Ruth’s Journey

by Donald McCaig

  Even so, Savannah was a friendlier city than Charleston, and had Philippe’s bride been more personable, she might have found friends. Her stillborn infant would have garnered sympathy, and Philippe’s wealth excused her unconventionality. Alas, Osanalgi was quite shy, and, after her Indian kin quit Georgia, she shut herself up in Philippe’s quirky, gloomy mansion. Those who did call never found her at home.

  Philippe’s advocacy for Indians embarrassed those who’d profited by Indian evictions, and, after the Treaty of Indian Springs, the legislature never again sought his opinion. Philippe devoted himself to cataloging his collection of Muscogee artifacts and corresponding with the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C., to find them a permanent home.

  Osanalgi might have been seen more often had anyone been really interested in seeing her. Philippe’s coachman brought her to the pine forest at the edge of the city and collected her at dark. Market hunters on uninhabited Fig Island mistook her for a runaway slave and were disappointed when their captive earned them no reward.

  In March, Savannahians turned out to welcome the Marquis de Lafayette, the aged Revolutionary War hero. The Jasper Greens brass band did enthusiastic justice to “La Marseillaise,” and Philippe presented the marquis with a Red Stick war club as a memento. Osanalgi wasn’t present and, had she been, couldn’t have prevented the chill Philippe caught, which occasioned his demise two weeks later and Pierre’s sudden immersion in his cousin’s affairs. Although Philippe’s wife attended his burial, she was heavily veiled, and some whispered she’d slashed her cheeks in a pagan mourning ritual. Pierre arranged the funeral and burial. The reception (which the widow didn’t attend) was at Pierre Robillard’s home.

  Pierre, Nehemiah, and Mr. Haversham spent weeks sorting out the estate. Philippe’s deeds to farms in Normandy and government bonds in various amounts were found in the unlikeliest drawers and files. A portmanteau unopened since Philippe arrived in Savannah decades ago contained clear title to a Martinique plantation worth fifty thousand. The secretary of the Columbian Institute was interested in Philippe’s collection if—and only if—it was properly cataloged. “We have a great number—nay, a superabundance—of uncataloged Indian artifacts.”

  Pierre didn’t know Osanalgi was missing until a week had passed, and when he discovered her absence the executor’s first response was more annoyance than distress. The Muscogee coachman knew more than he’d say, but no threat or promise persuaded him to divulge Osa’s whereabouts. One morning, six weeks after her husband’s death, Osanalgi reappeared with a newborn in her arms. Osanalgi’s devotion to her baby was fierce and unyielding.

  Pierre hadn’t known she was carrying a child, but, whatever his private reservations, he treated young Master Philippe Robillard as his cousin’s son and heir.

  All bad things must come to an end, and one winter afternoon Pierre and Nehemiah finished consolidating Philippe’s assets into a trust to be managed by Mr. Haversham’s bank and the two emerged from Osanalgi’s awful house warmed by self-congratulations. Pierre rubbed his hands together. Soon it would be Christmas.

  In that spirit, impelled by the most genial Christian motives, Pierre dismissed Nehemiah to walk home alone, and, since he was passing, he’d call on his old partner’s widow. It was too late for supper and too early for dinner; Pierre wouldn’t strain Mrs. Evans’s hospitality, and there had been some good years at R & E factors. Very good years.

  His hostess welcomed him into a house that had gone unfinished for a decade. The family lived in the finished part—the first-floor drawing room and family room, where exposed lath rose from unvarnished wainscoting to a yellowing plaster ceiling. The beautifully shaped staircase lacked balustrades and rose to a second floor whose condition Pierre could only guess at.

  No fire burned in the cavernous fireplace, and Solange’s daughters kept their cheap coats on. (Importer Pierre had an eye for fabrics.) Pierre took a wobbly chair, whose rungs were snugged with leather laces, for which the lovely widow apologized. “I have sold the good furniture,” she confessed. She added, “We bivouac in an unfinished Versailles. I should never have let Wesley start building it.”

