The Rebel Wife (16 page)

“Mrs. Branson,” Buck says as he approaches the buggy. “How was your trip out?” Simon climbs off his horse, but Buck steps in front of him, offering me his hand. The eyes of the mill women are piercing.

“How do you happen to be here, Mr. Heppert?”

“I am here for you. Now, why are you here?” His tone is dark. His brows crease as he narrows his eyes at me. Dark eyes. I had forgotten how deep.

“I am here looking after the interests my late husband left to my son.”

He raises his eyebrows and takes my arm. What presumption. He is so like his father.

“What do you mean you are here for me?” I ask.

“Pa asked me to meet you here. He’s been occupied, as you might imagine, with Mr. Branson’s affairs.”

How long has it been since I stood next to him? He has stayed away from me. I am glad he has. His face is changed. Lines crease his mouth and eyes. His skin has lost its softness, has grown tough from too much sun and spirits. I have heard about his gambling and running around. The rumors I have listened to, sought out over the years. But it is the same face before me, with his black mustache and his noble nose.

“You followed me here,” I say.

“No, I didn’t, Gus. I took the trails through Pa’s woods. You remember them?”

My face is hot, red, I’m sure, from blushing. “How did your pa know I was coming here?”

“Pa knows everything. You know that.” He barely smiles. It looks more like a grimace. His attempt at humor.

“Have you spoken with the foreman?”

“I told him you’d be along. He didn’t seem too happy about it, but he offered to show us around.”

The door into the mill is a wooden panel with a bolt and lock hanging loose from a metal loop and seems to be one of the few ways in or out of the building.

Simon stays outside in the sunlight, holding the carriage reins. He nods at me as we leave him. Buck and I walk inside, and it is another world, swollen with noise and cotton dust. The roar of the machines pushes everything at a vertiginous rush. The jennies and power looms are arrayed in long rows of tentacled machinery, whirring at a wild pace like thousands of Simon’s whirling lawn mowers. The chaos is dizzying. My veil is dusted with cotton fibers that float like snowflakes in the thick, humid air. The floor is peopled with white women and young boys and girls. A glassed-in office looks out on the mill floor. Two men in shirtsleeves and collars sit at desks piled with ledgers. A thick little man in a vest approaches us with red-faced irritation. He nods as he rubs his hands together.

“Mrs. Branson,” he says with the nasal twang of New England. “Welcome, ma’am. Everyone here at the Three Forks Mill is very sorry for the death of Mr. Branson. If there is anything we can do to help, we’re ready to do it.”

I nod. The racket of the machines makes it difficult to hear, so the little Yankee has raised his voice, which makes his face darken a deeper shade of red.

Some of the children are so small, even Henry’s age, that they stand on the fenders of the spinning jennies, delicately grasping at the bobbins when they are full and replacing them with thin wooden spools. They nimbly tie the thread into place as the new bobbin begins to coil, wrapping itself in the fine thread. The heat is oppressive.

Buck takes my elbow, and I look back to the two men. “Mrs. Branson,” he says. “This is Mr. Hunslow. He is the mill foreman.”

Mr. Hunslow shakes his head at me. “I apologize, Mrs. Branson,” he says. “We met at your husband’s funeral, but it was very quick.” He shakes my hand in long, hearty strokes. “Mr. Heppert here advised me that you were on your way out. Did you want to see the place? It’s yours now, so I’d be happy to show you around.”

“Of course.” I have to yell over the noise. “Thank you, Mr. Hunslow.”

He waves us forward down the long aisles of throstles, spinning with thread and spindles. The women, gaunt-faced, stand back from us in their soiled cotton dresses. They pull their hair up off their necks. Some wear kerchiefs tied over their faces. Already on my black gloves I can see tiny strands of white lint. It floats in the air, almost imperceptible. The children move like sleepwalkers. Sweat beads above my lip and on my forehead. Hunslow’s face has a sheen of moisture on it as he shouts.

“There are two thousand spindles operating here. We employ about fifty people, mostly women and children from the area. Some niggers, too. Back here, this is really where the process begins.”

Through a pair of wide barn doors, we enter an open shed. Wagons are lined up along the outside, and Negro men with large hooks unload the bales, cut them open, and pull out the cotton. It billows like clouds, rushing from the burlap skin onto the brick floor. The cotton is blinding white in the sunlight. Black women gather around the mountain in groups and beat at it with long sticks. They pick over it, pulling out twigs and branches and the blackened dried husks of cotton bolls.

