Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  “I suppose we’d better go about our business,” I said. “Good day, Mr. McComas.”

  He put a hand on the pony’s harness. “I’ll see you to wherever you’re going.”

  “I’m just off to visit a neighbor. Mr. Bailey will accompany me.”

  Nick didn’t glance at him, as if he knew exactly who he was and had granted me the right to help him anyway. “I need to visit all the nearby farms myself. I’ll ride along.”

  It was not a question, and I made no further effort to say no. At least he had not arrested me, not yet. I clucked the pony up as fast as it would go, the gray horse so close beside me, I could see Nick’s tall black boots without turning my head.

  The neighbor’s cherry trees were all in bloom, a froth of pink around the tall white house. The buggy he had managed to preserve from both armies stood by the walk, a horse between the shafts, and the neighbor came out in the yard, excited, red in the face. He was a thin man with sparse white hair, and he wiped his round eyeglasses nervously while Nick repeated the whole story about Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Booth. The neighbor professed his sorrow and alarm perhaps a shade too vehemently, maybe because his own boy had ridden south to Lee.

  “A shame,” he kept saying and rubbed his spectacles, looking confused and afraid.

  “The men responsible may be hereabouts. Have you seen anyone unusual?”

  “No, sir. No one unusual, why, not till this moment.” He gestured toward the buggy helplessly. “Thought I’d go to Baltimore to spend Easter with my daughter.”

  “Of course you can,” I cried, impatient with his explaining, as if he needed Nick’s permission to go anywhere.

  Nick nodded. “You’ll meet troops on every road.”

  The neighbor scurried in the house to get his bag. I had tied a bundle of clothes for Mr. Bailey, and I put it in the buggy.

  Nick stepped to the cart and offered Mr. Bailey his back. “Into the buggy, sir?”

  Mr. Bailey looked startled and tried to sound Yankee. “Why, thank you kindly.”

  Nick accomplished the shift with surprising grace, speaking to the boy in a low voice.

  When the boy was in the buggy, I climbed onto the running board and took his hand.

  “Now, write when you get there. And remember, give my love to Aunt Priscilla,” I said in light, lilting tones, though no such person existed.

  His eyes swam at me. “You haven’t heard the last of me. I don’t rightly know which place is more my home, my own or yours.”

  “You’ll know when you see your place.”

  Neither of us mentioned where that was, with the blue uniform in the corner of our eyes.

  The neighbor came fluttering out, banging his knee as he climbed in the buggy. Without saying goodbye he slapped the reins and rattled out the lane, and Nick mounted his horse but did not ride away. I climbed into the cart, grateful he had not stopped them from driving off. But why was he still here? Would he follow me home? Interrogate me about Richard’s whereabouts?

  But he only wheeled his horse and touched his battered hat.

  “Cousin, I’ll see you soon, I hope,” he called and galloped out the lane.

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMT that Nick kissed me, and I woke up happy, then guilty. I had been afraid of him the day before, and he might use that gun on Richard if the war went on. Richard was a hothead who would rather shoot a flock of songbirds than read a book, but he was still my brother. I got up and did my chores, and I tried not to think of Nick.

  A few days later, Lincoln’s body rolled across the county in its special train. Tim went missing for the day, though blacks were not allowed to congregate and had to spread themselves along the tracks. My mother announced that we would take the pony cart to watch it cross the Gunpowder on the reconstructed mile-long bridge once burnt in rage at this same president, and respectfully we dressed in black, arrived in good time, and joined the black-clad crowd, already dense along the riverbanks, and waited two hours in mounting heat.

  At last we saw smoke above the trees on the south shore, and the black-draped train chuffed into sight and onto the new bridge, the gray river shimmering below. Mrs. Lincoln was not onboard, having been too prostrate to make the trip, but the little coffin of their son had been dug up and put beside his father’s to ride home to Illinois. As the train reached us, you could hear sobs on every side—if not for Lincoln’s politics, then for the man, for the war, for all the young men dead. As it reached us, we saw stiff blue soldiers hanging from the cars weep unashamedly.

