Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  Now Smithson sounded shocked. “It’s not because of what they’re saying about—about that Negro of hers?” His voice trailed off, as if unable to go on.

  At least I could keep the wolves from tearing her apart just yet, until the thing was proved. “Of course not. That’s a filthy slander and should not be mentioned in my presence.”

  But as soon as I said it, I was disgusted with myself and her and Smithson, too. He looked at me like he was more than puzzled—he looked hurt and suspicious now.

  “Then what is it, man? What is it?”

  The ear in my hand was just half-husked, but I threw the whole thing in the fire. The hell with him. The hell with everyone.

  “I’ll tell you what, not that it’s your business. Anything but marrying for me.”

  And with that I stalked off to the barn, tacked up Jack, and rode the long way home through frozen night—tempted to think I could just hide out in my mountain aerie and not see anyone from that accursed place again. I could be free.

  BUT WHEN THURSDAY CAME, I knew I had to go. Like one condemned to hang, I washed and shaved with shaking hands and dressed in my best suit of clothes, fumbled in frustration with my tie, pulled it off, and tried again. The day was gray and frigid, the ground frozen hard and snow turning to ice, with flurries blowing sideways, rather like that day I made the first mistake, riding to her home holding a turkey’s claws. I wished I could go back and change the order of the thing, but I could not. Well, I probably would not anyway. My days with her had been the best thing in my life, and I expected nothing more as good, truly. Exasperated, I yanked off the tie and stuffed it in my pocket, tacked up my horse, and started to ride.

  The cold was brutal and the ride felt twice as long as usual. Dark shut down cruelly early, as if to proclaim the foolishness of marrying on such a day. My spirits were as black as the sky, when I began to recognize the roads that led to Jarrettsville. As I made my way close to the lands owned by G. Richard Cairnes, it seemed a wise precaution somehow to take a shortcut past some Negro cabins to Smithson’s place. I could put up Jack in comfort in the stable kept for the patrons’ use, and no one would notice if I left him there awhile.

  It was an easy quarter mile through woods to Richard’s barley fields, the dirt track between them lit by starlight, amplified by snow, and I followed it down toward the house, close enough to see the candles all ablaze inside, the parlor made festive with evergreens and white ribbons. Both of our families had gathered from the farms around, sleighs crowded together near the barn while horses warmed inside. The women wore plaid dresses for the season, their hoops bulging, glasses of sherry warming them, a fire in the hearth. Any normal man would have gone in and warmed himself and done the right thing by the girl, especially with her mother’s promise that he only needed to do that and then be free to go.

  But something in me was not normal anymore. I suppose it had been beaten out of me, though that’s a poor excuse. If I walked into the house, it would feel like I was offering my wrists to be clapped in irons. Like that pup—that pup!—could throw me down and bullwhip me again.

  Instead I turned up to the barn, into the hayloft where she had once lain with me to whisper and kiss. The loft was ours—the house was not. If only she could come up here to me, freely, on her own, I would take her in my arms and spirit her away. I would! Or so I told myself.

  The hay was stacked high, still green and sticky from the recent harvest and piled up nearly to the barn’s peaked roof. I climbed it to the very top, up bales stacked like steps in terraces, until I reached the open triangle under the roof’s peak, where I could lean and gaze down the slope toward the house. A few more sleds arrived, men and women bundled in their winter best hurrying inside, pulling off gloves.

  Then nothing happened for a long while. Cold crept into me, and I hunched in a ball on a bale, not knowing what I was waiting for. If I could not go down there now, I should go home. What did I think, that she would divine my presence and come up to me?

  I closed my eyes, tried to imagine her—not as she was this fall, but her warm, slender, laughing self, racing away from me uphill above where the two rivers met, the night shrill with summer frogs, the stars fat and low. If I could go back to that night, what would I do?

  A door slammed down at the house, and two men came running up the lane, a lantern swinging in between, its beams glancing, magnified by snow. Both of them shouted at once.

  “I’ll kill him!” yelled a voice I knew, hoarse and ragged. “I’ll kill him!”

