Southern Son

by Victoria Wilcox

  But there was one last thing that Francisco would have wanted that wasn’t so easy to accomplish. Francisco had asked him to watch over his children, to make sure they were not left orphaned as he had been, and John Henry had promised that he would. He had made the promise lightly, not understanding until later how Francisco had suffered as a child and how much he wanted to save his children from the same suffering. But lightly made or not, a promise was a promise, and he was bound to keep it. And now that he saw the state into which Francisco’s death had flung his family—husbandless, fatherless, close to hopeless—he knew he had to do whatever he could to help. But how? He was too far away, living in Atlanta, to make more than occasional visits, and even so, all the traveling back and forth was wearing him out. There was no other choice but to leave his Uncle John’s house and move to Griffin where he could practice dentistry, yet be a reasonable ride away from Francisco’s family in Jenkinsburg should they need him.

  Of course, moving would mean leaving Mattie behind, but in her state of mourning, being near her was almost harder than being without her. Living down the hall from her, spending his nights so close without being able to be closer, was tormenting. Moving away for a while was clearly the right thing to do, but funding such a move would be a problem. His monthly rents from the Iron Front Building would only be enough to pay for a boarding house room, not to purchase the dental equipment he would need to outfit an office. But the Iron Front could yield enough for all that and more—if he sold it.

  He was chilled already from hours of walking through downtown Griffin in the icy January afternoon, and with the thin light fading into dusk, he was only going to get colder. A drink would help to warm him some and bolster his courage enough for what he knew he had to do, and there was one place where he could probably find a drink and sell his property, too. But before he pushed open the door to N.G. Phillips’ liquor store, he stood back to take a final look at his inheritance. It was a fine house, the Iron Front Building, red brick all around and solidly built to last a lifetime. With care, it would still be standing in a hundred years, long windows looking out onto Solomon Street. But at least with his inheritance property turned into cash money, the gambler Hyram Neil could never come find it. He took a deep breath, coughing on the cold dry air, and stepped into the store.

  “Mr. Phillips,” he said slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the even dimmer light inside. “I’d like to reconsider your offer to buy my building.”

  “Reconsider? Why, Dr. Holliday, I thought you had your heart dead set on holding onto it!”

  “I had my heart dead set on a lot of things. Is your offer still good?”

  “Eighteen-hundred dollars.”

  “Then why don’t you open us up a bottle of that Tennessee and we’ll get down to business.”

  Phillips pulled two glasses from under the sales counter and popped the cork off an amber whiskey bottle. “Mind if I ask what changed your thinkin’?”

  “Mi hermano,” John Henry said, though he knew that Phillips would never understand.

  County Line Baptist Church had been founded just after the start of the War, with Martha and Francisco Hidalgo among the nineteen original members. And though the church had grown some since then, services were still held in the old schoolhouse that was the congregation’s first chapel. The building was set in a grove of pine and sweetgum trees just past the main road of Jenkinsburg, and if it hadn’t been for the rows of gravestones in the churchyard cemetery, the chapel would still look like nothing more than a schoolhouse. But that was fine with the members of the County Line congregation. Church was a school, after all, where God-fearing Christians learned from the Good Book and sinners were taught to repent.

  The funeral was as simple as the little church building in which it was held. The plain wooden coffin stood at the head of the main aisle, unadorned with flowers or even the usual black crape drapings—Francisco’s family had no money for such a show of bereavement. But the family’s mourning was clear enough to see, even without yards of crape and arrangements of funeral flowers. Martha, her face veiled, was surrounded by her six older children all dressed in their most somber clothing and sitting huddled together on the first row of the straight-backed pews. The four boys were solemn-faced, but the girls were weeping out loud, a sound made even more pitiable by baby Nita’s happy cooing. She was just three months old and would never know the father who had worried so over her future.

