Southern Son

by Victoria Wilcox

  “Christmas,” John Henry said, then he lay back down and closed his eyes against the thought. He had hoped to go home to Georgia for the three-week winter break, maybe even getting a chance to see Mattie while he was there. But the cost of the trip—forty dollars for a round-trip steamboat passage—was a needless expense, according to his father. Better to save the money for his room and board for the next session of school than squander it on vacation travels. But being away all those months still, clear until June, seemed like forever. Especially now, with every moment a long painful eternity.

  “It’ll pass,” DeMorat said as he picked up his hat and headed for the door. “And when it does, I’ll be ready to finish your training. We’ve still got all that gaming to do, you know—and the ladies to meet, of course. Then he turned from the doorway and pulled something from his coat pocket, tossing it to John Henry: a silver flask with a stopper chained to it.

  “What’s this for?” John Henry asked.

  “Hair of the dog that bit you,” DeMorat replied. “The only known cure for drinking too much liquor is drinking a little more. Cheers.”

  As his footsteps echoed down the wooden stairs like pistol shots ringing off the walls, John Henry pulled the stopper from the liquor flask. The smell of the whiskey made his stomach grow queasy again, but he held his breath and took a sip anyway. Nothing could make him feel any worse than he already did, and he’d try anything that might make him feel better. Then he dropped the flask to the floor, groaned, and pulled the bed pillow over his head. Debauchery, he thought, wasn’t near what it was made out to be.

  The whiskey helped some, lessening the pain in his head and settling his shattered nerves. But the queasiness stayed through supper and into the next morning, and the very thought of drinking more than a sip at a time was repulsive. So when DeMorat came back around a few days later offering to show him more of Philadelphia’s night life, John Henry nearly declined—and only went with trepidation. He would never go on a binge again, he told himself, gingerly nursing the same one glass of whiskey all night. But drinking it slow like that, one careful sip at a time, was enough to give him the pleasant liquor light-headedness without the humiliation of puking in the street or the pain of the hangover the next day.

  Moderation also left him with enough wits about him to enjoy the variety of pastimes the Philadelphia taverns advertised. Billiards came to him easy enough, and he soon became expert at the challenging table game called Bagatelle, using a cue stick to shoot small marble balls into a series of target holes on a decorated board. And though Philadelphia wasn’t much known for card playing since the days when the Quaker founders had frowned on all forms of gambling, there were still plenty of card games around, including one John Henry had never seen before. It was called Faro, played on a table of green wool baize patterned with a suit of Spades where the players laid down their bets while a dealer pulled cards to see who’d won. He watched the Faro game, made a little money on Spanish Monte, and a little more when he and DeMorat found a poker game at a riverfront saloon. And as long as he went easy on the whiskey, staying only mildly inebriated, he enjoyed the nightlife immensely.

  But his vacation wasn’t all leisurely fun. He did study some, reviewing his notes from the fall session and looking over the winter session material to come, in case his father happened to ask how he’d spent his free time. And he made sure to go to church on Christmas Sunday morning, as his mother would have wanted him to, even though he’d been out gaming and drinking for most of Christmas Eve. But if the other members of the congregation of Old Saint George’s Methodist Church smelled the whiskey still lingering on his breath, they didn’t mention it. It was Christmas, after all, and the season of peace on earth and good will toward men.

  It was hard to get back to work again when January came and the winter session of school began. He had gotten so used to staying up past midnight and sleeping in until noon that the eight o’clock clinic hour seemed more like the middle of the night. And the weather didn’t help any, snowing heavily and dropping to a low of five degrees, then warming up just enough to melt the snow and leave a slippery sheeting of ice on the cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks. The river froze solid above the Schuylkill Dam, and steamships in the Delaware had to maneuver around the ice. The newspapers were filled with stories of ice injuries: sprained ankles and strained backs, broken limbs and head concussions, and the tragedy of a boy on Race Street who fell to his death while leaning out a third-story window trying to catch an icicle. Yet the locals said it was a mild winter, all things considered, and John Henry wondered what bad weather was like in Philadelphia.

