Alice slapped him across the back and he jumped away, laughing, his palms out as she advanced on him with a large wooden ladle. When he reached the back door, he put a hand out to the knob and held up a fist. “Touch me,” he said, “and I’ll tell Judah.”
She hesitated just long enough for him to snatch the ladle away and give her a swipe across her buttocks. She yelped, flashed an open palm toward his cheek and he grabbed her wrist, yanked her close to his chest. He could feel her breath on his neck, her breasts flattened against his open white shirt stained with perspiration. His hand left the doorknob and touched her cheek. “I’ll see you tonight,” he whispered.
“Come near me any time,” she said, “and I’ll geld you.”
His laugh was weak this time, and he fairly pushed her away as he spun outside and strode quickly across the yard toward the stable. His hands were trembling, and a throbbing passed over the small of his back. It was crazy. He shuddered. She was black, little better than a slave, and here he was a married man reacting to her like a buck in rutting season. He stopped at the well and cranked up a bucket, plunged his hands into the cold water and doused himself heavily. Insane. He didn’t need another woman; Melissa was always ready—or had been before she’d begun this campaign to send them back to Philadelphia. Waited on hand and foot, catered to even by Cassandra, she was growing unbearable. That little-girl quality he’d once loved so much was now transforming itself into the image of a shrew. It certainly wasn’t his fault he had so much work to do—haggling with the merchants all morning before coming back to strip to the waist and play at being carpenter or field hand; it wasn’t his fault he fell into bed each night exhausted and unwilling to listen to Missy’s eternal whining. She should understand better. Christ, even Judah once told him he was working too hard!
Cass stood nervously on the opposite side of the road, wanting to leap forward and just barely holding herself back. They can take care of it, she thought, unconvinced; they can take care of it themselves, thank you very much, Mrs. Roe. Nevertheless, she was unable to refrain from clamping her hands to her mouth when Judah, Amos, and young Timothy nearly dropped their prize into the mid-March mud at the foot of the lane. The pillars that had once been the only Riverrun markers for passing travelers had been taken apart. The lane had been widened, the brush and trees on either side cleared back for nearly fifty yards. A portal of granite and wood had been put up, and the three blacks were now setting on top a large arch of iron-banded pine into which had been set the word “Riverrun”, each letter hand-carved from oak in the English style and stained a deep black to contrast with the blinding white of the rest of the entrance. There were thick pegs at either tip of the arch that would, when properly placed, fit snugly into squared pillars that rose out of the hand-smoothed stone; the whole would be nearly forty feet high from ground to apex, fifty feet wide across the mouth of the lane. Block and tackle were attached to nearby tall elms. Two mules and the three men labored silently.
Cass had visions of the whole thing plunging into the mud, shattering, two months work wasted because she wanted the world to know what lay behind the thin stand of forest.
Judah, please, she thought fearfully when one of the mules slipped and the left side of the arch swayed dangerously close to Amos’s head. Amos was on the left side, Judah on the right, while Timothy worked the animals slowly up the lane, raising and lowering the pegs while the two older men fought to slip them into their holes. For God’s sake, Judah!
Amos, whose hair was as gray as Judah’s was gone, suddenly grabbed hold of pillar and peg and grunted, his dark muscles gleaming in the afternoon sun, his lips drawn back over his teeth and his eyes narrowed to tiny white slits. He shouted something in his deep voice, and Timothy shoved the mules back. He shouted again, and again the mules stumbled backward. Then he slapped a palmful of grease onto the wood from a bucket at his feet, and the arch settled smoothly into place. A moment later Judah had done the same, and there was a long minute’s silence before Cass suddenly burst out screaming, leapt across the rutted road and waited until the two men climbed down from their perches. She hugged each of them in turn, kissed them soundly, and laughed when Timothy backed away quickly from her exuberance.
“A party,” she said, nodding, grinning, unable to keep from turning in tight circles. “Judah, tell Alice we’re having a party tonight. Riverrun is now, officially, open for business.”
