Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  “Peace offering for my nephew,” he said solemnly but with wry eyes and got onto his horse. His son, George Andrew, also mounted up and came with us. I held the turkey by its big, warm claws, which cooled as the five of us rode to the farm of G. Richard Cairnes.

  When we rode in the lane, no one appeared on the porch to welcome us. In the silence of the harsh cold air, the horses chewed their clinking bits and a rift of light snow swirled and tumbled like a ribbon on the porch.

  From inside the house I heard a clock strike twice, the time I had told Martha we would arrive. Sure enough, soon the front door opened and she came out looking radiant in a white wool dress with a red shawl, her eyes fixed on me and no one else. I smiled, took off my hat, let snow sprinkle my head.

  Behind her came Mrs. Cairnes, taffetas rustling, and Richard, who had evidently not been warned and looked as if he had still been at dinner, a blue napkin tucked into his collar. He yanked it out, looking young and belligerent, and it was his mother who spoke up.

  “Why, Will. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  Will kept his hat on and one hand on the rifle in his lap. “Afternoon, Mary Ann. We thought to bring you something. You know Nick McComas, I think, poor James’s boy. Young Nick has asked for the hand of my niece, Martha Jane, and I have said yes. I’m glad you’re all here today to hear me say it plain.” He paused and fixed his eyes on Richard for a while. “We’re not at war in this county. All that is finished. I have approved this marriage, for the sake of all of us and peace. That is”—he looked at Martha and smiled—“if the girl agrees.”

  Her face went sweetly pink, and she looked younger than I had ever seen her, closer to fourteen than twenty-four. But when she spoke, her voice was strong and lilting, with no quaver. “I do.”

  Mrs. Cairnes gave a small cry and pressed a handkerchief against her mouth. “If only my husband were alive!”

  Will waved an impatient hand. “If my brother were alive, he would agree, and so shall you. It’s for the best. Now, Nick has brought you a wild turkey, haven’t you, young man?”

  I was grinning like an idiot at Martha and couldn’t stop, and she grinned back. I held the big bird out by its warm neck, its green and rust feathers arranged in fine display, without one drop of blood.

  MARTHA WANTED TO ELOPE, gallop off a cliff holding my hand, and I loved her for that.

  But by now I knew she had a reckless side, and my role would be to steady her, channel her bravery toward more constructive ends—though I had no plans to tame her or teach her to obey. I knew a hundred spineless girls, and if I had wanted, I could probably have cornered one. But I preferred the challenge of Martha, the way she took nothing lying down. Well, some things of course I wanted her to take that way. And I had reason to hope she would.

  “My mother wants us to wait a while,” I told her with real regret.

  My mother had not asked me that, but I knew she was devastated by my father’s death, and she should not have to make further adjustments yet.

  It was adorable the way Martha tried not to pout, and as a reward I gave her a ring that had been my grandmother’s, an opal with pearls on either side. Some people thought opals unlucky, but she told me she wore it every minute of the day, often on a ribbon round her neck, since her hands had to pull cows’ teats and plunge into hot water to scrub clothes. I liked to think of it resting between her breasts, against her silky skin. Would that spot smell like rose water or like the fresh-baked bread I liked to sniff beside her nose?

  Now at least I had more chances to find out. We met in Alex’s home, only a half mile from Richard’s, though it might have been another planet, for its happier feel. The more time I spent with her, the more peaceful I felt, my terrors calmed. Alex’s wife was Martha’s close friend and cousin, Hannah, a lively girl who loved plays, especially Shakespeare, and on long, snowy evenings, the four of us would choose parts and read those grand speeches out loud to each other. When we felt ambitious, we would also act and posture, me posing as the gloomy Dane, a role I could see too well, with my own father murdered, unavenged. But another evening I was Romeo, much more to my taste, though he also ends up dead.

