“I’ll do my best in school, Pa,” he vowed. “I promise I’ll make you proud of me.”
“You do that, son,” Henry said heavily. “Our pride’s about all we’ve got left, these days.”
The Valdosta Institute was located in the remodeled old day school building and run by the erudite Professor S.M. Varnedoe and his sisters, Miss Sallie and Miss Lila Varnedoe, newly arrived from Savannah, and dedicated to bringing modern education to the backwoods boys and girls of Lowndes County. The coursework they offered was challenging, combining the basics with a heavy dose of classical language and literature. While penmanship still counted, composition and recitation became the true test of knowledge, and the students spent every Friday in written and oral examinations. But despite the rigors of the routine, the students quickly came to love and admire their new instructor. Professor Varnedoe’s techniques stirred his pupils’ sense of pride and ambition, and their reward was his benevolent smile and happy laughter. Learning with Professor Varnedoe was a joy.
The highlight of the school week was the Friday afternoon recitation contest, when the students entertained each other by reading their compositions aloud and reciting the long poems Professor Varnedoe assigned to them : William Tell, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, The Death of Napoleon. The best orators in school were Willie Pendleton and Constantia Bessant, Major Bessant’s pretty young daughter, but Sam Griffin was John Henry’s favorite, hands down.
Young Sam had a fervent love of the South, a fervent hate of the Yankees, and a way with a patriotic theme that could make an audience burst into applause. And as the son of the owner of the town’s general store, he often came prepared with cinnamon bark candy in his pockets to share, as he did one school day in spring.
“For the ladies,” he said with a brown-eyed grin, sneaking some out at recess time as he and John Henry loafed in the schoolyard. “Give a bite to Thea Morgan over there, I’ll bet she gives you a kiss for it.”
“Thea?” John Henry asked in surprise, stealing a glance at the skinny, pale-eyed girl who stood staring back at him from the shadows near the outhouse. “Why’d she do such a thing?”
“She’s sweet on you, don’t you know?” Sam replied with a laugh. “Constantia Bessant told me it’s so, and if Constantia said it, you can bet it’s true. Any girl with the grit to stand up to that Yankee soldier the way she did is bound to be tellin’ the truth.”
John Henry’s head shot up, the cinnamon bark and Thea Morgan forgotten all at once. “What Yankee soldier?”
“Why the one that arrested Dick Force, back last fall, didn’t you hear? It was Constantia Bessant first found out about the Captain bein’ in jail. She was passin’ by the jailhouse that day, goin’ home from my Pa’s store, when one of those uppity darky soldiers pushed his bayonet at her and told her to go on and git. Well, you know Constantia. She wasn’t about to git just ‘cause some Yankee darky told her to, so she turned around and told him he could go on and git himself right back up to Washington. And that was when she saw who it was that darky was guarding.”
“You mean the Captain?”
“Sure enough!” Then Sam Griffin started into an oratory to rival anything he’d ever presented in school. Sam was an actor at heart, and he could copy almost anyone’s voice, as he did now, letting his voice go high and flirtatious like Constantia Bessant’s.
“‘Why if it ain’t the Captain! Whatever are you doin’ in that jail cell, Dick?’”
When John Henry laughed at the mimicry, Sam changed characters, his voice growing low and angry like Dick Force’s. “‘They say I choked a darky, and I am under arrest.’”
Then, quick as a wink, he became Constantia again.
“‘Well, I am goin’ home and choke two or three of them myself, and then they will arrest me, too. And as this building belongs to my father, we will just turn them all out and take possession.’”
John Henry, playing along with the performance, looked concerned as he asked: “And did you get arrested, too, Miss Bessant, Ma’am?”
“Hell no!” Sam laughed in his own boyish voice. “But Constantia did go right on home and tell everybody that Dick was in jail. It was just awhile later that Alex Darnell and Jack Calhoun came and helped him to escape. So I reckon you could say that Constantia showed those Yankees what’s what, helpin’ get Dick out of jail.”
