Richard reached for her hand. ‘‘I can’t believe—’’ ‘‘I had no choice. I didn’t know what else to do.’’ Rosalind’s eyes fell to her lap.
‘‘Well, no matter,’’ said Clairborne. ‘‘We’ll get all that straightened around. Me and the boys are back, and we’ll get Rosewood back to normal.’’
The next several days were blissful for both Katie and Rosalind Clairborne. No longer did Rosewood’s fate rest solely in their hands. The men were back—to make decisions and do the hard work, and mostly just to know what to do.
The first day Mr. and Mrs. Clairborne walked all about Rosewood as Katie’s mother explained what she had tried to do, what she hadn’t been able to do, showing her husband the nearly empty slave quarters, the broken fences, and the partially planted fields.
The frustration at having been gone for so long was clearly evident on Richard Clairborne’s face as he saw to what a state the once proud plantation had fallen. But he was not one to mope about, and that same afternoon, he and Joseph and Caleb busily set to repairing a stretch of fence near the woods.
————
Two days later Katie sat at the kitchen table watching her mother knead a batch of bread. She was supposed to be peeling potatoes for their supper, but her hands were still, though her thoughts were not. ‘‘Mama,’’ she finally began, ‘‘why don’t Caleb and Joseph want to talk about the war? When I ask them questions, they just pat my head and change the subject.’’
Rosalind’s hands stopped too and she stared out the window. ‘‘I know, Katie—I’ve noticed that also. I think it will take time for all of us to get over the long separation and the awful memories to become a family again.’’ She turned back to Katie with a smile and buried her hands again in the dough.
At the stove across the kitchen, Beulah was just pulling a sweet potato pie from the oven. ‘‘Hmm, hmm,’’ she exclaimed. ‘‘My boys are going to have themselves a supper jes’ like da ol’ times,’’ she added. ‘‘Good, warm food, a roof ober dere heads, hard work every day—dere souls will be back wiff dere bodies in no time.’’
Katie and Rosalind smiled at each other.
‘‘Thank you, Beulah,’’ said Rosalind. ‘‘You’ve been a faithful part of our family all these years.’’
‘‘Yes’m’’ was Beulah’s only reply.
TRAGEDY
10
EVERY DAY ROSEWOOD RETURNED MORE and more to normal. Beulah’s deep contralto could occasionally be heard singing from the kitchen. With a newly slaughtered pig and calf, and a batch of potatoes dug up, there was more food for her to prepare than there had been in months. Smoke rose over the smokehouse, where most of the meat hung, and a fresh barrel of brine was prepared in the cellar for the rest. Flour and cornmeal were once again in plentiful supply after a morning’s session at the mill. And except for the problems at the bank, Rosalind began to think they had survived this after all.
Her husband had been too busy, however, to get into town. He kept saying he would get to it in a few days, just as soon as he and the boys got the most important things attended to at Rosewood. But Rosalind could tell he was no more anxious to go hat in hand to Mr. Taylor than she had been.
Exactly eight days after her father’s return, once again Katie was suddenly awakened in the middle of the night from a sound sleep. Startled, she sat straight up in her bed.
As she came to herself, she recognized the ominous thunder of riders approaching. From the bedroom across the landing, she heard her father shouting to wake Joseph and Caleb as he sprinted downstairs and to the gun cabinet. Several gunshots cracked through the night from the direction of the slave quarters.
Groggy and bewildered, Katie’s brain tried to make sense of the confusion.
Horrifying sounds were everywhere. Outside, shouts and yells, pounding hooves and frightened whinnies from what seemed a dozen or more horses screamed through the night.
In the house she heard more yelling . . . then footsteps hurrying up the stairs, and the door burst open.
‘‘Katie . . . Katie, get up!’’ said a voice in a terrified whisper.
Katie could see nothing as her mother shook her fully awake.
‘‘Get up, Kathleen . . . get up and come quickly!’’
