Tender Betrayal

by Rosanne Bittner

  Lee set the whiskey bottle down, staring at the sheet of paper in front of him. How many times had he tried to write this letter and been unable to do it? God only knew what had happened to Audra by now, and Joey’s death would all but destroy her.

  How could he keep his promise to Joey and see her again? There was a time when that was what he wanted more than anything on earth, even after she had screamed at him that day in Baton Rouge never to come back. He wanted nothing more than to find her and help her however he could, if she needed it; but how could he face her, knowing it was his own rifle that had killed her brother?

  Over and over he relived the shooting in his sleep. He had continued the march with Sherman, doing his duty in numb obedience. He didn’t care about anything anymore, nothing but to get this war over with, and for that, he needed his whiskey. So far his drinking had not interfered with his performance on the battlefield, if the raiding and burning of southern cities could be called “battles.” By the time they reached most of these places, the Confederate defenses were long gone.

  He took another swallow of fire and picked up a pen, dipping it into a bottle of ink and leaning over the desk in the back office of the church he had occupied in Savannah. From here his troops would be moving north into the Carolinas, continuing their march, encircling the Confederates and heading back into Virginia for the final kill. Sherman thought the war would be finished by summer, which meant he had to decide what to do about Audra.

  Dear Audra, he wrote. He stopped, wadded up the paper, and took another sheet from his supplies. He couldn’t write “Dear Audra,” as though he knew her. This letter was going to be from a stranger, a Confederate who had known Joey. The stranger would tell her that her brother had been shot as he was bravely trying to escape from Union soldiers who meant to take him to prison. The stranger would tell her of all the heroic things Joey had done in the war. He would make up some wonderful stories to make her proud…her and her damn father. It was Joseph Brennan’s fault Joey had even joined the rebels. If not for that man, Joey would have been home where he belonged, and if Joseph Brennan had not destroyed Lee’s letters to Audra, Lee himself might still be with her.

  It was all water over the dam now. The fact remained that Joey was dead, and he’d killed him. He had promised Joey he would find Audra and make sure she was taken care of, and he would keep that promise. But he didn’t know how soon that would be, and he couldn’t wait until then to tell her about her brother. Besides that, he wasn’t sure he could ever tell her he was the one who had killed the boy.

  Dear Mrs. Potter, he wrote the second time. I regret to inform you that your brother, Corporal Joseph Brennan, has been killed…Joey, a corporal. He smiled, thinking how proud the kid must have been of that. The smile turned to tears, just as it always did. He wiped at them with the sleeve of his uniform, wondering how and when he was ever going to get over this. If it weren’t for the whiskey, and for his promise to Joey, he’d shoot himself.

  He leaned back in the chair and took the letter from his pocket, a letter he had found on Joey. The boy had written to Audra, but the letter never got sent. Lee believed she should see it. Maybe it would help comfort her. He would send it—with the letter from the stranger who would write to tell her that Joey was dead.

  He opened the letter again, picturing Joey writing it by the light of a camp fire. Dear Audra, it read,

  I am in Georgia now, and they say this war will end before much longer and I can come home. I guess you know by now that I won’t come home victorious, but at least so far I am alive and unhurt. From what I have seen, I am lucky. I hardly know anymore what this war is about, and it hurts so much to see what is happening to the South. I worry all the time about you and Father, and I pray you are all in good health and that nothing has happened to Brennan Manor, for all I dream about now is coming home to the place I love, to my beloved sister, and even to Father. He will be so proud of my corporal stripes. When I get home, I will help however I can. We’ll save Brennan Manor, Audra, and we’ll be happy there. Maybe when the war is over, Lee will come back and you can forget all of this and be together like you should always have been. That would make me happier than anything I can think of. I know he’s a Yankee, but he’s one of the best people I know, and…

  The letter ended there. Joey never got the chance to finish it, and Lee was sickened to read those last words about himself…you can forget all of this and be together like you should always have been…he’s one of the best people I know…

  “And he shot you, Joey,” Lee muttered. “Lee Jeffreys blew you away.” He picked up the bottle of ink and threw it against a wall. The blue liquid splattered against a wooden cross, dripped down the wall. In Lee’s eyes it represented blood. “Blue blood,” he sneered. He stared at the cross, thinking how he deserved to burn in hell for what he had done. If only he and Joey had recognized each other one second sooner. If only he had not joined the damn army at all. He had been so sure he was right, so fired up to preserve the Union.

