Orphan Hero Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by John Babb

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  Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-049-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-059-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  One

  The Belt Of Orion

  Jeffersonville, Indiana 1848

  On the day he learned he was a murderer, seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Windes had been cutting purple-topped clover and orchard grass with a two-handled scythe which was, like his name, too big for him. It was already hot that May morning, and the humidity in the Ohio River bottomland didn’t make things any better, as a continuous drizzle of perspiration ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. He had cut and raked at least six bushels, and the sweet-smelling stuff was sticking to every sweaty inch of him when his stepmother found him.

  “I hear you been cuttin’ grass fer Abbie, so’s she can stuff them mattresses she sells.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How much she payin’ you?”

  Quickly, Ben considered the ramifications of his answer. If he lied, his stepmother might already know the answer, and she’d be only too happy to make use of a stout switch. In fact, it had seemed to him in past circumstances that she could be pretty enthusiastic in her use of timber where he was concerned. But if he told her the truth, he feared for the ownership of the small bag of coins he had buried in the chicken house.

  His stepmother read the hesitation, snorted under her breath, and decided this was the day to tell him. She’d been wanting to for a long time, and now he was old enough for it to really sink in. “Y’see, I figure you owe it to us, what with you killin’ yer ma and all. And the hard times yer pa has had ever since. For sure he woulda died too—that is if I hadn’t saved him.”

  Ben stood stock still. All of a sudden it felt like he couldn’t hold himself up. He pushed the blade of the scythe into the ground, bracing his weight against it to keep from falling.

  “You was too big when you was born, and you just broke yer ma down. She was pale as a ghost from then on, like she didn’t have no blood left in her body. And she couldn’t keep up with all yer squallin’, always wantin’ more and more milk and keepin’ her awake all hours of the night. She didn’t have the strength to hold up, and you stole ever last drop of life she had in her. You finally kilt her when you was about four months old. You kept her up all day and night fer over a week runnin’—and that last mornin’ she just fell over dead while she was totin’ a bucket of well water.” She paused briefly, her thin lips a straight line, to see what affect her words were having. “She’d be alive today, warn’t fer you and yer selfish ways.”

  Although it was said in a voice with no inflection whatsoever, he would remember the almost triumphant look in his stepmother’s eyes for the rest of his life. And from then on, whenever he smelled fresh clover, he couldn’t avoid the jolting recollection of his crime.

  She leaned toward him with a breath that took the sweet smells of spring out of the air. “So what about that money? Yer pa is headed back up the river to Pittsburgh tomorrow, workin’ fer that same steamboat outfit, and he needs to fill out his kit at Riley’s store.”

  Ben wanted to run off and be by himself, but he knew she wouldn’t allow him the luxury of having private, uninterrupted feelings. He pulled himself back to the present and remembered he had three quarters tied up in a rag in his pants that he hadn’t had an opportunity to add to his stash. “I’ve got six bits left, but I already spent the rest of it,” Ben sniffed, hoping he’d hit the right tone and wanting to cry again when he thought about the two hard weeks he’d worked for those three quarters.

  His stepmother looked at him, seeking a clue in his voice. “Yer sure that’s all you got? Don’t be lyin’ to me.”

  Ben almost squirmed as he struggled within himself to keep from telling her to just go straight to hell—straight to that fiery pit that Pastor Swinson kept on about every Sunday. He couldn’t think of anyone who deserved it more! He ached to say it, but his Aunt’s voice clicked magically inside his head, Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer. So he packed away those hard thoughts in the place in his heart that was already too full, reached for the rag that was tied inside his pants with a piece of string, and pitched the little bundle to her without a word. When she untied the parcel and saw the coins, he knew by the glint in her eye that he was in the clear.

  “You be sure you bring me anythin’ else you git. Don’t let me hear you been wastin’ no more money.” Her cold gray eyes made it clear—there’d be the devil to pay if he did.

  “Yes, ma’am. But Aunt Abbie said just yesterday she hadn’t sold many mattresses lately, so she might not need any more stuffing anytime soon.”

  She suddenly grabbed him by the hair, lifting his feet clear off the ground, and shook him hard before letting him go. He tried to make his face a mask and not give her the satisfaction of seeing him cry, for she seemed to take special pleasure in seeing him hurt, and he had finally discovered he felt much worse afterward if he allowed himself to give in to crying. But if he managed to not show any reaction to her meanness, he not only felt better about himself, but it also seemed to somehow disappoint her. Today he forced a blank look in her direction.

  “Just be sure you bring me the money when you get paid.” In the absence of the response she sought, his stepmother was already walking off. “And by the way, you kin stay with Abbie all you want whilst yer pa is up river.”

