by John Jakes
Leon reported that something like a quarter of the blacks on the place were whispering about being free soon. A few more questions on Jeremiah’s part revealed that a fierce split was developing at Rosewood. The more loyal nigras were being lectured by Maum Isabella until they promised they wouldn’t assist the invaders in any way. And although the malcontents went about their duties as usual, they did so with a changed attitude. Leon summed it up.
“They didn’t use to say nasty things about Miz Catherine, but they sayin’ plenty of ’em now. And every other word, almos’—it’s jubliee. Jubilee comin’—”
Did that mean only a celebration of new freedom? Jeremiah wondered. Or was it a code word that included reprisals?
Wherever he went on the plantation, he kept his sheathed knife in his boot.
iv
After the final trip back from the cache about midday on Saturday, Jeremiah was in the barn unhitching the mules when a long shadow fell across the matted straw on the floor. He turned, caught his breath—
Price was leaning in the entrance, arms folded.
“You and Leon sure been busy, mister soldier.”
“Listen, Price! You know my name.”
“Reckon I don’t have to use it, though. Reckon I don’t have to do anything you say with those Yanks so close. What you and Leon hidin’ back in the pines ’sides cotton?”
“Go ask Mrs. Rose!”
The anger didn’t ruffle the black.
“Oh, I doubt she’d tell me. Whatever you’re puttin’ away, I bet the Yanks find it. They goin’ to find you too. ’Less of course you plan to hide out.”
“Price, one more goddamn word out of you—”
A chuckle. “An’ what? You get after me? You tear into me? Any time, mister soldier. Any time you want, you welcome to try.” He unfolded his arms, started away, then paused. “Yanks gonna get you. Oh, yes, you bet they are.” The brown pupils seemed to grow larger. “If they don’t, I will.”
“Price, how come you despise me so much?”
The forced calm in Jeremiah’s voice brought a smirk to the other man’s face. “Why, that’s easy. You one of the soldiers been fightin’ to keep me property ’stead of a free man.”
“Bullshit.”
Startled, Price raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”
“You heard. Here’s the way I figure it. For you, being property’s only an excuse. The day you brought me here, I saw how you scowled at the mama of that little girl who ran to see your turtle. I think you like people to be scared of you. Nigra, white—I don’t think it makes a particle of difference so long as you keep ’em scared. I bet there’s not one damn person in creation you do like—or would ever treat kindly. I met a couple of officers in the army just like you.”
“Mister soldier, you think whatever you want. That won’t change the way things come out ’tween us.”
“Just how do you propose to fix me, Price? With my musket?”
The black put on a pious expression whose exaggeration was almost ludicrous. “Musket? You still got a notion I stole that?” A soft, clucking sound indicated how pathetic he found the idea. “I don’t need no musket, mister soldier.” He held up both hands, sunlight behind him shining between his fingers. “Just need these.”
He sauntered out of sight, his shrinking, distorted shadow lying at an angle across the straw at the barn entrance for what seemed like half a minute after he himself had disappeared.
Chapter VIII
With Serena
i
CATHERINE ROSE HAD MORE than a thousand dollars in Confederate bills in her office. On Saturday, Jeremiah locked the bills in a trunk in the steaming attic, along with pouches of valuable papers: deeds, ledgers, the colonel’s will. Downstairs, he returned the key to Catherine, who put it back on the ring with the others.
New padlocks had been hastily obtained from Louisville the day before. Jeremiah and Leon installed them on the doors of the gin house, corn cribs, and barns. As though locks could stop Sherman’s men!
But doing something was better than doing nothing, especially when the highway had begun to show increased activity.
Poor farm families, slaveless, passed in rickety wagons, fleeing the county. A Home Guards unit consisting of twelve elderly men and four boys marched by. Eight horsemen wearing yellow-faced gray arrived—a contingent of General Wheeler’s cavalry. As they watered their horses at the trough near the well they reported the situation was worse than anyone had imagined.
