by Julianne Lee
Jason leaned out to look at her. “He was seven, and he couldn’t write his name?”
“Of course not. He’d only started school that year, after the harvest. School is costly, and his father certainly wouldn’t have wanted to send him before he was old enough to grasp the learning.”
Jason ducked back under to look at the initials again. The world shifted. Slowly, and with great resistance, he began to wrap his mind around the truth that lay before him. “You somehow knew about the initials.”
“Yes, Lucas Robert told me about them.”
“Someone told you besides Lucas Robert. Someone from here and now must have told you.” He kept his head under the table and didn’t look at her.
She sat on a dining chair, her hands primly in her lap. “Who in the here and now knows about them? Did you know? You have sisters; did they know?”
He came from under the table. “How did you know I have sisters?”
“You told me they were generous in selling you their shares of the house.”
“Oh. Yeah. No, they never mentioned it.”
She continued, “Had they known of the carving, would they have cared enough to mention it, particularly to someone they didn’t know? Particularly when they never mentioned it to you?”
It was an excellent argument. Jason stood and let down the table cloth. He peered into Mary Beth’s face. “How did you say you got here?”
“Annie. One of my father’s servants. She comes from a tropical island somewhere where they believe in various sorts of magic. Voodoo. Pagan witchcraft. I caught her one day, casting a spell, and made her tell me what she was doing. She didn’t want to say at first, for she knows it’s a sin to practice such things. My father keeps a Christian home. And especially when I learned what the spell was for, I knew why she was so reluctant to tell me. Annie was trying to make a magic to set herself free.”
“Annie was a slave?”
“She is.” Mary Beth frowned. “Was. I forgot for a moment how much time has passed.” She shook off her confusion, and though her eyes still were soft and saddened, continued, “In any case, it sounded perfectly wonderful, to be able to simply say a chant and get something one wanted. And I wanted so much to be free, as well.”
“Free of this Lucas Robert guy.” Jason reached behind him between his knees to draw another dining chair close enough for him to sit as he listened to the story unfold.
“My father demanded I consent to marry him and encourage him to ask, and I was never able to do that. Other girls might could put a good face on it and bind themselves to a man they care nothing for, but for me it would be torture. I couldn’t bear to lead him on, but nevertheless didn’t dare defy my father. Nobody thought I was pretty enough to attract anyone but Lucas Robert. Not that I thought he would have been a bad husband, but I rankled at the idea I was required to marry anyone. And there was Amos. I couldn’t live in this house with Amos.”
“Amos was...?”
“Lucas’s brother.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was married already and...I wished him to...not be married.”
“You wanted Amos rather than Lucas.”
Color rose to her cheeks and she stood to retreat to the other room. Jason followed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
She sat on the sofa, gazing at the TV which was still flashing pictures she could only barely comprehend. Her voice was tight, and her words were careful. “I would never have committed any transgression, no matter the temptation. I never even wanted anyone to know how I felt—not Amos nor anyone else—and so I knew that living in this house would have been impossible for me. I would rather have married that thug Samuel Clarence than to risk compromising my honor by the daily temptation of living in the same house as Amos Brosnahan.”
“I can see that.”
She glanced up, and appeared to be gauging his reaction. “I went so far as to flirt with him. Samuel, I mean. But I could see it hurt his friendship with Lucas Robert. I couldn’t carry it through.” She sighed. “I’m a terrible coward.”
Jason stood in the doorway and watched her cringe over her perceived weakness. But where she saw weakness, he saw strength. Not many women he knew would have understood the risk involved in the situation with Amos, and fewer still would have cared. Mary Beth, though, was nearly beside herself at the thought of shaming herself with Amos.
He said softly, “So you think you’ll marry Lucas in spite of your thing for Amos?”
She turned to him. “I have no choice. Father has decided, and refuses to hear petitions from any other suitors. Lucas has made it clear he intends to ask him for my hand as soon as I’ve consented. Father knows his intention. He’ll wait until Lucas has worn me down. I’ve found myself actually hoping for war, to have an excuse to put off Lucas Robert until it would be over.”
