Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  But it must be said: My brother’s incautious dealings with women were his only failing. He had stayed at home to help our father, while most men got to go out courting, marry the girl they wanted, and take her to bed on their own farms. Could you really blame a bachelor for having secret women? A grown man has needs.

  But he never complained about that or anything, though our father was not an easy man to work for, anything but. Our father never praised us, only noticed when we did something wrong. After the duel incident, he had asked my brother to explain, and when he would not (to spare the lady’s reputation, I suppose), our father sent him out to shovel shit out of the pit of the latrine and bury it, a hateful task. But my brother did not complain even about that, though he had to leave his clothes up in the barn and scrub himself repeatedly with cold water and hard soap before our mother would let him in the house.

  Now he was cold clay and washed for the last time. Someone brought a wagon, and Dr. Jarrett and two men loaded him in, everyone silent and respectful now. Slow as a dirge, Jarrett walked the wagon horse to my mother’s house, my horse walking alongside. I had my brother’s pistol and my own crossed in my belt, and I was itching for the chance to use them both.

  We carried him into my mother’s house, and she fainted at the sight of him, as did our youngest sister, who was delicate. My aunt and other sisters screamed and wept. But they got the dining room table cleared, and we laid him out properly.

  Jarrett offered to give sleeping powders to my poor weeping mother and sisters, and I had no choice but to trust him, wretched traitor though he was. But I sat up with them awhile after they slept to make sure he had not poisoned them.

  I had never hated anyone, not specifically at least. Our father had raised us all to hate slave-owners in general, along with the criminals of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis and his lot, though I knew them only from their photos in the papers. Hating from a distance is a different thing and much more calm.

  But now I hated Martha Cairnes with a hatred that was quite particular. I was not sure I could let her live, and for that reason I left both guns with my mother and took myself home.

  MRS. AYRES

  Farmer’s Wife

  I WAS AT THE woodstove, getting supper on for Mr. Ayres. He would be coming down directly from the barn and liked his supper hot. He was always cross unless I had it ready from the second he sat down. I used to hate that, but after thirty years of matrimony, well, it wears a person down. Some things you just got used to, I guess.

  I heard a knock on the screen door and knew it must be someone else, a neighbor dropping in, looked like. Sure enough, it was Martha Cairnes, from the next farm south, poor girl. She had been a good friend to my daughter when they were both growing up, but I did not suppose they had seen each other much lately. My girl had married right well and had a fine place of her own and two little sons, though she was hoping for a girl next time to help around the house. Folks used to say that she was plain, and they always made out Martha Jane to be the prettiest girl around. Everyone thought she would make a good match. Well, it showed you how much some folks knew.

  Of course it was a shame how things had gone for Martha Jane. The things folks said about her, shaw! A person hardly knew what she should think. Well, you never knew about some people, did you? The Cairnes family, so proud, with their big farms and tall white houses, look at them now. But I was a Christian, and I tried to keep an open mind. So I opened the door to her.

  “Hello, my dear. Is everything all right? And what a nice suit that is. Such a good blue. I like a good blue, don’t you? Come in and rest your feet.”

  I did not mention what I really meant, that she had kept her girlish figure despite everything. That’s what made the suit look well on her. My girl Mary never managed that, what with cooking all the time and getting with child again so fast. Living in the kitchen, that’ll make you fat. I went back to turn the bacon browning on the stove.

  Next time I thought to glance at her, she was still standing up, holding onto the back of a chair with a tight grip. She looked like she had been crying and was maybe crying now.

  “Why, Martha Jane. Whatever is the matter, dear? Won’t you sit down?”

  She seemed to collect herself. “I’ve come to speak to Asbury. Is he at home?”

  Asbury was our younger son, and he had stayed with us to help his father out around the place, dear child. But today of course he had gone out for the parade.

  “He’s still to town, but he should be along right soon for supper. Are you all right, dear?”

  “Yes,” she said softly and seemed to waver as she stood.