But when they had left in a trail of joyous laughter, Cass remained on the road, looking up, staring at the word floating above her. They all knew how proud she was of the work they had done, and blessed her for her generosity, her warmth, and her love. And she knew what they would be thinking when the word got around that the name had gone up.
And she knew they would be wrong.
The months since October had fairly vanished in a second, a blink of an eye, and she had not allowed herself to think of anything but moving Riverrun forward so it could take the first step.
But Meridine would know, and the word would spread, and sooner or later its uncanny success at the hands of a woman would act as a lure, as bait, as a trap for those who would know who Mrs. Roe really was.
They would come to her then, and they would try to destroy her as they had tried to do before.
But this time it would be different. This time she was on her own ground, her home ground, and the rules would be hers.
She slowed as the house came into view, large and white and bustling with activity. With the shrubs trimmed back, the gardens rescued, with all the work that had been done, Riverrun had nearly been restored to its former glory. And it was then, with the portal behind her and proclaiming her presence, that she understood this was more than simply a stage where she would play out her revenge, more than just a monument to a man dead but not forgotten. The ties that bound her to the house, the land, the people she had adopted, had grown out of her anger into something more, something far more powerful than she had ever imagined. She put a hand to her throat, and shook her head to clear her suddenly blurred vision.
My God, she thought, but it’s true! Riverrun, for good or ill, had become her home! And as her home, she would defend it with her life. Home. Dear Lord, I have a home at last. And she walked toward the house with a smile of grim satisfaction.
All right, she thought, I’m ready now. Come and get me, you murdering bastards.
Chapter Twenty-One
The field had been put to the torch.
Cass walked slowly between the high green stalks, her hair pushed over her eyes by the strong wind that buffeted the flames and turned the sky a roiling mixture of black and pink. The mud was thick to her ankles, yet she moved easily, almost gliding over the slippery surface. She wore only a thin-strapped shift with a bodice squared over her chest and entwined with ivory lace that slowly shaded to brown as mud was kicked up by the fleeing hands. It was hot. And the wind was cold on her face. She put out a hand to the ears of corn, touching them, caressing them, stopping once to peel back the stiff leaves and brush aside the silk, nodding at the kernels as though each had greeted her. A cloud of smoke passed over her, sparking tiny fires like gnats in midsummer. She wandered through it, looked back once and saw that it had dispersed and had been replaced by a wall of flame that rose angrily toward the sky and engulfed the ear she had examined only moments before. She nodded, sighed, and moved on again as Amos and Timothy streaked by her, their eyes wide in fear, their soiled shirts and ragged-bottomed trousers scorched black by the enormous heat. Not once did they look at her, and not once did she call out to them. The other blacks followed quickly, empty water pails dangling from their useless hands, brooms for beating at the flames flung over their backs and flaring now and again into briefly bright torches.
Judah stepped in front of her, his face as always, impassive. She pushed him aside, the flesh of his chest icy against her palm.
Alice reached out to her from behind a flaming tree, but David caught her shoulder and spun her around, pressed
his lips to hers and they slowly sank, naked, onto a bed of quiet fire.
Melissa crouched on a hillock, pounding the head of a porcelain doll against a stone that shattered, reformed, and shattered again.
Proctor Johnson was there with his ebony pegleg, and Owen Garvey with his badge aflame, and Mayor Oliver with his beard ripped bloodily from his chin, and Billy Henshaw dismembered, and Harvey Jones untouched, and …
Suddenly she was in the front yard staring at the house while Vern Lambert threw a massive hawser around it, tied one end to the pommel of his saddle, and rode off down the lane, toppling the walls and spilling the roof and crushing the garden and killing the horses while …
A hand reached out of a tar-black cloud and pushed at her shoulder, and she pushed it away, and it came again and pinched her, and she pushed it again, muttering about the house and how beautiful it was, all stone and splinter and dust and rot and covering, though only barely, the tangled body of a man whose right hand reached up toward a weeping elm, a right hand in a black glove, grasping for air.