  All on its own, my body dropped onto the hay and curled up against the wall, covering its white face to leave nothing showing in the dark. The loft door rumbled back, and I could hear them clearly now, her brother and my own.

  “What good would that do your sister?” Alex puffed, out of breath from running even so short a distance. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him. We’ll take a preacher to him. We’ll wed them in irons if need be.”

  “Not if I kill him first!” cried Richard, who threw his saddle on his horse, leapt on, and shouted, “Hah!” to make it gallop off into the night.

  “You think you’ll find him by yourself?” yelled Alex, groaning as he heaved himself into the saddle, the leather creaking loud. His horse wanted to take off behind the other, its hooves drumming on the wood floor till he let it gallop out.

  When they were gone, I lay listening to my racing heart, my mind scurrying along their likely route. Even galloping, they would have snow to slow them on the long ride north, and it made my hackles rise to think of Richard knowing where my home was.

  But when they did not find me there, or at the Dutchman’s Arms, they might circle back and look more locally, perhaps even at Smithson’s place, where they might see my horse or hear from someone in the bar that it was there. But until they did, this loft might be the safest place on earth, because who would think of looking for me here?

  A commotion from the house made me stand up and peer out through the frozen gap under the eaves. Women screamed, a door banged, and something raced across the snow, around the back. It seemed to be a ghost, a figure all in white against the snow.

  But she passed a lit window, and it showed a circlet of white roses on her darker hair, thorns against the scalp, a white dress bulging at the belly, gleaming hoops held up to let her run flat out. Two men ran fast behind her, followed by a stream of women calling frantically.

  “Martha, no! Stop her, someone!”

  She crossed the yard, making for the barn, and for one wild second I thought she was coming to escape with me. I stood up taller, half wanting to signal her.

  But she ran into the orchard, where the trees were bare, and I could see her racing toward the pump. What did she mean to do? The pump was iron, its top pipe hard and menacing, and I had a vision of her impaled on it. I tried to move but could not, like an awful dream.

  One of the men pursuing caught her just in time and wrapped his arms around her from behind. She shrieked and tried to shrug him off, but the second man arrived to grab her round the legs and lift her up. I could not clearly see the men, but the first was tall and might be Isie’s husband, Cairnes. The other looked young and uncertain, fumbling, and might have been G. A.

  Her voice rose in a howl, no words distinguishable, and she struggled as they carried her back toward the house. Several women rushed to throw their shawls around her, exclaiming and murmuring. Soon they took her carefully into the house, and I had turned into a salt pillar, condemned to stand there through eternity.

  BEFORE DAWN I SLUNK to Smithson’s, got my horse, and rode back slowly on roads not often used, until I reached my rocky fields. Snow in the lane showed new hoofprints, but no one was at the house or barn to greet me but my hungry dogs and sheep. I fed them and waited for whatever vigilante posse might come now, aching hard one minute, feeling relief the next.

  But that day passed, and so did the next, and then a week. Two weeks, three, and no one came. I tried not to think of her on Thanksgiving or wee
ks later on Christmas Day. I was invited to have meals with several Quaker families, but for a penance I stayed home and ate the thin soup the Irishwoman had produced for me. As New Year’s approached, she offered straight out to relieve me of what longing I might feel for womankind. I suppose she must have felt sorry for me, but it made me feel encroached upon, and I gave her an extra month’s wages and let her go.

  I made do for a while, eating my own crude cooking, boiled eggs, potatoes, and cabbage, bread and cheese I bought from a neighbor’s farm. I calculated profits and losses from the sheep, made myself a budget, read the Sheepman’s Journal for tips. Evenings more than ever I would venture to the Dutchman’s Arms to drink a pint or two and have a pleasant chat with other men. When the old sheep men were in town, I listened to them carefully, absorbing all they knew.

  But it was clear that I could not go on forever on my own, and Sunday mornings at the Quaker meetinghouse, I allowed my eyes to wander, take in the eligible girls. One attracted me, a pretty, modest, fair-haired girl, just eighteen, almost half my age. I had no idea why she would want me, and yet she seemed to seek me out after the meeting several Sundays in a row. Her conversation was not stimulating, but she had been educated well, and she seemed to have a gentle spirit. She had never gotten on a horse or roamed free on her own.

