“Pa wants to talk to you.” His eyes are steady and hard.
“He does? About what?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t seem happy that you were taking Eli’s things from the mill.”
“They’re my things, aren’t they?” I should not have said that. That is no way to win Buck.
“Pa says if he’s in charge of the estate, they’re his papers. He wants you to bring them to him.”
“You heard Mr. Hunslow. He said he didn’t need the papers.” My wrists feel hot and damp.
“I don’t remember hearing any such thing, and I’m not going to argue with you. That’s what Pa says. I recommend you gather them up and take them to him today.”
“To him? He won’t come to me? I’m in mourning.”
“You went to that mill without worrying about your mourning. That’s what Pa thinks.”
The clock ticking is so loud. It counts on and on each silent second that sits between us. Buck won’t take his eyes off me.
“Yes, of course, I’ll take them to him. Whatever he wishes. I didn’t mean any harm by it.”
“Really?” One corner of Buck’s mouth curls up in mockery. “What did you mean by it?”
“Why, I didn’t mean anything. It just occurred to me that I’d like to have Eli’s things. His possessions. And then Hunslow gave me all those papers, and after making such a fuss over it, I could hardly say I didn’t want the things. I mean, I can’t say that I have the slightest idea what all Eli’s scribbling meant anyway. I haven’t even bothered to look at them. I’ll take them to Judge today.”
Buck looks at the floor between his knees and breathes out. He looks at me again. His eyes have darkened. “What have these years done to you?” he asks. “Did Eli turn you into a Yankee? Is it all about money?”
“What have they done to me? What have they done to you? How can you ask me that? I’ve been through the same thing you and everyone else in Albion has been through. Forgive me if I have borne it better than you.” He knows what I have been through.
“You haven’t been through the same thing. You’ve been in this house, safe and protected, with everything you want given to you. That’s not anything like what the rest of us have been through. You didn’t have the Yankees watching every move you made, listening in on everything you say, following you everywhere you go like you’re a criminal. That’s how they treated Pa. Like a criminal. And me, too. You were friends with them. You had them over for supper. Did Eli have the niggers sit at the table with you, too?”
“No, he did not.”
“Well, that surprises me.” His face is dead. Motionless. He watches me without expression, with that hardness underneath. “He did everything else for them. He used them to get back at us. He told them to vote and showed them how, right down to putting the ballots in the box himself.”
“My Lord, can anyone talk about anything but the Negroes for longer than ten minutes at a time? You’d think we were fighting them during the war.”
“They’re not better than us, Gus.”
His face is turning red. I can’t help but look at his face. There is such ugliness under there. What I thought was sadness has turned into ugliness.
“I don’t think it would be very hard to be better than us,” I say.
He stands up, his voice rising. “That’s Eli talking again. You really have taken up the mantle, haven’t you? You should understand right now that we aren’t going to be humiliated by them. We aren’t going to be humiliated ever again.”
“Buck, please sit down. You sound like your father.”
He freezes. His fists clench. His eyes seem to bulge out at me.
“I’m sorry, Buck. I didn’t mean it like that. I understand things have been harder for other people. I know Judge is right. Judge is right.”
“Gus,” he says, and it sounds like he’s spitting at me. “I didn’t watch men die for this. My friends. Hill didn’t die for this.”
“I know Hill didn’t die for this.”
What did Hill die for? What did any of them die for?
“Every battle could have been my last. Every one of them. Your first one is the only time you’re not scared. You hear the bullets whizzing past your head so close you think they’re hornets. A swarm of them all around you. You don’t imagine you’ll ever get hit the first time. But then after, you look around and see all the dead. Your friends. Men you’ve known your whole life, dead and staring in smoldering woods or in a pool of mud and blood. After that, you know that at any moment you could be the one staring at nothing. Cold and dead and left behind unburied like carrion. Every battle after that is like death staring at you in the face, waiting to take you. I didn’t live through that for this. I don’t know how or why I lived through it, but I know it wasn’t for Eli and the Republicans and scalawags to do what they’ve done.” He exhales. He seems calmer now. He unclenches his fists. He picks up his hat from the chair. He looks down at the rug.
