Southern Rapture

by Jennifer Blake

  "I can't do that, you know. Your aunt wouldn't like it. People might even say I did it for Splendora."

  "You can have Splendora."

  He was so stubborn but full of his own guile. Lettie tried a different tack, allowing her voice to rise with annoyance. "You think I would marry you for money, any more than Sally Anne would take the colonel?"

  "I don't care why."

  "I can't do it."

  "You love me a little. You could love me more." To say the words gave him such ease that it hardly mattered how she answered. He had accepted the fact that she was not going to say what he wanted to hear. There had been a chance, a very slight chance, that she might, though the dark shadows under her eyes this morning had made him fear that her need was past, even if his was not. Now all he wanted was to see what she would say to his ingenuous pleas, to watch her face and judge what she really was like, how she really felt. And not to betray himself by suddenly snatching her out of her chair and into his arms on the floor, if it took every ounce of his willpower. There was a fragment of a poem running through his mind, from where he did not know.

  O Western wind, when will thou blow,

  That the small rain down can rain?

  "I might, but it wouldn't matter."

  "It would to me."

  Christ, that my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again!

  But, of course, she had never truly been in his bed. Would she ever be?

  "Please," she implored him. "Don't say any more."

  He stared at her for a long, considering moment. What was a pleasure for him was torment for her. He should have recognized it before. He gave an abrupt nod. "I won't, then, for now."

  His understanding was so unexpected that gratitude welled up inside her. On impulse, she leaned over and brushed his forehead with her lips. The curve of her breast pressed for an instant upon his shoulder and her knee touched his chest. That contact, brief as it was, sent a wave of desire flooding in upon her. She drew back as if from a hot stove. She met his gaze, her own despairing, and saw that his eyes were pools of stillness, guarded, protective.

  There was the scrape of a footstep at the door. "Well, well, teacher," Martin Eden drawled in lazy humor, "if this is the way you conduct class, when do I start lessons?"

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  13

  Guard yourself from the heat, my dear, not only for the sake of your health but because warm climates are known to weaken moral fiber.

  Lettie dropped her mother's letter on the table and propped her elbow beside it, rubbing her forehead with her fingertips. Lately, some of the comments in her family's letters struck her as being not only uninformed but ridiculous. They seemed to think the entire state of Louisiana was a disease-ridden marsh peopled by cruel, hot-tempered men who deserved to be ground under the heel as punishment for their crimes against humanity. The thought of Ranny, Samuel Tyler, or any of the men she passed in the street in Natchitoches in that guise was ludicrous. They were simply men who had used a feudal system sanctioned for hundreds of years to build a way of life. It was not their fault that industrial societies, such as England and New England, that no longer had anything to gain from such a system had decreed, suddenly, that it was base exploitation and must be ended. No reasonable man could deny the truth of that statement; likewise, no reasonable man could, or should, have expected people with millions invested in slavery to end the practice overnight. The war had been a tragedy, but what was happening now was an outrage. She saw that so clearly that she could not think why it had ever seemed otherwise. It was a measure, she supposed, of how much she had changed.

  That she had changed greatly, she knew well. The idea her mother had expressed concerning the climate was one she herself had accepted once. Not anymore. She had seen no moral laxity during her stay. The warm weather might encourage more interaction among people and allow them to venture farther from restraining supervision, but whatever happened came from the people themselves, not the heat. She should know.

  She ought to leave, nonetheless, to go back to Boston where she belonged. She wasn't doing any good, wasn't making any progress in finding Henry's killer. All the things that she had thought she would do—and that her sister and her brother-in-law continually harped upon—such as hounding the sheriff and exhorting him to greater efforts, she now saw as useless. What should be done instead, she could not tell. She had made no efforts for some time, not since the night on the ferry. Her only usefulness was in teaching, and she often wondered if there were others who could do it better, with more patience and concentration than she could summon lately.

