Someone knocked at the door then, and Toosie stiffened and pulled away. Audra felt her own heart pounding, as neither of them had gotten over the fear that March’s men would come back looking for him.
“Who is it?” Toosie called out, wiping at her eyes and hurrying over to where she kept Joseph Brennan’s rifle propped beside the door.
“Just open up and find out,” a man’s voice answered.
Toosie glanced at Audra with a frown, thinking the voice sounded familiar. She kept the rifle ready as she carefully lifted the wooden latch. When she saw who was standing there, she gasped and set the rifle aside. Audra could not see who it was, but she heard Toosie cry his name. “Elijah!”
The man came inside, swinging Toosie around in his arms, and Audra saw that it was Elijah Jakes, the man Toosie had once loved, the man her father had sold to keep them apart. It warmed her heart to see the joy in Toosie’s eyes, and she thought again for a moment about Lee. There was a time when she would have wanted to greet him like that, to feel him holding her again, to know he had come for her. But there was no use in thinking about that now. Toosie wept with boundless joy, and Audra cried right along with her, but her tears were not just for Toosie’s long-lost love. They were for a love she herself had lost…and would never find again.
April 1865
Audra smiled as Toosie and Elijah danced around the bonfire to celebrate the fact that Toosie was with child. Elijah was a free man now, and in eight years he had not forgotten Toosie or married anyone else. In spite of the fact that she missed her dead father, Audra could see even more clearly how wrong the man had been to sell Elijah, and she was happy for both of them. Out of all the tragedy of the past months had come a little bit of joy.
All six Negro families celebrated, as well as four more families who had joined them from the Cypress Hollow plantation, bringing with them three more single men and two old women. Although it was still the middle of the day, they had got the fire started so they could feed it and build it as darkness fell. They clapped, danced, sang to the music of one old man who played a fiddle. Elijah was a handsome, well-built Negro with a warm smile. He was thirty-one now, Toosie thirty. Not long after he came back, they had searched out a country preacher and gotten married. Audra had gone to live with one of the widowed Negro women so that the newlyweds could be alone, and now a baby was coming.
Audra’s voice had grown a little stronger, but it still hurt to talk, and what came out was a low, rough, raspy sound that bore no resemblance to her once lilting voice. She was determined to keep using it and to do the special exercises she remembered Mrs. Jeffreys teaching her to strengthen her voice. Maybe what once made her lovely voice even more beautiful could be used to bring back a voice that was hardly there at all.
She helped care for the widowed woman’s children, who ranged in ages from four to ten, and in spite of her voice being only a step above a gruff whisper, and the pain it caused her to talk, she was managing to teach the children their letters and numbers, delighted to discover that they learned willingly and readily. Their mother, known only as Wilena, could not get over the fact that her children would know how to read and write, or that it was Audra Brennan Potter who was teaching them.
The Lord surely sent us to live here when we was slaves, she would say, carrying on about Audra being so generous when she could leave them and find refuge and a more comfortable life among her own kind. Audra didn’t feel she had any of her “own kind” left. She’d heard through news the Negro men brought from town that Uncle John was back, but he had not come to see if she was alive or dead, or to offer her help and shelter. Nor had she ever again heard from Eleanor. That was just fine with her. These people were her family now, her shelter, her comfort.
The only person she still cared about was Joey…and sometimes thoughts of Lee still plagued her. She could not deny that a little part of her still longed to be a woman again, longed to be held the way Elijah held Toosie, longed to be in a man’s arms again and make love not just out of physical need, but because she loved that man with every bone in her body. But it was partly because of men like Lee that she sat poor and destitute in this Negro camp, and that Brennan Manor lay in black ruins, weeds beginning to creep over and grow into what was left of the house. Things were the same at Cypress Hollow, and most of the valuables had been stolen, the livestock rustled away by thieves and other farmers, the rest having just wandered away. Because of men like Lee, outlaws could run wild through the South now, murdering innocent people like Henrietta and Lena, cutting Audra’s throat so that she could never sing again.
