She gently put a hand over my mouth. “Don’t talk of misery on a night like this. My aunt’s amaranthine tent can wait. She’s in there snoring. She won’t miss me.”
Subtle as an eel she slipped away and ran lightly uphill on the rough grass. I gave chase, both of us laughing, out of breath. In a minute we had reached the top, and below us the two rivers met the bay, glimmering in the black. The air moved big and sweet with hints of grassland meeting salt, seaweed brushing trout.
“You. How can you drive me mad, when you know you should throw me over for a fellow in a better condition? Be careful, I may kiss you half to death.”
For answer she pressed against me, unbuttoned my shirt, and stroked my chest hair. “Is this gray? I bet you were a smoother fellow when we started. We’ve had to wait too long.”
She kissed me hard as if to make sure I agreed, and soon we lay on the cool grass. Parts of me wanted to stampede at her immediately. It hurt physically to pull back onto my knees.
“Wait. Surely there are things I need to say. I don’t know when we’ll be able to marry. And you may never have a house of your own. I wanted to build you one, but it’s impossible, even if I use my own wood. There’s brick and pipe and sinks and furniture. Ah, I’m so miserable. You may be very sorry if you give yourself to me.”
She got up onto her knees, too, and I saw her brave chin lift, pale against the black.
“It seems to me we’re already married. I couldn’t give myself to anyone but you.”
My arms went around her tight. “Do you know it burns me every night you aren’t with me? And every time I see you, trying to keep my hands off you.”
We knelt like that for long seconds, holding off what would come next.
With a foolish sort of hope, I had brought my grandmother’s wedding ring, and now I reached into the pocket of my pants and felt the thin gold loop, worn finer on one side.
“I thought to give you this sometime. It was my grandmother’s, like the opal. It’s gold with an old floral design. I wish I could give you so much more. But will you have it for a wedding ring?”
She slid the opal off her ring finger. “Put it on me.”
It slipped on easily, too big, threatening to fly off. But she put the opal back on to guard it and closed her fist to keep both of them on.
“Then I am satisfied,” she said and opened up her arms.
I TRIED TO INTRODUCE HER gently to the mysteries, though she insisted on the full experience, not once but several times, claiming the pain diminished as the night went on. We did not sleep, or if we did, I did not notice it.
But the night could not go on forever, and when black sky began to fray along the eastern shore, replaced with faint rose, I helped her close the silken robe.
“You’d better get down there and mess up your cot,” I said and chuckled in her ear. “I want to see you scrubbed and shining in the preaching tent.”
“And you as well.” She stretched leisurely as a cat. “Is this how married women always feel? I’m so limber, I feel like a newborn infant. It feels like my bones can bend. Let’s never go home. Houses are just cages. Let’s never go inside again.”
I kissed her for that but was afraid to linger. The landscape was becoming visible, all of it still in shades of gray. “I’ll go down first, and you come by and by, another way. If anyone asks, say you went for a walk. It’s true enough.”
We grinned at each other and kept our hands joined till the pine grove, where I set off fast downhill through dewy grass, glancing back once to make sure she could not be seen. I strolled down a ravine of laurels, paused to wash myself in the creek.
Still bare-chested, in bare feet, letting myself dry in the air, I climbed the creek bank to where I could see the rope fence with fifty horses penned together, starting to play and joust with each other, and below them a flock of tents. A young black woman stepped out of one in a dark dress and neckerchief and lifted her face to watch the dawn.
I felt a rumble in the ground and, startled, turned in dread. A horse and rider raced full tilt downhill, a bandana over the man’s face, past the horse pen, toward the tents. Twenty others followed, hooves thundering as they keened the Rebel yell.
“Hoooooooooah-hooooooooooool!”
They plowed into the tents, lashing with whips, trampling and crushing all they could, and people burst out of them and sprinted for the woods along both sides. A young minister was on his knees praying outside the preaching tent—gunshots cracked the air, and he slumped on his side. The girl in the dark dress ran stumbling, pursued by a man on horseback who lashed her with a bullwhip, tearing away her neckerchief on the first strike.
