“Oh, honey, I see my friend Mr. Clark over there. You go ahead and I’ll be over in a second.” Theresa looked to an older gentleman seated in a white folding chair, his cane between his feet. He was tapping one black dress shoe to the music, his eyes closed and a smile on his lips.
“Of course,” Lucy said, suddenly self-conscious, as if someone had taken away her clothes. It was easier to imagine standing across from Jem with Theresa at her side. She was irritated with herself for being weak. She was relying on a woman she’d only just met to give her confidence. Lucy lifted her chin and summoned a smile. It was time to put on her game face and make polite conversation. This was no time to brood and fret. Her mama had raised her to be cool and collected in moments such as these.
Jem looked away as she walked up. He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look as if he felt anything at all. If he weren’t so intent on watching the rest of the party around the garden, Lucy might think he hadn’t been furious just minutes before.
There were two older men on either side of Dr. Stroud, and a beautiful young woman next to Jem. Lucy recognized her as a friend of Paulette’s. She had come by the house several times, usually on the way back from shopping in Birmingham. Her hair was the perfect shade of honey blond and her skin was milky pale, as if she never stepped into the sun. Her short black dress was simple, but obviously expensive, the halter neckline dotted with tiny crystals. She was slender, but not athletic. If it weren’t for the gentle pink of her cheeks, she might look unhealthy, but she seemed simply genetically blessed.
As for the men, one was short, with a receding hairline and weak chin. He stared at Lucy, but his gaze never went above her chest. The other was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. Something about his beard made her think of battlefield pictures of Confederate soldiers. Then he smiled wide and she remembered him as one of the reenactors who had volunteered at the center with the last school visit. He’d regaled the kids with tales of eating out of a billycan and having only one hobnail boot on a forty-mile hike.
“There you are, my dear.” Dr. Stroud reached out a hand. “Lucy, let me introduce Regan Ross. She’s Dr. Eugene Ross’s daughter.”
Lucy offered her hand and felt the quick, tight grip of a girl who didn’t want to make friends. It occurred to her that Jem might have come to the party with a date. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but for just a moment it took her breath away.
“Nice to see you again, Regan,” she said, but her sister’s friend only nodded.
“And my friends, Albert Archer and John Gregory. You’ve probably seen John during the battles. He’s made sacrifices no Southern man should be forced to make. This last time he had to wear a Union cavalry outfit and wrestle one of the twelve-pound cannons.”
“A pleasure to meet you both. Mr. Gregory, how’s your hearing?”
The group let out a collective chuckle. Lucy refused to take the bait of teasing him for dressing as a Union man and instead focused on the weapon. The howitzers were notoriously noisy artillery, and Lucy could hear the reenactors practicing from as far away as five miles.
“Excellent, thank you. What’s good enough for Ulysses S. Grant is good enough for me. He hauled his up to a church belfry in Mexico City, so I don’t complain about standing in the pasture with the sun at my back.” John gave a slight shrug. “Some men prefer to run at the enemy with rifles raised, but I think it takes a real command of spirit to handle a howitzer. Right, Jem?”
Jem turned, as if just taking noticing of the conversation. “Sure does.”
“I might be wrong, but I think Grant lugged an earlier brass version up that tower. What you all have out on the field is a redesigned bronze Napoleon 1857,” Lucy said.
There was a short silence. Stroud beamed at her. “Men, this is what gives an old codger like me some hope. Between young Jem here coming back to work at the clinic instead of staying in Boston, and Lucy preserving our Southern history, I know that we can’t go wrong.”
Hearing their names in the same sentence was a peculiar kind of pain for Lucy. Coming directly from Boston, she wondered how dirty and backward the place must seem to him now.
“I would hope the future of the South is about more than relivin’ old battles and knowing which cannon they used,” Regan said. Her tone was light and she looked as if she might have been giving a compliment, but her words were a rebuke. “We’re never going to get over our painful past if we don’t stop focusing on what happened in the war.”