  Lettie pushed the letter to one side and leaned back in her chair. She had heard from her mother, her sister, one or two cousins, and her best friend in the past two weeks, but the letter that Johnny had promised had not arrived. Aunt Em said not to worry, that he was getting settled, finding something to do with himself, making ready to send for his mother. He would write when he had his affairs in order. Still, it was troubling. She kept thinking of how quickly the Thorn had returned from hiding him, how quickly he had stripped off his disguise as an old woman. Nor could she forget the dangers that Johnny would have had to run to reach the state line. It wasn't that she actively doubted the Thorn. She was just uneasy and would be until she received word that Johnny was all right. She thought that Aunt Em, for all her confident air, was the same.

  The older woman had weathered the blood poisoning from the rooster's spur in fine form. The wound on her arm was still purplish, but it had healed nicely. She was back at her regular tasks, as well as being involved in putting up jars of the blackberries and plums that the children from the quarters picked and brought by the bucketful, or else making jelly and jam and cordial from the juice. She churned butter from the milk of a cow that had "freshened," or calved, and sold it to the townspeople who drove out for it, as well as for the buttermilk that was left from the process and the fresh eggs for which Aunt Em was famous. Her profit, she declared, was being eaten away by Ranny and Lionel, who insisted on a huge breakfast of biscuits and butter, eggs and ham, milk and fresh jam every morning. There was no heat in her complaints, however; she always beamed as she watched them eat.

  Food, cooking, planning what to eat, and eating it was so much a part of Aunt Em's daily routine that it wasn't surprising when she declared that the Fourth of July would be celebrated with a "fish fry." What was surprising to Lettie was that there would be a holiday declared at all. That was until Aunt Em pointed out with some tartness that many an ancestor of the people of the lower states had fought for their freedom from the British, too. Northerners, she said, had no monopoly on Independence Day.

  They converged on the riverbank early while the dawn coolness still lingered and the sun was just lifting a brow above the horizon. The early start was a bit perplexing until it dawned on Lettie that they were all expected to catch their own fish for the feast.

  Other than the Splendora household, which included Mama Tass and Lionel, there were the rest of the Tylers from Elm Grove, plus Martin Eden, who appeared to be squiring Sally Anne for the day; a full contingent of the military, with the colonel prominent among them; and even the tax collector, O'Connor.

  Lettie felt a bit sorry for the Irishman. No one seemed to have invited him or to have a liking for his company; he had just appeared as they were setting out. A more sensitive man would have stayed away, but it seemed that Splendora was one of the few places where the man was tolerated, and so he pushed in regardless.

  He was rather pathetic as he stood around the edges of first one group and then another, making a comment now and then but never really being drawn into the different conversations. He was pointedly snubbed by Samuel Tyler, who walked away whenever he approached, and once Sally Anne drew her skirts back as if he might contaminate them as he walked by. The soldiers exchanged quips with him, however, and Ranny smiled at him and offered him a fully rigged fishing pole. He took the pole with transparent gr
atitude though he only grunted his thanks.

  Red River was named for its rusty color, which came from the soil, washed from the surrounding fields and the iron ore hills farther north, that muddied it during the winter and spring runoffs. There was always a faint reddish tint to it, though it was less obvious in summer.

  Fishing the Red wasn't easy. They had moved upriver, away from Grand Ecore and the high bluffs nearby, bluffs from which a lovelorn Indian maiden was supposed to have leaped to her death. It was not the supposedly haunted location that caused them to seek other ground, however, but the problem in getting down to the water. The level of the river was fairly low in the section finally chosen, leaving here and there a shelving sandy bank to stand on. The edging of willow and sweet gum and dogwood trees mingled with hardwoods, all hung with gray rags of Spanish moss, gave some shade, but also made it difficult to move up and down and presented a hazard to getting a hook in and out of the water.

