Baby Hugh managed to snort: “He’s … too fat … to walk … much.”
“I’m sorry.” The officer motioned the men forward, and they led Betsy away.
“Please!” Tears streamed down my mother’s face. She sank onto the steps.
“Tell Reverend White to pray for us, ma’am. Pray for the South. Pray for Arkansas.”
He was trotting away, head down, slumped in the saddle. A moment later, and the only sounds were our sobs, and the continuing clucking of the frightened chickens.
“Don’t … cry … Mama,” Edith managed to say, but she couldn’t stop crying.
I sat down on the steps beside Mama, pulling her close. She buried her head on my shoulder, and her tears soaked my shirt. I tried to wrap my arms around her. Soon, Baby Hugh and Edith were on the steps beside us, Baby Hugh crying, Edith holding him and Mama.
We sat there for the longest while, and it struck me how wrong this was, how awful this war had become. A mother should never have to cry on her thirteen-year-old son’s shoulder.
Chapter Eight
The world, at least the world that I knew, which was pretty much southern Arkansas, turned upside down. The skies blackened. It rained again.
The day after Price’s army left Camden, Mama put on her rubber boots, poncho, and hat, and walked to Reverend White’s. She didn’t want company, although I told her I would go, that this insulation idea was my own, and that I should tell the preacher why he no longer had his Betsy.
“Stay home, Travis.” After making us a breakfast, Mama opened the door, stepped out, and turned back toward the kitchen. “But I do thank you for your offer.”
She had scrambled potatoes and eggs together in bacon grease, so Edith, Baby Hugh, and I ate in silence, then retired across the dogtrot to our Readers, but we had no interest. Not in learning. Not in eating. Rain pelted the roof, which began leaking in the northwestern corner by the fireplace, rare for the home Papa had built, but that didn’t bother me. It gave me something to do. I went into the kitchen, fetched a pot, and brought it back. Soon the plopping of water drowned out the rain, the wind, Baby Hugh’s reading aloud. Drowned out everything but the gloom.
Suddenly Edith blurted out: “What day is it?”
“Thursday,” I said.
“No. I mean the date.”
I had to think. “The Seventh.”
“Mama’s birthday is a week from tomorrow,” Edith said.
“When’s mine?” Baby Hugh asked.
“Not till November. And you know that.” I was testy.
“We should get her a present,” Edith said.
“Maybe Miss Mary will bake her a chocolate cake,” Baby Hugh said.
“Shut up,” Edith and I said at the same time.
Pouting, our kid brother slammed his Reader shut. “Well, what are you gonna get her? What you gonna do, walk fifteen miles to Camden and buy her something nice? With what? You ain’t got no money.”
Ignoring Baby Hugh, although everything he said had merit, I asked: “What would Mama want?”
“She’d want Papa to be home!” Again, Baby Hugh was absolutely right.
“Shut up!” Edith and I echoed sharply, and Baby Hugh opened his Reader and pretended to read.
“She’d want ….” Edith grinned. “She’d want coffee.”
“I wonder if we could find some,” I said.
The Reader’s cover slammed shut again, and Baby Hugh said in disgust: “Coffee ain’t much of a birthday present.”
“It’s what she would want,” Edith said. “More than anything … except for Papa coming home.”
“Well,” Hugh went on, “I’d think she’d rather have some of Miss Mary’s cake. Or cookies. Or a pie. But if you could find coffee, how you gonna pay for it? With what? A barrel of sawdust? You gonna haul that all the way to Camden? Or maybe you plan on borrowing somebody else’s mule and let that one get stole, too. Why don’t you …?”
I was up, hurling my Reader across the room. Baby Hugh ducked, and the book slammed against the fireplace, knocking a tintype onto the hearth and dropping into the pot of rain water. Hugh threw his book, which hit me in the chest, bouncing off, as I charged.
Edith yelled: “Thrash him, Brother!”
Breaking into tears, Baby Hugh shrieked, and bolted for the door.
“I’ll whip you good!” I let him know.
“I’ll tell Mama.” He pulled a chair over to block my path, and made for the door.
