Simon has a gun. Unlike most of the colored people. Their weapons were all taken from them. All those colored men who went away to the war. Who died in the fighting. And the rest who came home thinking they had won freedom. They’re not really free, like Rachel said. They have to leave here to be free. Like me. Do I have to leave here? If only we could find that money.
The sliver of moon shines off the barrel with a dull glimmer. I raise the gun and aim as if I am going to fire it. Does Rachel have a gun? Or Big John? How could they? The roads can’t be safe for a group of colored people emigrating west. She could use a gun. She doesn’t seem like a person who would be afraid of firing it. I want to see her once more before she goes. She saved my life when Henry was born, I am sure of it. I should go to her. I cannot leave things as they are. Eli would have been better to her than I have been. I can at least try.
I almost wish I were going with them. Going away from Judge and Greer and Buck. If only I had that money. We could get away for a while—and if the mill weren’t closed, I might never have to come back. But where else could the money be? We should go to the mill again. There must be a way to get into Eli’s office alone.
In my room, the blue bottles look at me like a pair of eyes. Perhaps I should take the gun and shoot them out. I can’t, that would be like shooting myself. No, I could shoot them, and my body would still be whole. If only I could sleep. Just a drop of it in a glass of water. Just one drop to help me sleep. That would not be too much. Just to ease me out of this anxiety.
I won’t. Rachel would not succumb like this. I must be up early to see her. I owe her that. I almost died the day Henry was born. Five years ago. Less—he was born in August, the hottest month of the year. He was early, the doctor said. I was here in this room with the pink-ribboned wallpaper, confined away, and yet there seemed to be so many people around me.
I labored for hours in this bed. Rachel and Emma tied a rope between the posts of the headboard for me to grip when the pains came, and Rachel gave me a slat of smooth wood marked by teeth from other women who had used it. The spasms came hard and went on for hours. A blur of sweat and blood and agony. The bedclothes were soaked, and my nightdress, too, that was pushed up over my knees so that I lay shamelessly exposed before Mama and the servants and Dr. Greer. More than once, he asked Emma and Rachel to leave, but I shook my head in panic, wild with pain and exhaustion and, more than anything else, fear. I was sure that I was dying.
The room was hot. The windows were shut tight, and candles guttered in the steamy atmosphere, thick with the stench of sweat and excrement. Mama sat by the bed, worrying herself and me with a handkerchief always at her eyes or under her nose. I could smell the choking, putrid scent of the cologne water she had soaked it in. Lemon verbena, an odor that I cannot abide to this day. Mama looked disapprovingly at Rachel and Emma. She clucked her tongue and shook her head and called it silliness. I was afraid. I could not listen to her. I could not allow her to take charge. After I cursed at her to leave Emma alone, she and the doctor resigned themselves to Emma and Rachel’s presence. Emma took cool rags and washed my face down, murmuring to me to keep breathing, that it would be over soon.
I heard Rachel arguing with Dr. Greer. She wanted to give me a cold tea she had made from roots, but he refused and dosed me with tiny grains of calomel that gave me convulsions between the contractions. I began vomiting.
“To hurry the child on,” he said, his red whiskers wagging over my face. I felt hot and suffocated and sick. The light of the room was a blur. It seemed to move against the walls like a magic lantern. I felt dizzy and would have cried if there were tears left in me after the sweating and sickness.
The waves of pain came crashing over me. My muscles flexed. I had no strength to reach for the rope. Emma and Rachel each took a hand and told me to squeeze as hard and as tight as I could. Dr. Greer knelt at the end of the bed, looking between my legs, and I whimpered in shame and suffering. God, the horrible indignity, the shame and awfulness of it. That shame seems so ridiculous now. But the pain, as if each muscle were stretched taut to snapping. I cried out but could not hear myself or feel the sound come out of my throat. The pressure in my belly, the hard flexing pressure, like red-hot hammers beating down on me all at once. Dr. Greer said, “I see the head. He’s coming.” And I thought, My God, it’s a boy. It’s a baby boy. But Greer could not have known then, he could not have seen until minutes later or hours. I could not tell the passage of time, only the screaming pain and those hands over mine. That was all I could tell, just the grip of the black hands in mine as I pushed harder and harder. Not pushing really at all, squeezing, pulsing, and panting out my breath, the desperate desire to expel this thing from my body and to survive. To outlive this moment. To try to forget it like everything else. And then there was quiet. That live stabbing pain was dead, and instead I felt a raw throbbing in its place. I was alive. I looked down at the blood-soaked nightdress and sheets, and Dr. Greer held this small purple animal in his bare hands. He dangled him by one leg.