“The cotton is cleaned and batted here, then taken into the carding room,” he continues. The black faces turn to us, impassive, but they keep at their work without pausing. Two white men, overseers, stand in the corner, talking and watching them as they work. They hold thick cudgels.

I pull in my breath, suppressing a cough from the dryness in my chest. Hunslow leads us through wide doors back into the mill, into a different room filled with more machines attended by women. They feed the clean cotton into wide metal mouths. The cotton is pulled in by rollers bristling with metal teeth that chew into it. The women gingerly push it into the metal maws, the tips of their fingers coming perilously close to the teeth of the carding rollers. We move close to them. Their nails are cracked and dirty. The cotton fibers feed out of the other end of the machine in thick braids, winding themselves into tall cans.

“The carded cotton is fed into the drawing cans and then goes into the spinning room, where it’s spun into thread. The threads are rolled onto bobbins, and the bobbins are loaded onto our power looms. We have sixty of them, and when we’re running at full speed, we can produce hundreds of yards of cotton cloth a day.” Beyond the carders are the great power looms, where more women stand monitoring and managing the machines. The warp threads rise and fall in an alternating cadence, and the shuttles fly back and forth with a bang, merging the weft through the web of threads. Cloth inches its way from the mouth of the machine as it is rolled onto bolts.

“It’s quite a system, don’t you think, Mr. Heppert?” Hunslow turns to Buck. We walk between the dead-eyed women, who stand reaching their thin hands out to the threads on the machines. The relentless roar is deafening.

“Yes, Mr. Hunslow,” Buck shouts back. “Very impressive.”

“As fine as any factory we have back in Rhode Island, I can assure you of that. I made sure of it myself. That’s why Mr. Branson brought me down here.” He nods with obvious pride, and the tiny blood vessels across his nose and cheeks stand out.

“Very ingenious, Mr. Hunslow,” I shout, looking back across the mill floor as we enter the glass-enclosed office. Mr. Hunslow shuts the door, and a hush surrounds us. The noise of the mill is muffled and we are in a silent paradise. The two men in the counting room stand up at their desks and nod solemnly to me as Hunslow introduces them. We stand awkwardly together, the three of us, with the accountants watching. Hunslow huffs and shrugs.

“Will there be anything else, Mr. Heppert?” he asks.

Buck extends his hand. “Thank you, Hunslow. That was very informative.” They both turn to me. The bullet-headed Yankee offers me his hand. I will not reach out to him.

“There is something more, Mr. Hunslow.” The accountants have beady, probing eyes. Buck stands over me.

“Yes, ma’am,” Hunslow says, puffing out his cheeks so the red lines stand out like rivers on a map.

“I appreciate your survey of the operations here. But I also came to collect my husband’s possessions. Whatever he may have here. And to see if there are any packages. I was expecting a parcel of books from Mobile.
Macaria
and
St. Elmo
.”

“Of course, Mrs. Branson. I have left everything just as Mr. Branson left it. Come into his office. Everything is just as he left it.”

Hunslow shrugs nervously and motions to a door behind the accountants’ desks. Buck steps aside to let me pass. His eyes bore into me. I will not look at him. Hunslow opens the door. The air feels cooler inside. The light is dim and Hunslow throws back the heavy curtains, stirring the dust off them.

Eli’s office. I can feel him in this room. I can see the curve of his back on the chair behind the wide pine desk. There are his footprints across the worn Persian rug. There are tiny blots of ink soaked into the wood of his desk. The desk is clear, but it is as if the papers were just swept from it. I can see them there by the metal inkstand, crisscrossed with his spidery hand.

Through the window, the sunlight flashes off the surface of the collecting pond of the mill creek, surrounded by trees that dip their branches down to touch the water. Three Forks Creek vanishes into a curve of their drooping leaves. Beyond, fields lay bare and open. The Cumberland foothills stand in the distance like painted scenery.

