Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is about ready to break wide open, and I sure don’t want to see you get swallowed up.”
I told him I would not get involved in any such things, though I was going to do whatever I wanted within reason especially if it was going to ensure that no other person would ever be enslaved, and not a single thing except maybe death was going to swallow me up or see that happen to me, certainly nothing involving him or that other one. I offered the two my good wishes and farewells, not moving yet watching as they walked away, Sawyer’s head and arms gyring like a nickelodeon picture, Huck nodding but never glancing back, until they vanished into the horizon near Mill Creek.
I never came across either one of them over the next few years, not even once, then the war began so perhaps both had moved away to some other place, Sawyer to Nevada or Oregon, where some of the local people were heading, Huckleberry to Kansas, or perhaps they had already headed off to fight on the Confederate side. There was a pressing question about which way Missouri would go since Governor Claiborne had sided with the insurrectionists, then General Lyon came and the Germans faced down and fired on the insurrectionists, all those scrubby Dutch with their rifles from the federal arsenal, though nobody I knew could believe white people would fire on other white people en masse like that. But they did and that was only the opening of the war here, as well as the sum of the fighting, at least for the people who stayed in St. Louis. By this time Johnny O. had come to live with me, and at first didn’t take so well to Louisa, though he stayed with us for about a year, finding work down on the levee with all the steamboats bringing goods to provision the troops, and in his off-time studied the healing arts with me when I wasn’t working the bar. He fell in love with a girl who was still bound to a family out in Bellefontaine, so I gave him money to go back to Chicago, so she could become free and they could marry. He left late one night and I was wrecked to see him go, but he wrote to tell me that after being stopped by the river patrols they got through, and he wrote me letters every other week, like I used to do with his sister and him, promising he was going to come back and fight.
Right around the middle of the summer of 1863 the army announced that we could sign up, at the Schofield Barracks, and though I was over 40 now, 46 to be exact, I felt it was my duty to contribute directly to the struggle, though I was sure they would say, Mr. Rivers, you are far too old, but rumor was an old black man had been the first casualty when the battles began in Washington, so if he was willing and able to serve why couldn’t I, and I walked over there anyhow. Louisa protested my decision but, without conceding that what I was doing was right, agreed to stay in town and run the tavern while I was gone. It tore me apart to say goodbye to her, us never having left the other’s side since we had taken up house together, but I knew both from all the signs at my disposal and deep in my core that at war’s end I would walk through that tavern door and see her standing there.
They took me and we, the First Missouri Colored Troops, men mostly young but some old from in state and some from points north, west and south, mustered out not long thereafter, and I will tell the reporter about all of this, about each battle from the time we crossed the Meramec, then headed to Helena, and the entire journey, with every battle and firefight all the way down to Texas, but only once I have finished telling him about the second time I saw that face, which was after we had already reached Los Brazos de Santiago, near Brownsville. Have you ever noticed how on the decisive day the light comes through the trees a certain way, how the patterns of the future reveal themselves as a ghost language and you got to do more than just pay attention but use all the knowledge and wisdom you have ever gained to interpret it? Because I had been studying on just that when Sydnor, from my company, ran right up to me hollering, all out of breath, “Colonel talking about how despite the cease-fire we might scrap it up one more time with the rebels,” repeating himself until Bergamire and the rest of them closed his trap with their glares. I listened to him since the light that morning was not shining like on the morning that I chose to cross the Mississippi with Sadie May and the children all those years before, the sun’s beams not drawing a path to the shore, not touching and catching and caressing the bluewood branches there in Texas just so, though in Hannibal it had been crab apples and cherries, the gleaming dressing the leaves with its omens and auguries, printing clues in shadowed patterns in the grass and soil you just needed to discern if you could, because the real test is always to go beyond mere guessing to following the map the world around you sets forth.
Soon enough here came Anderson, stomping over from the area of the officers’ tents, grinning broadly like the lottery man had called his name, but unlike Sydnor he knew not to mess with me when I was studying on something, so he stood beside me as my eyes followed the light's shafts down into the greenery, tracing it with my fingers, smelling it, listening to the aftersounds and the silence enfolding it and only then did he utter anything, only when he was pretty sure I was done, Sydnor watching me too until he couldn’t sit no more and hurried over to hear what Anderson had to say. Excuse me but what news you got for us, Pop James? is what this young man, once in bondage yet who knew how to write out notes like a schoolmaster and recite chapter and verse from the Bible and Longfellow without mixing up a single word, and who behaved like a gentleman when he spoke to an elder like me, asked me.
I answered, “I got to think about it for a little while more, but if you look at this sign here”—and I pointed to the cross of light with the faint shape of a heart hovering just above its center, a forewarning and lament—“and here, to the way the blades is bending outward on either side like an invisible arrow”—urging us to stay right where we were—“and to here,” a patch so dusty it was as if the desert of solitary death had already laid claim to it, “this is not the time to attack, I can almost assure you on my parents’ and my grandparents’ graves of that.” DeVeaux, who had also walked over, countered without even acknowledging me that my mumbo jumbo and hoodoo claptrap couldn’t be right, that what we needed to do is fight our way to the next line, lay those Confederates and their French and Mexican infantrymen low like the reaper, and they all commenced to smiling and clapping, Johnson, Scott, Shepard, Morris who had his sisters kidnapped into Arkansas well before the first shot down at Sumter, Wilson, Patterson, Renard, Kelley, even Bergamire, nearly every last one of them. DeVeaux was on a roll now, his voice a common preacher’s, which is what his father was, Anderson told me the first time I witnessed him going on like this, soon as he got free the daddy took up the Good Book and the son intended to follow that profession, these folks from the far northwestern corner of the state, near Nebraska, though he had shifted into testifying about how we all needed to go beyond shooting them down, we needed to kill at least ten apiece, have a slaughter to send a message to Price and Bedford and all the rest. When he had finally quieted down, Anderson reminded everyone we had orders to take them prisoner rather than go on a spree.
When he said this last word a few of them guffawed because they hadn’t ever heard that word before, but Anderson was wont to speak real proper at times, like a dictionary would if a dictionary could talk, which made me think of my old lady back home. He and Bergamire and a few of the others would take turns teaching classes early in the morning and by the campfire, on spelling and speaking and math, not the kind of learning people learned in the fields or in the store rooms in country towns, but the right way so that you can pen your name when the time came, and understand what your documents were saying, and count your pay before and after it hit your pocket, instead of having to rely on them other folks to do so for you. I found myself growing close to Anderson, and would tell him what I was picking up so that he could convey it to the rest as if he had somehow assessed it himself, since they were more likely to listen to him.