John Henry nodded, a hot light in his clear blue eyes. “I sure would like to show those Yanks a thing or two, myself! The way those darky soldiers parade up and down this town is more than a man ought to have to bear, and pushin’ a gun at a lady like that . . . Why, if my Pa wasn’t agent for the Bureau, workin’ with the Federals and all, I might just teach them a lesson in manners!”
“I’m with you, there, John Henry,” Sam agreed. “Too bad we’re not old enough to join up with Alex and Jack. I’ll bet we’d see some fightin’ then.”
“What are you talkin’ about, Sam?”
Sam looked around quickly, then spoke in hushed tones. “I’m talkin’ about vigilantes! That’s what Alex and Jack are puttin’ together. I heard ‘em plannin’ in the back room of my Pa’s store when they came in for a drink the other night. Alex and Jack and the Captain all fought in the War together, so they know somethin’ about fightin’. They say that if the Captain dies, there’s gonna be trouble, one way or another. I tell you, John Henry, I sure would like to join up with them and make some trouble myself!”
“Vigilantes,” John Henry said, the word rolling off his tongue with a satisfying sound. “Vigilantes! For the honor of the South!”
“For the honor of the South!” Sam Griffin repeated. Then he shrugged. “But us being only fourteen and all, they ain’t gonna take us in. Hell, John Henry! Sometimes I think I’m gonna bust before I get a chance to do a man’s work!” But Sam’s mood could change like quicksilver, and he let out a sudden laugh. “But I know one thing we can try that’s man’s business . . .”
“And what’s that?”
“Kissin’ women! Tell you what, you give that piece of cinnamon bark to Thea Morgan, and I’ll bet you two bits she lets you kiss her at the next barn dance.”
“You’re on,” John Henry readily agreed. Since his childhood days with cousin Robert, he couldn’t resist the thrill of a contest—especially one where a wager was involved. “And how about you, Sam? You gonna try for a kiss, too?”
“Sure am,” Sam said with a grin. “I aim to kiss Constantia Bessant!”
John Henry let out a whistle. “You do dream big, Sam! Constantia’s the most popular girl in school. What makes you think she’ll kiss you?”
Sam grinned again as he pulled a paper-wrapped wad of sticky candy from the pocket of his homespun trousers. “Cinnamon bark, John Henry! She’s got a real sweet tooth, that’s what I hear. And I’ve got the best supply of sugar in town. Why, by the time I’m done passin’ around candy to all the pretty girls, Valdosta’s gonna be needin’ a dentist.”
“. . . more than kisses, letters mingle souls,” John Henry recited, and though he should have known what to say next, his mind kept drawing a blank. “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls. . .”
“Yes, yes, Mr. Holliday,” Professor Varnedoe said, “you have already said that. The next line, please.” The professor looked at him patiently as did a classroom of young faces, all waiting while John Henry struggled with his final Friday recitation. Professor Varnedoe had assigned him selections from the English writer John Donne, and until this last poem, John Henry had been making a competent presentation. But though he’d read the words of the poem dozens of times and recited them to himself nearly that many times more, until this very moment, the meaning of the lines had alluded him. Now he stood suddenly understanding what the poet had meant, and feeling so overwhelmed by the truth of it that he could think of nothing else.
“. . . more than kisses,” Professor Varnedoe prompted, and John Henry took a breath and tried again.
“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For, thus friends absent speak.”
“Very good, Mr. Holliday. Now, that wasn’t so very difficult, was it? Class, you may offer Mr. Holliday a round of applause. Next, I believe we will hear from Mr. Albert Pendleton, Jr.”
And as the class clapped heartily at his dubious achievement and the next reciter came forward, John Henry quickly took his seat on the bench behind his wood plank desk. Sam Griffin, sitting on his right side, leaned over and winked, and pointed to where Thea Morgan sat across the aisle on the girl’s side of the classroom. Thea was looking back, her cheeks in a flush that made her skinny, pale face seem almost pretty. Why did she have to blush like that? John Henry thought, and right here in class, too. Surely, everyone would guess what she was blushing about and would think that she and John Henry were sweethearts.
