Jarrettsville
Page 6
“No fair! It’s only for human twins.”
“Aw, now, I think it’s fair.”
I steered us away from the shortcut through the woods and instead took Old Federal Hill Road because a red-haired woman lived there—and a red-haired woman was worth twenty points. Sure enough, she was out pinning up her wash, and by the time we reached Kirkwoods’, I had won, though not by much.
Sam was dozing in a hammock, hardly weighting it. His skin looked stretched tight on his frame, and even his bones seemed thinner than they used to be, his collarbone protruding sharp out of the shirt. When he opened his eyes, the change wasn’t great. Dull, milky blue, they didn’t seem to take much interest in anything.
Tim stood over him and took off his cap.
“We take you for a fine ride, Mr. Sam,” he said and slid his arms under him, set him in the chair. “You just say where you want to go, and we be there.”
Sam didn’t seem to notice anything. But Tim rolled him around the lawn and proclaimed the name of every flower not yet shredded by the children or the dogs.
“My, that a right fine Gabriel trumpet,” he said, pointing at a lone white gladiolus. “A whole choir of them Gabriels.”
A few calla lilies had come up, and he gestured at one but did not touch.
“This here we call the horn of the Lord, Who done trampled out the vineyard where the bad grapes was.” Humming, he pushed Sam along.
ONE HOT MORNING I glanced toward the lane end and saw no blue-coats, even the white tent gone. All morning I watched that way.
Just before noon, as I was setting the table for dinner, I saw Uncle Will’s phaeton roll in, a tall, thin young man beside him, his red hair tied back below his hat. Even from a distance he looked like a hooded hawk, and I knew who he was.
“Mother!” I shouted and raced pell-mell down the sloping lawn and jumped onto the running board of the phaeton, laughing, tears on my face.
Richard looked gratified, like this was the sort of welcome he had always deserved. For once he looked his age, twenty-one, his fringed buckskins replaced by a black suit, and more like an itinerant preacher than an arrogant, land-owning boy who thought he could overthrow the government. The flash in his eyes had always been cocksure, but now it seemed mixed with something else—not fear, but possibly confusion, maybe even shame.
Tim unhitched the matched bays from the phaeton while Uncle Will came in to eat.
My mother fell on Richard, sobbing, threatening to faint. I scrambled to find extra ham, biscuits, and hard-boiled eggs and fetched more bottled beans and pickles from the root cellar.
“Don’t bother asking for army reparations now,” Uncle Will was saying as I brought in the food. “Best to keep your name out of their notice from now on.”
For some reason he seemed to point at me especially.
“That means all of you. Just lie low. I called in every favor I had down there, and yesterday it still looked like he might be charged. I tell you, it was a near thing.”
He looked at Richard, and his voice went hard.
“You’re not to show your face, except in church. If you need something, send word to me and I’ll take care of it. If you have to ride somewhere, I will go with you. You’re not to be seen in public on your own, and if I hear there’s been any Harford Rifles riding in your lane, I’ll send you back to Washington, I swear I will.”
Richard bowed his head in perfect imitation of our brother the reverend and in every way conveyed the impression that he would not know which side to climb onto a horse.
FOR A WHILE RICHARD DID as he was told, sent me on errands with the pony cart, received no visitors, came out only for church.
The first week in July, four of Booth’s conspirators were sentenced to hang, four more to long prison terms. One of the condemned was a woman, and as she sat on the scaffold with a noose around her neck, soldiers held a parasol above her to protect her from the sun. When photos of the hanging appeared in newspapers, all of us went silent for the day, as if the angel of death had passed over the house.
The nation was in mourning all that month, and one Sunday when the air felt like boiled laundry, Richard and I and our mother dressed in stifling black and squeezed into the pony cart to drive on baking roads, wilted by the time we got to our ancestral church. Bethel Presbyterian had a tall spire and stone walls that could store the cool, and as we stepped into the dark interior, I sneezed twice, incautiously and loud, with a high note like a laugh, incurring a sharp glance from my mother.
