Finally I felt him relax and I stepped back. He looked down at me, smiled, and wiped at the tears falling down my cheeks with one of his fingers. It was almost like he had never seen tears before, though I knew that wasn’t true. But maybe these were the first tears since my mama’s that had been shed just for him. Then he stooped down and kissed me on the forehead and hugged me again.
‘‘It is good to see you again, Mary Ann,’’ he said. ‘‘I missed you.’’
‘‘Oh, Papa, I’m so glad you’re home!’’ I said. ‘‘We were so worried before we got your letter, and then I’ve been anxious about what would happen to you ever since Katie left again.’’
‘‘Well, it all seems to have worked out,’’ he said.
‘‘Did Katie tell you what happened with her uncle Burchard and us leaving and everything?’’
‘‘She told me every detail,’’ he said, chuckling a little. It was so wonderful to hear him laugh again! I don’t know what my papa would have been without his laugh and sense of humor. I could tell that he was tired and that his time away had changed him. Even with his laugh, he seemed quieter and more somber. But seeing his eyes sparkle and hearing his laughter made everything suddenly all right again.
‘‘But what happened?’’ I asked. ‘‘How did you get out of jail?’’
‘‘Kathleen charmed a few people,’’ laughed my papa, ‘‘and gave almost every dollar she had to her name. And we’ve got to pay the man more money later. But he agreed to drop the charges. We just have to harvest this cotton of ours.’’
‘‘We can do it, Papa. We did it before to pay off the bank—or part of it, at least. This year we’ll harvest the cotton to pay your bills.’’
‘‘In the meantime, we’ve got no money!’’ he laughed. ‘‘We may not have much to eat between now and then.’’
‘‘I don’t care,’’ I said. ‘‘We’re all back together, that’s the only thing we need.’’
‘‘As long as we don’t starve in the process.’’
‘‘We won’t. There’s plenty to eat at Rosewood. Don’t you worry—Katie and I know what to do.’’
‘‘I’m sure you do.—But it looks like there’s someone else who’s as glad to see you as I am!’’
I turned and saw Katie coming toward us.
‘‘Katie!’’ I said, feeling myself starting to cry all over again.
‘‘Hi, Mayme,’’ she said. ‘‘I think we’re finally home for good.’’
We hugged each other, a long quiet hug without words. Sometimes those are the best kind, when the hug itself says all there is to say.
‘‘You remember my uncle Ward,’’ said Katie as we stepped back and she glanced behind her.
‘‘Yes. Hello, Mr. Daniels,’’ I said to my papa’s brother, who had walked out from the house with Katie.
‘‘Howdy, Miss Mary Ann,’’ he said.
‘‘And he’s your uncle too, isn’t he, not just mine?’’ Katie added.
I didn’t know what to say. Neither did Mr. Daniels. He seemed a little embarrassed by what Katie had said. Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to have a colored girl think of him as kin, though now that I was calling myself Mayme Daniels, like Papa had said he wanted me to if I thought it would be right in respect of Mr. Jukes, we did share the same family name.
THE TWO UNCLES
41
IT TOOK A LITTLE TIME FOR ALL OF US TO GET USED to each other again. My papa was his same cheerful self, and it was obvious he was glad to be back at the place he now considered home. But with his brother with us now too—the other Mr. Daniels, who none of us other than Papa really knew much, except for Katie, who’d traveled all that way north with him on the train—sometimes we didn’t know what he was thinking.
We couldn’t help wondering what would happen, and whether he might decide to start making a lot of changes too. The fact that he was the legal owner of Rosewood added to the uncertainty. I don’t think Katie was nervous about it. But she wasn’t black. Things happened to blacks that didn’t to whites. And if I was secretly a little anxious about what Mr. Ward—that’s what we called him—might eventually do and whether he might want to send us away like Katie’s uncle Burchard, then I knew Emma and Josepha probably wondered too. I don’t know whether the fact that I was his niece too, like Katie, made any difference to him. We never talked about it again after Katie’d said what she did, and at first I was afraid to call him Uncle Ward like she did and didn’t know what to call for him for a spell. Something like that seemed a liberty without the person giving you permission first. But the fact was, one of Katie’s uncles owned Rosewood now, not Katie.