  Despite that bleak room, conversation proceeded apace until Pierre uttered that most conventional of platitudes with the most conventional of sighs. “God’s ways are inscrutable, dear Mrs. Evans. We must accept what we can’t understand.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Madame?”

  “My husband slips on a scrap of cotton waste and breaks his neck. Your Louisa and darling Clara, who’ve survived many fever seasons, unexpectedly succumb. That we cannot do anything about these tragedies is perfectly apparent. That we must accept them as part of some Divine Plan is disgusting.”

  Pierre gaped: was the woman a freethinker? Her guest’s discomfort didn’t check Mrs. Evans’s excursion into the unconventional when she blamed her Dear Departed for her present penury. “That the cotton business was overextended was evident to anyone with eyes to see. Indeed, sir, you had slipped that trap. But Wesley ignored logic”—she made logic seem like bad temper wielding a bullwhip—“and forged ahead. Sir, persistence in bad judgment ever makes matters worse!”

  “Maman,” Pauline warned. “Please.”

  “I trusted Wesley! I did not know!”

  Pierre tried to forgive her, him, and everyone. “How could you, a woman . . .”

  “Pah! Who ever said the ability to bear children forecloses ­intellect?”

  Pierre’s own intellect was completely overwhelmed. He made his excuses, and on his way out discreetly slipped a double eagle under the dusty visiting card tray.

  Half a block down the street, the coatless Solange caught him. “Sir, I believe you forgot this.”

  “Madam?”

  She thrust the gold coin at him. A prudent woman, and he knew Mrs. Evans to be such, could feed her family for a month! “But . . .”

  Her temper cooled. “Dear Pierre. Sir. You meant nothing amiss. You have a kind heart. But you must be aware how your generosity might appear to gossipmongers.”

  * * *

  As it turned out (as Pierre thought, ironically), to avoid titillating society they had scandalized it. The next time he visited the widow, Nehemiah carried a heavy basket of provisions, a custom he repeated every two weeks. As weather warmed and they could sit outside, Pierre’s visits became less duty than pleasure, and one afternoon he visited without Nehemiah (over that worthy’s objections). Not long afterward, he visited later, much later, after So­lange’s children had been put to bed.

  He had thought himself no longer capable of rapture. He had thought his fingers and lips would never again trace the scented contours of a woman’s skin. That grateful mindlessness of thrusting into the light!

  Solange might have wept or accused her seducer, but she did not. She stretched luxuriously. “I had forgotten what pleasure can be. Thank you, dear, sweet Pierre.”

  Which was when Pierre Robillard, who was quite old enough to abjure love, heard its summons loud as a clapper striking a bell.

  He hired workmen to finish the Pink House and commissioned Thomas Sully, whose portrait of Lafayette was widely admired, to capture Solange’s likeness.

  Three months of careless bliss, tainted only by Pauline’s disdain. (Eulalie, the second child, was too young to make judgments.) The four took Sunday drives and picnicked on Fig Island. With no regard for discretion, Pierre, Solange, and the children visited friends’ plantations as a family. Father John dropped by L’Ancien Régime to inquire about Pierre’s intentions.

  “Intentions?” the befuddled Pierre replied.

  “I cannot absolve Mrs. Evans if she means to continue in sin.”

  “Sin?” It had never occurred to Pierre that love was a sin.

  When Solange told him he was to be a father again, Pierre was de
lighted. His life was opening like a spring flower. “Marry me,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  Pierre was flabbergasted beyond speech. His jaw dropped. His face went from pink to scarlet. “But . . .”

  Solange laughed merrily and kissed his forehead. “Certainly I will marry you, dear Pierre. You are the gentlest, most amusing man in the world.”

  “Hmmm. I thought it was my strength, my dominating presence, my service with Napoleon. My brute force . . . ?”

  She giggled like a girl.

  Savannah loved the wealthy, amiable Pierre, but, as Solange’s pregnancy became unignorable, gossips resurrected memories of Solange’s first marriage and the duel that ended it. Mrs. Haversham dubbed Solange the French Widow, and despite (or perhaps because of) a certain lethal spider, the name stuck. When a prominent, well-bred, painfully homely spinster complained, “That woman has buried two husbands, is she now to get a third?” her remark was quoted around town.

