Come Juneteenth

by Ann Rinaldi

  "She's dead," one of them told Gabe as they gently pried his hands loose. "Son, she's dead." Turned out he was the doctor. "You have to let her go, son."

  Dead. Free, finally. Sis Goose was free. And I wondered what things would have been like if the Texas plantation owners had told their slaves they were free over two years now. There would be no Heffernan at our place. There would be no Sis Goose dead.

  "And that blood on your shirt isn't all hers," the doctor went on kindly. "Come on, son. It's yours. You're shot. Let's see to it."

  "Only if you bring her along," Gabe muttered. "I'll not let her go."

  They promised they would see to her only because Gabe wouldn't release her. We all, Heffernan included, were escorted to the saloon.

  It seems the saloon was the most decent place they had in town. There everything was polished and clean. The doctor went ahead to prepare a settle in his "surgery," a back room where he'd already treated some townspeople. The officer who carried Sis Goose back set her down on a settle and covered her with a blanket.

  "Who shot her?" asked Major Cogan, the officer in charge.

  I wanted to speak. I wanted to tell them it was me. But I couldn't. Some force, some hand, had reached out of the heavens to strangle me after that first scream when I saw Sis Goose crumple to the ground. I plunged into a whirlwind of silence, as if into a creek of warm water that was now up to my neck. And I didn't want to get out.

  Gabe said, "He shot at us first. He hit me and I went down. My sister picked up her gun to defend us. He was aiming to shoot her. And the moment she fired he—he pulled Sis in front of him. That's what we call her. Sis Goose. Her real name is Rose Smith."

  Major Cogan looked at me. He was not tall by any means, but there was an air of command about him. He was young, too, with long sideburns and a pointed beard on his chin. "Is that the way it happened?" he asked.

  I nodded.

  "Can't you say 'yes, sir'? Can't you talk?"

  "She's my little sister," Gabe said, as if that should explain it all. He was clutching his shoulder and there was blood all over his hand.

  "Why you dragging her around like this?"

  "I'm her guardian."

  "Still doesn't explain."

  "We come from our ranch up near Washington. It's occupied by your people. I was given permission by a Captain Cochran up there to make this trip to bring back Sis Goose. I needed my sister along. This note explains that Heffernan is a deserter." He pulled Cochran's paper out of his pocket. It had some blood on it. "I just got discharged myself."

  Major Cogan read it, nodded his head, and gave it back.

  "Been killing Yankees?" one man asked.

  Gabe shook his head. "Would have if I was ordered to. But I was guarding the frontier from Indians. Fort Belknap. Name's Captain Holcomb."

  "Give the captain the respect he deserves," Cogan chided his men. "Could your sister talk before the shooting?"

  Gabe nodded, wincing in pain. "Like a magpie. Never shut up. Never let me off the hook."

  "Let's get that arm fixed," the captain-doctor said. "And I want to take a look at your sister, too."

  So I sat in the captain-doctor's surgery while he cut off Gabe's torn and bloody shirt, examined the wound, and pronounced that there were no shattered bones, no bullet lodged in there, and that it was just a nasty flesh wound. He washed the hurt place and dusted it with morphine. He bandaged it up and gave Gabe some rum and laudanum for the pain.

  I just sat there, watching and crying without making a sound. Tears kept pouring down my face. Then Gabe asked me to go out to his horse and get a clean shirt out of his saddlebags. It was the first time he'd spoken to me since the shooting. I was never so glad to do anything. I knew he and the doctor were going to talk about me, but I didn't care. Gabe had spoken to me, and that was all that mattered.

  When I got back the doctor helped Gabe into the shirt and then came over to see to me. He felt my pulse. Then he took a peculiar-looking instrument out of his pocket, put one end in either ear and another against the top of my dress, right about where my heart should be. "Don't be afraid," he said. "It's called a stethoscope. Been around since 1838 but few, if any, of my colleagues use it. It's my little secret. It lets me listen to your heart."

