“I really don’t see why you have to go at all,” Aunt Em persisted. “You have your teaching, your school. Everything was going so well. I thought you liked it here with us.”
“I do like it.”
That wasn’t quite true. She loved it. She had come to adore the cool, dew-washed mornings and the drowsy, hot stillness of the afternoons; the lingering bluish purple evenings and deep velvet-plush blackness of nights that throbbed with life. Oh, she would miss it, miss the warmth of the people and the soft sounds of the voices, miss the big old open house that closed no doors either to the night air or to lonely strangers. She would miss the laughter and the music and the easy acceptance of love and life and death. On cold winter days in Boston, she would think of them, and of the blinding sunlight, the abundance, and the joy.
And yet, because she had seen them and shared them, they were a part of her. She would never be quite the same, never be quite so quick to blame and accuse, never be quite so ready to turn away from a smile, a touch, a kiss. She would, in some deep innermost part of her, always be a little Southern. As Thomas had said, it seemed to affect some people that way.
“If you like it, then don’t go,” Aunt Em said with simple logic.
“I have to, I really do.”
Lettie put on her hat and gloves and gave a nod to the young man, a nephew of Mama Tass’s, who waited to take her trunk out to the buggy. She gave one last look around the bedchamber that had been hers. Already it wore a strange, indifferent air, as if she had never belonged there. She turned her back on it and opened her arms to hug Aunt Em.
“Thank you for everything. You’ve been so good to me, I don’t know how to tell you or to say how much I appreciate it.”
“Pshaw,” Aunt Em answered, giving her a fierce squeeze. “All I want to hear is when you’ll be coming back.”
“I don’t know. Maybe someday.”
“Make it soon, or I swear I’ll send Ranny and Lionel after you.”
Lettie smiled. There was a hard lump in her throat. Disengaging herself with a last quick kiss on the older woman’s soft cheek, she turned away toward the hall. Mama Tass and Lionel were there. She had small gifts for them, a set of cameo earrings for the cook and a book on medieval knights for her grandson. She shook hands with Mama Tass but gave Lionel a brief hug, then ruffled the soft wool of his hair as he gave her a cheeky grin.
The buggy was waiting. She walked from the house toward it, letting herself out the gate and picking up her skirts to climb up into the seat. Mama Tass’s nephew gave her a hand up. He would be driving her to town in order to return the buggy to Splendora. She gave him a smile as he settled on the seat beside her, then leaned around him to wave good-bye.
“Hurry back now, you hear? You hurry back! Come back to see us. Hurry back!”
The cries grew faint, fading away as the carriage rolled down the drive. Lettie strained backward in her seat, waving at the trio of figures on the veranda until they were small and indistinct with the distance, the roiling cloud of dust, and the moisture that stood in her eyes.
Hurry back.
She would never return, she knew; still, it was lovely to be wanted. The warmth of the farewell served to ease the cold desolation inside her, though nothing would ever erase it entirely. She faced forward, straightening her hat, pressing the tips of her gloved fingers under her eyes.
Hurry back. The call still rang in Lettie’s ears long after she had been dropped at the stage office and the buggy had bowled away back toward Grand Ecore, long after the great lumbering stage, swinging on its springs, had pulled out of Natchitoches on its way to the railhead at Colfax. She would always remember it, she thought, and was forced to conquer a strong tendency to weep once more at the memory. How sentimental she had become. It seemed a hazard of increased sensibility, one she must guard against if she didn’t want people like her sister and brother-in-law to stare at her in amazement. Not that she cared. Let them think what they liked.
Lettie’s traveling companions were a brush drummer, a short, rotund preacher with silver-gray hair, and a large white male rabbit in a crate. Of the three, the rabbit was the most interesting since the other two leaned back, put their hats over their faces, and went to sleep before the wheels had made a complete revolution. Lettie spent a few minutes scratching the rabbit behind the ears through the bars of its crate until its eyes closed also.