I chased the man barefoot and grabbed his bullwhip. He had the advantage on his horse and flicked it away from me, but I grabbed his leg and tried to pull him off.
The light came up a notch, and colors returned all at once, grass green, the man’s bandana butternut and slipping off his face. He was no one I knew, and when he lifted the whip to lash me, I dropped to the ground and rolled fast to get away.
Within a minute the whole posse thundered back uphill and vanished. A few men scrambled bareback onto horses to pursue them, while others knelt beside the fallen minister, who did not move. Someone went to fetch a doctor, though it was fairly clear he would not come in time. Others wandered dazed around the camp, weeping, looking for their families, or rushed exclaiming into the big tent, where women set anxiously to work tending wounds.
When the young minister was pronounced dead, the remaining clergymen conferred.
“God is with us. We will meet again,” a gray-haired minister announced. “But on this sad day we must take our women and our children home for safety’s sake.”
I managed to find Martha packing her aunt’s things. She was in tears over the minister but said she was all right, and I told her I was, too.
Quietly I asked, “You know that old orchard where you and I first walked, years ago, with your cousins, in the woods? See if you can meet me there, Wednesday at three o’clock.”
She looked relieved to know a time when we would meet again.
“All right,” she said in a whisper that made my hair stand up.
How could I want her again so soon, after a night like that and so much violence in the morning? But I did. I could hardly think of anything else. I felt like a danger to myself, and as if I could bring a block of wood to life if I put my hands on it. But I set to work to help my mother pack and take her home.
THE RAID ON THE CAMP meeting was condemned by editors and senators, especially those who once had Rebel sympathies, wanting now to seem upright, law-abiding, never implicated in such violent activities. The governor attended the funeral of the young minister and vowed to bring the guilty to justice, though no arrests were made.
All that summer Martha rode to meet me in the orchard, our happiness far better than I thought was possible. Old stone walls of what had been a house still stood there, floors and roof long gone, and we lay in a grassy corner, out of sight if anyone came by. It took some doing, but I convinced her to be unafraid and naked on my army blanket, watched by the blue sky. I explained the ways we could prevent a child, some of which she had heard of but did not understand. She liked to run her tongue tip down my side, along the inside of my arm, any hairless skin that she could find, giving me chills, until I shuddered and recaptured her tongue.
Far too soon the apple blossoms that had showered down on us gave way to hard, green nubs of fruit that swelled day by day and tinged slowly red. Full, sweet, and ripe, bored into by worms, they began to fall. Sunlight glowed with a declining slant that only made it look richer, and we lay together in a winey smell of rotting apples, swarmed over by dying bees.
On one of the last afternoons when it was warm enough to graze the sheep outside, Tim took them to the meadow while I groomed Honest Abe, who still looked for my father every time the barn door opened, crestfallen when it was only me. I put a saddle on him and took him out for a good gal
lop on the roads, then brought him back and groomed him again. When I had done the same with Captain Jack, I gave them each a bucket of oats with molasses for a treat.
After dinner in the house, the afternoon promised cold sun for a few hours, no smell of snow as yet, and I walked out to the sheep meadow to take over and send Tim home. Cutting through the woods, I heard the pleasant sound of him signaling the dogs to turn the flock back toward the rock, his whistle sharp and true as a train’s but far more musical.
As I left the trees, I was surprised to see that he was not alone but sitting with a woman on top of the big rock, both of them so engrossed in whatever they were saying, they did not notice me. Not far from the flock, the yellow mare grazed by herself, and when I saw that, something hot flashed in my chest. We had made no plans to meet today, but here she was. Was it Tim she came to see?
I almost turned and left them alone, when I saw him swing down the steep side of the rock, drop to the ground, and give me a salute before he set off toward the cabin, not waiting to greet me or see what I would say, and I wondered what that meant.