Lucy hadn’t really expected much from someone who spent so much time with Paulette, but if Regan thought that sort of comment would win points in a group of Civil War reenactors and the curator of a historical interpretive center, then she wasn’t as smart as she looked.
“And wasn’t Nathan Bedford Forrest the Confederate leader in that battle at Brice’s Crossroads? I don’t think we should be celebrating that man.” Regan arched one lovely brow and waited for Lucy to respond.
An awkward silence hovered. Nobody liked to talk about Forrest. Most agree that he founded the KKK, then tried to disband it. That statue of him in Memphis was hotly contested, and most polite Mississippians avoided discussing the man at all costs.
“Do you think we should pretend he wasn’t there or just act as if the entire battle had never happened?” Lucy asked.
“As a Black girl, don’t you feel it’s wrong to glorify the man?” Regan asked. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you because your family is very prominent in the area, but most Blacks don’t want anything to do with Forrest.”
Lucy tried not to roll her eyes. Making sure history was accurate was hardly glorifying anybody. And to say that her race or family status kept her from understanding the horrors of lynching and oppression was downright offensive. “I’m a historian. I can’t pick and choose who headed the Confederate army that day. Ignoring it all, for whatever reason, helps no one.”
“So, you’re saying we can learn from the past to make the world a better place?” Regan popped a hand to her hip.
Lucy watched Regan’s face carefully, just to be certain that she wasn’t kidding. Lucy almost wished the girl were putting on some sort of spacey act. The alternative was too awful. Lucy opened her mouth to answer, but Jem’s voice derailed her thoughts.
“R. G. Collingwood said studying the past shows us what it is to be a man, what it is to be the kind of man you are and what it is to be the kind of man you are and nobody else.” Jem looked over at Lucy. “And on a more practical note, if we simply forget the most painful episodes of the past, we might make the same mistakes over again.”
Lucy felt as if someone had stolen the air from her lungs. She nodded meekly. “Yes, exactly,” she managed. He wouldn’t forget what had happened. And she never could.
“Honey, should we start the presentations?” Theresa asked, walking up to her husband and laying a hand on his arm. The question defused the tense moment. “I know you didn’t want them to make a big fuss over you, but just smile and say thank you.”
“Now, you deserve this award more than I do. When Mrs. Sussman presents it, feel free to stand up and set the record straight,” Dr. Stroud said.
Theresa laughed, pink flooding her cheeks. “Oh, Jacob.”
He stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and pretended to be giving a speech. “Gentlemen and ladies, you think I’m a saint to dedicate so much of my time to the Free Clinic, but the true hero in this house is my wife. She works as hard as I do, or harder. She’s been tireless in soliciting funds and directed the grant writing this year. We wouldn’t be moving to Crawford House without her help.”
Lucy watched the expressions pass between them, and her throat grew tight. She swallowed hard. Not here, not now. She couldn’t cry yet. This couple had something she might never have. And standing across from Jem while she faced that fact was almost too much.
“You inspire me,” Theresa answer
ed. “I want to make a difference when I see you offering yourself to this community.” Her voice was soft, but sure. “I want to be by your side.”
“Are you from around here, Mrs. Stroud?” Regan cut into the moment. “You don’t sound like a native.”
Theresa turned, her lips tilting up ever so slightly. “No, Regan. I’m from the low country of Louisiana.”
“Don’t you get lonely for your own folk?” Albert asked. “They say a woman is never happy away from her family.”
Lucy blinked. One would think that decades of marriage would qualify them as a family, but they had no children, and some felt a couple without children wasn’t on the same level as a couple with a brood of children and grandchildren. Albert either had a bone to pick with the Creole people or he was needling Stroud, knowing the best way to get to the man was through the woman he’d just expressed such admiration for.