That man is going to come for you, and you’ll have to put the past behind you, Toosie had told her more than once. The woman wanted so much for Audra to find love again, and she was convinced Lee would come back for her. Audra had told her it would do him no good. It could never be the same, but Toosie insisted that it could. Nobody will ever again love you as much as Lee Jeffreys loved you, she was always reminding her. Yankee or not, he’s a man caught up in this war same as you were, and he’s no more responsible for what has happened to us than your own father or the rest of our southern men who chose to fight for what they believed in. When this war is over, he’ll just be Lee Jeffreys, and you have to put it all aside and let yourself love again, Audra. Don’t throw that man away.
Audra was convinced he would not come back, but as the war seemed to be drawing finally to an end, the realization that he might try was beginning to be an almost daily thought, and the things Toosie had told her weighed heavily on her mind and heart. Now, seeing Toosie and Elijah dance around the fire, knowing Toosie would be having a baby, made her ache for all of those things. No matter how confused her feelings were about Lee, the fact remained that when she thought about being a woman again, being a wife, having babies, she could not picture giving herself that way to any other man.
For now, she had to decide what she was going to do for the more immediate future. There was a total of sixty-three Negroes living here now, and since his return, all Elijah talked about was heading for Kansas soon to start their own settlement as a free people. Their only problem was money to buy the things they needed to get them there and help them get started in a new life. Audra had to decide whether she would go to Baton Rouge or New Orleans, or whether she should go to Kansas with them. She felt a strong desire to help Toosie and the others, as they had befriended and helped her. They had already said they would wait for her, knowing she would not leave until Joey came home. If Joey would come soon, he could help her decide what to do. Whatever they did, they could always be together.
There was really not much reason to stay in either Baton Rouge or New Orleans. The whole South was a shambles, people broke and starving. Some of the Negroes had managed to get to Baton Rouge a time or two and bring back a newspaper, which enterprising citizens still managed to print. In it she’d read about how people feared what would happen once the war was over. With everyone penniless, wealthy Northerners were sure to come down and buy up peoples’ mortgages. For those like herself who owned their land outright but who were without money, Northerners could take over the banks, the county governments, maybe force some kind of heavy land tax on those with property. What could she do until Joey returned?
Elijah picked Toosie up in his strong arms and told her she must stop dancing or she would “lose that baby before it even grows its fingers and toes.” Everyone laughed, and one woman announced that they all could eat now. In spite of the shortage of food and just about everything else humans needed to sustain themselves, the women had managed to prepare a little banquet table. They had cooked potatoes and squash in several different ways, and two dairy cows and a goat had provided enough milk for them to keep making butter, at least for as long as the salt supply in the root cellar lasted. The fire had not damaged the cellar, nor its supply of last year’s harvest of potatoes, carrots, corn, squash, and jars of canned foods. A couple of the men had managed to catch a wild turkey, and it sat nicely roaste
d now, a royal feast for a people hungry to find something to celebrate.
Audra joined the line to fill her plate, a piece of expensive china that had once sat in a cupboard in the kitchen of her palatial mansion. Now it was used by the Negroes. All these little things kept bringing back stabbing, painful memories that would hit her at the oddest times, making her want to cry. She forced back the tears and put a small piece of turkey on her plate, not wanting to take too much, as the poor bird had to be shared by sixty-three people. Even if it was only a bite or two, real meat tasted wonderful. How strange that such things were a luxury now!
Joseph Adams rode in then on the one-and-only horse left to the plantation. Joseph was one of the single men, who Audra knew was romantically interested in Wilena. He had been visiting the woman often, playing with her five children. Because he was a strong man who had been used and sold frequently by slave owners who liked him because of his strength, he had never married, mainly because his owners would not allow it. According to Wilena, they had used Joseph like a stud horse, forcing him to mate with many Negro women to produce strong babies for future use in the fields. In one respect it would seem a man would not mind such a duty, but Audra could understand that Joseph had looked at it as horribly degrading. Wilena said he suffered from terrible guilt for having to force himself on some of the women because he’d been ordered to do it or be whipped. Joseph felt humiliated and guilty, and he was looking for a woman to love, a woman he could be with because of that love, a woman who wanted him just because she in turn loved Joseph and wanted him in her bed.
