Thinking of Forney, she asked, “The rape—your brother’s—whatever came of the miscreant?”
“Well, we hanged him, of course. But before that, I personally castrated the bastard.” He seized and twisted the air, demonstrating, and then grinned.
She looked away, feeling dizzy. She needed to get off this carriage and take a breather to sort this out. “I need a rest stop, Thorne.”
“Not now, we’re almost there.” He chuckled. “Just go in your pants if you have to.”
Why, the nerve of him, she thought. How utterly revolting, just like his story—and his attitude. She stared at him in growing anger.
“Speaking of which,” he said, “burn that god-awful dress when we arrive. Except when I took it off of you, you’ve worn it every day since your father’s funeral.”
Alice had planned to dispose of it anyway, but she wasn’t about to tell him so. Her words came out tight and low: “We shall see. Perhaps it’s your smelly uniform that needs burning.”
Thorne looked at her with wide eyes, showing surprise at her tone. “If the South does secede one day, as is threatened, then I won’t need this Federal uniform any longer. I’ll let you set the fire.”
They lapsed into heavy silence.
Thankfully, the journey was nearly over. On the overgrown road north of town, they encountered a hand-scrawled sign reading “NORWICK,” which pointed down a wide trail tracked with wheel ruts. They followed it and soon could see the four Corinthian columns of the manor house.
The Norwick house’s white paint glowed in the sunlight shining through the trees. Other buildings sat nearby, including a cook’s cabin and another, plain-looking house that befitted an overseer. Chickens pecked at the bare ground that threaded among the structures. Her gaze returned to the manor house. It was small, she thought, not as big as Poppa’s nor as ornate as the aristocratic mansions she was used to seeing—not that she’d had time to visit many because life on Poppa’s plantation was anything but leisurely, what with all the sewing and attending to the slaves’ needs. Northerners—at least the ones she’d met—seemed to think that having slaves equaled a life of leisure. She knew this because a New England traveler, once while attempting to sell her something, had said sarcastically, “When the mistress has but a moment in her extremely busy, overtaxed schedule …” Alice imagined her life here would be even busier. She doubted that a man such as Pierce kept many women in his household. He probably had lots of house slaves, however. One of those slaves now exited the house and approached.
Thorne stopped the carriage and dismounted. “Jonah, where is my brother?”
An odd mixture of emotions played across the old man’s face. The wrinkles actually moved clear to the crown of his bald head.
“Jonah? I asked you a question.”
Thorne moved so that he was nose-to-nose with the man, who lowered his eyes as slaves were expected to do.
“He—he dead, Massa Thorne.”
A moment passed as Thorne searched the leathery face and then the sky. He rocked back on his heels as if struck by wind. Then he struck back—a fist to the slave’s chin sent him down.
Without a word, face reddening, he stepped over Jonah and into the house.
Alice rushed to the old man and supported his head.
“My—” she said, starting to say “my god,” but stopped herself. The wave of revulsion at Thorne passed, just like the other, similar feelings she had suppressed. Tears dropped onto the old man’s face.
She looked at her surroundings in disbelief, trying not to add up all of the last month’s misfortunes. Finally, she decided she must wear the blue dress for one more funeral, and then never destroy it as she had planned, for she now knew that death would always follow her.
✽ ✽ ✽
Thorne accomplished receipt of the plantation’s ownership by burying Pierce’s body and filing a legal document. Alice assumed the station of mistress nearly as easily: she composed a to-do list and had at it. Their marriage wouldn’t make it onto the list for another month. There was simply too much for her to do while Thorne and Obie Redger supervised the cotton boll harvesting—an activity she was glad to be too busy to monitor, given how slaves normally sang about Jesus in their working songs.
She discovered she hadn’t underestimated the chaos wrought by Pierce’s not having a female to manage domestic affairs. Obie had handled the farming well enough, but no one had kept the house clean, nor mended the slaves’ clothing. The storeroom was a shambles, making every day a scramble for basic staples such as salt, soap, and candles. How could they have lived this way?
The answer, of course, was that they hadn’t—or rather, Pierce hadn’t. As the sickness reached its final stages, he’d holed-up in his room, refusing food and then refusing people by throwing excrement at them.
“He did what?” Alice said in disbelief. Standing in Pierce’s bedroom—which still stank of sweat and feces, even with him four days cold in the ground—Alice searched the face of the female cook reporting this news.
Eliza Tefera, old Jonah’s comparatively young wife of twenty-five (but who looked forty), nodded insistently. “Yes’m. Throwed his stuff right at us. Then he don’t clean his hands—I think that made ’im worse. I knows of such things, cooking food and all.”
“Who found him dead?”
“I did. I come in to ask if he want breakfast. He all wrapped-up in his sheets. Maybe strangle hisself.”
Grimacing, Alice looked at the bed, taking in the mound of stained sheets still lying there. This afternoon had been her first chance to do anything about it, and right off she’d asked for cleaning water, which was now being fetched.
Eliza regarded her openly, not afraid to look directly at her face. Already, Alice relied on her for many of the hand-maiden sorts of things, such as helping her dress, that Hannah used to take care of back home. “So when you gonna marry the massa?”