Sherman’s sixty thousand were sweeping across the state on a broad front. In its wake the army left burned buildings, ruined fields, slaughtered livestock, and occasionally—one of the troopers whispered to Jeremiah—raped women. The leader of the cavalrymen warned Catherine Rose to leave the plantation. She thanked him for his concern, said no, and sent the riders on their way.
ii
Late Sunday afternoon Jeremiah was on his knees in the sitting room, using his knife to cut a slit in the back of an expensive horsehair sofa.
Once the cut was made, Catherine started to hand him the family silver. He slid each piece through the slit and worked it down into the sofa’s stuffing. Perhaps eighty or ninety pieces were jammed in before he pushed the sofa back against the wall.
He walked around in front and sat, deliberately letting his weight come down hard. The sofa clinked and jingled like some peculiar musical instrument.
“God a’mighty!” he sighed. “Any Yank sits here, he’ll discover the silver right off.”
“I’m hoping they’ll be decent enough not to intrude into the house—” Catherine began, interrupted abruptly by a distant crackling.
Jeremiah dashed to one of the open windows, jerked the curtains aside, stuck his head out into the sunlight. He heard the crackling again.
“That’s musketry!”
Catherine turned pale. She and Jeremiah rushed outside, joined a moment later by Serena, who appeared around a corner of the house. They stared at the lane, the highway, the fields beyond. The crackling was repeated a third tune, but more faintly.
Jeremiah wiped sweat from his forehead and turned to Rose’s widow. “Wherever they are, they’re close. I’d better take the wagon and mules into the pines. Where’s Leon?”
“I sent him down to the bottom to hide three crates of chickens.”
“All right, I’ll go alone.”
“Let me help,” Serena volunteered, startling him.
Although it was the Sabbath, the girl wore an everyday cotton dress. Catherine had decided not to waste time attending church services in Louisville.
The day was warm, with a languid, summery feel unusual for the end of November. A haze hung in the air and a sultry breeze blew. As Jeremiah scanned the blurred contours of the land to the north and west, he suddenly spied something that made his belly hurt.
He pointed. Serena strained on tiptoe. Finally Catherine saw it too. A thin, almost invisible streak of black smoke rising beyond the trees along the Ogeechee, an oblique mark across the reddening afternoon sky.
Catherine pressed a fisted hand to her chin. “Something’s on fire.”
“We’d better go right now,” Jeremiah said. “I’ll hitch the mules.”
“You’ll need help with that too,” Serena said, surprising him again. She didn’t seem the sort for physical labor. Her duties during the last couple of days had been limited to light tasks, including the gathering of pieces of jewelry, which Catherine had put into a small leather bag she wore beneath her skirt. The bag was fastened around her waist by a length of rope. Naturally Jeremiah hadn’t seen the bag. Serena had described it.
He couldn’t get over the change warm weather and tension had produced in the girl. Dirt smudged one cheek. Sweat rings showed at the armpits of her dress. Somehow, though, her untidy state didn’t detract from her prettiness, actually seemed to enhance it by lending her a more human, less remote quality.
She dashed for the house. “I’ll fetch a shawl. It’ll be cool by the time w
e walk back.”
Staring after her, Jeremiah again chided himself for his interest in the girl. The interest was even more foolish and harder to explain in the light of what he already knew about her temperament.
Maybe the attraction had nothing to do with Serena personally. Maybe it was just a normal combination of curiosity and inexperience with the opposite sex. Yet he doubted that. He found himself wondering how Serena’s body looked, naked, beneath all those clothes.
Not just any woman’s body. Hers.
He had difficulty dealing with his feelings about her. Turning his back on her at Thanksgiving dinner had compensated for earlier slights, and he’d tried to start off the next day fresh—as though nothing unpleasant had happened earlier. She too had behaved differently, had actually been cordial a few times. And when a mood was on her—a mood that prohibited cordiality—at least she didn’t act contemptuous of him. He suspected one possible reason for her change, but preferred not to think about it.
