by Sarah Bird
I went to start after him myself, but Solomon stopped me with a hand on my arm, a sour look wrinkling his face.
“What?” I asked. “Man can read. Can help us with whatever papers come our way. Might keep us from getting bamboozled. He seems to know the way of things.”
“Man seems a lot of things,” he said, peeved. “Lot of miles between seeming and being.”
“Aw, Solomon, you’re just jealous ’cause folks are paying him all the mind.” It was true, Solomon liked being top dog and wasn’t shy about baring his teeth and bristling up when a challenger came too close.
“Because he can read?” Solomon demanded. “Because he can write? I’ll tell you what, that man there, he’d steal the butter off a blind man’s bread and put him on the wrong road home.”
I laughed at Solomon’s jealous words and he stomped off.
Meanwhile, the happy band gathered up around Mr. Spectacles was already heading off. I consulted Mama and Iyaiya on whether I should follow him or Solomon, then waited for their sign.
No sign appeared to nudge me in one direction or the other. And, in that moment, I felt as bewildered and scared about what was to come next as any of the others. The only two people in the world I cared about were dead. I had nowhere to go. And no one who cared if I got there.
Except for Solomon.
It hit me then that if I had a friend, he was it. With no other choice, I started off after him. The last thing I heard from the stranger was the Bible man asking him, “What’s your name, son?”
Mr. Spectacles stopped, turned back so all behind could hear, and answered in his distinct voice, “Vikers. They call me Justice Vikers.”
Chapter 21
That night, in spite of Grant forbidding it, no power on earth could of stopped the rejoicing. Not after four years of fighting and starving and dying. Especially since all the generals had ridden away to Washington to meet with Lincoln to figure out how to shrink the military from the near two million that had fought against the Rebellion down close to the sixteen thousand it was when the Secesh traitors started the whole mess.
Most everyone, both white and black, except for Solomon and me and a few ancient aunties, went down to the woods outside the village and commenced to throw the biggest shebang ever held. Solomon refused to join in the festivities, saying he’d seen a right sharp of snot-flying drunks in his time and had no need of making a special trip to see more. So we watched the hullabaloo from up top the rise.
Outside the courthouse, a proper band, not some piddly fife-and-fiddle job, played “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Overhead fireworks exploded like a century of Fourth of Julys crammed into one night. Great dandelions blew golden fluff into the night and giant chrysanthemums opened their red petals. For a spell, I was content to sit and ooh and aah with the old folk.
Then a mighty burst threw crazy bolts of light across all the faces below, black and white, and I could see them down there having a high old time. Next, the black sky went noontime bright as a fountain of silver lit up the heavens and rained sparks down on the merrymakers. The band played “Aura Lea” and sang about the “maid with golden hair.” In the sporadic flashes of fireworks light, I saw frozen glimpses of couples dancing. Most were just ordinary whores and their customers, but they were all raised up high in their joy to a place I longed to visit just once in my life.
“Solomon, let’s go on down there.”
My friend sat on a tree stump, one leg folded over the other, one arm tucked up in his armpit, the other holding his clay pipe to his mouth, all settled in the way he liked. He tugged on the pipe, puffed out a cloud of smoke, knocked the edge of the pipe on the heel of his boot, and said, “No, thank you, Queenie. This is where we were posted. Where we supposed to be.”
“Solomon, there’s no posting anymore. Everyone’s run off or been mustered out. Don’t you understand? War is over. We can do what we want. Go where we want. This is the start of a whole new life for us. We did it, Solomon. We won. We got a right to celebrate.”
“Won? What you think we won?” he barked back.
“Freedom, Solomon. We won freedom.”
He harrumphed and said, “You’ll see what black folk won. War was the easy part, buttercup. Peace with white folks gon be a whole new war. War we be fighting alone. You think them Rebs we saw riding off back home gonna be a hair different from what they were before the war? Only difference now is they hungrier, poorer, and meaner ’cause they got a grudge. Think they were done wrong.
