Confederacy.
The few surviving canal boats were stranded in a basin beside the James. Most were sunk to their gunwales. The boats were long, with low cabins to pass under bridges. One occupied boat was swathed by tattered canvas from bow to stern so it seemed more tent than boat. A lantern glowed behind the canvas where a porthole might have been.
DEACON HANLEY OPENED the door for the younger man. “That’s them. Mrs. Jones’s husband sewed tents for the army. He sewed that roof too. Mrs. Jones by herself since he run off.”
In the dim glow of Hanley’s carriage lamps, Jesse picked his way across slush-covered black planks, some which gave alarmingly under his feet. Behind the boat basin the James River was a flat black carpet. The boat rocked when he set his foot on the stern and a woman cried, “Who that on my house? Best you sing out! I got me a pistol in my hand.”
“It’s Jesse Burns,” Jesse called. “Jimson Burns’s father.”
He waited in the cockpit until she pulled a canvas flap aside where once the wooden door must have hung. Her face was smallpox-scarred and years ago her left arm had been broken and badly set. It jutted like a broken wing. Behind her, in the light of her lamp, Jesse saw heaps of old clothes, blankets, and rags.
“You that legislator man!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I didn’t vote for you and I didn’t vote ’gainst you so you needn’t be comin’ ’round here.”
“It’s about my Jimson, Mrs. Jones. I am told . . . I believe Jimson was shot tonight.”
The woman clapped a hand to her mouth. “Jelly, he never said nothin’ ’bout that!”
“What did Jelly say?”
“Said it t’weren’t nothin’, what they done. T’weren’t nothin’. Said him and them other boys was on Calhoun Street on that bridge and a rig was passin’ and the driver was wearin’ a top hat and so, boys bein’ boys . . .”
“What did they do?”
“There ain’t nothin’ for them! Nothin’! White men gots all the jobs. They’d hire an Irish before a nigger!”
“What did they do!”
“They made snowballs and when he comes out t’other side, they smacked his hat.
“Well, they runs for a ways, you know. They figure the driver, he curse an’ keep on goin’, but he don’t.”
“He come after ’em, Mr. Burns. They walkin’ down Grace Street when they hear this horse a-gallopin’ and that’s who it was, ’cept he ain’t wearin’ no stovepipe hat no more. He standin’ up in his rig. He takes out his pistol and shoots. Jelly never tol’ me he shot nobody. Mr. Burns, them boys shouldn’t have done what they done, but there weren’t no call for shootin’.”
“I’d like to talk to Jelly.”
Her face slammed shut. “Jelly ain’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“Ain’t here. Jelly gone. I don’t want no trouble, Mr. Burns.” She withdrew her head and as her canvas door fell into place, she said, “I’m right sorry ’bout your boy.”
Jesse hadn’t felt like this since the war: everything up for grabs, life and death so interwoven you couldn’t tell the one from the other.
When he came back to himself he was leaning against the cab, and the Deacon was saying, “You all right, Mr. Burns? You feelin’ all right now?”
“Can you drive me to City Hall?”
Jesse climbed the familiar steps into City Hall and his heels clicked down the long marble corridor past “City Treasurer” and “Commissioner of Revenue” in gilded letters on frosted glass. Jesse had often come here before, helping constituents trapped in the white man’s law. Sometimes they couldn’t understand what they’d done wrong; some times they’d done nothing worse than attracting a policeman’s notice. Jesse descended into the basement, which housed the police and the city jail.
SERGEANT MCBRIDE LAID his cigar in a soapstone ashtray some prisoner had carved. McBride was so pale-complected Jesse wondered if he ever came out of the basement. “Evenin’, Assemblyman Burns.”
“A white man shot my stepson, Jimson Burns, tonight.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Hurriedly, the sergeant flipped through his record book, his fingertip skidding down the pages. “I just come on, you see,” he apologized. “I ain’t caught up with things yet.”
“Grace Street. It happened on Grace Street.”
He flipped the page and his finger stopped: “Commander E. B. Wetherell. With the Federal navy. Wetherell was driving down Grace to his hotel when he was attacked by several colored men. Commander Wetherell drove them off with his pistol.”
“He . . .”
“Says here he fired his revolver and the coloreds, uh . . . dispersed.” McBride swiveled the book. “Here. Read for yourself.”
“Leaving my stepson dead.”
“Assemblyman Burns, I wasn’t there. I don’t know the particulars, and the officers what looked into it wasn’t present neither. Them Knock-abouts, that Shockoe Bottom gang—they tried to rob an officer of the United States Navy who defended himself. That’s what it says.” He tapped the register.
“Where is Jimson now?”
“It don’t say nothing ’bout that.”
“Where is Jimson now?”
McBride set elbows on the counter. “Assemblyman Burns, you’re sorrowed and upset. If I was in your shoes I’d be sorrowed too. But the policemen who visited the scene and interviewed Commander Wetherell say he had the right of it and I ain’t terrible surprised the Knockabouts have come to this. We been keepin’ an eye on them boys.”
