Cursed by Christ

by Matthew Warner

  Grimacing, he put his hat back on and looked away. He was obviously reluctant to discuss his health, but he’d been asked a direct question by the plantation mistress and had to answer.

  “Yes’m. Same rash as last fall. I thought I’d beat it, but it’s back.”

  “And none of this started until our arrival here, is that right?” She didn’t voice the unspoken question of whether Christ was responsible for this as well.

  “No, had it once before, about four months after Pierce took me on.” He looked at his shoes, his features tensing when he spoke the former master’s name.

  “You two were good friends, weren’t you?”

  Nodding, he took off his hat again and fanned his face with it. He sweated more than seemed warranted.

  The question was intended to make him more at ease—to back off from the subject of his rash—but she realized with a start that she may have just answered her original question. Pierce had died of syphilis, and according to Thorne, was a Sodomite, (she had no other word for it). Obie, well into his twenties, also had not married. He blamed it on lack of prospects, but Alice wondered. …

  “Have you seen the doctor about this? You may have—” she blinked, trying to phrase it delicately. She seized upon her memory of that day in Pierce’s bedroom. “Pierce may have left behind something in the house that you contracted.”

  Obie retreated a step, looking horrified. He pointed his hat at her. “No. I—no. He didn’t give—I mean, I don’t have nothing like that.”

  Interesting reaction, she thought, but it broke her heart. Here she was many months living here, and unable to establish any real friendship with him. Concern about his health was being rebuffed with fear and defensiveness.

  “Miz Alice, if you please, I’ll take care of this rash, surely, but I came up here to—”

  “Are you sure? I could summon the doctor this afternoon.”

  “No!” His red cheeks flared even more. “I mean, no thank you, ma’am. I came here to ask you about the storeroom.”

  Sighing, she bowed her head. Oh well. Thinking he was asking for permission to get in, she pulled the storeroom keys from her skirt pocket. “Of course, here you are. Just bring them back to me.”

  “That’s just it,” he said, making no move to take the keys. “I found the door unlocked. Nothing’s gone, far as I can tell, but I’m worried some of the slaves have been up to mischief.”

  Alice thought it more likely that this was just another of his paranoid rants about slave insurrections, but she had to answer him politely. A war was on, after all, and since last summer there had been a few runaways. The storeroom was accessed through the walk-in basement around back, and very well could have been burglarized. But there was also another possibility, and she said so: “I’m sorry, I must have left it unlocked again.”

  His welts flared like tiny torches. “You? You left … ? Uh, Miz Alice—” He scanned the tree line, as if hoping Thorne would appear and help him. “With all due respect, I think this is becoming a problem.”

  Alice felt all her volition drain into the swing she sat upon. The last several months seemed to break on her, all at once. His resentment, like her forgetfulness, was just more of the same. She knew she was getting worse with misplacing things and not performing well, being so preoccupied with thoughts about her husband. She hadn’t been able to think straight enough to balance the household budget for several months.

  “We have to be more careful these days,” Obie said. “Don’t need to give the slaves any temptations.”

  He continued talking as she studied the woodgrains on the porch. Tired of it. Tired of everything. Just tired of the responsibility. Perhaps it was time to relinquish some of it, just as Gramma Wharton back home—oh God, was she still alive?—had relinquished her responsibilities when she grew too senile for them.

  Alice cut him off mid-sentence by holding the keys out again. “Here, take them. I’m sure under your vigilance the storeroom will adhere to the highest standards of security.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment, probably amazed at achieving victory so easily, but he took the keys. “Thank you.” Putting his hat back on, he turned as Eliza Tefera stepped onto the porch.

  “You comin’ back and help me with that pig, Miz Alice?” she said.

  Alice began to stand, feeling weak, but Obie cut in: “How dare you ask the mistress to do your duties. Get back there! She’ll return to your company only if it strikes her fancy.”