“You won’t be able to speak for a month when I’m done with you!”
I leaped over the chair and toward the open door. As Baby Hugh was turning toward the lane, I heard him scream. Bolting through the door, I tried to stop, but I lost my footing on the wet boards, and went sliding toward the kitchen cabin. I pushed myself up, sitting back against the log wall. My face reddened, not with anger, but embarrassment.
Baby Hugh had run straight into the hands of Uncle Willard, who had picked him up and brought him back to the porch in his carriage. After alighting and taking off his soaked, wide-brimmed hat, Uncle Willard grinned, before turning to spray the nearest puddle with tobacco juice.
“Reckon I broke up an interestin’ go at fisticuffs.” He wiped his mouth with a coat sleeve.
“He was after me, Uncle Willard,” Baby Hugh said. “You ought to whup him with your razor strop.”
Timidly Edith poked her head out the door.
“Who you fightin’, Edith?” Uncle Willard asked.
“Nobody.”
“That’s good. Ain’t ladylike to tussle. What you two fightin’ ’bout?”
Baby Hugh’s mouth opened, then closed. Mine never opened. We just looked at Uncle Willard, who slapped his thigh and laughed.
“Well, that’s good. That’s mighty fine indeed. Don’t fret none, you two. Me and your pa fought all the time. It’s a wonder we growed up at all, spendin’ most of our childhood tryin’ to tear one another’s head off. Part of our adulthood, too.” He laughed again at some old memory, sniffed, wiped his nose, and added: “I take it your ma ain’t here.”
I managed to pull myself up, brushing off my pants. “She went to the Reverend White’s.” I saw no reason to tell him why she had gone.
“In this weather?” I shrugged. Uncle Willard turned to say something to the slave driving his carriage, and I glared at Baby Hugh, warning him with my eyes that he had better not say anything about my sawdust plan, or why Mama had gone to see the preacher.
When Uncle Willard turned back around, Edith asked: “Are you on patrol, Uncle? You know? For runaway slaves?” She had stepped outside, drying my Reader with the sleeve of her dress.
“Only a fish would be out in this weather,” he said. “Reckon your ma’s half bream.” He smiled at his joke. “Just payin’ y’all a visit. When will she be back?”
“She just left a couple hours ago,” I said.
Uncle Willard turned again to his slave. “Max, you recollect where that tub of lard they call a preacher lives? Right before you get to the Frederick plantation? That little woods lane that turns off to the south?”
“Yes, suh.”
“Well, you go fetch my sister-in-law. No sense in her drowning for the Lord. I don’t reckon that you’ll run into no patrols … militia or Confederate … so I ain’t writin’ you no pass. If you catch up to Missus Ford before she reaches the fat preacher, go ahead and let her do her visitin’, then bring her back here. If she gives you any sass, just toss her inside. But make sure you bring her back here. And don’t spend all day with that preacher. You got that, boy?”
“Yes, suh.”
“Then get.”
Max clucked at the horses, and the carriage turned in the mud and headed down the lane toward the main road.
“Ain’t you a-feared that boy’ll run off?” Baby Hugh asked, and I saw my sister cring
e.
Uncle Willard spit again. “He ain’t got the guts.”
Baby Hugh laughed. “I’d love to see that boy throw Mama into the wagon. That’d be something funny to see. That would rile her up, I mean to tell you.”
As he stepped deeper into the dogtrot, Uncle Willard began shedding his coat. “Iffen Max was to lay a hand on a white woman, even a Yankee-minded petticoat like your mother, I’d flay the skin offen his back, then feed him to my hounds.”
Baby Hugh’s face paled.
Uncle Willard pointed toward the kitchen. “Don’t reckon y’all got no coffee on the stove?”
We kids looked at each other.
“By Jacks,” Uncle Willard said. “Nobody’s got coffee. Folks’ve been burnin’ acorn or grain, makin’ coffee that way. And I knows Anna Louella ain’t got no ardent spirits ’round here.”
“There’s milk,” Edith said. “And some leftover potatoes and eggs.”