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. I lost control of myself.” He is sad Buck again. The rage is buried and he is ashamed.
“You didn’t upset me. It’s been nice visiting with you.”
I won’t get up. He can walk himself out.
“Yes. Thank you.” He makes a small bow to me but will not look in my eyes.
“Please let your pa know I’ll be by shortly.” He cannot deny to me that he is going directly to Judge.
He scowls and doesn’t answer. He stalks out of the parlor and into the hall, swinging the heavy door wide. His footsteps tap on the brick walk. He has left the door open. That is his last word. He’ll go tell Judge I’m a Republican and a Negro lover and God knows what else. You can’t see straight with that kind of anger inside you. Judge doesn’t seem as angry as Buck. But Judge didn’t fight in the war. He just talked about the fighting. Buck and Hill and all the rest of them actually did it. Only Buck came back. It doesn’t seem fair. Buck can’t see the fairness of it, either. Mama kept asking him for a lock of Hill’s hair like it was the only thing that mattered.
The door latch clicks. It is Simon in the hall. He has closed the front door. “Miss Gus?” he asks.
“Hello, Simon. You move as quietly as Emma.” He smiles a little. “Were you nearby?”
“Yes, ma’am. I was in the dining room, helping Emma with the silver.”
“Did you hear?”
“No, ma’am. I just wanted to be nearby.”
“Oh. Thank you for that.” He is so calm and grave always. But he has a sense of humor. He likes irony. I can appreciate that. “Thank you, Simon.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Yes, we have to go to Judge. He wants the papers I took from the mill. Buck sent him here to ask me. He asked specifically that I bring them to his office.”
Simon’s eyebrows lift. He doesn’t smile. There is nothing to smile about. Quite the opposite. “Did Buck Heppert say why?” He rests a hand on the door frame.
“No, Buck pretends to be ignorant of his father’s reasons, only the instrument of his will. Would Judge know about the packets Eli would prepare for his friends?”
“He might have been aware that Eli would be preparing something. He was aware that politics requires a lot of lubrication. He and Eli both knew that. If he knows of this package, it is because someone told him.”
“Someone from the mill?”
“Perhaps.”
“We should go. Judge will be angry enough without me keeping him waiting.”
Simon nods and steps back. He will get the carriage ready, and I must rebutton my sleeves.
“Simon, you will stay nearby, won’t you?”
He turns back to me, ever grave. Simon the snake killer. “I will stay as close as I can, ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
Fourteen
JUDGE WAS NEVER A real judge. Not one appointed by the governor or who rode a circuit. Mama said when he was young, his pa said he was as serious as a judge. So everyone calls him that.
Simon drives the buggy around the square. The courthouse sits across from Judge’s office and dominates a space of lawn shaded by oaks and magnolias and bordered by a picket fence—the wrought iron was torn up in ’63 and fed to the foundries in Selma. The fence frames the courthouse, lined on its front and rear with eight Doric columns and topped by a green copper dome. A weather vane with a brass rooster sits at the top of the dome. It is still, facing northeast, and glistens in the sun.
Judge read law in Huntsville when he was young, about the time Pa was courting Mama. He opened his practice right on Albion’s town square before I was born. The three-story brick building sits on a lot his father had purchased well before Albion was anything but grid lines on parchment. His practice has been in that same office for almost forty years.
The streets around the courthouse are lined with brick buildings, two or three stories with simple facades, some more ornate with rusticated stonework. They line up like militiamen waiting for orders. The massive brick pile of the Maples Hotel sits in their midst like their captain, surveying the square, dressed with ironwork balconies over the wide entrance.
