That is barbaric. That is not civilization.
But is it any less barbaric, or civilized, to allow the lies of one man to condemn another?
This is a Yankee court. Their bias towards you, as Southerners, will color the outcome, this you know.
The War is over, and law is blind.
It should be, but it never is—you are surely astute enough to realize. Law is an abstract concept, and in theory is blind, but men, who are paid to uphold it, are surely not.
I bent forward and braced over my knees, struggling for a solid breath, but there was nothing left in my guts to expel. I knew not what this week, with the arrival of the judge, may bring—I could not hope to predict any potential resolution. There was only one certainty in my mind, and it allowed for me a shred of comfort.
No matter what, I would not go on without Sawyer. I intended no histrionics, nor did I intend exaggeration by making this claim. It simply was. Our paths had been intertwined before what we knew in this life—in other places, other centuries, inextricably braided together, a connection never fully severed, by death or passing time. I understood, however, we were not allowed to find one another in each subsequent life. Here, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we had been given the gift of one another, born within ten years of the other and bestowed with the consent—whether heavenly or otherwise—to meet.
And I refused to allow death to part us so rapidly, not in this life.
“Come, girl,” I murmured to our horse, kissing her face before leading her back towards the homestead with one hand curved beneath her jaw; I was unable to mount without the benefit of the corral fence, and had no halter with which to lead her, but she followed dutifully, towards the lantern light spilling out into the evening.
Charley joined us around the fire this night; he had a room at the hotel, but lingered with us for a time before continuing into Iowa City. I leaned against Malcolm, Rebecca on my other side, and Charley accompanied Boyd, playing his harmonica while Boyd fiddled. Waltzes and reels, songs of our lost homeland, rendered so masterfully that tears glistened in Rebecca’s eyes time and again; I was only privy to this because we sat so near, and reached to briefly curl my hand around hers, thinking of the way she had touched Boyd this morning. He was bowing with eyes closed, as was his usual fashion, overtaken in the music.
But between songs, he sought Rebecca’s gaze.
Above, the moon had vanished from the heavens, allowing stars free reign across an echoing black canvas, stretched taut, pinned to Earth just beyond the edges of our vision. Enmeshed in worry, exhausted, I intermittently experienced the odd feeling that I sat alongside myself, connected by only the thinnest of threads to reality. Tilson’s pipe smoke filled my nostrils. The men had positioned their rifles within reach. Malcolm rested his head on me, and the fiddle dusted our hair with shivering notes.
Sawyer is all right, I told myself, time and again. It is all right.
Of course Sawyer, alone in the dark jailhouse, could sense my restive thoughts, try as I might to prevent him further distress; but he felt the unpolished edge of fear that cut into my heart, and sought at once to reassure me.
I am here, darlin’, I am safe, he thought, and I relented, allowing him welcome access, closing my eyes to better allow the picture he, too, was envisioning, that of him aligning our bodies so that I was protected, enfolded in his love. He parted my lips with his, claiming full possession of my mouth, his fingers lacing together low on my back; here, at the fire, I wrapped carefully into my own arms, letting Sawyer flood my mind with other pictures, his golden hair loose and his eyes fierce with passion, my body rigid with the aching need to join with his—to feel him held deeply inside, letting me believe for those consecrated moments in time that we could never be forced apart.
On and on the music played. My physical presence remained here at the fire, while my soul flew with wild joy to Sawyer’s, together becoming one entity under the new moon on this July night, in the year of 1868.
* * *
The menfolk sat up long past the time that Rebecca, Malcolm, the little boys and I retired. Malcolm tucked in with Cort and Nathaniel in the loft, while Rebecca insisted that I share her bed, and we lay together in the dimness, hearing the comforting rise and fall of the men speaking together at the fire. The scent of tobacco drifted inside, ghost-like.