She turned to stare out the window, hanging onto the strap and watching the trees and the sights she had glimpsed during the past weeks go by, thinking and trying not to think. She would be glad when she was on the train. Maybe then she would begin to feel as if she were really leaving the events that had taken place behind her, that she was on her way to forgetting.
The stage jolted and bounced in and out of holes. It swung and dipped, flinging Lettie this way and that, rattled and shook as if it would fall to pieces at any moment. Overhead, a box or trunk thumped and bumped with maddening regularity. The man on the box yelled and cursed at the horses and cracked his whip. The dust that rolled from under the horses’ hooves sifted inside the stage in a fine haze that soon coated everything with a gritty powder. The wind of their passage fluttered the veil on Lettie’s hat, the fur of the rabbit, and the end of the drummer’s cravat that was out of his waistcoat, though it did little to temper the heat of the sun striking through the windows as the morning advanced. The only respite was the few minutes they stopped in the shady yard of a farmhouse to water the horses. The dust and heat seemed worse when they started off again. Lettie clenched her teeth and hung on with dogged endurance, and as her reward, the miles fell away one by one.
The rider came from behind them. The stage was so noisy that she did not hear the sound of his horse’s hooves until he was even with the window. There was no time or need to wonder and fear. She saw the shape of the man’s head and his broad back and knew at once who he was and what his purpose must be. Her heart began to beat with a sickening rhythm, and she clasped her hands so tightly together in her lap that a seam of a glove split.
She heard the man call to the driver, something about a message for one of his passengers. There were rules, she was sure, about stopping for such trifling causes. In the way of many rules in this part of the world, however, it seemed likely to give way to human consideration. The stage began to slow. Then it bucked and jolted to a halt. The drummer awoke with a snort. The preacher opened his eyes and unfolded his hands from across his waistcoat.
The door beside Lettie was wrenched open. “Lettie, honey,” Ransom said, “there’s a thing or two you seem to have forgotten. Won’t you step down and let me tell you about them?”
“It will serve no purpose,” she said, meeting his gaze squarely, hoping that he would understand without her having to go into detail under the interested gaze of the preacher and the annoyed glare of the drummer. She should have known better.
“You could be right, but I prefer to think otherwise,” he said, his hazel eyes gleaming.
“This is most irregular,” the preacher said in a pompous tones. “If the lady doesn’t wish to speak to you, you have no recourse—”
“Sir, this doesn’t concern you,” Ransom said.
The preacher, his eyes starting from his head at the steely tone of the quiet rebuff, drew back in a prudent huff. Ransom turned to Lettie.
“Be reasonable. Let these good folks go on their way unmolested while you and I have a few words.”
Was there a threat in his request? She rather thought that if there was, it was not directed at the men with her. “You are the most unscrupulous, unprincipled—”
“And unhanged, too, thanks to you. I can treat these gentlemen to a list of your virtues, but I don’t think they would be entertained. I give you my most solemn promise that when I have spoken I will see you to Colfax in time to catch your train, if you will come with me now, and if that’s what you want. Otherwise, I will not be responsible.”
There was no longer any amusement in his tone. She had
been offered a choice. She could go with him willingly or he would use force and take the consequences.
“Lady, for heaven’s sake,” the drummer began, then fell silent at a quick, hard glance from Ransom.
“Oh, very well,” she exclaimed, a trace of despair in her annoyance. She had thought to avoid this confrontation. If she could not, then she would face it with some modicum of dignity.
He held out his hand. She placed her fingers in his and climbed down without looking at him. He stepped back, drawing his mount aside and waving at the driver of the stagecoach. The driver shouted and snapped his whip, and the clumsy vehicle began to move.
“My trunk!” Lettie cried.
“It will be waiting for you at Colfax stage office.”
She stared after the stage until it was out of sight around a curve. When it was gone, she fixed her attention on the woods that closed in around them at that spot, on the silent forest of pine and oak, ash and hickory and sweet gum.
“Lettie, look at me.”