The square is so quiet. Before the war, the hotel and square bustled with activity. Teamsters and merchants moved back and forth along Alabama Avenue from the riverfront up to the railroad depot and the Cotton Exchange. On market days, there is a hint of the old activity. Bales of cotton piled onto wagons. Men, black and white, flocking the sidewalks and gathering outside the taverns, talking cotton and weather and politics. Today there is only an odd dray with a cursing teamster making his way from the river to the railroad with no sense of rush. The hot air slows the few men who walk between the bank and the courthouse or the remaining merchants and factors who bother keeping their offices here. They watch the man with his wagon from their second-floor windows, waving tired hands at lazy flies and listening to the echo of the horse’s clip-clop bounce from building to building. There are so many empty storefronts. Broken windows gape at the street. Some are boarded over, with for rent painted across the warped, weathered wood.
On the far side of the square is the burnt-out hulk of the old Union League. The building was put up for the Albion Agricultural and Mechanical Society, some long-dead organization Pa had been a part of. After the war, Eli used it for his Union League meetings. The league was not exactly a political party, not that I ever gathered, but it acted like one, organizing all the freedmen in the county to vote. Who else would they vote for but the Republicans? Back then Judge couldn’t vote. Nor could Buck nor Mike, even. All the black men in the county did, and they had marches around the courthouse and up to the depot. Canvassers for state office would come and step off the trains, groups of men, white and black all mixed together, wearing suits and beaver hats, talking about the responsibilities of freedom. Eli took me to some of the speeches until I insisted on indispositions. It was almost enough to make you laugh, seeing master for slave and slave for master. That all went on until the Knights began harassing them, even in broad daylight. There were many Negro men dead from it. I don’t know how many. Probably no one knows, except maybe the Negroes themselves. I wonder whether Rachel would know if I asked her.
The building caught fire a few years ago. They never found out the cause. No one really tried to find it out. People whispered that the Knights had set the fire. The blaze could have taken down the whole town. There were guns and gunpowder in there, secreted away, that blew up with a terrible noise, shattering windows along the square and rattling people out of their sleep as far north as Black’s Cove. The whole block bears the charred scars of that night, piles of blackened rubble and rock.
Eli seemed tired after that. He stayed in his office more, and out at the mill. He seemed to have thrown up his hands and given up on voting and politics. The Union League didn’t disband, it just blew away like smoke.
Simon pulls the buggy up to the curb and helps me down. “I’ll be near,” he says in a low voice.
I take the bundle of papers under one arm. Narrow stairs lead up to Judge’s office. They are high risers. They make me dizzy even with a hand on the banister. On the second floor an antechamber is divided by a baluster that protects his office door. There is a colored boy asleep by the back windows, one arm hanging off the bench, his fingers nearly grazing the floor. I wait, holding my hat and veil in one hand and the papers against my hip. I bite my lip and knock lightly at the door.
Papers rustle, and Judge’s gruff voice calls out, “Come in.”
The heavy door creaks as it opens. “Judge, I’m so sorry to bother you,” I begin. He sits at a wide desk of dark mahogany and glowers at me over the papers spread out before him, his blue eyes like ice freezing me.
“Come in, Augusta. I’ve been waiting for you.” He waves me to one of the empty chairs in front of him, and I sit obediently. That is Judge. With a wave of his hand, you are rendered speechless. He scribbles on a sheet of paper, dipping his pen into a turtle-shell inkwell as he refers to other sheets scattered across his desk. The windows are open and catch a weak breeze that lifts the corners of the papers. The creak of a wagon passes near. It is coming up from the river, moving toward the depot. I can see the crumbling brick of the old Union League hall, like the engravings of Richmond after Grant burnt it.
Judge lays down his pen and looks at me with thinly disguised irritation. He crosses his white and wrinkled hands on the desk and clears his throat. “How was your visit to the mill?” he asks.
“It was fine,” I say, smiling. “Very fine, thank you. It’s quite an enterprise.”