He didn’t exactly like Serena. Not in the way you liked a friend, a camp comrade. Yet he was attracted to her, even though caution suggested it was unwise. Caution, however, came from the head. His interest lay in another direction entirely. He felt an embarrassing stir in his groin when he thought of riding alone with her into the pines.
Catherine seemed to have no objection to their going off together. She was preoccupied, watching the smoke rise in the west. “Damn them if they’re burning private property! Damn them for making war on homes and farms!”
Surprised by her use of profanity, he offered another of his reassurances. “We won’t let them do it here, Mrs. Rose.” But it was becoming more a hope than a certainty.
For a moment he forgot Serena, imprisoned again by the kind of despairing mood that had gripped him when Rose spoke to him just before he died. There was no honor in this scurrying around to hide family possessions. Hell, it was downright disgraceful!
He stared at the column of smoke and tried to convince himself it didn’t mean what it seemed to mean. And he silently repeated his vow to stand up to the Yanks if they came, and demand they deal honorably with the residents of Rosewood.
iii
Bess and Fred, the mules, were balky. Jeremiah was glad to have Serena’s assistance in hitching them.
She’d combed her hair, pinned her shawl to her bodice with a brooch, and put on cologne. He caught her scent as he maneuvered the wagon out of the barn. Serena closed the door, padlocked it, and climbed up beside him, sitting so close on the splintered seat he could practically feel her leg beneath her skirt.
He drove straight down the dirt track between the slave cabins. Beside one of them, Price rested in the shade. He surveyed the wagon without a flicker of expression. Jeremiah shook the reins to speed the mules.
“Damn it, why’s he lying around as if he doesn’t have a care?”
“He doesn’t,” Serena said. “The Yanks are almost here. Besides, what else is there to do except wait?”
“He would have to see us drive off! He’ll know where we’ve hidden the wagon. He’s probably found the cache already.”
“Leon wouldn’t tell him.”
That relieved him a little. “You’re right. And Leon’s the only other one who knows.”
“Leon’s trustworthy. He’s behaving himself too. Some of the rest are getting more and more sassy. In the kitchen just this morning, Maum Isabella had to slap Francy. She sauced me when I gave an order. I slapped her once myself for good measure.”
She sounded pleased about it.
Serena began to hum. It took Jeremiah a few moments to recognize the melody. The way she speeded it, the hymn sung at her father’s memorial service sounded more like a minstrel tune. Lord, what an odd one she was!
He reached down to his boot to make sure the sheathed knife was secure. The wagon rolled by the slaves’ burial ground and back toward the dark privacy of the pines.
Once into the relatively cool shade of the trees, he began to feel increasingly nervous. The mules plodded. A fly deviled his cheek. He brushed at it several times, then tried a slap. The fly disappeared. All at once Serena stopped humming and leaned against him.
“Jeremiah.”
“Yes?”
Softly: “I’m mighty glad you came from Atlanta.”
The touch of her shoulder started his loins quivering in that embarrassing way. He squinted down the weed-grown track. “Is that right? I had a notion it didn’t make a bit of difference to you.”
“You were wrong. It does.”
“Well, Miss Serena, you’ll forgive me, but for a day or two, you surely didn’t act like it.”
“I was all upset! Because of Papa. I loved Papa more than anybody on this earth.”
It might be true, he thought, but it didn’t change the fact that she’d undergone an almost complete reversal.
“Besides—”
She slipped her hand between his elbow and his ribs, linking her arm with his. In the silence of the woods—silence interrupted by another far-off stutter of gunfire—he felt nervous and hot. Her cologne even masked the scent of the pines. The pointed firmness of her left breast pressed his arm.
“—we need a man on the place. Women just can’t control a bunch of unruly niggers.”
“Price is the one to worry about. When he wouldn’t confess to stealing my Enfield, we should have locked him up.”