  Well, now the Union was saved, for what that was worth. He had lost his own identity, his own reason for living; had even lost the only woman since Mary Ellen that he wanted to share his life with, all to save the Union. He had killed an innocent boy who had practically worshiped him. Just like Joey, he didn’t even know what this war was about anymore.

  He picked up the pen again, opened another bottle of ink on the desk, and kept writing. Joey died bravely, he continued, and he did not suffer. He fought a Union soldier who was taking him to prison, and in the struggle the soldier’s rifle fired, killing Joey instantly. What was the sense of telling her the boy lived a few minutes? It would be agony enough knowing he was dead. Every time he thought about Audra getting the letter, and the unfinished letter Joey had been writing to her, pain seared his gut like fire, at times making him literally double over. He wasn’t even sure himself how he was going to finish this war. If the pain in his stomach didn’t finish him, the whiskey probably would, or maybe a bullet from his own gun. He was either going to have to learn to live with what he’d done and find a way to forgive himself, or end it all; but as long as Audra was alive and might need his help, he had no choice but to go on. She was all there was left to live for.

  He kept writing. The letter had to be finished. It had to be sent, and that was that. Audra had a right to know her brother was dead. Why let the hope go on any longer? Why let her wonder or let her pray for something she could never have?

  He swallowed more whiskey, then turned up the lamp and kept writing, while ink dripped from the cross, and in the distance yet another southern city burned.

  28

  Audra watched Toosie standing at the stove of the primitive little cabin in which they now lived. The beautiful Brennan home was gone, consumed by fire. Toosie and some of the other Negroes had managed to salvage a few dishes, pots, and pans from the kitchen, which was left standing. Only eight blackened pillars, and several fireplaces with brick chimneys, also stood amid the rabble of the mansion.

  It was a chilly January in Louisiana, but two days before, Audra had insisted on seeing what was left. She had managed to walk out to the rickety little porch of the cabin, and through a clearing left by winter-bare trees and fields that had been trampled by March and his men, she had seen the remnants of her beloved home. She could still feel the heat of the fire that raged around her that awful day, could still smell the smoke. Toosie and some Negro men had gotten her out of the house before the fire spread to where she lay, and they had carried her to one of the empty cabins in the Negro camp.

  The rest of that day and the several days and nights afterward were a blank in Audra’s mind. Toosie had been nursing her for two weeks now. For the last several days she had finally felt stronger, but the horror of what March Fredericks and his men had done would never leave her.

  Poor, precious Henrietta was dead! So was Lena! It was all still so unreal, and at the same time all too real. Toosie had ordered some of the Negro men to b
ury them, and March Frederick’s body had been dumped in the old, abandoned well, as Audra had advised Toosie to do. The man’s horse had been run off, and everyone prayed fervently that the men March rode with would not come back looking for him. They never had—a small consolation for the horrors that had been visited upon them, but at least Toosie and the others seemed to be safe now from a hanging.

  Audra was not sure how the hideous event had affected Toosie, who had herself been badly battered. March deserved what he got, and thank God Toosie had had the courage and fortitude to do the man in before he could rape them both; but killing a man was still something that weighed on a person’s conscience. Toosie had remained amazingly calm and quiet, showing a strength Audra never realized the woman had.