“I sent Buck to join you. I thought it would be best. No need for you to expose yourself traveling alone all over the county with a nigger coachman.” His mouth curls down, and anger burns from his pale blue eyes. I open my mouth to speak, to defend myself, but there are no words. To argue such a vulgar suggestion would be to give merit to it. To suggest that Buck would somehow be a chaperone for me and Simon makes me shudder.
“No matter. It is all nothing. You spoke to Hunslow, didn’t you? I guessed you would. And was he clear on the situation at the mill? Are those the papers you took?”
“Yes, Buck said you wanted them, so I brought them right away.” I heft the papers from my lap and lay them on a bare corner of Judge’s desk. “They aren’t of any use to me, but Hunslow insisted.”
He grunts and nods, looking at the papers. “So I gather. Is that all of them?”
“Yes, everything. I just wanted Eli’s personal things, but there didn’t seem to be much there. Only an engraving and some candlesticks.”
Judge stares at me. He is digesting what I say, evaluating it coldly. He looks at the ledger in front of him and taps it with his pen. “I’m going through the books now. Just the past six months. To be honest, there are some very serious irregularities in them.”
The office feels so hot. My palms are wet in my black gloves. I wait, seeing no purpose to further talking. Judge will have his say. He picks up his pen and leans forward, poking at the figures, talking more to himself than to me.
“Purchases of raw cotton. Dozens of bales of it each week. Thousands of pounds of it. It shouldn’t be more than ten or twelve cents a pound, but the mill purchased it at fifteen cents a pound. How do you like that? Fifteen cents. Like it was Sea Island cotton! Some of it for as much as seventeen and eighteen cents.”
His face turns pink. He is shaking his head at the paper, furiously stabbing at it. “I asked Hunslow about the purchase, and do you know what he told me? He told me Eli did all the purchasing and kept all the records. Kept pretty tight control of it. Now, what do you think of that, Augusta?”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Judge. I was never very interested in Eli’s affairs. He was so busy all the time.”
“I’ll tell you what to think of it,” Judge resumes impatiently. “The mill has been having trouble turning a profit because the cotton Eli was buying was so expensive. I’m going to go out to some of these farmers, and I’m going to ask them how
much they were paid for their cotton, and I will wager you that they were paid no more than eight cents a pound!” Judge slams the pen down on the desk so hard it rattles the tortoise shell. “Eight cents a pound!” he shouts, and I lean against the back of the chair. “Eli has been robbing the mill!” His face is fiery red and his eyes are wide, bulging at me.
“Judge, that’s impossible,” I say. I must say something. “How could Eli rob the mill if he owned it? Why would he?”
Judge turns quickly back to ice. “Because,” he says, staring down at me. “Those precious dividends you are so interested in did not go exclusively to Eli. There are other investors in the mill.”
“I see. Are you an investor?”
His mouth creases in a disgusted frown. “That is neither here nor there,” he hisses at me. He has the glassy gaze of a reptile.
“That is all over, isn’t it? Eli is dead. Can’t the mill become profitable quickly? That’s what you said. That’s what Mr. Hunslow said. So a dividend could be paid in July?”
“There will be no dividends paid from the mill. Not until it becomes clear how much Eli Branson stole and it is paid back to the other shareholders in full. If those are your future dividends, so be it. You won’t see a penny from that mill until the money is repaid.”
“That’s not fair! I didn’t steal the money!”
“You should thank me. If this wound up in court, you’d be lucky to end up with the clothes on your back. It is high time you fall back on your own resources.” He sits rigidly, watching me.
“My own resources? I don’t have anything. You said you would handle it all.”
“That was before you began meddling in my business. What did you want with all these papers?”
“I didn’t want anything. I don’t know why Hunslow gave them to me.”
He waits, his eyes on me. “Augusta, you are my blood kin. I had a great fondness for your mother, and the things I am doing for you, I know she would want me to do. But don’t test me. You stay out of this business. And don’t go meddling into anything on behalf of the Negroes, either. Do you understand?” He points the pen at me.
The Rebel Wife Page 16