It was the last thing she wanted to do. Her muscles were stiff with reluctance and the restraint that she held on herself as she turned to face him. She lifted her gaze to his, then went still.
He had removed his hat. It was Ranny who stood before her with the sun shining in the soft gold of his hair and his face serious, waiting. But Ranny had never been real. A spasm of pain crossed her face. She swung away from him. “Don’t!”
“Don’t what? This is me. This is who I am.”
“No, it isn’t!”
He caught her arm, turning her to him once more. “Yes, it is. What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing! Just let me go. That’s all I want!”
“I can’t, not like this. I love you, Lettie.”
“Indeed? Which one are you?” she demanded in bitter anguish.
He stared down at her with comprehension gathering in his eyes. “So that’s it.”
“What did you expect? I have seen two men and loved them both in different ways, but neither one was real.”
Almost, Ransom reached out to her because of the admission she had made and because she was so lovely standing there with dust on the brim of her hat, which was tilted forward on her high-piled hair, and the soft tulle of its veil softening the defiance in her eyes. But she had said loved, as if she felt that emotion no longer. As if it were past.
“Is it so impossible,” he said, his voice deep and quiet, “that I am both?”
The sound of his words vibrated deep inside her, setting off waves of feelings like a rock thrown into a still pond. She wanted to believe him, wanted to fling herself against him and be held in his arms. Something prevented it. Her answer came unbidden, rising from that same hidden source.
“You can’t be.”
“Why?” There was an ache in his chest more grievous than any wound he had ever received. He could not reach her with words and dared not try to force her physically for fear of making her despise him, and rightly so. There seemed no way to prove what he said.
“It’s beyond belief that two men so different could reside in the same person. One must be false.”
“Which one?”
“That I don’t know,” she said, the look in her eyes clouded.
He watched her, his gaze steady. “If you could choose, if you could say this is the one that I prefer, which would it be?”
“I don’t want to choose!”
“But if you could?”
She opened her mouth to speak, to say that she preferred Ranny, only to be snared by the light in his eyes. It was a light that reminded her of a gray, rain-swept night and unbidden pleasures, of a rocking ferry and a dark dream of ecstasy. It wasn’t a fair question, for the answer was an impossibility. She would prefer that he was both, wished with painful fervency that he could be both.
There was a shifting movement at the edge of the trees to the left and behind Ransom. A man stepped out of the deep shade, moving into the sunlight. He was tall and wore a rough shirt and trousers and a pair of broken boots. In his hand was a gun.
Lettie drew in her breath, but before she could sound a warning, he spoke.
“I advise you to take Ranny,” Martin Eden drawled. “The Thorn is too wild and full of devilment to make a comfortable husband.”
Ransom, seeing the widening of Lettie’s eyes as she looked past his shoulder, spun around before the words were out of Martin’s mouth. His muscles jerked to stillness at the sight of the gun. He relaxed with care, easing in front of Lettie. His gaze infinitely watchful, he said, “I’m sure she’s obliged to you, Martin.”
“I thought she might be. Just as I am obliged to you for taking our Lettie off the stage for me. I was afraid she might make her escape, but I depended on you to prevent it, if I stuck with you long enough. Clever of me, wasn’t it.”
“Brilliant.”
“I knew you would appreciate it. You were always so quick, Ransom. I used to wonder why you didn’t suspect that I was the one using your sign, blaming you for the things I had done.”
“It occurred to me, but you were my friend — mine, and Johnny’s.”
Martin shrugged. “You and Johnny, so trusting, both of you. It was hardly sport to fool you.”
“And was it sport to kill him?”
“Hardly at all. Do you know what he did? He turned around and came back here after you had seen him into Texas. He actually came to me in the middle of the night and warned me that he was going to make a clean breast of it and that I had better prepare to take the consequences. I did that, all right. I rode out with him, and when the way was clear, I shot him. He looked so surprised. I can’t think why he looked so surprised.”
His voice, so light and without any emotion beyond sneering self-satisfaction, grated on Lettie’s nerves. “Because he was a man of honor who could not betray a friend, who was haunted at his betrayal of strangers. You wouldn’t understand that, of course.”