  Ben watched her cross the field in her short-stepping, pigeon-toed way. His whole life he had known his ma died when he was just a baby, but this put a new perspective on everything. All the sadness he had felt because he had no mother—all the nights he had lain awake in the dark, wishing for her affection, imagining what it would be like if she was still alive—could it be it was his fault all along? What did his pa think about what he had done to his mother? Did he hold a grudge against his son? Here he was seven years old, and he guessed it was true that he had killed her. Surely, nobody would lie about a thing like that—not even his stepmother.

  He stuffed a bushel of hay into each of his two potato sacks and began dragging them the half-mile back to his Aunt’s house. She lived beyond the end of Market Street, where it petered out to a rutted dirt lane halfway between Jeffersonville and Port Fulton, Indiana.

  He had gone to live with his Aunt Abbie after his mother died, because his father couldn’t take care of him on his own. Abbie lived with her three-year-old daughter, Sue, on the edge of town and was glad for the extra company. She called herself a seamstress, but as far as Ben could tell, she mostly just washed clothes and mended holes for people in town.

  Abbie had caught the smallpox when she was a girl, and though she survived, her face still bore the evidence. The bottom lobe of one of her ears was completely gone—taken by the pox, as well as a piece of her nose—and this unila
teral imperfection gave the impression that her head was always cocked to one side. Sometimes Ben tried to see past the scars to see what she really had looked like.

  He asked Abbie about his mother—her sister—all the time. The stories about the two girls growing up in Pennsylvania, moving to Ohio with their family, both of them getting married within a month of each other, and finally locating in Indiana, he could almost recite by heart. By luck, the smallpox had missed his mother. Both sisters had jet-black hair, which Ben had inherited, as well as what some of the women in town described as the blackest eyes they had ever seen. No likeness of Ben’s mother existed, and since his pa never spoke of her, he had to rely on Abbie’s description of her to draw a picture in his mind. No doubt she had been beautiful.

  After he made three trips with the cut clover, Ben carefully spread it out in the backyard, unrolling a large fish net to cover the grass so it could dry in the sun. Abbie liked using flowering clover because it was so much softer than most hay, and it retained something of its sweet scent for months after it was cut. It was popular with her customers too.

  Ben told Abbie about his stepmother’s visit and giving her the money he had earned. But he kept it to himself that he had found out he was responsible for his mother’s death. Maybe he didn’t want someone else to confirm it as being true, or perhaps Abbie didn’t know the real story, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her finding out the terrible thing he’d done. Anyway, he had to think about it by himself for a while before he was willing to talk over what he had just learned with anyone else.

  Abbie put her hand on his shoulder. “Well, with the clover you cut this morning, and what we have already, I can make at least ten mattresses when I need to. So for now, you can stop cutting and hauling grass. Besides, I’ve got another idea.” Ben looked at her. “You and I are going into the soup business.” She answered his confused look:

  “You see all those steam boats and rafts stopping on our side of the river? I figure the crews will all be hungry for a decent meal, as well as the men who work on the docks. If I make a big pot of soup every day and a couple of skillets of cornbread or some of those soda biscuits, you can take it down to the riverfront and sell it for maybe ten cents a bowl.

  “If we’re lucky, we can sell twenty or thirty bowls a day. I’ll give you two cents for every bowl you sell, but you’ve got to promise me that you won’t spend a penny of it. I’ll bet Mr. Riley was running his mouth to your pa or his wife and told them about you having money to spend in his store. You can’t take a chance on that happening again, or she’ll be back to get your soup money too.

  “I’ll do the cooking, but I need you to be the one to sell the soup down on the dock. I just don’t like having to deal with people in town if I can help it.”

  Abbie turned her distorted face to one side as she spoke, while Ben’s head was spinning with the financial possibilities of making forty to sixty cents a day. That would make him the richest kid in town—maybe in the whole state!

  Abbie could see him figuring. “You can’t tell anybody you’re making any money. This town is too small to keep a secret—particularly from that stepmother of yours. We’ll need to make our garden twice as big as it is now so we can keep making soup and still have something left for us. If you’re willing, we’ll start plowing this evening.”

  Ben asked, “Do I need to ask Mr. Finnerty for his mule?”

  “If you can hold the plow steady, I can handle the traces. Even if he is my neighbor, I don’t care for the way that man looks at me. He reminds me sometimes of a washtub full of wet laundry—like he’s completely wrung out. It’s almost as though he’s plumb used up—maybe empty is a better description—with hardly any life left in him. And the way he keeps up that shack of his is a disgrace.”

  Ben thought this might be a good time to pose his question, as he needed to make sure he had a place to stay, “Is it alright with you if I stay here while Pa is working on the river?”

  Abbie smiled grimly to herself, thinking about the real motive behind his request. “Sure you can. That’ll give us a chance to get our soup business started without you having to walk back and forth every day and get anybody’s suspicions up.”