  He looked into both my eyes and made me open my mouth. He felt me around my neck. "You feeling all right otherwise?" he asked.

  I nodded yes.

  "You're in shock," he told me and Gabe. "You've got a pallor, cold and clammy skin, and a weak pulse. You allowed to have brandy?"

  I looked at Gabe, who nodded yes. So the doctor poured a small glass and I drank it. Vile stuff.

  Gabe slid off Doctor Tucker's table, for that was the good doctor's name, and the doctor said I should lie down on a small bed in the surgery. So I did. He covered me. I closed my eyes, but all I could see was Sis Goose in that blue velvet cloak, being pulled in front of Heffernan, then sliding to the ground. I saw the bloody wound on her forehead, heard my gun go off, over and over, until the sound of it, and the brandy, put me out.

  TWO THINGS of immense importance happened in the next few days.

  We buried Sis Goose in the small cemetery on a hill outside town. Gabe didn't want to. He wanted to take her home. But Major Cogan and Captain-Doctor Tucker advised against it. Too far away, they said. Too hot. He couldn't manage with that arm of his. Not a good idea. Why, he was running a fever. As a matter of fact, he and I shouldn't go any farther than San Felipe and the good nuns for a while. We should stay there until we were both better.

  What they didn't know is that it would take years for us both to get better. Or maybe they did know and just didn't say.

  Gabe was hurting, and not only in his shoulder. He walked around like a man in a daze. He was broken in places that had never been pierced by a bullet.

  The doctor kept giving him medicine for the fever.

  And I, I was just broken in half. Half of me knew it would be my responsibility to get Gabe to San Felipe, to the nuns, where they would help his physical wounds, even as they had helped Pa mend. And the other half of me wanted to be buried with Sis Goose.

  We buried her in her blue velvet cloak.

  I cried more silent tears at the funeral. And Gabe made no attempt to comfort me. Standing there on that small hill, he looked like some ghost out of a Dickens novel, with his duster flapping in the wind.

  Would the arm mend properly?

  Alone with Doctor Tucker, who asked to see me after the funeral, I wrote it on a piece of paper, because I still couldn't speak.

  "Yes," he said. "You must give him time."

  "But he's got to run the ranch when we get home. And my pa is dying," I wrote.

  "Half the country is hurting like you two are," Doctor Tucker told me. "The war has left its toll. Some men are doing without arms or legs. Lord knows I amputated enough of them. Some are blind or addicted to painkillers. We all just have to go on. Now what else is bothering you? Tell me?"

  I blushed and wrote it down. After all, he was a doc tor. "I missed my woman's time of the month," I wrote. "How can that be?"

  "Too much anxiety," he said. "And with all of this, with your being in shock and unable to speak, it may not come until you settle down again. Just try to forgive yourself for shooting the girl. From what your brother tells me, it wasn't your fault."

  I wrote again. "Did he say that?"

  "Yes."

  More writing. "But I think he hates me."

  "He doesn't," Tucker said. "He's got his own self to hate, from what he tells me, for not telling her she was free for over two years. Tell me one more thing: Does he treat you all right? Your brother?"

  "What do you mean?" I wrote. "We fight sometimes. Sometimes I win, sometimes he does. Is that what you mean?"

  "Never mind. You just answered my question."

  The other thing that happened was that we had an inquest for Sis Goose's death.

  Then and there, in the saloon after the funeral. Major Cogan said we
should really go to New Orleans for it, but since Gabe and I weren't fit to travel, we'd have it now.

  Heffernan was present and testifying.

  They put me on the stand, which was a bar stool, and I considered it no fitter place. I had to write my answers. And then they put Gabe there, and he spoke shakily and told them how it had truly happened. How we were defending ourselves after Heffernan shot, and I did not set out to kill Sis Goose.

  "Did you intend to kill Colonel Heffernan?"

  "Yes," I wrote. "He was intending to kill me. It was self-defense."

  They dismissed the charges against me and Gabe. We were free to go, as free as either of us ever would be. Heffernan they took in hand because he still had to face a court-martial.

