The Rebel Wife (30 page)

“Simon,” I whisper, loud enough so he will hear. “Simon.” I knock again, and his head emerges from the window, looking down at me. He does not say a word, though his expression is clearly confused, almost stern. He holds his hand out in a sign for me to wait. I hear his feet on the stairs and the door opens. He is still pulling on his suspenders.

“I have to see Rachel,” I whisper. “You must take me to her.”

“Miss Gus, the whole town’s sleeping. What’s so urgent?”

“She’s leaving, Simon. I have to give her something before they go.”

He grimaces and shakes his head but walks to the back of the carriage house and opens the wide doors. He is not happy, but he will take me.

Simon harnessed the horse quickly. We head down the lane toward Tulip Street, where it borders the cemetery. Eli’s grave is beyond the stone wall to the right, by a young oak. There is still no marker. Mr. Weems asked me to order one, but I couldn’t. Perhaps I will leave it unmarked and no one will find it. Only I will know. Only Simon and I will remember Eli. Simon is sitting beside me. He went to mount the horse, but I told him to climb into the gig. What is the purpose? It is absurd to worry about exposing myself now.

“Ma’am, look.” Simon points the whip to the center of the graveyard, where there are a number of new graves. It is too far away to make out. Simon whips the horse. He turns us up Tulip Street. The carriage runs close along the cemetery’s edge. In between the trees and the few marble monuments, there are rows of graves, fifteen, maybe twenty. Some of them are mounded high with fresh red earth and others gape, openmouthed, waiting for the dead. Bodies sewn into sheets lay nearby. Four of them. They do not even bother with coffins or ceremonies now. Is it Mr. Weems’s hand that sewed those shrouds? Who will keep the memory of these dead alive?

Two colored men, their shirtsleeves rolled up, dig another new grave. The early-morning light is golden and slanted, shining off the sweat from the grave diggers’ heads.

The Collins family plot has two new graves. The Sheffields have three. The Yankee officer McCoy bought a plot for his family, and there is a small new grave there.

“My Lord, Simon.”

He touches the horse with the whip and she picks up to a trot. We head quickly through the quiet streets. The homes seem so still, shuttered under trees bursting with leaves. Their doors and windows are shut, and they remind me of those homes along the pike from Three Forks—vacant, abandoned, given up. We turn onto Jefferson Street and head toward the depot. The houses are smaller, modest shotgun shacks of two and three rooms that face the railroad tracks on our right. They are quiet, too, but some windows are open. Some doors. Smoke pours from a few chimneys as if they have a great blaze in their stoves. Others are quiet, with weathered clapboard coated in peeling paint. There is an X in whitewash on several of the front doors.

“What is that?”

“Order of the mayor. All sick houses get marked with an X.”

“What good will that do?”

Simon shrugs. We shouldn’t be here. I know it and he knows it. We should be long gone from Albion.

The depot looms ahead, a massive brick pile three stories high, painted yellow with green shutters. In tall letters along one gable end, the word albion is painted in black.

At the ticket window there is a large crowd. A group of men—and some women—jostle each other on the sidewalk. The doors to the waiting rooms are closed, and there are two men in rough, dirty clothes struggling to pull them open. There is shouting. There is no order here. These people are not ticket buyers but a mob that is becoming agitated.

Simon turns the carriage to cross the tracks to the North Ward, but he pulls back on the reins hard. A loud whistle blast, high and shrill, comes from the west. The blasts are long, longer than I’ve heard them before. Down the tracks, a train is pulling in fast. Black and menacing, the engine charges down the rails with a thick plume of smoke trailing behind, widening fanlike into a great tail. The train has no intention of stopping. That is clear. The men and women race toward it. They stampede after the cars, charging up to the rail bed. Some are ahead of it and climb on the tracks, waving their hands and screaming for the train to stop. Only the whistle shrieks back, warning them to clear the tracks. By some miracle, the men jump clear, brushed by the cowcatcher to tumble down the gravel slope.

The cars roar by us, the windows closed and the blinds down. It is twelve cars long and going at breakneck speed. The men on the ground shake their fists, shouting profanities as the train barrels into the distance.

“My God, Simon. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should go to see Rachel. I think we’d better get back to the house.”

