“Africa,” I said.
“You kill a serpent by striking off its head.”
Africa? Was my father, indeed and at last, mad? I was long used to his reliance on elaborate, obscure figures and his habit of displacing the immediate present with the Biblical past, and while usually I could follow his circumlocutious path to his meaning without much difficulty and often found his meaning original, profound, and insightful, this time he had me. Africa! Had the shock of Fred’s murder begun to settle in and madden him? He had so far evidenced no grief or outrage over it, but deep feelings too much denied or suppressed can inexplicably erupt in fissures elsewhere.
“Look, they’re here!” he suddenly said, sounding almost relieved, and he stood and pointed towards the western track, where there came the first of Reid’s force over the horizon, and following close behind came a great troop of men on horseback, riding three abreast and at full gallop. Father slapped his sword into its scabbard and instantly began giving orders. “Hold your fire, men! Aim low, and wait till they’re upon us!” he shouted, as he ran from one man to another, his dozen fighters and Captain Parson’s twenty more, encouraging them and bucking up their courage in the face of this most formidable, terrifying force.
Straight on the riders came, as if expecting no one to oppose them, as if we had indeed done the rational, expected thing and abandoned the town to them. Soon they were only a quarter-mile off, well within range of our Sharps rifles, of which we had perhaps ten, and still Father said to hold fire, wait for his command, and then they were within range of our muskets, but he would not let us shoot yet, so we held back a few seconds longer, until they were fit targets even for our revolvers, when finally Father called, “Fire!” and thirty guns — thirty rifles, muskets, and revolvers — roared as one, and twenty or more of Reid’s men cried out and fell like clods of dirt. Those who were not hit in the fusillade wheeled away from the trail and, firing wildly from horseback, fled into the woods in several directions at once, while we reloaded and went on shooting at the riders and killing those on the ground who had gone down not dead but merely wounded in the first volley.
Reid’s force was like a huge wave rolling in upon a rock. And when the riders had fallen away before us and their ranks had broken on both our flanks, they at first swirled and scattered amongst the trees in confused eddies, then made their circuitous way to a height back up the road a ways, well beyond the range of our guns, where they re-gathered in military formation, as if preparing to roll in against the rock a second time. Meanwhile, Father strode back and forth among his hunkered men, making sure that no one had been shot and readying us for the renewed attack, assuring us that the Lord would protect us and walking about in full view of the enemy, as if he needed no such assurance himself.
I lay tucked in behind a low, brush-covered hummock, studying through the gaps in the brush the moves of the enemy on the distant rise, when I saw one of Reid’s men dismount and get down on one knee and carefully aim his long rifle in our direction. There was a puff of white smoke, then the sound of a single gunshot, and when I turned to see where the bullet might have hit, Father was standing next to me, still recklessly exposed to the enemy.
He stepped close, turned, showed me his back, and said, “Can you see anything torn or bloody, Owen?”
I replied that I could not.
“Well, I believe I just took a terrible rap on the back from that fellow’s long rifle.”
“What! Then stay down!”
He grinned and said, “Don’t fret yourself, son. The Lord doesn’t intend for me to be shot in the back. He just wants me to keep facing His enemy, that’s all. It’s a little reminder.”
I remember turning towards Reid’s men then and seeing for the first time their cannon. This was no guerilla skirmish; this was warfare. They had rolled the weapon out and were loading it with grapeshot. A moment later, they fired the thing, and it made a terrible roar, snapping off whole trees and tearing down branches overhead. They quickly reloaded and fired a second time, with the same, frightening effect. It made a deep bellow and then a shriek as the grape whistled over our heads and crashed against the trees and hummocks, splintering and smashing everything it hit. While the cannoneers with each new firing brought their weapon closer and closer into deadly range, the rest of Reid’s men, gathering courage from its destructive power, dismounted and formed large companies of shooters and commenced to advance on foot upon our position, stopping every ten or fifteen yards to aim and fire their muskets, driving us slowly back towards the river.
Father kept exhorting us to hold our ground and wait for close quarters and aim low and so on, but first Captain Parson’s men and then Father’s, too, even Salmon and Oliver, were now in full retreat, firing and running, ducking behind a tree or a rock and firing and running again. I stayed at the front beside Father and watched them fly past. Father and I looked at each other and said nothing. Here several of the men were shot and went down — older men: Mr. Partridge, as I recollect, and Mr. Holmes — and this terrified the rest even more and turned their more or less orderly retreat into a pandemonious rout, until finally even Father at this point gave up the fight and, showing the enemy his back, made for the river, with me close behind.
I remember stopping atop the bank, the last of the Osawatomie defenders to flee, and looking down at our men as they waded through the chest-high water, with Father coming after, as if he were not following them but was in hot pursuit — a revolver held high in each hand and his battered old palm-leaf hat set squarely on his head and the tails of his mustard-yellow linen duster floating out behind.
He cut a ludicrous figure. Except for those men — both ours and the enemy’s — who lay dead on the rough ground behind me, they all did. It made no sense to me, none of it. I no longer knew what I was doing here or why. For a second, I thought of turning away from Father and the others and walking straight towards Reid’s cannon and riflemen, offering myself up to them — as a prisoner, if they wanted, or as a sacrifice — just to end it, to finish this mad fight and give sense, if not to my life, then to my death. In a world where every man was trying for no apparent reason to kill the other, the only sensible man should have long since been slain. Like poor, murdered Fred.
Then I heard Father’s hard voice call up to me: “Owen! God sees it, Owen! God sees it!” And with that, down the embankment I scrambled and into the river and on to the further bank — saved once again from myself by my father’s call to come along, come and kill men another day.
We arrived late that evening, foot-sore, weary, and sullen, at Uncle’s cabin, which Reid’s marauders, having marked it already with Fred’s cold-blooded murder, had passed over and left intact. Earlier, as we re-gathered on the far bank of the river, we had stood awhile and watched the smoke rise over the village of Osawatomie, where the Ruffians were gaily pillaging and burning. Now and then, the silence was broken by the whoops of the victors and the random sounds of their guns being fired exuberantly into the air. That there was still in effect, despite contradicting claims on both sides, an unwritten law against violating or otherwise injuring women and children was cold comfort to us: houses and barns filled with the long, arduous summer’s harvest were going up in flames, and Free-State livestock was being herded together for travel east to feed hungry mouths in Missouri, and stores and the several public buildings were being looted and burned to the ground. All over the region, the grassy plains and pretty cottonwood dells were scarred by the blackened ruins of farmsteads and crossroads stores, and the trails and roads were increasingly haunted by the wagons of burned-out Free-Staters and pro-slavery families alike returning with their few remaining possessions and animals to their home states — ruined by this war, slump-shouldered, disillusioned, and broken.