  The only person who elected not to wet a hook was Sally Anne's mother. The older woman spread a quilt for the youngest members of the party, Sally Anne's sister's two children, who were little more than crawling babies, and sat beside them flapping at gnats and mosquitoes with a leafy switch. The rest spread out along the water's edge, most of them wandering up and down surveying the possibilities of floating logs, crooks, bends, and stumps as "fishy" looking places, likely hiding places for fish. It seemed the best-looking ones were always the most inaccessible, either choked with trees or fronted by steep, muddy banks.

  Peter and Lionel, their faces narrow-eyed with concentration, settled down with a can of worms and a forked branch broken from a handy tree to receive their catch between them. They scowled and made hushing noises at everybody who came by in their anxiety that the scaled monster they sought would be scared away.

  Aunt Em and Mama Tass, veterans of bank fishing, had brought wooden buckets to sit on. They turned them bottom-up and sat down on them with businesslike determination. Samuel Tyler wandered away downriver, squinting from the sun to the tree shadows cast on the water and muttering to himself.

  The men in blue, or rather in pieces of their blue uniforms combined with whatever civilian clothes they happened to have, had hauled a wooden boat with a square prow and stern to the river. Three or four of them piled into it and poled up and down, tangling their lines, hooking each other's hats, and generally having a fine time.

  Lettie, with Ranny just along the bank below her and Martin, O'Connor, and Sally Anne above, settled down near where an uprooted tree trailed its still-green branches in the water. Ranny had shown her how to bait her hook, sliding a wiggling worm on the evil-looking barb without a trace of compunction. Her line was of black silk and the pole of bamboo cane cut from a veritable cane forest in back of the old blacksmith shop at Splendora. Some four feet or so from her hook, fastened to her line, was a piece of bobbing cork carved more or less in a sphere. It had been provided by Colonel Ward, another of the army's contributions to the outing, in addition to the boat, the usual lemons, and a pair of rubber ground cloths that would later become their tables when it was time to eat. Lettie, unsure of what to do with her fishing gear, watched as Ranny gave his hook and line a careless flip out into the water. She tried her best to do likewise.

  The sun crept higher in the sky. The day grew hotter. Flies buzzed around them. The whine of mosquitoes was an irritant, but it was even more nerve-wracking when they were silent since it meant the vicious little insects had found likely spots to sample their victims' blood.

  Now and then came a yell as someone's cork went under or they pulled in a gleaming sun perch or big blue gill. Sally Anne caught a grindle two feet long and several pounds in weight. It was fun to pull in, she said, but it wasn't worth the worm, being a trash fish full of tiny bones embedded in meat like cotton. Martin and Colonel Ward nearly came to blows over who was going to take it off her hook. Martin won the honor, though it was possible that the colonel, looking at the fish that resembled some prehistoric creature with teeth like a crosscut saw clamped around Sally Anne's line as it made grunting, grating noises, may have given in gracefully. By the time Martin had removed the hook and line, he was hot, flustered, and swearing. He threw the grindle, by that time thoroughly dead, into the bushes.

  A short time later, there came a loud grunting and squealing from the direction in which the fish had been thrown.

  Lettie swung around to look at Ranny, her eyes wide. "What's that?"

  "Not the grindle." He didn't look up from his cork.

  "What, then?"

  "Hogs."

  "Hogs?"

  "They clean up the mess. They like fish. Or anything else."

  "Ugh."

  He shrugged, giving her a smile. "Better than letting it lie there and smell."

  He had a point. Any fish not kept at least half-alive in water would soon spoil in the heat.

  The hogs trotted off. Quiet returned. Ranny caught a fish that glittered red and blue and gray. Lettie pulled up her line and looked at her worm. It was still there. Ranny caught another sun perch.

  Lettie sent him a frown. "Why are you catching fish and I'm not?"

  "You drowned your worm."

  It sounded like a terrible thing to have done, but it hardly seemed to matter since the poor thing was going to be eaten by a fish.

  "So?"

  "So put on another one."

