“Oh, yes, they can, Miz Rachel.”
“They’ll be arrested.”
“They vouch for each other. If the Yankees take ’em to court, they got—what did he call it? Alibis, what means they lie for each other.”
“We have support in this town.”
“You got enemies. Every shop owner and ironworker and glassblower. Every lawmaker. The sheriff. They’re all KKK.”
“And just exactly when do they plan to burn it?”
“Tonight. Well—first thing in the morning. Once all the children get inside.”
Rachel got quiet. It wasn’t like her to be quiet. The only time he’d seen her quiet was the time he’d twisted her wrists. He looked at her—looked at the sun shining into her eyes—and his thinking got scattered. He didn’t know what to think anymore. He was in trouble, that’s what he was thinking. He had betrayed the Klan and they would shove him in a barrel and roll him into a pond.
34
A Torn Skirt
“ARE YOU WILLING to disclose to Mrs. Perkinson what you have told me?”
Shad shook his head no.
But she said, “I’ll get her. Stay there.” And she was gone. Just like that. The door closed in his face.
The last person in the world he wanted to see was Miss Elizabeth. He couldn’t tell her any of this. He’d come to deliver Abigail’s dress and warn Rachel. That was all. When Jeremiah and Clifton came to torch the shed, he prayed that the colored children would be home safe in their beds. School temporarily closed on account of the teacher out of town for a spell. That was all.
He knew Rachel was telling Miss Elizabeth everything right now, and he knew he should run. But he couldn’t bring himself to move.
“Mr. Weaver?” announced Caroline. “Mrs. Perkinson will see you now.”
Shad left the bolt of fabric on the front step and slunk into the house. Miss Elizabeth stood in a simple black dress, arms folded across her chest. It occurred to him that Rachel had stood just like her, arms folded across her chest. Rachel had learned all of her ways from Miss Elizabeth.
“Mr. Weaver. Well, well, well. I’m surprised you have the gall to show your face in my house.”
He made his face blank. “Ma’am?”
“Don’t pretend, Mr. Weaver. And don’t intimidate my girls. If you have something to say, say it to me.”
Shad wrung his hands. He looked at his feet. He coughed. He knew he deserved her anger, but he hadn’t come here to admit anything. What had happened, happened. George Nelson had died. But that wasn’t the end of it. More was going to happen.
He watched her pace the room. She pointed at the crimson brocade settee and Shad sat.
She paced. With one hand to her brow, she said, “In this house, we are grieving the death of George Nelson.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry he died.”
“When you so ruthlessly murdered George Nelson—”
“No! No, ma’am, I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I didn’t kill him!”
“I know Sheriff Parker better than you might imagine, Shadrach. That man pulls strings all over town, but he doesn’t fool me, and neither do you.”
“I swear, ma’am. I swear on—” Shad jumped from the settee and ran to the bookshelves.
“A Bible—is that what you’re looking for, Shadrach? So that your sworn statement will be as believable as John Parker’s statements? Or David Kechler’s? Ha.”
Shad didn’t move. His back was to her, so she couldn’t see his face in that moment, and he was glad she couldn’t. He didn’t know what Miss Elizabeth knew.
He straightened slowly and turned around. “Ma’am, I came here today to deliver Miss Abigail’s dress. That’s all.”
She tilted her head to one side and squinted at him. “I hear that the Klan means to burn our school at first light.”
“You ain’t heard nothing from me, ma’am. I came with a delivery from Weaver’s Fine Tailoring. That’s all, ma’am.”
Shad thought she was going to smack his face. He got ready for her little repeat-after-me business.
But instead, she said, “I see.” She sucked in her cheeks and stared at him for a long time. She paced some more.
“All right, then, Shadrach. I understand. And I appreciate your coming today.” Miss Elizabeth turned toward the hallway. “Caroline! Would you please bring me that sage skirt?” Then she pointed at the settee and addressed him like a dog. “Sit.”
Shad went back to the settee.