“Thinking he might be killed in battle?”
Her head flew up and she nailed him with a hurt look. “Never. I would never wish that!”
Jason sighed as he noticed the sun had gone down. “Well, I think it’s about time you went home.”
Her face brightened. “You can send me home? Why didn’t you say so?”
“No.” He held out his palms. “I mean, your apartment. Shelby’s apartment. Across the tracks. Unless you want to sleep over with me tonight.” Mary Beth paled and stammered and blinked, flustered, and he said, “I’ll call that a ‘no.’” He gestured for her to follow. “Come on. I’ll take you there. It’s not far.”
Mary Beth seemed unsure, but followed him anyway.
Chapter 17
October 1862
“We’ve got to bury him.” Shelby stared at the body in the sitting room, unable to take her eyes from it. They’d have to send Clyde deep into the woods to dig a grave where nobody would find it. They’d already had him take Martha upstairs, and now she lay on her bed up there, awaiting cleaning.
Ruth stared too, then gawked at Shelby. “What about Martha?”
Then an idea clicked, and Shelby blurted before she could over think it and chicken out. “We’ll bury him under her.”
The older woman’s eyes went wide. “No. We can’t. Not in the same grave. I couldn’t bear to think of her buried with him!”
“Do you want the Yankees to find him? Do you want them to pry into what happened here?” Deep exhaustion weighted Shelby’s body. More than anything she wanted to curl up on the sofa just across the room and sleep, but there was work to be done and she couldn’t rest now.
There was a shadow in the connecting door to the dining room, and Shelby looked over to find Dad Brosnahan, leaning heavily on his cane. He stared at the body, then looked at Shelby. Then at the body, and with a long sigh he turned and faced back into the dining room.
Ruth watched him go, then said, “But he’s a Confederate. They won’t care about him.”
“They will if it suits them to care. They’ll turn him into an excuse. We’ve got to hide him where nobody will find him. Nobody.”
Ruth looked over at him, and resumed crying. Shelby said, “Go up and stay with Martha for a minute. I’ll make it right. I think I can make it so it won’t be so awful for her.” She gathered her skirts and went looking for Clyde again.
She told the farm hand to dig a grave, in the family plot, but just a little deeper than usual.
“How come?”
“Because I want to throw some soft dirt back into the bottom of it, Clyde. So she’ll rest more comfortably.”
A goofy smile came to his face, like he thought she was having him on. “Dead folks can’t feel.” Either he was taking Martha’s death extremely well, or else Clyde hadn’t truly grasped the fact that Martha was gone and would never come back.
“It doesn’t matter if they can or not, Clyde. I would feel more comfortable if I didn’t have to think of Martha out here, lying on the hard ground. So I want you to dig a hole just a little deeper than you usually would. You ever dig a grave bef
ore?”
He nodded. “Sure enough. I done dug lots of graves, Miz Mary Beth.”
“Then you’ll do a good job on this one.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that, I will. I’ll do a real good job for Miz Martha.”
“So she’ll be comfortable.”
“So you’ll be comfortable.”
Shelby had to smile, and wondered how often Clyde’s brain power was underestimated. “Right. So I’ll be comfortable.”
While Clyde went to do as he was told, Shelby returned to the house and set to stripping the dead man.
Ruth came down to see. “What are you doing?” She sounded detached now, holding a bloody towel she’d brought from upstairs. She spoke to Shelby from the foyer door. Matthew was quiet in his basket, watching with fascination what was going on.
Shelby replied, “Should the body be discovered, the less there is on his person the less chance there will be he’ll be identified. Neither you nor Martha recognized him; maybe he’s from up Kentucky way.”
“More than likely.”
“I also want to see if he’s carrying anything valuable.”
“Mary Beth!”
“Well, he’s got a gun. We want to keep his gun.”
