Free I Was a Revolutionary by Andrew Malan Milward

eyeballed measurements to be correct. He sat alone on a stool in the starlight and hum of cicadae, his hands resting on the rough denim of his overalls. He wasn’t finished, but it was quiet now, and the hammer-and-nails work he had left would wake his family. He would finish in the morning, but for now he just sat there a long time thinking, listening, being still.
    Word later came that the mayor of Leavenworth himself had climbed aboard the Joe Kinney to stuff a wad of bills in the captain’s hand, begging him not to leave any more of these wretched people in his town. “Take them on to Atchison, please,” the mayor was rumored to have entreated. Of course CK and Mil knew nothing of it at the time, lodged as they were with the others in the hull of the towing barge. They’dpieced it together only later, when they exited the steamer and walked the banks of the Missouri, met by the cold stares of Atchison townsfolk who were not pleased to see Leavenworth’s refuse on their shores.
    â€œMorning, folks,” CK said, tipping his hat to the crowd as he and the others carried what was left of their belongings from the steamer.
    â€œGo on back where you come from, why don’t you,” a voice called out.
    CK smiled pleasantly, a calculated gesture of obliviousness that he’d often used to deflect hostility. “Fine day here in Leavenworth,” he said, as he helped an old woman struggling to carry an armful of blankets from the ship.
    â€œAin’t Leavenworth ground you standing on, nigger,” the voice in the crowd called again. “You’s in Atchison here. They don’t want you, and us neither.”
    â€œAtchison?” CK said, and slowly the pieces started coming together.
    Earlier that morning, after Dulcet disappeared with their money, Mil had fumed, cursing his name.
    â€œI don’t understand,” CK said in a monotone daze. How could a friend who called himself family just up and disappear from your life? Leave you in such a bad spot?
    â€œThat darn fool is drinking away our money and you know it.”
    â€œNo, ma’am,” CK said. “He went back for his kin, I’m sure it.”
    â€œBelieve what you will,” she said. “Fact is, that money’s gone.”
    â€œHe’ll meet us in Nicodemus,” he said, but his words failed to convince even himself.
    â€œHow we gon get to Nicodemus now?”
    She was right, and as he thought about that money—nearlyenough to secure rail tickets—CK’s befuddlement dissipated, stoking a slow-burning resentment he struggled neither to voice nor to dwell upon, if only for Mil’s sake. Instead he’d made like such a thing could just be shrugged off, saying with new resolution: “We move on.” Having little desire to stay in a place that now seemed haunted by Dulcet’s betrayal, CK went to the relief board and looked into their options. One of the last free-passage boats, the Joe Kinney , was set to leave for Leavenworth later that very morning, and a man on the board said it was a town where one could find steady work. And so he boarded the boat with his family and a new optimism that was almost convincing until now, when they’d arrived in a town that hadn’t been their destination.
    Those first few days in Atchison were long and without prospect. Just summer heat and hunger. Here there were no relief boards or wealthy donors, and local blacks seemed consumed by a growing indifference to the boatloads of needy refugees who so regularly appeared. CK and Mil had arrived with nearly three hundred others, and many were in a bad way. The hard travel had taken its toll in pneumonia and measles, and their clothes had become little more than rags. There was worry they might even carry yellow fever, so the local authorities concerned themselves with quarantine followed by expulsion, arranging for ships and trains to take the indigents elsewhere.