Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1)

by Phillips, Michael

  ‘‘Ah wouldn’t be too hard on da chil’, ma’am,’’ said Henry from behind them.

  ‘‘I’m grateful for what you’ve done, Henry,’’ rejoined Mrs. Clairborne, turning back toward the stable hand, ‘‘but now you must really mind your own business. The child is careless and scatterbrained. She needs to watch where she is going.’’

  ‘‘Yes’m,’’ said the black man. He tipped his hat to mother and daughter, then ambled back in the direction of the livery.

  PUZZLING WORDS

  4

  AN HOUR OR TWO AFTER FALLING ASLEEP that same night, Katie awoke to voices coming from downstairs. She recognized her mother and father talking in hushed tones, not wanting Katie or her older brothers to hear. They weren’t exactly arguing, but her father sounded urgent and determined, her mother tense and afraid.

  Strange and undefined fears filled Katie’s heart as she lay awake and strained to listen. She tiptoed toward her door.

  ‘‘Don’t you understand, Rosalind?’’ her father was saying. ‘‘I have to go. If we don’t fight, everything we have lived for will be taken away.’’

  ‘‘Why does it have to be you?’’ implored her mother.

  ‘‘What would you have me do, stay home when the rest of North Carolina’s men are risking their lives for our freedom? I won’t spend my life thinking I was a coward.’’

  ‘‘But the boys, Richard, surely they don’t have to—’’ ‘

  ‘We will be back in a few months, Rosalind. It won’t take longer than that.’’

  ‘‘I can understand Joseph,’’ Katie heard her begin again. ‘‘But the others are so—’’

  ‘‘Caleb and Jason want to go,’’ he interrupted. ‘‘ I’m not going to stop them. They’re men now too.’’

  ‘‘Sixteen and seventeen—that’s hardly men.’’

  ‘‘You can’t keep them boys forever, Rosalind.’’

  It was quiet for a few long seconds. Not wanting to hear her parents argue but unable to prevent herself from eavesdropping, Katie put her ear closer to the opening.

  ‘‘Where will you be—will I be able to get in touch with you?’’ she heard her mother finally say. Her voice was soft and hesitant. Katie could tell her mother was starting to cry.

  ‘‘I’ll be moving about,’’ answered her father. ‘‘Fort Sumter at first, then I don’t know. It depends on how long it takes us to drive the Yankees back north. You’ll just have to take care of things.’’

  ‘‘What if your brother . . . what if Burchard makes trouble with you gone?’’

  ‘‘There’s no reason for him to find out.’’

  ‘‘He always seems to know what you do, almost before you do it.’’

  ‘‘He’ll be busy with his own crops now that spring’s come. I doubt you’ll even see him before I’m back.’’

  ‘‘What if I do?’’

  ‘‘He can’t do anything legally in the short time I’m away. You’ll be fine, Rosalind.’’

  ‘‘What about the plantation . . . the crops?’’

  ‘‘Everything will be all right for a few months. The winter wheat’s in, the new wheat’s planted. The cotton will be in within two weeks. The boys and I will be back in time to harvest.’’

  ‘‘What if you’re . . . you’re delayed?’’

  Katie could feel the shakiness in her mother’s voice. By now her mother was crying in earnest. It filled Katie with a kind of fear she had never known before. Her mother was the focal point for everything in life— a rock, strength itself. Her mother knew everything and could do anything. To hear her cry seemed to unravel the very fabric of her existence. Katie would not have put it into those kind of words back when she was a child. But as she stood trembling, she felt dreadful forebodings. She had never heard her mother sound this way, so uncertain, so afraid. She had never heard her mother weep.

  But then her father’s voice again floated up into her hearing.

  ‘‘The slaves know what to do,’’ he was saying. ‘‘They just need someone to push them, to crack the whip every day or two. Tell Mathias what to do. He’s a good man. He’ll keep the darkies in line and take care of the crops.’’

