Louisiana History Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  “I don’t believe I’d care for it, though I won’t say no to a glass of water.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before!”

  “Don’t get up,” Johnny said quickly, waving her back down in her chair. “I’ll step out to kitchen.”

  Lettie rose from where she was sitting. “I’ll get it; I wouldn’t mind some myself.”

  “I’ll just come with you,” Johnny said at once.

  Lettie, who was beginning to gain some insight into the character of these people, did not argue. Johnny’s offer, she realized, was as much because the way to the outdoor kitchen was dark at this time of night and she was a woman presumed to be in need of protection, as to save her the trouble of waiting on him, though the last was an added aspect. The courtesy was innate, based not simply on good manners, which could be taught, but on concern for other people, which was learned only by constant example. It was a phenomenon she had met with often since she had been at Splendora, not something reserved to Johnny. It made her feel warm inside every time she came across it. She was going to miss it when the time came to leave.

  “I don’t suppose,” Johnny said, looking around hopefully when he had set the lamp he carried on the kitchen table, “that there’s any bicarbonate of soda?”

  “I’m sure there must be.”

  They found it on one of the open shelves on one wall. Johnny mixed a spoonful of it in a small amount of water and drank it down, then stood pressing his abdomen while he waited for the sovereign remedy for a troubled stomach to work. Lettie dipped a glass of water for herself from the bucket that sat on the workbench, then got another glass for Johnny and handed it to him. The black smoke and fumes coming from the lamp they had brought with them were bothersome in the heavy air, and she stepped away from them to the open door. She leaned on the frame, breathing deeply of the soft night air and sipping her water as she looked out into the darkness. After a moment, she turned back to Johnny.

  “You know who the Thorn is, don’t you?”

  Water from the glass he was lifting to his mouth slopped over the rim and down onto the front of his shirt and waistcoat. “Good Lord, lady, just look what you made me do!”

  “Don’t you?”

  Brushing at the water on his clothing in comical dismay, he did not look at her. “What makes you think so?”

  “You stared at him this evening as if you had seen a ghost.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do, ignore it when a man is killed in front of me?”

  “Oh, come, you faced men on the battlefield and probably killed your share. There could have been nothing unusual in that. It was the man behind the priest’s disguise that startled you.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I? You know, it stands to reason that the Thorn is an ex-Confederate soldier. A man with his strength and stamina and peculiar abilities must have been in the middle of the fight. It stands to reason, then, that he should be near the same age as you and Ranny and Martin Eden. If he has made such a stir now, he must have been well known to the community before the war. How could you not know him?”

  “Easily. He could be anybody from anywhere; some stranger passing through on his way to Texas, a Northerner with Southern sympathies, a straggler from the Union army, a conscript-dodging jayhawker, anybody.”

  “If that was the case, you wouldn’t have recognized him and you wouldn’t have been so disturbed.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Don’t I?”

  Johnny stared at her, then drank down his water and set the glass aside. “It wasn’t the Thorn, it was the little girl. I keep thinking about her. She was so small and sweet, the same age as my little sister who died a few years back, before the war. If the priest — the Thorn — whoever he may be — hadn’t come along just then, what would have happened to her? Her parents would have been killed. Those two pieces of scum would have taken her and — I can’t bear to think about it, but I can’t stop.”

  There was a raw sound in his voice and horror in his eyes. Lettie could not doubt he spoke the truth, but was it the full explanation for what she had seen? She could not tell, nor could she continue to question him in the face of his distress. Concern for others was not restricted to the South.

  The reason behind Lettie’s need to know the identity of the Thorn remained the same, but added to it was one more thing. She required some means to connect in her own mind the man who had killed her brother with cold calculation and had made love to her in a darkened corncrib with the man who had saved her from the jayhawkers and had appeared as the avenging priest and prevented the death of the travelers. How could a man be a murderer and thief and the champion of justice and defender of those in danger at the same time? It made no sense. And yet she could not think that the evidence collected so carefully by her brother was wrong. It almost seemed that there were two men riding in the night.