“Since they’d die before they ever admitted what fools and traitors they were, every one of them beat Rebs’ll go to his grave sure as God that we, all us ungrateful slaves, were the reason for every bit of the misery they brought on themselves. Bad as they were before, they gon punish us now.”
“All we got to do is stay away from them. We can go north.”
“What? You think the Yanks’ll be a whole lot better? You think they’ll be waiting up North to give us their own good jobs? Nice houses to live in? Plates of fried ham and redeye gravy? Huh? That what you think?”
Though I told him that, of course, that wasn’t what I thought, he still said, “You dreaming, buttercup. North. South. White man’s a white man.” He drew heavy on his pipe like he had just spoken the final word and the case was closed.
Well, it wasn’t. “Dog you, Solomon,” I said. “If it was raining silver dollars you be moanin’ ’bout you forgot your umbrella.” I stood up, brushed bits of grass from my skirt, and smoothed the hair back behind my ears.
“Where you think you’re going?”
“Don’t think, know. I am going down there and have me a dance or two with a free man.”
Solomon jumped to his feet and blocked my way. “No, ma’am, state that crowd is in, wouldn’t be safe for a young lady without an escort.”
“Why, Solomon Yarnell, I do declare,” I trilled out, the way those sap-headed Southern belles back in Missouri used to. “Ain’t you the gentleman.” The instant I said it, though, I realized it was true. That’s exactly what Solomon Yarnell was. He was a gentleman. And had been from the start.
He tapped out his pipe, stuck it in his pocket, and grumbled to Matildy, “You heard the lady, best put on your dancing shoes.”
I ran to yoke up the team. If this was the first and maybe only time I was to be squired about by a fellow, I reckoned we’d do it in style. Also, I was imagining Justice Vikers watching me ride in and had to admit that I wouldn’t have minded seeing that impressive gent again.
By the time we navigated the back road down to the village in the pitch-dark night, the party was roaring and most in attendance had celebrated themselves into a state of paralysis. Leastwise that’s what we made out from the sound of the goings-on for we couldn’t yet see them, as groves of thick woods surrounded the open field where the revelers were dissipating themselves in the light of bright bonfires made of torn-down Secesh barns. We left Matildy tethered in the wagon we parked at the edge of the woods and commenced to make our way towards the spree.
Halfway through the woods, we spotted a pack of rough-looking jaspers malingering about a sad little campfire, passing a jug around, joylessly working at getting drunker than boiled owls. The gang was dressed in scraps of Yankee uniforms and civilian clothes, though these lowlifes were probably wearing Secesh gray a few days back. They looked to be hard cases who’d been heading nowhere fast when the war bumped into them and, now that the shooting was over, they were continuing on in the same direction.
Though they were ossified good, it wasn’t moon-howling, cutting-up drunk. It was mean, spoiling-for-a-fight drunk. It was the grudge-holding drunk of men drowning their sorrows. Men who reckoned they’d been done wrong. Just like Solomon predicted.
We were giving the jackals wide berth, keeping far back where they could neither see nor hear us, when the familiar gleam of a patch box, muzzle, and trigger guard of polished brass caught my eye, for they were all attached to a yagger rifle. My yagger rifle.
“Solomon,” I whispered, “that’s my rifle. That’s my yagger I left hidden back home in the trunk of a hollow tree. One of those crackers found it.”
The long arm I had taken off the snake-bit Reb deserter lay unattended, even prettier than I remembered her. That was my rifle all right for I had not seen another like her amidst the vast assemblage of weapons I’d noted over the past months. A pang cinched me up tight and I was so overtaken with longing for Mama and the times we’d had with that selfsame rifle that no power on earth could of stopped me from reclaiming it.
The instant I moved toward it, though, Solomon clamped a grip on me could of halted a buffalo and whisper-hissed, “What on God’s green earth you doing?”
“Getting my rifle.”
“Getting kilt more like it.”
“Can’t kill what you never hear or see. Solomon, I can do this. I have to do this.”