The day after they got back, he and my papa got shaved and cleaned up and into clean clothes and looked real nice. With clean-shaven faces they looked more like brothers than ever, except for my papa’s little thin mustache. And then slowly over the next few days, we began to pick up where we’d left off several months ago before Papa’d left and Katie’s uncle Burchard started coming around. And after Henry and Jeremiah went home, I took over the milking again.
At first Mr. Ward acted kind of like a guest. We all gradually went about our business like always. There was plenty to do, and now with even more mouths to feed—and two hungry men—and clothes to wash, we kept busy enough. Henry and Jeremiah came out from town oftener than before too, and when we were all together, even without Aleta, there were nine of us and that’s a lot of food. We had to start making bread almost every day and were more careful about saving all the milk for cheese. We would have to butcher another hog or cow pretty soon too. It was almost starting to be like a real plantation with enough people around that it took some doing and some planning to keep food on the table. It sure was changed from Katie’s and my first days together when we just milked the cows to keep their bags empty and dumped out the milk we didn’t drink.
We’d started something all right, and it was becoming a bustling, active place!
And things changed inside the house too. There were five bedrooms and it seemed only right that the two Daniels brothers ought to each have one to themselves. Emma and William needed one too. I could have shared a room with Josepha, but Katie wanted to share her room with me, so I moved my things back into her room like we’d done in the beginning. It might have seemed pretty uncommon for blacks and whites all to be sharing bedrooms on the same floor under the same roof. But that’s how Rosewood was, and Mr. Ward didn’t seem to pay any more attention to anyone’s color than my papa did. And every time Josepha or I suggested it, Katie wouldn’t hear of anyone going to the slave cabins. It was just a great big family full of all kinds of people—a little colored boy, two grown-up white men, a huge colored woman who didn’t know any other way of life than cooking and taking care of people and loved it all the better the more people she had to feed, and me and Katie and Emma . . . cousins and uncles and babies and half-whites and half-blacks. I couldn’t imagine a more complicated and unlikely gathering of folks that called themselves a ‘‘family’’ anywhere.
Since my papa had already been with us before, he knew how life at Rosewood was. He’d settled himself into a kind of daily working routine back then and now fell back into it within just a few days. He asked Henry to stay around as much as he could to show him whatever he might need to know from when he’d been gone. It was obvious he considered Rosewood home. But it was different with Mr. Ward. After the first few days, he seemed a little bewildered and restless about it all, like he didn’t know what to do with himself or how he fit into life at Rosewood. Everyone else got up every day and just went about their chores. But he didn’t know what to do. It had been a long time since he’d lived a regular life as part of a household.
One day I saw him out standing by the grave markers. He’d taken his hat off and was just standing there quiet and respectful.
I suppose it was something we all had to face and deal with in our own way eventually—the death. We’d all lost family and were now trying to figure out how to live a
nd act with the new family God was giving us. We’d thought we’d lost everything and then had discovered that we still had some family after all. I had a wonderful cousin and father. Katie had me and two uncles.
But it all took some getting used to. Change always does, and sometimes change isn’t easy. Now I reckon it was Mr. Ward’s turn to have to face some of these things and the changes that were coming to his life. It wasn’t that he and his sister had been that close. It was still hard to think of her as my own Aunt Rosalind. It seemed presuming of me to think like that, even though it was true. She was still Katie’s mama in my mind. But what I was getting around to saying is that death is a fearsome thing even if you aren’t close to someone. It makes you wish you had been closer. Death can’t help but bring a few regrets along with it, and I had the feeling as I watched him standing there that those kinds of regrets were going through Mr. Ward’s mind right then, who was my uncle just like Katie’s mama was my aunt. It was sure hard to get used to!
I heard a step behind me. I turned to see my papa walking forward. He smiled, paused with me for a minute, put his arm around me and pulled me toward him for a second, then continued on toward the graves.
