The Burning Barn: Speed and Hattie In Civil War Missouri

By Richard Black

Speed Wilson and Hattie Willis Wilson answered their own calling during the civil war. Arrested for harboring a Confederate recruiting officer, Speed faced the prospect of military service against his conscience or leaving Hattie with six children and crops in the field. Farmer Speed must play the surprising role of nurse to survive Gratiot Street Prison in Saint Louis, Missouri while Hattie manages farm and family through a brutal winter. Reunited, their love is challenged by the death of a newborn and the tumult of the war still raging in boarder state Missouri.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456609306

Richard Black

I live in Great Britain and I'm an avid reader. Sometimes I'm fascinated with sensational style journalism and the 24 hour news cycles on cable TV. I'm left amazed by how tabloid reporters and cable Networks choose to chronicle the times of our lives. I own a typewriter but it might as well be for decoration. I prefer using computers as they are a lot more user friendly. Among my other possessions are a shelf full of books, an e-reader and a fruit blender.

Book preview

encouragement.

Part One

A Boy Named Speed

Chapter 1–– April 1835 –– Leaving Whitley County

Dark was coming fast to the Southern Kentucky hollows in late April of 1835 when Speed knocked softly at Aunt Ruth’s porch door. She called, I been hoping you’d come. You need another lesson. She sat in her front parlor, not in the schoolroom out back where he and his schoolmates had their lessons. A lamp lit her face. He thought she looked schoolmarm stern. Speed was impatient to get back to the cabin, to get on with preparations for departure, and just wanted to give Aunt Ruth a polite goodbye. At twelve years old he was growing fast and stood as tall as she. His brown hair hung into his blue eyes, covering several of the random freckles about his face. Aunt Ruth didn’t stand, but remained seated in her best wingback chair. Bring that stool up and read for me, read just one last time. She opened her Bible, the big family Bible, which listed the births, marriages, and deaths of the Wilson family. Speed always looked at the carefully lettered roster, taking particular note of his own entry (John Speed Smith Wilson, b. 1823 d.…), his father’s, (David Winston Wilson…b.1795 d. 1825), and his aunt’s (Ruth Jean Wilson, b. 1783...d….) The old lady let him satisfy his curiosity, and then she pointed to a passage in the book of Isaiah.

Speed looked at the lettering, printed large, as he balanced the great book on his knees. At first he did not recognize the words as he read in a high-pitched, halting voice: But with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and reprove with equity the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his mouth he shall slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. Then he got control of his man voice, a smooth deeper voice, so that he could read the familiar lion and the lamb passage. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

Keep going, said Ruth. See, He’s coming to end all strife; look next––even the animals––and He’s for all the poor and the meek, but we got to do our part. That’s what God wants.

Speed’s voice, his man voice, gained confidence as he read, And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together. The lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den. Speed stumbled over the word cock-at-rice, but continued, They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

You read real good, Speed, said Aunt Ruth, real good for your age and just plain real good. Maybe soon you’ll be a preacher. You’d be a good preacher. But those are real good words for a body going out to Missouri. I guess it’s right you leave me and go, leastwise that’s your mother’s choice. Maybe… you… can, she emphasized each word, make earth full of the knowledge of the Lord out there. She stood from her chair and put her arms around the seated youth. Oh Speed, Speed, you’re such a wonder. He stood to face her and was intimidated to see tear streaks down her stern and determined face. It made me so proud when you learned your lessons. I know it woulda made your father proud too. Don’t forget your old aunt when you’re a big man out there in Missouri. She rested her forehead against his shoulder, so Speed put his arms around her because there was nowhere else to put them. He was surprised at how little there was to his teacher. Mostly he felt ribs and a backbone. Shortly she pulled away and blew her nose with a surprising rasp into a violet-bordered handkerchief, opened a drawer in the lamp table and handed him a black leather-bound Bible. Take this and read it regular. It’ll help you get through.

Speed took the book, placed it under his shirt next to his skin, then buttoned the shirt again. Ma says I can’t stay too long. The statement was an outright lie. Speed didn’t want to lie, but he had to escape this embarrassing woman. Thank you for the Bible. I liked that verse, he said. I’ll read it real careful and remember when I get to Missouri. I got to go now.

