The Rebel Wife (13 page)

He stands and opens the door into the house, waiting for me to pass through. “We won’t know until we look,” he says.

I walk by him. Who is he, after all, and how much of what he says is true? I will have to watch him, as I am sure he is watching me.

I CAN HEAR THAT
bottle in Eli’s room as if it is calling me. It has a sweet song. Different from the Vinegar Bitters or Dr. Scopes Elixir or the pills of mercury tartrate that give sweats and spasms. The song started low and whispering but grows louder as the days pass. Maybe I can have a little—just to calm me.

The money and the will worry me. Simon worries me. This story of a package. It seems so far-fetched. He said he searched the bedroom but found nothing. How can I believe him? How did Eli trust him? Eli’s absence, too, has a strange effect. After so many years of resentment, how strange when those feelings begin to fall away one by one, like a flower losing its petals until only the stem is left. He was the axis of my day for almost ten years. Now, in the time between sunset and sunrise, everything has changed. The questions are still here, though, and the problems pile up on each other like those bills that Eli is not here to pay. Do I resent him more now that he is gone? He can’t answer the accusations that Judge finds it so easy to make. Or Simon’s stories of bribing and politics.

No, Eli is not wholly gone. He is strong even in his absence. He is in the room with me. I can feel him like I do Hill. Perhaps Weems was right. He will stay alive in spite of everything.

He haunts my steps. He chases me down the hall, into the corners. His bloody face with gaping eyes is before me. My dreams are filled with images of him wet with his own blood, embracing me. He seems to reach his hands out and I quail, terrified but powerless to move. I choke, smothered in winding sheets, and awake, unsure if I have cried out. I dream of that family in the county soaked through their clothes with blood. It rushes from the rude door frame of their cabin.

Emma shakes her head when I ask her about any sickness, saying she hasn’t heard any more. I cannot convince myself that she is telling the truth.

I am fretting these days away, snapping at the servants. We are trapped here together. Simon and John have wisely forsaken the house for the out-of-doors. It is quiet out there, but so hot. Simon keeps to the garden, digging up bulbs and clipping boxwoods. How can he be so calm?

My jewelry is spread across my dressing table. The bills are in a neat pile. The butcher. The milliner. The man who delivers the milk. And, of course, the servants. They will all want to be paid. I can hardly rely on some mysterious package that Simon believes exists. Perhaps he is a fool. Judge would say so if I told him.

The gold is separated from the silver, the earrings from the necklaces, bracelets, and lockets. The onyx is worth keeping. It would not bring much, and it is wearable for mourning. A gold necklace studded with garnets. I can part with that. It was a gift from Eli. How much is it worth?

The back stairs creak from someone’s weight. They are sneaking around the house, trying to avoid me. But there’s Henry’s voice. And Little John’s. Rachel must be taking them into the nursery. I’ve never been good with the servants. Mama was better with them, although I don’t think there was one among them who had much affection for her. She was hard on them. Perhaps I should be harder.

“Miss Gus, ma’am,” Rachel says. She is almost beside me and I didn’t even hear her. She must have crept in through the door from the back stairs.

“Yes, Rachel.”

“That Mike is outside to see you.” She makes a sneering frown. She doesn’t like Mike coming around. That must be why she took the boys to the nursery.

“My brother?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s him.”

“He asked for me?”

She tightens her nose and exhales sharply through it. “No, ma’am, he’s sitting on the back porch waiting, and I figure it’s for you. I’ve got the boys in the nursery to keep them away from him.”

Rachel pushes too much. They are all pushing me. What Bama said. Maybe I shouldn’t let Rachel keep the boys together so much.

“Tell him I’ll come down.” I open the drawer and push all the jewelry into it, locking it closed with a small key.

“I’d like to have a word with you, too, ma’am.” She takes a step closer. She smirks at the key in my hand as I slip it into my pocket. Her arms are bare almost to the shoulder. Rachel has strong arms. She has spent the morning beating the winter rugs before they are rolled up and put away. That should have been done weeks ago.

“I wanted you to know, ma’am, that before long, John and I are going to be going.” She looks me in the eye and frowns. She is relentlessly blunt.

“I don’t understand. Has someone offered you more wages? Where are you going to?”