  I put the bacon on a plate to drain and set it in the oven with the biscuits so it would stay hot. I threw some extra lard into the bacon pan, and when it was hot, I dropped in the balls of apple dough I had already made for fritters. That was Mr. Ayres’s favorite treat of a Saturday night. I moved the coffee kettle to the hottest spot on the stove because he liked his coffee piping and didn’t mind a little burn.

  “Did you eat already, dear?” I thought to ask her, since there really was enough.

  She nodded and looked at me, her eyes shining too bright. “How nice it is in here.”

  I wondered if she had fever and went to feel her forehead, but it was cool enough.

  “Do sit and rest your feet,” I said again, and finally she sat on a hard chair.

  I tried to cheer her up. “It’s not always so nice in here. There’s the rheumatism in the cold, unless you have good fires. I like a good fire of an evening, don’t you? It’s comforting.”

  I went on to tell her about my Mary, how well she was and what fine boys she had and that she was expecting a third child, a girl this time, she hoped. Sometimes I paused a little, hoping Martha Jane would say something. But she just said “yes” and “oh,” and I gave up expecting company from her.

  Boots stamped outside the door, and Mr. Ayres came in, bringing in the evening chill. He had on a threadbare sweater I sometimes tried to take away from him, it was such a disgrace, but he refused to give it up, said he was attached to it. He hung up his old hat, and his poor bald head shone white in the lamplight. But his face was brown and cracked from a long life out of doors.

  With a start he seemed to notice our visitor. “Why, neighbor, what has troubled you, to call this time of night?”

  She blinked quickly. “Why, hello, Mr. Ayres. Is Asbury with you? I’ve only come to speak to him about a particular matter.”

  I could not help it—I bristled at the airs she took. A particular matter? Why couldn’t she speak like anyone? But Mr. Ayres was generous to a fault, and he spoke to her kindly.

  “Well, that ye may, I’m sure. He’s overdue for his supper.”

  He gave a quick glance toward the stove as if to make sure food was coming, and when I set the plate in front of him, he hunched over it and ate like I had starved him for a week.

  Martha stayed on at the table, and I went on trying to get her into conversation. I asked about her mother and Richard. But all she said was, “Both quite well.”

  “And your brother has a wife now, doesn’t he?”

  This subject seemed to distress her, though I did not know why it should, really. Her brother had married a fine young lady, a Nelson, one of her cousins, and he had built a house across the lane from his mother’s place. But Martha had tears sliding down her cheeks, and she did not even brush them off.

  Mr. Ayres finished his supper and drank his milk. “Has he got the house finished? I should look in on him and see if he needs help. Is he going to dig himself another well?”

  “Why, I’m not sure,” she said, taking a jagged breath. But that was all.

  “Don’t expect he’ll have much trouble in that spot, what with the hill and all. Well, I’ll be off,” he said and clumped with weary steps to the stairs. I heard them creak as he climbed up.

  He would need help with his boots, now that the rheumatism had gotten in his hands.

  �
�You’ll excuse me, I’m sure,” I said to Martha and took off my apron.

  But I heard hooves hitting in the lane and turned to fill another plate. “That’ll be Asbury. I’ll leave you with him for a bit, if you don’t mind.”

  I got all the way upstairs and had pulled off one of Mr. Ayres’s boots, when I heard shouting downstairs. Mr. Ayres and I both lifted our heads to listen. It sounded like Asbury.

  “You better go see what that’s about,” Mr. Ayres said wearily. Lifting his shaggy eyebrows, he gave me a look that said neighbors who showed up at bedtime were quite rude.

  “After I get the other boot.” I reached for it, but the shouting got louder.

  “Best go now,” he said.

  Going down the stairs was harder now than going up. My knees hurt every time one of them had to take all of my weight, and it was a while before I got down.

  Now I started to make out what Asbury was shouting.

  “M-m-mother!” he bawled.

  Martha was on her feet again, and she said something shrill I could not make out.

  Asbury was stuttering so bad, he almost couldn’t get it out. “Wh-wh-what does it matter? G-g-good God! You sh-shot him d-d-down just like a hog!”

  I rushed into the kitchen fast as I could go. “What’s that you’re saying, son?”