“Honor? I had honor enough before the war. I was full of honor, in fact, honor and chivalry and pride. I had all that knocked out of me at Shiloh and Gettysburg and half a dozen other battles, as well as in a Yankee prison camp before I bribed a guard to let me escape. Honor doesn’t fill your belly or stop your pain or give you back what you have lost. It isn’t worth a damn.”
“Without it, man is nothing more than an animal.”
“All right, then I’m an animal, a rich animal.”
“And a thief and murderer.” Lettie stared at him, at his narrow face and shallow eyes and his lack of breadth in the shoulder, and wondered how she could ever have thought that he might be the Thorn. She must have been blind, willfully blind.
He smiled, a mirthless twist of the lips that did not affect the coldness of his eyes. “You left out scalawag. But I won’t be that for much longer. I’m getting out. No more stepping off the sidewalk for puffed-up former slaves. No more licking the boots of carpetbaggers and being their errand boy. I’ll have more money than I ever did and be a bigger gentleman. That’s what it takes: money, not honor.”
“You’re wrong,” Ransom said.
“Am I? We’ll see when I collect on this new payroll, when I’m sitting in New Orleans with a house in the Garden District and an aristocratic Creole wife, when I stroll from coffeehouse to saloon all day and visit the opera house and my quadroon mistress on Rampart Street at night.”
“It won’t happen.”
Martin’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, it’ll happen. You just won’t be here to see it, you and Miss Lettie.”
“You won’t get away with it.”
“Won’t I? Being without all that honor, I’ve decided you will still make a fine scapegoat. As for Miss Lettie, I have a grudge to settle with her. She left me tied to a tree in my drawers with the mosquitoes feasting on my blood. More than that, she took my money and my watch and fixed it so that Angelique’s papa would find me and forbid her to go with me to New Orleans. She made a fool out of me. Oh, yes, I do have a grudge.”
“
It seems to me that we are not yet even,” Lettie said with a lift of her chin. “You had my brother killed.”
“That I did not.”
“Surely — surely it was you who sent the outlaws to intercept him.”
“No.”
Something cold and clammy and more fearful than the man who faced her with a gun touched Lettie. She had placed her faith in Aunt Em’s theories, had wanted to believe them. Now the old suspicions came crowding back so that she felt sick and suddenly old. She turned her head slowly to look at Ransom Tyler.
Ransom gazed back at her, aware of what must be going through her mind, aware, too, that there was nothing he could say to combat it. He had already stated his case beside the clear, cool waters of the spring where Henry Mason had died. Either she believed him or she did not.
She swung back to Martin. Her voice laden with scorn, she said, “You must have.”
He smiled, the bright smile of a man who has achieved a triumph and wants someone to know it. “No, I didn’t have him killed. I killed him myself.”
Pain robbed Lettie of her voice. She whispered, “You.”
“It was almost an accident, almost. I knew he was carrying the gold, knew he was traveling alone. I had papers to carry to Monroe, all very open and aboveboard. I caught up with him at the spring. I’m not sure what was in my mind, except that I was tired of being poor, tired of watching other people — Yankees, strangers, fat fools like O’Connor — grab everything. We went down to the water to drink. He got down on his knees to use the gourd dipper. It was so easy, so easy. I couldn’t resist.”
The picture he painted was vivid; Lettie could see it all too well. She put her hands to her mouth, afraid she was going to be ill.
“That was how it began, there at the spring. Because a pair of jayhawkers, outlaws by the name of Laws and Kimbrell, saw me. They took half the gold, damn them, and told me I had better send them news they could make use of or they would spread the tale. They didn’t reckon on who they were dealing with; two could play that game. I told them I’d send them word for half the profits, or else the sheriff might learn the names of the outlaws operating in the backwoods. It worked like a charm, especially as long as the supply of locusts and thorns held out.”
Louisiana History Collection - Part 2 Page 149