“You push it, Queenie,” Solomon said in a despairing way. “Always push it. World’s gonna push back. See if it don’t.”
But he set me loose and I advanced. No snake slithering across a plate of glass could of been quieter. When I came close enough, the sludgy, ignorant twang of the most miserable specimens of Southern manhood assailed my ears.
The fellow who had stolen my yagger was a bony specimen wearing greasy buckskins and a coonskin cap appeared the coon been eaten by a bear and vomited up directly onto the man’s head. He was squabbling with a squat, beady-eyed individual, had a round face shining with grease, most likely from salt pork handed out by the conquering Yanks.
The fatty said something I didn’t catch and Coonskin Cap barked out in a nasal whine, “Whud you jist call me, Loudermilk?”
Loudermilk raised his voice and answered in a mocking la-di-da way, “Why, Dupree, my good man, I am surprised you failed to catch my drift. ’Specially as I was speakin’ in your native tongue. Allow me to repeat myself, Dupree.”
With that, Loudermilk tilted his chunky butt to one side, lifted a meaty haunch, and let loose with a rump ripper fueled by four years of beans and bad water.
The rifle-thieving Dupree was on his feet and plunging into the withering brown cloud Loudermilk had released quick as could be. They were all spoiling for a fight and would of preferred to thump a few Yankee or ungrateful black gourds, but they took this one and every one of them pitched in. It must of seemed to most of those rednecks that they’d gone to war for less than a fart, so why not bust some knuckles over a real one?
Once the thrashing started and they were occupied grinding their knuckles into each other’s eye sockets, booting one another’s groins, yanking out handfuls of hair, and trying to bite an ear or two off, my yagger was easy pickings. I snatched it and vanished.
Oh, how I gloried in having that fine firearm cradled in my arms once again. I ran to Solomon, expecting him to be as happy as I was. But he had sulled up on account of my pushing it and going against him and he wasn’t speaking to me.
His mood brightened, though, when we emerged into the open field and found folks having all kinds of times out there. Everyone was jubilating. Bluecoats from every Yankee state in the Union along with swarms of freedmen camp followers, vendors selling tonsil oil, turncoat Rebs, drifters, bunco men, and cutpurses.
Clumps of drummer boys, unused to the strong spirits being passed about so freely, lay dead to the world like so many rag dolls left outside. I searched for the young fellow who brought me water and hardtack when I was barreled up, but didn’t find him and said a prayer that he had survived the Rebellion and was making his way home safe to his abolitionist ma and pa.
Fiddlers, drummers, and fifers who hadn’t lit out for home or the nearest city with gaslights and loose women for them to waste their separation pay on played lively tunes. Grizzled veterans capered about the bonfires grabbing any soldier, officer or enlisted, who passed their way by the arm and swung him around like they were do-si-doing at a barn dance. Long lines snaked into the tents where the hardtack girls had set up. They were charging two dollar a head and still couldn’t keep up with business. At those exorbitant rates, even a fair portion of the washerwomen had temporarily shifted from the cleaning to the dirtying business.
Most of the suds ladies, though, confined themselves to selling dances as soldiers were happy to pay two bits just to whirl around with a woman in their arms and laugh and stick a Rebel cap on her head. It was quite a hoedown, with soldiers from every unit in the Union army represented. I’d learned to pick them out by their speech and I heard Irish Yankee, Boston Yankee, New York Yankee, German Yankee, and Swede Yankee all wove into the soft brown velvet of my people’s way of speaking. Which, to my ears, was how the Lord had intended his creatures to speak.
I was gawking about like the most country hayseed when a fellow with a wide mouth and teeth spaced far apart as a gator stepped up, pointed at my chest, and asked, “What you got there?”
That was when I noticed that while retrieving my yagger, my bodice had come unbuttoned, revealing a fair amount of my bosom. I quickly closed it back up and snapped, “Nothin’ that you’ll ever put your nasty hands on.”
“Calm down, sister. I got no interest in that washboard of yours. What I meant was them scars.”