It was a boy, my God, it was a little boy, and the pale and purple cord ran from his belly back inside of me. Dr. Greer slapped his rump and the baby boy—Henry, named Henry like my father—he let out a wail like a rebel yell. A wild holler that filled the room. I could hear Eli’s feet pacing outside, just outside, excited. I didn’t want to see him. I wanted Henry. To hold him. To see if he was real, if he was truly alive, this screaming red and purple thing, slick and wet and alive. Dr. Greer cut the cord and Henry wailed. Rachel bundled him quickly in cotton blankets and brought him to me. I could have cried again but for my weariness and shock.
Mama leaned in and looked at him. “He’s a screaming thing,” she said. “He’ll get bigger, I suppose. When Hill was born, he was a little giant. He nearly killed me, but what a cry he had.” We both looked up because Rachel and the doctor were arguing again. It was a surprise to me to hear a servant girl argue with a doctor.
Emma sat at my other side and smiled at me and the baby. She held out a finger to him, played with his tiny hand. He grasped her finger, and she looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, Miss Gus, Rachel knows what she’s saying. Her mama birthed more babies than Dr. Greer.”
Dr. Greer didn’t hear, though. He was red-faced like the baby, and Rachel stood in front of him, her arms crossed and her face set hard and determined.
“You ain’t cutting her with that thing,” she said, and she pointed at a scarificator in his hand.
“You nigger fool,” he said furiously. “Get out of the way. If she doesn’t get bled immediately, she could die.” The doctor held a small wooden box in his hand. It had a spring lever that activated a row of tiny razors. When the lever was tripped, the little blades popped up, cutting a row of incisions about an inch long, freeing the blood from an engorged area. Dr. Greer is a committed bleeder, and bleeding the fresh wounds of a new mother after childbirth is a common practice for him. He wanted to place the scarificator between my legs and cut me. He insisted that the birthing forced blood down there, and now it was concentrated and needed to be relieved. Rachel was adamant.
“You stupid girl, get out of here,” Mama said, standing up. “This is none of your affair.” But I shook my head and Emma held my hand.
“No, sir,” Rachel said to Greer, nearly shouting. “Her flux should be packed onto her wounds to make it heal. How many women have you killed with your cutting machine?”
I shook my head again but could not speak. I knew only that I did not want to bleed anymore.
Greer’s face was thunderous. He went to the hall and got Eli. They stood over me, and Eli beamed with pride. He had a son.
Mama stood up and said to him as he approached the bed, “Mr. Branson, my daughter has borne you a little king.” She was smiling and so was Eli, but Greer frowned. He pointed his finger at Rachel and said ugly things. She stood solid and unmoved.
Rachel said, “Ask Miss Gus what she wants.” Greer scoffed at the idea. I could barely think
myself.
Eli looked at me and I shook my head at him, looking into his blue eyes rimmed with pale lashes. Milky eyes, washed out and blurred from that horrible night. I shook my head again and said, “Rachel.” I couldn’t say more, but he understood. He took Greer out into the hall, and they raised their voices at each other until Greer finally left.
Mama stayed with me while Rachel and Emma banded the flux between my legs. Then they left, touching Henry first, playing with his little hands. Rachel whispered over Henry a chant that was like some sort of blessing. And then I was alone with Mama and the baby.
