“Why,” exclaimed Jason, not expecting the question, and distracted by all the activity in the yard, “that means ‘Jackson, old and fierce.’” He’d heard Delia use the expression dozens of times.
“Indian term, ain’t it,” Harris drawled.
“Yes, it—yes, it is,” Jason replied, a hint of caution in his voice.
“Thought so,” said Harris. He gave a nod to the slave, who vaulted up into the driver’s seat and took up the leather reins. “Ho! Giddyap!”
Rupert Harris rolled off into the night, with new things to ponder.
Down in the barn Fes Farson was likewise pondering things. Very drunk, but not drunk enough not to realize the portent of Jason’s words in the yard, he also knew the raw humiliation of public chastisement. “Ainobdy do… do ’at to ol’ Fes…”
Staggering to the horse trough, he picked up a five-gallon bucket, dipped it into the water, hoisted the bucket, and dumped the contents over his head and shoulders. The procedure was repeated, and the cold water effected a slight change for the better.
Or possibly for the worse. “Miz Randolph…she…becuzathe bull…the bitch!”
Of course; it was clear to Fes. The fact that he had a nip now and again throughout the day, from the jug concealed behind loose bricks in the milk shed, had never hindered his efficiency, not one iota. It was just because of that stupid kid going off into the pasture. She’d probably blamed that on ol’ Fes, too, and combined it with a story about the drinking—which, in any case, how could she know about?—when she’d told Randolph.
Wait. Was he getting this straight? Was this right?
“Damn right!”
Smoky-eyed bitch, strutting around like some kind of a queen! Like to take her up to the haymow some afternoon, an’ put John Thomas through his paces. That’d show her.
Poor old Fes. Nothing had ever gone right for him, and this was another one of those times. One job after another. He could always get jobs, because he knew how to do it, and how to look responsible. But something always went wrong. That stupid nigger who had to go and die after Fes’d flogged him, plantation outside of Raleigh. The shyster brother of that warehouse owner in Charleston, who’d—Fes was sure—dipped into the till even more than Fes’d been doing, and then blamed it on him. That was the way things always went, and always Fes had had to take it, accept it, and move on. And the wife of the ship owner in New Orleans, who got mad because Fes had decided to experience the pleasures of her darkie slave girl. Well, what the hell was a slave girl for, except to work and give you her stuff when you wanted it?
“No…more,” he muttered, running a hand through his wet, dirty-blond hair, squaring his shoulders. “No…more…to…old…Fes…”
Having made that vow, he grabbed a pitchfork and lumbered out of the barn toward the house, ready to settle scores. Only one or two buggies remained in the yard. Good. Fes skirted the lantern-lighted area and headed for the back of the house. The field workers had long since gone drunk to their bunks, so Fes had no problem getting to the back door. He peered into the kitchen. The nigger girl was up to her elbows in dishwater, and them other town girls was scraping and cleaning and yammering. The handle of the pitchfork was hard in his hand. Let’s see, if I go around and sneak in by the verandah, might be she’s over on that side of the house. No, there would be people around, saying good night…
Then he had an even better idea. What was the use of poking the tines of this fork in Missus Randolph’s gut? Why not just do something to that dumb little kid, who was bound to get himself obliterated anyway, the way they let him run around. But where did the kid sleep?
“What are you doing back here?”
Fes jumped at the sound of the voice. The girls working in the kitchen screamed. Fes dropped the pitchfork, and somebody grabbed him by the shoulders and thrust him into the lighted kitchen. It was Phil Foley.
“Jes—I was jes…”
“You,” Phil Foley ordered Tanya. “Get Mr. Randolph. Right away.”
In moments Fes was looking into, and then trying to avoid, the inquiring eyes of Jason Randolph. Phil had produced the fork, and was explaining how he’d seen Fes lurking about the back door. To harm the servant girls?
“No, I don’t think so,” Jason reasoned, with a look of horror. He knew Fes Farson had been after a far more devastating kind of revenge.
“’Sail a lie,” Fes tried; but this new defeat and the resurgent effects of fatigue and booze combined to rob him of his last defiant impulse.
