The Rebel Wife (15 page)

Simon slows us as we bounce from the dirt track onto the Chattanooga Pike. The iron-rimmed wheels clatter on the uneven boards, jostling me. The road is not much better than the half-timber corduroy the armies threw down as they moved across the county during the war. Simon salutes the passing Negroes, who jounce in the back of buckboards or stand idle at the edges of fields of parched red earth, half green with struggling cotton plants.

Simon has a charm from Rachel. I think it is, at least. A small burlap purse like Emma had. He carries it in his jacket pocket and reaches a hand in to touch it. Simon is coal black—pure, dark African. But he has a prominent nose, high-ridged. He must have Indian blood, too. Eli never said where he came from. Certainly not from Albion. I would have recognized him. Maybe from the county or somewhere downriver. He doesn’t have the Gullah accent of Negroes from low-country South Carolina or speak the Geechee from Georgia. And he is too dark to come from the Mississippi Delta.

Many Negroes in the area, many of the freed slaves in the county, if they were not brought here overland from Georgia or South Carolina, came upriver from New Orleans. The steamboats would ply the Mississippi and the Ohio, then down the Tennessee as it curves backward and scoops into Alabama. In the spring, when the rains fill the rivers, a boat with a shallow draft could make it past Triana to the mouth of the Oosanatee and all the way to Albion.

Simon takes his hand out of his pocket to hold the reins. He pulls back and the buggy jolts to a stop. A wagonload of Negroes rolls toward us. There are a half dozen of them, dressed poorly in overalls and torn and dirty dungarees, in the back of the wagon driven by an old white mountaineer. The white man is grizzled, with red-rimmed eyes, and he spits his tobacco through a wide gap between his brown teeth.

One of the hands in the back of the cart calls out, “Howdy, Simon.” He is dark, too.

Simon nods and smiles. “Howdy, Jesse. Where are you all headed?” His accent sings, not the laughing, bumptious accent of the local Negroes. It is more liquid, with a solemnity that makes him seem grave, as if he is singing a very sad psalm. He is so much more dignified than Eli was. Eli was like one of the dirt farmers who scratch out a living at the edge of the mountains. Simon must come from a different caste.

“We’re going down to Judge Heppert’s place over on the other side of Hayfork. We’ve got to give him his days.” The other men in the wagon nod agreement, waving to Simon in recognition as they roll by.

“How many days does he take from you?” Simon calls to them.

“Forty days in the season. I barely have enough time to tend my own patch,” Jesse calls back. “Shame Mr. Eli ain’t around to make my contract!”

Simon nods, and another man calls to him. “When you heading off to Kansas? Any room in your wagon?” The man is dark. He slouches, his legs hanging off the back of the wagon.

“Not yet,” Simon calls back. “Not yet.”

Buzzing like cicadas vibrates in my ears. Did I hear that man right? The motion of the carriage makes me dizzy and sick. We are turning onto the cowpath that leads to the mill. The lane is covered with a thick blanket of pine needles. Simon clucks at the horse and we cross the roadway. The wheels don’t clatter anymore. The woods are darker. These trails. I rode them with Buck a long time ago. The sunlight falls in shafts between the thick pines and dapples the brambles.

“Simon, are you going to Kansas?” I ask.

“Eventually, ma’am. Yes.” He moves gently in time with the easy pace of the horse.

“Are you going with Rachel and John?”

He turns to look at me. “Did they tell you?”

“Yes, Rachel came to me and said they are leaving. Is everyone leaving? Is Emma going?”

He laughs and turns forward. His wide shoulders shrug. “No, ma’am. Emma has no plans to leave.”

“Why are you going? To be a farmer?”

“I might. This time I’m going to help people get settled on homesteads. I’ll come back and let folks here know how things stand up there, and then maybe there’ll be another group of folks interested in going, too.”

“Colored people?”

“Yes, ma’am. Colored people.”

“Do they all want to leave so bad?”

“Some do. Most want to know there’s a real chance for something better before they go. That is what I’m going to find out for them.”

“Is that what you want the money for?”

He nods once without looking back. He only half turned his head to speak to me.

“Was Eli helping colored people go to Kansas?”

Simon turns his head to me again. His eyes are serious. “No, he was not. I am.” He turns away.

My gloves make my hands itch. The pines stand tall and dense beside the road, cutting the sunlight into thin slices as we pass.