“No, I must see Rachel. Do you have your pistol?” Simon smiles wryly at that. “Then we will be fine.”

He whips the horse to hurry across the tracks, and from the rise we have a view of the shantytown that houses most of the colored people of Albion.

Some of the houses are little cabins, split log with mud and daub in the chinks to keep the wind out. Smoke from kitchen fires hangs in the air as if to half hide their squalor. They look little better than old slave cabins. Others are even more primitive, lean-to huts with a hole in the roof for a chimney. An old railroad car without wheels sits crossways to the street with a white X on its side. There are white X’s everywhere. How many of those doors hide the abandoned dead?

Simon turns the carriage up a dusty street, sunbaked and lined with shacks and old army tents. These fields in ’65 were filled with tents then, too, but of the U.S. Army. It was here that Eli would come to oversee the arrival of the trains loaded with cornmeal, hardtack, and green bacon. Judge would claim he kept the best to resell to soldiers or whoever could afford it. Has Judge refugeed away, too, without a word to me?

Down Moore Street stands a row of wagons harnessed to mules. Simon stops the buggy at the side of the street. I step down without waiting. The odor of smoldering refuse lingers in the still air. A knot of Negro men stand whispering by one of the wagons. They watch me as I walk toward them. Their conversation stops, and they turn curious eyes on me, a brazen white woman alone in their part of town. They step back from me nervously. One man stands with his mouth open, looking at me as if I am death coming for him.

“Where is the home of Rachel Simmons?” They look at one another and then back at me. One of them nods in the direction of a small wood-frame house and tips his cap to me.

A pile of bricks serves as a step up to the open door of what is hardly more than a shanty. In the half-light, I can make out a few pieces of rude furniture on a gap-planked floor, a small hearth, and a rope bed in one corner. Rachel is on her knees, working to untie the ropes, with Little John standing beside her watching. The walls are lined with bundles of dried herbs and jars of powder like an apothecary.

“Rachel, I’m so glad you’re still here.”

“Miss Gus, ma’am,” she says as she stands up, brushing the dirt off her apron. “What are you doing here?” Little John looks at me, blinking and smiling.

“I’m sorry to bother you like this. I just—I wanted to give you something before you go. It’s not much. But maybe you can trade it for something.” I take the gold chain from my pocket and hold it out to her. She looks at it.

“Ma’am?” she says.

“Please, Rachel. Take it.”

She holds out her hand, and the chain pools into her pale yellow palm. The gold shines brightly in the dusky room. “You don’t need to give me this—”

“Yes, I do. I should have paid you something. Eli never would have let you leave empty-handed. And I want you to have this as well.” I pull the gun from my other pocket. The shiny Remington with inlaid horn of black and white on the grip.

Rachel takes it by the barrel and turns it to grasp it by the butt with her other hand. She looks at it. She smiles. Her eyes are gold-colored, with flecks of pale green and brown. They shimmer like the chain in her hand.

“I wish you the best of luck, Rachel. I know you’ll make your way out there.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” she says. “Thank you.” She steps forward in a rush and takes hold of me, hugging me so tight that I can feel her strength.

“Miss Gus, you have got to leave town, too. Right away,” she whispers into my ear, then leans back and looks me in the eye.

“I know.”

Rachel shakes her head. She puts the chain and gun in a small bundle tied with a bandanna. “Just take you and your boy and go. Emma, too. The sickness here is bad. You can’t see it, but it’s here. You shouldn’t even be in this part of town.”

“Eli died from it. I was with him. We were all with him. Maybe we can’t get it?”

“None of us touched it, ma’am. His blood. You didn’t, either. But don’t be fooled. It’s a slow creeper, this sickness. And it respects nobody. It ain’t going to stop until its work is done. This is God’s work, ma’am.”

“God’s work? How can you say such a thing?”

Rachel’s face loses all expression, but her eyes scintillate. “God’s work. That’s what I said. Just like in Pharaoh’s time, God sent ten plagues to punish Pharaoh for holding people in bondage. It’s our time now. God’s people know enough to run ahead of the plague. You should, too. The first plague was blood, ma’am. You know enough of your Bible to remember that. This is a sin that’s being paid.”

“Rachel, that’s all in the past.”

“Ain’t nothing in the past, Miss Gus. You look at Emma. You look at her hard and close, and you tell me slavery ain’t still a sin that has to be paid. You look at her.”