“You’ve got ten minutes to get off my property,” Jason was telling him. “If you’re not, I’ll lock you up and take you into Harrisville jail in the morning, and press charges, too.”
Fes stumbled off, not too far gone to recognize a bargain when he got one.
“Phil, I won’t forget this,” he could hear Jason telling Foley.
“No,” Fes vowed. “No, an’ Fes Farson don’t forget, neither.”
When he stumbled back into the barn to retrieve his jug, he saw a girl come ass-swaying down the haymow ladder. He grunted in amazement, and, startled, she looked around.
“Is… is the dinner over?” she asked warily, noting his condition, and measuring the distance to the barn door.
“Yeah…yeah, it is. What’re you…?”
Melody decided that Fes was a kindred soul. “I wasn’t good enough for Mrs. Randolph,” she said bitterly. “I was sent to wait out here, fell asleep in the hayloft.”
Then she was gone, trying to catch the Foleys and get a ride back to town, and Fes was standing there, swaying in the barn, comprehension dimly beginning to dawn on him that there had been—all the time—an actual, live, and probably agreeable woman right here in the barn all evening! If only he’d…
Then the thought slipped and spun away, diffused into a thousand pale threads amid the dull, gloomy lights of his brain.
“What the hell,” he mumbled.
He staggered toward the place where he hid his jug. A jug was always better than a woman, when you got right down to it.
A jug lasted longer, at least if it was full to start with.
Chapter XII
Delia was already in bed when Jason slipped in beside her. She was anxious, for a number of reasons, two of the most important being Fes Farson’s intended assault and Gale Foley’s machinations. Three times she had checked to see if little Andrew was safe, and sleeping soundly. And yet each time she closed his door and tiptoed from the room, she was pressed by an impulse to ascertain his safety yet again.
Next to her Jason sighed.
“Anyway, it’s over,” she said, reached out, and found him there. He took her hand.
“No,” he said, “I’m afraid it’s only beginning.”
She did not answer immediately, both wanting and not wanting to know news that promised not to be very good. “Something about us?” she managed. “About me?”
“Indirectly. Well, to tell the truth, quite directly. Do you recall, just before dinner you came and asked me to tend the barbecue, and I was talking to some men?”
She did. The men had looked worried, distressed, angry. *
“And then Reuben Sills caused that little disturbance at table?”
“Yes. I wondered why.”
He sighed again and turned toward her. “I’ve long suspected that a few things were amiss around Harrisville. Well, more than just a few things. But suspicions are one thing and hard evidence is quite another.”
“You have this evidence now?”
“I haven’t personally seen it, but I intend to. However, I don’t doubt that it exists. Reuben Sills had to take his wife up to the hospital in Lexington last month, remember? While he was there, waiting for the doctors to examine her, he strolled over to the courthouse. That’s where Rupert Harris was supposed to have—finally—filed the deeds and land claims for the folks around our area. Now, we all know Reuben isn’t doing so well on his farm, but at least he owns the land. He knows that, too, and he thought it would give h
im a kick to go into that courthouse and tell the registrar of deeds and titles, ‘Look here, my good man, I’m Reuben Sills and I own a piece of land down near Harrisville. I’d like to inspect my papers.’”
“So he did that?”
“Sure he did. Or he tried to. The clerk on duty rummaged around and took out the books for our county, and went on down the list and said, ‘What was your name again?’ ‘Sills, Reuben Sills.’ ‘Nothin’ listed here for you, Mr. Sills,’ the clerk told him.”
“How could that be?” Delia cried.
“Because Reuben’s land is held under the name of Rupert Harris.”
“What? How…?”
A little over a year before, when it became clear that Harrisville was going to endure, was not going to fail or fade back into brush pine and wild grass, the people had grown restless over Rupert Harris’s relaxed you-trust-me-and-I’ll-trust-you land practices. They wanted regular titles, all legally signed and witnessed. Harris hadn’t resisted. On the contrary, he had purchased new respect from his people by quickly hiring a Lexington lawyer, had brought the man down at his own expense to Harrisville; and there for three and a half days, morning and afternoon and into the evening, the lawyer had drawn up papers and summoned landowners and witnessed signatures, and when he was finished, everybody knew what was what and who owned what and who didn’t.
