Ranny sent her a brief glance from under his lashes, then shook his head. “No.”
“But I thought you said—”
“I would rather learn here.”
Oh, but you wouldn’t be the only adult,” she said earnestly. “There will be quite a few others, men and women who have been slaves all their lives or who have lived so far back in the wilderness that they never learned to read.
“Here,” he repeated. “With Lionel. And the others.”
“The others?” she questioned, at a loss.
“From the quarters. My people.”
He meant the people of Splendora who still lived in the quarters behind the house. “They could come to the school.”
“But they won’t. They have to work so they can eat. And some will be too afraid.”
She lifted a brow. He had a point, one that she would like to take up with the officials at the Freedmen’s Bureau. “I understand. I’m sure I could teach you in the evening.”
“We could start now, the three of us. Here?”
His smile was so guileless, so expectant, that she hadn’t the heart to refuse him. In any case, it would take her mind off things she would just as soon not dwell upon.
Lettie had brought with her a few primers and readers since she had been advised that such things were in short supply. She also had a small slate and a box of chalk. She brought these things out and spread them on a table on the veranda. She and Ranny and Lionel spent a hilarious half hour with their heads together, drawing letters. Lionel apparently had had some instruction, for he could not only write the letters’ of the alphabet but could form simple words. Ranny tried diligently, sticking the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in his concentration, but his letters had a tendency to stagger over the slate in such a comical fashion that Lionel smothered giggles behind his hand. The harder Ranny tried, the worse it became until the reeling letters began to look downright tipsy.
Lettie, frowning, gave a slight shake of her head at the young boy for his lack of compassion. She put her hand over Ranny’s strong, brown fist to guide him. He allowed her to move his hand without hindrance while he turned his head to look at her. So near was he that only inches separated their faces. She was snared by the steady light in his eyes, alerted by the glint of humor she saw in their depths.
She caught her breath, then gave his hand a push that made the chalk squeak on the slate. “You’re doing it on purpose!”
Lionel burst out laughing and fell from his rocking chair to the floor, where he rolled back and forth. Ranny grinned and gave a sheepish nod.
“Why?”
“You wanted to teach me.”
“You might have told me I was wasting my time!”
“There could have been something I didn’t remember. Besides…”
“Besides what?” she asked with deep suspicion as he paused.
“You’re pretty when you are being so — so…”
It was Lionel who supplied the words. “So stiff and mean like a schoolteacher!”
“How else should I be?” she said with a frown, not quite sure whether she was offended or not.
Ranny tipped his head to one side as he surveyed her without answering. “Very pretty.”
She gave him her most severe look, though she could not prevent the faint twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “I can see that I’m going to have to prepare a test for both of you to see how much you already know.”
“Tomorrow,” Ranny said with finality. “Can you read to us now?”
“Read to you?”
Lionel sat up and clasped his arms around his knees. “Sometimes Miss Em reads us stories all about knights and soldiers, like Ivanhoe.”
“Does she?” Lettie considered the idea. Anything that encouraged either of them to read must be good, she supposed, and for the moment she did not feel up to the mental task of constructing a test. “I suppose I could do the same if I had a book.”
“I’ll get one!” Lionel yelled. He leaped to his feet and raced into the house. He was back in an instant with a leather-bound volume in his hands, a tale by Dickens. He handed it to Lettie, then settled at her feet. Ranny leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs out before him. Lettie set the slate and chalk aside, then opened the book and began to read aloud.
She held the book in her lap, turning the pages with one hand while the other rested on the arm of her chair. She had read only a few paragraphs when Ranny reached to touch the back of her fingers with one hand. He smoothed the fine skin at the bend of her knuckles, then traced the almond shape of her nails. He turned her hand palm-up, following the lines that crossed it with one finger before branching off to investigate the blue veins that pulsed in her wrist. At last he curled his fingers around hers, clasping them in a firm but light hold.
She raised her head to look at him, an inquiry in her brown eyes. He met her gaze, his own clear. The veranda was shaded, but the afternoon sun seemed to cast the reflection of its bright golden glow over him, giving him a burnished look. So perfectly regular were his features, so crisp and vital his hair, and so bronze his skin that he did not look quite human. The jagged scar, cruelly outlined by the harsh light, increased the impression. There was something disturbing about him, a sense of great promise lost or, perhaps, of a masterwork wantonly damaged, forever marred. She felt it inside like an ache.
“Do you want me to let go?” he asked.
“No, I don’t suppose.”
He gave her a slow smile that seemed to make the light in his eyes burn like a steady flame. “Good. It makes me feel … better.”
Her mouth curved in answer for an instant before she returned her gaze to the book. However, as she found her place once more and began to read with slow emphasis, it was as if she could feel the warm strength of his grasp seeping into her, supporting her.
It was the effect of simple human contact, of course, but curiously enough it made her feel better, too.
6
THE NEXT TWO DAYS AT SPLENDORA were uneventful. Lettie, with little to do and an ingrained dislike of being idle, offered her services to Aunt Em. In company with the older woman and Sally Anne, Aunt Em’s niece who was still visiting, she helped about the house: polishing furniture, plying a needle through torn linens, pulling weeds from the front flower beds, preparing the endless array of vegetables that was put on the table.