After he turned to the door she resumed her seat, balanced her great Bible on her own knees and continued reading, her lips moving silently. As Speed stepped into the chilly April evening he formed a memory of her which he held from that time forward. It was of a slight and sharp-featured woman reading under the soft yellow glow of an oil lamp about a man bringing heaven to earth. Speed had no intention of being a preacher, but there was something in his aunt’s manner that suggested a higher calling for him, something he could not articulate, but nonetheless a compelling prospect. It crossed his mind that as he opened his Bible in the ensuing years he might think of the promise she held out for him.

Speed’s ambitions were to be a farmer as his father had been before him. But the Missouri part was right. Everybody was going to Missouri now. People said it was God’s country where the land was rich and free for the taking. When his mother hinted they might join the exodus from these hills to the far land, Speed could dream of little else. Missouri was a golden land where he could farm for his mother, free of all that bound them down in Kentucky. He didn’t quite see how a bear could eat with his cows, but he accepted the notion that the land of Missouri could be God’s holy mountain where all God’s creatures lived in peace.

On the way back to the cabin, Speed passed by his father’s tombstone in the graveyard of the Christian Church of Whitley Courthouse as he had all of the years of his boyhood. Speed had a vision of his father as a man without a face but with a voice who would someday come up behind him, put a hand on his shoulder and say, Son, you did real good. Speed’s mother never talked about his father. On the few occasions when she let the topic come up she would quickly dissolve into tears. One day when Speed was washing Aunt Ruth’s slates after school he complained to her about his mother’s closemouthed ways. The old lady looked at him with resignation in her steel gray eyes. Your ma and my brother had something special, and Joycie’s never really adjusted. I think that’s what gives her that moody and restless way sometimes. Speed was taken aback by his aunt’s frankness, but recognized his mother in what she was saying. Aunt Ruth took a deep breath and said, "Your pa never wanted to go off to the Creek wars back in 1812, and he didn’t have to. Governor Blount of Tennessee called for two armies, one in the East under a fellow named Cocke, and one in the West under Andrew Jackson. That’s the same fellow as is President now. But volunteering seemed like what men was doing, so he did it too.

Well, he never liked the war once he got caught up in it. He said it was really a fight between two groups of Indians; it was none of the white man’s business. And then it turned out what Jackson really wanted was Indian land so he could shove all the Indians out of Georgia and Alabama. Your pa said what came out of war was never what they promised when you went in. And then he wasn’t quite right when he came back from that war. He couldn’t sleep, drank a lot, flew off the handle easy, and not two years after you was born he drowned in a ditch. The old lady stood from her chair to look away from the boy. Oh, he thought baby Speed was the sun, the moon, and the stars. I always wished he coulda seen taking care of himself woulda let him take care of you. Oh coulda, woulda, shoulda. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Tell you one thing though, that’s how you got your funny name. He liked two of the men he served under, a Captain Speed and a Captain Smith, so that’s how come you isn’t plain John Wilson, you is John Speed Smith Wilson.

Speed’s reflections on his father’s legacy—a strange name, nineteen acres of bottom land, and a restless mother—ended when he threw open the cabin door to see his mother Joycie preparing their meager belongings for the upcoming journey. The single-room log cabin that Speed shared with his mother didn’t have furniture that would load into a wagon. The posts for the two beds were sunk into the dirt floor so that the beds probably would not have held together if they were uprooted. There were the pots and pans and the crockery and the mismatched collection of forks and spoons, of course, and they were in bundles mostly, although Joycie had a sturdy wooden box for her Sunday clothes and a goodbye quilt the ladies had stitched for her. Speed took the Bible from under his shirt and placed it in the folds of the quilt where it would be safe.

Speed was up several times that night, and even went out in the yard thinking it was morning when the rooster over at the McCurdy place crowed not long after midnight. He missed his dog, Buster, who should be coming from the cow shed, his tail wagging his whole hind end, but Buster had not returned from the woods one day last month and his mother had said he probably found someplace better. Speed didn’t question her, but the McCurdy boy teased him, saying Buster might have fallen in a well, been bit by a snake, or got the worst of a bear or a mountain lion.