“Wha—?” She tore her gaze away from the room with difficulty. Something about the stale air, the twisted sheets, reverberated like an old echo.
“I said, when you gonna marry the massa? Jonah and me goin’ cook a turkey.”
“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully, but at the moment had other concerns. She pushed past Eliza into the hallway, sucking in the fresher air. Pierce’s presence was still there, faintly, and it irritated her like a draft. If this kept up, she would have to find a rose so that she could maintain control of the angel’s wings.
“You feeling sick, Miz Alice?”
“No,” she said, trying not to gasp. She pointed at the bedroom. “Just have to get away from there. Him.”
She immediately regretted adding that last part and hoped Eliza wouldn’t notice. She’d think Alice was crazy, and the last thing a mistress needed was the loss of a slave’s respect.
But the woman did notice. Her eyes went wide. “You … you got the spirit eye, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You feelin’ the Massa Pierce. How that be? White people don’t have the Knowing.”
Strange reaction, and yet Alice realized now that it would be useless to deny anything. With the angel’s wings coming alive inside her, she could sense as much. Eliza was much more than she appeared. How or why, Alice didn’t know, and with cramps spreading through her stomach—the smell from Pierce’s room actually intensifying—she didn’t care.
“You’ll say nothing of this,” she grunted.
The slave who’d gone for water was climbing the stairs, carrying a bucket and sponge. She stopped and almost dropped them when she saw Alice doubled over.
Eliza took charge. “Girl, you don’t mind the missus. You go on in there, scrub the dickens outta that room. Open the windows.”
The girl knew better than to argue. When she was gone, Eliza helped Alice down the stairs.
“A flower,” Alice said. “I need one.”
“Don’t have none, Miz Alice. Cold snap took ’em out last week.”
She vowed not
to lose control, not in front of a slave. At the bottom of the stairs, she stood stock-still and shook away Eliza’s hands. Forcing the words to come out normally, she closed her eyes and said, “All right, that’s fine. You may go now.”
Eliza remained standing there, regarding her uncertainly.
“I mean it, girl. Get!”
That got her moving. The slave took off through the pantry, pausing once to look back and make a strange sign in the air. Alice waited until the footsteps went outside, and then buried her face in her hands. She wished she could physically touch the hated wings to hold them still. The cramps had subsided when she moved away from the bedroom, but a loss of control was imminent if she didn’t release the wings into some object.
She stumbled into the dining room, bumping the table. On shelves and small tables against the walls sat a dozen mirrors and glass prisms that splashed rainbows and light droplets against the ceiling. They were intended to distribute nighttime candlelight from the chandelier. The largest mirror, easily six-feet-tall and with a large, engraved “N” at the frame’s top, stood between the two windows as if it were a doorway. Alice sobbed when she saw the pain tugging at her features. She placed her hands against the glass, and then her forehead.
The mirror’s cool surface felt soothing against her forehead, and this close, her reflected eyes resembled two pits. Indeed, the wings allowed her to see deep into her own mind, flying from her eyes and reflecting back into her head, where they explored the person there as if she were someone else.
What she saw inside herself with her powers made her shudder.
Maybe what had disturbed her so much about the psychic emanations from Pierce’s sheets was that she felt so close to being on that same plane of insanity. Her deep-down fear was that her disfavor with Christ had left her just as spiritually shredded as Pierce had obviously been from the syphilis in his brain. The roiling torrent of pain she saw within herself, normally concealed from conscious awareness, seemed to confirm this.
As minutes passed, her initial horror subsided into a kind of numbness. It reminded her of the first time she’d seen a dead body, during the viewing of Grandpapa Wharton before his burial. Through the night, the body had remained just as dead, but she got used to it and ceased to be uncomfortable around it. The same with her mental reflection. She wasn’t sure if her fears about herself were completely true, but as her emotions crested and settled, she calmed down and got used to what she saw. Maybe she could deal with her mental wounds—at least for today.
And in the time it took Alice to reach this conclusion, the angel’s wings exhausted themselves bouncing off the mirror and back through her head, just as they would have by blasting through a rose’s every nook and cranny.
She stepped back, now in control of herself and feeling she could better deal with the woman she saw in the mirror. Her fingers lingered against the glass, which felt warm to the touch.
Chapter 7
The angel’s wings—or more accurately, the Heavenly albatross—assumed a welcome dormancy through the rest of 1860 and the first half of 1861. Alice secretly hoped Jesus Christ had tired of tormenting her. Perhaps His interests had shifted elsewhere, and He was collaborating with Satan to destroy other people’s lives. And with current events the way they were, Alice believed she had located Christ’s project.
