The Woman Who Loved Jesse James (2 page)

Too often lately my life seemed a constant battle—the outer meekness I was taught was proper for a Southern lady warring with an inner boldness out of all proportion with my upbringing as a pastor’s daughter. Like the country itself, I was unsettled of late, and wondered if peace was truly possible, both for my nation and for myself.

“I’m looking forward to the cake,” Esme said.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten real sugar or light flour. The war had brought hard times here to Missouri, especially for Sesech families like ours. “But dancing’s better than cake,” I said. “Lucy said that after dark the Browders have ordered lanterns hung in the trees to light a dance floor. Which means there’ll be lots of dark shadows for sneaking away and stealing kisses.” I had never kissed a man, but I had thought of it often, and on a night when I anticipated such a rebellion as dancing adding kissing seemed scarcely to compound my sin.

Esme giggled. “Maybe the unfortunate Mr. Colquit will try to kiss you.”

I made a face and knotted the last rag into place. “Mr. Colquit and his misfortunes would do best not to come near me.” Anthony Colquit was a member of my father’s congregation, a widower who, in addition to three unmanageable children, was possessed of a prominent mole on his left cheek. His wife had died of cholera the year before, leading my mother and the other women in our community to refer to him as “the unfortunate Mr. Colquit.” Recently, he had indicated an interest in me, one which I had no intention of reciprocating.

Esme plopped onto my bed, making the ropes holding the mattress squeak. “He’s not so bad,” she said.

“I’m not interested in Mr. Colquit,” I said.

“I’m not so sure either one of us can afford to be uninterested in any man who courts us,” Esme said. “We’re both of us already nineteen and it’s not as if there are a great many young men available, what with the war and all. At least Mr. Colquit has a farm, and he’s not so terribly old.”

“He must be almost thirty!” I protested. But neither his age nor his mole nor his three terrible children were the chief reason I rejected the notion of Mr. Colquit as a husband. “I’m already a poor farmer’s daughter. Why should I end up a poor farmer’s wife?” And I didn’t want to wed a man who sought a convenient mother for his children; I wanted a man who would love
me—
not for what I could do for him, but solely for who I was.

I searched in the drawer of the dressing table for the bit of red flannel I used to darken my lips, and the precious tin of rice powder, which I
would
wear to the wedding, even if my mother had forbade it. I avoided looking at my reflection in the spotted glass of the mirror. I was thin and pale, yet who of us wasn’t after so many years of deprivation? “I’m tired of suffering and making do,” I said. “I want someone who can offer me more in life.”

“As if you’re going to meet a man like that in Missouri.”

“Mrs. Peabody says a woman should never sell herself short.”

“My mother says Mrs. Peabody is no better than she should be.”

“My mother says the same thing, but that doesn’t mean Mrs. P. is wrong.” Amanda Peabody lived alone in a little cabin a quarter mile from our farm. She said she was a widow, though some folks thought otherwise. And no one could deny that Sheriff T. Wayne Henry—a married man—spent a great deal of time at her place. The sheriff claimed Mrs. Peabody was only doing his ironing, which led to any number of ribald comments about what, exactly, was being ironed.

“I guess if anyone knows about a woman selling herself—short or otherwise—it would be her.” Esme hooted with laughter, and fell back on the bed.

I scowled at her. “Mrs. Peabody is my friend, and I won’t have you saying mean things about her. She’s never been anything but nice to us whenever we’ve visited her.”

“You’re right,” Esme said, staring up at the sloped ceiling. “I’m sorry. I’m just out of sorts, wishing I was the one getting married, and not your sister. With most of the young men off fighting the war and the ones left at home either old or crippled or Northern sympathizers—it makes me despair of ever finding a husband and having a family.”

“The war can’t last forever,” I said. “When it’s over our men will come home and they’ll all be looking for wives. You’ll have so many beaux you won’t know what to do.”

“I’ll have to ask Mrs. Peabody what to do. She’ll be able to tell me.”

We were both laughing over this when my mother called up the stairs. “Sister! Esme! You girls come down here. I need you to take the punch over to the wedding.”

Grumbling, we slipped on our wrappers and hurried down the stairs. We found my mother in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove with one hand and wiping jam from my little brother Henry’s face with the other. A row of flatirons heated on the stove, bundles of dampened linens piled on the hearth.

“We can’t go anywhere right now, Mama,” I protested. “We just rolled our hair.”

“Put on your bonnets and no one will see you. Your father’s already loaded the cask of punch into the trap, but he and Joey had to leave to see about a cow down by the creek.” Joey was the darky who worked for us part-time. We were too poor to afford even one slave, unlike the family my sister was marrying into. The Browders owned
seven
slaves, both field hands and household servants.

“Why do we have to take the punch now?” I asked. “The wedding’s still hours away.”

“It has to be put on ice to cool. Now go. All you have to do is drive over to the Browders and one of their men will unload it for you.”

Esme opened her mouth to protest, but I tugged on her arm, silencing her. “We’ll be happy to go, Mama,” I said. “Let me run upstairs and fetch my bonnet.”

I raced up the narrow flight of steps to my room, Esme at my heels. “What are you looking so cheerful about?” she asked. “It’s hot as Hades outside and over a mile to the Browders’s place. We’ll melt.”