  Within a week, the new president made us even sorrier Lincoln was dead. Johnson seemed to think that Sherman’s methods were the best, and anyone with Rebel sympathies could still be rounded up and their land seized, especially those connected to John Wilkes Booth, who was still at large. One day a pack of men in blue rode in to ask where Richard was. I met them in the yard, relieved to see that I knew none of them.

  “My brother is very young,” I said, as my mother made fainting sounds from the porch. “He’s had to run this farm alone since our father died, with no men to help. He hopes to make a living distilling whiskey, and he’s gone to look for oak barrels.”

  Richard did hope to do that, though he hadn’t started yet.

  The officer in charge rode a big bay, its neck bent in a bow, opening its mouth against the bit while he reined it hard. The man was fair skinned with a stubborn Yankee face, his jaw like a shovel, but he gave off the air of one who thought himself the object of admiring eyes. He gazed around at the fallow fields, still unplowed. “He won’t distill much whiskey without grain. We’ll be back, and we’ll expect to see him then.”

  When the soldiers left, I found Tim in the barn, mending a harness for our one remaining ox, and together we began to struggle with the plow, ripping out chokecherries and milkweed in the fields along the county road, the ones the Yankees would see first. The ox balked, and Tim had to lead it, speaking softly in its big ears, while I stood on the plow to make it bite into the dirt.

  By dark even my bones hurt, and my feather bed felt hard. But the next day at dawn, we were back at work, and in a week we had the front fields turned and manured, wheat, rye, and barley seed scattered, and the first night it was in, a gentle rain pattered to help it set. When the grain was planted, we started on the field beside the house, where we set corn in rows, tomato plants between.

  ONE AFTERNOON A MAN in blue rode in the lane, surveying the fields. I saw him, sure it was the shovel-jawed captain, and ducked under the fence from the cornfield to the lawn, hiding my hands in my skirt pockets so he would not see my broken nails rimmed with grime.

  But as he rode closer, I saw that it was Nick on his gray Thoroughbred and felt myself flush. Standing still, I waited for him, composing myself.

  “I’m afraid you’ve missed my brother,” I said pleasantly. “He has business in town.”

  Nick put a finger to his lips. “Don’t say any more, you’ll perjure yourself.”

  He swung out of the saddle and handed me a dispatch, which announced that Booth had been caught by Federal cavalry in a Virginia barn and killed by a shot to the back of his head, the way he had killed Lincoln. It listed names of men arrested at or near the scene, some of them Harford Rifles, including G. Richard Cairnes of Jarrettsville. The blood that had swarmed to my skin minutes before now sank to my feet and seemed to pour into the ground. Nick took my arm.

  “Here, sit a minute.” He helped me to a lawn chair and crouched beside it. “Troops may come to possess the farm, but they can’t do it till he’s been convicted of a crime, and they may not have the evidence to keep him. For now they’re only holding him. He hasn’t been charged.”

  My heart raced so fast I had to pant, mouth open, to get air. They, he said, not We, as if he was not really one of them, as if he did not agree. “Where have they taken him?”

  “Washington. Tell your uncle to find a lawyer who can go there.”

  I knew he meant my uncle Will, my father’s oldest brother, who was now fath
er-in-law to Nick’s own brother, Alex. Uncle Will owned the big ancestral farm a mile away, and when Nick was gone, I threw the sidesaddle on the pony and rode there through the woods. The big farm was much grander than ours, and after the woods I passed long fields already tilled, a hundred fat cows wandering wide pastures with creeks and oaks. Descending a long slope past chicken houses, hog sheds, smokehouses, icehouses, and corn cricks, all freshly painted jolly shades of red, I reached two blue silos attached to big red barns, one just for cows, built in the latest octagon design.

  My uncle was in a far field, sitting on his horse and watching his new cultivator churn the dirt ten times faster than a single-bladed plow. He was a tall, lean man with a straight spine, and he wore a straight-brimmed hat, his long gray hair and beard stirring in the breeze like banners of authority. He was known to be a moderate, a pacifist who had not sent his son to fight on either side, a man who had no quarrel with anyone, except young members of the family who acted rash in any way. When he saw me, he rode over, frowning.