I could not see a thing at first, except that the pews were full. But as I followed Richard and our mother up the aisle, my eyes adjusted and I saw a neck I knew. The skin was weathered, black curls over it, the head held up at calm alert, surrounded by his sisters’ black bonnets. I looked away quickly, but saw enough to notice he was dressed now like the other men, in black linen. Most grew muttonchops and mustaches or beards, but his face was shaved, his cheeks clean.
I felt sudden vertigo. What was he doing here? His family followed the Methodist circuit preachers, known for Radical views. And here I was, walking with Richard, who had nearly gotten himself hung for the murder of the greatest Radical of all.
My mother’s pew was near the front, and when we sat down, I opened a hymnal and found the numbers posted by the altar, the bare back of my neck tingling between bonnet and collar, where I could feel eyes turned toward me, two of them maybe Nick’s. I could not listen to the prayers and scarcely noticed what I sang. I tried to train my mind to the drone of the sermon.
“The dove of peace has reached the ark, bringing an olive branch, and now the lion will lie down with the lamb. Let there be no thought of vengeance in any heart. We have seen the awful price of vengeance taken into human hands. Rivers of blood have flowed, but now they must run dry, for we are called upon to study peace.”
It was the same theme we had heard for months, from the pulpit and in dry, dutiful letters from my reverend brother every week. No one was listening. When the service ended, the congregation stood and roared with chatter, glad to be released.
I shouted at an old, deaf aunt and took her arm to give Nick time to leave. But my aunt picked up a sprightly trot and swept me toward the door. Shrinking as small as possible inside my hoop skirts, I kept my face low as I felt the sunlight strike my bonnet rim.
My head down, I still saw a folded fan slap Nick’s lean shoulder, held by one of my fair cousins, the last of Uncle Will’s unmarried daughters, a very pretty and flirtatious girl currently swathed in black lace, with cameos that dangled from her ears, a locket on a ribbon round her neck, and bows that fluttered on her mourning dress. The Ladies’ Aid Society had said the job of women was to help the men forget, and she seemed more eager than most to do her part.
I ducked around a corner to the cemetery, where limestone angels guarded marble stones carved with weeping willows. Across hot grass I found the graves of my father, my grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Why didn’t I have sensible emotions? Surely all these dead people had controlled themselves. Crouching by my father’s stone, I yanked out weeds.
From one side of my eye I could see someone walking down the rows, a man in black, and with sudden odd panic, I leapt up and began to stride toward the cornfields.
“Miss Cairnes,” a voice called. It was deep but lilting and playful—a man’s voice with the intonation of a boy, and it stopped me like a fishhook in my skin.
“Forgive me for intruding. I thought I’d ask for your opinion of the sermon.”
Now I had to turn, as he had the decency to ask what every young man had been taught to say, and I would only have to murmur the expected things—“Reverend in fine form,” “a comfort in such trying times.”
But his face had an expression of such innocence that something in me pounced.
“Did you know Rebel soldiers have been starved to death in your prisons? Others only half-starved and made deathly ill? Not only in the South, but also in the North.”
“Not my prisons. I never wanted them to do that. Oh, my dear, I’ve heard about your cousin. I’m so sorry.”
Groping as if blind, he pulled me quite close, until my hoops enveloped him. He tried to touch his forehead to mine and bumped my bonnet rim—both of us recoiled, and he turned his cheek and pressed it to my ear instead. Astonished, I breathed him in, a smell of soap and leather, a touch of horse. I could feel the booming of his heart against my chest, while my own felt like a choir of angels bursting into song.
Somehow I must have muttered something, pulled away, because a moment later both of us were flushing red, as we stumbled back to join our families.
A FEW DAYS LATER my mother came back from the dry-goods store with several letters for me. They looked like they were from my cousins, and I took them to my room to read when I was done with chores. Hours later I had one slit open before I noticed it was in a bold and graceful hand I had never seen before.