Cass screamed, and screamed again, and sat up in her bed with her hands splayed to either side, her head bowed and her mouth opened for air.
“Lawd, I’m sorry, Mrs. Roe.”
She blinked, gasping, and looked up. Judah was standing at the foot of the bed, his eyes self-consciously focused on a spot on the wall just over her head. Quickly, she grabbed at the sheet and pulled it to her neck. It was the first time Judah had ever come into her rooms, and she was disturbed—not by the familiarity, but by the fact that she was suddenly wondering what it would be like to take him in her arms and let his hands … she shook her head angrily.
“What is it, Judah?” she snapped, reminding them both of his place in the household.
“They back again.”
“Damn! All right. Get Mr. Vessler—”
“He in town, Miss.”
“Damn, and double damn!” She gestured toward the door. “Wait in the hall, I’ll be out in a minute.”
Judah ducked his head and hurried out, the door almost slamming behind him. Cass glared at the space he’d just occupied for a moment, then threw aside the covers and slid to the floor. Damn, she thought. God damn that Garvey! Without worrying much about what anyone thought, she pulled on a pair of man’s trousers, high boots, and a shirt a size too large that she hastily tucked into the waistband. Almost everyone but Melissa had grown used to seeing her dressed this way, and even in Meridine those who knew her stopped staring once they’d realized she could not have cared less what tongues were set to wagging. Dresses, when you tried to run a plantation and a house and a household, were nothing more than encumbrances only someone like Melissa would bother to suffer. Tying her hair into a single strand at her back, then she flung open the door and raced out, passed Judah who was lounging against the wall, and took the stairs two at a time, beating the tall black man to the kitchen by more than a dozen strides. Alice, fussing with two of the women over something on the stove, looked around, saw the expression on her face, and froze.
“Again?”
Cass said nothing, and Alice shrugged, deliberately turning her back when Judah went by.
Within minutes they were in and out of the stables, pistols in saddle holsters, riding past the servants’ quarters toward the nearest tobacco field.
“How many?” she demanded when Judah pulled up alongside her.
“Five, I think. Mebbe more. I don’t know.”
“They do any damage?”
“They makin’ noises mostly. Got po’ Timmy shittin’ at his feet.” Judah grunted, then, but said nothing about his language.
“Did you send Amos for Garvey?”
Judah nodded.
Cass knew what he was thinking; like all the other times, it would do them no good. The ex-reb soldiers would be long gone before Garvey arrived with a few fainthearted deputies, and whatever mischief the outlaws were up to would long since have been completed. The mischief was no longer tolerable. It had started when the first of the corn crop had been harvested: a few stray shots from the cover of trees surrounding the fields, horsemen riding through at night shouting and frightening the women and children, a lone man or two wandering up to the field hands and explaining in specific, foul terms what would happen to all the blacks if they continued to work for the Yankee widow. But despite it all, the outlaws (or so Cass preferred to think of them) delivered their messages with laughter and sometimes infectious good humor—if Amos and the others were to be believed—and no one took them seriously at all.
Until the week before, when kerosene had been poured over some of the seedling tobacco.
Garvey had told her that without definite proof there was nothing he could do about it; they weren’t bothering anyone else in the area and he had only her word the ex-rebs were involved.
Cass had nearly slapped him, and would have if David had not kept hold of her wrist.
The field was low and broad, the faintly brown-green tobacco leaves wide and shifting in the morning’s cool breeze. At the far end, as she drove her roan hard down the middle of a row, she could see a group of blacks huddled around someone lying on the ground. Cursing loudly, she rode up to them, and was out of the saddle before the mare had time to come to a complete halt. The men, most of them in their late middle age and wearing white to ward off the sun, jumped back to get away from the roan’s prancing hooves. None of them said a word. Cass knelt on the ground and stared, glared, said without looking up: “Why?”
“Dunno,” one of the men said. “They was horsin’ around and passin’ a jug. Cussin’. Same as always, Missus.”