“We can come back the long way by the creek, in the shade.” I threw open the wardrobe and pulled out the dress I’d made special for the wedding. Or made-over, rather, from an old-fashioned ball gown Mrs. Peabody had given me. No one around here had seen new cloth since before the war.

“What are you doing?” Esme asked as I tugged off my wrapper and tied on the crinoline hoops necessary to make the wide skirts then in fashion fit correctly.

“Tighten my laces for me, won’t you?” I asked, turning my back to her.

She did as I asked, pulling the laces to my corset tight and tying them in neat bows in the back. Then she helped me lift the dress over my head. Fashioned of blue and buff striped satin, it featured wide flared sleeves trimmed with flounces, a low, square neckline with more flounces, and a deep flounce around the hem. I had spent many an hour gathering all those ruffles and carefully attaching them to the dress, but I was proud of the results. I was sure I would be as fashionable as any young woman at the ball.

“On the way home from the Browders’s we can stop by Mrs. Peabody’s,” I said as I smoothed my skirts over the hoops. “I want to show her my new dress.”

“You can’t go downstairs all dressed up,” Esme said. “What will your mother say?”

“Nothing. She won’t even notice.” My mother was so distracted by the demands of running a large household that whole days passed without her looking directly at me.

“We’ll get in trouble.” Esme looked unsure.

“We’ll ask her to read your tea leaves—to tell you about the man you’ll marry.”

Esme’s expression brightened. “All right.” She shed her wrapper and took her crinolines and gown from where she’d laid them out on the end of the bed. “Pull tight on my laces,” she said. “This is last year’s dress and it’ll never fit, otherwise.”

In record time we were dressed and down the stairs, our rag curls hidden by deep poke bonnets. Mama was busy in the kitchen; she didn’t look up as we passed.

The sun beat down on the main road, baking us beneath the patched parasols we held over our heads. The horse moved at a plodding pace, puffs of dust as fine as face powder rising with the impact of each hoof. Esme and I held an old blanket over our laps in spite of the heat, to protect our skirts from the dirt.

The Browders’s property was marked by a wooden fence, whitewashed each spring by a team of darkies. Horses grazed behind the fence, and beyond that stretched fields of corn and hemp that drooped in the heat.

I turned the trap in at the front gate, which stood open, its broad expanse decorated with wreaths of laurel and oak. An old darky near the front told me how to get to the kitchen, and I guided the horse to the open-sided cook house behind the main house. A trio of black women—two small and one very large—worked amid billows of steam from boiling pots and smoke from the pit fires where big joints of meat were roasting. I told the big woman I’d brought the punch and she ordered a younger man to unload it for me.

As soon as we were able, I turned the trap and left. “We should have asked to water the horse,” Esme said. “And we could have asked for a glass of lemonade for ourselves.” She fanned herself. “I’m parched.”

“Mrs. Peabody will have lemonade.” I slapped the reins across the horse’s back, urging him into a trot. He could have all the water he wanted at Mrs. Peabody’s.

“But she won’t have ice,” Esme whined. The Browders were the only ones in our neighborhood who were wealthy enough to afford to have ice shipped down the river and packed in sawdust all summer in a special ice house they’d had cut into the side of a hill.

I ignored her and turned the trap onto the shady creek road. I was thinking about what I’d said earlier to Esme—that Mrs. Peabody would read her tea leaves and tell her who she’d marry. I would ask Mrs. P. to read my leaves as well—to tell me of my future husband. Please God, let it not be the unfortunate Mr. Colquit, or any man of his ilk. Give me a man with some spark and sense of adventure. A man with ambitions that went beyond planting the next hemp crop.

Mrs. Peabody’s cabin sat close to the road, with a small yard swept free of any greenery, behind a sagging wooden gate. I tied the horse to the gatepost and while Esme was pumping a bucket of water for him, Mrs. Peabody came out onto her porch. “Don’t you girls look pretty,” she said, with a Georgia accent as smooth and sweet as thick cream poured over ripe strawberries. She was dressed in a loose wrapper of faded pink cotton, a white lace cap pinned to her closely-cropped curls. “Come in out of this heat,” she urged, and motioned us over to the porch swing in the shade of a wooden arbor onto which wild jasmine had been trained to grow. “Sit yourselves down and I’ll fetch some refreshments,” she said, clearly delighted to have our company.

Esme and I sat in the swing, arranging our skirts around us. It felt good to stop in the shade, and I even imagined a faint breeze stirring the jasmine.

Mrs. Peabody returned bearing a silver tray on which sat a cut-glass pitcher of some amber liquid. “Cool sassafras tea,” she explained, filling three china cups. “Very refreshing on a hot day like this.”

She served us, then sat back in a wicker rocker across from the swing. “Now let me look at you. Are these the dresses you’re to wear to the wedding?”

“This is the one I made over from the gown you gave me,” I said, fingering the striped satin.

She nodded. “And a fine job you did. It looks just like a picture from
Godey’s
.” She turned to Esme. “Did you make your dress as well? It’s very pretty.”

Esme blushed and smoothed the brown cotton figured with pink roses. “My mother made it,” she said. “I don’t sew as well as Zee.”

Mrs. Peabody set her teacup on a small round table between us. “Tell me all about the wedding. I hear it’s to be a grand affair.”

“We delivered a keg of punch to the Browders’s just now and they’re fixing enough food to feed an army,” Esme said.