The carriage rides easier without the constant racket of the plank road.
“Yes, ma’am.” His hand is back in his pocket, toying with the charm. “I’m very lucky to have a broad acquaintance.”
“How do you know so many people?”
“Through Mr. Eli’s influence, ma’am. I worked with him to organize the freedmen back in ’66 and ’67. To organize the Union League through the whole county. And then I was a registrar of elections in ’68. I met many people in our community that way.”
“That’s very fortunate for you.” I remember, of course. Eli seemed to go out of his way to disgust my old friends and my family. Mama was scandalized when Eli made the Union League in Albion. Organizing the freed slaves to vote for the Radical Republicans. Organizing them as if they were some sort of secret army. I felt like I couldn’t go out of the house.
My veil feels hot. Tall pines rise up on all sides. Their scent is spicy and earthy and sweet.
“Yes, ma’am,” Simon replies. “There is good fortune in it.”
“What does a registrar do?”
“A registrar? He stands there with another man on voting day to make sure all the men voting are who they say they are. To make sure nobody votes twice. And that no dead men vote, either.” Simon turns his head halfway to me and smiles.
“Dead men vote?”
“It is a highly unusual occurrence, but it has been known to happen.” He turns forward and adjusts the round derby he is wearing. They are a new thing, and all the Negro men in the county seem to have bought one.
“Do you still do that?”
“I only had the pleasure a few times. You understand, Miss Gus, there being some hostility to a Negro man serving in such a position.”
“Weren’t you going to run for office, Simon?”
He doesn’t move and does not hesitate to reply. “No, ma’am.”
“No?”
“No, ma’am,” he says again.
He is lying. Was it three years ago? Maybe four?
The November elections were nearing. There had been talk, some kind of talk, from Eli, I guess, or something I overheard when he was downstairs with officers or his Republican friends. He said Simon was going to run for sheriff in the next election.
Then Eli had gone traveling. He did travel. Trips to Nashville and New Orleans and Montgomery and Mobile. The colored men would come in the morning, and Emma would tell them to scat, that Eli wasn’t home and to tell their friends to stay home, too. They would linger for a few minutes, standing by the carriage house talking to John to make sure Emma was telling them the truth. Then they’d drift toward the square or back to their shacks in the North Ward. By noon, they’d be gone.
At night, I’d make Emma check all the doors to make sure they were locked. I was sleeping across the hall then, in the rose room with the ribboned wallpaper. What a relief it was to sleep there when Eli was away. It was autumn, I think, well into it, because my windows were closed and I had a fire that smoldered and gave the room the dry, coarse odor of burnt wood.
I heard men talking, shouting in the lane. It was late, past midnight. From my window, I could see a group of men on horses back by the carriage house. The Knights of the White Cross. I pulled my wrapper tighter. They were wearing dark clothes, like robes, with a cross on the chest and hoods. They shouted at Simon, but I couldn’t understand the words. One of them hit Simon with a truncheon, and another pushed him down and tied his hands. They ripped back his shirt and took turns, one by one, each of them whipping him. They each gave him twenty lashes. They counted every strike out loud. Simon cried out again and again until he lay still, as if he was dead. Except at each stroke of the whip, his body would jerk like he was electric. They left him there in the dirt and the dark alone. He was still, his back shiny and wet in the moonlight, striped from the whipping. Like in slavery days. It was like any whipping from slavery days. For anything. Mama used to make a man on our place give out the whippings. They said he never did them hard. But this was hard, the way they whipped Simon, and he just lay there still, and Emma ran out to him with a blanket and covered him and helped him up to his room. She stayed with him, I think.
Eli was so angry when he came home. But Simon isn’t lying. He didn’t run for sheriff.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Simon. “I thought you were going to run for office of some kind once. I made a mistake.”
“No, ma’am,” he says to me. “I never ran for any office here.”
“Did you run for office someplace else?”
“I once ran for captain of my company during the war.”
“During the war?” We saw black troops after the war. Drilling by the depot, following the orders of white Yankee officers. But Simon?
“Yes, ma’am,” Simon says, and he looks back at me quickly. “I was in the army, like a lot of folks.”