  Angel and devil.

  That explanation was too simple, however. There must be another one. Perhaps the Thorn meant to confuse the issue with his good deeds. Perhaps there was in him a streak of knight-errantry or, like Johnny, he had a fondness for small girls as well as large ones like herself. Or possibly he resented the encroachment of the jayhawkers upon his territory and sought to dissuade or destroy them. Whatever the reason, she would find it. She must. To discover the identity of the Thorn was, she had decided after long hours of cogent thought, the best way to find and stop the man himself. And the best way also to regain her self-possession.

  The summer advanced, though the heat-drugged days seemed to slow to a crawl. The colonel and his men were frequent visitors. They sat on the veranda fanning themselves with their campaign hats and laying wagers among themselves as to who was quick enough to catch two of the flies that buzzed around before a count of twenty. Aunt Em held court, her scepter a fly swatter with a four-foot-long handle with which she whacked the pesky creatures and anyone else who became too brash. The flies were inescapable, attracted by the lemonade. Bringing the ingredients for the refreshment had quickly become a tradition with the Union soldiers.

  Sally Anne lingered at Splendora. She tried several times to return to her father’s house, but there was such a chorus of protests that she always abandoned the move. Her son’s voice was among the loudest; Peter was enjoying his lessons with Lionel and Ranny. Aunt Em forbade her niece to go on the grounds that if she did her old aunt would be danced off her feet during the impromptu cotillions. Lettie begged her to stay so that she would not have to take all the soprano parts during their singing sessions alone or entertain all the lovesick swains who would be left behind. Thomas Ward declared that he would be lost without her smile, and his men swore, with varying degrees of fervor and on various objects from the stars to tombstones, that they would die of heatstroke if she took her cool blond loveliness away. Ranny gave no reasons. He simply said, “Don’t go,” and Sally Anne stayed.

  Whether from the warm weather, the lightness of her spirits due to the pleasant company, or some other cause, Sally Anne began to soften the severity of her mourning. First a few silk flowers appeared under the brim of her dark straw bonnet. The ornament made of her husband’s hair in the shape of a heart was replaced by a gold locket, which hung from a blue silk ribbon. A shirtwaist of white linen given to her by Aunt Em was paired with one of her black skirts, and color was added at the waist by a belt of blue silk faille. Finally a day came when the young woman asked Aunt Em to ride into town with her to select a length of material for a summer gown.

  Aunt Em insisted that Lettie go with them. Between the two of them, they persuaded Sally Anne to take not only a piece of lavender lawn, suitable for half-mourning, but also another of white shadow-striped dimity embroidered with small bouquets of violets. The last was a gift from Aunt Em or, as she put it, from her chickens who provided the egg money.

  Handling the light, airy fabrics, Lettie became aware as never before of the heaviness of her own clothing. In a burst of enthusiasm, she boug
ht herself a length of the dimity, though one embroidered with roses; a piece of voile in a color called French vanilla that was edged with broderie Anglaise scallops, plus the white taffeta to go under it; and also a piece of calico in a delightful coral and aqua stripe.

  It was an odd thing, but the new finery, when made up, caused Lettie to feel not only cooler but lighter of spirit, more carefree. It was apparent that Sally Anne’s had much the same effect on her, for her smiles came more frequently and her light laugh could be heard often on the warm air. There was little danger Lettie would forget that the many compliments that came her way when she wore her new garments were caused as much by loneliness and propinquity as by the way she looked in them; still, there could be no doubt that the effort she and Sally Anne had made was appreciated.

  Colonel Ward, in particular, applauded the change in the young widow. He presented her with flowers and equally florid compliments, with books and bonbons and even a few verses in his own hand until the poor woman stammered and blushed rosy red. She finally used up a not inconsiderable store of excuses for not driving out once more with him in the evening so that she was forced to go if merely to stop him from asking. After a time, it was the excuses that stopped.

