The Rebel Wife

by Polites, Taylor M

  Nine

  HENRY AND JOHN ARE playing marbles in the shade of the arbor. The boys share them, taking turns aiming them and flicking them with their fingers into a ring drawn in the dirt. The faint click of glass is just audible, except when the servants have raised their voices. They are in the kitchen with the window open. John and Rachel are arguing. Emma is there, too, but she doesn’t speak.

  They are arguing about Eli’s will. He was generous with the servants. Their wages were more than generous. He gave them gifts at Christmas and on Emancipation Day. He even asked Rachel and John to live with us in two rooms next to Simon’s in the carriage house. They declined. Because of Rachel, I always thought. She holds the reins in that marriage. They prefer to live in that awful back slum north of the depot. Lord knows why. I guess Kansas would be better than living over there.

  “It ain’t his money to hold on to. It’s ours. What’s he doing with it, anyway?” Rachel asks. Her voice is sharp. Maybe they won’t be leaving for Kansas so soon after all. A dull pounding comes after her words. The thud is repeated again and again. Emma must be making biscuits, pounding the dough with her wooden rolling pin.

  “That ain’t none of your business, woman,” John says in a high voice. “That’s Mr. Heppert’s business, and the more you argue back at him, the more time he’s going to take.”

  “He ain’t my master. He sure acts like it, though, doesn’t he, Emma? Telling lies about Mr. Eli like that. He didn’t steal from the Freedman’s Bank. More likely Judge Heppert did.”

  “How do you know that? How do you know what Mr. Eli did or didn’t do? Is that what Simon told you?” Emma keeps pounding at the dough like the beats on a metronome. Thud. Thud. Thud. A slow waltz.

  “I don’t have to listen to Simon to know what Mr. Eli did. Though he’s got more sense than you when it comes to Mr. Eli. You talk like that old billy goat.”

  “I saw the way he looked at you, Rachel. Don’t try to fool me. There’s something going on. You tell me what’s going on.” Their voices are higher. Almost shouting. Emma pounds the dough faster, and the strikes sound like the smack of a hand.

  “There ain’t nothing going on, fool. You just sit around here all day making things up. I think you need more work to do. I’ve had enough of your fooling around.”

  “Don’t you walk away from me, woman! You answer me.”

  “John, if you were a husband to me, you would have gone and got that money from Judge Heppert, and we’d be long gone from here. Mr. Eli would have gone and got the money. He would have gone straight down to that office and looked that old man in the eye and said, ‘Give me my money.’ All you do is sit here talking like a fool.”

  “If you’re so worried about money, why don’t you go after Miss Gus for our wages? We haven’t seen a penny since Mr. Eli died.”

  The door creaks on its hinges and slams shut. It creaks again. They must be coming outside.

  “That’s what I thought,” John shouts. “This ain’t over, woman.”

  I walk to the other end of the porch, watching Henry and Little John.

  Rachel comes out from behind the kitchen, headed toward the boys. Big John follows just behind her but walks down the gravel drive past the apple trees to the carriage house. His shoulders are hunched forward, fists clenched. He hurries, almost running.

  “Little John, what are you doing over there?” Rachel calls out to her son. Henry looks at me, and she follows his gaze. I do not look at her. Her eyes narrow, and she watches me as she walks. I have to get away. I can’t take her stare. I turn my back on her and rush into the house. Emma is still in the kitchen, beating the biscuits.

  The grip Mike held on my arm has made a bruise. The pressure of his fingers is marked in four short, pale lines. I’ve looked in every book and ledger in Eli’s office, but no money. I don’t know why I thought I would find anything in the first place. Only entries in long columns and manuals on agriculture and mechanics. Why even bother opening the drawers. Mike has already pilfered what he can.

  I understood his meaning, as twisted as it is. The war destroyed everything. It is not Eli’s fault. The land would have been gone if Eli hadn’t saved it. And still Mike comes around, scavenging for money.

  When Mike left home, it was after Atlanta fell and the Confederate army under Hood was limping its way to Nashville for a last desperate stand. He left a note for Mama that he was gone to join Buck and Hill—that he was old enough to fight. He was only fifteen, but he had always been spirited, almost wild. He would pick fights with boys bigger than him or whip the servants as if he were master of the house. Mama couldn’t control him.