  “Martha Jane. Where is your brother? You know you shouldn’t ride out alone.”

  I shook my head impatiently and told him what the dispatch had said.

  “The young fool,” he growled, at once giving up the lesser project of reforming me.

  “Will they take the farm?”

  “Not if I can help it. Tell your mother I have gone to Bel Air to get help. You go home and stay with her. She shouldn’t be alone there on the place.”

  I waited until after dinner, the dishes washed and dried, to tell her, and she still fainted away cold. Uncle Will sent his only son, George Andrew, to keep a lookout for the Federals, and he sat up late on the front porch and slept in Richard’s room.

  In the morning, soldiers in blue had pitched a peaked white tent at the mouth of our lane. But they did not come any closer, and when Uncle Will rode in later to say that he was on his way to Washington, they did not stop him.

  A few days later George Andrew brought the cultivator and a team of Percherons, finished the back fields, and churned manure in the garden plot behind the house. Creolia and her daughter Sophie were usually the ones who planted vegetables for all of us, but now they refused to venture out “with all them mens around.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll do it,” I told my mother and went out.

  I could scarcely admit it even to myself, but when Nick took the trouble to ride in and tell me about Richard, something had shifted, and as I knelt in dirt to put in seeds, little sparks lit up around my body at the chance that he might see me from a distance or that I might see him.

  Slowly I planted beans, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, carrots, melons, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and broccoli, arranged to look attractive as they grew. I drew colored labels for each row, with orange carrots, red tomatoes, green peas, and took extra care as I plucked warm eggs from under hens, brought in cows to milk, inspected fields more often than they strictly required.

  SUMMER SOON ARRIVED with motionless blue skies and white clouds stalled in heat, cicadas tuning up. My mother had not put down her smelling salts since Richard’s arrest, and one scorching afternoon I could not stand the stifling quiet anymore. She was lying down upstairs, shades drawn, when I told her I would walk to visit cousin Isabelle.

  “Take your hoe,” she said faintly in the gloom. “A lady may go anywhere so long as she takes her hoe. If you meet anyone, say you’ve gone to scoop up wildflowers for the garden. And for heaven’s sake, wear a broad-brimmed hat and don’t let anyone see you at Kirkwoods’.”

  I sighed, annoyed. Isie had grown up on the farm next door, just my age, and she and I had always been best friends. But too much bad had happened in her life since then, her father and one of her brothers killed in accidents, her mother remarried and moved far off. Her one remaining brother, Sam, was our family’s only openly enlisted Rebel soldier, and he was still in Union prison camp. Isie herself had been disgraced at seventeen, when she had a healthy baby two months after her wedding day. Half the family no longer spoke to her, and I had no patience for them. So far as I could see, Isie was the one sensible woman in the whole family, the only one who was not afraid of black cats in her path or unlit candlesticks or hats on beds or even spilled salt, and she had always taken the last cookie from the plate, unconvinced that it could make her an old maid. Well, now it certainly could not, as she had borne five children, the oldest only six.

  Setting off across a hot cornfield, relieved to reach the woods, I followed a cool brook, crossed Deer Creek on a covered bridge, slipped through a stile, and skirted a herd of black-and-white Holsteins. As I approached the pond where all the boys had fished, frogs leapt, startled, launching in the air, legs akimbo as they kerplunked in murky green. I laughed and thought of Nick for no reason at all, with a feeling like a private moonbeam in my chest.

  Isie was standing in the yard of the small white house her husband had built for her, across the lane from his parents’ home. She had a fire going under the laundry pot, a baby on her hip, while the older children crawled and dashed and toddled on the grass, peevish with heat, the grass a welter of popguns and tin horses and dolls with china heads and tiny wood tea sets and whiffs of dirty diaper. Isie’s children looked the way she used to, with wavy reddish hair, pale eyes, and perfect skin—all dressed as girls though some were boys, since everyone knew boys were really girls until the age of three or four. Isie teased the boys, called them Edwina and Augusta, while they squealed and pummeled her. Isie herself looked somewhat lumpish in a gray dress, more like a woman of forty-two than twenty-four, a new gap in her teeth, her middle spreading in a way no corset could control, and her hair faded the color of an old bloodstain. Even her teeth had started to erode, and she kept her lips down over them as she thrust the baby in my arms and snatched the four-year-old.