  She thought of intervening but didn’t have the energy to do so. Obie, after all, had not witnessed the more friendly relationship she had with the slave. She listened in resignation as Eliza said, “Yes’m,” and shot a look of hatred at Alice—guilty by association with Obie.

  Harsh reminder of our true roles, Alice thought.

  “No, wait,” Obie said as Eliza turned to leave. “You’re coming with me to inspect the storeroom. And if I find anything out of order, you’ll have an explanation.” He smiled coldly and followed her off the porch.

  Eliza had time enough to scowl once more at the mistress before disappearing around the corner. Alice didn’t need the angel’s wings to feel the resentment. They weren’t friends, exactly—one could never truly be friends with a negro—but Eliza and her husband, Jonah, were the closest things to friends she had. The neighboring plantation mistresses, of course, had their get-togethers, but just as back home, Alice failed to fit in. She couldn’t abide the little games people played with each other, the talking behind a fan held to the face, the laughing smirks. The innuendo. She was also afraid one of those shallow gadflies would discover her marital problems with Thorne, and the last thing she needed was to stain his good name—or her own, what was left of it.

  No, the slave could never be a true friend, but she did listen as Alice talked about her home sometimes, about how she missed the old millstone by Sugar Road, or how she missed the familiar concern of Momma and Gramma, and even Poppa. Once, she even told Eliza her concern that she may have left home too hastily. Talking to someone who could nod at the right times and say, “Umm hmm,” made the loss easier.

  Eliza had even helped on that dreaded business of Pierce’s bedroom, first by nearly rescuing her from an impending brainstorm, and then by insuring Pierce’s mental residue would never bother her again. Pierce’s room was now her room, while Thorne slept in the other bedroom down the hall. It was no secret, at least not to Alice, that Eliza dabbled in the occult practices the slaves had brought over from Africa, but Alice didn’t rightly care anymore about such things. Before the emergence of her powers, she would have been deeply offended by such covert practices—would have had them severely punished—but now she was indifferent. Christianity wasn’t exactly a better alternative. So when she had discovered Eliza in the bedroom about a week after the incident, in a deep trance and incanting under her breath, she had left her alone—then been amazed afterward to feel the utter emptiness of the room, how it had been wiped clean of all mental echoes that might upset the angel’s wings. She had thanked Eliza by treating the woman as a friend.

  She shifted idly on the swing. Well, this quarrel would pass. She had no hope, apparently, of really befriending Obie Redger, but Eliza was her slave and couldn’t avoid her. Eliza would get over this latest argument, and if not, then Alice would talk to her through her husband, Jonah, perhaps by approaching him one day as he embarked on his daily errand to groom Thorne’s horse. Now there was a kindly man, although it had taken him many months to grow comfortable around her after Thorne’s assault that first day. If she could only get Thorne’s ear so easily.

  As if they knew she was thinking about them, Thorne and Jonah approached from opposite directions to converge in front of the house. Jonah was leading Thorne’s horse—a mangy mongrel whose name Alice had never bothered to learn—which was saddled up and packed with a bed roll and provision bags. Thorne was dressed in a civilian shirt and hat, but wore his old Army pants, boots, saber and pistol.

  “Tho
rne?”

  He glanced at her as if annoyed by any delay she might cause, then walked to the foot of the porch. “I got a letter from Bedford. Wants me to meet him in Kentucky. He’s putting together a cavalry battalion.”

  She shook her head as if recovering from several slaps to the face. “Wait a minute. Are you talking about Nathan Bedford Forrest?” Thorne had met his old Tennessean friend Bedford, as he was called, through their connections in the cotton industry.

  “Right. He joined up last month as a private, but already some Memphis people have convinced the governor to give him more responsibility.”

  She didn’t find this hard to believe. Bedford’s wealth surpassed even Thorne’s, and he was probably equipping his own men.

  She stepped out into the July sun, already feeling dizzy from her previous conversation, and was now ready to throw up from shock. Numbness swept over her as she placed her hands on Thorne’s chest. She had known, deep down, that he, once a major in the U.S. cavalry, would eventually have to leave, but she had hoped it wouldn’t be this soon—at least, not before they could rekindle their marriage.