In a sleepy daze Katie swung her feet over the side of the bed. Mrs. Clairborne pulled her to her feet and Katie struggled to stand.
Suddenly gunfire exploded outside, and her mother let out an involuntary scream. Terrible shouts echoed everywhere. Katie was too frightened to wonder what this confused nightmare could mean.
Tugging her along by the hand, Mrs. Clairborne hurried her daughter downstairs and into the parlor. She stopped, threw back the rug, yanked up the trapdoor, and pushed Katie down the cellar ladder, then followed herself. Katie sat down on the cold floor, trembling from cold and shock.
‘‘I’ll be back in a few minutes, Katie,’’ said her mother frantically, throwing an old quilt around her shoulders. ‘‘I’ve got to go back up and get a few things. Don’t make a peep. Do you hear me—not a sound!’’
Mrs. Clairborne turned and hurried up the rickety ladder. A moment later Katie heard the wood door clunk back down onto the floorboards. She was absolutely alone, still wearing her nightclothes, sitting in pitch-black darkness beneath the floor of the house.
Above and outside, the terrifying sounds continued, though she could not make out what they were through the floor and rug and furniture.
Somewhere a door banged open, heavily booted feet tramped above her—suddenly a terrible crash made her jump where she sat. Katie didn’t know it, but her mother’s glass china cabinet had just fallen over, sending plates and dishes and cups spewing in broken pieces across the floor.
Shouts followed. More doors slamming. Another crash, and sharp blasts of gunfire. Voices she didn’t know—screaming . . . what she thought was her mother’s voice. More screams, more explosions that seemed to go on for hours. Running footsteps, a few shouts . . . then gradually the muffled sound of horses retreating in the distance.
And then finally . . . silence.
What she had been listening to was foreboding and terrible. Even with the quilt around her, Katie’s body began to shake with undefined terror.
Afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid to think, Katie sat in a black stupor. How long she remained huddled in the dark corner where her mother had tucked her, she had no idea.
Why doesn’t Mama come back? was all she could think.
But she heard nothing. The great Clairborne house was quiet as a graveyard.
Eventually—how long was it, an hour . . . maybe two—Katie fell into a restless sleep.
When she came to herself she was slumped on the dirt floor, clutching the quilt around her, so cold her arms and legs and feet were numb. All she could think was that she had had a terrible nightmare, was still in the middle of it, and would wake up before long in her own bed. But finally sleep overtook her again.
Morning came. But Katie didn’t know it. Not the tiniest crack of light entered the cellar. All remained silent above.
Katie gradually began to feel things that told her she wasn’t dreaming and she wasn’t in her bed—like the growling in her stomach and the freezing cold in every inch of her body.
Finally she sat up, moved her stiff arms and legs, and pulled herself to her feet. She felt her way to the ladder. Slowly she put one foot ahead of the other and began climbing. Her head bumped against the cellar door. She pushed against it, but it wouldn’t budge.
With all the strength she could muster, Katie struggled to raise the trapdoor. Finally a chink of light came through a tiny crack as she strained to hold the door up. Now she knew it was daytime for sure.
Whimpering with cold and fear, she gave one last shove with all her might. Something rolled off the door with a dull thud, and it swung up and back on creaking hinges.
‘‘Mama—Mama!’’ cried Katie. ‘‘Mama, where are you!’’
Nothing but silence answered th
e dying echo of her voice. Katie took another step up and pushed herself the rest of the way into the room.
Katie’s hand went to her mouth. Destruction was everywhere. Windows were broken. The furniture was turned over. Pictures and vases and plates and glassware had been shattered and strewn about. The china cabinet wasn’t the only case on the floor. Several bookshelves had suffered the same fate. Books and pieces of china were scattered all through the parlor. Her mother’s piano was still upright, but had a big gash on top where something had crashed on it. Her own violin beside it was shattered into three pieces, held together only by the now useless strings. Seeing the sight broke through Katie’s shock. Music and books were as much a part of her life as her special place in the woods. She began to cry and tears poured down her face.