  His cheeks flushed red—he had not come all the way into the kitchen, one foot still on the stoop outside, and he seemed to swell to fill the doorway, vessels bulging in his face. He pointed a thick hand at Martha.

  “She sh-shot a man not an hour since. I s-saw it all at the hotel. She sh-shot him and she sh-shot him and she sh-shot him d-dead!”

  Martha raised her voice, face flushed. “I’ve only come to ask you if they carried him inside. Is he inside or still on the cold ground? Tell me quickly, and I will be gone.”

  I gaped at her, terrified, and whirled around and clattered back upstairs, calling for Mr. Ayres. When I told him what Asbury had said, he stared at me like I had gone mad.

  In a second he had thudded down the stairs in one boot, shaking the house frame, me after him. “What? What’s that you’re telling, son?” my husband cried.

  “She’s a m-m-murderer. She k-k-killed a m-man not an hour since. I t-tell you, he’s lying d-dead at the hotel!”

  Mr. Ayres took hold of Martha’s arms and shoved her back into the chair. He did not turn to look at Asbury. “Son, run to Mrs. Cairnes and tell her she’s got to come and take her daughter home. Take the horse and be quick. The officers will look for her, and when they find she isn’t there, they’ll come here, and we don’t want them. We’ve done nothing wrong. Now, you go on.”

  The screen door banged, and Asbury was gone.

  “Forgive me,” Martha said. “I’ll just walk back the way I came.”

  I wanted to slap her for having sat by me so calm, not letting on!

  Mr. Ayres held up his big hand and blocked the door. “No, you won’t. I’ll keep you here until your mother comes. I have a thing or two to say to her about all this, young lady!”

  None of us spoke after that, and it felt like an hour before Richard and George Andrew Cairnes burst in. Richard moved in jerks and coughed, and even George Andrew’s solemn face looked wild as they stepped to either side of Martha and faced us.

  “Where is your mother?” Mr. Ayres demanded, standing back.

  Richard coughed and choked but sounded pleased. “She’s gone to bed. She fainted in a heap when Asbury told her.”

  Abruptly Martha turned and walked out the door, and George Andrew and Richard tumbled after, barely keeping up. They must have brought horses. I could hear the bridles clinking in the dark, and one horse sighed, flapping its nostrils.

  Martha’s voice rose clear and strong through the screen door. She was still on about the man she killed. “Richard! Have they taken him into the house?”

  Richard snorted in the dark. “Taken who? He’s gone to his reward. It was in fine style, too, you did the thing. You didn’t mince a word. Just blam! You put the fear of God into those Yankee saps, I’ll tell you that.”

  “But what of him? Will he live?” she cried shrilly. “Have they taken him inside?”

  For a minute I almost felt sorry for her, poor mad wight.

  Richard’s voice was hoarse with impatience. “Oh, calm yourself, woman. We have to figure where we’re going to hide you. What do you think, G. A.? Baltimore?”

  “What about the Baileys’ in Virginia?”

  “Yes, that’s first-rate,” said Richard. “We can set off in the morning.”

  Martha must have started to walk back alone in the pitch black, because they both cried out. “Hey! Come get on your horse!”

  Mr. Ayres had had enough. He flung the door open. “Go home now and leave us be!”

  “Yes, sir,” Richard called.

  But as they walked their horses off, I heard Richard laugh and crow.

  “Not one of those damn Yanks will sleep tonight!”

  II.

  Martha Jane Cairnes

  1865

  SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1865, dawned fine, yellow sun and leaves beginning to unfurl, and I decided it was time to take the legless man onto my back. Not a man really, more of a boy, sixteen, but still a Rebel soldier, one of Jubal Early’s men, who was marched up from his home in Horse Pasture, Virginia, wounded, and left for dead. He had been well enough to travel for some months, but with no safe way to get across the Union lines. Virginia had seen the worst, parts of it burned to ashpit, and the things you heard had happened there did not bear thinking of—twenty acres of dead Rebels left unburied at Fort Harrison, small boys caught spying and dragged behind horses till their heads came off, and how many hundred thousand men put in the ground?