What was that expression—“cut off your nose to spite your face”? It fit, but the United States had cut off much more than its nose by electing Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. The action compelled the piercing cries for Southern secession to finally shatter the ties of interstate union, starting with Alice’s old home of South Carolina in December 1860, and including her new home of Georgia a month later. A civil war was inevitable, and the Confederate States of America and the United States of America commenced their banquet of self-cannibalization in April 1861—the dinner bell being rung at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
Especially on rainy days, the shock of events lent great import to mundane activities. Alice would walk about the plantation on her errands—perhaps checking on the Teferas in the kitchen building, or inspecting the condition of the slaves’ bedding—knowing that if it were up to the Yankees, this way of life would end. Oh, it was much more than the ownership of slaves that the North despised, although that was indeed a focal issue. As Thorne put it, the North’s industrialized way of thinking was simply at odds with the more civilized ways of the Southern planters. Unless able-bodied men fought for their country, the more corrupt society would consume the other.
The South may not have been ready for a real War for Independence, but politicians such as Senator Toombs spoke truthfully when they said it was necessary. They could no longer suffer under the yoke of Federal policies, which abused its own powers for the purposes of favoring Northern states. No longer would they have to respect the huge import tariffs that favored the North or the North’s monopolies on coastal trade and ship building. No longer would the South be slighted out of its fair entitlement to public monies. And most importantly, under their new government, they wouldn’t have to fight tooth and nail with abolitionists such as Abraham Lincoln every time growth into a new territory was contemplated.
When Alice and Thorne spoke to each other, which was rarely because he kept himself so busy, these were the types of things they talked about. More often than not, she would sit with Thorne and Obie as they ate their midday meal, listening to them debate issues. It was how she formed her political opinions; as was her custom with men, she accepted ninety percent of what they said as truth. Alice therefore felt she shared the same opinions on most issues—Thorne perhaps with a greater focus on slavery—and she looked forward to their “conversations.”
Because it was the only thing they did together.
Thorne made love to her—if one could even call it that—for only five months after their unadorned, private and very secular wedding ceremony. But he stopped the activity after too many rounds of, “Are there any signs yet that you’re pregnant?” were answered in the negative.
Not that this was any great loss, as procreation was clearly his only goal. He usually came into the bedroom with a determined look on his face and commanded her to “roll over” so he could enter her from behind, probably so he wouldn’t have to look at her face. Thorne was never erect when he walked in, and Alice normally had to wait several minutes, listening to the dry whisk of skin on skin as he masturbated himself to the point of orgasm, only to insert for the final few strokes. He would have the gall afterwards to kiss her neck and tell her how beautiful she was, before standing up to dress. No warmth, no seduction, no conversation, and Alice felt she was a fool to expect it. Thorne had, after all, achieved his conquest of her on the road, and now he wanted only to sow the great Norwick bloodline. She doubted he felt any attraction for her at all; she was just a utility.
She supposed that was why Thorne drank so heavily when she failed to become pregnant—no doubt from the same Christ-caused brand of infertility Momma had suffered. She was terrified Thorne would send her away. After all, the main role of a Southern belle was not to manage the affairs of a plantation, but to procreate. Planters had even been known to remarry on account of this priority.
He didn’t send her away, however. He only requested that they begin sleeping separately, first by saying, “Obie and I play cards until one in the morning, and I don’t wish to wake you getting into bed,” and then by saying, “I thrash about quite a bit in my sleep”—although Alice had never seen it—“and I don’t want to damage you during the night.” At least he’d had the decency to remove himself to the other bedroom and not kick her out of her own. It was a very cold winter.
Beating her own stomach and cursing God, she retreated more frequently to the dining room mirror to meditate. She told herself that no matter how bad it got, Thorne was a damn saint for rescuing her from the troubles of home, for marrying her, and for housing and feeding her—especially now, when her only remaining value was for doing househ
old work, and for enhancing his image during the occasional social call.
And it wasn’t all that bad, was it? After all, he sometimes did show her small signs of affection—a pat on the back, a smile. They were like table scraps thrown to a dog, but at least they were something.
Her relationships with others weren’t much better, as much as she deluded herself to the contrary. This was brought back home, painfully, on one of the more pivotal days of her life, just a few short months after the start of the War.
She had just sat down on the porch swing, which hung from chains near the front door, thinking innocently enough that she would rest a few minutes before resuming work. She’d been helping Eliza salt a pork in the kitchen building. Afterward, she had planned to tour the slave settlement to examine the quilts the slaves were airing in their windows. She was an experienced seamstress and was naturally curious about the odd way the slaves here had of sewing. On Poppa’s plantation, they remained quite utilitarian and unadorned, with a deteriorating quilt used as batting for a new one. But here, she was surprised to discover a wide variety of colorful patterns: diamond-shaped stars composed of long rectangles, triangles arrayed like flying birds, and so forth.
Obie Redger stomped up the steps to the porch, removing his straw hat. For being an overseer who spent a fair amount of time outside, he was the most pale person she’d ever met. He sunburned easily, often turning his face into a tomato. Today, the burn had provoked a splotchy red rash that played about his cheeks.
“Well?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I asked you a question.”
“I’m sorry, Obie, I didn’t hear you. I was noticing your sunburn. It’s quite pronounced.”
“Uh,” he said, and shook his head. Sunburn must have had little to do with his question. He opened his mouth as if to ask it again, but Alice interrupted.
“No, that’s not a burn at all.” She leaned forward, intrigued by the welts she could see better now that he’d stepped closer. “You’re sick again, aren’t you?”
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