“You two should sleep,” she said after the servants had left the room. “You’ve been through enough.” Mama picked up her knitting that she had in a sewing bag, and she began work on a cap and jacket for the baby in gray yarn. “You’re a mother now, Augusta,” she said, her needles clicking together. “So I feel obligated to tell you, mother to mother, that you should be careful of Emma.” I looked at her weakly, not sure I understood what she was saying.
“Yes. You love Emma. She is a part of our family, but she’s not our blood. Don’t forget that. Ever since she lost her own children, she has been unnaturally fixated on mine.”
I must have looked confused, unsure, because Mama put down her knitting.
“Yes, Augusta, it’s true,” she said. “It was just before you were born. Emma had two babies. Two boys. Twins. I wasn’t going to have some screaming babies in the house upsetting us both, so I had your father send her down to Point Place. They got whooping cough or something and died. Both of them. It was a bad winter for sickness. She came back, and God knows she had enough milk for you and her others, too, if they had lived. Anyway, it’s all in the past. But you should be mindful of it.”
I nodded and turned back to Henry, sleeping quietly, still coated in a slick red wash, so tiny and delicate. The breath came out through his tiny nose. His nostrils flared open with each tiny exhale. I wrapped the blanket tighter around him and pulled him close on my chest, hugging him to me, watching him sleep until I, too, lost consciousness.
Twenty
LIGHT HAS SLOWLY CREPT into my room, thin and gray, so that I can see enough to dress myself. Emma will be up soon and so will Henry. Emma will tend to him while I am gone. The gun and a gold chain are in my pocket. Now Simon must take me to Rachel. I have been so impatient for the sun to rise that I have barely slept these past few hours. I think of nothing but Rachel. I only hope we get there in time.
They will be gathering up in the North Ward, piling their belongings into wagons for the trip to Nashville, where they will join other Negroes who are leaving the South. They will travel by wagon to St. Louis and then across Missouri to Kansas. There have been many colored families who have passed through Albion on their way west. Sometimes riverboats will not accept them, or they will be barred passage at river crossings. There are men like Judge who are nervous about these emigrants. They see the men and women who plow and pick cotton leaving. Without them, who will labor on the land?
Rachel will make her way. She is strong and tough, like my Blackwood grandmother. She will make a better farmer’s wife than she did a servant. I will make up for what I should have said last night.
The air outside is damp and warm. The sun is beginning to crest above the trees. No rain after all. No respite, either. The heat has settled in with the same oppressive force. The traces of mist that hang around the trees have been singed away by the sunlight.
I knock lightly at the outside door of the carriage house.
Emma’s attic window is open. There is no movement inside.
“Simon,” I whisper, loud enough so he will hear. “Simon.” I knock again, and his head emerges from the window, looking down at me. He does not say a word, though his expression is clearly confused, almost stern. He holds his hand out in a sign for me to wait. I hear his feet on the stairs and the door opens. He is still pulling on his suspenders.
“I have to see Rachel,” I whisper. “You must take me to her.”
“Miss Gus, the whole town’s sleeping. What’s so urgent?”
“She’s leaving, Simon. I have to give her something before they go.”
He grimaces and shakes his head but walks to the back of the carriage house and opens the wide doors. He is not happy, but he will take me.
Simon harnessed the horse quickly. We head down the lane toward Tulip Street, where it borders the cemetery. Eli’s grave is beyond the stone wall to the right, by a young oak. There is still no marker. Mr. Weems asked me to order one, but I couldn’t. Perhaps I will leave it unmarked and no one will find it. Only I will know. Only Simon and I will remember Eli. Simon is sitting beside me. He went to mount the horse, but I told him to climb into the gig. What is the purpose? It is absurd to worry about exposing myself now.
“Ma’am, look.” Simon points the whip to the center of the graveyard, where there are a number of new graves. It is too far away to make out. Simon whips the horse. He turns us up Tulip Street. The carriage runs close along the cemetery’s edge. In between the trees and the few marble monuments, there are rows of graves, fifteen, maybe twenty. Some of them are mounded high with fresh red earth and others gape, openmouthed, waiting for the dead. Bodies sewn into sheets lay nearby. Four of them. They do not even bother with coffins or ceremonies now. Is it Mr. Weems’s hand that sewed those shrouds? Who will keep the memory of these dead alive?