  She looked around the only room of the little cabin, staring at a fire in the little stone fireplace and thinking how ironic her situation had become. All her life she had looked down on Negroes as a lower class. All her life they had waited on her, and she had ordered them around without a thought. Yet in the end some of them had risked their lives for her—some had lost their lives for her. Now these people were her only friends, those who protected her, housed her, nursed her. She lay in a cabin that belonged to her father’s Negro camps, in a homemade bed with ropes for springs and flannel stuffed with feathers for a mattress. Even the nightgown she wore had belonged to a Negro woman.

  There were only six families left on the plantation. Besides Toosie there were six other women, two of them widowed. Among them were twenty-two young children. Eight men still called the Negro camps of Brennan Manor home, four of them husbands, the other four single. Audra had still not gotten straight which children belonged to which women, but through those children she had found some little bit of hope. In spite of what they had been through, and now living in near-starving conditions, the children remained happy and smiling, their bright, dark eyes full of mischief, finding wonder and excitement in the smallest thing: discovering a bird’s nest or beating on an old tub with a stick or biting into a piece of fresh bread.

  Audra thought how Toosie and the others had an amazing resiliency and an ability to overcome hardship. They seemed to have tremendous faith, and they found pleasure in the smallest of blessings. They prayed often, sang when they worked, could carry on in the face of tragedy. She knew Toosie was suffering over her mother’s senseless and brutal death, but she had tried to accept it with a feeling of hope. Mama’s with Joseph now, she had told Audra. She’s out of her physical pain and the misery of having lost your father. She hated walking with that cane, and she was lonely without Joseph.

  Audra had insisted on visiting Lena’s and Henrietta’s graves the day before, and an older Negro man helped support her when she was too weak to stand alone. He had gently kept hold of her as though she were his own daughter. Several of the Negroes had gone with them, and there had been praying and singing over the graves unlike anything Audra had ever seen or heard. She had never gone into the fields and listened to them sing, or ventured into the Negro camps at night. This place had always seemed so frightening and forbidding. She realized now that although she had lived with Negroes nearly her all her life, she knew hardly anything about them. There was nothing frightening and forbidding here.

  Out in front of the cabin, little boys helped the Negro men with hoeing a field not far away, keeping the ground worked up so it would be ready for another planting of potatoes and vegetables as soon as the weather turned a little warmer. Thank goodness there was a long growing season in Louisiana. Some things they could plant and harvest twice. They were determined to fend for themselves, feed themselves, learn to live without someone else providing for them. There was no money to buy anything, and none of them knew where they should go, what to do with themselves—so they would make do right here until and unless a better opportunity came along. They were free now, and some had talked about heading west to Kansas, where it was said even Negroes could homestead.

  Their faces lit up at the prospect of living on land that was all their own, but there was no money to procure the necessary wagons and supplies for such a trip. Even so, they could dream, and Audra began to see that these people had the same hopes and desires and willingness to succeed as any white man. They loved, had families, laughed, cried, enjoyed being together, supported each other. The only thing they lacked was education, but if Toosie could learn to read and write, why not all of them? She felt almost ashamed that most of her life she had believed these people did not have enough intelligence for such things. Toosie had taken time to teach letters to some of the little ones, and they were learning quickly.

  Audra put a hand to the bandages at her throat while she watched Toosie knead some bread dough. The woman had taken charge since Audra’s injury, and all the Negroes had come together to help both Toosie and Audra. At first Audra had just wanted to let life slip away, for it seemed she had lost everything, even her voice. In all likelihood she would probably never sing again, and perhaps not even talk. Her beautiful home was gone, and there had been no word from Joey.

  Everything that she had ever loved was gone. Lee would never come back, and even if he did, nothing could ever be the same. She knew he was a good man, but he was still a Yankee, and the hatred of the South for the North would prevail for a long, long time. Her only consolation was knowing she was among others who had also suffered tremendous losses, and the faith and courage of the Negroes helping her now renewed her own faith. They were as good to her as if she were one of their own. Some had even wept over the fact that she had lost her voice.