  And I could see now that Martha was right when she had written that we ought to meet in company awhile and get to know each other in the light and not just in the dark. I got to see how she would react to situations, things that I was glad to know before it was too late. For instance, one night Hannah went to all the trouble to behead and pluck and roast a chicken for us. My brother loved the skin, considered it a treat, and Martha admitted that she did, too.

  But when Hannah brought some out in a cup and Alex insisted Martha take some first, she only gaped at it awkwardly, not saying why she seemed unable to take any, though Alex teased her for long minutes.

  “Martha? Come on now, have some skin. Come on.”

  I could not blame her when I glanced into the cup and saw a flabby, yellow mass.

  But she could not find a way to extricate herself, and in the end she mutely thrust the cup at Alex and left him puzzling.

  Later she explained to me: She did love the skin, but only when it was crisp and brown.

  “Well, you could have said something,” I pointed out.

  “Said what? I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and I don’t know how to lie.”

  This made me laugh. “Really? You can’t lie, not about anything?”

  She looked stricken and adorable, her cheeks coloring pink.

  “No. Not if someone asks me something. It’s as if they’ve woken me up in the middle of the night and shined a bright light in my face. I can only tell the truth.”

  I laughed and felt lucky. In a flash I understood that, having grown up with few servants, she had learned to cook delicious chicken, make piecrust and bread, put up produce for the winter, smoke hams, stuff sausages—all skills that Hannah lacked, having been born on the big farm, daughter of a first son and heir.

  “And now you and Hannah have to cook for us poor brothers,” I said with real remorse. “But I’m sure glad to know which one of you will cook for me!”

  Other evenings were not so pleasant, when we read the gloomy newspapers. That winter Johnson closed the Freedmen’s Bureau and vetoed the Civil Rights Act. Congress overrode him, but the governor proclaimed it void in Maryland, where “it would cause Race War.” He was a Republican, of Lincoln’s party, yet he thought Negro suffrage would mean “Black rule of the White race”—because on the cotton-growing Eastern Shore, blacks did far outnumber whites. To stop it, he decided to let Rebels vote, even those who had not signed the Ironclad Oath.

  If Lincoln could have seen what happened to his party then! The Republicans began an unseemly scramble to court Rebel votes, transforming themselves overnight into the party of the White Man’s Government, though that honor had always belonged to the Democrats.

  Other horrors also crawled out of their holes. Some editors proposed that we “do the Will of the Creator and return to slavery.” Others revived the movement to send Negroes to a reservation in the West or Africa. My personal favorite was the visionary who suggested they could be removed more expeditiously.

  “The Negro has no rights, no rights at all,” he wrote. “Fewer than a mule, since a mule is a valuable possession and the Negro no longer is. He is a noxious infestation, and he should know that he is liable to be murdered, as some recent juries have acquitted those who have seen fit to eliminate some particularly egregious example of African degradation.”

  Reading such stuff could throw me into helpless rage and grief for my father, and only holding Martha on my lap could keep it off. She would hold my head and whisper in my ear, warm me so much that I did not feel the cold, not even when my brother and I took the sleigh to deliver her back home.

  FINALLY, SPRING BEGAN TO inch our way, and one day in March, when I could smell the dirt, its top layers thawed enough to let crocuses break through the lawns, I rode toward Shawsville, past the Colored Church where my father had
helped a black teacher to start a school. It was a low brown building set back from the road, its almost unmarked cemetery plot buried in weeds. The last time I had ridden by, its doors were open, children inside reciting math.

  This time I smelled char from five hundred yards. The building almost looked intact, just sagged slightly toward the ground. But when I got there I could see fire had gutted it, the roof fallen in, only the front wall left standing.

  It was Tim’s day off, but I rode out to the clearing to make sure he was all right, thinking I might suggest he move into the little house across the lane from us. It was rented to a German family who spoke very little English, and God knows we needed the cash. But I wanted to at least offer it to him, for safety’s sake.

  When I got to the clearing, he had his mule hitched to the plow and was churning every square inch of ground, though it was still frozen underneath. When he saw me, he grinned shyly, stopped, and lifted his hat. I waved at him to carry on.