It was cold, but in the dark of the moon the sky was resplendent. He sat on a bench outside their front door and imagined he could float up in the stars of the Milky Way. After the tail of the Big Dipper had dropped noticeably toward the ridge in the east and he was cold through and through, he gave a long sigh, wondered if the stars would be this good in Missouri, and crawled back into his bed carefully so that the frame would not creak and wake his mother. As he tried to get back to sleep he thought again about the move. They didn’t have any family in western Missouri. When people asked his mother about it, Joycie said, I’d just like a new start for Speed. This comment puzzled Speed. When people asked Joycie about friends and relations in Missouri, she said she didn’t have any but there was that preacher, the Rev. Hebert Spencer, in a town called Liberty in Clay County. It was near Kansas Town and the Platte Purchase, and he had said to the congregation the last day he preached in Whitley Courthouse that his door was open any time any of them wanted to come. But that didn’t feel quite right to Speed either. Was the preacher’s general invitation really enough for a woman to take her son and go all the way to Missouri?

There was one thing, a person actually, that Speed would be glad to leave behind, that snake-in-the-grass Buford Crawford. Why did his mother let Crawford visit so often? His ma made Speed go to Sunday evening worship by himself one night in January, and when he came back early, there was Mr. Crawford sitting by the fire. He was polite and all, but Speed knew he had a wife, a prissy lady named Annabelle Crawford who was always buying hats and things in Fergusson’s store when Speed went in for penny candy. How come she didn’t come along with Buford Crawford? After dark on a Sunday night was a strange time to be making social calls. Later, when he asked his mother, she said, Well, Mr. Crawford’s buying our house, land, and livestock, so he had to come by and discuss the details. Speed accepted the explanation when his mother said it, but after the McCurdy boy elbowed him in the ribs at Aunt Ruth’s school and said, Guess your ma’s not too lonely lately, Speed, he blushed in shame and started having daydreams about how he would humiliate Buford Crawford in front of the whole town. No, he considered as he drifted back to sleep, at least in Missouri they would be far from Buford Crawford.

When Speed heard the McCurdie’s cock crow again, he swung his feet to the floor for the third time that night. He looked over at his mother and saw that she was awake, staring at the rafters with a vacant look he had seen more often lately. When she didn’t object, he determined that he could get started. As he pulled his pants on he noticed that the right leg was ripped most of the way up to the knee. It was a small matter. His mom could darn it up. There would be lots of time on the flatboat for something like that. He pictured himself lying on the deck floating down a peaceful river with trees reflected in the water, his leg stretched out while his mother darned his pant leg. Even without a tear, his pants were well above his ankles, but that wasn’t unusual for youth on the Kentucky-Tennessee border.

Outside he saw by the position of the Big Dipper that there was another hour before the sky would lighten over the ridge that ran northeast. When he opened the door to the warm shed, Bullnose the ox gave a gentle grunt in greeting, perhaps sensing that this morning was special. Speed’s hand found the hay fork where he had left it the night before, and he felt for the last of the fodder from the shed floor. Today would be his last day with Bullnose, but he could feel the excitement of the journey extinguishing his regret at parting from the familiar bovine. His mother had sold Bullnose and the wagon to Buford Crawford, who had a buyer up in Corbin, Kentucky. She had got $9.50 for the both of them. While he brought a pail of water from the creek to Bullnose’s trough, he considered that $9.50 was a lot of money and he wondered what a wagon and ox would cost in Missouri, but that was his mother’s business.

He hitched Bullnose to the wagon and led him to the cabin door, proud that he could hasten their departure. Ma, I need the box and the stuff for the wagon, he called through the closed cabin door.

Get in here and get some food in you. You got a long day ahead, came the reply.

Hurry up, Ma; we got to meet Mr. Crawford at the flatboat landing. Simmons won’t wait his boat. Speed jerked open the door to see his mother staring into the fire as she ate. When she stood, she was a woman still several inches taller than Speed, generous of figure with a round pudgy face and straight brown hair parted in the middle. Speed knew her hair wasn’t as fancy as Annabelle Crawford’s but was the way a mother’s hair was supposed to look.

Let me worry about Simmons and Crawford, young man. I got one egg left and you’re going to eat it.

Although Speed thought it strange that she did not turn to face him as she said these words, he scooped the fried egg from the pan with a piece of bread and stuffed it in his mouth. He gulped a glass of water and then started putting his extra shirt and a few other possessions in a cotton flour sack. He knew Aunt Ruth’s Bible was still in a fold of the quilt in the wooden clothes box. It was his lone prize possession, an item dedicated by Aunt Ruth as a symbol of the great life that awaited him in Missouri.