“It’s strange, really.” Theresa didn’t seem too upset by the question. “The only time I’ve ever been lonesome and feeling like the last pea at pea-time is when Jacob was working in Memphis. I stayed here by myself. He was interning at a hospital in a really rough part of the city, and we thought it would be better if I held down the fort.”
“The hardest job I ever had,” Dr. Stroud said. His white mustache turned down. “And not because of the gunshot wounds every weekend.”
“Surely you wouldn’t have wanted to be in the middle of a place like that,” Regan said. “When Lucy’s sister Paulette and I went to Birmingham last time, a man came up to our car while we were at a stoplight.” Her eyes were wide, horror on her face at the memory.
“Did he have a weapon?” Jem asked.
“What?” Regan frowned at him. “No, he was washing our windshield with a nasty old rag and then wanted us to roll down the window and give him change. It was the scariest thing.”
Lucy caught Jem’s eye and almost laughed. Just the crook of his eyebrow said everything.
“Poverty can be quite frightening, I agree,” Dr. Stroud said, his mustache twitching.
Regan slipped her arm through Jem’s. “That’s the last time we go alone. Our next shopping trip, I’m taking along a big, strong man like Jem.”
All the laughter that had been building in Lucy faded away at the sight of Jem’s tolerant smile. He bent his head and whispered, “I shall defend you from the scary window washers.”
Wrapping both hands around his arm, Regan cooed, “I bet you will. Look at this muscle.”
Lucy turned her head, scanning the garden party for Janessa, Paulette, anyone. She’d thought standing across from an angry Jem was as bad as it could get, but she was wrong. Watching a beautiful, brainless girl such as Regan touch Jem and to watch him flirt back was far, far worse.
“Really, Jacob, we should get started or the mayor will have had so much punch that the speech won’t make any sense at all.” Theresa nodded toward the drinks table, where a bald man in a wide, red tie served himself.
“Yes, m’dear.” Jacob inclined his head to the group. “Excuse us.”
Moments after their departure, Albert and John both decided to seek out more whiskey.
Lucy stepped to the side, hoping to ease away from their awkward trio, but Regan spoke first. “Paulette said you went to Harvard but had to drop out. Was it real hard? My cousin Shirley June is applying there.”
Lucy blinked. “Are you asking if I flunked out?”
“I’m not trying to be nosy. I just want to know what to tell Shirley June.”
“You can tell her it’s a beautiful campus full of wonderful people.” Lucy’s voice had gone husky. The one year she’d spent there lived in her memory as a precious time, even as she dealt with her self-inflicted heartbreak.
“Well, don’t feel bad about having to leave.” Regan reached out and patted Lucy’s arm. “I flunked a big test one time. It was on cellular biology. I mean, how do they expect us to memorize all that stuff? It should have been an open-book exam.”
Lucy wanted to say she hadn’t flunked out, but that her family had simply run out of money. She hated herself for being too proud to tell the truth, but she couldn’t force the words out.
Looking up, she caught Jem searching her face. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and when she didn’t, he glanced away.
“Excuse me, I need to find my sister before they start the speeches,” Lucy said, her words tumbling over each other. She backed away, a smile fixed to her face. If she could just get away from Regan and her questions, away from the way she held on to Jem as if he were her property, then Lucy would be okay.
She turned her back and crossed the room blindly. She had to get control of her emotions. If he didn’t have a girlfriend right now, he would very soon. Jem wouldn’t stay single forever, especially surrounded by beautiful women who found him absolutely eligible now that he had a medical degree and a nice salary. They looked at him with admiration and respect. They looked at him the way she should have when he was only a poor white kid from the wrong side of the tracks who had nothing to offer her but his love.
Jem watched Lucy wend her way back through the small-knit groups of people. Regan was still chattering about how impossible it was to pass a science class, her words fading in and out of the strains of the music. Lucy hadn’t corrected Regan about failing school, but it was unlikely—no, it was impossible—that she had failed. Lucy had one of the brightest minds he’d ever met. She loved all words, but poetry especially. She absorbed information in a way that made him simultaneously giddy and painfully jealous. He’d once said he admired Thoreau, and she’d read all his books by the time Jem had next seen her, reciting whole sections and debating with him whether a person could truly gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection.