  “Stop it, all of you. Eddie, let go of Gus. Molly, take Peggy in the shade and just sit still. Calm down, all of you, or there will be no lemonade. Straighten your pinafores.”

  The oldest jutted out her lower lip but jerked her sister’s dress in place and pulled her to the yews along the pasture fence. Left alone, the two toddling boys yanked grass out of the lawn and offered it to each other to eat. Isie turned her back and rolled her eyes.

  “Why does one have so many children? Oh, shaw, almost forgot,” she cried and took hold of my arm, gave it a shake as if to wake me up. “Mary Bay was here this morning. And guess what? She was quite green again!”

  Mary was my mother’s niece, and she had married Isie’s young uncle and swelled up like a melon within months—though she had not one shred of humor on the topic and dressed severely in bell-like capes of stiff black taffeta. Mary had just emerged from her third confinement, and Isie giggled, telling what she had seen. “I’m sure of it. Looked like the smell of bacon turned her stomach, and her face had gone all warped. Fourth time in four years!”

  I tried to be demure. “Well, I suppose she likes children.”

  Isie whooped. “I’ll tell you what she likes!”

  We covered our mouths to keep our laughter from the children’s ears. We had once found a pamphlet hidden in an attic trunk, Your Sacred Duty, or Advice to Married Women, written by a doctor who railed against women who took pleasure in the marriage bed or used lemon slices or sponges or something called “pulling out” to prevent conception.

  “Reproduction is the only purpose of the marriage sacrament!” it had proclaimed, and it said wanton women should have “a simple operation” to relieve them of their urges and make them chaste, or else they risked insanity. This document had the opposite effect on us of that intended, and the sight of a lemon sent us into gales of giggles ever afterward.

  But I was puzzled now. “Why doesn’t she do something?”

  Isie wrinkled her brow as if she had forgotten how ignorant I was, the only virgin older than twenty in the family. “None of it works, that’s why.”

  “Nothing?”

  Isie shook her head so hard her
hair came half-undone. “Nothing. What do you think, I would have . . . ?” She gestured helplessly in the direction of the children.

  The babies turned to catch the nuance floating by—we closed our lips.

  Isie grabbed her second-youngest toddling past and sniffed its diaper. “Pew!”

  I handed her the baby, took the toddler in the house, cleaned it up, dumped the contents of its diaper in the outhouse, and added the diaper to the bucket on the back porch, which already overflowed, despite Isie’s efforts. With the first few babies she still had Black Annie, who was born on Kirkwood place. But one day Annie disappeared without a word, and we heard she had gone to Baltimore, where rumor said that several thousand Negroes lived unsupervised and held a rowdy cakewalk every Saturday. Few freedwomen were left locally to hire, and you couldn’t get Irish colleens to deal with diapers or chamber pots, which they called “nigger work.”

  “We’d better keep the kettle boiling,” I said, returning the toddler to the yard.

  Isie fanned herself with a bare hand and gasped as if she couldn’t breathe. “Don’t check any of the others. Let’s let the air clear a minute.”

  “Fine by me. You suppose our mothers did that themselves?”

  “Not on your life.” Both of us sighed.

  Inspired, Gus picked up an old dog bone and threw it at Eddie’s head. Eddie shrieked and swung, and Isie swooped to restrain him. The baby gasped, clutched Isie’s shoulder, and let out a wail. The three-year-old tottered across the grass and sank her face into her mother’s skirt, sobbing.

  Like the promise of a cooling rain, a black buggy rocked into view across a long cornfield, riding high with a chestnut gelding in the shafts that clipped along. The buggy belonged to our aunt, sister to both our fathers, who was also Isie’s mother-in-law, since (in keeping with family tradition) Isie had married one of our first cousins. Our aunt herself had also married one of her first cousins, before producing Henderson Kirkwood and Isie’s husband, G. Cairnes Kirkwood.