  Although Pierre was happily deaf to such remarks, Solange was not, and, of course, Nehemiah heard every aside white folks whispered as well as secrets whites did not tell but every Savannah housemaid knew.

  An embarrassed and aggrieved Pierre came to Solange. “Dearest,” he said, “apparently there’s been offensive talk.”

  “Don’t you dare take exception. I’ve surfeit of the ‘field of honor.’”

  “Dear me, no. I mean I wouldn’t. I mean, I would but . . .”

  She hushed him with a fingertip upon his lips. “Pierre, when was the last time Philippe’s widow was in society?”

  “I couldn’t say. Although my cousin introduced her, the poor woman didn’t . . . she . . . it was excruciating. Poor, dear Cousin Philippe. He believed Indians had lessons for civilized men!”

  “By some measures, she and I are alike.”

  “You? You two?” Pierre continued as if Solange hadn’t spoken. “Her competence is in good hands, and she lacks for nothing. She adores her child. Sunday mornings, when all are in church, she walks Little Philippe through the city. Osa, the toddler, and that coachman. They don’t return anyone’s greetings.”

  The boy’s saturnine features and high cheekbones hinted of his mother’s people. His blue eyes, as cold as a winter sky, were his father’s. “Philippe is a handsome child,” Pierre said. “My duty . . . I fear I have not performed my full duty to him or his mother.”

  “You shall have your chance. Pierre, I want Osa to give me away.”

  “Osa?” He imagined the wagging tongues of Savannah’s scandalized society. He could almost hear the mosquito whine of their gossip. Fortunately, Pierre’s face was perfectly shaped for an impish grin. “How kind . . . How kind you are, my dear.”

  “And those Irishmen you sometimes do business with?”

  “The O’Haras? Their younger brother has arrived from Ireland. Supposedly Gerald O’Hara’s even shrewder than his brothers.”

  “Invite them. Wives, brothers, children—all the Fenian kit and caboodle.”

  Pierre’s grin broadened. “But, dear Solange, all the best people—why, they’ll be scandalized.”

  Solange’s grin was as small and wicked as his was good humored. “That, my blessed husband to be, is my intention!”

  * * *

  But on his nuptial morning, with spring flowers flowering and gladdening the air, surrounded by chattering Fenians while his peers hid in their carriages, Pierre Robillard wondered how wise they’d been to snub people unaccustomed to snubs. A vague, brave, rather-be-anywhere-but-here smile clung to his lips. A rumpled, unshaven Irishman stuck out his hand. “You’ll be the lucky groom. May you have children and your children have children.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Gerald O’Hara, sir. Formerly a merchant in my brothers’ firm, but as of last night at four thirty-seven, not long before this blessed—this very blessed—sun decided to rise, I became a planter.”

  Fuddled, Pierre couldn’t help asking, “So early?”

  “No, sir. So late! At the hour when the rooster is clearing his throat and drink numbs the wits of the gambling man.”

  Gerald O’Hara, new-minted planter, was shorter than Pierre by six inches and resembled the bird he’d just mentioned. His broad, happy face was empty of guile and so flushed with the conviction that the world, as a matter of course, would share his joy that, despite Pierre’s dreary ruminations (perhaps because he’d tired of them), Pierre asked, “Have you been to bed then, Mr. O’Hara?”

  “No, sir. First because I would not (because I was playing cards) and then because I dare not (because I was winning) and then because I must not because a gentleman, having sacrificed the contents of his wallet, laid the deed to an Up-country plantation on the cloth and was urging me to wager against it. I had nines over jacks, a full house, and I believed he held a straight, though in cards, sir, one may be mistook.”

  Pierre, who hadn’t wagered at cards since he was Napoleon’s soldier, agreed.

  Gerald’s brother James intervened. “Boyo, it is Master Robil­lard’s wedding day, sure it is. God’s nightgown! Don’t bore the man with your goings-on.”

  None of Pierre’s finer guests had set foot outside their carriages. Well, then. Perhaps he’d marry without them. Pierre said, “I have some difficulty with your brother’s accent, James. But I relish his tale.”