  But other than cursing the ice as he slipped and slid and shivered his way from his boarding house to school every morning, he didn’t have time to ponder much on the climate, for his professors seemed more determined than ever to overload their students with work. There were exams at the end of every lecture week, and case presentations to be made, and the endless line of clinic patients to be treated. And come March, when the senior students would be graduated and gone, the clinic work would double.

  Spring came on all at once, with the ice in the Schuylkill River thawing out overnight and the riverbanks turning floody. But the warming temperatures brought the tree-lined streets into a bloom of green leaves and flowers, and made John Henry suddenly homesick for Georgia, where the air would be lazy-sweet already with a smell of honeysuckle to it and the azaleas would be blooming pink and white and wild among the pines. And best of all, Mattie was in Georgia, waiting for him.

  Chapter Nine

  VALDOSTA, 1871

  THERE WAS AN OLD PROVERB THAT SAID YOU COULD NEVER GO HOME again, and it had never before made sense to John Henry. But as the Atlantic & Gulf Line Railroad chugged along through the Georgia piney woods and steamed to a stop at the depot in Valdosta, he suddenly understood what it meant. Though he knew that Valdosta was a small place, with its few hundred inhabitants and fewer businesses, he had never before realized how very primitive it was. There were no paved streets in Valdosta, no sturdy brick sidewalks, no horse-drawn trolley cars going anywhere, and no place to go if there were. There were no gas street lamps to light the green darkness of the country nights, and no public waterworks to bring bath and drinking water into the rustic frame cottages where the smell of the outhouses stewing in the summer heat nearly overwhelmed the scent of the honeysuckle. And as far as John Henry was concerned, Valdosta was not only miles away from anywhere worth being, it was years away, as well.

  He had a hard time explaining his dissatisfaction to his father, for Henry had seen Philadelphia, too, and thought it crowded and noisy. But Henry had only been a visitor there, come and gone in a week’s time. John Henry had spent ten months of his life there and had grown to enjoy the bustle of the place, with its theaters and restaurants, its music halls and saloons. And that was the problem: he’d grown up in Philadelphia. But now that he was home he was being treated like a child again, expected to obey his father’s every whim.

  Henry had his life all planned out for him, of course. In addition to the preceptorship he’d be serving under Dr. Frink, there was work to be done in the Carriage and Buggy business and plenty to do around the home place as well. His father wanted the horses groomed, the barn cleaned out, the buggy polished until the brass fittings shone like mirrors. There were bird droppings to be cleaned from the window sills, squirrel nests to be swept out of the attic, and loose roof shingles to be nailed down before another wind shook them free. And though there were still paid darkies around to do the hard labor, he wouldn’t have been surprised if his father had asked him to clean out the privy, as well. But when he made any mention of the fact that he was halfway through dental school and practically a doctor already and ought to be above such work, Henry only gave him more to do. Responsibility, he called it, and gratitude as well, as though John Henry had never shown either.

  Mostly, though, he just wanted to sleep. The long days of dental school and longer nights
of studying had left him worn out, and even Rachel commented that he seemed awful tired. It was probably the change in climate that was causing it, she said, being home again where the weather was warm and languid-like. Rocking chair weather, she called it, and enough to make a body feel downright fatigued. His father just thought he was being lazy.