She turned to Judah. “Did you tell them to leave?”
“Jes’ like you tol’ me, I was polite and I was firm. I said to them they don’ have no rights here.”
“They laugh,” a man called Billy said.
Judah nodded, though Cass didn’t see it. “I tell them I was gone fetch you, and they laugh agin. So I went. Jes’ like you said. I din’ cause no trouble.”
“Billy,” she said, “then what?”
Billy, whose left arm was withered, scratched nervously at his face with his good hand. “I don’ know, Missus. They was laughin’ and cussin’, and ’fore I could say shoo Chet here was grapplin’ with one. Too fas’, Missus. They was too fas’ for us.”
Chet, a mulatto she knew could not have been much older, than David, had been stabbed three times in the chest, and his shirt was already stiffening with drying blood. His eyes were open, his mouth agape in shocked surprise. She snapped her fingers and one of the others took off his shirt. Carefully, she laid it over the man’s face, paying no attention to the fresh stain that spread redly over the thin cotton fabric.
“I want no man in the house from now on,” she said, rising and dusting her hands against her thighs. “Whatever carpentry there is left will have to wait. Billy, Amos is the preacher, right? Give Chet a funeral, tonight if you can, Judah,” and she climbed back into the saddle, looked down and hoped he couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. “Judah, leave off plowing under the corn. I want patrols. All day, all night. They got away with this, and they’re going to try it again.”
“But the law say—” Billy started, and choked off the rest when she turned and glared down at him. Then her face softened and she passed a heavy hand over her face.
“Billy, you have to have witnesses, or Garvey won’t do a thing, much less believe that his precious ‘free spirits’ committed a crime like this.”
“But they is—” Billy stopped and looked to the others standing around him. He knew, then, what she meant. It made no difference here in the backwoods that things like the ’66 Civil Rights Act and the Freedman’s Bureau guaranteed the blacks the same rights as whites, even going so far as to demand military justice for those who deprived the blacks of what was theirs. It made no difference at all. If a man was black, he was invisible, and there’s no such thing as an invisible witness. Not even to murder.
“Y
ou will do nothing on your own,” she warned them as a second thought. “This may have been a mistake on their part, and they may not do anything more but call you names. If they come back, don’t provoke them, Billy, Judah. We can’t afford to have Garvey turn against us now.”
Amos returned alone. Garvey was busy in another part of the county, and none of the deputies left behind would leave town.
Usually, dinner was almost a festive occasion. There were stories of obstacles triumphantly overcome, merchants cajoled into extensions of credit, a new piece of furniture, a new coat of paint, the sheer joy of having survived one day more against the odds they had established for themselves by beginning with nothing. The first corn sales had paid off a number of debts, but had brought them no profit since the money was put back into more grain, some livestock, and a winter’s worth of provisions in the enlarged cellar. But there’d been enough for some wine, some brandy, more cloth for the clothes Alice and her seamstresses were turning out by the yard and selling through Harvey Jones’s dry goods store. They weren’t making a fortune, but they were making a living, and Cass was seldom able to look around the house, around the plantation, without wondering why she had been given such a large share of fate’s smiles.
Tonight, however, dinner was subdued. Melissa had retired early to her room and was being served in bed. David was glowering at the glass he’d set in front of him, and Cass was unable to keep Chet’s blood from flashing before her eyes. Finally, when Alice had served the fruit and retreated into the kitchen to roust the women to their quarters, Cass folded a coarse napkin neatly on the table before her and cleared her throat loudly. David looked up without raising his head. They were seated at opposite ends of the long table, and the candles between gave his eyes shadows that should not have been. “Do you want to tell me?” she asked. “Or do I have to guess?”
David leaned back in his chair. He was wearing no jacket, and his shirt was open to the center of his chest, its ruffles parted and stained. His hair was longer now, and sun-bleached, yet despite his labors and the lines they produced there was still something of the boy about him that continually annoyed her.
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