  But thank God the truce was signed six days ago, and General Grant had said the Rebels might go home. A few generals were still fighting farther south. But a neighbor had promised to get the boy as far as Baltimore and on the train, and he planned to leave today.

  I dressed the boy in one of my father’s suits, the legs stitched closed, and my father’s second-best hat, though it was too big and rested on his ears. I was supposed to wait for help to get him to the cart, but with no men on the place, there were just some things you had to do yourself.

  “There now, Mr. Bailey, you climb on,” I said and turned my back to him as he sat on the bed. “Go on, grab me around the neck like I’m a sack of oats.”

  “Don’t want to hurt you, Miss,” he said and clasped me tight.

  I staggered to my feet, grasping his arms to stop them from choking me. A man’s weight is all above the legs, and he hung like the anchor of an iron-sided ship. Through my skirts I felt his stumps cling to my hips. Before the war, if any man had come so close to me, someone might have had to take a gun to him.

  “Forgive me, Miss Cairnes,” he murmured in my ear with hot, dry lips, as if determined to point out the liberties his stumps were taking with my hips. He must have turned his head to get around my pinned-up hair, and it gave me goose bumps. He had sometimes gazed at me with moony eyes as he lay in the bed, more and more as he got well, and I had had enough of it.

  “It’s nothing, Mr. Bailey,” I gasped, and it was true, compared to all I had already done for him. When my brother Richard brought him home with two others wrapped in bloody blankets, we had to hide them in the attic, dress their wounds, and carry chamber pots in our own hands so the servants wouldn’t know too much. The first one died the first night here, the second the next day. With no freedmen on the place, I had to help Richard bury them in a back pasture, jumping on the shovel to drive it in the dirt so hard it broke one of my boot soles, mud to the waist before we got them in the ground.

  But we had to do it secretly, because you couldn’t even feed a Rebel then. The farm was close enough to Gettysburg to hear the guns, but six miles inside Maryland, and under military rule, “Aid and Comfort to the Enemy” could have put us all in jail. Men we knew had ridden out at night to burn railroad
bridges and stop Union troop trains passing through, and Lincoln had sent nine hundred Union soldiers to subdue this county alone. He suspended habeas corpus and let them arrest without charge, and when the legislature threatened to secede, he threw them all in jail, not wanting the Confederacy north of Washington.

  My father was descended from John Jay, who had signed the Constitution, and he took Lincoln’s breaches of it as a personal offense. The worst was in the first months of the war, one hot August day when he heard Lincoln had authorized seizure of Rebel property—including the farm of my father’s dead brother, now owned by his son, Sam, who had ridden south to join Lee’s cavalry. Outraged, my father galloped to a meeting in the county seat, Bel Air, and died of apoplexy on the way. Which meant my brother Richard could not follow Sam, because the farm was his, and Federals could have taken it the day he went.

  But we also had first cousins on the Federal side. Bob Cairnes had once played Joseph in the Christmas pageant, while I was the Virgin Mary, holding a doll, and Bob had his thigh shattered by a Rebel sharpshooter at Gettysburg. Billy Cairnes was epileptic from a fall down a corn shaft, could drop into a fit if we played tug-of-war, and was now dead of dysentery in a Union camp. Closest to us was Henderson Kirkwood, the kind of mild fellow who used to help the youngest tie hooks on their fishing lines when they fished in his parents’ pond. Henderson had joined the advance at Chancellorsville and had half his chest blown off, while nearby, Sam (whose hooks he used to tie) was captured from the Rebel ranks. And the night after the truce was signed, Richard had ridden out and not come back. We had no idea where he was or if he had been buried in some pasture miles away.

  NOW NO ONE was there to stop me. My mother was at church to ready it for Easter services, and my mother’s old servant Creolia was churning butter on the kitchen porch. I could hear the steady thump-thump of the churn as I lurched down the attic stairs, traversed the hallway on the second floor, down the broad staircase to the front door, across the porch, and down four steps to the lawn, my broken boot sole flapping. The cart was waiting in the lane, a shaggy pony in the shafts, and Mr. Bailey grunted as he grasped the rail to hoist himself inside.