Several rebels fell. The rest who got a taste of that trained army bucking lead at them hopped off their horses, and took cover behind the slave pen, returning the favor.
Bullets whizzed back and forth down the alley, but the Old Man, standing over me, paid them no mind. He stared at me, clearly annoyed, waiting for an answer. Well, since he was waiting, I couldn’t tell him a lie.
“Captain,” I said. “It’s true. I fell in love and had my heart broke.”
“Did you commingle with anyone in a fleshly way of nature without being married?”
“No, sir. I am still clean and pure as the day I was born in that fashion.”
He nodded grumpily, then glanced down the alley as bullets zinged past him and struck the shingles of the building next to him, pinging the wood out into the alley in splinters. He was a fool when it come to standing around getting shot at. The men behind him ducked and grimaced as the rebels gived them fire, but the Old Man might as well been standing in a church at choir practice. He stood mute, as usual, apparently thinking something through. His face, always aged, looked even older. It looked absolutely spongy with wrinkles. His beard was now fully white and ragged, and so long it growed down to his chest and could’a doubled for a hawk’s nest. He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before: black trousers, black vest, frock coat, stiff collar, withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. His boots was worse than ever, crumpled like pieces of text paper, curled at the toes. In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.
“That is a good thing, Little Onion,” he said. “The Good Book says in Ezekiel sixteen, eight: ‘When I passed by thee and looked upon thee behold, that was the time of love and the Lord spread his skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness.’ You has kept your nakedness covered?”
“Much as possible, Captain.”
“Been reading the Bible?”
“Not too much, Captain. But I been thinking in a godly way.”
“Well, that’s something at least,” he said. “For if you stand to the Lord’s willingness, He will stand for you. Did I ever tell you the story of King Solomon and the two mothers with one baby? I will tell you that one, for you ought to know it.”
I was aching for him to move, for the firing had ramped up even more. Bullets zinged high overhead and kicked around his boots and near my face, but he stood where he was a good five minutes, lecturing his thoughts on King Solomon and about me not reading the Good Book. Meanwhile, just behind him at the near end of the alley, which he couldn’t see, Broadnax and his band from the slave yard had made their return. They somehow got hold of the rebels’ cannon, which had been parked at the edge of town, and they plumb rolled that thing back to the end of the alley and swung the hot end to face the rebels. The barrel of that thing was just over the Old Man’s shoulder. He didn’t notice, course, for he was preaching. His sermon about the Holy Word and King Solomon and the two mothers with one baby was clearly important to him. He went on warbling about his sermon as one of Broadnax’s Negroes flared a light and set fire to the cannon’s fuse.
The Old Man didn’t pay it a lick of mind. He was still bellowing on about King Solomon and the two mothers when Owen piped up, “Pa! We got to go. Captain Lane’s riding outta town and gonna leave us.”
The Old Man looked down the alley as bullets whizzed past his head and at the lit cannon over his shoulder, then down at the rebels firing and cussing at the other end of the alley gathered behind the slave pen, trying to mount up the nerve to charge. Behind him, the fuse of Broadnax’s cannon was lit and was kicking out thick smoke as it headed home. The Negroes backed away from it in awe, watching the fuse burn. The Old Man, watching them, seemed straight-out irritated that they was taking the fight from him, for he wanted the glory.
He stepped out in the clear, right in the middle of the alley, and shouted to the rebels who was shooting at us from the slave pen. “I’m Captain John Brown! Now in the name of the Holy Redeemer, the King of Kings, the Man of Trinity, I hereby orders you to git. Git in His holy name! Git! For He is always on the right side of justice!”
Well, I don’t know if it was that lit cannon belching smoke over his shoulder that done it, or them rebels losing heart when they seen the Old Man hisself in person standing in the clear, untouched with their bullets zinging past his face, but they turned and took the tall timber. They took off. And with that cannon fuse lit and burning home to its maker, the Old Man stood right next to it and watched the fuse burn to nothing and fizzle out. It didn’t hit the hammer. The thing was dead.