  Our beautiful Audra used to sing prettier than any bird God ever made, one of the women said once when she was bathing her. You will sing again, Miss Audra. God won’t take away that voice forever.

  Audra had her doubts, and to bear the loss, she reminded herself that she was at least alive. She could not easily mourn the loss of her voice when the more immediate concern was to overcome the shock of March’s hideous attack, Lena and Henrietta’s tragic deaths, the sight of the black, skeletal remains of Brennan Manor. It was enough to bear the realization that her life would never be the same again, that her precious father was gone, that Joey still had not come home.

  “I have some soup for you,” Toosie was saying, interrupting her thoughts. She was carrying a tray over to the bed. “You have to try to eat again, Audra. You’re much too thin.”

  Audra had no appetite, and when she did try to eat, swallowing was misery, and food did not always go down the right pipe. Sometimes she ended up coughing violently because something would get into her windpipe instead. The coughing would bring her unbearable pain and sometimes start the bleeding again, but every day Toosie made her try again, just to keep her from starving to death. March Fredericks had done a fine job of destroying her voice and had damaged her ability to swallow properly. Audra had not seen her own injury yet, and she wondered if it would leave an ugly scar. At least the knife had not found her jugular veins, and Toosie and the others had managed to keep her from bleeding to death; but Audra was still not sure that what was left of her life was worth living. Her only hope now was Joey. How wonderful it would be when he came walking through that door, her Joey. Together they could find a way to survive, maybe even find a way to rebuild Brennan Manor.

  “Try this,” Toosie was saying. “It’s potato soup. I’ve got time to feed you while the bread is rising.”

  Audra shook her head and took the tray from her. “I’ll…do it myself,” she whispered.

  “Well, you just be careful. I’ll sit right here. It’s not too hot, so it won’t burn.”

  Audra took a spoonful, realizing that for the first time in two weeks she had a bit of an appetite. The soup smelled wonderful. She put a spoonful in her mouth and thought how good it tasted. Now, if she could only get it to go down right, perhaps she could enjoy food for the first time since the horror of March’s attack.

  She swallowed, and to her surprise there was very little pain. She took another spoon
ful, another. She smiled, and Toosie smiled back at her, tears in her eyes. Audra felt like crying herself, finding it amazing, after the life of pampered wealth she had led for nearly twenty-three years, that she could sit in a Negro’s bed, in a Negro’s cabin, sharing this little victory with her Negro sister, and take such pleasure in merely being able to eat a bowl of soup.

  She took several more spoonfuls before stopping to meet Toosie’s eyes again. She reached out and took the woman’s hand. “You risked…your life for me,” she whispered, still finding it painful to try talking.

  Toosie squeezed her hand in return. “And you for me.”

  Their eyes held, and Audra could not hold back her tears. “I love you, Toosie.” The words had come out so easily, and they felt so right. It was not something that she ever dreamed she would say to any Negro, certainly not a mulatto who was the product of her father’s loving a slave.

  Toosie was smiling, but her eyes were also brimming with tears. “And I have always loved you, way before you knew who I really was. We all love you, Audra. You will always have a home with us if you want it. We don’t have much, and I don’t know for sure where we’ll go, but we’ll share what we have with you for as long as you need it.”

  Audra set her tray aside and turned to sit on the edge of the bed, taking hold of both of Toosie’s hands. “I’m so sorry…about Lena…and that you had to shoot March Fredericks. If anyone…should ever come…for him; if they find him…I’ll tell them I shot him. I have…the scar on my throat…to prove he attacked me…and I’m white. It would go easier on me.”

  Toosie nodded, and suddenly they were embracing and crying. Out of tragedy had come something sweet and binding, a revelation for Audra, who realized that her best and most loyal friend had always been Toosie. She was still loved, still had someone who cared about her, still had family, even if that family was now Negro.