“Please write and tell me how your cousin is. And send the design of the wheeled chair. Do you think the bleeding helps? I’ve seen it done but never seen it help. Does he cough less when it’s over? Tell me what you’ve read lately. I only read of sheep, and sheep are even duller when you get to know them well. My father has had the brilliance to buy a large flock, just as the wool market collapsed, with no more army contracts now. God knows what we’ll do with them. But the lambs are fun to watch. I’m out with the flock right now, and there are so many little fellows, one is always ready to hop in the air, like popcorn on a fire. Last night just as it was getting dark, a big bird flew over the field. He had a blunt head and wide wings, whitish.”
The last page was a drawing of the bird, the flock, and a stone wall by woods, all suggested in a few deft lines and signed with the initials NMcC. I stared at them a long while, then found some ink powder and mixed it up, rejected my own bent metal nib, and found a newer one in Richard’s desk. With unsteady fingertips I dipped and scratched onto a sheet of good paper.
“What a wonderful drawing, so spare. Was the bird an owl hunting at dusk? I suppose it might take a small lamb. Have you lost any lambs?”
I drew an awkward sketch of the wheeled chair and told him I had read a Dickens and a Brontë that was more to my taste. I didn’t like the villains in Dickens, because they seemed worse than real people, too simple, all one way, no good in them. I folded paper for an envelope, addressed it carefully, and on the way to Isie’s the next day, I walked it to the Federal Hill post office.
Two days later he wrote back. “I dreamt about an owl because you told me that, but it wasn’t a bad owl. I was riding Dick, the pony I had as a boy. It was a wonderful dream.”
He sent two drawings, one of a boy on a pony with a shaggy mane and forelock, a big white bird above. The other was of a young black woman resting her chin on folded hands and gazing from the page, done with a minimum of pencil lines. Her skin was lightly shaded, her nose and mouth wide, her hair curled shorter than a man’s. Something about it seemed odd. Then I realized—she wasn’t working. I’d never seen a servant pictured as if thoughtful and at rest.
“Lovely drawings,” I wrote back and described Fancy, who had been a fine-limbed chestnut with a white blaze and expressive ears, one of them often back to one side, as if skeptical of human goings-on. “I wish I could draw her. I miss her, and I miss riding.”
I wrote a few bitter lines about the army taking her, tore up the page, and started over. Instead I told him how once Fancy let me stand in the saddle to pluck apples from a tree. One hot day she had cantered straight into a pond and soaked me to the waist.
He sent two more drawings, one of a young woman standing on one leg in a sidesaddle to pluck apples from a branch, and another of her laughing as her horse charged into a pond, the horse’s ears pointed different ways and water flying all around. In both the girl’s face was startling—straight nose, full lips, eyes large and bold, my own.
He also enclosed an article from a Philadelphia paper:An incident in Havre de Grace, Maryland, has come to our attention. It occurred a few weeks ago when a trainload of Rebel prisoners was returned to their families at the ferry dock there. The prisoners released that day were the very dregs of the Rebel mob, many of them wasted with fever and neglect by their own officers and saved by intervention of the Union troops. Everything possible had been done for these men, and yet troops standing guard at the landing dock reported being menaced by ungrateful ruffians in a hostile crowd, some of whom let out the blood-curdling Rebel yell. Great restraint was shown by Union forces on this occasion, and no arrests were made, the unruly mob being allowed to return to their homes. Peace has been restored in Havre de Grace.
Below the article, Nick had penciled in, “Was this the day your cousin came home?”
I clutched my pen and dipped it fast, ink clotting in sedimenting drops.
“Yes, but it’s all lies. Menaced by ruffians! The ruffians were the ones in uniform.”
I described what I had seen, leaving nothing out—soldiers pointing rifles, the rotted smell of the sick men. Within a day he sent me back a drawing of a young man on a litter, just a skeleton with skin, a young woman kneeling next to him surrounded by her skirts.
A FEW WEEKS LATER Nick wrote to say someone had opened the back gates to his father’s place one night and released the sheep, and now he had to stand watch every night.