  ‘‘How will I know what to tell him?’’

  ‘‘Just tell him to get the cotton planted and then keep it weeded. And Leroy knows more about animals than any darkie alive. Just tell them to run things for a while—we’ll be back by fall.’’

  ‘‘What about the grain?’’

  ‘‘Let the wheat turn golden, then give it another week before the scythe is put to it. The color’s the key—green’s got to be gone and the head gold. But if you see rain coming, get it in even if it hasn’t been a week. Once it’s gold, you’ve got to get the wheat under the roof before the rains come, else it’ll fall and rot on the ground. But Mathias knows all that. He and Leroy know what to do. Just make sure it’s gold.’’

  Their voices grew soft.

  ‘‘. . . what about . . . and if my brother . . .’’

  Her mother’s voice drifted and she couldn’t hear the rest. Now her father spoke again.

  ‘‘. . . hasn’t come around in all this time . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . but if he comes around again . . . his gold . . . what if he . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . not going to show up with a war on . . . give it to him like you always said . . . but probably back in California . . . for all we know.’’

  ‘‘. . . hate to think . . . if Templeton found out . . . you not here . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . couldn’t possibly . . . unless . . . your family . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . been too long . . . my family . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . sister might know where . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . got it out of Ward . . . hate each other too much . . . Ward would never give him . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . always ran with a rough bunch . . . tell him . . . haven’t seen him in years . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . what should I . . .’’

  ‘‘. . . just keep . . . down where . . .’’

  Again her father’s and mother’s voices became so distant that Katie could make out no more of their conversation. She crept back into her bed. But she couldn’t go to sleep. She lay for a long time confused and afraid.

  What did her mother’s two brothers have to do with whether the wheat was ripe and golden? She’d never even seen either of them, though she’d heard her parents talk about them before. She knew her father didn’t like either of them.

  Talk of war, talk of her father and brothers leaving— it all frightened her.

  But gradually she fell asleep and dreamed of golden fields of wheat, of golden coins, and the light golden hair of her doll Rebecca. . . .

  Only a few days later Katie’s father and three older brothers rode away from Rosewood, leaving the plantation in the hands of Katie’s mother and the slaves. The conflict forever known as the War Between the States had arrived . . . and life in North Carolina would never be the same again.

  WAR COMES

  5

  KATIE KNEW HER FATHER OWNED SLAVES, but like most young white children—and I suppose black ones like me too—she took it all as part of the natural order of things. She’d never thought about it, never questioned it, never stopped to wonder whether it was right or wrong. She had no idea what the conflict between North and South was all about.

  The fighting broke out on April 12 of 1861 when Confederate soldiers attacked Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor. The Union commander of the fort surrendered two days later. The war had begun.

  In July the Union army was routed at Manassas in Virginia. It looked like the prediction of Katie’s father might come true, that the South would defeat the North in plenty of time for them to get home for the harvest.

  But when Katie and her mother next saw Richard Clairborne a few weeks later, he didn’t have the joy of victory on his face. He had come home to tell them that Katie’s brother Jason had been killed in the battle. Her other two br
others were off somewhere with the army. He didn’t know when he’d see either of them again.

  Katie’s mother cried for days. By the time she said good-bye to her husband a second time, hard lines of grief had already begun to etch themselves onto her face. Despite her husband’s optimistic words, she was well aware that the war could take the lives of her other sons too, as well as make a widow of her. She did not cry or argue at his departure this time. She was too angry to cry—angry at her husband for getting involved, angry at Abraham Lincoln, angry at Jefferson Davis, angry at them all. Why did men always have to fight? Couldn’t they see the stupidity and senselessness of it?

  With steely eyes she watched him ride off without answers to the questions that had plagued women like her for untold centuries. She loved him. But at that moment she thought Richard Clairborne to be about the most stupid man alive. He was leaving his wife and daughter alone just so he could try to kill other men who had also left wives and daughters behind at their homes. Possibly he would get himself killed by one of those men. Men killing other men . . . and for what?