“You were a Confederate?”
Simon laughs out loud at that. “No, ma’am,” he says through his laughter. “No. I was a volunteer with the twelfth United States Colored Infantry. At your service.”
My face is hot. I wipe the perspiration at my temples. “Did you win your election?”
“No, but it wasn’t a great loss. The captain was killed a few weeks later at Nashville.” He looks back and smiles again.
“My brother was killed at Nashville.”
Simon’s smile vanishes. He looks ahead and then back, somber. “I’m very sorry for it,” he says. The air is still and heavy. The horse has an effort pushing through it. Always back to Hill. I am half sick of these memories.
“Do you vote, Simon?”
He is surprised. He shrugs. “No, ma’am, I haven’t voted in a while.” The horse’s feet thud into the dirt at a trot. “Would you like to vote, Miss Gus?” He turns back. Is he sincere or is he making fun of me?
“Me? Of course not. It’s not my affair. Nor is it yours!”
Simon laughs again. I wipe at the moisture on my cheeks.
“No, ma’am, it is not,” he says, and he gives a laugh with a hard edge to it.
There’s the roar of the engines at the mill, faint but closer. We round a bend, and the mill is in view down a long alley of pines.
Three creeks tumble down the Cumberland foothills to form Three Forks Pond. The pond feeds Three Forks Creek as it meanders through the valley down to the Oosanatee. Fifty or more years ago, the water that flows through Three Forks was captured for a ginhouse and cotton press. When Eli took over the place, the old mill was a burnt wreck. The foundations bear black scars from the war. The rotting sluices were repaired. During the months when I carried Henry, Eli received letters of advice from millwrights in Lowell and Fall River. Yankee factories contributed the machines, great contraptions to spin thread and massive, roaring power looms that bang threaded shuttles back and forth through the warp, inching out miles of cotton cloth. The old shed that housed the cotton press was incorporated into the long brick building. No one in Albion had ever seen such a massive venture, standing lonesome in the woods by the creek.
The roads that meet at the mill come from the little market towns of the area. Cotton is carried, already baled, in wagons that creak down the lanes. Women and children ride on the bales, coming to work at the mill from the villages that bear silly townlike names, Pennyacre, Hayfork, Black’s Cove.
Simon pulls back on the reins suddenly. He squeezes his legs against the horse’s flanks and turns back to me, taking his hat in his hand. “I can’t go into the mill with you, ma’am.”
“No, of course not.”
He looks at me in an earnest way. He holds the hat and reins in one hand and leans the other against the horse’s rump. “I hope you’ll look around for that package. For anything. Maybe you can collect Mr. Eli’s personal effects. I’m sure you want them.”
“I’m sure Judge collected Eli’s things. He is in charge of the estate.”
He nods to me and looks down.
“I will look for it, Simon. Of course I will.
If it exists.”
He looks at me, his lips pressed together, then turns and digs his heels into the horse. The carriage jerks forward. The trees fall away until we’re in the clearing with the massive brick and frame pile of the mill before us. A thick column of black smoke climbs into the sky from the brick stack of the engine house. The machines roar.
The hairs prick up on the back of my neck. I feel that itch again. Near a doorway, leaning on a hitching post with his horse’s reins in his hand, is Buck Heppert, looking thunderous. What is he doing here? The nerve he has to stand there looking at me like I’ve kept him waiting.
A group of women, all white, cluster together outside, snorting snuff from their fingernails and spitting in the dirt. They stare at me as Simon drives up to the single doorway by the hitching post. Down another path into the woods, there is a row of houses—small white-washed shacks, each with a small wooden step at the front door. Children, babies yet, of the white families who work in the mill sit in the dooryards. One sits in a cotton shift but is otherwise naked, her face dirty and smeared, grasping at the straggling weeds that spring from the open space under the cabins. The houses are set up on bricks, and chickens cluck and flutter at the corners, chased under and out of their shelter by a lean dog that looks like he doesn’t even have the strength to make a kill. Our hands had better cabins before the war.