  “It is just two hundred acres,” red-eyed Gerald continued as if no objection had been raised. “Being Irish, sir, I’ve ever dreamed of ‘a bit of land’ of me own. Nothing grand, mind. Land where neither king nor grandee could expel me or mine.”

  Gerald described his deed in surveyor’s detail. “. . . and five hundred from the white oak at the corner to the Flint River. Isn’t that a grand name? Hard as flint, but soft as water. I cannot wait to see it.”

  “Flint River . . .”

  “’Tis Up-country, mister. The lottery of Cherokee lands. Some was won by honest settlers, others—as I gather ’twas the case here—by speculators seeking not land but only the profit to be made off it.

  “I come, Mr. Robillard, from a country where men squabble over a few yards of dirt that grow nothing better than potatoes. These Indian lands have never known a plow! They will grow anything!

  “I shall name it Tara, sir. I name it for that grand and great place where reigned the Irish kings.”

  Overwhelmed by the little man’s bonhomie, Pierre took Gerald’s hand again. “Sir, I congratulate you. It is good to become a king!”

  The Irishman’s face was alight with good humor. “Faith and it is that. For yourself, your honor: may the most you wish for today be the least you receive.”

  At the dismounting step, Philippe’s son tumbled out of his father’s disreputable coach, banging his ankle on the stone and setting up a howl to gladden any savage.

  The boy was dressed unexceptionally in short pants, shirt, and felt hat. His mother wore a beaded red and green headband, and a necklace of some sort of animal claws above what may have been the same gown she’d worn to the disastrous Christmas ball so many years ago.

  Pierre hurried to her, extending his hand. “Osa! Osa! So good of you . . . So very good . . .”

  Nehemiah collected the howling child, who thumped his ears just as the bride’s carriage turned onto the street and gentlefolks’ carriages disgorged their contents.

  As they neared the melee, Antonia Sevier asked Solange, “You seem so distant, my dear. Regrets?”

  “One does what one needs do.”

  “Of course, but . . .”

  “Pierre is honorable. Perhaps too honorable. He hasn’t a devious bone in his body.”

  “But?”

  “Dear friend, there are no buts. I have no reservations. We will be happy together, my Pink House will be completed, my dear daughters”—the younger daughter smiled,
the elder exhibited repugnance for noisesome remarks coming from such a being as her mother—“will enjoy the advantages two parents provide. We will be happy. Do you hear me, Pauline? We will be happy.”

  Pauline glowered at her gloved hands.

  Antonia gasped. “Mrs. Haversham, Mrs. Lennox, Old Birdy Prentis—why, everyone is here.”

  “My dear Antonia,” her friend replied. “Of course they are. Savannah has come to wash the soiled dove.”

  * * *

  A beaming Father John greeted the wedding party while Nehemiah clamped the squalling child’s arm. Young Master Philippe gasped but stopped howling.

  His cousin’s widow, Osa, offered Pierre a tentative smile, but Pierre’s eyes couldn’t leave his bride. He bowed to kiss her small hand, and his besotted eyes met Solange’s amused ones.

  Solange said, “Shall we go inside?”

  The wedding party was followed by Savannah’s young mayor, William Thorne Williams, the Havershams, and other dignitaries, who demonstrated by insistent chatter that neither the occasion nor St. John the Baptist was more important than they. After those they privately called “the nobs” made their entrance, the O’Haras took the three back pews.

  * * *

  Osa performed her modest duties creditably while her son rattled the pew door, which Nehemiah had providentially locked.

  Mrs. Haversham murmured to Mrs. Sevier, “That boy is more savage than his mother.”

  Mrs. Sevier whispered, “He is uncommonly beautiful in repose.”

  “Which is when?”

  Holy matrimony proceeded to its customary destination, and Pierre Robillard kissed his bride with enthusiasm that might have fetched applause in a less formal setting.

  Pierre held Solange’s arm as if his bride were life itself, and the couple led the procession into a fine morning and wedded bliss.

  When the party appeared, coachmen quit gossiping and hurried to their Masters’ conveyances.