  But desolate as the family was, they were far from deserted. The little church was full to overflowing with Francisco’s friends and acquaintances from as close by as Jenkinsburg and as far off as Fayetteville. Even Doc Whitehead, the physician from over at Indian Springs, had closed his office for the day to pay his respects. It seemed that, for a poor man, Francisco had been rich in some ways.

  All those mourners must be some consolation to Martha Hidalgo, John Henry thought—but they were no consolation to him. He’d had too much of dying and burying in the past few weeks, and even Pastor Kimbell’s hopeful obsequies couldn’t lift his own mournful spirits.

  “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,” the pastor quoted as he read from the Holy Book, “they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint. . . ”

  The familiar cadence of the scripture reminded John Henry of his mother and the way her musical voice had made the ancient words come alive.

  “In the world ye shall have tribulations; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world . . .I am the resurrection, and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live . . .”

  But there was no cheer in the words for John Henry today; his mother was gone, his uncle was gone, and now Francisco was gone, too. And as far as he could see, the resurrection was a long ways off.

  It wasn’t until the funeral service ended and the congregation moved outside for the burial that he saw his father standing solemnly just inside the church door. He shouldn’t have been surprised to see his father there, as he sent the news himself. But he’d never really expected Henry to make the long journey up from Valdosta just to watch Francisco’s remains go into the ground. It was, after all, a three-day’s train ride with the usual stopovers for food and sleep, and Henry would have had to ride straight through to get to Jenkinsburg in time for the funeral. There was no figuring him out, that was for sure. He hadn’t been around to bury Uncle Rob the month before, his own younger brother, but now he appeared out of nowhere for a servant boy he hadn’t seen in years. But there was no avoiding him either, now that he was here, and John Henry made his way to his father’s side.

  “Mornin’, Pa,” he said under his breath as the mourners shuffled past. “I reckon you got my wire.”

  Henry nodded. “I had some business up in Atlanta, and figured I’d stop by to pay my respects.”

  John Henry didn’t comment on the fact that his father’s business seemed surprisingly convenient, demanding his arrival in North Georgia just when Francisco was being eulogized. But then, irony was not one of Henry’s strong points.

  “And how did you happen to be around to send the wire, anyhow?” Henry asked.

  “Martha sent me word that Francisco was dyin’. Helpin’ out with the funeral seemed to be about all I could do. She’s had her hands full with that new baby of theirs.”

  “Fool thing to do, bringing a new baby into the world, sick as he was,” Henry commented.

  “I reckon they were thinkin’ more of life than death,” John Henry replied, remembering Francisco’s hope for a miracle .

  “Well, they should have been thinkin’ about who’d be needin’ food and shelter when Francisco passed. I don’t suppose those boys of his are big enough yet to run a farm alone. Rueben’s not sixteen yet, and he’s the oldest. And little Finney’s only six, for hell’s sake.”

  It wasn’t his father’s language that surprised John Henry, even within the sacred walls of the church house, but the fact that he
knew the ages of Francisco’s children. Who would have thought that Henry would even remember their names?

  “Martha’s figurin’ on hirin’ some help until the boys get bigger,” John Henry said. “But it’s not all that much of a farm, anyhow.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, he discovered too late.

  “And what makes you a judge of a man’s farm, John Henry?” his father said in an angry whisper.

  “I was just makin’ an observation . . .”

  “Francisco had two-hundred acres on that place, all turned over by himself and those boys. Slave work, in the old days, but they done it. And likely more work than you’ll ever know.”

  And all at once, John Henry felt like a child again trying to please his hero-father. “I know farm work, Pa,” he said, defending himself. “I grew up at Cat Creek, remember? And I worked in the Pecan orchard, too, before comin’ up here.”

  But Henry turned steel-blue eyes on him, and said coolly:

  “I remember workin’ the farm while you practiced your piano lessons. And as I recall, you only spent a couple of weekends in the orchard before you took a sudden notion to make a visit to Atlanta. I don’t believe you ever worked hard enough in your whole life to wear a callus on your hand, John Henry.”