Rather, they believed that they knew these things.
“How could that be?” Delia wanted to know. “Everyone here in town saw what was being done, and then Harris and the lawyer personally took the records to file them in Lexington, didn’t they?”
“They filed papers, all right. But not the same ones that we prepared and signed here.”
The realization of what had transpired was, to Delia, no less than astounding.
“So Reuben found it out,” Jason was saying, speaking quietly, tiredly.
“And our land?” she managed.
“It’s in his name, too.”
“I might have guessed.” She remembered his acquisitive, proprietary expressions, signals of an interest in their farm far beyond normal concern for a part of his community. “But how did he manage to do it?”
“My signature is on a piece of paper witnessing his title to our land. And the signatures of a lot of others, Reuben among them, attest to the same kind of arrangement.”
“But you didn’t sign—”
“No, the signatures are false. Rank forgeries.”
“So? What is the problem? Is there no way to put the situation aright? Among my people—”
“These are your people,” Jason corrected.
“Among the Chickasaw,” she amended, “a matter such as this would not arise. The land belongs to all, and all partake of it. It’s even sadder to think that Harris has tricked his own people out of land that is really ours—that belongs to the Indians.”
“We have our law,” Jason said.
“So, then, let it do its work. Let it take its course.”
“It is not that simple a thing.”
“What do you mean? Harris has cheated and—”
“Ah I Certainly he has. But it is his word against ours.”
“His word against yours?” She could not believe some high form of white man’s law would even listen to Rupert Harris.
“There are some serious problems.”
Delia waited.
“It is a matter of time, and hiring lawyers. And more seriously, many of the people here do not believe Harris has actually done what Reuben claims. Reuben has a poor farm, a sick wife, and he is by no means the world’s most intelligent man. Also, there is the element of fear. Harris runs the town, manipulates affairs, has signed agreements awarding him with various percentages of people’s harvests. All of this is fact. We cannot change it, and neither can we alter the effect of the power it gives him. Moreover, the fact is that the papers on file in Lexington are legally drawn up.”
“Legally?”
“Formally, then. The fact that they exist and are on file according to proper form means that it is us—those few of us in Harrisville who may chance a trial—who are the plaintiffs. We, not Harris, must shoulder the burden of proof.”
Delia was outraged. “It is no surprise to me that you white people kill others and rend the land, with laws like that!”
Jason saw her point, but he was a little hurt nonetheless.
“Delia, you are part of me. We are us! You have white blood in your veins.”
“There are times I wish not to think of it, nor even to admit it.”
He was silent for a moment. “Then do not use Indian expressions at table. Chula Harjo,” he said, pronouncing it slowly.
“The old and fierce one,” Delia said coldly.
In the darkness she could sense him thinking.
“Has he ever done anything to you? I do not mean to your people, that is a matter of war. But to you personally. Has he ever caused you harm?”
Delia recalled Harris’s desire to invite Jackson here to Harrisville.
“How might he have done that?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”
Jason was silent again, then: “Darling, there is nothing you cannot tell me. You know how much I respect General Jackson, but you also know how completely I love you. If there is something—”
“There is nothing,” she answered, too quickly.
“Was it Jackson in charge of the attack at Talking Rock?” he asked, too abruptly for her to evade his question effectively.
“That is absurd!” she said. “I was a baby. How would I have—”
“Let it be,” he said, in a gentle voice. “Let it be. I have done my best to leave behind the bitterness of my wife and child’s deaths. Let me try and help you do the same.”
She reached out and touched him gently. If he only knew the entire story. Or did he? Had he guessed?
“But it is unwise to use Chickasaw expressions in front of Rupert Harris. He is always on the lookout for information that he could use to his advantage.”
“I won’t do it again.”
