“John Henry, what are you starin’ at? You look like a big catfish, with your mouth hangin’ open like that.”
He choked on her teasing words and turned aside, mortified that she had seen him looking at her that way. Stupid, stupid girl! he thought with anger and embarrassment. And feeling a need to prove something, he dove into the water and swam out toward the deeper, faster flowing stream. He was a good swimmer, but his heavy clothes slowed his movements and the branches of the underwater bushes caught and pulled at him, starting to drag him down.
Mattie saw and screamed at him, “John Henry! Hang on honey, I’m comin’!” and she gathered up her dress and tried to follow him into the deeper water. But the weight of her long skirt held her back and she watched helplessly as he slipped farther and farther away from her.
But the undergrowth that entangled John Henry also kept him from being swept out into the middle of the river, and he hung onto the branches and dragged himself slowly back toward the riverbank. Finally, soaking wet and mad at himself for looking so damned foolish, he stumbled up the bank and threw himself down on the ground. Mattie struggled up through the mud and the sand and fell down on her knees beside him.
“Whatever were you doin’, John Henry? I thought you were gonna drown! Are you all right, honey?”
“I just wanted to go for a swim,” he muttered, not looking at her, watching as a green snake slid down from a tree at the river’s edge and slipped out into the dark water.
“Well, you scared me to death. I was about to go out and save you, for heaven’s sake, and you know I can’t swim!”
He looked up into her serious, solemn face for a moment, then he started to laugh. “Well Mattie, that was mighty brave of you, but who’d have saved you after you’d saved me?”
She stared at him a moment, then started to laugh. “I didn’t think about that! I just knew you needed me, that’s all.” Then she lay back on the grass, her hand over her face to shield her eyes from the sunlight.
John Henry rolled over and looked at her lying there beside him, wet and dirty and laughing in the sun, her hair coming all undone around her face, and the feeling came again—the need to reach out and touch her face, run his fingers through her hair. It was an awkward feeling and he looked for something to say to break the silence.
“What’s the little ring you’re wearin’?” he asked, as the sunlight glinted off her hand.
“It’s a Claddagh ring, from Ireland,” she replied, holding up her hand to admire it. “It was my Grandmother Fitzgerald’s. My mother gave it to me when I went off to the convent school in Savannah. She says it’s an heirloom, and I am to pass it on to my own daughter someday. She says it was owned by an Irish princess, a long ways back. Imagine that.”
John Henry looked closer at the ring, noting the intricate carving of two hands holding a heart with a king’s crown above.
“The two hands are for friendship,” Mattie explained. “The crown is for loyalty. The heart is for love. I think it’s a good luck token and I wear it always.” Then she smiled up at him. “Maybe I should give it to you, so you don’t drown yourself!”
“Maybe you should learn to swim,” he shot back, making them both laugh.
Then she sighed and said softly, “Oh, John Henry, it’s so good to laugh again, like we used to in the old days. Seems like we used to laugh all the time, you and me and the whole rest of the world. Before the War. I miss those days. Seems like the best part of my life is already over.”
“I don’t know where my life is,” he replied. “Seems like every time I get things figured out, somethin’ changes. And then I’m supposed to just take it like a man, that’s what my Pa says.” He looked down at the ground, his fingers pulling at the wet grass, thinking that he might never be man enough for his father.
“He expects a lot from you now, I’m sure,” Mattie said, “with your mother so sick and all . . .”
“She’s dyin’,” he said suddenly, surprised himself to hear the words. He hadn’t planned to tell her. But being with Mattie always made him feel so safe that it just seemed to spill out of him all on its own. “Uncle John said it’s the consumption, but she made him promise not to tell my Pa.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“She hasn’t told anyone but me, but you see how she is. She just gets weaker all the time and coughs all night long. And last week, I saw her rinsin’ out her pillowcase early before my Pa got up. There was blood on it, Mattie. She’s coughin’ up blood.”
“Oh, honey . . .”