  We left for San Felipe two days later. I still couldn't talk. Gabe talked at me, not to me, telling me to ready for the trip back.

  They bade us good-bye. Doctor Tucker spoke quietly and separately to us both before we left. I don't know what he told Gabe, but he spoke to him like Pa would.

  "Take care of your brother," he told me. "Be good to him. It's your responsibility now to shoot the snakes and the wild boar if you meet any. He said you're capable and smart."

  I warmed at the words. And I hugged Doctor Tucker before we left. He said any day now something could happen to shock me back into speaking again. I wanted to believe him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I SHOT ONE rattlesnake on the way back. It slithered into our camp that night. I had gathered the wood for the fire and rubbed the steel and flint together to start it. I cooked the supper and cleaned up afterward.

  Gabe spoke to me, giving directions. We would take our watches, as usual, he said. If he saw something, he'd wake me so I could ready my gun. There was no more talk about "others out here like us" because he knew there never could be. And no more talk about who was scared and who wasn't because I knew now that I would be scared, too, just sitting down in Ma's house.

  He saw the rattlesnake first. I picked up my gun, feeling it an alien thing in my hands. I sat there just looking at it dumbly.

  "Come on, shoot!" he urged.

  I shot. I killed the rattlesnake. Just like I had killed Sis Goose.

  "It only took you a hundred years!" he scolded. Raw, unconcealed anger. I turned away and he picked up the snake and threw it into the far night.

  I took the first watch. There were no stars in the sky.

  THE NEXT day we reached San Felipe and the Sisters of Charity.

  They welcomed us. They exclaimed over Gabe's wound and took him in hand and changed the bandages. He told them what had happened and how I couldn't talk. And Sister Geraldine took me in her arms and called me poor child and hugged me.

  We saw Ham. And the reunion was joyful between him and Gabe, the way it used to be with me. I know Sister Geraldine spoke to Gabe in private about me. I know she told him I was hurting because he hadn't spoken like his old self to me.

  I know this because I wrote it out for her in one of our conversations.

  We sat at table together. We enjoyed Ham's company and the food and the talk, and still Gabe never teased or joked with me.

  I went to take a siesta that last afternoon of our stay because I was tired, because tomorrow morning we were leaving for home, and because I needed to think. About Mama and what I would tell her about Sis Goose. About Pa and what he would say to me. Would they ever forgive me?

  I suppose I could have gone into the chapel, like Sister suggested. I tried. I did try.

  But when I opened the heavy, dark door I nearly wet my pants.

  There was Gabe. Seated in the third row from the back, his hat off. Just sitting there, doing nothing. Still, the idea of my strong, Indian-fighting brother, my shot-up, bandaged-up brother even coming in here...

  I closed the door and crept upstairs to my room to rest.

  As long as I live I'll never forget that image of him sitting there and praying. Because that's what he was doing. Why else does a person go to a place like that with all those statues staring at you?

  And as long as I live I'll never tell him I saw him there, either.

  But never mind Gabe. What about me?

  For no matter what anyone said to me, even with Gabe testifying that it was not my fault, even with Major Cogan setting us free of all charges, even with Sister Geraldine talking softly to me and tucking me in and telling me that God did not hold me accountable, even with all that, I did not feel forgiven.

  It wasn't God that I needed to forgive me.

  Afternoon sunlight filtered in through the blinds. From somewhere downstairs a nun was playing a harp. The song was "Greensleeves." I fell asleep. I don't know how long.

  It was then that I heard some men talking. I looked out the window to the barnyard and I saw Gabe and Priam, the nuns' man-about-the-place.

  Priam was checking the cinch on Gabe's saddle.

  Gabe was saddled up! He was leaving! Without me!

  How, oh how, had this come about? He was leaving me here with the nuns!

  How could he get home alone? Who would do for him? Who would gather wood for his fire? Strike the steel and flint to start it? Shoot the rattlesnakes?