  The lessons Peter so enjoyed absorbed Lettie also. They had been moved from the veranda to one of the slave cabins behind the house. The cabin, shaded on one side by the spreading umbrella of a chinaberry tree and on the other by the gnarled limbs of an ancient live oak, was small but serviceable, and perhaps one of the coolest places on the plantation.

  Lettie, with the help of Mama Tass and Ranny, had swept the accumulated debris from it and scrubbed it with lye soap and carbolic in steaming hot water. Aided by one of the men on the place and hindered as much as helped by Peter and Lionel, Ranny had cut back the encroaching blackberry vines, shrubby growth of French mulberries, and sweet gum saplings. Then they had whitewashed the cabin inside and out. Four crude benches had been made by placing boards across upturned kegs. Slates and chalk had been brought from town. Then the instruction had begun.

  Each morning Lettie spent two hours with Ranny and the boys, and in the evening she devoted two more hours to any of the former slaves of Splendora who wanted to learn to read and write and do sums. It was engrossing, fascinating, if sometimes frustrating work. It was also rewarding.

  By degrees, her evening class grew larger, drawing not only from Splendora and the people there, most of whom were Mama Tass’s brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, but also from the neighboring houses. More benches were constructed, more slates bought, and still there were times when not all of the people wanting to learn — old women with their gray heads tied up in kerchiefs; young ones large with child and with other children dragging at their skirts; half-defiant, half-grown boys and older men straight from the plow with bent backs, swollen knuckles, and dirt under their fingernails — could find places.

  Each and every one of them had a terrible yearning to better themselves and to relieve the burden of their ignorance. And yet many of them had never been exposed to the printed word, to the plethora of ideas and images contained within the covers of a book. They had never tried to form a letter, never tried to draw or to write with a stick in the dirt. They did not lack understanding or ability so much as the very concept of either. A few were quick to grasp at knowledge; some gained it slowly but steadily; while for others there seemed to be a great barrier against it inside of them, as if it were so totally beyond their experience that they were separated from it by an unbridgeable chasm. The first group gave her fine visions of herself as some mythical goddess spreading enlightenment, while the last made her feel stupid and without talent as a teacher, as if it were in some way her fault that she could not transfer the skills she held to them.

  There were just as many highs and lows in teaching Ranny and the two boys. The hours spent with them contained quiet satisfaction and a great deal of merriment, but also some of the same pressures. Peter’s level of intelligence was perfectly normal for his age, while Lionel and Ranny were so nearly equal according to her tests that she usually constructed a single lesson for them. She had attempted once or twice to persuade them to join the class in the evening, but every time they seemed near to agreeing, Ranny was stricken by another of his headaches. Since he seemed consistently free of them in the morning, she finally ceased to mention the change.

  It was Ranny who caused the problems. His progress was erratic. He seemed to advance and retreat according to his mood, state of health, the weather, and even whether Lettie was holding his hand or not. It sometimes seemed that the harder she tried to force the pace, the slower he became. There were occasions when he stared at her with an expression of such vacuity that she was exasperated to the point of screaming, even ready to think he did it on purpose to annoy her. And then there were the times when he displayed such flashes of stabbing intelligence that she was pierced to the heart by the realization of what he had lost.

  One such incident took place not in the schoolroom but in Aunt Em’s front-yard garden at sunset. Lettie had been clipping a few blooms to put in the lovely Old Paris vase that sat on the table beside her bed. Attracted by the mind-swimming fragrance of a bed of flowering tobacco in full bloom, she moved toward it. Her approach startled a cloud of butterflies into flight. They fluttered around her, their wings making a soft and delicate clattering. Their coloring was a velvety brown-black with the edges of their wings braided with gold and speckled with a line of blue. One settled for an instant on the curve of her breast and another on her skirts. She stood still, holding her breath in enchantment.