I was here with Buck ten years ago. The ginhouse was a blackened shell, and the old shed and press stood broken and idle. It had a charm to it, as calm as a graveyard next to the pool fed by the whispering creeks. Tall trees waved lazily in the breeze. Buck wanted to show me the spot. He frightened me with stories of how the gin would eat a man’s hand if you weren’t careful. The place had been the Harrisons’ back then. They had moved north to Illinois, leaving their land to the tax collector. Eli had gotten it cheap.
“Mrs. Branson,” Buck says as he approaches the buggy. “How was your trip out?” Simon climbs off his horse, but Buck steps in front of him, offering me his hand. The eyes of the mill women are piercing.
“How do you happen to be here, Mr. Heppert?”
“I am here for you. Now, why are you here?” His tone is dark. His brows crease as he narrows his eyes at me. Dark eyes. I had forgotten how deep.
“I am here looking after the interests my late husband left to my son.”
He raises his eyebrows and takes my arm. What presumption. He is so like his father.
“What do you mean you are here for me?” I ask.
“Pa asked me to meet you here. He’s been occupied, as you might imagine, with Mr. Branson’s affairs.”
How long has it been since I stood next to him? He has stayed away from me. I am glad he has. His face is changed. Lines crease his mouth and eyes. His skin has lost its softness, has grown tough from too much sun and spirits. I have heard about his gambling and running around. The rumors I have listened to, sought out over the years. But it is the same face before me, with his black mustache and his noble nose.
“You followed me here,” I say.
“No, I didn’t, Gus. I took the trails through Pa’s woods. You remember them?”
My face is hot, red, I’m sure, from blushing. “How did your pa know I was coming here?”
“Pa knows everything. You know that.” He barely smiles. It looks more like a grimace. His attempt at humor.
“Have you spoken with the foreman?”
“I told him you’d be along. He didn’t seem too happy about it, but he offered to show us around.”
The door into the mill is a wooden panel with a bolt and lock hanging loose from a metal loop and seems to be one of the few ways in or out of the building.
Simon stays outside in the sunlight, holding the carriage reins. He nods at me as we leave him. Buck and I walk inside, and it is another world, swollen with noise and cotton dust. The roar of the machines pushes everything at a vertiginous rush. The jennies and power looms are arrayed in long rows of tentacled machinery, whirring at a wild pace like thousands of Simon’s whirling lawn mowers. The chaos is dizzying. My veil is dusted with cotton fibers that float like snowflakes in the thick, humid air. The floor is peopled with white women and young boys and girls. A glassed-in office looks out on the mill floor. Two men in shirtsleeves and collars sit at desks piled with ledgers. A thick little man in a vest approaches us with red-faced irritation. He nods as he rubs his hands together.
“Mrs. Branson,” he says with the nasal twang of New England. “Welcome, ma’am. Everyone here at the Three Forks Mill is very sorry for the death of Mr. Branson. If there is anything we can do to help, we’re ready to do it.”
I nod. The racket of the machines makes it difficult to hear, so the little Yankee has raised his voice, which makes his face darken a deeper shade of red.
Some of the children are so small, even Henry’s age, that they stand on the fenders of the spinning jennies, delicately grasping at the bobbins when they are full and replacing them with thin wooden spools. They nimbly tie the thread into place as the new bobbin begins to coil, wrapping itself in the fine thread. The heat is oppressive.
Buck takes my elbow, and I look back to the two men. “Mrs. Branson,” he says. “This is Mr. Hunslow. He is the mill foreman.”
Mr. Hunslow shakes his head at me. “I apologize, Mrs. Branson,” he says. “We met at your husband’s funeral, but it was very quick.” He shakes my hand in long, hearty strokes. “Mr. Heppert here advised me that you were on your way out. Did you want to see the place? It’s yours now, so I’d be happy to show you around.”
“Of course.” I have to yell over the noise. “Thank you, Mr. Hunslow.”