Caroline brought the skirt, and Miss Elizabeth held it up and out. She turned it this way and that until she found a straight seam. Then Miss Elizabeth clenched her fists around the seam and yanked.
Shad nearly jumped out of his seat. She was ruining that skirt!
Miss Elizabeth smiled. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Please bring it back the next time you need to warn us. Do you understand? You need not say a thing. Just return the skirt on a day that suits you.”
Shad didn’t know what to say. He looked down, taking in the fact that Miss Elizabeth understood. She understood!
“Uh, ma’am?” Shad stood. “Miz Elizabeth, if it’s a straight, simple seam what’s ripped like this, well, your coloreds can fix a straight seam. Anybody can fix a simple, straight seam. You don’t need no tailor for this.”
He saw her face go into a funny, crooked smile. “How bright you are, Shadrach.” She took the skirt, looked it over, and yanked again. This time a ragged tear ripped sideways, fraying the cotton.
Shad ground his teeth.
“There. How’s that? Have I torn it enough for your grandfather to mend? Or your mother? Or you, Shadrach? Perhaps you can mend it yourself. You’re quite the tailor now, aren’t you?”
“Uh, yes, ma’am.”
“Be sure to return it on a day you need to warn us, do you understand? We won’t need it until then.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And Shadrach, before you go today, the proper English is: You haven’t heard anything from me, and You don’t need a tailor. The double negative is improper.”
“Beg pardon, ma’am?”
“You haven’t heard anything from me. Say that one first, please—you haven’t heard anything from me.”
Shad walked slowly down Twenty-eighth Street toward Nine Mile Road. He carried a sack of food and a bolt of blue calico fabric wrapped in brown paper. Under his shirt, he held a sage skirt, rolled up as small as he could get it, and tucked beneath an arm. As he walked, it rubbed against bruised ribs, and he thought to shift the bolt, sack, and skirt into different positions so that nothing would rub, but he didn’t make the shift. He let the rub hurt. He deserved to hurt.
Way up ahead he saw the break in the tree line where his family’s little house sat. He slowed his pace and a shudder went through him. So much was so wrong.
He had up and befriended a colored girl. Rachel. Was that where it had all started to go wrong? He’d let himself get sucked into that crazy world of hers—that Perkinson household—that amazing place. And she had dared to let him sit in her classroom. She’d opened her school to him, and now her school would go up in flames tonight.
Because of him.
Shad went inside. Mama was running an iron over a damp linen skirt, and steam was billowing up. Pssst. Pssst. The fabric sizzled. Her hand and the handle of the iron were wrapped in rags. Something simmered at the cookstove. Smells of pork fat and butter beans. Shad set down the sack and the bolt of fabric.
Mama’s eyes went to the sack. “That from Miz Elizabeth?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He watched her pull the cloth strips from the iron’s handle and set the iron in the cookstove fire. Then she unwrapped the cloth strips that protected her skin from the heat. She opened the sack and laid out the foodstuffs�
�cornmeal and sugar and a pouch of tobacco—turning each one over as if looking for a reason to return it.
Shad fingered his shirt with the sage skirt folded underneath. He didn’t want to talk to Mama right now. He said, “I’m gonna check on the chickens,” and he went out.
He needed to hide the sage skirt. Breathing was easier away from Mama, but the deeper he breathed, the tighter his fists. He wore a thin coat of sweat.
He couldn’t keep his mind off Jeremiah. He’d have to report to his brother tonight. Eight children. They’d arrive just before the crack of dawn, stay about an hour and a half, maybe two. That was all. There. He’d make his report after supper tonight, and early tomorrow morning, Jeremiah and Clifton would torch the shed.
The bed tilted when Jeremiah got up in the night. Shad heard the sound of straw crunching. Feet sliding into boots. A boot hook dropping to the dirt floor. Cool, damp air slipping through the window. The sweet smell of chestnut blossoms. Creepers singing by the pond.
Shad pretended he was asleep, curled in a ball. He heard Jeremiah’s britches brush the windowsill. Heard his body drop to the ground. Funny how he kept going out the window now that Mama knew full well they were Klan. He might as well walk straight out the front door.
