To my surprise and pleasure, besides having recruited Salmon and Oliver, Father had brought out from North Elba our neighbor and brother-in-law Henry Thompson. Henry was the most fervent abolitionist of all the sixteen Thompson sons, a tall, strapping, young fellow who idolized Father. The Old Man instructed him to begin at once building a proper corral for the horses, and he told me and Fred to take ourselves off with him and give him what help we could. “A little movement and fresh air will improve you,” he said, and we instantly complied, and of course he was right — in a short while, quite as if we had been able-bodied all along but merely had not known it, both Fred and I were cutting and dragging poles from down by the river up to a narrow defile close to the camp where Father had determined was the best location for a corral. Later on, by midday, as ordered, Oliver returned from the town of Osawatomie with stovepipe and three tin campstoves, and Father promptly installed one in each tent, and when he and Oliver had them properly working, he sent Oliver off to commence digging a proper privy and then turned to educating Wealthy as to the best care and treatment of John, whose color, now that he was breathing more easily, had already begun returning to his face.
In half a day, Father had turned Browns Station from a place of desolation into a proper frontier settlement. The tents were tightened against the wind, and with sweet-smelling streams of woodsmoke flowing from their tin chimneys, they looked secure and warm, even cheerful, situated in the protective crook of a narrow, forested cut that switch-backed down a long, grassy decline to the meandering river below. Spade and crowbar scraped against dirt and stone, hammers pounded stakes and drove nails, and axes and handsaws bit into wood, sending blond chips and sawdust flying. The air was filled with the bright clatter of leafless trees falling, of brothers calling to one another through the cold afternoon as the light began to fade — the sound of men happily at work, eager to finish their tasks before dark. There were the startled neighs of horses suddenly released to pasture inside a temporary corral made with a rope strung between trees, the bang and scrape of pots and pans being washed, the snap of wet laundry hung to dry in the breeze, and someone down in the cottonwoods even began to sing — Salmon, I realized; of course, it would be Salmon, for he had the best-pitched, clearest voice of us all and the sharpest memory for the old hymns — and first Father joined in with him, and then one by one the others picked it up, even Fred, even me.
Who are these, like stars appearing,
These, before God’s throne who stand?
Each a golden crown is wearing;
Who are all this glorious hand?
Alleluia! Hark, they sing,
Praising loud their heavenly King!
Towards evening, Oliver came marching proudly into camp with his old Kentucky rifle in one hand and, in the other, four fat prairie chickens, low-flying ground birds somewhat like our partridges, which he delivered over to Wealthy and Ellen, two to each woman. After praising the lad in such a way as to goad the rest of us to go and do likewise every day from here on out—”For I have seen considerable game on our way here,” the Old Man said — he then bade us all to cease our labors now and follow him out to the knoll, where he had earlier laid the mysterious pine box. Even John, with Salmon and Oliver half-carrying him, was obliged to come out to the windy hilltop.
Now, I thought, now each of us will be given his own Sharps rifle! I had come to despise my old muzzle-loader: it didn’t suit my fantasies or my intentions in the least; it was a boy’s smooth-bore gun, suitable mainly for shooting birds and raccoons; I wanted a weapon that would let me slay men. I wanted one of the famous new-style, breech-loading Sharps rifles that fired with deadly accuracy ten times a minute. Manufactured in the armory at Harpers Ferry, they were the so-called Beecher’s Bibles which that winter had commenced appearing all over Kansas in the hands of the more radical Free-Soilers. First sent out in crates marked Bibles by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s congregation in Brooklyn, New York, they were being purchased and shipped to the Free-Soil settlers now by churches all over the East. I was sure Father would not have come out without at least one case of weapons from the Church of the Holy Rifles — he was not in Kansas, after all, to farm.
But when we had all gathered there on the knoll, I saw that, sometime during the day and without my having observed him, Father had dug a deep hole in the ground next to the box, and for the first time I began to see that it was perhaps not a crate of Sharps, but something else, for the box resembled nothing so much as a finely carpentered coffin. Father looked down the line of us and reached out and drew Jason and Ellen forward to the center, where he stood, so that the three of them were now standing before the box, and at that I understood finally what was inside the box and why we were gathered out here.
The sky was darkening down in the east and cream-colored in the west, and the chilled, late afternoon breeze blew into our faces. Without looking at any one of us, staring instead down at the box before him, Father said, “Children, when I rode out from the east I carried with me a whole set of maps. A whole passel of maps, and overlapping they were, and one of’em, Jason, was sent to me by you, as you know. That was the very detailed map that led me to the grave that you dug in slaveholding territory, where you wrapped in a blanket the body of your poor little boy, Austin, and buried him whose soul has now gone on to God in heaven. But whose body lay buried in Missouri soil.
“Among my other maps, Jason and Ellen, and above all of them, the master map, as it were, is the one that guides them all — the map that is given to me by the Bible. It is God Almighty’s plan of these United States, which I carry with me wherever I go, and on that map this Kansas Territory is still free and will remain free so long as I draw breath. Children, I mean to lay those two maps over one another, Jason’s very detailed drawing of where his child lies buried, and God’s equally detailed plan, and align them.” He then looked straight at Jason and Ellen and said to them, “I know, my children, that you were surrounded by the enemy back there in Missouri and were afraid therefore and were maybe somewhat confused as to what was fitting and proper. I don’t mean to scold or upbraid you, children, but I myself could not abandon that boy’s body in slaveholding territory.
“I went there to my grandson’s grave, to pray over it, as you asked me to do, but then, when I had completed my prayers for his soul, I realized that I could not tolerate the thought of anyone with my blood and name lying under a little wooden cross in a potter’s field in a slave state. The very thought of it enraged me. So I retrieved Austin Brown’s body from that tainted ground, and Henry and I built it a proper coffin and placed it inside and put it into my wagon, and now we have carried it here to Kansas, where men and women and children are not chattel, here to bury it properly, here to place and mark his gravesite on God’s map of this land and not Satan’s!”
Then, with the darkness coming slowly on, Father handed ropes to Henry Thompson and me, which we draped beneath the pine box, and holding to them, we lowered the coffin slowly into the earth. Jason and Ellen held each other and wept. Wept with grief, but I am afraid also with shame. For Father had shamed them terribly with what he had done.
When the box had gone down into the hole, we filled the hole with dirt and moved from the gravesite one by one in a kind of confused browse, as if we were both reluctant and eager to get away from it. Last to leave were Father and Jason and Ellen, and I heard him say to them, “Tomorrow you will make a cross with your boy’s name and dates on it. And you will set it at the head of the grave, there,” he pronounced, and placed his foot firmly on the ground at the place beneath which he knew the boy’s head lay. Directly, then, he departed from the knoll, leaving Jason and Ellen alone at the gravesite. Thus ended the harsh, sullen division between Jason and his Ellen and the rest of us. We were all one family again.