“You seem to know everyone. They must trust you.”

The carriage rides easier without the constant racket of the plank road.

“Yes, ma’am.” His hand is back in his pocket, toying with the charm. “I’m very lucky to have a broad acquaintance.”

“How do you know so many people?”

“Through Mr. Eli’s influence, ma’am. I worked with him to organize the freedmen back in ’66 and ’67. To organize the Union League through the whole county. And then I was a registrar of elections in ’68. I met many people in our community that way.”

“That’s very fortunate for you.” I remember, of course. Eli seemed to go out of his way to disgust my old friends and my family. Mama was scandalized when Eli made the Union League in Albion. Organizing the freed slaves to vote for the Radical Republicans. Organizing them as if they were some sort of secret army. I felt like I couldn’t go out of the house.

My veil feels hot. Tall pines rise up on all sides. Their scent is spicy and earthy and sweet.

“Yes, ma’am,” Simon replies. “There is good fortune in it.”

“What does a registrar do?”

“A registrar? He stands there with another man on voting day to make sure all the men voting are who they say they are. To make sure nobody votes twice. And that no dead men vote, either.” Simon turns his head halfway to me and smiles.

“Dead men vote?”

“It is a highly unusual occurrence, but it has been known to happen.” He turns forward and adjusts the round derby he is wearing. They are a new thing, and all the Negro men in the county seem to have bought one.

“Do you still do that?”

“I only had the pleasure a few times. You understand, Miss Gus, there being some hostility to a Negro man serving in such a position.”

“Weren’t you going to run for office, Simon?”

He doesn’t move and does not hesitate to reply. “No, ma’am.”

“No?”

“No, ma’am,” he says again.

He is lying. Was it three years ago? Maybe four?

The November elections were nearing. There had been talk, some kind of talk, from Eli, I guess, or something I overheard when he was downstairs with officers or his Republican friends. He said Simon was going to run for sheriff in the next election.

Then Eli had gone traveling. He did travel. Trips to Nashville and New Orleans and Montgomery and Mobile. The colored men would come in the morning, and Emma would tell them to scat, that Eli wasn’t home and to tell their friends to stay home, too. They would linger for a few minutes, standing by the carriage house talking to John to make sure Emma was telling them the truth. Then they’d drift toward the square or back to their shacks in the North Ward. By noon, they’d be gone.

At night, I’d make Emma check all the doors to make sure they were locked. I was sleeping across the hall then, in the rose room with the ribboned wallpaper. What a relief it was to sleep there when Eli was away. It was autumn, I think, well into it, because my windows were closed and I had a fire that smoldered and gave the room the dry, coarse odor of burnt wood.

I heard men talking, shouting in the lane. It was late, past midnight. From my window, I could see a group of men on horses back by the carriage house. The Knights of the White Cross. I pulled my wrapper tighter. They were wearing dark clothes, like robes, with a cross on the chest and hoods. They shouted at Simon, but I couldn’t understand the words. One of them hit Simon with a truncheon, and another pushed him down and tied his hands. They ripped back his shirt and took turns, one by one, each of them whipping him. They each gave him twenty lashes. They counted every strike out loud. Simon cried out again and again until he lay still, as if he was dead. Except at each stroke of the whip, his body would jerk like he was electric. They left him there in the dirt and the dark alone. He was still, his back shiny and wet in the moonlight, striped from the whipping. Like in slavery days. It was like any whipping from slavery days. For anything. Mama used to make a man on our place give out the whippings. They said he never did them hard. But this was hard, the way they whipped Simon, and he just lay there still, and Emma ran out to him with a blanket and covered him and helped him up to his room. She stayed with him, I think.

Eli was so angry when he came home. But Simon isn’t lying. He didn’t run for sheriff.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Simon. “I thought you were going to run for office of some kind once. I made a mistake.”

“No, ma’am,” he says to me. “I never ran for any office here.”

“Did you run for office someplace else?”

“I once ran for captain of my company during the war.”

“During the war?” We saw black troops after the war. Drilling by the depot, following the orders of white Yankee officers. But Simon?

“Yes, ma’am,” Simon says, and he looks back at me quickly. “I was in the army, like a lot of folks.”

“You were a Confederate?”

Simon laughs out loud at that. “No, ma’am,” he says through his laughter. “No. I was a volunteer with the twelfth United States Colored Infantry. At your service.”