He waves us forward down the long aisles of throstles, spinning with thread and spindles. The women, gaunt-faced, stand back from us in their soiled cotton dresses. They pull their hair up off their necks. Some wear kerchiefs tied over their faces. Already on my black gloves I can see tiny strands of white lint. It floats in the air, almost imperceptible. The children move like sleepwalkers. Sweat beads above my lip and on my forehead. Hunslow’s face has a sheen of moisture on it as he shouts.
“There are two thousand spindles operating here. We employ about fifty people, mostly women and children from the area. Some niggers, too. Back here, this is really where the process begins.”
Through a pair of wide barn doors, we enter an open shed. Wagons are lined up along the outside, and Negro men with large hooks unload the bales, cut them open, and pull out the cotton. It billows like clouds, rushing from the burlap skin onto the brick floor. The cotton is blinding white in the sunlight. Black women gather around the mountain in groups and beat at it with long sticks. They pick over it, pulling out twigs and branches and the blackened dried husks of cotton bolls.
“The cotton is cleaned and batted here, then taken into the carding room,” he continues. The black faces turn to us, impassive, but they keep at their work without pausing. Two white men, overseers, stand in the corner, talking and watching them as they work. They hold thick cudgels.
I pull in my breath, suppressing a cough from the dryness in my chest. Hunslow leads us through wide doors back into the mill, into a different room filled with more machines attended by women. They feed the clean cotton into wide metal mouths. The cotton is pulled in by rollers bristling with metal teeth that chew into it. The women gingerly push it into the metal maws, the tips of their fingers coming perilously close to the teeth of the carding rollers. We move close to them. Their nails are cracked and dirty. The cotton fibers feed out of the other end of the machine in thick braids, winding themselves into tall cans.
“The carded cotton is fed into the drawing cans and then goes into the spinning room, where it’s spun into thread. The threads are rolled onto bobbins, and the bobbins are loaded onto our power looms. We have sixty of them, and when we’re running at full speed, we can produce hundreds of yards of cotton cloth a day.” Beyond the carders are the great power looms, where more women stand monitoring and managing the machines.
The warp threads rise and fall in an alternating cadence, and the shuttles fly back and forth with a bang, merging the weft through the web of threads. Cloth inches its way from the mouth of the machine as it is rolled onto bolts.
“It’s quite a system, don’t you think, Mr. Heppert?” Hunslow turns to Buck. We walk between the dead-eyed women, who stand reaching their thin hands out to the threads on the machines. The relentless roar is deafening.
“Yes, Mr. Hunslow,” Buck shouts back. “Very impressive.”
“As fine as any factory we have back in Rhode Island, I can assure you of that. I made sure of it myself. That’s why Mr. Branson brought me down here.” He nods with obvious pride, and the tiny blood vessels across his nose and cheeks stand out.
“Very ingenious, Mr. Hunslow,” I shout, looking back across the mill floor as we enter the glass-enclosed office. Mr. Hunslow shuts the door, and a hush surrounds us. The noise of the mill is muffled and we are in a silent paradise. The two men in the counting room stand up at their desks and nod solemnly to me as Hunslow introduces them. We stand awkwardly together, the three of us, with the accountants watching. Hunslow huffs and shrugs.
“Will there be anything else, Mr. Heppert?” he asks.
Buck extends his hand. “Thank you, Hunslow. That was very informative.” They both turn to me. The bullet-headed Yankee offers me his hand. I will not reach out to him.
“There is something more, Mr. Hunslow.” The accountants have beady, probing eyes. Buck stands over me.
“Yes, ma’am,” Hunslow says, puffing out his cheeks so the red lines stand out like rivers on a map.
“I appreciate your survey of the operations here. But I also came to collect my husband’s possessions. Whatever he may have here. And to see if there are any packages. I was expecting a parcel of books from Mobile. Macaria and St. Elmo.”
“Of course, Mrs. Branson. I have left everything just as Mr. Branson left it. Come into his office. Everything is just as he left it.”
Hunslow shrugs nervously and motions to a door behind the accountants’ desks. Buck steps aside to let me pass. His eyes bore into me. I will not look at him. Hunslow opens the door. The air feels cooler inside. The light is dim and Hunslow throws back the heavy curtains, stirring the dust off them.
The Rebel Wife Page 12