Audra had seen some ugly aftereffects of slavery, both physical and emotional, especially among the slaves who had come from Cypress Hollow. One man had the most hideous scars on his back and chest she had ever seen. They were from whippings, some at the hand of Richard Potter, and she felt less and less guilty over not mourning the man’s death.
Joseph walked up to her with another newspaper. “You’d best read the headlines, Miss Audra,” he told her, still addressing her in the old way all of them were used to calling her.
Audra turned and set down her plate, opening the newspaper while others quieted and watched her, most of them still unable to read. Toosie walked up next to her and gasped when she read the headline herself. It was dusk, but still light enough to read without a lamp. She turned to the others, knowing how difficult it was for Audra to speak up loudly enough for others to hear. “President Lincoln is dead! He was shot by an assassin!”
“Dear Lord!” one woman exclaimed, and others joined her in lamenting his death. Audra just stared at the headline, her emotions mixed. In her mind Abraham Lincoln had been responsible for the ruination of the entire South. She could not find it in herself to grieve for him, but she knew that to most Negroes he was a savior. In spite of their state of poverty and having no one to care for them now, they were free, and the man who carried the ugly scars turned away and wept.
“What’s this country comin’ to?” another man asked.
“Maybe he was shot by some southern man who’s fixin’ to start the war up all over again,” another put in. “Maybe they gonna try to git things back the way they was, put us in chains agin.”
Audra turned to look at them. “That will never happen,” she assured them, straining to be heard. “There is no money nor means left…for any of us to go back to the way life once was. President Lincoln…already declared all of you free…before he died.” She put a hand to her throat, her voice already weakening from just that small effort at talking louder. “A new President will simply…take over and carry on…where Lincoln left off.”
Wilena approached her, touching her arm. “We is sorry life is bad for you now, child, but we can’t help bein’ happy for our freedom. We can’t help mournin’ Mr. Lincoln’s death. You got to admit that no matter what has happened, Mr. Lincoln had a great dream in mind—a dream of stayin’ united, a dream of freedom for all the people of the United States, not jus’ the white folks. Slavery was wrong, Miss Audra. Surely you know that.”
Audra moved her eyes to gaze at all of them again. She rubbed at her throat as she spoke. “I knew it was wrong…long before the war. Men like my father…wanted to end slavery…but they wanted to do it…in a way that would keep something like this from happening…all this bloodshed…all the burning and dying. Now…all of us have suffered for it.”
“So has Mr. Lincoln,” Wilena reminded her.
Audra’s eyes teared as she once more contemplated the ironies of this hideous, needless war. “Yes,” she said softly. “Everyone has…on both sides.”
Wilena leaned close and hugged her, and when she moved away, Joseph held out a letter. “Miss Audra, this was waitin’ for you at the newspaper office,” Joseph told her. “They been holdin’ it for many weeks, waitin’ for you or one of us to come to town for another paper. Ah don’ know how long it’s been sittin’.” He handed her the envelope, and Audra laid the paper aside, taking the letter with a shaking hand. She looked at Toosie.
“It could be…from Joey!” she said, her voice already reduced to a whisper again. “Or maybe it’s about Joey!” She handed it to Toosie. “I can’t open it, Toosie. You…do it.”
Toosie took the letter, seeing the return address was a Private Larry Jones, Savannah, Georgia. No army regiment was given, no street address, nothing. “Do you know a Larry Jones?” she asked.
Audra shook her head, her throat aching, her heart pounding so hard that her chest hurt. Who was Larry Jones? Why wasn’t the letter from Joey? A horrid dread began to fill her, but she clung to hope while Toosie opened the letter. Several of the Negroes gathered around her, many of them having known and loved Joey, all of them just as concerned for him as Audra and Toosie.