  “Good-looking garden,” I called. “What are you going to plant?”

  He shrugged and rubbed his head. “Why, everything, reckon. Cabbage, corn, greens, ’tatoes, ’matoes. Man’s got to eat.”

  “You should bring out some of that horse manure from the heap beside the barn. It’s been there long enough, I think. If it’s aged right, it’s the best for vegetables. I don’t know about sheep dung. Not sure I’d use that.”

  “No,” he agreed and looked at me like he was expecting some sort of order.

  I looked around elaborately to let him know this was a social call. I admired the rabbit hutch, already full of bunnies, and the chickens scratching on the ground. He had a good spring, at the bottom of a hill, and he had built a stone cistern over it. Of course he would not want to move.

  I told him about the Colored Church, and he nodded like he already knew.

  “Listen. If you ever feel in danger out here, bring your family to the house. All right?”

  He nodded somewhat warily. “We be all right.”

  I nodded, too. “Just in case.”

  A young woman came out of the house and walked to the cistern with a wooden pail. She looked very young and pretty, dressed like a white woman, with a full skirt. She was clearly with child, and when she smiled at me, I smiled back and felt the urge to compliment Tim again.

  “I didn’t know you had a wife,” I said in admiring tones. “And such a pretty one.”

  He seemed to go stiff all over and hauled himself up tall. “Not wife. Sister.”

  He put his hat back on, chucked up the mule, and plowed fast away from me, and I knew I had committed an error, though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

  “Well, good,” I called. “Is her husband here? Bring him along. I’ll find work for him.”

  He did not turn around, and as I left, I could only wave to his retreating back.

  APRIL STAYED GLOOMY, though so many apple, pear, and cherry trees burst into bloom at once that pink and white petals blew on the breeze, fluttered in windows, littered floors. Pink magnolias and dogwoods flowered, too, while finches, robins, thrushes, and cardinals filled every hollow of the woods with yearning song. Martha was having wedding clothes made up, and she was as cheerful as a bird with bright new feathers, preparing to take flight in spring.

  On the first anniversary of Appomattox, Federal veterans and militias put on a parade at Jarrettsville, with an exhibition of cavalry maneuvers in a field. Most of the neighborhood stayed home, pretending to be utterly absorbed in planting fields and garden beds.

  But Martha came on her mare, looking splendid in a blue velvet riding suit that had been made for her trousseau, with a small matching hat. After the parade and our silly maneuvers, my big gray and I chased her and the mare into the woods. When we caught them, I plucked Martha down and took her in my arms while Captain Jack cautiously approached the mare and scratched along her mane with his big teeth until she scratched him back.

  The next day, at my urging, Martha rode out to the pasture where I had the flock. I was lounging on the sun-warmed boulder, trying not to feel anxious, and when I saw her, I jumped up, scrambled off the rock, and lifted her out of the saddle, feeling like I could breathe again.

  “There you are,” I said. “There you are.”

  I untied her bonnet, plucked the pins out of her hair, and tucked them in the pocket of my shirt. Fingers trembling, I combed them through the long waves down her back, my eyes lavishing delight. In the sun her hair was every shade of brown and gold, shining like silk, and her eyes crinkled as she tried not to smile.

  We kissed and walked around the edges of the flock and kissed again. We sat in the warm grass by the rock, and I showed her sketches in my pad. From time to time one of the sheepdogs scudded up and gave me an alert look, as if reporting in, then slunk back fast to turn a sheep that had strayed half a foot. The sheep watched us with their black faces and turned at the dogs’ commands. A smell of mutton and crushed grass rolled back to us.

  We drowsed against the sun-warmed rock and talked of everything we thought about, my arms around her as she leaned against my chest.

  “You know,” she said dreamily, “Isie was lovely before she got married, but then she changed. It isn’t fair what those babies did to her. It makes a girl afraid to be married.”

  She kept her voice light, but I could hear the serious note under it.