Then she told him about finding Melody in her closet, and how Melody had discovered the leather pouch.
Quite suddenly he grew cold. The pouch. Torch-of-the-Sun. Delia’s Indian lover seemed to appear, right there in the room with them.
“I… I did not mean it that way…” she faltered.
-He remained silent.
Delia explained how she had sent Melody out of the house.
“Gale is still willing to cause trouble,” he said without inflection. He did not ask her where she had hidden the pouch this time. It was at the bottom of the flour barrel in the pantry.
Then she told Jason about the coal.
“Oh, God!” he exclaimed.
She thought he was responding angrily to this acquisitive trait in Harris’s personality, which caused the man to seek and take and grasp and seek and take, to trick by smile or treachery, to gain and gain and gain. But Jason had reached another conclusion, an insight Delia herself had known at dinner.
“He’s going to use Andy Jackson and fear of the Indians to get those mountains!”
They were quiet for a long time. Then Jason spoke. “I believe it would be beneficial for us to entertain again. General Jackson.”
Delia’s blood ran cold, so cold that she was no longer Delia, but rather Dey-Lor-Gyva, who had vowed to kill Jackson Chula. A ripple of sharp cunning came to her, and she could not, did not want to, hold it back. Jacksa would be here in her house!
“Whatever you wish,” she said, neutrally. In her body, in her soul, was the quickening impulse that a brave enjoys with his enemy just about to die, targeted there down the length of the arrow, and the bowstring already loose in his fingers.
“You see,” her husband explained, “if he stays with Harris, Jackson will receive only one side, one very limited interpretation of our situation here. But if he is here at Riverbend, I can to some extent control what information he receives—and you will le
arn he is not the ogre you think.”
We shall see, Delia thought. We shall see.
“Perhaps I can turn him from this madness of starting up the Chickasaw wars again,” Jason said. “Coal or no coal.”
“Would Jackson want war, when he is now seeking power of another kind?”
“I doubt it. But if his people—we westerners—are threatened, he would be compelled to act. And action of that kind is something with which he is not unfamiliar.”
This Delia knew.
“Coal!” said Jason. “That too, now. Delia, Rupert Harris is a great man.”
“You cannot mean that!”
“Yes, he is. But a very dangerous one, as most great men are. In a sense, he is like Andrew Jackson, only less subtle.”
Jason talked for a little while longer, about ambition and paradox, and about all the unknown things that arise from both.
Chula Harjo will be under my roof, Delia was thinking. And, unknowingly, he will be at my mercy.
But then she recalled a tale she’d heard: “Old Hickory can smell a redskin twenty miles downwind.” And she no longer felt so confident.
Then the night was deep and dark, and all talk ended, save for the speech of the flesh. Much time had passed since that hot afternoon beneath the pin oak; Delia and Jason had made love many times, in many ways, many places. He had taken her in their bed, in sweet hay, in soft, light-dappled bowers beneath summer trees, knowing her quickly, slowly, now with breathlessness and urgent need, now as slow as time, gently, deeply. Her soul and body he had kissed countless times, and she his.
In the early days Torch had been a presence when they made love, a silent companion to their meldings. But time had passed. Jason seldom thought of the chieftain who had at once given him both Delia and his life. For Delia, the memory of Torch would never, could never die; but because her love for Jason was real, and because the pleasure she had with him was so piercing, she always tried to put the thought of Torch out of her mind when she felt Jason’s touch upon her body.
And so she tried to do tonight, as Jason moved closer to her, touched his lips to her face, and with knowing fingertips keyed delicately, and wooed, and tantalized the living, pulsing pearl of all sensation. She moved for him in all the many ways she knew; and when she moved, his sound was like a joyful sob, an inexpressible cry of wonder, as if the sensation she gave offered, too, a glimmer of heaven, as if one could actually see with the pleasure of flesh. And for Delia, when ecstasy flirted with her, approached, and finally, finally let itself be taken, the words that came to her were cries of the Chickasaw tongue. Rapture sent her back to find an earlier, purer, more primitive self, fair and true and lovely.
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