  Mike never made it to Hood’s army. He said that he found General Roddy down south in Coosa County. He bragged about how they harassed the Union rear guard, disrupting supply lines that stretched back to Nashville. His stories overlap and contradict each other. By the time he staggered back home late in ’66, he said he had been to Texas and back. Fighting Indians and keeping civil order. He found Mama alone, living off of Eli. The land was gone, confiscated for taxes and debts. The Confederate bonds Mama had bought at Judge’s insistence were worthless, no good even for lining your shoes. All of it was gone. But I had married Eli by then.

  That was about the time Eli started to buy land. He had already taken land for the unpaid loans of my family’s friends. He began to broker deals for cheap land with newly arrived Yankee officers or their carpetbagger friends—Eli’s friends. He bought land through the Freedmen’s Bureau. As its head in Riverbend County, he was responsible for what they called “abandoned” lands. He said he bought the Sedlaw and Wardwell lands for me. For the children we would have. So they are Henry’s now. As they should be. Henry is the only living heir of our next generation. Henry Blackwood Sedlaw Branson. Henry’s name was one thing Eli and I agreed on. All the lands will be his if Eli hasn’t lost them for him.

  Simon wants to go to the mill, and Mike says there is money there that is mine for the asking. Buck told him so. Maybe that’s true. Can I go to the mill and ask for it? It is my money, isn’t it? Whatever Mike and Buck talked about, Buck had some idea from his father about the mill’s profits. Mike knows more from Judge than I do. I am left alone in the house, ignored as if I am irrelevant, disregarded. Even the servants seem to have no respect for me.

  Emma and Rachel avoid me. Emma stays in the kitchen and Rachel has suddenly become emphatic about the laundry. She stays behind the carriage house with John and the boys, mixing soap and pearlash in pots of boiling water. I catch her and Emma together, the two of them whispering, Rachel’s arms bundled with our family linen. Am I a wraith to them, a haunt who shadows them and whom they evade? Am I like the shade of Eli who stalks my steps through the rooms of the house?

  This heat increases every day. I wake up sweating and go to sleep sweating. Henry is cranky. He cannot sleep well. He cries and asks for his papa so that I can barely keep myself from slapping him. If only I had the money, I could be gone from here. There is money at the mill. And it is my money. How dare Eli have entailed everything on Henry? What does that leave for me? I will go to the mill. It is very simple. I will go to the mill and demand my money from them. Judge be damned.

  Emma and Rachel’s muffled voices carry through the door of the china closet that makes a passage from the dining room to the kitchen. Rachel is whispering furiously about something. I open the kitchen door and step onto the brick pavers. Emma stands at the sink, and Rachel is beside her. Emma has been pumping water, and it scatters in fitful sprays from the red mouth of the pump. Her back is to me, and she extends her hand as if she is pushing Rachel away. They look at me in surprise, their mouths open. Emma clenches her fist quickly and puts it in the pocket of her apron. Rachel rushes to the open door to the yard. Emma and I are left alone.

  “Emma, what did I interrupt?” I ask. The kitchen is hotter than anywhere else in the house. Hotter than outside.

  “Nothing, ma’am.” She turns back to the pump and begins worki
ng it until the water gurgles and sprays over the joint of meat in the sink.

  “Emma, what’s in your pocket?” I am not one to demand absolute obedience from servants, not like Mama, whose fits of temper were born of seemingly silly infractions, crumbs on the floor, a window left open, the sheets not ironed quite right. I see a flexion in Emma’s shoulders, a tense shrug that immediately relaxes. Perhaps she hears Mama’s voice in me. She turns and looks at me, reluctant yet obedient. She slips her hand in her pocket and keeps it there, fingering something small with mass to it.

  “It’s nothing, ma’am,” she says without conviction. “It’s really nothing at all. Just some silly idea Rachel has in her head.”

  I step closer, my eyes on her pocket. Perhaps it is something I would be happier not to see. “Show it to me.”