  January settled cold and bleak, with not much work to do, and eligible bachelors went courting then. But I did not call on her or anyone. I still had a sense of waiting for something that had to be played through. Waiting, in silence, not speculating, not wondering. Just waiting.

  One clear, cold afternoon, the sky so blue that it looked stretched, my brother came on Honest Abe with the Harford County sheriff beside him on a piebald horse, a heavy, holstered man picking his brown teeth. I went out to meet them in the snow. I suppose I had expected the sheriff, known he would come eventually to charge me with the child, take some of my scarce income for its upkeep, whether it was mine or not. I supposed this meant the baby had been born, and in spite of everything, my breath came slightly fast. The sheriff tipped his hat but left it on.

  “Sheriff,” I said. “Would you care to come inside and rest awhile?” My feet were starting to go numb inside my boots, sunk deep in the snow.

  “No need. I expect you are familiar with the bastardy statutes of the state of Maryland?”

  I nodded, my mouth dry. “I am. Though I am a citizen of Pennsylvania now.”

  “No matter. I can take you back to Bel Air forcibly, if need be. And if you don’t pay, your brother will. You wouldn’t want to pass that burden on to him, now would you?”

  I glanced at Alex, who looked mortified to be related to such a miscreant as me.

  “Of course I won’t do that. I expect you have papers to serve on me.”

  The sheriff handed down a heavy parchment, furled, and my hands trembled as I unrolled it:SUIT TO MAINTAIN THE MALE CHILD BORN TO MARTHA JANE CAIRNES, SPINSTER, ON JANUARY 1, 1869.

  The spinster names as father Nicholas McComas, formerly of Black Horse, current whereabouts unknown. The state of Maryland charges him, and in his absence, his brother, Alexander McComas, with the upkeep of the Child, in the sum of $80 Due Immediately and $30 Per Annum until the Child is grown. Failure to pay will result in a misdemeanor charge, punishable by a prison term of undetermined length.

  I blinked rapidly, blurring the page, eyes dazzled by sun flashing on snow. A son. Martha had a son. Possibly mine. Or not. The crowd of black crows flew into my head, cawing and flapping.

  I squinted up at the sheriff. “Have you seen the child?”

  His chin tripled as he gazed down at me sternly. “No, sir. Miss Cairnes is greatly respected in the county where I serve, by some of us at least. I took her at her word.”

  My head went light and I closed my eyes, requested that my heart send blood back to my brain. Maybe, if I could see the baby for myself? And if it looked like me? Could I still marry her and bring her to my rocky fortress, keep her and the baby safe? My heart, for answer, gave another leap. I would have to think it over carefully.

  Meanwhile, I did the decent thing, took the document inside and tried to give it a signature worthy of the heavy parchment, with homemade ink and a quill pen. I had the $80 from the wool, though I would be hard-pressed to make it through the winter comfortably without it. I wrote out the draft in Martha’s name and took it and the parchment back outside.

  “Do me a favor,” I said to the sheriff, though he had no reason to agree. “Don’t give this to her brother. Leave him out of it. Can you do that? I have made it out to her. I want her to know I have agreed to say the child is mine. But not one cent of this is for Richard Cairnes. If you can’t promise that, then I won’t pay and you can take me into jail.”

  He held up pudgy hands in haste. “I don’t want to hear no particulars. I got your signature and that’s enough. But I will give the draft to her if you like. You’ll owe another thirty this time next year. You can send it to her direct. But if I hear different, if I hear you don’t send the money proper-like, I’ll have to ride up here again and take you in. You hear?”

  I heard, and soon he and Alex left, pausing only to water their horses with the snow I had melted for my own.

  When they were gone, a strange elation gripped me, of unknown origin. I would be poorer. It would have cost me less to marry her, and she would have done the housework, which I could not afford to pay for anymore. So that would be the final laugh on me.

  And yet, at that moment, money was not my worst regret. Right then I wished that I had asked the baby’s name.