“Sergeant McBride, where is my son?”
“Jesus wept, Mr. Burns. Wouldn’t I tell you if I knew?”
THREE INCHES OF fresh snow covered the pavement outside City Hall and the gaslights illuminated circles of innocent snow. Deacon Hanley was tucked under robes beneath his snow-dusted hat, head bowed, asleep.
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Jesse slapped the side of the cab.
“Deacon, please take me to Colonel Elliot’s home. Corner of West Fourth.”
Elliot was an ungracious, testy man who’d been wounded at Gettys-burg and walked with a cane. When the legislature was in session he used the speaker’s office to give Mahone’s legislators instructions. On his way out, each man collected an envelope with his name on it.
When Duncan Gatewood and his family were preparing to leave for Montana, Jesse and Sudie had visited this same house to wish them luck. Its wrought-iron gate opened onto a narrow walk covered with glossy, untrodden snow.
The elderly negro who answered Jesse’s ring recoiled. “You come ’round back!” he hissed. “Who you think you is?”
“I am the Honorable Jesse Burns, delegate for Marshall Ward, with urgent business with Colonel Elliot.”
Recognizing Jesse’s driver, the old negro called, “Deacon Hanley! Deacon Hanley! This man who he say he be?”
“Mr. Burns. He in the legislature!”
Partially reassured, Elliot’s houseman let Jesse into the hall, but didn’t offer to take his hat and didn’t show him into the parlor. “You wait here, Mr. Delegate, while I fetch the Colonel. He decide whether he talk to you or don’t.”
Colonel Elliot wore a patterned moss-green silk dressing robe. His left hand clutched the stair rail as he descended, placing his cane before every step. “Burns, what do you mean, coming to my home? You know I don’t discuss business—” When his eyes came level with Jesse’s, the Colonel frowned. “What’s wrong, Burns? Why are you here?”
“My boy Jimson. He . . . Jimson’s been killed. My Jimson has been shot to death. I don’t know . . . where my boy is lyin’ tonight.”
“The police . . . ?”
“Won’t tell me anything.”
Elliot sat heavily on a hall chair and eased his left leg straight before him. “Your son, you said?”
“My stepson. Jimson’s not but eighteen. His mother is desperate.”
The Colonel rubbed his leg. “It’s snowing. You have a cab?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Colonel got his leg back under him, but sweat popped on his forehead as he rose. “Wait until I am dressed. Burns . . .”
“Yes, sir?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Twenty minutes later, in business attire, the gray-faced Colonel came back down the stairs. Jesse held the front door but didn’t dare offer his arm.
In the closed cab, Jesse could smell the Colonel’s bourbon. “Nothing?” He snorted at a private joke. After a while he admitted, “Had a son myself.”
After a silence broken by hoof thuds and the jingle of trace chains, he continued, “First Lieutenant Peter Elliot, 14th North Carolina. We expected great things . . . great things. Peter Rexrode Elliot. Named for my wife’s father. I remember . . .”
“Yes?”
“Too many things. Far too many things. God, how I hate remembering.”
The cab stopped at a grand house on Church Hill.
Although the Mayor’s houseman insisted his master was abed, the Colonel pushed past into the dark house while Jesse returned to the cab. Snow fluttered in the lamplight. He could see his breath.
Lamps flared in a front room.
Deacon Hanley shuffled his feet over Jesse’s head. “Mr. Burns,” he called softly.
“Yes, Deacon Hanley.”
“I’m terrible sorry ’bout this. I was right hopeful for that boy.”
Jimson’s father had had no hope for the boy. Jimson wouldn’t go to school. He wouldn’t improve himself. He wouldn’t . . . Jesse groaned.
“You poorly, Mr. Burns? You feelin’ poorly?” The Deacon’s anxious face appeared at the hatch. “Oh, you grievin’. That’ll be all right, then.”
Jesse had worked to improve the negro race, but he’d done nothing for the young man in his own home, the young man who’d eaten at his table, who’d campaigned for Jesse’s election believing, trusting, that somehow the election would lead to something better for both of them.
All the while he thought he’d been helping the boy, he’d been casting him down. “Oh, Jimson,” Jesse sorrowed. “Oh, my dear boy . . .”
Moments after the Mayor’s door closed behind Colonel Elliot, the lamps in the house were extinguished. Elliott gave Jesse an envelope. “From Mayor Solney for the police.”
“What is it?”
“Just hand them the damn thing.”
They rode downtown silently. When the cab stopped again, Colonel Elliot said, “Burns, I’ve done what I could. You’ll remember that.”
“Will my remembering make any difference?”
The Colonel’s eyes were bleak as cold ashes. “Not to me, certainly, but perhaps God will care. Burns? Whatever your reason don’t ever come to my home again.”
As Deacon Hanley took the Colonel away, Jesse climbed the City Hall steps for the second time that night.
He waited on a hard bench while McBride woke the duty captain. Jesse tried to stop thinking, but he couldn’t.