Now Martha was coming down, and I watched as she hastily grabbed fingerholds in the rock wall and set herself down on the grass with ease, as if she had practiced that far more often than I knew. Briskly she walked toward me.
“I—I came to look for you,” she called, stammering. “And he was wearing your old hat. From a distance I thought it was you.”
I wondered why she felt the need to explain so much. Only a few feet away from me, she looked very pretty, cheeks pink (flushed from what?), eyes wet (moved by what?). Her hair shone clean, and I wanted to believe her, that it was for me she had prepared herself.
She stepped close and kissed my face. “You’re so quiet, dear. Are you all right?”
My hands moved by themselves, one to her head, one to her waist, to cradle her and rock her gently back and forth. With great clarity I realized that this person was precious to me. Her independence and her bravery were things I loved, and did I want to clip her wings? My grandfather would have. He forbade my grandmother to speak unless she was spoken to, and she seldom left the house except for church, accompanied by him.
Of course I didn’t want that. But for the first time I felt a shadow underneath my happiness, producing a chill. We stayed that way a long while, listening to the last songs of crickets in the woods.
FOR THE FALL ELECTION Rebels were allowed to vote, but not Negroes, and when the votes were tallied, you could almost hear the damn Rebel yell reverberating through the countryside. Newspaper headlines broke the happy news:
Counter-Revolution! Victory for Law and Right!
Former Rebels had been put in office all over Maryland, and a new state constitution that included the return of the Black Codes had been approved by a vote of two to one. In the early, heady days, some pundits called on Negroes to choose masters and return to slavery, and “State Rights” flyers were tacked to fence posts and the sides of dry-goods stores. Our local paper, the Aegis, published in the county seat, Bel Air, adopted a “States Rights” header with a drawing of Justice as a buxom woman in a blindfold holding up the scales.
I started to carry a pistol everywhere I went, and I tried to give Tim one, too, one day when he was out watching the flock. He was holding a black border collie puppy I had given him from a litter produced by my sheepdogs, the pup chewing on his knuckles happily. Under the Black Codes, Negroes were not allowed to own guns or keep dogs, on the assumption they would use them to poach on someone’s land, and that was reason enough for me to give him both. I knew he had used my father’s rifles but did not have one of his own.
But when I held the gun, butt out, toward him, he did not take it. His eyes on the sheep, he said, “Trouble with guns? If you got one, you might could have to shoot someone.”
“Better that than what someone might do to you.”
He looked off, petting the pup. “Reckon they gone do that more, if I got a gun.”
He might have been right, and I let the subject drop. But I took to riding by his cabin several times a day, to make sure all was well.
A few weeks later, after the first snow, sheep growing curly coats of wool, he did not report for work, and I rode out to the cabin to see what was up. When I reached it, I saw horse tracks in the snow, coming from the other direction, from the hilltop down into the glade, and they worried me.
His mother opened the door and glared, not answering when I asked for him. I took a step closer and tried to peer in, but it was too dark inside.
“Is everything all right? Is Tim all right?”
Without the smallest sign of invitation, Creolia walked into the house, and I followed her. The main room was windowless and smoky from the hearth, but at the cabin’s back we had built a room with a large, unglazed window, and the shutter was thrown open now, despite the cold. Tim lay on a low bed under it, looking gaunt, a bandage on his head that was black with dried blood. His lips were cut and bruised, one eye swollen shut, his arched nose smashed.
I walked quickly to his bedside. “Good Lord. What happened to you?”
His one good eye threw me a fearful glance, and his mother answered with scorn.
“You don’t know beating when you see it? Like this, with a damn fence post.” She swung her hands in the air over him to demonstrate.
Tim moved his lips and winced—they were too hurt to use.
“Who was it?” I demanded.
But not even Creolia would answer me this time, not trusting me to keep it to myself, when saying who it was might only earn him worse.