  I HEARD NOTHING after that for months, all through the long and lonely winter, my existence fairly miserable as a solitary shepherd and barfly. I suppose I missed the Irishwoman, that bit of human contact in the day, and I was beat down by the cold. It was close to Maryland, but these hills felt more like Maine. Every day I dressed in long johns, wool pants, and shirt, two jackets, hat, gloves, and a wool scarf around my face, and when I walked to the barn, my nose running and freezing hard inside the scarf, I checked the maple in the yard. It had tight leaf buds, hard as horn, and they stayed that way, refusing to promise anything.

  But one morning I was arrested by a purple crocus poking through the snow, followed the next day by more, then a whole flock of daffodils in the sheep meadow. No daffodils had bloomed out there the year before, killed by the late blizzard probably, and I took these hearty yellow bells as a good omen. Pussywillows soon fuzzed out, and the leaf buds on the maples swelled with a rush I felt in my own body, knew too well. Snow vanished. Creeks swelled bright and cold. Soon pink apple and white pear blossoms blew on every breeze, and the whole damn spring began again. The sky remained uncertain, cold showers chasing thin sunlight, the ground still frozen at grave-depth. But each day the sweetness grew, and I felt unworthy of it all, a man who brought lambs into the world and not much else. Though I might have a son.

  Slowly I became resolved to see the baby, speak to Martha Jane, and settle that somehow. The boy would be several months old now, old enough for me to see if he resembled anyone I knew. I knew she would not want to speak to me, so I approached her warily, with a letter first to Isie.

  Isie wrote back.

  “I don’t know why I’m writing to you, after what you did to her. Her confinement was so awful she can’t even walk yet! And she won’t look at the baby. She just lies there and cries and won’t eat. Everyone thinks she might die of grief. Her own mother hopes she will! And that’s because of you. You should hear the ugly lies people say about her! Here, I’ll send you a sample. This is all your fault!!!! Nobody would have said those things if you had married her! Her life is ruined thanks to you. You disgusting man, did you really think she could give herself to a black Negro? That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard! I’m warning you, if I ever see you, I can’t be responsible for what I do.”

  She had enclosed a piece of newsprint, a transcript of a sermon by a local minister.

  THREATS TO TR
UE WOMANHOOD

  It has come to our attention that a woman, a supposed lady of respectable standing, has been brought low in a town near us, and while one must condemn the men accused with her, in this case it seems the manner of her upbringing must also be brought into question. She was known to ride out on a horse alone and traipse around the countryside at all hours. She had learned to fire a rifle and was observed to read more than the Bible without assistance from her father or brother.

  Hark, God-fearing men! Women are weak creatures, not governed by reason, and we must protect them every second of their lives. To this lady’s sad story there is more, much more, and worse. This woman, this “lady” of fine manner—this supposed virgin and pious church-member—has been observed on several occasions to show undue interest in African servants. Some say that has led her into the most deplorable unchastity of which a lady can ever been accused. And she has brought a child into the world from this unchastity. The soul quakes to think of such a godless, heathen act!

  Her family has so far shown restraint in not ejecting her from their home. Yet the question must be raised: Might not a woman so polluted damage the innocents exposed to her? Should this contagion be allowed to fester in our midst, perhaps to spread?

  I threw the paper on the fire, feeling great relief at having escaped all that myself.

  Then guilt shot through me like a flaming arrow. I had to know about that baby boy. No one seemed brave enough to mention how he looked. If he was white—and if he looked like me—then I would either have to marry her or go through life with that arrow in my heart.

  I WROTE TO Isie and Alex’s wife Hannah, telling both of them I would make the return trip to Jarrettsville for Appomattox Day, and begging them to help me speak to Martha and see the child. The thought of the parade was terrible, exposure in that public way right in the heart of Jarrettsville. And yet I would be surrounded by a hundred other men in blue, hidden in my uniform as well as any sheep inside its flock. But if Isie or Hannah would tell Martha Jane, she might recognize me in the herd. “If Martha is well enough to come see the parade, I would be abjectly grateful to see her. I won’t go to her brother’s farm, and you have to believe me, I do have good reason for that, reasons that are not my fault. But I need to see her and especially the child, if there is any way to manage it.”