Katie tried to call her mother again. But her trembling lips could hardly form the word.
Hers was not an imagination capable of even dreaming such horror. But the sights before her were enough to fill her with mute shock.
What confronted her delicate young innocence was a hurricane of death and destruction.
She stumbled across the room in a trance. Before she could find her voice again, the sight of her mother’s body lying across the doorway into the kitchen, her dress torn and bloodstained, made calling out again useless.
Katie’s knees began to buckle. She gagged once or twice and an icy chill seized heart and brain together, more despairing than any cold she had ever felt.
Shaking and crying, she gagged again and looked away, then made herself turn back into the parlor. Now she saw the bloodied body of one of her brothers slumped beneath the window, the rifle still clutched in his stiff hands, and that of her father next to the trapdoor, where his body had slid off it as Katie had climbed out of the cellar.
Katie stood, incapable of movement, unable to utter a sound, unconscious that she was now an orphan . . . unconscious of anything. She only stood rigidly with arms clutching herself, all physical and mental functions frozen into uselessness. She was unaware that even her few movements across the floor had already stained her feet and nightgown with the blood of her proud Southern heritage.
How long she stood in a stupor of shock, she wouldn’t have been able to say. Death was all around. Blood was splattered everywhere—some dried black, some in pools so thick it was still red.
Suddenly Katie heard footsteps behind her. In the midst of the awful silence, the sound frightened her back to reality.
She nearly leapt out of her skin and spun around. Her muscles tensed in readiness to flee.
There stood a lanky black girl near her own age whom she had never seen before.
That girl was me.
MAYME
11
NOW I RECKON IT’S TIME YOU HEAR A LITTLE about my part of this story.
I know how it is when you’re trying to keep track of what’s going on, and the storyteller jumps about till you get so confused you can’t tell what happened when. And now here I am doing that same thing.
But sometimes it just seems that’s the best way to tell something. And like I said, I’m so used to having Katie beside me telling her part of this that I’m a little befuddled myself knowing how to explain it. So I reckon you’ll just have to keep track of it the best you can—which I’m sure you’ll be able to do—until I somehow get the whole thing laid out for you.
I may have said earlier that Katie’s brain was in the habit of moving a mite slow, though her imagination was alive as could be. I was just the opposite. She hadn’t had to think or make decisions. But I had. Where she was a dreamer, I was practical. There isn’t a thing wrong with either kind of person. I reckon it takes both to make a world, and if we were all alike it’d be a pretty boring place.
I had to be practical. I’m not saying I didn’t have time to dream, because you can dream and let your imagination go where it wants whatever else you might be doing. But the work was hard, and I didn’t really think much about dreaming. I just did what I had to do. That included telling stories, like I said, but somehow that was different, more like just a way to pass the time.
I was the oldest of five kids. I grew up telling stories to little Samuel, and after him came three more little ones, Rachel, Robert, and Thelma. Seems my mama was always expecting a baby, and I had to not just tell the young’uns stories, but I had to take care of them too—feed them and change their dirty diapers and wash their clothes and anything else that was needed while Mama was out working the master’s garden or trying to get our clothes clean down at the stream.
So I learned mighty quick to fend for myself and do what needed to be done.
It was a hard life, being a girl in a slave family. Mama depended on me, and that’s how life was. My daddy and all the men worked in the master’s fields all day. When he and the men came back to the slave quarters every night, they were so tuckered out, it was all they could do to sit at the table and eat the watery stew Mama and the other women had made that day.
It was a hard life for women too, and for children like me. Everybody had to work—work was what we did. It was the only life we knew. When the sun came up, we got out of bed and started working. We worked till we fell asleep that night.
But Sundays were different. After the chores were done, the master let us have the whole afternoon and evening to ourselves. That’s when the old men told stories and people gathered round. Then in the evening there would be a big fire and lots of singing.