When the sun had been up an hour, a Kentucky farmer returning from hunting rabbits saw the two of them, a solid woman perhaps deliberately plain in a serviceable dress and bonnet plus a white-skinned boy with a rip in his pants, proceeding along a country lane toward the Cumberland River. Had the same farmer been so nosy as to follow them along, he would have seen the little party arrive at the flatboat landing when the sun was now well risen and glinting on the wavelets in the river.

A fat, bald man called out from a craft floating near shore, Get your stuff and get on board. You’re wasting my day. River’s slow for April. I got stuff waiting down-river for Nashville. That was Flatboat Simmons, and the grease on his clothes was so established that certain areas appeared to be leather.

Mr. Crawford’s got to come and get my ox and my wagon, Mr. Simmons, called Joycie. Just hold your horses. We’ll load and he’ll be here.

Guess you know Crawford better’n me, replied Simmons. Joycie blushed crimson under her bonnet. The man continued, Get your stuff on board and maybe he’ll be here.

Speed was afraid Simmons would float away and the trip to Missouri, with all its promise of a new life, would collapse in the muck of the Cumberland riverbank. He felt himself tearing up and called, Don’t worry, Mr. Simmons. We’ll be okay. I’m loading right now. He began to splash through the shallows near the riverbank with an armload of their belongings.

Speed was stepping back on the shore to look for any last items before he saw it. The mouth of the snub-nosed flat head was wide open, fully displaying the folds of distinctive flesh that gave the snake its name. Cottonmouth, called Simmons. Watch it, watch it. Too late. The snake struck at Speed’s leg exposed by the tear in the fabric. Speed swatted the fanged head from his leg, then glimpsed the animal slithering away through the brown river water.

Joycie screamed while Simmons grabbed Speed back into the flatboat and threw him onto the deck. Damn fool boy. Get yourself bit and mess me up. I should know women are bad luck. Shoulda never agreed to take you two.

Simmons pulled out a rusty knife and cut crosses across the two small holes in Speed’s calf. As the blood began to flow from both of them, he sucked it and spat it over board. It was to this ghoulish scene that Buford Crawford and his Negro, Boston, presented themselves from the trees onshore. While Boston looked in wild-eyed amazement at the prostrate boy, the screaming mother, and the river man with blood smeared about his mouth, Crawford worked systematically to achieve his objectives for the morning. He waded into the river, oblivious of his fine shoes and tailored suit, pressed specie and coin up into distraught Joycie’s hand, and called over the commotion on deck, Here’s for the land, the house, the ox, and the wagon. Then he shouted at Boston, Help me push them to the current!

As Speed descended into swirling unconsciousness, he saw the Negro’s head disappearing on the other side of the flatboat and then felt the end of a wet rope whipping across his face.

Chapter 2––April 1835–– Down the River

Joycie could not leave Speed’s side. After an hour his calf had swelled as round as a six-month piglet and turned the purple of a storm cloud just before the rain. In his delirium Speed kept repeating, The hole of the asp, the hole of the asp. Joycie opened her wooden box to find one of her handkerchiefs, which she dipped into the brown waters of the Cumberland and applied to Speed’s fevered forehead.

Simmons used his sweep oar to keep the boat in the middle of the river where he could take maximum advantage of the April current and avoid the snags and sandbars closer to shore. Joycie looked up at Simmons.

He will live, won’t he? she pleaded.

Don’t know, replied Simmons. Every hour he lives is good, long as he don’t get pneumonia. You ever see a prettier day? Look at those tulip trees over there. Bet those trees been there two hundred, three hundred years. Oh, she sure is pretty in April.

Joycie cursed the boatman in her mind for remarking on the day when her son was comatose, but she kept silent. She offered a prayer to God that if he would spare Speed’s life, she would forever forsake the company of men and lead a righteous life for the rest of her days. The prospect of arriving alone in Missouri was more than she could bear. She resolved to drown in the river if Speed died.

Mr. Simmons, when are we going to get there? she asked in a flat voice.

There, where?

Missouri, to Platte Purchase, Missouri, to our new place.