  She draws her hand out of her pocket slowly. It looks like a small piece of wadding, like the rough woven material used for cotton sacking. It is tied into a tiny bundle with a piece of twine. Emma closes her hand over it, and she gives a small frown. “It’s just a thing Rachel made. A charm.” She puts it back in her pocket.

  “A charm? For what?”

  “To ward off sickness,” Emma says, and she exhales through her nose.

  Rachel fancies herself a conjure woman. Rachel’s mother was a famous midwife in Albion and attended the births of hundreds of babies before the war. While the doctors saw their patients die from childbed fever, old Sarah’s mothers always seemed to survive the ordeal. Her reputation was so high that white women would ask for her specifically to wait on them at their lying-in. Rachel has that reputation, too, claiming she learned things from her mother and the wise women of the slave quarters. Emma and Rachel were in the room during Henry’s delivery in spite of Dr. Greer’s grumblings.

  Emma slides the small burlap purse into her pocket. I want to grab it from her, touch it, open it up, and see what it is made of. I want to throw it away.

  “I don’t believe it none,” she says quickly. “But you know how Rachel is.”

  “What sickness, Emma?” My fingers go cold and start to tingle.

  “Any kind of sickness, Miss Gus. It’s not meant for anything special.” Emma rubs her hands against her skirts and looks away from me toward the sink. “I should get this roasting.” The heat off the stove is intense. The air refuses to move through the open door and window.

  “I don’t believe that.” The sound of buzzing cicadas comes through the garden door in a rhythmic, endless chant. “It’s because of Eli.”

  “Rachel’s just scared. That’s all. She’s got a little boy, and you know how she can be. She’s worked up, and she’s doing what she does to feel better about it.”

  “I have a boy, too.”

  “I know. I know.” She speaks almost tenderly, as if she wants to reassure me.

  “What is the charm?”

  Emma shifts uncomfortably and breathes out through her nose again.

  “Tell me, Emma,” I say. “What’s in it?”

  “Ma’am,” she says slowly. My hands make fists. “It’s chicken blood. And some rattlesnake bones. And some dirt from the graveyard.” Emma stops short. I must have cringed.

  “From Eli’s grave?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Emma answers.

  “What else?”

  “And some of Mr. Eli’s hair Rachel clipped.”

  The sweet, ripe odor of blood and rot from Eli’s deathbed rises in my throat.

  “How did she get it?” I ask softly.

  “She trimmed up his hair and whiskers. Before he was buried. I asked her to because Mr. Weems made such a mess of it. She held on to the clippings, I guess.” I am too confused to be angry. Too confused and frightened. What is all this? What else are they keeping from me?

  “Have there been other people sick like Eli?” I avoid her eyes.

  “Not that I know about. Rachel thinks there is, but she doesn’t know anything at all.” Emma catches me with a sad glance.

  “What has Rachel heard?”

  “Rumors from the hands on Mr. Eli’s place. John’s cousin has a farm up toward Pennyton, past Three Forks. She says there are sick folks there, but she doesn’t say how, and Rachel gets her mind all worked up.” Emma’s hand moves back into her pocket. “I’ll talk to Rachel and tell her she has to give all the clippings to you. She was wrong to do that.”

  “No, don’t say anything. I don’t want you to say anything to her. I just wanted...” What did I come here for, after all? “I wanted you to see if Simon could take me out to Three Forks. Have John bring the carriage around. The gig. With the hood up.”

  Her hand stays in her pocket, playing with the charm, as I leave the kitchen.

  Ten

  THE RED CLAY BLUFFS rise in high banks along the river like a cup filled with muddy water. Everything is darkened by the thin net of my veil, so that even the sunlight seems gray. The river runs below us, sluggish and black. The hood is pulled as low as it will go. Simon sits on the horse in its harness, guiding her. He bounces in the saddle but handles the horse with ease. There is no box for him to sit on, so he must ride the horse. We are both more comfortable this way.

  Simon slows us as we bounce from the dirt track onto the Chattanooga Pike. The iron-rimmed wheels clatter on the uneven boards, jostling me. The road is not much better than the half-timber corduroy the armies threw down as they moved across the county during the war. Simon salutes the passing Negroes, who jounce in the back of buckboards or stand idle at the edges of fields of parched red earth, half green with struggling cotton plants.