“Mary Beth, don’t you be keeping anything of his.”
Shelby finished peeling and tearing the clothes from the body, and began searching the pockets. One pocket held a knife and a poke of tobacco, and another a small wad of Confederate cash. “We can use these. Except the tobacco.”
“No, Mary Beth. Don’t keep any of it.”
“We need the cash.”
“Not badly enough to let it taint us. Throw it all away. Toss it into the outhouse.”
“We’ve got knives. I suppose we could throw it away.”
“All of it. Throw away the money. I don’t want it around, and I don’t want anything it would buy. I mean it, Mary Beth. Don’t keep any of it.”
Shelby thought a moment, then sighed and nodded. “Okay, then. We keep the gun—”
“No.”
“Yes. The gun we’ll keep, because we’ll need it for protection if those men ever come back. But the rest of it we’ll throw into the outhouse. We’ll burn his clothes, and throw the ashes in also. But the gun we’ll keep.”
The suggestion those men might return silenced Ruth, and she nodded.
That night, Shelby and Ruth buried the raider in the grave Clyde had dug for Martha, then covered over the corpse with two feet of the loose dirt piled beside it. The man’s clothing was burned and the ashes dumped into the outhouse, and the rest of his belongings as well. Only the two guns were kept.
The next day, Shelby walked to the next farm to begin spreading the news of Martha’s murder at the hands of an unidentified intruder who had escaped unscathed. Folks from Hendersonville began visiting, to mourn with the Brosnahans. The day after, people from all over Sumner County who knew and loved Martha gathered to lower into the ground the sheet containing her body. Nobody attending noticed the abundance of soft, cloddish dirt at the bottom of the grave, nor did anyone comment on the shallowness of the hole.
As Shelby watched the burial, her stomach turned at what she’d done. The man lying beneath Martha had been a creep and a criminal, but the horror of having killed a human being wasn’t mitigated in the slightest by that. Where there had once been a living, breathing soul, now there was only carcass. It made her go cold to look at the grave and realize what she’d become.
Over and over, she told herself there had been no choice. That man had been a killer and a thief, he’d killed Martha, and more than likely those men would have murdered them all if she hadn’t fought back.
At the very least she would have been raped, and the horror of that knowledge took her to the edge of rationality so that her head spun and her vision became jumpy. Anything but that, especially here and now where rape could mark a woman for life. “Fate worse than death” was a euphemism with teeth. There was no doubt in Shelby’s mind they were doing the right thing by hiding the body, and had done the right thing by killing. Martha had been murdered, and the neighbors didn’t need to learn one of those raiders had gone with her. If word of that got out, someone in a blue uniform would come looking for the gun that had killed him, and Shelby had both the captured guns carefully hidden.
There was no telling whether she would actually ever use them. She was woefully inexperienced with firearms, and these revolvers were muzzle loaders in the bargain. Before firing, the chambers had to be loaded one-by-one with powder, wadding and ball, each carefully tamped down with the rod hinged to the underside of the barrel. Then percussion caps were placed at the back of the cylinder, one for each chamber. It was a difficult weapon to load and carry safely, and the powder and shot were hard to come by in any case. The guns were long-barreled and each required both of her small hands to hold it steady. But having the pistol had saved her life and Ruth’s, Dad Brosnahan’s, and Matthew’s. She intended to learn how to use it.
The caps were the hardest item to acquire. She was able to finagle powder from the dry goods store by telling a lie about needing it for her father so he could hunt. Wadding was nothing more than bits of cloth, so she cut up an old rag for that. For balls she melted down the lead weights from window sashes, using molds belonging to Lucas and his brothers.
But the caps. She needed percussion caps, or the gun was useless. She took a day and walked to the Donelsons’ house to speak to Mary Beth’s father. If anyone knew where to find them, he would.
When she arrived, she found him tucked into a corner of the sitting room with a book on his lap. Not reading it, but rather staring into the fire. She had the impression it was how he spent his days any more. “Hello, Father.”