His first kiss had been nothing, really, and he almost felt bad about taking Sam’s wagered two bits for accomplishing it. Thea Morgan was as meek and mild-mannered as she looked, and she didn’t put up any fuss at all when he held her by the hand and led her behind a bale of hay in the barn near the Darnell’s Livery Stable the night of the spring dance. Getting her there, out of sight of the chaperones, was easy enough, and getting the kiss wasn’t much harder. After stalling a bit out of his own nervousness, wondering just how he ought to go about it, he figured he might as well get on with it and he just up and kissed her. It was over almost before he realized that he’d done it, and there was Thea, looking at him with her pale eyes shining and a funny-kind of smile on her thin lips. But there was so little of anything remarkable about the feeling of kissing those lips that he reckoned he might as well have kissed the family cow or his favorite riding horse. So though it was the first kiss of his young life, it was nothing much to remember.
What he did remember from that warm evening in mid-May was Colonel William Bessant interrupting the barn dance to announce that Dick Force had died. It had taken five long months for the Yankee bullets to do their work, but the slow poison of the gangrenous wounds had finally killed the Captain, as sure a murder as if he’d died the same day he was shot. And without Colonel Bessant there at the dance to soften the news and try to calm the angry young crowd, there would have been trouble in Valdosta that night for sure, for murder demanded justice, or vengeance at least. But Colonel Bessant reminded them all again that the Lord would surely repay what they could not, and it was best for the townspeople to keep their tempers and their tongues. In the heated atmosphere of the times, even a rumor of revenge could bring down a flood of Federal soldiers on them all.
The dance was quickly dismissed, as was school for a few days, and the students sent home to cool their heels and their hot heads. But for John Henry, living away out in the country, seven miles from school and Sam Griffin and the rest of the boys, the time away only made his anger grow. Dick Force was only nineteen-years-old when he died, just five years older than John Henry himself, and too young to suffer such a lingering and loathsome end. Why, if he’d had any say in the matter . . .
But he had no say, nor even a chance to talk out his frustration. His mother was sick in bed most of the time, too ill to be disturbed. His father was busy with business and the job he had taken as local agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau—and even that rankled John Henry. Working for the Bureau was nearly as bad as being a Yankee, in his mind, and he tried not to remember that his father had only taken the Bureau job to make the money to send him to school.
He was still in that solitary and sorrowful mood when a letter came for him from Jonesboro. Cousin Mattie had finally written to tell him how things were going back in her hometown—a hometown that she hardly recognized anymore since Sherman and his soldiers had swept through.
Nearly the whole town is burnt up, she wrote, her neat handwriting filling the front, back, and margins of the one small sheet of stationery, an economy necessitated by the high price of writing paper since the War. Broad Street is changed so, you’d hardly recognize it. Where the rails used to run down the middle of the road, there’s two roads now, one on each side of the rails. The Yanks lowered the town side of the street and dumped the dirt on the McDonough side to raise it, which they supposed would make it harder for us to get around. They burnt the old train depot, up on the north side of town by Aunt Martha Holliday Johnson’s house, and tore up all the tracks along through there, but there’s talk of building a new depot when there’s any money for it. My father’s warehouse where he had his mercantile is just a pile of bricks and charred boards, like most of the rest of downtown. The Courthouse is gone, and the Academy, and lots of folks lost their homes. Our home is still standing, though in disreputable shape, the wall plaster is broken and full of holes from gunshots and the clapboards were stolen by the Yanks for firewood, so we hear. Mama said she told you about the graves in our vegetable garden, Captain Grace and Father Bleimal. How sad it all is! When I went to the convent school in Savannah, I left a pretty white house with flowers in the yard. Now I’ve come home again, but it hardly seems like home anymore. I miss the way things used to be. Do you feel the same? How I wish we could talk to one another again . . .
He knew just how she felt, and wished so much, as she did, that they could talk again. But Jonesboro was so far away, farther even than Griffin, and he was buried out in the quiet of the countryside. If only he were older, he thought for the thousandth time, and had some say in his own life.