  Just because I'd frozen before shooting that rattlesnake around our fire, had he given up on me? And then I saw Ham on a horse. Not mine, but one belonging to the nuns.

  Oh, he was taking Ham and not me! I stumbled about, looking for a robe and my moccasins. I opened the door and fumbled my way down the stairs.

  I ran through the house and out the back door. Over the back verandah and out to the barnyard.

  They were gone!

  I ran down the path on the side of the house that led to the street. They were in the street already. Several houses away.

  I stood there like a jackass in the rain. And then, not thinking, I called out.

  "Gabe! Gabriel Holcomb, you come back here!"

  They stopped. They turned their horses to look at me and I ran to them, running until I was out of breath. I stood in front of them in the afternoon street. Oh, I could see their faces all right. And they could see mine.

  "Gabriel Holcomb," I scolded, just like Mama would when he came into the house with muddy boots. "Where do you think you're going?"

  He scowled. Then he shook his head. "You're talking," he said.

  "I'm doing more than talking. I'm giving you the what-for you deserve. Where do you think you're going without me? Who's going to light your fire, cook your food, kill your rattlesnakes? Ham? You know you need me. Do you hear me?"

  "The whole town does."

  "And why would you leave me here? What for?"

  "Leave you? Do I look like I'm leaving you? Where are my saddlebags? Where's the mule? You're really teched in the head now. Besides which you look really domineering in your robe and slippers in the middle of the street."

  I looked down at myself in horror and hugged myself for modesty.

  "Where are you going then?" I demanded.

  "Taking one of the horses to have its shoe repaired at the blacksmith at the end of the street. Is that all right with you, madam?"

  He was joking with me again. It was so all right with me I wanted to pick up stones and weeds and throw them, cry out, and do other necessary solemn acts, like Grandpa had done when he claimed the land, only I didn't know what they were.

  "All right if we go get the horse's shoes fixed now?" he asked.

  I nodded. "Be back in time for supper. We ride tomorrow morning."

  "There's one thing you're forgetting, Luli. I've got to come back with you. Can't leave you here. I promised Cochran. You're under my recognizance, remember? That's his language for it. In mine it's Southern honor."

  I just looked at him. It meant a lot to him, that honor business.

  "It's what the war was all about, Luli. Lost or not. It's what we're all about, and if I have to teach you that, I will. Anyway, glad you're talking."

  "Me, too."

  "Remember, no sass."
/>   "No sass," I agreed.

  I turned and started walking back to the convent.

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  YOU WOULD think things were all right after that. They were, in small portions, like a spoon of sugar in a lifetime's cup of coffee. We had more bitter than sweet between us. And because of that we trod like the ground was full of rattlesnakes that I couldn't shoot in a hundred years.

  I sit here in my room of the log house, the same room Pa had when he was alive, and I have my after-school cup of tea and write in my diary. Bone weary I am and only twenty-one years of age.

  I have been teaching school here now for what seems like years. I teach the freedmen's children. It's a promise Pa made to them that 19th of June when he gave them their freedom so many years ago, and an obligation we have. The freedmen call the day Juneteenth now and have a great celebration.

  I teach eight children. I could do more.

  Pa died the summer Gabe and I came home from our trip. He did not take it well that Sis Goose was dead. Gabe wanted to spare him and me by telling him that Heffernan shot her.

  But I said, "Please, Gabe," because I don't sass him anymore, "please let me tell him the truth."

  He looked hesitant.

  "Pa always liked the truth," I reminded him. "It's about Southern honor."

  He just looked at me with a strange light in his eyes and said, "Go ahead."

  And so I did. Did I say it was easy? Pa lay in bed and cried. Gabe looked away, out the window. I wiped Pa's eyes. "My poor little Goose Girl," he said, "and carrying a child, too. My first grandchild. Yours, Gabe. You sure you tried your best to get her back?"

  "Yes, sir." Gabe's answer covered a whole range of emotions.

  Then Pa said, "My poor Luli. What a way to have to grow up."

  Within a week he died. We buried him in the family cemetery.