  She shook her head and turned back into the house. Matthias or not, there was work to do, and it was going to be hard and would test every bone in her body. She knew that well enough by now. If men like her husband thought the war didn’t really matter to the women at home, then they were fools.

  She couldn’t have been more right. When it came, the war came to everyone.

  The fighting dragged on much longer than Richard Clairborne or most Southerners had figured it would. But Katie’s mother was not surprised. She had seen it coming. And she knew it would get worse. Rosalind Clairborne did her best to hold everything at Rosewood together, but daily the hardships increased.

  Especially for rich folks like the Clairbornes, who had been insulated from the harsh realities of life, the difficulties of the war spread like a creeping rot. At first everything on the plantation continued pretty much the same. But without the master and his sons overseeing the slaves, they gradually slacked off, working at a slower pace and accomplishing less. Even Mathias, who had always been as faithful as any black man could be to his master, couldn’t keep the lethargy from setting in.

  The first year’s wheat eventually got harvested and sold, and the cotton crop was about normal. When Mrs. Clairborne and Mathias and Jeremiah took the three loaded wagons of harvested cotton into Mr. Watson’s mill, the money for it was good enough to keep the Clairborne account at the Shenandoah bank full for another year, feeding Katie and her mother, along with the slaves, and providing for some winter repairs about the place. They had most everything they needed.

  But by the following year, Rosalind Clairborne was beginning to see inevitable signs that the work was falling behind. The crops were slow getting sown, and as the summer progressed the fields weren’t as well attended. Fences were starting to require attention, and more than once she had to run through the fields herself to chase away deer nibbling at the shoots of wheat. Sometimes Leroy was late to milk the cows. And she even had to watch Beulah and Elvia a little more carefully with the kitchen and household chores—something she had never had to do before. A drought through most of July didn’t help matters. As a result, the year’s crop was less than half as plentiful as the previous year, and Katie’s mother was feeling the financial pinch. She knew the plantation was suffering. One of the wagons was old, and her husband had talked of buying a new one this year. But now she wouldn’t be able to do so. And throughout the previous winter they had to slaughter more cattle, chickens, and hogs than she would have liked just to feed themselves and the slaves. They couldn’t continue this way or the stock would eventually dwindle down to nothing.

  It was during that second year that she was forced to start borrowing from the bank. As she did, she silently railed at both her husband and her brother, the one for putting her in this position, the other for having the means to help but being so irresponsible that he had disappeared without a trace. She ought to just—

  No, she said to herself. Things hadn’t gotten quite that bad yet, and she would pay off the bank with the next year’s crops.

  Mrs. Clairborne was forced to understand much that she’d heard from her husband for years, and realize why he’d complained about the slaves, the weather, the fences, the constant drain of cash, and a hundred other things. And always more bills appeared than she could manage—where did they all come from? It wasn’t easy managing a plantation, she had heard him say many times. Now that she had to do it for herself, Rosalind Clairborne realized just how hard it really was.

  She vowed that she would roll up her sleeves and go down to the slave quarters every day and get the work started herself . She would supervise them throughout the day too. How many times had she heard her husband say, ‘‘If you don’t stand over their shoulders and make them do what you tell them, nothing will get done.’’

  She had been lax. She had assumed everyone would do just as she said. A lot of what had happened this last season was her own fault. From now on she would watch things more closely, even if it meant getting out in the fields every day and working right along with them. If that’s what it took to keep the cotton hoed and free of weeds, that’s what she would do.

  She would make them work. If her husband could do it, she could. She couldn’t afford another bad year.

  It was a bewildering and lonely time in Katie’s life. At one time she came upon her mother, uncharacteristically exasperated with Beulah or Elvia, another time just sitting and crying from sheer exhaustion. Yet her mother’s attempted explanations made little sense in Katie’s ears.