She learned to hoe in the garden and to identify the young growth of such exotic crops as okra, squash, sweet potatoes, the love apples more correctly known as tomatoes, and also the collard greens and cow peas that had once been raised for the slaves but were now considered acceptable for everyone. She was also taught to distinguish the young plants of marigolds and zinnias, or old maids as Aunt Em called them, common flowers that would brighten the vegetable garden in midsummer and provide bouquets for the house.
Among the outbuildings on the place was a cabin containing a spinning wheel and a loom. In it, Aunt Em carded wool and cotton and spun it into thread, then colored the yarn using homemade dyes, such as brown from the hulls of black walnuts and blue from indigo she had grown herself. She then wove her own material for coverlets and curtains. She had made many a shirt and pair of trousers for the Confederate soldiers, she said, every fiber and stitch a product of Splendora. Watching the older woman at the loom was absorbing, and Lettie was even allowed to weave a few inches of cloth, though Sally Anne warned her with a smile not to make it perfect or she might find herself with shuttle in hand every day.
The poultry yard was another interest of Aunt Em’s. There she raised everything from bantam chickens, with the appearance of animated hat decorations and the disposition of scrappy street fighters, to great, gawky, and superior-acting turkeys that were so delicate of constitution that they had to be petted and protected every minute of their lives; from commonplace Leghorn chickens to French geese and rare Chinese ducks. The older woman also kept a pair of peacocks that screamed at each other constantly like
an irate husband and wife to the point where Aunt Em swore she was strongly tempted to find out what the Persians had found to their taste in peacock meat.
In theory, the poultry stayed in their yard fenced in by tall, half-rotted, and rather drunken-looking palings. Actually, they were out of it more often than in. They roosted at night in the fig and peach trees behind the kitchen building and made their nests in the brier thickets that had grown up around the slave cabins. One wise old hen, more enterprising than most, had found a cabin with an open door and made her nest in the blackened and empty fireplace.
It was necessary to make a circuit of the various nesting places every day to gather the eggs, otherwise the hens would lay a clutch of a dozen or so, then stop laying and sit on them to hatch them. As long as the nests were never full, the hens continued producing eggs for most of the year, eggs that, when sold in town, gave Aunt Em her pin money.
Evidence that the hens, as well as the ducks and geese and turkeys, were better at hiding their eggs than the humans were at finding them was plain in the numerous small groups of young chicks and ducklings and goslings that fluttered here and there, scratching among the flowers and tempting the barn cats as well as the owls, hawks, and foxes that crept out of the surrounding woods at night.
Another use for the poultry was to supply feathers for pillows and mattresses. On the third morning after Lettie’s visit to the spring, she and Aunt Em and Sally Anne were reworking pillows on the veranda. They were sewing fresh cases out of striped ticking, fluffing the old feathers and adding handfuls of new down, then stuffing the cases and sewing up the ends.
It was pleasant on the veranda with the fresh morning breeze wandering along its length, now and then wafting the scent of flowers to them. Lettie had never felt that she was the sort of woman who had a need for constant companionship; still, it was also enjoyable getting to know the other two women.
Lettie, rubbing her nose, which itched from the flying bits of feathers in the air, while also trying to stitch up the end of the plump pillow she held under her arm without squeezing out its stuffing, sent the older woman a quizzical glance. “What a busy person you are, Aunt Em, always at some task. I can almost regret having anything to do with taking your slaves from you.”
“Whatever are you saying, child? I do less now than I ever did before the war.”
Before the war. It was a phrase heard again and again. Though in the past few decades there had been the Seminole Indian War, the War for Texas Independence, and the Mexican War, there was never any question of which war was meant. Lettie ceased sewing, saying with interest, “Surely not?”
“Oh, but it’s the truth. There were always forty or fifty people to be looked after, to be kept fed and with clothes on their backs, not to mention seeing to it that they were healthy.”
“But there were servants to do the work!”
“While I sat in the shade sipping lemonade and fanning myself? Tell me, dear, does your mother have hired help in the house in Boston?”
“Why, yes, a cook and a maid, and sometimes an extra woman during the spring cleaning.”
“And do they do their jobs without somebody right behind them to see that they are done properly?”
Sally Anne looked up from where she was loosening a knot of feathers. “Or without being shown how to do them time and again?”
“I see what you mean,” Lettie said with a wry smile.
“In a city like New Orleans, it may have been a little easier,” Aunt Em said with a judicious twist of her lips. “A lot of what we made from scratch at Splendora could be had out of the store there, and was fairly cheap since it didn’t have to be shipped upriver. But here in the country it was different.”
“Nicer,” Sally Anne said.
“Quieter, less sickness, less gossiping and carrying on,” Aunt Em amplified, then gave a short laugh. “It was downright boring at times, but we could always get up a dance or a quilting bee or a fish fry on the creek bank. Kinfolk came and stayed on for days, sometimes weeks, and there were always weddings and birthings. No, I wouldn’t have changed with those city ladies for the world. I liked planting and watching my chickens and seeing the seasons come and go before the war, and I like it now.”