“That’ll have to do, I reckon. Let’s see if I can’t dry out these wet bones of mine, and warm myself up, before Max fetches your ma home.”
* * * * *
Waiting in the kitchen with Uncle Willard proved almost intolerable. After twenty minutes, the rain had stopped. He pulled out his chaw of tobacco, and laid the quid atop the crown of his hat, which he had set on the table. He heated up the potatoes and eggs in the skillet in the fireplace, then ate them with his fingers, right out of the cast iron skillet. Standing up, he washed the food down with milk. Then he wiped his fingers on his trousers, moved to the table, and put the tobacco back in his mouth.
Mama would have had one of her hissy fits had she seen any of that.
Next Uncle Willard pulled up a chair, scraping the floor with the legs, which made our skin crawl. He turned the chair around and straddled it, leaning his arms against the back, staring at Baby Hugh, then at me and Edith.
“Y’all know what happened yesterday,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, but I answered. “Yes, sir. Some soldiers came here while they were marching to Washington.”
“Steal anything?”
I ran my tongue over my lips, thinking of how to answer that and not lie.
Edith came to my rescue. “What’s there to steal here?”
With a snort, Uncle Willard spit into a tin cup he had liberated from the wash basin.
He seemed to have changed since his last visit, and that hadn’t been that long ago. His face was paler, and there was more stubble on his cheeks. The clothes he wore had a disheveled appearance, and red lines rimmed his eyes. It wasn’t that Uncle Willard dressed like some Yankee businessman and looked well-groomed when he came visiting, but, I don’t know, he just seemed different, and I couldn’t blame it all on the rain. Haggard. Nervous. Worried. Bitter. Maybe a combination of all of those emotions.
“Heard the soldiers was poisonin’ wells,” he said. “That why they come here?”
“I suppose,” I said, “but they didn’t.”
His eyebrows raised. “No?”
“They were gonna drop dead dogs in our well,” Baby Hugh said.
“Mama talked them out of it,” Edith added.
“Another Confederate defeat by the Yankees,” he said, and let out a bitter laugh. “Didn’t make off with your cow?”
Our heads shook.
“No chickens?”
“Mama talked them out of that, too,” Edith said.
With a grin, Uncle Willard shook his head. “By jacks, that woman should be an officer in the Confederate Army. We might be winnin’ this war iffen our boys had her sand.”
Though I didn’t want to, I grinned.
Uncle Willard shifted the tobacco to his other cheek. “Well,” he said, “you know what’s happenin’? No army to defend Camden. Yanks is pressin’ from Little Rock. Right now, the road out in front of your place looks like Moses leadin’ his tribe from the pharaoh. Ain’t many folks left in Camden. Soon as Price’s boys started pullin’ out, they started packin’.” He paused to spit. “Y’all should come, too.”
We looked at each other, then back at our uncle.
“Are you going?” Edith asked.
“I ain’t got no choice. Maybe the Yanks won’t come to Camden, but there ain’t nothin’ to stop ’em. Not yet, nohow. And I ain’t about to let some Bluebelly curs take my slaves from me. So I’m packin’ up what I can, and lightin’ a shuck for Magnolia.”
That was a city, maybe thirty or forty miles southeast of us.
“Thought about followin’ the army to Washington, but the Yanks’ll be marchin’ that way, too, I warrant, and I ain’t got confidence in none of our soldiers no more.”
His tune sure had changed since his last visit, when he’d said General Price could whip any Bluecoat.
“So Magnolia it is. For now.” His head shook. “But might be I’ll have to keep travelin’. Maybe into Texas. Jefferson, I reckon. Might could wind up in Dallas. I hate to do it, but I ain’t got much choice. Not until somebody drives the Yanks up north again. So I figure I wouldn’t be much of a brother to Connor if I didn’t take y’all with me.”
I swallowed.
“Mama won’t leave,” Edith said.
“She’ll have to.”
“She won’t,” I said.
“Stubborn as your ma is, I warrant that you two’s probably right. But … she might send you kids with me.”