Rebecca and I whispered our good-nights, and enough time had passed that I believed her to be asleep; I lay inches away beneath the quilt, exhausted and yet alert, my heart taking up periodic bouts of thunderous beating, which frightened me, though it had happened time and again when I lived at Ginny’s—my anxieties taking on physical form, manifesting as a rapid heart. I tried to draw a steadying breath and it was then that I became aware that Rebecca was weeping. She made not a sound, hardly a movement to indicate, but I knew.
Without a word, only because it felt as natural as reaching for a sister, I slid my left arm over her waist and cuddled closer. It was the fashion in which Deirdre had always held me, offering comfort with her touch, her murmured assurances, until I calmed. Rebecca heaved a painful breath and caught close my hand, curling both of hers around it; I could feel her trembling.
“What is it?” I whispered, letting the warmth of her comfort me, in return.
“Lor…” her breath hitched and broke apart my name. She drew a breath and managed, “I am so…sorry…to wake you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” I whispered.
“I feel so…selfish,” she gasped out.
“You are anything but selfish,” I reprimanded in a whisper.
“I am selfish, crying for myself,” Rebecca explained at last, in a hushed and broken voice.
“What do you mean?” I whispered, though I knew.
“I loved Elijah so,” she whispered, half-moaning the words, as another sob shuddered over her. She bent her head before continuing, “I am a widow, a mother, and I have less than no right to feel possessive of any of you. I know your journey is only just beginning, and that mine is stationary, here in this place. But I shall not deny, the full extent of my loneliness has struck me so forcefully since all of you arrived…”
Squeezing tighter her hands, I whispered, “You have every right to your feelings. I hate to think of you being lonely.”
She sighed, releasing a soft breath, and whispered, “I have felt a closeness with you since the day we met. Around all of you, I almost dare to feel like a young girl again.” The sound of Boyd’s laugh, low and fleeting though it was, reached our ears where we lay curled together. So softly I could barely discern her words, she said, “I was so frightened this morning.” She shivered, violently, before whispering, “I love hearing him play his fiddle. He is very talented, and so…engulfed in the music. It is a joy to simply watch him.” She paused and I could almost feel the increase in her pulse. She whispered fervently, “But please, speak not of such things to anyone. Please. I shall never mention them again. I have behaved very foolishly.”
“That is not so,” I insisted, rolling to one elbow. In the dimness, Rebecca’s face was a pale blur, her hair a dark spill over the pillow. At Ginny’s, Deirdre had been the only person with whom I had spoken freely; I wished for a similar honesty to exist among Rebecca and myself, and whispered, “There is something between you and Boyd, and I know you realize this. You have not behaved foolishly.”
Her words hinging on a sob, she contradicted, “But I have. Leverett intends to marry me, eventually, and I care for Leverett, I truly do. He is a good man, earnest, and willing to accept the charge of my boys, along with me.” She did not sigh, but I heard the desolation hiding in her words, regardless. She whispered, “I must accept this, and besides, I could never leave this place. I could not venture north and bring my children into unknown country.”
Tears prickled my eyes, blurring the outline of her. I whispered, “I care for you. I do not want to leave you behind.”
Rebecca whispered, “I care for you, as well, and I shall do
whatever I am able to support you, when you go before the judge. I’ll demand that Leverett do the same. I believe we have a fighting chance against this marshal, this Yancy.”
“I pray it,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Oh God, Rebecca, I pray it.”
“I shall see you in the morning,” she whispered. “Please do rest, dear, your eyes were red with weeping when you returned from your ride. Rest. We are safe indoors.”
I nodded my acquiescence, whispering to reassure her, “I intend to sleep until morning.”
But it was not to be on this night.
* * *
The road beneath my bare feet was familiar, though I had never stood shoeless upon its surface; in fact, rarely had I ever set more than my eyes on it—and then usually from the second-floor balcony where I had spent years of my life, walking each evening as the sun died and bright stars were pinned with eager fingers to the darkening heaven. In my whore’s costumes I had paraded that balcony in a nightly attempt to attract more customers, and therefore more gold, to Ginny Hossiter’s establishment. Music tinkled from between the batwing doors I had once known well, the ones leading into the prison of her whorehouse. People were milling about the boardwalks, talking and paying little mind to me; when two men carrying a large, ornately-bordered mirror between them passed near, I caught a glimpse of my reflection.