“Or shot him,” Serena said in a matter-of-fact way. He was stunned; he’d had the identical thought, but he wouldn’t have spoken it to anyone.
“Too bad we didn’t have another gun,” she added.
Recovering, he said, “I’ll keep watching him.”
He had doubts about his ability to cope with the black on a man-to-man basis, though. He was rapidly regaining his strength. The bandaged wound on his leg troubled him less and less often. But he had no illusions about Price being a weakling. And he recalled the threat in the barn: “Yanks gonna get you. If they don’t, I will.”
To impress her and reinforce his own determination, he added, “If any of those Yanks show up, we’ll just have to talk to ’em straight and tell ’em we expect decent treatment.”
Serena giggled.
“What’s so blasted funny?”
“Sometimes you are priceless! You think Yankees’ll act polite just because we ask?”
I have to believe that. It’s one of the reasons I’m here. Where I came from, there was no honor left. Not after your father died.
“Yes, I do. They damn well better respect civilian territory. They will, Serena. I’ll bet that every place there’s been trouble, people have provoked them.”
“Now you sound exactly like Catherine,” she sighed as the wagon rounded a bend.
The mules flicked their ears to drive off the huge blue flies. The slow, lazy rhythm of the hoofs, the fragrance of her cologne, the isolation, and the feel of her breast touching his sleeve drove him into a state of almost uncontrollable excitement.
At the same time he felt uneasy, endangered, somehow. But it was a sharp, sweet danger, tinged with the lure of the unknown. Tense as he was, he wouldn’t have stopped the wagon for a minute.
Yet he did stop it all at once, his tongue stuck in his cheek and his head cocked.
Serena frowned. “What’s the trouble?”
He put a finger to his lips. Cold-eyed, he pointed off to the right, whispered, “Thought I heard something.”
“Jackrabbits.”
“No. Louder. Heavier.”
They listened. He was sure he hadn’t been wrong. But the telltale rustling of pine needles and the rattle of disturbed underbrush wasn’t repeated. He hawed softly to the mules and set the wagon rolling again.
iv
Serena gazed at dusty bars of sunlight slanting between the trees. “Getting late. It’ll be dark before we’re finished.”
“Maybe not,” he muttered. The notion of being alone with her after nightfall had become almost too nerve-racking to bear.
“Know something, Jeremiah? For a long time Catherine thought Price was the best buck on the place.”
“She made a mistake.”
A curt laugh. “Not her first. She always thinks the best of everybody. There was only one person she never thought well of.”
“Who?”
“My real mama.”
The words had an unforgiving sound. He let her go on. “I heard Catherine arguing about it with Papa once. He said my mama was a lady, a private music teacher, and Catherine wasn’t to forget it. But she said he was a liar. Said the kind of lessons my mama gave didn’t take place on any old piano stool.”
He nearly laughed, but was thankful he hadn’t when Serena turned to look at him. Her blue eyes were smoldering. “She called my mama a filthy name.”
“What was it?”
“I won’t repeat it. Why, you know a lady isn’t even supposed to say she has legs. She has limbs. Once Catherine and I had a real fuss over that, too. But she did call my mama a filthy name.”
He risked the question. “Did she call your mother that name without any cause?”
“Makes no difference! She was my mama!”
Silence for a while. He’d overstepped. But Serena’s anger was evidently directed at Catherine for the moment. Sounding melancholy, she continued.
“I’ve never even seen a picture of her. There was a picture in the house at one time, but it was burned. Papa said Catherine burned it. Believe me, Catherine isn’t as pure and forgiving as she lets on!”
“I’ve never met a perfect person yet, Serena. You should be able to understand why your stepmother isn’t wild about your father’s first wife. When my mother remarried, my father felt the same way about her new husband.”
“But Catherine didn’t have to use a filthy word! I can’t forgive her for that. Ever!”
She drew a deep breath.
“One of these days I’m going to pay her back.”