When McBride came back, he said, “Mr. Burns, Captain says we ain’t gonna charge Commander Wetherell on account of he was defendin’ hisself.” He returned the Mayor’s letter. “Captain says they took your boy to the hospital. Dr. Hunter McGuire’s got him.”
Hope surged through Jesse. “Then . . . Jimson’s . . . he’s alive?”
McBride shook his head. “That’s not what he’s doin’ there.”
THE RICHMOND HOSPITAL was three blocks from City Hall, just beyond the dilapidated mansion which had been the Confederate White House. After Richmond fell, Abraham Lincoln had spent the night in the house, sleeping in President Jefferson Davis’s bed.
Until Jesse showed him the Mayor’s letter, the hospital attendant denied knowing anything about “Jim-son? Jim-son Burns?” The young attendant’s eyes were insolent. “Whew,” he said. “Mayor Solney himself. Ain’t you the Nigger King.” He blotted pustules on his cheek with a handkerchief polka-dotted with blood. “Reckon your Jim-son’ll be in the theater.”
“Theater?”
“Oh, yeah. Boy’s set to be a headliner!” The young man was amused.
They climbed two flights of iron stairs and passed down a dim hall lit by every third gaslight.
It was like a real theater, Jimson lay on a zinc-topped wooden table beneath a circular chandelier. Rows of seats rose into darkness behind the stage.
Jimson was naked and his clothes were nowhere in sight.
The attendant dabbed a pustule and pronounced, “Dr. Hunter McGuire was Stonewall’s personal physician.” He examined the handkerchief. “McGuire is reckoned the finest surgeon in Virginia.”
Jesse approached the table reluctantly. Jimson had been a modest boy and Jesse had never seen him naked. He was smaller than he’d been alive.
“Most of our cadavers are negroes,” the attendant continued. “Don’t make no difference to Dr. McGuire. McGuire says there’s not a ‘lick of difference’ ’twixt a white man and one of you, but I ask, how can that be?”
His stepson’s forehead was the purely coldest thing Jesse had ever touched. The wound in Jimson’s left breast was a small circular hole, blue-tinged at the edges. How could something so small kill a grown man? The gas jets sputtered overhead. Jesse’s ears rang.
“You gonna take him?” the attendant asked.
Jesse nodded.
“I give twenty dollars for this boy. Who’s gonna refund my twenty dollars? We get plenty infants and shriveled-up old birds, but we don’t get many prime specimens like this one. I gave that cop twenty dollars.”
CHAPTER 49
RATION DAY
Rations per indian person shall be: Daily: a pound and a half of beef (or in lieu thereof, one-half pound of bacon), one-half pound of flour, and one-half pound of corn; and for every one hundred rations, four pounds of coffee, eight pounds of sugar, and three pounds of beans.
Plenty Cuts never hunted again. Although he
went with the gamblers from lodge to lodge, he never wagered. He had been known as He Who Fooled Chasing Cranes and He Who Speaks for Red Cloud. He became the man who watches the bone game.
It was no longer good between us. When he lay with me, it was like laying with a stranger.
He grew fat. He did not keep himself clean.
I talked to Tazoo. Tazoo talked to me. I talked to my husband. He did not talk to me.
The winter was hard and more Lakota came in to the Agency.
Yellow Hair’s brother arrested Chief Rain in the Face and beat him, and Rain in the Face was shamed and vowed to eat Tom Custer’s heart. Rain in the Face escaped. The Seizers laughed at Rain in the Face’s promise and the Lakota laughed too. They weren’t laughing at the same thing.
Black Face and Yellow Hair were to lead the Seizers to the Yellowstone.
They said this was a peaceful expedition, but it was Lakota land by Red Cloud’s treaty and they had no right to enter it.
One morning I said to my husband, “We should join my brother in the Grandmother’s land. Your soul is dying.”
Plenty Cuts was so angry he struck me.
The next day I went to Shivering Aspen for the medicine that would kill the baby I was carrying. That night I had terrible cramps and the baby was not born. I lashed together sticks for a raft and sent my boy down the river to the Shadowland.
Every fifth morning, I’d stir the fire, boil water, and make Tazoo’s mush. Tazoo would stay with Touch Dog while I went for rations. Plenty Cuts always pretended he was asleep and when I returned, he would be elsewhere, so he could pretend he didn’t know about the rations. Our poor food appeared in our lodge as if by magic.
That morning—it was the Moon When Blackhorn Calves Are Born—I gathered with other women on the riverbank. A few of us at a time were admitted into the stockade, where we touched the pen for our rations.
Sisters called greetings to sisters, married women asked virgins why they hadn’t gotten a man and advised others to leave the husband they had. Though we made many jokes, no woman joked about our husbands’ inability to feed their families.
The Seizers’ Ariska scouts wore indian leggings and breechclouts and blue wool coats. In tongues the Washitu didn’t speak they named Lakota and Cheyenne warriors they’d killed. We women pretended we didn’t hear their boasts.