  Simon has a charm from Rachel. I think it is, at least. A small burlap purse like Emma had. He carries it in his jacket pocket and reaches a hand in to touch it. Simon is coal black—pure, dark African. But he has a prominent nose, high-ridged. He must have Indian blood, too. Eli never said where he came from. Certainly not from Albion. I would have recognized him. Maybe from the county or somewhere downriver. He doesn’t have the Gullah accent of Negroes from low-country South Carolina or speak the Geechee from Georgia. And he is too dark to come from the Mississippi Delta.

  Many Negroes in the area, many of the freed slaves in the county, if they were not brought here overland from Georgia or South Carolina, came upriver from New Orleans. The steamboats would ply the Mississippi and the Ohio, then down the Tennessee as it curves backward and scoops into Alabama. In the spring, when the rains fill the rivers, a boat with a shallow draft could make it past Triana to the mouth of the Oosanatee and all the way to Albion.

  Simon takes his hand out of his pocket to hold the reins. He pulls back and the buggy jolts to a stop. A wagonload of Negroes rolls toward us. There are a half dozen of them, dressed poorly in overalls and torn and dirty dungarees, in the back of the wagon driven by an old white mountaineer. The white man is grizzled, with red-rimmed eyes, and he spits his tobacco through a wide gap between his brown teeth.

  One of the hands in the back of the cart calls out, “Howdy, Simon.” He is dark, too.

  Simon nods and smiles. “Howdy, Jesse. Where are you all headed?” His accent sings, not the laughing, bumptious accent of the local Negroes. It is more liquid, with a solemnity that makes him seem grave, as if he is singing a very sad psalm. He is so much more dignified than Eli was. Eli was like one of the dirt farmers who scratch out a living at the edge of the mountains. Simon must come from a different caste.

  “We’re going down to Judge Heppert’s place over on the other side of Hayfork. We’ve got to give him his days.” The other men in the wagon nod agreement, waving to Simon in recognition as they roll by.

  “How many days does he take from you?” Simon calls to them.

  “Forty days in the season. I barely have enough time to tend my own patch,” Jesse calls back. “Shame Mr. Eli ain’t around to make my contract!”

  Simon nods, and another man calls to him. “When you heading off to Kansas? Any room in your wagon?” The man is dark. He slouches, his legs hanging off the back of the wagon. />
  “Not yet,” Simon calls back. “Not yet.”

  Buzzing like cicadas vibrates in my ears. Did I hear that man right? The motion of the carriage makes me dizzy and sick. We are turning onto the cowpath that leads to the mill. The lane is covered with a thick blanket of pine needles. Simon clucks at the horse and we cross the roadway. The wheels don’t clatter anymore. The woods are darker. These trails. I rode them with Buck a long time ago. The sunlight falls in shafts between the thick pines and dapples the brambles.

  “Simon, are you going to Kansas?” I ask.

  “Eventually, ma’am. Yes.” He moves gently in time with the easy pace of the horse.

  “Are you going with Rachel and John?”

  He turns to look at me. “Did they tell you?”

  “Yes, Rachel came to me and said they are leaving. Is everyone leaving? Is Emma going?”

  He laughs and turns forward. His wide shoulders shrug. “No, ma’am. Emma has no plans to leave.”

  “Why are you going? To be a farmer?”

  “I might. This time I’m going to help people get settled on homesteads. I’ll come back and let folks here know how things stand up there, and then maybe there’ll be another group of folks interested in going, too.”

  “Colored people?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Colored people.”

  “Do they all want to leave so bad?”

  “Some do. Most want to know there’s a real chance for something better before they go. That is what I’m going to find out for them.”

  “Is that what you want the money for?”

  He nods once without looking back. He only half turned his head to speak to me.

  “Was Eli helping colored people go to Kansas?”

  Simon turns his head to me again. His eyes are serious. “No, he was not. I am.” He turns away.

  My gloves make my hands itch. The pines stand tall and dense beside the road, cutting the sunlight into thin slices as we pass.

  “You seem to know everyone. They must trust you.”