But at least he had Mattie’s letter, and reading it over again and again until he almost had it memorized made him feel closer to her. Dear cousin Mattie, who understood him and cared about him as no one else seemed to. So on this final day of Friday recitations, the last week of the school year, the poet’s words were alive in his heart:
“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For, thus friends absent speak.”
Thea Morgan could smile at him all day if she wanted to, and dream a hopeless dream that he would ever kiss her again. It was cousin Mattie who had his heart and always would.
Summer came too soon that year, and with the end of the school session, John Henry found himself alone again on his father’s farm with only the field hands and his horse for company. Most days, as soon as his chores were done and his piano practice was over, he’d be off riding somewhere, shooting at rabbits or fishing in the green waters of the Withlacoochee. But wherever he’d gone to spend the days, he was always home again for his evening devotional at his mother’s bedside.
It was there by his mother’s side that he celebrated his fifteenth birthday, while Alice Jane lay coughing with the consumption that racked her ravaged body. And though the August day was sweltering, even the heat of the south Georgia summer didn’t seem to warm her anymore, and she shivered as she lay under a heavy quilt.
“I am so sorry, my dear,” she said breathlessly, “I should have planned a party for you . . .”
“Don’t be silly, Ma. What do I need a party for? I’m nearly a man now. Besides, who’d come all this way just to celebrate with me?” And though he tried to make his voice sound light and uncaring, there was something wistful in it. Who would come out so far just to see him, anyhow? Only Sam Griffin maybe, and Sam was busy helping out in his father’s general store that summer, where he was no doubt filling his mind with thoughts of vigilantes and other town-boy excitements.
“Nearly a man . . .” Alice Jane echoed. “Look at you! My sweet boy, so grown up. I am glad there is so much McKey in you . . .” She reached her hand to his face, fair and freckled from the summer sun, then touched his sandy hair, threaded with traces of reddish-gold.
He did look some like his mother’s side of the family, that was true, with the McKey’s Scots-Irish coloring and clear china-blue eyes, the graceful gait and aristocratic bearing. But the rest of him was all Holliday, with his father’s high cheekbones and squared jaw, his peaked hairline and hair-trigger temper.
“I do have something for you, though,” she whispered, “a birthday gift.”
“W
hat gift, Ma?” he asked, as his gaze went quickly around the little room, falling on washstand and chair, wardrobe and trunk before settling back on the quilt-covered bedstead. “I don’t see any presents.”
“Your gift isn’t here. It’s back in Griffin. I wanted you to have it as part of your inheritance from my father’s estate. The money may do you good one day. You remember Indian Creek, your Grandfather McKey’s plantation?”
“Sure, Ma, I remember.” How could he ever forget? Indian Creek had been like paradise to his childish mind, and at the mention of it, he could almost taste the Muscadine grapes that grew on the arbor, almost feel the breeze blowing over the endless acres of cotton and corn and sugar cane. Paradise lost, he thought, like everything else he loved. Like his mother, who was dying.
“I tried to keep some of the plantation for you,” she went on, struggling for breath, “but all that’s left now are the house lots in town and the Iron Front . . .”
“The Iron Front?”
“It is . . . a business building . . . my father invested in it . . .” her voice broke then, torn by a coughing fit, and John Henry pulled the covers closer around her.
“Don’t talk now, Ma,” he said gently. “You can tell me later.” Or never, he thought with a shudder. What did he care about a building, anyhow? Even Indian Creek Plantation wouldn’t make up for his mother’s fading life, or his own frustrated one.
“Yes,” she whispered, “later . . .” and she closed her eyes. “Happy Birthday, my dearest . . .”
“Thank you, Ma,” John Henry said. And as he bent to kiss her cool damp brow, his heart repeated her words, “Happy Birthday . . .”
The one pleasure that he could offer her in her failing days was the piano music she so loved, though she was too weak to play for herself anymore.
“You play for me, John Henry,” she would whisper in her breathless voice. “I do love to hear you play.” So he would open the sheet music that she had taught him and stumble through Schubert and Liszt. But as the days passed and September and Indian Summer came on, Alice Jane no longer had the strength to ask him to play, or even to listen, and the music ended altogether.
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