He looked up, and smiled. “Mary Beth. How is my grandson? Have you brought him?”
“No, he’s a mite too heavy to carry such a long way any more.” She sat and folded her hands on her lap.
“What brings you here without Matthew, then?” The habitual edge of disapproval colored his voice.
She shrugged, hoping to put a casual air on her trip, but also in an effort to ignore Father’s attitude. “I was just wanting to visit. What have you been up to lately?”
He shrugged also, and no further reply seemed forthcoming.
“Been hunting at all? Yankees get your guns?”
He threw her an ugly glance and replied, “You know they did.”
“How about your ammunition?”
A spark came into his eyes, and he said, “I’ve held onto some things. Powder and lead. I also kept a box of caps. Hid them in the creek, wrapped and sealed in paraffin.”
Shelby smiled. Good. “You have caps? What’re you going to use them for?”
“Don’t matter. They couldn’t take them away from me, and that’s what counts. They’re mine, and the Lincolnites can’t have them.”
“What if you knew someone with a gun who could use them?”
He shook his head. “I’ll have my own gun again someday. I’ll need them then.”
“Would you trade some of your caps for a pistol?”
Now he caught on to what she was getting at, and peered at her as he set his book aside on the table. “You know someone who has a pistol?”
“I have two. I could trade you one of them for half your caps.”
He snorted. “I’d advise you to just give me both weapons, young lady. You’ve got no business waving a pistol around, or handling caps or powder. You’re liable to hurt yourself. Blow off a hand, or something.”
“No, Father, I’m keeping one of them for self-defense.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not safe for you to handle a weapon.”
“It’s not safe for me to live in that house by the tracks with a woman, a baby, an old man and a retarded one, with no way to defend us.”
“You don’t even know how to load a gun.”
“I do. It’s not exactly rocket science. Besides, Dad Brosnahan taught me.”
Fathe
r gave a snort of disgust at the idea of teaching a woman to handle a gun.
Shelby continued, “So, yes, I can load the gun. All I need is a supply of caps.”
“You’ll not get them from me. And I’ll expect you to hand over the pistols.”
“No. You may have one of them. In exchange for half the caps.”
“It’s not safe—”
“Do you want the gun, or not?”
“Hand them both over, or I’ll make certain the Yankees know you have them.”
“Make the trade, or I’ll make certain the Yankees know you have the caps.”
His eyes went wide. “You dare to speak to your Father—”
“You hit me.” That brought silence, and she continued, “Because you hit me, you deserve no more consideration than anyone else who happens to have a box of caps. So, Mr. Campbell, take it or leave it. You want the gun, hand over the caps.”
She sat back and entwined her fingers, and waited as he fumed. His face reddened and he glared at her with a ferocity that would have been horrifying, had he actually been her father. But instead of rushing to placate him as he expected, she watched in utter silence.
Finally his anger seemed to ebb. The redness faded. Eventually, he opened his mouth to say, “All right. It’s against my better judgment, but I’ll let you keep the one gun.”
Let? Sheesh. But Shelby replied, “Good.”
Now she was armed. The gun and its ammunition resided under the third riser of the stairs, in a wooden box. Not easy to get to in an emergency, but at least it was there and her father was the only person outside the household who knew she had it.
The winter passed hectically and the calendar turned another year, to 1863. All through the cold months news came of Morgan’s activities nearby, harrying the Union troops that guarded the railroad, and tearing up the tracks. Using the same technique General Sherman’s army would next year in his march through Georgia, General Morgan’s men made of the rails what folks called “neckties”. A crew would pull a section of rail from its bed and carry it over to set it atop a large wood fire. Once the center of the rail was glowing red hot, the men would then lift it and bend it around a tree. Sometimes, depending on whether there was a leisure of time, they would hammer the rail back onto the ties, with one end of it stuck up in the air. It made the track impassable until another piece of steel could be brought or the bent one sent away for milling.