“You make it sound almost — not primitive, but rather like the days of the early settlers.”
“And why not? When I came here thirty-five years ago as a girl, that’s the way it was; this was the frontier. We came by ship to New Orleans from Georgia and then up the river by steamboat. From there we put everything we owned in wagons pulled by oxen, including my mama’s big armoire and tester bed that her grandmother had given her, and hauled it into the depths of the wilderness. My father had bought a place north of here, good, black bottomland, but he cleared it himself and built a house of logs with the trees — though later he built a big house with lumber. There were bears and wolves and panthers then, and the nearest doctor was thirty miles away. When I married James Tyler and we moved to Grand Ecore, I thought I had come to the city. But it really wasn’t that different.”
Aunt Em’s husband had been killed trying to swim his horse across the Red River during a flood; Lettie had learned that much already. Ranny’s mother had died of consumption when he was small. Instead of going back to her family at her husband’s death, Aunt Em had moved in to take care of young Ranny, allowing her husband’s holdings to revert to the two brothers who were left. Then Ransom’s father had been felled by a stroke during a heated argument over secession the year the war began. With Ranny in the army and later incapacitated, the responsibility for the running of Splendora had fallen on Aunt Em.
“I think it’s wonderful the way you have held this place together, making it produce a living,” Lettie said.
“Don’t let Ranny hear you say that, please. He helps all he can, but he feels terrible that he can’t do more. He worries about the way I should be living, the way the house looks and the fences and the fields. I see him looking at it all sometimes, as if he is remembering, and it just breaks my heart.”
“He does a great deal. Yesterday I saw him plowing with a mule in one of the back fields.”
Sally Anne carefully removed a feather that was stuck to her lip before entering the conversation. “Yes, and last night he had another one of his headaches.”
“You can’t tell him anything,” Aunt Em said with a sigh. “He just won’t listen.” She turned to Lettie. “He pays attention to you during the lessons. I’ve been meaning to tell you how grateful I am to you for taking the time with him, and with Lionel.”
“And Peter,” Sally Anne added. Her son had joined the lessons when he discovered they were taking place.
“It’s been fun, really, though I don’t know how much any of them is learning. They are such cutups.”
“It’s been good for Ranny, I can tell. Not just the learning, but having you speak so naturally to him. A lot of people don’t know how to act with him, especially young women.”
“They are either tongue-tied,” Sally Anne said, “or else they chatter as if their salvation depended on it. And that’s only if they can’t find an excuse to stay away from him.” The older woman shook her head. “It wasn’t always like that.”
“Heavens, no!” Sally Anne grinned, though there was a faraway look in her eyes. “Half the belles in the parish were wild about Ranny before the war. And you should have seen the way they flocked around when Bradley first brought him back, when he was unconscious. His bed was piled three-feet deep in fancy embroidered and crocheted pillows. Lionel and Peter made themselves sick on the cookies and candy that he was in no shape to eat. Someone had to dust the house every day because of the carriages coming and going on the drive, with girls begging for just a glimpse of him. But all that ended the minute they learned he wasn’t quite right.”
“I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Sally Anne.” Aunt Em’s tone was fretful. “He’s just a little slow.”
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry, but he m
ight as well be a complete imbecile the way he’s treated.”
“He’s far from that.” Lettie placed another stitch in her pillow before sending a quick glance to Ranny’s cousin. The flush of anger across Sally Anne’s cheekbones gave a nice color to her face. She was very attractive and still less than thirty. It was odd that she had not remarried. Or perhaps it wasn’t. So many of the men her age had not come back from the war. Moreover, there was a tendency in the South, or so Lettie had heard, to view widows as having buried their hearts in the grave, a tendency that must be doubly hard to overcome when the dead husband was a war hero who had sacrificed his life for the Lost Cause. It was also possible, however, that Sally Anne’s affections were given to the cousin that she defended so warmly.
Aunt Em’s hands were still as she looked out over the veranda railing. “It hurts me when I think of Ranny never marrying, never having children. He used to be so good with babies, not at all afraid to hold them like some men. And there’s Splendora. What will happen to it, and to him, when I’m gone?”
There was, of course, no answer to be made to such a question. Sally Anne said, “He’s still good with children, like Peter.”
Quiet fell as they returned to their sewing. Lettie thought of Ranny and Peter, and also of Lionel, as the three of them had set off down the drive earlier. They had carried their fishing poles and a jar of earthworms that they had dug up behind the kitchen for bait. They were going to try their luck at Dink’s Pond, and possibly along the river. The two boys had skipped along to keep up with Ranny’s long strides, chattering to him as if he was their age, which in a way he was. There was indeed something affecting in the thought that he would never enjoy the rights and pleasures of normal manhood.
Pity did not seem proper, however. There was about him, in all situations, an innate dignity that forbade it.
“Someone’s coming,” Sally Anne said.
The young woman’s voice sounded flat, stifled. Lettie was not surprised to see a blue uniform when she looked up, though it was a little unusual that the man wearing it was driving a smart black buggy with yellow wheels and silver fittings. It was Colonel Ward who got down in front of the gate and, removing his campaign hat, came up the walk.
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