Free I Was a Revolutionary by Andrew Malan Milward Page B

Roberts said, and they continued on in the direction of his farmhouse. “That was the problem with the others, you know,” he said a few seconds later. “No workers. Most of your bunch seemed content to wait on charity.”
    â€œPlenty willing to work,” said CK, feeling comfortable enough with Roberts to speak openly. “But some are sick, need care.”
    â€œWhatever they are, they ain’t working.”
    Later CK wanted to explain what he knew Roberts couldnever understand: what it felt like to make this journey together, up from where they came from. To suffer sickness and hunger, waiting on boats, penniless, packed into different churches, always being separated or sent to another town. Whether you’d ever spoke a word to them or not, the ones who’d made it this far were as much family as your true-blood kin. But those words wouldn’t come to him in the moment. All he could say was: “Well, we here now.”
    â€œYeah”—Roberts smiled, his face mottled from the long day—“can’t argue that.”
    â€œAnd now they sending us to every town under a Kansas sky.”
    â€œExcept the one you want.”
    â€œYes, sir,” CK said. “Nicodemus.”
    â€œAh, Nicodemus.”
    It was Roberts who set CK on the idea of hitching a ride on a supply wagon headed west. “Take a little longer, but cheaper than waiting on that rail line,” he said. “Get you closer, too.” Roberts went so far as to make inquiries, and toward the end of May, CK and Mil had raised enough to buy passage with a husband-and-wife freighter team whose name CK never troubled himself to learn.
    â€œCan take you as far as Bull City,” the husband said. “Got a delivery there, but then we head south, on to Hays. That’ll put you close, though. You can catch another freighter from there. Probably walk it even. Ain’t but some miles.”
    â€œMight could, yes sir,” CK said, taking the money from his pocket and handing it to the man. “Much obliged.”
    They set out from the livery stables in the early morning, CK and Mil cramped in the back of the covered wagon with Rachel, while the husband and wife sat side by side in the cab, driving the team of horses. During the long bumpy days CK played with Rachel, dandling the wide-eyed child—so bewildered by the newness of everything—on his knee as he toldtales about what lay ahead in Nicodemus. Sometimes Rachel would coo in response, and he’d say, “I’m telling the truth, my little queen—I swear on it,” which sometimes elicited a laugh from Mil in that way CK loved to hear. Tired though they were, deliverance was near.
    In the evenings the husband would lead the horses to the trough of whatever town they were passing through and CK would start the fire, while Mil and the wife fixed supper. They ate quietly, though sometimes the white couple indulged CK’s joviality, grinning at a joke or story, as if despite themselves. At night CK and Mil removed their belongings to make room for the couple to sleep and would spread their dusty blanket on the ground beneath the wagon, lying down in the warm night with Rachel soughing restlessly between them.
    There was a small one-foot rent in the tarpaulin covering that had been rigged to shelter the back of the wagon from which CK liked to look out at the passing land, baffled by the way the landscape of Kansas seemed to change right before his eyes. The way the open prairie went from rolling and tall-grassed in the east to flat and short-grassed the farther west they went along those desolate high plains. Strange that a place was actually made up of so many different kinds of places. Wasn’t so different from Mississippi when he thought of it, though. He’d rarely left Bolivar County but heard tell of the hill country up north, the sandy gulf to the south, the riverboating east, and the tall piney woods