How I loved the singing! It wasn’t the kind of music Katie and her mother made from notes on a page that somebody had written down. Our music came from our insides—from our souls, I reckon you’d say, and from our feelings. Our music was about us and about our way of life, and sometimes it could lift a body right up to heaven, it was so pretty.
That’s where I started to learn about religion too, from the singing and the stories. It seems that the harder the times got, the more we sang songs about people in the Bible, about others who’d had to work hard, who’d suffered too.
But Monday always came again, and then the work would begin the minute we got up.
But children don’t know a hard life from an easy one. Youngsters just cope with what they’ve got to cope with and don’t think about it.
I didn’t think about it either. I just did what I had to do. I reckon that’s where I got my common sense and practicality, in the same way that Katie hadn’t yet learned to do too much for herself. Maybe that’s why God saw fit to bring me and Katie together—so that our differences could fit together to help us be more than either of us could have been by ourselves.
The man I called ‘‘Papa’’ died when I was twelve. I don’t know why. I think he got sick from something. Death was part of slave life. Somebody was always dying. Mama was expecting again. The master said she could stay on in the cabin till the new baby was two. Then she’d need to marry again or be sold off.
Mama cried for a day or two. Then the tears dried up, and we went on doing what we had always done.
Sometime after that I came upon Mama one day sitting alone on the bed with a strange kind of look on her face, kinda happy and sad at the same time. I guess it’s what you’d call nostalgic, but I didn’t know that word then. She was holding a funny-shaped little blue thing.
‘‘What’s that?’’ I asked.
‘‘Just a reminder of a long-ago time, chil’,’’ she said, smiling that peculiar smile again.
‘‘What does that word on it mean?’’
‘‘Dat ain’t a word, chil’. It’s a reminder of the tears of life dat sometimes a body can’t help, an’ some memories are best left unremembered.’’
‘‘Where’d you get it, Mama?’’ I asked.
She looked at me deep in the eyes, then down at the pin, then up at me again and smiled. Then she put it away with her Bible, and I don’t recollect seeing it again, excepting every once in a while on a special day like Christmas when she’d hang it from a chain around her neck. But she never answere
d my question . . . and I never asked about it again.
Nothing much changed right after that. My grandpapa lived with us too after Grandmama died, but he was getting too old to work in the fields. The master wasn’t too happy about our cabin full of people with none of us working in the fields. When the new baby was two months old, Mama went to work out in the fields with the men.
A while after I got to be fifteen, I recall a day when the master and two of his sons came down to the quarter. He visited a few minutes with Grandpapa. Then Grandpapa called out to fetch me and Samuel, who was now eleven. We came and stood while the master looked us over head to toe. Behind him, the master’s oldest son was looking at me real ugly-like.
We both knew what it was all about. Slaves had value to their masters in one of three ways. Strong men worked. Strong women had babies. And children were raised to do one or the other—or else be sold. Boys grew up to give the master more work. Girls grew up to give him more babies. If he didn’t think they’d do either very well, or if he needed what money he thought they’d bring, he’d sell them. The time had come when the master was thinking what would be best to do with me and Samuel when our time came.
He looked Samuel over, probably asking himself when he could start taking Papa’s place in the fields. He was feeling the muscles of Sam’s arms and looking over his shoulders and chest, wondering how much he was going to fill out, while my brother stood there staring straight ahead still as a statue. Then he came over to me to do the same. People nowadays probably think it a pretty awful thing for a man to do, but back in those days a slave was his master’s property and he did whatever he pleased with them, same as he would a wagon or a cow or a saddle.
He walked up to me and started looking me over too. He stuck a couple fingers in my mouth and pried it open so he could see all my teeth. Why didn’t I try to bite his fingers off , you’re maybe wondering. Because I didn’t want my back bleeding from a whipping, that’s why. I’d already had two whippings in my life, the worst from the master’s son, and I didn’t want to ever get another one.
Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) Page 6