I glanced around. The window shutter looked too flimsy to keep out anyone who wanted to get in. On the bed beside him lay a book, open to an illustration of a knight in armor on a horse. But there was little else of cheer around the place. In the kitchen I saw nothing but an empty cornmeal sack carefully washed and folded on a rack to be a towel.
“I’ll be back in a while,” I said. “I’ll get the doctor and a clean bandage.”
“Don’t need no doctor,” Tim struggled to say.
“Don’t need nothing,” Creolia said quite clearly.
I rode straight to Jarrettsville and talked to Martin Jarrett, who was not the doctor I could have wished for, but he was the closest. He said he would try to find the place, though his face told me he would not.
The next day, when I took out all the food my mother could spare, a little ham and cornmeal, and a roll of bandages, I asked Tim if Jarrett had been there, and he said, “No, sir.”
Yet his head was clean and bandaged with a long strip of pale blue cloth I thought I had seen before, embroidered with dark blue moths. And on the hearth a pot of stew was steaming, smelling of beef and potatoes, though nothing of that sort had been there the day before.
I TOLD TIM TO REST till he was well, and I did not ask Martha if she had been to the cabin, hoping she would tell me so herself. We had fewer chores in winter, and I could do them all myself, now that wind rattled the windows and the ground was frozen hard, too cold to lie on even with a blanket underneath. Martha and I sometimes met at my brother’s place for supper and charades and longing looks, a few furtive squeezes in the hall when no one was watching us. But she said nothing about helping Tim, and I was puzzled, not sure what I should think.
So my afternoons were free to fix things that had needed it for months. I liked working by myself, alone with my thoughts. My father had rigged a suction pump to send springwater through a pipe into the kitchen, and the pump got clogged with pebbles and dirt and needed to be cleaned out every few months. I took it apart, honed the pieces that had been worn down, oiled it, and hooked it back up, then packed around the pipes with straw to insulate them from the cold.
One day when I was in the barn, mending tack, a man rode up my lane through the snow. He was all in black with a black hat, his face hidden in a gray scarf that flapped behind him in the wind, and his horse was a large dark bay, not one I had seen before. I watched him through the
window of the barn, then pulled my gloves back on and walked out to where he sat on the horse, as if expecting a footman to come help him down.
I looked up at him inquiringly. “Are you lost, sir?”
He unwrapped the scarf from around his face. He was no one I knew, but I had seen him somewhere, a big man in middle age, with sandy hair showing under his hat brim. He regarded me a while as if taking my measure before he spoke.
“Mr. McComas, Nick McComas, am I right? And you are betrothed to a lady by the name of Martha Jane Cairnes, am I correct?”
I told him that he was, and his mouth closed in a straight line.
“Then I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have the right to know. There’s a Negro with a cabin near here, works for you, I think? Yes. Well, your lady has been seen riding there more than once, when he was alone, his mother and sister away from the place, and she stays a good while. Yesterday I saw her go in, and I waited for her an hour, and then followed her to make sure I had the right woman. She stopped to speak to me and uncovered her face. It was her all right.”
I felt the blood drain from my lips. “Who are you, sir? I demand to know your name and what business you think that is of yours.”
He waved that away. “Consider me a friend, looking out for your interests.”
“I’ll thank you not to do that in the future. If you must know, that man was a member of Miss Cairnes’s household, and someone beat him savagely about two weeks ago. I imagine she was there to help him. Tell me, have you beaten any Negroes with a fence post lately?”
For answer he smiled grimly, wrapped the scarf around his face, and wheeled his horse.
“Never set foot on my land again!” I shouted, running after him with all the menace of a chipmunk chattering to chase away a wolf.
I LOATHED THE MAN who had told me that, and I knew I should shake it off, but I could not. It began to eat at me. I knew it was a mistake to test her, but I could not stop myself. Every time we met, at my brother’s house or at church or on a few happy evenings in a frozen barn, I brought up Tim, giving her an opportunity to tell me easily. But she did not.
Jarrettsville Page 15