  Rachel was right about the weather being warm that summer, even for south Georgia. The temperature stayed near one-hundred degrees for five straight weeks, hardly coming down much at night, and folks slept with their windows wide open, letting in flies and mosquitoes along with whatever cooling breezes might come by. But uncomfortable as the nights were, the days were worse—especially for the town dentist and his apprentice, working all day in a stuffy dental office and properly dressed in wool suits and high-collared shirts. By the end of the day, John Henry was sweating like a field hand and wishing he were down at his old swimming hole skinny dipping in the green waters of the Withlacoochee. And imagining himself there only made him more miserable still. For the swimming hole was where he’d taken Mattie all those years ago when her family had stayed with his at Cat Creek, and thus far he hadn’t yet figured a way to get up to see her, though he’d looked forward to the visit all year long.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t just up and announce that he was heading off for a few days to see his sweetheart, as their romance was still a secret as far as he knew. Nor could he leave his preceptorship with Dr. Frink since his attendance was a required part of his dental education. So until he could come up with a reasonable excuse for leaving work and town both, all he could do was cool his heels and curse the heat—and in the end, it was the heat that made his trip possible.

  Dr. Frink and his family were originally from the town of Jasper, up towards the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia. So when the weather turned torrid and stayed that way too long, Dr. Frink decided to close down his office and remove his family back to the mountains for a spell, and John Henry was suddenly free to make a trip of his own—and he soon settled on the perfect excuse to make to his father.

  “Uncle John’s been wantin’ to know how my dental studies are comin’,” he said one evening after supper, as his father sat out on the front porch sipping at a lemonade and watching the fireflies in the yard. “I reckon I could use the time to go on up to Atlanta and tell him all about it.” And stop off in Jonesboro to see Mattie as well, he thought to himself.

  “I reckon you could,” his father said, “but your Uncle John’s not in Atlanta just now. He’s taken the family up to Tennessee to visit your cousin George’s wife’s kin. They’re havin’ a big first birthday party for that new baby of theirs. A good excuse to get out of the city, sounds like to me, away from the heat and the smell both. You think one outhouse is bad in the summer? Atlanta’s got thousands of ‘em, and street garbage as well. Glad I live away out here in the country when the weather is steamy like this.”

  But John Henry wasn’t happy to be stuck in the country, nor was he going to be so easily distracted from his plans.

  “Well, I suppose I should at least pay a call on Uncle Rob,” he said with a sigh, as though that were the last thing he wanted to do. “He was mighty good to me that summer I stayed in Jonesboro. Seems right to thank him for his generosity.”

  “Seems like the thanks is a long time in comin’,” Henry replied, giving him a curious look. “What’s got you so mannerly all of the sudden?”

  John Henry shifted uneasily under his father’s steady gaze. “Well, I reckon I’m just growin’ up, Pa, and recognizin’ my responsibilities.”

  He chose the words carefully, knowing that the one thing Henry couldn’t deny him was the chance to be responsible. Still, his father took a little long making up his mind, not answering until he’d drunk down the whole lemonade.

  “All right,” Henry said finally, “I’ll send a letter to your Uncle Rob, let him know you’re comin’ for a visit. But you make sure to be a good houseguest up there, help out around the place and all. You know Rob hasn’t been doin’ well since the War. I reckon he could use an extra pair of man’s hands, with all those girls he’s sired. Good thing he joined the Catholics when he got married. He’s practically raisin’ a convent up there.”

  John Henry smiled a reply, but it wasn’t for his father’s attempted humor. It was the other thing Henry had said, about his Uncle Rob needing an extra pair of hands around the place. For that was the first time, to John Henry’s recollection, that his father had ever called him a man.

  His father, it seemed, wasn’t the only one who noticed he was no longer a boy—as he discovered when he finally arrived in Jonesboro and Mattie’s little sisters met him at their front door, giggling.

  “What’s that on your face, Cousin John Henry?” Marie asked. “Did a ‘coon lose its tail?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Theresa replied, “that’s just a mustache. Like Pa’s, only scraggly.”

  “Well it looks like a ‘coon to me,” Marie said again. “And it don’t look right on John Henry.”

  But before he could take too much offense at their girlish chatter, Mattie stepped up behind them and said with ladylike kindness, “Why, I think it makes him look real handsome. Welcome home, John Henry.”