Jeremiah ran into the night, and Shad rolled onto his back. His thoughts were a jumble. He wanted to know what Jeremiah was doing each minute. How far up Nine Mile Road was he now? How long would it take him and Clifton to get to that shed and send it up in flames? Where was Rachel? Where were Miss Elizabeth and Caroline and Eloise right now? Nathaniel and Maggie and Kitty?
Shad wanted to follow Jeremiah. But no, he didn’t dare. One look at his face and everyone in the Klan would know he’d warned Rachel.
35
Lord Have Mercy
SHAD HEARD BIRDS chirping and opened his eyes to sunlight coming in at a slant. He’d fallen asleep. He jerked his head to see Jeremiah’s side of the bed. Empty. His brother hadn’t returned.
Shad slipped to the outhouse, sure to see Jeremiah coming or going. But no. He wasn’t at the outhouse. Or the well. Or the chicken coop.
Shad gathered eggs—one each from Peep and Poke—and found Mama at the cookstove. “Look, Mama. Two eggs today.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“I don’t know,” he said, cringing over yet another lie. He knew full well where Jeremiah had gone. He just didn’t know what had happened when he got there.
Mama fried the eggs and set them on plates with last night’s leftover corn bread. Shad wasn’t hungry. He stared at his egg and Mama stared at hers, too. He remembered days with nothing to eat, and that made him put a bite to his mouth.
After a time he said, “I’ll save this corn bread for later, Mama.”
She nodded and wrapped it in a piece of cheesecloth. Then she took her place in the chair by the window and hemmed a fancy shirt for Doc Moore. She put in two stitches, looked out the window, two more stitches, craned her neck.
Shad picked up the scraps of fabric and threads for braiding into a foot mat. His fingers shook. “You want me to find him?”
Mama shook her head. “Near the death of me the day they arrested him. Both you boys was gone, and I cried the day long. No, Shad, you stay right here. Give me peace of mind.”
“Okay, Mama.”
At the sound of a horse, Shad and Mama jumped up. But it wasn’t Jeremiah. Wasn’t anybody they knew. They sat down again—Mama by the window, Shad by the table. They didn’t talk. They waited. And stitched. And waited.
After a spell, Shad heard a clip-thud, clip-thud. Granddaddy. It wasn’t like him to come out their way in the morning.
They met him in front of the house, and Granddaddy didn’t get two words out of his mouth before Mama started crying. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”
Granddaddy hugged her. “He’s okay, Adeline. Just beat up, is all.”
“Where is he? Where’s my baby?”
Granddaddy closed his eyes and buried his face in her shoulder. “Libby.”
“No!” Mama wailed. She pushed away from Granddaddy. She threw her hands in the air, let out a scream, and would have collapsed on the ground if Shad hadn’t caught her. He patted her back gently like patting a baby, and her tears wet the front of his shirt. “He’s just a boy,” she mumbled.
Shad set his head on top of Mama’s. Libby Prison. Good Lord. During the war, Union prisoners had been locked up there, and, ever since, the Yankees had controlled it. They held former Confederates there—men who’d refused to relinquish their arms, men who’d attacked the roaming Yankee militias, men who’d stood up for the South long after the war had ended. Granddaddy had called them political prisoners. Said they never got a fair trial. Lots of men who went into Libby Prison never came out. Some got a trial and a walk to the gallows. Many died of dysentery.
“Not Libby. Lord, not Libby,” whispered Mama.
Shad walked her into the house. She slumped into a chair and buried her head in her hands. “I knew something was wrong this morning. I just knew it.”
“We’ll get him back, Mama,” Shad told her, trying his best to sound strong.
“Jeremiah. My baby,” she mumbled. “What’d they get him for?”
“Taking a torch to a shed,” said Granddaddy.
“W-why on earth? Where?”
“Perkinson house.”
“No! Why would he burn her shed?”
“School for coloreds.”
Mama gasped.
“Word is that some Yankee friends of Miz Elizabeth were staying at the house. They caught the boys in the act.”