He stopped beside his brother and now put the same arm around Mr. Ward’s shoulder. I couldn’t hear what they said, but my papa told me later.
‘‘Makes you think of all the things you wish you’d said and done, doesn’t it?’’ my papa said after they had been standing beside each other a minute or two looking at their sister’s grave in silence.
Mr. Ward nodded.
‘‘Time is always too short. You never realize it till someone’s gone,’’ my papa said. ‘‘It was real hard for me at first, knowing how little I’d been there for her and that now it was too late to do anything about it. But then I realized, like we were saying when I was sitting in jail up north, that I still had a chance to do right by her by watching over Kathleen.’’
It was quiet again. Then finally Mr. Ward turned away from the graves. He glanced at his brother, blinking a little harder than usual. My papa understood. He knew what Mr. Ward was thinking. He’d felt the same uncomfortable warmth in his eyes a few times since he’d been here too. But there were some things that were best left unspoken between men. Like tears.
Slowly they began walking away and I turned back toward the house so it wouldn’t seem like I was staring at them, even though that’s just what I had been doing.
‘‘It’s different for you, Templeton,’’ said Mr. Ward as they walked out on one of the paths toward the fields. ‘‘You was always closer to Rosalind. At least you came around every once in a while.’’
‘‘Not too often,’’ said my papa. ‘‘Only when I needed something from her, I’m afraid. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I even stole money from her a time or two.’’
‘‘Yeah, that may be, but at least you saw her, and saw Kathleen when she was growing up.’’
‘‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Ward. We both did a lot of things we regret. Now we’re trying to make up for it however we can. Don’t forget, it was your gold that saved this place from the bank.’’
‘‘I reckon. But what am I going to do now? When I came back I didn’t count on all this. Suddenly everything’s changed.’’
‘‘I know what you mean. That’s just how I felt when I showed up. It knocked me so hard in the head that I left again. Especially finding out about Mary Ann. It threw my life upside down for a while. But eventually I realized that this was my home now.’’
‘‘That might be so for you. You got not just a niece, but a daughter. A fine girl too, that Mary Ann. Her mama must have been quite a woman when she grew up.’’
My papa nodded. Now it was his turn to fight back the inner tears of memory.
‘‘But it’s different for me,’’ said Mr. Ward. ‘‘Kathleen and all the rest of them—they know you better. You can tell they look up to you.’’
‘‘Just because I’ve been here longer.’’
‘‘It’s more than that, Templeton. You fit here. You like the work, you know what to do. I’ve watched you with those cows, milking and cleaning out those stalls—if I didn’t know any better I’d think you liked the stinking smell of that manure!’’
‘‘You get used to it,’’ laughed my papa. ‘‘It’s not so bad.’’
‘‘That’s just what I mean. This life agrees with you. I’ve never seen you look better or more content with yourself. You talk to that fellow Henry like you’ve been running a plantation all your life.’’
My papa laughed again. ‘‘I had to learn,’’ he said.
‘‘Yeah, but it seems to come natural to you. I’m just a drifter, Templeton.’’
‘‘You could have said the same for me a year ago.’’
‘‘I don’t know if I could change like that.’’
‘‘Nobody’s asking you to.’’
‘‘Then what am I going to do? You and Kathleen got a plantation to run. You got a daughter to look after. But me . . .’’
His voice trailed off. By now they had come to the field where the stalks of cotton were growing up to their knees.
‘‘Look around, man,’’ said my papa. ‘‘What do you see?’’
‘‘I don’t know. . . I’m no farmer. What is it?’’
‘‘It’s cotton, Ward. Acres and acres of cotton. King cotton! Built the South into what it was before the war. Made more men more money than all the gold in California. We planted it, Ward—the girls and I and Henry and his kid. I planted some of that cotton myself and I’m proud of it. And do you know whose it is?’’
‘‘I don’t know. . . what do you mean?’’
‘‘Whose cotton is it?’’
‘‘I don’t know. . . Kathleen’s, I reckon. What are you driving at?’’
‘‘No, it’s yours! You’re the owner of Rosewood now. It’s your name on that deed of Rosalind’s.’’