That stopped me cold. “You mean these?” I asked, touching the scars. “Why you asking?”
He shrugged. “No reason. Just ain’t never seen the like except on one other gal.”
“What other gal?” I asked, slitting my eyes against this fool.
“Gal follows Grant’s camp.”
“What her name?” I demanded.
The man tapped his forehead. “Was right on the tip of my tongue.”
I felt Solomon move in close to me, lean down and whisper, “Don’t do this to yourself, Cathy. Don’t go opening hurts been healed up.”
“Solomon, that hurt will never heal.” I turned back to the man and asked again, “What her name?”
The man snapped his fingers and said, “Clemmie! That’s it, gal’s name’s Clemmie.”
“You knew Clemmie? You knew my little sister?”
“‘Knew her’? I’m still knowing her!”
“No…” I was trying to sort out the right words from the tornado whipping through my mind when he said, “Y’all wait right here where I can find you. I be back directly,” and disappeared into the crowd before I could stop him.
For one stupid second, I believed Gator Mouth would bring my little sister to me. Then I accepted that either I’d never see him again or, if I did, he’d be dragging along some warty girl just happened to have the same name as my sister. My dead sister. Though I knew I was a fool for letting even the tiniest green sprig of hope sprout up, I still felt low and let down even with all the uncorked happiness churning up around me.
The band struck up a comical version of “Dixie” made up on the spot for the occasion. Those still conscious raised an unholy ruckus howling out the new words, “In Dixie Land we’ll take their land and make them die in Dixie! Took away, took away, took away Dixie Land!”
“Forget it, Cathy,” Solomon said, and I took note of the fact that he’d called me by my name. Twice. I smiled at him, and set on putting pain aside for that night, I even joined in shout-singing, “Took away! Took away! Took away Dixie Land!” Determined not to let Gator Mouth spoil our fun, I grabbed Solomon’s arm and jostled him in a kidding, maybe even a flirty type way, until he opened his mouth and added what turned out to be a right agreeable baritone. When he sang out “… and make them die in Dixie!” the third time, he was grinning big and both the business back in the woods and Gator Mouth had been forgotten.
A whiskey vendor came our way with a jug and a tin cup. Solomon handed over a few pennies from a pocket inside his vest and bought us each a blast. The man waited impatiently for me to slug down the stiffener so that Solomon could take his turn with the man’s single cup. It was the first strong drink ever passed my lips and I liked it fine. It had a pacifying effect that
calmed me the way hearing Scriptures does some folk.
Just to be ornery and aggravate the white vendor, Solomon was taking dainty sips out of the man’s cup, pretending to savor the rotgut while the vendor told him to step it up since a passel of thirsty guzzlers were waiting.
I’d never worn a corset, though I was acquainted with that instrument of torture from helping Old Miss get harnessed up. Still, I felt like I’d been laced into one my whole life and that my first cup of joy juice had caused all the stays to bust loose, letting me breathe freer than I maybe ever had. Feeling all let out, I rested the yagger in a safe, dark spot, and asked Solomon straight-out, “You plan on inviting a young lady to dance?”
Instant I issued my invitation, Solomon slugged down his jolt, tossed the cup somewhere in the vicinity of the vendor, and raised his arms into dance position perfect as a gentleman at a cotillion. I stepped right into them and, for the first time since I was pulled away from Mama and Clemmie, I felt like I had a partner.
Solomon held our hands out so that they made a prow to cut through the ocean of people. I was feeling as though we were about to launch on what I’d begun to suspect would be a long journey, one that might last the rest of our lives, when a heavy hand clamped onto my shoulder, jerked me around, and I came face-to-face with Dupree.
Chapter 23
Beneath Dupree’s coonskin cap was a pinched, weasely face even more starved out and pie-eyed up close than it had been from a distance.
“Whar’s my rifle?” he demanded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I knowed you took my yagger. We had us a lookout posted what seen you make off with my weapon. I was occupied or would of come after you directly. So give it over fore you find out what happens to a nigger wench steals off of Hiram T. Dupree.”