“We’re going on to Kansas. There is a group of colored folks getting together. John has a brother Garson in Tuscumbia, his only brother left after Wendell was killed. He’s going with a whole group to settle on government land up in Kansas so we can farm for ourselves.”

“Are you unhappy here, Rachel? Eli has so much land, surely you could farm on that if you want to farm.” Kansas? She must have lost her mind. Next she’ll tell me they’re going to California to prospect for gold.

“We want our own farm,” she says firmly.

“I could sell it to you over time. You could buy it for yourself if you like. Then you could continue on here.”

Rachel shakes her head, her eyes never wavering. “No, ma’am,” she says, and I bristle at the sound of it. “Mr. Heppert would never allow us to buy that farm. You know that as well as I.”

“Mr. Heppert doesn’t have anything to say about it, Rachel, if I insist on it.”

Rachel narrows her eyes in disbelief. “I mean no disrespect, but Mr. Heppert and those others are not interested in helping out colored folks. They want us under their heel, and they’ve got us there no matter what Mr. Lincoln said. Nobody I know ever got forty acres and a mule. I had to watch my father killed by slavery before the war, and I thought things were going to be different. But they are back to the same. There isn’t any future for colored folks down here. There isn’t any future for my boy here. Mr. Eli tried. He was a good man. He helped a lot of us, helped us try to make something out of the nothing we had. And I was willing to stay for John as long as Mr. Eli was here. But now with him gone, I don’t see any way around it. I’ve watched what those Knights have done, what they did to Wendell. They beat him and strung him up on a tree for running a farm the way it should be run. There’s no place for us here. There never was except as slaves to somebody else. So we’re going. That’s all there is to it. I just wanted to let you know. We’re not going today, but we’re going. If you want to send me packing, that’s fine. That’s your choice. But I’ll expect my wages.”

Rachel exhales again and stands looking at me for a moment. She turns and walks to the bedroom door.

“When did you decide all this?” I shoot the question at her, and she stops in midstep. She turns back to me gravely.

“John and I have been talking about this for a long time. You know John sat down with Mr. Eli all through this past winter and talked about it. The only thing stopping us was the money. When the Freedman’s Bank went bust, we lost just about everything. We were going to stay longer and try to save up some, but with Mr. Eli gone, it’s safer to go with no money than to stay here. The longer we stay, the less chance we’ll ever get out of here.” She fixes her eye on me and nods.

“Rachel, I don’t like the boys spending so much time together. After Mike leaves, make sure you get Little John from the nursery.”

She shoots me a dark look, then leaves the room, closing the door to the back stairs behind her.

My stomach tightens at the sight of him. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, hey there, sister,” Mike says. He slams Eli’s desk drawer shut. “Just looking to see if old Eli has any leave-behinds. You never know what you’ll find around old Eli’s office.” He smiles and swaggers past me to the porch. The desktop is littered with papers, and books lie open on their spines across the floor. Half of Albion has searched this office. Would Eli leave money lying around here? Why didn’t I look?

On the porch, Mike pulls a weathered canebrake chair toward him and sits, tilting it back on two legs. He pushes his muddy boots against a porch post. He has a tattered Union cavalry officer’s slouch hat in his hand. The insignia has been removed, but it is trimmed in worn gold braid and has one side of the brim pinned up to the crown. Mike was wearing it when he showed up at the house on Allen Street long after the war was over, and he always gives a wry smile whenever he is asked how he acquired it. He spins the hat by the brim with one hand and whistles as I approach him.

“Where’s that boy of yours?” he says with a smile on his face. He has a thin growth of silky hair for a beard. Hard to believe he is only twenty-six, barely a man. The things he must have seen and done.

When he came back in the fall of 1866, Mama acted like Jesus Christ had been resurrected again. She sent a runner to me and demanded I go to them immediately. She had been given a reprieve of some kind. But Mike is hardly a blessing. She left him everything she had when she died. He sold it all and went through the money like it was water. The house. The gardens. The books and furnishings. All gone but for my father’s bench upstairs.

“Henry is off playing. What do you want, Mike?” I stand before him, keeping my distance, clasping my hands in front of me.

“Now, is that any way to welcome your brother? Have a seat, Gus. I’m just here to check up on you. I am the head of our little family now, aren’t I? At least until Henry gets big enough to whoop me.” He laughs and leans back further. An empty chair sits near him. I pull it a distance away before sitting down.