My tongue feels thick and dry in my mouth. The rivers and seas turned to blood. That’s what happened in the Bible.

“Don’t wait for nothing, ma’am. Just go.”

“Thank you, Rachel. I will.” Outside, I turn back to look at her once more. “Thank you, Rachel,” I say again.

She follows me into the light with the bundle under one arm, holding Little John’s hand. The men are staring at us. One of them calls across the street to Rachel. “You done already? Where’s your man at? We’ve got to get going.” They shift on their feet anxiously, looking around at the quiet shanties. They are eager to be gone.

She walks toward them. “He’ll be along directly. Don’t worry. He had one last thing to do,” she says.

Simon waves at Rachel, and she waves back as she stuffs the bundle into a half-empty wagon. He helps me into the carriage and leads the horse around. He keeps the horse moving slowly, then mounts the step with one foot as the other leg swings away. He climbs in beside me, takes the whip and touches the horse’s back, but pulls on the reins suddenly. Rachel is calling out to us.

“Miss Gus, wait!” She rushes up to the side of the carriage, waving a fist that has tiny strands of gold leaking from it. “I can’t take this, ma’am. I want you to take it back.” She is beside the carriage and takes my hand, forcing the chain into my gloved palm.

“Rachel, I insist.”

“No, ma’am. You need it as much as I do. I’m keeping the gun, though.” She smiles, though it fades quickly. “And ma’am. I’m sorry to say this. You can’t imagine how it hurts me, but John, my husband John, he’s been working for Mr. Heppert, too. I don’t know what he’s been doing for him, he won’t tell me, but I don’t think that you should trust him, ma’am. Mr. Heppert, that is. I don’t think you should trust him at all.”

My eyes meet Simon’s. We both look at Rachel.

“That’s all I know,” she says. “Honest, Simon. That’s all I know.”

“Thank you, Rachel,” I say as a chill comes over me. “Goodbye. And Godspeed.”

“Thank you, Rachel,” Simon says. “I’ll see you in Nashville.” He clucks to the horse. Rachel steps back from the carriage, and we ride away.

Simon urges the horse into a fast trot. His jaw is set and his lips are a grim line. We cross back over the tracks. The people have gone, mostly. Just a few are gathered outside the depot, but now the doors are wide open, and many of the windows are smashed in. Papers litter the street, tickets and blank forms trailing where the rioters must have tossed them as they ransacked the depot.

Simon’s face is tired. His jaw seems to sag and his eyes are haggard.

“John has been working for Judge. That is how Judge knew everything. He betrayed us,” I say.

“I don’t know. It may not have been a choice for him,” Simon responds. He doesn’t look at me.

“What else could he have been doing for Judge?”

Simon almost snorts. He gives his head a faint shake.

“You don’t think he was watching me?” I ask.

“Oh, he was watching you, and probably more than you.”

“Watching all of us? He was watching Eli.”

Simon’s hands clench and unclench on the reins. “Yes, ma’am. I suspect.”

“He’s looking for the money. He thinks I know where the money is.”

“I suspect. Yes.”

“Then they can’t have found the money if they’re still looking for it.”

“I think they’ve found it. So John is free to leave. He probably made some good money, too, to help them get on to Kansas.”

The streets are so quiet. Simon and I are the only ones foolish enough to be out. My skin tingles along my arms down to my fingertips. This dread I feel.

“How can you be sure they’ve found it?”

“Because we haven’t found it. It’s not in the house, and I don’t know where it could be. Judge must have it by now.”

We turn down Tulip Street. The cemetery is before us again. So many graves. The grave diggers are gone now. They’ve thrown the dead into a shallow hole and barely covered it before running away, too. Simon looks at the cemetery and at the row of houses on our right, their shoulders turned to us as if they don’t want to look at the cemetery, either. There is no one around. We must leave, like Rachel says. We should gather what we can and go. There is no hope. Not if Judge already has the money.

Simon sighs and shakes the reins. “The only place we haven’t searched is the mill,” he says. “Maybe Eli hid the money there. Maybe it’s still there.”

“Then we should go to the mill.”

“I’ll go tonight after it gets dark. With the mill shut down, it should be easy. That’s the only thing I can figure.”