My eyes had been made unfamiliar, enlarged and outlined with the thick black smudge of a kohl stick, my lips redder than warm blood, cheeks decorated with perfectly-round spots of fuchsia rouge. My hair hung loose and my breasts were lifted outrageously high by the pinching of a black satin corset, my waist likewise cinched and ludicrously diminutive, as if I was nothing more than a caricature of a prostitute, drawn in ink by the mocking hand of an Eastern cartoonist peddling pulp novels. Twin straps of black dangled down my thighs, but there were no stockings attached to these garters, and I was in fact naked from navel downward, with no additional garments to cover my lower regions.
Before I could react bodily to the heated shame at this recognition, rough hands clutched my waist from behind, thrusting me to my knees upon the dirt of the road. The mirror was positioned directly in front of me now, the evening sky appearing in its smooth glass surface at a cockeyed angle, stars flaring into view and then away. The man behind me was faceless and savage, brutally penetrating my flesh—and try as I may, I could not look away from the vicious scene. My body twisted and writhed to escape his assault; I heard the raw screams issued, but another part of me, my spirit perhaps, remained oddly still and silent, observing from a brief distance.
A woman whispered in my ear, and somehow I could hear her words despite my cries and desperate pleas, the animal grunting of my attacker.
They used your body, Lorie, but not you.
You must understand this difference.
They used you, but they cannot destroy you, do you understand?
The stars twirled and pitched in the reflected surface of the mirror, as a child’s rotating toy, distorting my awareness. I was both within and without my physical form. The woman whispering so urgently to me possessed eyes of a very vivid blue.
Do you understand?
I understand, I whispered at last.
You must go on.
You must, no matter what, Lorie.
You must.
A horror beyond even the violence of the rape seeped coldly into me. I did not comprehend just exactly what she meant, but I knew suddenly that I could not agree. I would not agree.
No, I said. No. Leave me. Leave me!
The crow glided into view, large and gorgeously black, supple and lissome as a catamount, a predator that had never known a day’s hunger. It landed elegantly atop the golden gilt of the mirror’s frame, and suddenly there was nothing besides it—and me. The landscape receded and faded to gray featurelessness, but in the mirror, red light suddenly leaped and grew, monstrous and demonic, consuming everything in its path.
I ran to the water pump in the side yard at Ginny’s, where I had once spent the days of my monthly bleeding hanging laundry, and cranked fiercely upon the handle, filling a heavy bucket, stumbling over the ash-covered ground in my haste to douse the fire. I threw the water upon the flames with all of my strength, but the liquid struck nothing more than the flat surface of the mirror, scattering in droplets, utterly ineffective.
The fire burned higher.
- 26 -
I was not simply seeking to reassure Lorie when I said that there were plenty worse places I had slept, as a soldier. Many a night during the War had I spent the long hours of darkness entrenched in dampness, or outright mud, hollow with fear and loss, hunger and fatigue, wrapped in nothing more than my army-issued coat; after time, that had grown threadbare and pitiful. We were lucky to come across occasional Companies with whom we could trade—though it was anyone’s guess which was the better trade, that for food, or warmer garments. By War’s end, I felt less human than an old dog, flea-bitten and ragged, chiseled away to bones, each rib prominent. A skinny bag of innards held together by little more than the dream of returning to Cumberland County, and the family I believed there, waiting for me.
And yet tonight, lying here on the lumpy, unwashed cot upon which many another prisoner had rested his sorry self, I truly felt as though no place could be worse; now that I had found Lorie, nothing hurt as desperately as our physical separation. A part of what kept me sane during my time as a soldier had been my dream of finding her—the woman meant for me, and to whom I would equally belong, a belief to which I clung with stubborn determination since one early morning in the summer of my twelfth year, when I returned to the haunted cave in the Bledsoe holler to retrieve my lost boot. Upon arriving at the mouth of the cave in the silvering light of dawn, I found my boot, which the night previous had been wedged between two rocks, now unstuck and waiting patiently as a pup for its master.