My face is hot. I wipe the perspiration at my temples. “Did you win your election?”

“No, but it wasn’t a great loss. The captain was killed a few weeks later at Nashville.” He looks back and smiles again.

“My brother was killed at Nashville.”

Simon’s smile vanishes. He looks ahead and then back, somber. “I’m very sorry for it,” he says. The air is still and heavy. The horse has an effort pushing through it. Always back to Hill. I am half sick of these memories.

“Do you vote, Simon?”

He is surprised. He shrugs. “No, ma’am, I haven’t voted in a while.” The horse’s feet thud into the dirt at a trot. “Would you like to vote, Miss Gus?” He turns back. Is he sincere or is he making fun of me?

“Me? Of course not. It’s not my affair. Nor is it yours!”

Simon laughs again. I wipe at the moisture on my cheeks.

“No, ma’am, it is not,” he says, and he gives a laugh with a hard edge to it.

There’s the roar of the engines at the mill, faint but closer. We round a bend, and the mill is in view down a long alley of pines.

Three creeks tumble down the Cumberland foothills to form Three Forks Pond. The pond feeds Three Forks Creek as it meanders through the valley down to the Oosanatee. Fifty or more years ago, the water that flows through Three Forks was captured for a ginhouse and cotton press. When Eli took over the place, the old mill was a burnt wreck. The foundations bear black scars from the war. The rotting sluices were repaired. During the months when I carried Henry, Eli received letters of advice from millwrights in Lowell and Fall River. Yankee factories contributed the machines, great contraptions to spin thread and massive, roaring power looms that bang threaded shuttles back and forth through the warp, inching out miles of cotton cloth. The old shed that housed the cotton press was incorporated into the long brick building. No one in Albion had ever seen such a massive venture, standing lonesome in the woods by the creek.

The roads that meet at the mill come from the little market towns of the area. Cotton is carried, already baled, in wagons that creak down the lanes. Women and children ride on the bales, coming to work at the mill from the villages that bear silly townlike names, Pennyacre, Hayfork, Black’s Cove.

Simon pulls back on the reins suddenly. He squeezes his legs against the horse’s flanks and turns back to me, taking his hat in his hand. “I can’t go into the mill with you, ma’am.”

“No, of course not.”

He looks at me in an earnest way. He holds the hat and reins in one hand and leans the other against the horse’s rump. “I hope you’ll look around for that package. For anything. Maybe you can collect Mr. Eli’s personal effects. I’m sure you want them.”

“I’m sure Judge collected Eli’s things. He is in charge of the estate.”

He nods to me and looks down.

“I will look for it, Simon. Of course I will. If it exists.”

He looks at me, his lips pressed together, then turns and digs his heels into the horse. The carriage jerks forward. The trees fall away until we’re in the clearing with the massive brick and frame pile of the mill before us. A thick column of black smoke climbs into the sky from the brick stack of the engine house. The machines roar.

The hairs prick up on the back of my neck. I feel that itch again. Near a doorway, leaning on a hitching post with his horse’s reins in his hand, is Buck Heppert, looking thunderous. What is he doing here? The nerve he has to stand there looking at me like I’ve kept him waiting.

A group of women, all white, cluster together outside, snorting snuff from their fingernails and spitting in the dirt. They stare at me as Simon drives up to the single doorway by the hitching post. Down another path into the woods, there is a row of houses—small white-washed shacks, each with a small wooden step at the front door. Children, babies yet, of the white families who work in the mill sit in the dooryards. One sits in a cotton shift but is otherwise naked, her face dirty and smeared, grasping at the straggling weeds that spring from the open space under the cabins. The houses are set up on bricks, and chickens cluck and flutter at the corners, chased under and out of their shelter by a lean dog that looks like he doesn’t even have the strength to make a kill. Our hands had better cabins before the war.

I was here with Buck ten years ago. The ginhouse was a blackened shell, and the old shed and press stood broken and idle. It had a charm to it, as calm as a graveyard next to the pool fed by the whispering creeks. Tall trees waved lazily in the breeze. Buck wanted to show me the spot. He frightened me with stories of how the gin would eat a man’s hand if you weren’t careful. The place had been the Harrisons’ back then. They had moved north to Illinois, leaving their land to the tax collector. Eli had gotten it cheap.