Then with the rush of words came the tears he’d held back for so long, and Mattie put her arms around him.
“My poor John Henry! How awful for you! But why hasn’t she told your father? Surely he needs to know.”
“My father . . .” he sniffed and wiped his hand at his blue eyes. “My Pa hates sick folks,” he explained, “and my mother doesn’t want to be a burden to him . . .”
The reasons didn’t seem to make any sense, saying them to Mattie. But having her arms around him was comforting, the closest thing to having his mother’s arms around him.
“Then we must tell him ourselves,” Mattie said reasonably, “so he can do what needs to be done for her.”
“No! I can’t! She made me promise not to tell anyone until she gives me leave. I shouldn’t even be tellin’ you. She made me promise, Mattie. I can’t betray her wishes like that.”
“But maybe if I tell my mother and make her promise to keep the secret, too, then we can do more to help. If I tell her it’s our sacred oath, make her swear on the rosary, then she’ll have to keep it secret, at least as long as we’re still here in Valdosta . . .”
And for the first time, John Henry realized that Mattie wasn’t going to stay on the farm forever, and a sudden loneliness ran through him.
“Do you have to go, Mattie? Can’t you stay on here after your family leaves? My mother could use the help, and I . . .”
“You know I can’t. We’ll be leavin’ as soon as my father comes home again. But it’s sweet of you to want me to stay.” She brushed her hand through his damp hair while she spoke, as if calming a small child. “You know we’ll always be together in our hearts, John Henry, no matter where we are. You’ll always be my favorite, dearest cousin.”
“I love you, Mattie.” He said it easily, as he’d said it all his life, like little brother to his doting sister. But now in the golden light at the water’s edge, it suddenly seemed to mean so much more.
“I love you too, John Henry. I always have and I always will.” And for one sweet moment in time, his mother’s illness and the war were both forgotten and the world was perfect again.
In April of 1865, the war finally ended when General Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. But beyond that there was nothing dramatic to signal the end of the Cause and the fall of the Southern Confederacy—just the ghostly, desolate landscape of the conquered nation that was its own memorial. Even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln seemed little cause for celebration.
Though south Georgia had been spared any fighting during the war, a month after Appomattox one final fight came near to Valdosta. Jefferson Davis, the hunted, haunted president of the fallen Confederacy, was making a run for freedom from the Federals. His route led south from Richmond through the Carolinas and down into Georgia as he tried to reach the safety of Texas and the western territories. His plan was to cross over the Mississippi and rejoin Confederate sympathizers there where he might be able to start up the secession fight again. But he only got as far as Irwinville, Georgia, halfway between Macon and Valdosta, when the Yankees caught up with him, camped out with his family in a piney wood. The Yanks took him away in chains as a traitor to the United States of America. He said the chains made him feel like a slave.
Slowly the soldiers came home, from disbanded regiments in Virginia and Tennessee, from prison camps in the North, from lonely outposts in the far West. Most of them came on foot, walking hundr
eds of miles to find their homes in ruins, their families scattered. And one by one, John Henry’s uncles returned from the war: William Harrison McKey, with a battle wound that refused to heal; Dr. James Taylor McKey, who had served as a field surgeon and did his best to tend to his brother’s wound; and the youngest McKey brother, Thomas Sylvester, who had finished the war as a nurse in the Confederate hospital in Macon.
Tom was John Henry’s favorite McKey uncle, only nine years his elder and close enough in age to be almost like a big brother. So when word came that Tom was on his way home from Macon, John Henry saddled up his own horse and tied another of his father’s stock behind, and rode out to meet his uncle. It was a brave thing for a thirteen-year old boy to do, with the roads filled with starving, desperate men who would think nothing of stealing a horse or two and leaving a young rider in a ditch. But John Henry went armed with a shotgun in his saddlebag and his father’s long pistol laid across his lap, and knew that he could outshoot any man he could see. And with the headstrong determination of youth, he found Tom walking along the road from Macon and brought him back home to Valdosta. If his mother had known his plan, she never would have allowed such a thing, but his father seemed to understand his need to try himself on this adventure, and let him go.