  And Mrs. Clairborne’s irritation with Katie’s innocence occasionally boiled over.

  Katie was out next to the pasture one day, playing with a doll and talking to a cow grazing on the other side of the fence. Rusty lay curled up asleep at her side. Mrs. Clairborne hurried up to them.

  ‘‘Kathleen, what are you doing!’’ exclaimed her mother in frustration. ‘‘Do I have to do everything around here myself? What am I going to do with you if you’re always in your own little dreamworld?’’

  Katie was confused at her mother’s outburst.

  ‘‘The dream is over, Kathleen,’’ Mrs. Clairborne went on, hands on her hips. ‘‘You’re going to have to be in charge of your own home someday. It’s time you learned to do some things. And I need help around here. So we’re going to start right now. I’m going to teach you to handle a team of horses. It will be a big help to me if you can go down to the slave quarters with a wagon of food now and then. Come with me while I hitch up the horses.’’

  Katie complied and learned to do whatever she was told, though at the end of this day, when the lesson with the team and wagon was done, she went to her room, sat down with Rebecca and Peg and Sarah in her lap, and started to cry.

  Why was her mother so irritable? Why had she said those things today?

  Her mother never read to her now, and hardly ever smiled. There used to be music in the house all the time, and they used to go to concerts. The war had made everything so dreary. She didn’t feel like playing her violin or the piano all by herself, and her mother never sat down at the piano anymore either.

  TWISTER

  6

  ROSALIND CLAIRBORNE READ ABOUT MR. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the Greens Crossing Clarion in January of 1863, and it didn’t help matters for her. Though only a few of the Rosewood slaves knew how to read, and they never got their hands on a newspaper, somehow they learned of the proclamation within a few weeks. How news traveled so fast among slaves was a mystery to Katie’s mother.

  But soon enough she saw signs that they had heard about it and were wondering what it was going to mean in their lives. After that it became yet more difficult to get the work of the plantation done.

  All through the South, colored folk were restless. And white plantation owners were nervous.

  By now Katie was getting to an age where she could be of some actual help with t
he chores around the house. She still could be distracted with daydreams, but for the first time in her life Katie’s white cheeks were often stained with dirt and her dainty hands wore blisters. With money scarce, there were no more pretty dresses or new dolls.

  Another year went by.

  Things on the plantation did not improve. Still the war dragged on. Rosalind had heard nothing from her husband for over six months when a brief hurried note was passed along to her from a wounded soldier returning home. Mr. Clairborne was still alive—at least he was then.

  In the fall a rare tornado swept through North Carolina.

  As the day progressed and the wind rose into a howling frenzy, Katie’s mother kept close watch on the dark horizon. Finally the wind whipped into such a fury she wondered that the roof didn’t blow off. Then she saw the shape of the wind funnel. It appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly there it was just a few miles away!

  ‘‘Elvia!’’ she cried to the Negro cook, who was younger and about half the size of Beulah. ‘‘Run to the slave quarters and tell everyone to hurry up here as fast as they can.’’

  ‘‘But, Miz Clair—’’

  ‘‘Now, Elvia! Run as fast as you can. There’s a twister coming. Everyone—especially the little ones . . . hurry!’’

  The eyes of the terrified woman were now as big as two white saucers in the middle of her brown face. Finally grasping the urgency of her mistress’s command, she turned and left the kitchen at a run.

  Mrs. Clairborne yelled for Katie, then ran to the middle of the parlor, pulled back the rug, and opened the hinged door in the floor that led to the underground cellar. She didn’t stop to wonder what her husband would do in this situation. There’d never been a tornado this close before. She knew it wasn’t proper to bring any but house slaves inside. None of them but Beulah and Elvia had ever set foot in the plantation house.

  But she couldn’t worry about that now. She’d think about the right and wrong of it later. If her husband was angry that black folks had come into his home, so be it. Right now she had to find a way to keep them all alive.