  I pulled away and looked at her with a mock frown. “I can see I’ll have to keep you far away from Isie’s ruffians. They’ve given matrimony a bad name. But you know we won’t have half so many and we won’t have any with red hair. I wouldn’t let them in the house.”

  She pulled me back to her and cradled her cheek against my chest, as if to hear the thudding of my heart.

  “Isie says there isn’t any choice in it. They just keep coming, willy-nilly.”

  I patted her, wondering how much I should say. I had been initiated at fourteen by a freedwoman, and my education had been furthered by a young white woman whose husband was old and frail. She had seemed to take comfort from me, though we were not in love, or at least I wasn’t. She claimed I broke her heart and that I had given her a child, though I didn’t think that could be true. She might have been the one who told her husband. In any case, he challenged me to a duel, though I declined to participate. Recently I had heard of his death, but that did not make me want to seek her out. In fact, I lived in fear of running into her at the dry-goods store.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said cautiously. “There are things we can do.”

  “Isie says none of it works. What do you mean, there are things we can do?”

  I smoothed her hair. “Young Cairnes was still a whelp when they were wed. Believe me, there are things that work. Your condition won’t be delicate until that’s what you want.”

  Breaking my grip, she sat up with huge shocked eyes. “How did you learn such things?”

  “Ah, well.”

  I shifted away from the rock wall to lie on the warm grass and closed my eyes.

  I tried to pull her down to me, and she resisted, placing an accusing palm against my chest. I suppose it was a test—engagements had been broken for less, once a man’s “impurity” was uncovered. It could be grounds for breach of promise and complete release.

  But if she really was the wife for me, she would not see it that way.

  “It’s ridiculous to expect a man my age to know nothing of sex. Or to call something that natural impure. If I had any money, I would wager most men lie about it anyway. There’s not a man past puberty who can truthfully claim that sort of ignorance.”

  She was breathless with self-righteousness, though I also detected a thrill in her voice. “What woman have you known? Tell me at once!”

  Her hand rose and gave my breastbone a small slap, and then another one.

  I caught her hand. “No lady, I assure you. No one of the slightest importance.”

  She tried to free her hand, but I kept hold, squinting in the ligh
t to make her look at me.

  “No one, ever, half so beautiful as you.”

  She twisted away and seemed torn between desires to kiss me and to hit me more. “Tell me her name. I have to know. Or was there more than one, you wretch? More than one!”

  I laughed. “You shouldn’t want a man so ungallant as to say. Their secrets are safe, and so are yours.”

  “There was more than one!” she cried and buried her eyes against my chest, as if determined not to look at me ever again.

  I kissed her head and ears until she half shoved me away and kissed me violently, kisses meant to lash and put me in my place. But I met her force with surrender, opening my lips, and she seemed surprised to feel her tongue slide in my mouth and meet the soft tip of mine, which teased and beckoned till she followed it, then pushed back.

  We went on like that for quite some time, and she seemed sorry when I stopped. Leaning on one elbow, I lifted strands of hair out of her eyes and said half-teasingly, “Where did you learn to kiss that way? Some lucky fellow, I’m sure.”

  She gasped and tried to pull away. “What a horrible thing to ask. You’re the first man I ever kissed in my whole life.”

  “On your honor, never before me? You can’t lie to your future husband, remember. Troth means truth, so now confess. We’ve pledged our truth.”

  “I told you I can’t lie. That is the truth. Unless you count what children do. All right, I’ll tell you. I kissed a little Negro boy when I was five or six, in the hayloft. There, now I’ve told you everything. And will you do the same?”

  My mouth fell open in mock shock. “You didn’t.” Laughing, I took hold of her and gave her backside a quick swat. “Bad girl!” I swatted her again, and we rolled laughing on the grass until she lay exhausted on my chest.

  She looked up at me musingly. “But that was it. No man ever, except you.”

  I meditated on that. “Well, I know how fortunate I am. I’ve never known a white woman so fond of spooning with a man.”