  “Why go now?” she said. “There’s no conscription. Stay here and defend Georgia, not some other state.”

  He pulled her hands off of him. “Bedford wouldn’t have written if he didn’t need me. I’m older, more experienced, and have connections.”

  “But what about the cotton?”

  “I promise to be back in time for harvesting. And if not, don’t worry—Obie’s not as inexperienced as he was last year.” He held up his hand to silence her when she started to speak. “Besides that, I should be joining the embargo anyway.”

  Thorne was referring to President Davis’s volunteer embargo on cotton exports, intended to blackmail Britain and France into formally recognizing the Confederacy. Alice thought this policy was as thick-skulled as locating the Confederate capital in Richmond, only a hundred miles from Washington, and until now, she had thought her husband felt the same way.

  So many things were changing at once, within a span of maybe ten minutes, that she might as well have been shot.

  She found herself staring at his chest, eyes losing focus. Thorne must have thought she was taking stock of his uniform because he said, “I know, it’s not up to my usual standard. There wasn’t even a uniform code until last month, but—”

  “I could sew one for you. Just stay a few more days.”

  He stepped forward and kissed her for the first time in weeks. He scratched her with his beard but tore her heart out. “No, I’m sorry. I can permit no delay.”

  Three short strides, and he had a foot in the stirrup. He said other things—a promise to write soon, and empty sentiments—but she hardly heard them. It was as if they stood in a deafening storm—sound and sight obscured by sheets of rain—and indeed her surroundings grew hazy. Thorne disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  She broke into a run before she knew what she was doing but failed to catch him. A flash of anger: Thorne needed another conquest. She hadn’t been an unattainable goal for him since last summer. But anger quickly buckled under grief, and she collapsed.

  Jonah caught up to her. He watched her cry for a couple minutes, and then lent a supporting hand. “C’mon. Let me help ya.”

  Alice refused to move, her tears turning the dirt into mud. Her pain could not have been worse if they were her life’s blood.

  Chapter 8

  Summer 1864

  In three years, no letters had come from Thorne—not one damn letter or response to any of hers. Alice wondered if Billy Yank had killed him, and in her worst moments, she wished he had.

  Yet she couldn’t let him go. She was sure he was still alive, somewhere, deliberately ignoring her. This was why she’d forbidden Thanksgiving celebrations on the plantation. There was nothing to be thankful for, and certainly not to Christ, who had obviously engineered this long silence to persecute her.

  Seized by endless melancholy, she couldn’t summon the gumption to leave. She wondered sometimes if she had grown too comfortable with the life of an aristocrat. Perhaps she had crowed a little too happily when Obie Redger bought an exemption to the Confederate conscript in the spring of ’62, because she’d used it as license to heap more of her duties upon him until eventually she had none. She knew that everywhere women were in hospitals—factories if they were in the North—working themselves to the bone supporting the war effort, but she could hardly rise from bed in the morning. She noted with indifference the sunken cheek bones among the slaves although her own rations remained the same. It wasn’t as if she didn’t care, but an empty pool reflects no light. She bathed only when her body odor became strong enough for her to smell it.

  No one except the Teferas spoke to her, treating her as the walking dead that she was. She tolerated her own depression only because she was so familiar with it. Frequent meditations on her baggy-eyed image in the dining room mirror—sometimes with telepathy but usually not—enabled this.

  This afternoon, she was in Thorne’s study, in search of another book to carry her through the next gray block of days. In a rare burst of energy, she retrieved the stool from behind the rotating lawyer’s bookcase in order to reach the main bookcase’s top shelf. There, behind a stack of tomes yellowed with age, awaited five large books bound in leather. She took one down and opened it, her eyes falling to what she thought was a random passage:

  “All thy lovers have forgotten thee; they seek thee not; for I have wounded thee with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one, for the multitude of thine iniquity.”

  The Bible. The work of God and Christ. She might as well have discovered a pile of feces.