Eli was not a ripple of water that smooths itself but something more permanent. The things of my past will never meet the things of my present. Buck is here as if he has some right to a role as my guardian. Like Judge. Buck talks to me as he used to. How easy to slip back into the past, to pretend like we are here again at Three Forks on our horses and there is no Eli and no war and no mill. But the fit is rough on me. He makes me uneasy. He watches me. I think he is waiting for a sign that we could go back to that summer after the war, that we could somehow sew together that year and this and cut away all that has happened in between.

Hunslow steps behind the desk, rubbing his palms against his vest front. “Let’s see,” he says. “What sort of things were you looking for, ma’am?” Buck stands too close.

“Everything. I would like to take his things home. Are there any packages? I have been waiting for those books for so long.”

“Papers, too? Some of them relate to our business here.”

“The business papers can stay, of course. What you haven’t felt a need for since his passing, I’d like to take with me.”

“Gus,” Buck interjects. “Do you need these things now?”

“If you are pressed, you can go anytime, Buck. There is no need for you to stay on my account.”

Buck lets out a grim laugh. “No use arguing with ladies, is there, Hunslow? Especially when they’re waiting for their novels.”

Hunslow gives him a weak smile in return. He is opening drawers, pulling out ledgers and stacks of loose paper. A penknife and a larger one that still has wood shavings stuck on the blade. A gold watch that has stopped running.

“Will you be wanting the other things?” Hunslow asks, wagging a hand around the room, indicating the inkwell, a clock, and some pens.

There isn’t much else. Some prints tacked on the wall—cutouts from a magazine. A stack of old newspapers in a corner by the fireplace. A pair of tin candlesticks.

“If you could box everything else and send it to my home, I’d appreciate it very much. And any packages?”

Hunslow surveys the room again and shrugs. “No, ma’am, just these things. I can take them out to your carriage now.” He collects the papers in a large pile.

I slip the watch into the pocket of my dress. “Just one more thing,” I say.

Buck shakes his head with exasperation.

“Dividends. When are the dividends paid?” I force a smile. My hands clasp. Is my voice shaking? My teeth clench.

“Well,” Hunslow stumbles. Heat rises in my face. “Well, ma’am. We once paid dividends quarterly. But Mr. Branson suspended dividends since—well, over a year ago now.”

“Suspended dividends?”

Buck is grim-faced and nodding in agreement as if aware of all this.

“Yes, ma’am,” Hunslow says. “The mill has had some difficulties. We hope to turn things around soon.”

“What sort of difficulties, Mr. Hunslow?”

“Well.” Hunslow looks at the papers and back to me. “Maybe we ought to sit down.” He coughs into his hand, looking at Buck with discomfort. He takes the chair behind the desk and motions Buck and me to sit. He looks around the room slowly and coughs into his hand again. “The mill has operated without interruption for almost four years. We have not fully recovered from the panic. We were building out a list of buyers, cloth merchants and the like, but with the panic, we saw our business fall off quite a bit. The operation was only two years old and given the amount of capital that was put in for the building and the machinery—well, you can imagine. We have recovered some clients and found some new ones. The cloth is, you know, of a coarser grade—osnaburgs and the like. It was always the intention of Mr. Branson to move into finer cloths. We’ve found merchants in Atlanta and Nashville who have been consistent buyers, and now some in Birmingham. It’s been a difficult return to profitability. But things are getting better.”

“The mill isn’t making money.” I blurt it out. What are these meaningless subtleties between profits and losses?

“Oh, yes, ma’am, it is,” he insists quickly. “Oh, of course, it is. But we’ve had some reverses, you see, in the cloth market and so on. We’ve been unable to realize profits that the investors expected. And you are now the main investor.”

“But Mr. Heppert said the mill was profitable. He said it was very profitable.” Hunslow looks at Buck with raised eyebrows. “The senior Mr. Heppert,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am, I see,” Hunslow says. Buck shifts in his chair. “And Mr. Heppert, Mr. Everton Heppert, is correct, in a way. With careful management, the mill should be very profitable and very soon. I’ve guaranteed Mr. Heppert that I can do it. That I can turn it around and make the place a model for the whole South.” Hunslow smiles with pride.

“How soon will that be, Mr. Hunslow?” My voice is sharp, like Rachel’s. I am hot and tired and confused. Hunslow flushes.

“Now, Gus,” Buck says and reaches for my arm.

“It’s my mill, Buck,” I say. “And it’s my money. I don’t even know why you’re here.”