This flatboat goes as far as Cairo, Illinois. You get a steamboat from there. You might make it by September, depending on how fast the river goes.

As Joycie pondered this information, she realized she had begun this voyage with only the vaguest of understandings. She understood people left Kentucky and arrived at Missouri. Buford Crawford had told her Simmons would take her and her boy on a flatboat, but she had trusted that Simmons would take care of all of the particulars. Now she wondered if the dollars Buford Crawford had paid her would last all those months. As she considered her predicament, a blue heron broke from the shore and with rhythmic sweeps of its great wings landed on a snag downriver near the water, so she was not certain what was bird and what was branch protruding from the water. She wondered if it was her fate to likewise disappear with her son on some snag of a wilderness river.

Mr. Simmons, can you go all night? Can we get to Cairo sooner?

Not here. Not on the Cumberland. The water’s too tricky. On the Ohio maybe.

Where are we going to sleep tonight?

On the flatboat. Too many critters on shore. Joycie looked at the shore and saw that the trees came right to the riverbank. She could also observe that there were no beds or bunks on the flatboat. Just then Simmons let out a great whoop that startled the dazed woman. Simmons began to wave his hat toward a wisp of smoke on the southern shore. He put his sweep oar hard over so that the sluggish progress of the flatboat was oriented toward what proved to be a man sitting beside a small fire under the wall of vegetation still in the vulnerable green of early spring. When they were still some yards from shore Joycie heard them talking in almost conversational terms.

How many barrels? asked Simmons.

Five.

Sid, you coming down to Cairo?

Thought I would.

I can use the help. Got passengers. The boy is sick. Snakebite.

He gonna make it?

Young kid. He’s got a chance.

Let’s get these barrels on. Simmons threw one rope to Sid, who quickly wrapped it around a tree and held fast as the current began pulling the flatboat close to the two-foot bank. Simmons startled Joycie. Arm! Arm! Lookee arm! The rope rasped below Joycie’s elbow. She watched transfixed at her arm resting in the center of a coil of rope that was rapidly shrinking as it played toward shore. Just as she threw herself on her back, the rope thunked taut. Had her arm been there, the full force of the flatboat in the current of the Cumberland River would have snapped the rope through her forearm rather than merely etching a raw rope burn across it.

Simmons grinned at her, showing tobacco-stained teeth. Lady, that was close. I thought I might be burying two on this trip. Joycie seemed to throw off the fog of her situation as she stood on deck to face Simmons squarely. In an even voice she said, You ain’t burying nobody. My boy and me is going to the Platte Purchase in Missouri.

Simmons returned her look, grunted, and turned to hand heavy wooden planks from the flatboat bulwark to Sid on shore. Both men set about rolling the heavy barrels onto the flatboat.

What’s in the barrels? asked Joycie, wishing to give the conversation a new focus.

Tennessee whiskey. Best there is, Simmons replied. Pays better than passengers in Nashville. After forty-five minutes of wrestling the barrels across the planks and onto the flatboat, the two men stowed the planks on board, and Simmons cast loose the downriver rope, then poled the flatboat a few yards upstream so the upstream rope would slacken. Sid untied it, let it drop in the water, and leaped from shore to boat.

Joycie returned her attention to Speed. By the time the flatboat was well out in the center of the river, she could observe, with resignation, the men were passing back and forth a small flat bottle of that good Tennessee whisky. She hoped the river could float them without the attention of these two men.

That first day on the river she learned that life could be very slow. Simmons rigged a lean-to canvas shelter for Joycie and Speed, and Joycie’s attention was entirely on the boy. The sun was hot on the deck, and the mother kept herself and her son under the shade of the lean-to. Simmons encouraged her to pick a feature well ahead on the riverbank, sometimes a dead tree, or perhaps a sandbar, or the mouth of a creek, and then watch as it passed. If it was a mile when you first saw it, you make a mark on the deck every time we pass one. There ought to be thirty marks by the end of the day. But it’s gonna take us about forty days to get to Cairo, just like Noah in the Bible, forty days and forty nights, ’cept I don’t run at night mostly, so anyway I don’t know how many marks you’ll have by the time we get to Cairo. He gave a great yellow grin. We’ll have my boat filled with marks, ma’am, filled with marks by the time we get to Cairo.

Just then Speed gave out a great cry and thrashed