  She returned the volume to the shelf and stepped off the stool, grief washing over her. She sank to her knees. Surely this was no accident. Christ had directed her eyes to that passage to torment her. He’d been waiting for her to be at her most vulnerable before springing it upon her. Every family had a Bible in which to record births, deaths and marriages. Poppa had kept one for the Wharton family. He had likewise stored it on a top shelf—supposedly out of harm’s way, but Alice now realized he’d been protecting it from Momma’s sight.

  No. She wouldn’t permit Christ to destroy her with a single verse. Standing up and wiping her eyes, she tried to redirect her thoughts. And failed.

  Who kept the Wharton family record now? Not her, not Alice, who was married to an absent husband. Their marriage was surely not recorded in the Norwicks’ Bible—not that she’d touch it again to check—for their union was unsanctioned by Christ, just as she was. Was her name similarly stricken from the ledger of judgements, which Reverend Forney had often referred to?

  Crying again, and feeling as if sand bags were slung over her shoulders, she went out into the hot afternoon sun and crossed to the kitchen building. If Eliza didn’t have a pot of water handy for her to rinse her hands of the Bible’s touch, she’d slap the woman.

  But Eliza did have a pot ready, and a heated pot at that, because she was already at work on the evening meal. Alice couldn’t remember eating her morning meal but reasoned she’d had it since she felt no hunger.

  Skewering apples onto a skinning machine, Eliza froze when the mistress entered, obviously unsure how to react. Alice ignored her and scrubbed her hands in the cooking water—she didn’t care if this was unsanitary—and then sat down on a low stool to rest.

  “You need help with somethin’, Missus?”

  Alice ignored her and stared, unfocused, out the window. She allowed the crackling sounds of the cooking fire to isolate her.

  A period of time must have passed before she blinked, because it was suddenly darker outside. More feet scuffled around her on the wooden floor.

  “How long she been sittin’ der?” someone asked.

  “Shh!”

  The slave said something else, but there was a loud squeak as Eliza moved the swinging iron arm that held the stew pot over the flames—as if meant to drown out the comment.


  She blinked again and focused. A cream separator, really nothing more than an upright metal cylinder on a tripod, stood in front of her. A narrow window ran up its side so she could see the milk sinking to the bottom while cream rose to the top.

  Gramma’s voice mockingly spoke in her ear: “Gotta make cream out of that milk.”

  Startled, she looked around for the speaker. Eliza and the other slave, both dressed in aprons and headkerchiefs, quietly looked away.

  “Why did you say that?” Alice said.

  Eliza looked bewildered. “’Scuse me, missus?”

  “Why do you hurl my grandmother’s words at me?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Do you know what Gramma meant by saying that? That I should be optimistic—make lemonade out of lemons, cream out of milk.”

  Eliza’s husband entered the kitchen with an armful of firewood. Sensing something was wrong, Jonah carefully put his load down. He stared suspiciously at Alice. “How’s de missus?”

  Her temper rose, much faster than the cream ever would. Alice bit off her words: “The missus is fine, but wants to know why her cooks use their powers to resurrect the taunting phrases of her grandmother.”

  Jonah and Eliza exchanged a wide-eyed look.

  A long moment passed. The younger slave woman, shaking with fright, excused herself and hurried out.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Alice said to the two Teferas. “Gramma’s dead, isn’t she?”

  When they didn’t answer, she glanced at the other cooking pot sitting upside down in the corner. “If I am not treated with more respect, then I shall tell Obie you’re calling a meeting tonight.”

  The slaves’ eyes widened in horror. They looked between Alice and the upturned pot, and Eliza covered her mouth.

  “That’s right,” Alice said, and pointed to the pot. “That’s your signal to summon a meeting amongst you slaves, is it not?” She tapped her lower lip in mock puzzlement. “Is it not strange how these meetings of yours always coincide with airing of certain quilts? The ‘tumbling boxes’ pattern, for instance, is always out when the cooking pot is upside-down.”