“At least the sky is beautiful, so many stars. Last night I saw the moon come up. Have you ever noticed how it looks like a great big bubble of light at first, then shrinks down flat as it goes up the sky? Why is that?”
Today his ink was green, the writing quick and scrawled as if he wrote with feeling, and instead of the accepted closing (“Yours, & co.”) he had written “x, Nick”—sealed with a kiss, the way my cousins signed notes to me, but no man ever had.
That night I stayed up late to see the moonrise, and he was right—it did look like a big soap bubble, frail and wobbly, but only for a little while. Excited, I sat at the writing desk beside my narrow bed, below the rose-print wallpaper, and praised his observation like a major piece of scientific discovery. Going to the bookcase in the living room, I pulled out a volume called One Hundred Favorite Poems and pawed through it for mentions of the moon and listed them for him.
“Why do poets write so much about the moon?” I asked. “Is it because they never sleep?”
“Goodness, you’re good about taking in the mail these days,” my mother observed one afternoon. “Actually, I have something for you to take to the big farm, if you’re off that way.”
“I’m not. I thought I’d go to Isie’s and check on Sam.”
Undeterred, she handed me an embroidered bed jacket for Nick’s sister-in-law, who had just had a baby and was doing her obligatory two-week confinement at her parents’ house.
“It’s not far out of your way. And don’t forget your hoe.”
It was a mile out of my way, but even such a distant connection to Nick made me do as she said. The sky hung nearly white with heat, and I was in a sweat before I reached our lane end, crossed the road, and climbed a sloping cornfield, pursued by gnats, to cooler woods, where the sun glowed green through heavy leaves. They broke open to a field where tall gold wheat now stood, with farther fields of hay, barley, and corn. Descending the slope that held outbuildings, I walked through orchards and gardens, a half acre just for raspberries, another for beans and carrots, cucumbers, potatoes, peas, lettuce, and radishes and arrived in the backyard of the big white house, where a cake was baking in the summer kitchen, sugar in the air.
I could feel a paste of sweat and insects on my face and hoped not to see anyone.
But on my way around an enormous boxwood on one side of the house, I stopped still, quivering. A tall gray Thoroughbred stood tied at the hitching post, buckling one l
eg and switching its long white tail. The saddle was well worn, with a dark outline of Nick’s thigh. I felt cracked open like an egg. Didn’t he have lambs to tend? How could he be here?
I retreated to the back, afraid he might be out on the front lawn playing croquet with my pretty cousin. I climbed the steps to the back porch and went in the winter kitchen, my eyes dazzled by the light outside, and for a minute I could not see. But I smelled a hint of leather, which meant a man nearby, and lavender, which meant a woman. Setting the package on the table, I turned to flee.
A woman’s hoop rustled, and I heard the quiet voice of my aunt, Uncle Will’s wife, who set a soft hand on mine. “Hush, dear, don’t wake the baby. Hasn’t slept a wink all day, and such shrieking you never heard, until Uncle Nick took him. Poor little wight wanted a man.”
Now I could see him, by the window with the infant on his shoulder, its small lips slack. His big hands enclosed the tiny swaddled back, and he rocked it back and forth. He looked at me as if amused and crossed the kitchen springily, with rocking gait. Shooting me a lively glance, he carried the baby out the door onto the lawn, as if to avoid all sound. I gestured at the package on the table, whispered to my aunt who it was for, and tiptoed quickly out the door.
I thought I would just slip into the orchard and head home. But when I reached the grass, Nick strode to intercept me, the baby sprawled across his shoulder, given up to him.
“Don’t leave me with this infant,” he said low. “He seems only to require the absolute attention of three or four adults. But who will entertain me if you go?”
Rocking the baby side to side, he led me past the flowerbeds to where a wooden swing hung, wide enough for two, in the shade of a tall maple. I held it steady as he eased into the seat.
“Sit here with me,” he murmured.
Awkwardly, I wedged in beside him, my hip pressed to his through my hoopless work skirt.