  From Ben’s perspective, Abbie was as tough as anyone he knew. She had raised her daughter by herself since her husband Albert had disappeared over two years earlier, when he headed out west to find a place where they could set up a trading post. Albert had begrudgingly moved with Abbie to Jeffersonville the year before Ben was born at the urging of Ben’s father. It was true that there had always been employment along the river, but what Albert really wanted to do was move out to the very edge of the frontier, despite his wife’s lack of enthusiasm for life away from the conveniences of a town.

  He figured that a trading operation would allow him to connect with the wild land out there beyond Jeffersonville. Indiana was just too crowded with people and towns for his liking. Apparently, he had not considered the impact a constant stream of settlers on the Oregon Trail might have on any feeling of being away from the hubbub of life. Naively, he had headed west.

  Abbie’s last contact with him had been a letter he sent her from Joseph Robidoux’s Trading Post in the township of St. Joseph, Missouri. She had read his short letter a thousand times.

  Dear Wife

  I am up the Missery River, an I heared thet they was a fin plac fer trade up on the North Platt. Don worry none. The injuns has been pacyfied fer a couple years. I’ll be sendin fer u an Sue afore ye no it.

  Yers, Albert P. Grimsby

  That was all she knew. However, twice since his departure, she had seen newspaper articles that warned people to travel only in large wagon trains on Crow and Pawnee land. Albert’s letter had not mentioned that to head very far up the Platte meant traveling into the hunting territories of the two tribes, which were said to be among the most ferocious and merciless toward small parties attempting to cross their land.

  Some people in town said, without too much effort to speak quietly, that Albert probably just ran off to another life. For months after that last letter, Abbie spent long minutes every afternoon staring down the road, wishing, and praying he would just walk back from wherever he had been. For the better part of a year, she continued to tell Sue that her pa would send for them one day when he found the right place. Ben realized it had been some time since he last heard Abbie make that promise. It also dawned on him that Abbie no longer spent any time looking down the road. But he continued to catch sight of his little cousin from time to time, standing at the front door, gazing down the lane and off toward the horizon for her pa.

  Unlike most women of her generation who lived along the river, Abbie could read and write. And after teaching Ben those skills last year, they spent at least a half hour reading to one another at the close of every day. He loved the luxury of being read to, of dreaming about the characters, the scenes, and the heroic struggles without having to hit and miss on some of the words. Most of the time, he and Sue sat with each other while Abbie read. But for at least a portion of every night, he was the reader. After hearing all of Abbie’s seven books read to him at least twice, he no longer had problems with very many of the words. But next year he was going to have to go to school. She insisted that he needed a real teacher if he was ever to be somebody.

  When Ben lay down on his pallet in the loft, he had no intention of going to sleep as he had something he had to take care of. He waited silently until the sounds behind the curtain at the back of the cabin, where Abbie and Sue slept, faded completely away.

  When he was satisfied that Abbie was asleep, he slipped the latch on the door and stepped out into the yard. The night was cool, there was no moon, and the sky was literally awash in millions of stars, but he spent no time admiring the sight. He looked off to the southwest, about forty-five degrees above the horizon, where he knew he would find his mother. When he was just three years old, Abbie had explained to him that heaven could be found directly on the opposite
side of the three stars that made up the belt of the constellation of Orion the Hunter. And whenever he had a need to talk with his mother, he should look directly toward that exact area of the night sky, where she would be waiting to hear his voice.

  It was a hard thing to do, but he had to apologize to her—to tell her how sorry he was that he had been the cause of her death. Always before, the conversation had been to tell her how much he missed her or describe one of the vexations of his young life. But after what he had learned that day, it seemed somehow wrong to talk about his small troubles. Now every time they talked, he would need to apologize for being the reason they were apart.

  Abbie stood at the window, watching him there with his face turned to the sky. She could tell that he was upset, as several times he appeared to be wiping tears from his eyes with his sleeve. Maybe he would tell her what was bothering him when he was ready. But she had discovered he was a boy who usually kept his deepest thoughts to himself. When he finally turned to come back to the cabin, she hurried to get back to her bed before he re-entered.

  Two

  I Don’t Wanta Get Hung

  Jeffersonville, Indiana 1848

  The morning they launched the soup business, Ben let the chickens out in the yard and sprinkled a couple of handfuls of grain on the ground for them. But when the pigeons in the barn loft swooped down to feed with the busy chickens, as was their daily custom, Ben was prepared for them. He clubbed two greedy pigeons that got too careless, cleaned them, and cut them up into small chunks. Abbie got a hot fire going in the woodstove, put a bit of bacon grease in the iron pot, and browned the meat. Then she filled the pot half full of water and added vegetables. By mid-morning, they were ready.

  Ben was instructed to pull his wagon down close to the dock and get a small fire going. He would have to keep the soup warm and keep another pot on the fire in which to dip the bowls after they were used. They only owned five bowls and six spoons, so if they were successful, he would have to continuously keep his dishes wiped clean. As always in Abbie’s kitchen, the corn muffins were done to perfection.