Something fell out of the envelope, and Toosie bent down and picked it up to see that it was stripes that had been cut off a uniform, as well as another letter. She opened it to see it was addressed to Audra. It took only a moment to realize what this must be. With tear-filled eyes she handed the cloth stripes to Audra, who took them with a shaking hand, her eyes wide with horror.
Toosie scanned the letter that had fallen, seeing it was from Joey. She folded it and pressed it into Audra’s hand. “It’s an…an unfinished letter…from Joey.”
“Dear Lord!” one of the women groaned. “This day of celebration has turned to sorrow.”
Audra just stared at Toosie, holding Joey’s letter tightly, his corporal’s stripes in her other hand. “Read the letter,” she whispered.
Toosie took a deep breath for courage. Of all the hell she had been through, even fighting off March Fredericks and having to shoot him, nothing had been as difficult as this.
“Dear Mrs. Potter,” she read. “I…regret to inform you that your brother…” Toosie fought back her own tears. “Corporal Joseph Brennan, has been…killed…fighting for the proud Confederacy.”
It would be several days before Audra could bear to hear the rest of the letter. A darkness enveloped her, and she wilted into Joseph’s arms, a blessed unconsciousness temporarily keeping away the pain of the most grievous loss she had ever known.
29
May 1865
Eleanor opened the door of her small but neat home, her eyes widening with a mixture of surprise and indignation, and finally a look of sweet satisfaction. There stood Audra, wearing a flower-printed cotton dress so cheap looking that one might expect to see it on a Negro woman. She wore a pink scarf around her neck, which did not go with the dress at all, and since it was such a warm spring day, she wondered why her cousin wore the scarf at all. She glanced past Audra to see a buckboard sitting out in front of the house, pulled by two sorry-looking horses. Two Negro men sat in the seat of the wagon, and an older Negro woman and Toosie both sat in the bed of the wagon.
“Well, my, my,” Eleanor drawled, looking Audra over scathingly. “What terrible luck have you had, cousin dear? And what are you doing clear down here in New Orleans? I do hope you haven’t come begging.” Sh
e smiled on the first words, but the smile turned to a sneer of hatred. “We don’t give to traitors, certainly not a woman who would sleep with a Yankee while her aunt burns alive in a fire set by Yankees! It’s a good thing Father isn’t here right now. He would throw you right off the porch!”
“Uncle John is all right, then?” Audra asked.
“Yes. He came home four months ago, but he’s not the same man. The war affected his mind, all the horror and all, then coming home to find Mama dead, the bank and our home destroyed. Poor Father is in a terrible state of depression.”
“Eleanor, who is it?” the woman’s husband asked, coming from another room to stand behind her.
Eleanor sniffed. “It’s Audra. You know my cousin, remember? The one who whored with that Yankee soldier friend of hers while my mother was dying in that awful fire!”
She suddenly broke into tears that Audra suspected were fake. She turned to glance back at Wilena and Toosie, who sat waiting hopefully in the back of the buckboard. Joseph Adams, who had married Wilena, and Elijah also waited, hoping Audra would be able to do what she had come here to do. It had been a long, hard trip, and all along the way they had all seen the devastation left behind by the Yankees. There were few people left with any money or valuable possessions. Her only hope now was Eleanor’s husband, Albert Mahoney.
She turned back to look up into Albert Mahoney’s eyes. Eleanor’s husband was a tall, gangly, rather homely man who was already balding, and Audra wondered if he had married Eleanor only because no attractive women would have him. Even so, he did not deserve a wife like Eleanor. He was a kind man who doted on his wife and was gracious to everyone. He also seemed very intelligent and enterprising, for somehow he had managed to salvage a lovely home out of this hideous war. He and Eleanor were well dressed. Apparently Albert was still doing all right, in spite of the poverty most of the South was in now. She hoped he was kind enough, and that he still had enough cash left, that he would be able to give her what she had come here for, or this arduous trip would have been for nothing. She had vowed once never to go to Eleanor for help, but she had no choice now. She told herself it would not be Eleanor she begged from, but rather Albert. “I would like to speak with you, Albert. May I come in?”
Tender Betrayal Page 40