  "This one still looks all right to me."

  "You," he said solemnly, "are not a fish. He needs it to be wiggling."

  She made a face. "It sounds like torture."

  "That's the way things are. Haven't you ever been fishing before?"

  "No," she said, her voice defensive.

  He gave her a slow grin. "Why didn't you say so? Put on a new worm."

  Lettie, her lips curled in disgust, stripped off the dead bait and carefully threaded a new, desperately wriggling specimen on her hook. Holding it in her fingers, she sent her teacher a pained look. "Now what?"

  "Put it in the water."

  "Right." She plopped the line and hook into the river.

  "Give him a little air now and then. Move your hook around."

  She obeyed his instructions and also the others he gave her at intervals, but it didn't help. After a time, she moved farther along the bank, closer to Martin. O'Connor seemed to be having about the same luck she was, for he shifted also, throwing his hook back in the water between Martin and Lettie.

  At a shout of triumph from Aunt Em, Lettie craned her neck in that direction. The older woman was pulling in a huge, slick, silvery gray fish that appeared to have whiskers.

  "Channel cat," the older woman called in answer to a faint question from somewhere beyond her. Aunt Em's skirt was nearly to her knees as she perched on her upturned bucket. Under it, she had on what looked to be a pair of men's trousers. Her head was covered by a battered old man's hat to keep off the sun. The outfit was immensely practical and looked just as comfortable.

  Lettie had worn her oldest skirt and shirtwaist and shabbiest shoes, but she still felt overdressed compared to the others. Even Sally Anne had on a faded and patched gown that fell short of her ankles.

  With a glance around to be sure no one was watching, Lettie rolled her sleeves up past her elbows and opened her collar wider for coolness. She unbuttoned the few buttons on her low shoes and kicked them off long enough to remove her stockings and put them in a rolled ball in her pocket. Then she put her shoes on again.

  The river flowed past with the sun glittering on its surface like billions of tiny flashing mirrors. It swirled sometimes into patterns, making little gurgling sounds, carrying bits of bark and leaves and spent tree blooms. A dragonfly, a beautiful insect of iridescent blue-green with black gossamer wings, landed on the end of Lettie's pole. A great white crane flapped by overhead with slow, majestic beats of its wings. Birds called back and forth in the trees around them. It was so calm and lovely, so peaceful there with nothing to do but watch a bit of floating cork.
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  Her cork! It was gone. She snatched at her pole, jerking it straight up. The line stretched taut for an instant, then, as the fish got off the hook, it snapped out of the water, flying up, reaching high, higher. The end of the black line struck a tree limb high above her to her left with the hook whirling. It caught. It hung.

  Getting a hook hung was nothing unusual from what Lettie could tell, but she had yet to see anyone, even young Peter, hang theirs in a treetop. Pink with annoyance and chagrin, Lettie yanked on her pole. Nothing happened. She thrashed it back and forth. The line whipped and vibrated and the tree limb shook up and down as if in a gale, but her hook did not come loose. Bits of green leaves and bark showered down on O'Connor, who looked up at her line caught on the tree limb above him. He had the effrontery to laugh.

  "It's blue gills we're fishing for, Miss Mason, not blue birds," he said.

  Lettie looked over her shoulder at Ranny, farther along the bank now and absorbed in removing another fish, this time a blue gill, from his hook. There was no help there at the moment. Turning back, she took her pole in both hands and gave it a tremendous pull toward her.

  The tree limb bent double. With a loud and sudden crack, the hook popped free. The limb flew up and the small tree thrashed. Something long and thick and writhing fell from a higher tree branch. It struck O'Connor on the shoulder, tumbled down his shirt front, then hit the ground with a heavy, slapping thud. The tax collector gave a hoarse yell.

  "Snake!"

  O'Connor jumped back, stumbling, cursing, dropping his pole. The snake righted itself and slid with a soft rustling into the water. O'Connor rounded on Lettie.