‘‘That don’t mean nothing.’’
‘‘Of course it does. Rosewood belongs to you.’’
Mr. Ward took in his words like he’d never actually considered the fact before. They almost seemed to stun him.
‘‘I’m no plantation man, Templeton,’’ he said after they had walked along a little farther. ‘‘I could never be.’’
‘‘That’s what I thought. But I helped plant this field of cotton. And it’s a good feeling now watching it grow and knowing I had a hand in planting it, and knowing when harvest comes that I’ll pick my share of it and pay off Roscoe with my own hard work, with maybe enough left over to buy those girls of ours each a new dress.’’
‘‘You sound like a plantation owner all right! You sound downright excited about some green plants growing in the ground.’’
‘‘I suppose I am, Ward. Because it’s honest labor, and you can make money and make a good life for yourself that way too, just like men have been doing for centuries. Sure I panned for a little gold, though I never broke my back at it like you. But other than that, when did I ever do two days’ honest hard work in a row in my life? Maybe that’s why I like it. I go to sleep at night thinking that maybe I accomplished something worthwhile that day.’’
‘‘Yeah, you’ve changed all right, Templeton.’’
‘‘Maybe this land’s finally got into me. I suppose those two girls have got into me too,’’ he added. ‘‘I helped a little with it last year. But it was different. It still didn’t feel like it was mine, like the work really mattered. Now it does. Maybe family’s like that, Ward. It gets into you. That’s what it’s made me realize, that maybe I’m finally ready to settle down and think of the land and the work I can put into it as the kind of life I want to live.’’
‘‘I don’t know,’’ said Mr. Ward, rubbing his chin like he did, even though there were no more whiskers on it.
‘‘So if I’ve learned a thing or two,’’ my papa went on, ‘‘I’m offering my services to you as your foreman.’’
Mr. Ward turned and looked at hi
m, then began to laugh.
‘‘I’m serious,’’ said my papa. ‘‘You’re the owner of Rosewood . . . I’ll be your foreman.’’
‘‘I don’t know. I’ll think on it. I still ain’t sure I’m cut out for this life.’’
‘‘Too late. Your name’s on the deed.’’
‘‘I’ll sign it over to you or Kathleen,’’ said Mr. Ward, ‘‘just like Rosalind did to me. No reason I couldn’t if she did.’’
‘‘I’m not so sure Kathleen would want you to. I think she’d say the same thing that I’m saying. She’d want you to stay.’’
Mr. Ward thought a while more. Then they both turned back toward the house. As they went he brushed his hand through the green stalks, seemingly looking at them in a new way, like he was thinking about everything his brother had said.
My papa saw the look in his eye and recognized it, in the same way he had known what he was thinking while standing at their sister’s grave.
‘‘All right, then,’’ said Mr. Ward after a couple more minutes, glancing at my papa with just the hint of a grin, ‘‘I’ll let you be my foreman for a spell . . . a week or two . . . till I see if I can get the feel of this place . . . at least just till I decide what to do with that deed.’’
MEAND MY PAPA
42
THE SUMMER CAME ON. IT GOT HOT AND DRY AND the cotton grew.
By the middle of August Henry was starting to come out and check on it every few days.
One day in the middle of the morning I saw Mr. Ward standing at the kitchen window looking out. I went and stood beside him. There was Henry in the distance walking through one of the fields.
‘‘Why is Henry always looking over the cotton?’’ he asked.
‘‘He’s looking to see when it’s ready to pick. Then we’ve got to start harvesting.’’
‘‘How will he know?’’
‘‘Come on,’’ I said. ‘‘I’ll show you.’’
We went out into the cotton field.
‘‘We’ve got to start the harvest as soon as we can, the minute it’s ready,’’ I said. ‘‘You’ve got to get it in when it’s dry. Two years ago a huge storm came and ruined half the crop before we were done and we didn’t get enough to pay off the whole loan at the bank. That’s why Katie looked so hard for your gold that she finally found where her mama had hidden it.’’
Together is All We Need Page 18