  The afternoon light coming in through the open door shone like gold on her auburn hair. And though it had been nearly two years since he’d last seen her at Cousin George’s wedding in Atlanta, suddenly it seemed that no time had passed at all.

  “‘Afternoon, Mattie,” he said, his heart warming at the sight of her. “How’ve you been?”

  It was a needless question, considering all the letters they had exchanged since he went away to school. But he couldn’t very well say what he was feeling—that seeing her again was like coming up for air after staying under water too long—without embarrassing them both in front of her whole family. So for the time being, pleasantries would have to do.

  “I’ve been well, Cousin,” she replied politely. “And we’re all so happy you could come to pay us a little visit. Why, I can’t remember how long it’s been since you were last in Jonesboro.”

  Her little sisters, however, were not quite as schooled in the social graces as Mattie was, and Catherine blurted out: “Of course you remember, Mattie. Last time John Henry was here, everybody was talkin’ about his tryin’ to blow up that Courthouse. His Pa made him leave town and come on up here . . .”

  “That’s enough, Catherine!” Mattie replied firmly. Then she put her hand on John Henry’s arm, “Never mind her, honey. She lives for dramatic moments and we have so few of them here in little Jonesboro. And it is, truly, very good to see you again.” And the way she looked up at him, her eyes filled with more than just family affection, made him forget Catherine’s careless words. “Now why don’t you put your things down here in the hall and come on into supper? Lucy and Roberta and I’ve been cookin’ a nice welcome home meal for you.”

  Then, as if overhearing them, his Aunt Mary Anne called from the kitchen at the back of the house, “Suppertime, children! And don’t you let that front door slam behind you, John Henry!”

  “Don’t worry Mother, he’s all grown up now!” Mattie called back, and John Henry looked at her quizzically.

  “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

  But Mattie didn’t answer, only laughing a little as she slipped her arm through his and led him into the dining room. And John Henry decided that, whatever else was said, the only thing that mattered was that Mattie had said he looked handsome.

  The old Celtic cross hanging on the wall over the dining table had been given to Mattie’s mother by her own mother, who’d received it as a wedding gift when she was married long ago in Ireland, and Aunt Mary Anne revered it as though it were some sort of saintly relic. Taking her place at the far end of the long trestle table across from her husband, she always stopped a moment to bow her head toward the cross, a quiet gesture of faithfulness. Then she would settle herself onto her slat back chair, skirts draped
around her and hands clasped on her overturned supper plate, and lead her family in the blessing on the food.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” she would say in her lilting Irish-accented drawl, “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive through thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

  The family would say the holy words along with her, then cross themselves properly before she would allow them to turn their plates over and begin the serving. But that was as far as the solemnity went, for as soon as folded hands were free to pass the bowls of rice and buttered squash and biscuits with gravy, her husband would take over as head of the table and the laughter would begin. For Robert Kennedy Holliday was as lighthearted as Mary Anne Fitzgerald Holliday was serious-minded, always ready with a joke or a funny story about someone in town—which Aunt Mary Anne tolerated with Christian patience and long-suffering.

  “Now Rob, dear,” she would say in gentle admonishment, “the Blay-locks are our neighbors. We mustn’t talk about them unkindly.”

  “It’s not unkindness,” he would answer between mouthfuls of his supper, “just pointin’ out the truth, that’s all. If a man can’t tell the difference between a bottle of liquor and a bottle of castor oil until he’s drunk too much of one of them, I reckon maybe he’s already had too much of the other. Or ought to build himself a new privy closer to the house so’s he can get there before having to admit his mistake publicly. Pass the stewed prunes, please.”

  Though Mary Anne had tried for all the twenty-odd years of her marriage, she had never been able to temper Uncle Rob’s sense of humor. So it was surprising to John Henry that his uncle seemed less jovial now, though his father had mentioned something about Uncle Rob’s not being in the best of health. He did look more worn than usual, tired-out maybe, or troubled.