It hadn’t been hard to recognize Tom, even amidst the straggling crowds of dirty soldiers who filled the roads. Tom’s red hair shone like something on fire, his usually fair complexion turned to the color of a ripe apple from weeks of walking in the summer sun. He looked more like a mischievous little boy who’d stayed out too long in the sun than a weary soldier coming home from War, but the huge knife at his side proved that Tom was man enough for the fight.
“I call her the Hell-Bitch,” Tom confided as he unsheathed the knife in the barn one afternoon after his return. “She started out as a plowshare back at Indian Creek, but your Grandpa McKey had it forged into a meat cleaver for slaughterin’ the hogs. When the War came, I had her forged again into this . . .”
He held the knife out toward John Henry and his nephew instinctively flinched away from the blade, fifteen inches long from swamp oak handle to point, two inches wide across the blade, and more than a quarter of an inch thick. Both edges of the blade were sharpened to a shine, and either side could have sliced a man clean through as easily as slaughtering a hog.
“Go ahead,” Tom said, “give her a try. She’s a beauty,” and he dropped the Hell-Bitch into John Henry’s hands.
The knife was so heavy that John Henry’s arms fell from the weight of it. But once in hand, he found the knife to be remarkably well-balanced.
“You can feel the meat cleaver in her still,” Tom said, “the way the blade runs up from the hilt. That angle at the point is where the corner of the cleaver-blade used to be. Give her a swing and you’ll see how well she handles.”
But when John Henry raised the Hell-Bitch over his head, Tom laughed. “Who taught you to knife fight, anyhow? You can’t throw a knife that big! You just cut with it.”
Tom took the knife back and slid it into the holster, then swung the rawhide bandoleer over his shoulder, pistol-style. “She’s a cross-draw weapon,” he explained, “like this.” Then in one quick move, he pulled knife from sheath and pointed it at John Henry, upside down in his hand so that the monstrous cutting edge was clean against his nephew’s throat. “That’s how you knife fight with the Hell-Bitch. One fast slice, and your enemy don’t have a jug’lar anymore.”
John Henry swallowed hard, though he knew his uncle would never do him any harm. “Did you ever . . .kill anybody with it?” he asked, half hopefully.
“Never had reason to,” Tom replied. “Once I showed her, the discussion was generally over. Besides, I didn’t get into much fightin’, bein’ in the regimental band and all. Mostly, I just carried her like a saber, for show, though she hides neat when she needs to. But no, she’s got nothin’ but pig blood on her. I’ve seen enough man’s blood to fill me up for life, anyhow.”
“But you said you never killed anybody . . .”
“Didn’t have to,” Tom said, his bright smile fading and his eyes taking on a distant look. “You heard how I finished the war by servin’ in the military hospital up in Macon?”
“I heard.”
Tom shook his head. “You never heard nothin’, boy. Nothin’ about what that hospital was like.”
“Tell me?”
“I’ll tell you, though tellin’ don’t do it justice, and I hope you never have to learn what it’s like for yourself. War’s a terrible thing, John Henry, and the hospital ward’s as bad as the battlefield. Men come in, all shot up, bleedin’ still or so far gone they don’t have nothin’ left to bleed, gangrene in their wounds, smellin’ worse than anything I ever smelled. Plenty of them died before the doctors could do anything to help them. Plenty more died after the doctors worked on them, hackin’ off their arms or legs. Out back of the hospital was a dead house to store the bodies until we had time to bury them. Sometimes that dead house was so full we couldn’t put any more in, and we had to stack up the corpses outside. The stench of it was somethin’ you wouldn’t ever forget. Some of them we never even knew their names, never could write home to their families or sweethearts to say how they died—not that the homefolks would have wanted to hear how it happened. Though knowin’s better than not, I reckon.”
“We haven’t heard anything about my Uncle Rob, not since the war ended,” John Henry said. “He was in a prison camp, last time there was any news.”