“So that’s why I decided to switch my major to psychology. Even though I’ve never found a job where I can use it, I knew I could really help all my friends with their problems. I could make a difference in the world,” finished Regan.
Jem turned his head, blinking down at Regan. She’d uttered those last words with such conviction that he was pulled back to the conversation. “I admire you for wanting to help others.”
She nodded, blue eyes impossibly wide. “Exactly. Some people spend their whole lives focused on horrible things like wars from a long time ago, when people need help right now.” She brushed back her hair. “My friends say I always solve their problems. Like, just yesterday someone called me and she was totally upset about this guy that had asked her out once, and then never again. So, I told her”—Regan glanced up to make sure Jem was ready to hear her wisdom—“call him. He’s nervous. You’re so pretty and smart that he doesn’t know how to approach you.”
“Didn’t he already ask her out once?”
“Well, yes, but it was probably easier before he really knew her.” Regan leaned back a bit, satisfied with her logic.
He wanted to laugh. Poor guy. One evening might have been enough for a lifetime. He liked Regan well enough, but his mama would have called her the type of person who didn’t know whether to scratch her watch or wind her bottom. Pretty, but sort of clueless. Regan rambled on and he let her words float past him, adding a few affirmative sounds now and then.
Jem noticed Willy Crawford in the center of the large deck, pompously holding court over a group of similarly pompous-looking folks. Jem had always suspected Lucy’s mother was the one with the business sense, and now he was sure. The picture came together for him with startling clarity. Lucy had left Harvard either because her mother had passed away or because they had run out of money. Lucy’s family had suffered a true reversal of fortune, and so had he.
“Oh, I think they’re starting,” Regan said, and tugged him toward the front of the garden. The band rested their instruments on their knees, and Dr. Stroud tapped on a glass with a spoon, the clear tones echoing through the evenin
g air.
“Before we start, I wanted to introduce our newest member of the Free Clinic staff. Jeremiah Chevy, fresh from his internship at Boston Children’s Hospital, was born and reared in Tupelo, so don’t worry when you address him. He speaks Southern real well,” Dr. Stroud said.
Laughter greeted his words and Jem had to smile at the thought of all his fellow Mississippians working to make themselves understood to someone from up North. He’d had his share of conversational mishaps in Boston.
“Jem, would you care to come up and say a few words?” Stroud waved him forward. “I didn’t warn him beforehand, nor did I monitor his consumption of the Chatham Artillery Punch, so brace yourselves.”
The room rocked with laughter, and Jem felt a few hands pushing him forward, up to the front of the room. He didn’t have a phobia of public speaking, but he would have liked to have prepared something.
“Go on, everybody’s waiting,” Regan said, pulling on his arm. As he reached Dr. Stroud, he realized she still had her arm through his, as if they were there to introduce themselves as a couple. He moved his hand, as if to ease away, but her grip was tight. There was no polite way to shake her off.
The guests waited for him to speak and he looked up, searching for something, anything, to say. “I’m glad to be back in my hometown, if only for a few years.” And he realized he was, sort of. He’d missed the land, the accent of his community, the food and the music.
His gaze found Lucy, by herself off to the side, watching him. “There’s a line of poetry that makes me think of this place, something about ‘the quiet-colored end of evening smiles, miles and miles, on the solitary pastures.’ Tupelo has grown a lot since I’ve been away, but the green grass and the landscape is the same, and the people are the same.”
Lucy’s eyes had narrowed, but not in anger. She looked as if someone had prodded an injury, her shoulders hunching a bit as if she wanted to curl in on herself. Her arms wrapped around her middle.
Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread Page 8