This had been strange enough, sending a chill along my young spine—I was not nearly as brave as I pretended to be, in front of Boyd and our brothers—but I had reached for it gamely enough, the thoughts of fey creatures from Mama’s stories in the forefront of my mind. As my fingers closed around the familiar old leather, a voice deep within the cave had told me two words. The angel, I heard. And from that moment forth there had arisen in my soul the need to find her, my angel, the woman meant for me.
Boyd and Ethan laughed themselves sick when I informed them of this truth, later that same morning.
“You’s crazy as a jaybird,” Boyd had said. “Ain’t no voices in caves, ’less you’s hearing things that other folks ain’t.”
“I’ll tell you who’s an angel, is that Helen Sue Gottlender,” had been my brother’s contribution, once his laughter died away. He continued, with an air of reverence, “You think her legs are as fair an’ freckled as her arms? I aim to find out.”
And Ethan had, by his and her sixteenth summer.
I turned to my other side, alone after the two men in the adjacent cell had been released earlier in the evening. There was no moon this night, and the jailhouse was dark as a tomb, but my thoughts were elsewhere, far away back home, and I allowed the memories of my old life momentary sway in my thoughts, a faint amusement tugging at me as I remembered my brother and his never-ending accounts; he had inherited Mama’s gift for storytelling.
As eldest, I felt it should have been me earning the right to tell such tales of girls and the softness of their limbs, and yet Ethan had been the bold one in those days, always knowing just the right words to draw forth giggles and blushes in the local girls. I had been jealous and Jeremiah simply in awe, as he was far too painfully shy to be within a country mile of any girl not related to us, unless forced, as he was at school. The three of us shared a room, Eth and Jere a bed, and many a night had we crowded near Ethan as he related his exploits in hushed, excited whispers.
“I tell you, her daddy would skin me alive,” I heard Ethan say, and if I closed my eyes I could plainly see his face in the moon-spill ent
ering into our bedroom that long ago summer night. He insisted, “I tell you, we was kissing, an’ she weren’t wearing a thing beneath all them layers of skirts, an’ her legs sorta opened up, an’ she sorta lifted up, as if she wanted me to keep going.” He paused purposely at this critical juncture in the story, grinning impishly. Ethan dearly relished being able to hold our rapt attention.
Jere, effectively bated, whispered breathlessly, “Then what?”
I had scoffed, restacking both hands beneath my head and directing my gaze at the wooden beams of the ceiling. I muttered irritably, “She did not.”
Undaunted, Ethan said, “Shows how much you know, Sawyer. She did. An’ then, sweet Jesus, I felt right between her legs. It was so soft, an’ wet…an’ she made a sweet little sound that I swear I want to hear every night for the rest of my livin’ life…”
Jere interrupted to dutifully inform, “Reverend Wheeler would say it’s a sin, Eth.”
Ethan snorted a laugh and replied confidently, “It ain’t no sin, deartháir beag. Nothing so precious could be sinful. If it is, curse me straight to the devil!”
Now, many years after the fact, I held close my brothers in my mind—Ethan and Jeremiah, the three of us inseparable, right to the horrific end. As I had so many times since returning from War, I thought, Forgive me for not taking better care of you. I know we were grown men when we left home, but I was eldest. I intended to keep you safe, mo dheartháireacha daor, and I did not. Forgive me.
Boyd had known Ethan and Jere nearly as well as I, and loved them as I had loved Beau and Grafton Carter as my own kin. Malcolm was too little to share the same depth of memories, only seven years when we left the holler in November of 1862. Of course, our plan was to drive out the Yankee invaders and return home victorious, no later than the eve of the New Year. The worst kind of foolishness, and blind pride, and it had killed everyone but Boyd and me, and little Malcolm. I understood I could hardly assign myself blame for the fevers that had taken a third of Suttonville the final winter of the War, a population weakened considerably by loss and starvation, a toll exacted upon those we were fighting for, left behind with little word, and even less food.
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