Two colored men, their shirtsleeves rolled up, dig another new grave. The early-morning light is golden and slanted, shining off the sweat from the grave diggers’ heads.
The Collins family plot has two new graves. The Sheffields have three. The Yankee officer McCoy bought a plot for his family, and there is a small new grave there.
“My Lord, Simon.”
He touches the horse with the whip and she picks up to a trot. We head quickly through the quiet streets. The homes seem so still, shuttered under trees bursting with leaves. Their doors and windows are shut, and they remind me of those homes along the pike from Three Forks—vacant, abandoned, given up. We turn onto Jefferson Street and head toward the depot. The houses are smaller, modest shotgun shacks of two and three rooms that face the railroad tracks on our right. They are quiet, too, but some windows are open. Some doors. Smoke pours from a few chimneys as if they have a great blaze in their stoves. Others are quiet, with weathered clapboard coated in peeling paint. There is an X in whitewash on several of the front doors.
“What is that?”
“Order of the mayor. All sick houses get marked with an X.”
“What good will that do?”
Simon shrugs. We shouldn’t be here. I know it and he knows it. We should be long gone from Albion.
The depot looms ahead, a massive brick pile three stories high, painted yellow with green shutters. In tall letters along one gable end, the word albion is painted in black.
At the ticket window there is a large crowd. A group of men—and some women—jostle each other on the sidewalk. The doors to the waiting rooms are closed, and there are two men in rough, dirty clothes struggling to pull them open. There is shouting. There is no order here. These people are not ticket buyers but a mob that is becoming agitated.
Simon turns the carriage to cross the tracks to the North Ward, but he pulls back on the reins hard. A loud whistle blast, high and shrill, comes from the west. The blasts are long, longer than I’ve heard them before. Down the tracks, a train is pulling in fast. Black and menacing, the engine charges down the rails with a thick plume of smoke trailing behind, widening fanlike into a great tail. The train has no intention of stopping. That is clear. The men and women race toward it. They stampede after the cars, charging up to the rail bed. Some are ahead of it and climb on the tracks, waving their hands and screaming for the train to stop. Only the whistle shrieks back, warning them to clear the tracks. By some miracle, the men jump clear, brushed by the cowcatcher to tumble down the gravel slope.
The cars roar by us, the windows closed
and the blinds down. It is twelve cars long and going at breakneck speed. The men on the ground shake their fists, shouting profanities as the train barrels into the distance.
“My God, Simon. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should go to see Rachel. I think we’d better get back to the house.”
“No, I must see Rachel. Do you have your pistol?” Simon smiles wryly at that. “Then we will be fine.”
He whips the horse to hurry across the tracks, and from the rise we have a view of the shantytown that houses most of the colored people of Albion.
Some of the houses are little cabins, split log with mud and daub in the chinks to keep the wind out. Smoke from kitchen fires hangs in the air as if to half hide their squalor. They look little better than old slave cabins. Others are even more primitive, lean-to huts with a hole in the roof for a chimney. An old railroad car without wheels sits crossways to the street with a white X on its side. There are white X’s everywhere. How many of those doors hide the abandoned dead?
Simon turns the carriage up a dusty street, sunbaked and lined with shacks and old army tents. These fields in ’65 were filled with tents then, too, but of the U.S. Army. It was here that Eli would come to oversee the arrival of the trains loaded with cornmeal, hardtack, and green bacon. Judge would claim he kept the best to resell to soldiers or whoever could afford it. Has Judge refugeed away, too, without a word to me?
Down Moore Street stands a row of wagons harnessed to mules. Simon stops the buggy at the side of the street. I step down without waiting. The odor of smoldering refuse lingers in the still air. A knot of Negro men stand whispering by one of the wagons. They watch me as I walk toward them. Their conversation stops, and they turn curious eyes on me, a brazen white woman alone in their part of town. They step back from me nervously. One man stands with his mouth open, looking at me as if I am death coming for him.
The Rebel Wife Page 23