Bleeding Kansas

I attended a two-room country school but know nothing about farming. Without the help of the Pendleton family—John and Karen, their children, Margaret, Will, and Liz, and John's parents, Al and Loretta—I could not have begun to write this book let alone finished it. Needless to say, the errors, which are doubtless legion, are all my own. Further, there is no resemblance whatsoever between any real Kansans, whether friends of my youth or the amazingly energetic Pendletons, and any of the people in this novel. All the characters here, especially Nasya, are creations of my own hectic imagination.

Thanks to Karen Pendleton, I am a proud honorary member of the Meadowlark chapter of Kansas 4-H; the many skills Lara Grellier learns in 4-H in this novel are a real sample of what Kansas kids actually do learn.

I spent an informative afternoon at the Newhouse Dairy near Topeka. I am grateful to a very overworked Will Newhouse for taking time out of a day that starts at four each morning, for the first milking, to talk to me. As he warned me, that was scarcely a beginning of understanding dairy farming, so I apologize for the numerous liberties I have taken with cows in this book.

Professor Allan Lines, at Ohio State University, provided much useful information on farm economics.

Sue Novak, at the Kansas State Historical Society, was generous with her time and resources as I began my research into Kansas pioneer history. Sheryl Williams, curator of Special Collections at the University of Kansas, was most helpful in directing me to sources on the early history of settlement in Kansas.

My brother Jonathan helped in many ways, from talking over the book as it developed, introducing me to Douglas County DA Angie Wilson, who generously provided information and advice on Kansas law and Douglas County courts, to helping create the Hebrew-speaking heifer.

I have taken a number of liberties with the Douglas County government, including times of bond hearings, and the behavior of the sheriff's department, which I modeled more on Cook County, where I live, than on the real behavior of Douglas County deputies. In addition, for my own story needs I moved the county fair from August to July, which would never happen in reality. I have also added about a mile to the landscape between Lawrence and Eudora to accommodate the Schapens, Grelliers, Fremantles, Ropeses, and Burtons so that I need not displace the Pendletons, Wickmans, and other actual farmers in the valley.

If you are ever in Douglas County, look up the Pendleton Country Market. My old two-room school, Kaw Valley District 95, where I played baseball with more zest than skill, is now a high-end prep school not too far from Highway 10. It now boasts many rooms.

With the exception of Z's Espresso Bar, every place and person mentioned in this book is fictional.

I grew up in eastern Kansas in the valley of two rivers, the Wakarusa and the Kaw. On maps, you'll see the Kansas River, but we call it the Kaw, as the Indians who first settled there did, and that is the name I use in this book.

I've been away from Kansas for forty years, but it still is in my bones. The landscapes of childhood are so familiar that it is hard to write about them. I see Chicago more clearly now than I do the prairies, where my brothers and I hiked and worked and played. It took eight years of thinking about the people and places I knew before I could write this novel.

In the 1850s, the ferocious struggle over slavery in Kansas earned the territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” The wars fought on that soil were among the bloodiest in our nation's history, as pro-and anti-slavery forces battled over whether the territory would join the Union as slave or free. John Brown's name is well known, but at least a thousand anti-slavery emigrants were murdered in cold blood by “border ruffians,” as they were called, who poured into Kansas Territory from the neighboring slave state, Missouri, with the tacit consent of territorial governor Wilson Shannon, himself a slave owner. In 1861, Kansas came into the Union as a free state, but Lawrence suffered a bloody massacre in 1863 in which hundreds were murdered by raiders led by the Missouri slave supporter William Quantrill, who took advantage of most of the able-bodied men being away fighting for the Union.

I grew up on that history, on knowing I shared a heritage of resistance against injustice. Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, sent “Beecher's Bibles” into Kansas Territory: trunks full of rifles for anti-slavery forces covered with Bibles so they could get past the slavers who controlled access to Kansas. I grew up proud of the role of pioneer women, who sewed bullets into their crinolines to smuggle them past the slaver guards.

A century after Kansas came into the Union as a free state, it was painful to acknowledge that Lawrence was a segregated town. In the 1960s and '70s, in a reprise of Bleeding Kansas, the town of Lawrence and the University of Kansas became the site of some of the bloodiest campus battles in the nation—over segregation, over women's rights, the Vietnam War, American Indian rights, African-American rights. Some of the town reacted in alarm, convinced that Communists had taken over the town, the university, and the county. The Republican revolution began then. People who thought African-Americans and women were out of line demanding their rights began taking over government at the grass-roots level to ensure that old-fashioned values would prevail.

This novel is set in the present, against the backdrop of that history. It is set on the farms of the Kaw Valley, where I grew up. In 1958, my parents bought a farmhouse east of town to escape the poisonous segregation of the era, which affected African-Americans the most but, to a lesser degree, Jews as well. The house we lived in had been owned by the Gilmore family, who at one time farmed ten thousand acres in the Kaw Valley. My family lived in that house for forty years, but locals still call it the Gilmore house, never the Paretsky house, and in this novel the Fremantle house is treated in the same way. Like the Fremantle house, “our” house had a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room, a silver-backed water fountain in the upper hall, and many beautiful fireplaces.

Part One
  
PROTEST

1.  THE CORN IS GREEN

2.  LOOKING TO THE PAST

From Abigail Comfort Grellier's Journal

3.  THE PASSIONS OF SUSAN

4.  FIRE BOMB

5.  FAMILY THANKSGIVING

6.  DRUG BUST

7.  BEING NEIGHBORLY

8.  UNDERGROUND WARS

From Abigail Comfort Grellier's Journal

9.  THE MILKMAN

10.  THE RED HEIFER

11.  CAPPUCCINO AND ITS MAKER

12.  NOT RICHARD BURTON

13.  THAT OLD HOUSE

14.  THE COVEN GATHERS

15.  FIRE DANCE

16.  RAMPING UP THE ARGUMENTS

17.  OUT OF THE TANK

18.  ONE LAST FIGHT

19.  THE LONG GOOD-BYE

20.  TAPS

Part Two
  
FALL

21.  THE QUAGMIRE OF YOUTH

22.  TEACHER OUT OF SCHOOL

23.  WITCHES' BREW

24.  WHO WAS THAT…INTRUDER?

25.  ADOLESCENT FURY

26.  THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE

27.  NIGHT VISITORS

28.  WEIRD—REALLY WEIRD—NEIGHBORS

29.  SUICIDE TRY

30.  SUNFLOWER CROP

31.  PENNED IN

32.  PHOTO OP

33.  A SHOT IN THE DARK

34.  ACTION IN THE HEIFER'S BARN

Part Three
  
MIRACLE

35.  TALES FROM THE CRYPT

36.  MAN IN THE MIDDLE

37.  MANGER WARS

38.  COLD COMFORT FARM

39.  MURDER ABOUT

40.  A GIRL'S “FRIEND”

41.  COLLAPSE

42.  HAUNTED BY THE DEAD

43.  MORNING AFTER

44.  PUPPY LOVE?

45.  VISITING HOURS

46.  TALK, TALK, TALK…NO ACTION

Part Four
  
HALLOWEEN

From Abigail Comfort Grellier's Letters

47.  HIDEAWAY UNCOVERED

48.  WORD STORM

49.  GRAFFITI ARTIST

50.  HEIFER CLEANING

51.  A CHRISTIAN SERVICE

52.  SACRIFICIAL CALF

53.  SAMHAIN

54.  BURN, BABY, BURN

55.  THE AWAKENING

Part Five
  
CODA

56.  HISTORY LESSON

57.  TIDYING UP

58.  SPRING