She’d never do that. That was my first thought. It became also my first prayer.
* * * * *
The next ninety minutes passed slowly. Uncle Willard bragged again about his dealings with Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, complained about the Arkansas economy, reflected some on growing up with Connor, talked about Mama, mentioned all the reasons he had never married, and criticized generals Sterling Price, J.O. Shelby, and John S. Marmaduke.
“How come you ain’t in the Army?” Baby Hugh asked. “Papa is. How come you didn’t join up?”
Tobacco spilled out of our uncle’s pouch. He had moved from chewing tobacco to pipe tobacco, and had been tamping the clay bowl, but now he cursed, brushing flakes off his thigh and onto the wooden floor.
Baby Hugh wasn’t done. “I know Billy Ray Bandy. We play sometimes after church on Sundays. He’s about my age. He’s got a pa who ain’t in the Army, neither. Billy Ray don’t say why, but I’ve heard some grown-ups talking about him. Not to Mama. Just overhear them sometimes after church lets out when they’re standing around talking amongst themselves. Billy Ray’s pa ain’t got no front teeth, but he used to have ’em. The folks at church says he pulled them out himself so he couldn’t fight in the Army. No front teeth means he can’t bite off the tops of the powder charges, or something like that. So that’s why he ain’t in the Army. But you gots all your front teeth. One of them’s even gold.”
Uncle Willard’s face reddened, and he shoved the pipe stem between his teeth—indeed, one of the incisors was gold—and fumbled about looking for a match.
“I deal in slaves, boy,” he said, still searching for a match. “I’m too important to the economy.”
“But you just said the economy’s awful.”
“Not because of the slave trade.” He found a match, but it broke in half when he tried to strike it against his boot.
“And that General Forrest,” Baby Hugh went on. “He was a slave trader, too. You said so yourself. But now he’s fighting. I think he’s even a general. And a bona-fide hero. You said that yourself.”
The next match also snapped, but the third fired, and Uncle Willard brought it to the pipe in trembling hands. While he busied himself lighting his pipe, I glanced at Edith. We grinned at each other.
Sometimes, Baby Hugh seemed all right for an ignorant kid brother. I almost even regretted trying to thrash him earlier that morning.
Chapter Nine
The carriage’s arriv
al saved Uncle Willard. His pipe going, he shook out the match, dropped it in the skillet, and headed for the door, never answering Baby Hugh’s question. Uncle Willard’s Negro driver had returned with Mama, who shunned her rain gear. She hung coat and hat on the antler on the outside wall to dry and replaced her rubber boots with her regular shoes, all the while exchanging informal pleasantries with her brother-in-law.
“Hear you drove off Price’s army.” Uncle Willard’s pipe puffed like a chimney.
“There was a nice young officer,” Mama said, combing her hair with her fingers. “He stopped them from poisoning the well … if that’s what you mean.” She shook her head. “That road is a mess! And I’ve never seen so much traffic on the Pike.”
“You will. And it’ll get messier,” Uncle Willard said. “Yanks’ll be marchin’ down it, soon enough and sure enough.”
Mama sighed.
“Figured you’d like that, Annie Lou,” he said just to spite her. “Bein’ Yankee born and all.”
“I’ll be glad when I never see another soldier, Willard,” Mama said, “except for Connor coming home.”
“Amen to that.” Which sounded strange for Uncle Willard.
“Can I fix you something to eat?”
“Already done it myself,” he said. “Anna”—his tone changed—“I’m pullin’ out. Magnolia.”
“Magnolia?” Mama wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. “That town south of here?”
He nodded. “Might have to go even farther. But that depends on Old Pap and our boys. But the Yanks’ll be here. Nothin’ to stop ’em, and I got my property to think of, to protect.”
“Well ….” Mama put her hand on his shoulder. “We will miss you, Willard.” She even sounded like she meant it.
“You ought to come with me, Anna.”
She removed her hand, smiled slightly, and said: “We’ve been over this time and again, Willard. For two years now. I’m not leaving our home.”
“Then send the kids with me.”
Mama stepped back as if he had slapped her.
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