  She had not known Ranny was there until he stepped out from behind her. He eased around her until they were facing each other; then, his face absorbed, he reached out his hand toward the butterfly on her bodice. There was neither threat nor apprehension in his movements. He touched her breast with his forefinger, gently nudging the butterfly, and the beautiful insect climbed confidently on it.

  “Nymphalis antiopa,” he said softly on a note of satisfied wonder, “the mourning cloak.”

  Just as quietly, Lettie said, “You collect butterflies?”

  He shook his head. “I could never stick a pin in them.”

  “The name you gave it was Latin, you know, and quite correct.”

  He looked up, his gaze clear and plainly startled, and then it became slowly opaque, like the drawing of a curtain. “Was it?”

  “Do you know the names of any others?” There was an urgency in her voice as she asked it.

  But the moment was gone. “No,” he answered.

  Later, in the night, Lettie began to think. Butterflies and locusts. Latin names and Latin quotes. And on the night when they had seen the Thorn disguised as a priest, Ranny had been at Splendora guarded by Lionel, felled by one of his headaches. Or had he?

  She was being ridiculous. Surely the man who sat across from her at the supper table, meekly accepted her strictures on the sloppiness of his lessons, fed the chickens in the backyard — sometimes scooping up a strayed and peeping chick and carrying it around in his shirt to save it from the cat until it could be restored to its mother — could not be the same man who had shot down a murderous jayhawker, stolen the prisoner of a squad of soldiers and set them afoot without their boots, and made a laughingstock of the tax collector O’Connor? Surely golden-haired, smooth-shaven Ranny could not be the ruthless mustachioed giant who had taken her upon the cornhusks? Surely she would know it if it were so, surely she would sense it?

  And yet he was a strange man, was Ranny. And because he was tall and broad and strong, because of what he had once been, glimpses of which she had seen herself and had heard about from others, she must eliminate him before she could go on to consider who else might fit the part.

  The headaches would be her excuse. After the days and weeks she had been at Splendora and the time she had spent teaching Ranny, it could not be thought surprising if she showed concern for him. In all truth, she was troubled
by the frequency of the recurring pain in his head. Such pain was not normal, despite his injury. It was possible that it was a symptom of something gone wrong, some pressure against his brain caused by fluid or possibly a splinter of bone from his skull that should have been removed. Someone should encourage him to see a doctor. But it seemed that because the problem had gone on for so long without worsening, everyone just accepted it.

  There was, she suspected, little money for journeying from one doctor to another in search of a cure, but that was no reason to ignore the situation. Means could be found if it was necessary. Injuries to the brain were not something that could be taken lightly. They could cause paralysis, madness, even death. How terrible it would be if any of those things befell beautiful, gentle Ranny. It did not bear thinking of.

  What was required for this test of him was simply another night when he retired early after asking for his laudanum. Lettie had not long to wait. At the dinner table on that particular night, Ranny was silent, only answering the questions put to him in monosyllables and often resting his head on his hand. He did not mention his pain, he never did. His eyes simply took on a glassy sheen and, a short time later, he murmured his excuses and left them.

  There had been no company that evening. The three ladies and Peter moved from the dining room to the sitting room in the hall. Aunt Em took out a sheet to mend, Sally Anne picked up her embroidery frame, and Peter sprawled on the floor playing with a top and a piece of string. Lettie settled into a corner of the settee to read a few more pages in a volume of Thackeray that she had found in a book cabinet.

  The minutes ticked past, punctuated by the chime on the quarter and half hours of the clock in the parlor. Layers of smoke from the lamp chimney hung in the still air. From outside came the constant whirring of crickets and peeper frogs. The calico cat stalked through the open back doors, rubbed around Aunt Em’s ankles until she nudged it away, batted Peter’s top here and there, then leaped up to curl itself in Sally Anne’s lap.