“Them Yankees have it in for Jeremiah,” cried Mama. “Last time they thought he’d murdered a man, and they questioned him—”
“We ain’t just talking about questioning, Adeline.”
“But why Libby?”
“Caught ’em red-handed, is what I’m telling you.”
“Lord, help us.”
Granddaddy ran a hand through his silvery hair. His mustache hung limp. He was in sore need of a shave. “An offense against a colored school is an offense against the Freedmen’s Bureau, and that’s a government agency.”
“How we gonna get him out?”
“We’ll see.”
Shad listened and didn’t say a thing. If he talked, he might give away how he’d betrayed the Klan.
Mama shuffled to the cookstove and mumbled something about last night’s butter beans. “I got to feed him.”
Granddaddy paced. Clip-thud, clip-thud.
“I want to see him,” Mama announced.
“They might not let you see him.”
“Then I’ll stand outside and Jeremiah can wave to me from the window,” said Mama.
“Boys get shot if they lean out windows.”
“Not no more! That was during the war.”
“Just saying, Adeline. Just saying.”
“Well, I mean to see him,” said Mama with resolve.
“Lord,” whispered Granddaddy, shaking his head. “Lord have mercy.”
By the time Shad, Granddaddy, and Mama got to the curve in Nine Mile Road, Mama was limping so hard, Shad needed to hold her up at the waist. Her scuffed shoes had rubbed her ankle raw, and Shad doubted she’d make it all the way to Libby—all the way across Shockoe to Cary Street.
Around the curve came a horse pulling a rickety farm cart.
“Well, if it ain’t Bertram Dabney!” shouted Granddaddy.
“Henry Weaver! How you been?”
“Been better.”
Mr. Dabney’s face was long and narrow, with a dusty beard that pulled it even longer. Shad watched him tip his beat-up cap at Mama as he leaned over the neck of his horse—a spotted gray mare, flea-bitten with one ear lopped off. Shad thought she was a sad-looking horse, but something about the way her big black eyes took h
im in made her seem a thoughtful and intelligent animal. She reminded him of Daddy’s horse, old Mindy-girl, who had enlisted with Daddy and never come back.
“Listen, Henry,” said Mr. Dabney quietly, but not so softly that Shad couldn’t hear. “Word is your grandson got picked up last night.”
Mama burst into tears, and Shad wrapped his arm tighter around her.
“Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry. Adeline? I didn’t recognize you.”
Mama whimpered.
Granddaddy said, “Say, Bert, we’re heading to Libby right now. You wouldn’t by chance be able to give us a lift, now, would you?”
“Libby?” gasped Mr. Dabney.
“So we’ve heard.”
“Climb on in. I just unloaded kale and collards down Shockoe. Y’all don’t mind riding in the cart?”
“Much obliged.”
This was a stroke of good luck. Shad held the pot of butter beans Mama had brought for Jeremiah, and the men lifted her into the farm cart. Granddaddy sat up front with Mr. Dabney, and Shad and Mama rocked and bumped along in the back. As they rode, Mama and Shad peeled up scraps of kale and collards from the floorboards. They wiped off the dirt and added the hearty greens to the pot, making a fine little feast for Jeremiah. The whole ride, Shad heard Granddaddy and Mr. Dabney talking up a storm, but it was politics and government and taxes, and Shad couldn’t keep it straight.
When Mr. Dabney stopped at the Cary Street corner, he and Shad helped Mama from the cart. Mr. Dabney made a show of acting particularly careful, leaning in close to Mama, then straightening up tall, preening with pride over the opportunity to help a Confederate widow.
Before he rode away, Shad shook his hand and said, “Thank you for the ride, sir. And, uh, thanks for the chickens, too.”
“Don’t mention it, son. Glad y’all could use ’em. They laying eggs yet?”
“Yes, sir. One each this morning.”
“Good to hear, son. You take care o’ your mama now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Dabney nodded toward the prison. “Good luck,” he whispered in a tone that said they’d surely need it.
Brotherhood Page 21