“What do you want, Mike?”

“Just checking on your health is all.” He takes his feet from the post and lets the chair fall onto its four feet. He squares his feet with the chair and rests his arms on his knees.

“My health is fine, Mike. We’re all fine. What have you heard?”

He raises his eyebrows. “Why, nothing, Gus. Nothing at all.” He half grins at me as if he knows something I don’t. “And have you got everything all figured out with Eli’s money? You’re set up now, ain’t you?”

This is what he’s after. He did not take long to get to the point.

“Everything Eli had is entailed to Henry, and Judge is the trustee. He’s reviewing things now.”

“Is that so?” He raises his eyebrows and leans back in the chair, lifting its legs again.

“Yes, Mike. That is so.”

“From what I hear, you’re going to have a lot to spread around here, though. Ain’t that right?”

“And you’re looking for a share of it.” He won’t get anything from me.

“Maybe I am.” He smiles again, looking at the whitewashed boards of the porch ceiling.

“That’s not something I can give you, Mike. Judge is the trustee. He’d have to approve anything I do with the money.”

“Oh, come on, sister. Don’t be so stingy.” He sounds almost like he is making a joke, though he is not laughing.

“I doubt he could see his way to giving you an allowance, given how we both know you’ll spend it.” I am not laughing, either.

Mike lets the chair feet crack against the floor and looks at me. His face is hard. The years he spent at the war, the youth he gave up to it, are plain in his eyes and the snarl of his mouth. He stands and points a rigid finger at me.

“I ain’t looking for an allowance,” he says, fairly spitting at me. “I’m looking for what’s mine. What should have been mine if that filthy scalawag hadn’t stolen it all out from under us—from
me
.”

“What are you talking about, Mike? About Eli? Stealing from us?” His reasoning amazes me. If anything, Eli did nothing but give Mike handouts since he came back.

“Don’t play dumb with me. All that land Eli got was Pa’s land—it would have been my land by rights. And that’s who it should come back to.” He sits again and pounds his fist on his knee. He whines like a saw.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mike. It’s out of my control, anyhow. The estate is in Judge’s hands.”

“Goddamn Judge and goddamn you,” he shouts, standing suddenly. “You’re all a bunch of liars. I’m going to get what’s mine.”

I won’t be bullied by him. Not in my own house. “You had your share, Mike. What happened to the money you got from selling Mama’s house?”

His face is terrible. “That’s none of your goddamn business, you hear?” he shouts at me. His hand is clenched in a fist. The wild look in his eye.

“Mike, please.” Where are the servants? The windows are open, but there are no shadows observing us. Where are they?

“You know all Judge ever cared about is himself. He always hated Pa.” Mike lowers his voice and leans in to me. “He’s lying to you if he says you can’t get that money. Buck told me you’ve got all the money in the world. All the money in Riverbend County for sure.”

“Mike,” I say, looking around again. “You talk like Eli had the Confederate gold. He’s lost everything.”

“Bull, Gus,” he spits back at me. “Bull and crap. That’s what you’re talking. That mill at Three Forks practically prints money. You think I’m so dumb I don’t know that?” He takes a step closer, and I shrink back into the chair, trying to get away from him. He grabs my arm and pulls me to him, whispering fiercely. “Is that how dumb you think I am?” I pull back, barely breathing. “Answer me,” he says.

“No, Mike.” My voice wavers. I do not want him to see my fear. “I don’t think you’re dumb.”

“I talked to people, Gus. Buck and other people. I know that mill’s got money in it. Your money, you hear? All you’ve got to do is go down and ask for it. It’s yours, ain’t it? And that goddamn Judge can’t say nothing about it, can he?”

“I don’t know,” I say, trying to pull my arm away. His grip tightens until I cry out in pain. “I don’t know,” I insist, resisting the urge to scream. “Let go of me!”

Simon walks from the carriage house, carrying a crate of seedling plants. He has a long, sharp hoe thrown over his shoulder. The same hoe he used to kill those rattlesnakes. Mike turns me loose and I step back. Simon looks at me and nods. I rub my forearm where Mike’s fingers have been and watch Simon move across the path to a freshly turned bed waiting for planting. He looks at Mike evenly and nods at him, then kneels down, focusing on his task.