“Well, there’s hope in that, anyhow,” Tom said, as he slid the knife back into its sheath and pulled the bandoleer from his shoulder. “And your Aunt Mary Anne’s a pray-er, with that rosary of hers. Prayin’s better than just waitin’.”
“She says he’s comin’ home for sure, but I don’t know how she knows. What do you think, Tom? Do you think Uncle Rob is comin’ back again?”
Tom was quiet a moment before answering. “That’s hard to say, John Henry, that’s hard to say. War’s a funny thing. Some men go off and come home again just fine. But there’s some that come home and never do come back.”
While the family waited and Aunt Mary Anne prayed for Uncle Rob’s safe return, John Henry had to keep going to school—his mother insisted on it. A gentleman’s son still needed an education, even in a world rent apart, and John Henry didn’t mind too much. The seven-mile journey to school and back was a good excuse to take his horse for a fast ride, especially since the Cat Creek Road was pretty much deserted, the only traffic being an occasional gray-coated drifter heading home. And so it was that on one late May afternoon as he was on his way home from school, he nearly ran down one of those drifters.
The man was walking right down the middle of the dusty road, his head bent and his feet dragging, and he hardly moved at all when John Henry hollered at him to get out of the way. If the horse hadn’t been so well trained to John Henry’s hands, wheeling around and rearing its front legs clear off the ground, the man would have been trampled for sure. But even with the whinnying of the startled animal and John Henry’s shouts, the soldier barely moved at all. And the way the man just stood there, staring out of deep-set eyes and skinny as a rail, gave John Henry a spooky feeling, like seeing a skeleton come to life. He was glad to get his horse turned back toward home and take off again in a cloud of dust.
“It was the strangest thing, the way he just stared,” he told Mattie awhile later, as he brushed down the horse. “It was like he was seein’ a ghost, though he looked more like the ghost than me.”
“You should have stopped to ask if he needed help,” she chided as she held out a handful of feed to the horse. “He might have been lost, or hurt. He might have needed a place to stay.”
“He might have been armed and crazy, too, and ready to kill me for all I know. I should think you’d be more concerned for my safety than for the welfare of some stranger. I could have been hurt myself, you know, the way my horse reared up. If I didn’t have such a good seat . . .�
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“If you hadn’t been racin’, your horse could have stopped faster. Seems like it’s your own fault she reared on you. You ought to be more careful, John Henry. Next time you will run somebody over.” Mattie had a way of sounding sweet even when she was scolding him, but he still didn’t like the lecture.
“It’s our road!” he retorted. “If folks walk down the middle of it, they’re gonna get run over!”
“John Henry,” she said, shaking her auburn head in that slightly superior way of hers, instructing a wayward child. But the instruction didn’t come, as she looked up from the horse and across the yard, her little mouth slowly dropping open in astonished silence.
John Henry, turning to follow her gaze, saw the same scarecrow-man he’d nearly run down on the road, dragging slowly up to the front gate.
“Aw, hell!” he complained, “that’s him. Now I suppose you’re gonna ask me to apologize to him and fetch him a plate of supper.”
But Mattie had no reply as she dropped the rest of the feed from her hand, picked up her calico skirts, and ran across the yard toward the gate. And to John Henry’s amazement, she threw herself into the drifter’s arms.
“Mattie!” he called. “What do you think you’re doin’? Mattie!”
But she didn’t answer him, as she buried her face in the drifter’s chest and started to cry. Then, for the first time, John Henry really looked at the man, his gaunt face half-covered in an unkempt black beard, his dirty uniform coat still carrying the gold collar badges of a Captain in the Confederate States Army. It was no drifter that he had almost run over, but his own uncle, Captain Robert Kennedy Holliday, Mattie’s beloved father come home at last.
Uncle Rob looked so different from the hale and healthy man who’d left Georgia four years before that John Henry hardly recognized him. But Mattie knew him, even with his haggard appearance. Her heart told her it was him the minute she looked up toward the road.
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