  He couldn’t have been more hurt if Henry had slapped him across the face, humiliation and pain altogether. Try as he might, he was never good enough for his father. But he wasn’t a child any longer and he couldn’t let Henry see the anguish his words had caused.

  “No, Pa, I don’t believe I ever have. But that doesn’t mean I don’t work hard, anyhow. Why, there’s been days I’ve left Dr. Ford’s office so tired I can hardly walk home . . .”

  “Your home, John Henry, is in Valdosta. But that is another matter. Right now, I’ve got a boy to bury.”

  And as his father turned on his boot heel and walked out into the graveyard, John Henry watched him in stunned silence. For there was such an unexpected sadness in Henry’s words that instead of calling Francisco “boy,” he might as well have called him “son.”

  In the little graveyard next to the church, the mourners were already gathered around the open chasm of Francisco’s waiting grave. The formal religious service was over and all that remained were the singing of a final hymn and the last prayer before the red dirt was shoveled over the lowered coffin. The placing of a proper gravestone would come later. For now, the only grave marker would be the new mound of freshly turned red Georgia clay.

  Tara, John Henry thought, remembering Sarah Fitzgerald’s fanciful words. This, too, was Tara, except that Francisco was Mexican, not Irish, and this was no consecrated Catholic plot. But Francisco had loved the Georgia soil that was soon to be his final home, and maybe that was enough to make this a Tara for him.

  Then the hymn singing began and John Henry’s thoughts turned sharply from Irish legends. The song was so familiar that he could almost sing the words from memory.

  “Abide with me: fast falls the eventide;

  The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide!

  When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,

  Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”

  He had sung that song in church services when he was just a boy, sitting restless by his mother at the old Presbyterian Church in Griffin. But there was something more than restlessness in his memory of it, something more like sadness and shame mixed together . . .

  And then he remembered when he’d last heard that song. It was on the long road from Fayetteville to Griffin, riding home from his Grandpa Holliday’s funeral, as his mother sang and he sat in the back of the wagon, holding the heavy knowledge that he knew she was going to die.

  “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;

  Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

  Change and decay in all around I see;

  O Thou, who changest not, abide with me . . .”

  He looked up at his father, standing beside Martha Hidalgo at the head of the grave, and had a sudden longing to reach out to him, to put aside the pain of the past and somehow grab ahold of the childhood he had lost. He sniffed back a surprise of unmanly tears, took two steps toward Henry, put out a hand to touch his father’s shoulder . . .

  Then Henry’s words made him freeze in his tracks.

  “There’s an inheritance, Martha,” Henry was saying. “It came from his mother’s folks, a business house over in Griffin. I’ll see what I can do about having him deed it over to you, for the children. He won’t be needin’ it. He’s got a position waitin’ for him back in Valdosta, and God knows he’s got no sense for handling property. I should have arranged for it to go to Francisco years ago. He’d have appreciated it more than John Henry ever will. He was a good boy, Francisco. He was always a good boy . . .”

  Then Henry stopped to clear his throat and wipe something from his eye, and Martha smiled and nodded.

  “I know, Major, I know. And Francisco always did love you, too. He always thought of you as a father.”

  Henry cleared his throat again and said in a voice hardly audible: “Well, I’d have been proud to have had a son like him . . .”

  John Henry drew a quick hard breath of the cold January air, barely noticing the pain as it filled his aching lungs. There was a bigger ache inside of him, buried deep in his chest, where his heart felt like it was breaking.

  “Your father loves you,” his mother had said, “more than he even knows . . .”

  But he’d loved Francisco more.

  Chapter Seventeen

  GRIFFIN, 1873

  HE’D EXPECTED CURSING WHEN HE TOLD HIS FATHER ABOUT SELLING off his inheritance and he got plenty of it, even though there was nothing Henry’s chastisement could do to change things. The Iron Front building was sold and gone and Mr. Phillips had no intention of giving it back. What he hadn’t expected was his father’s grudging approval of his plan to open a dental practice in Griffin where he could keep himself close to Francisco’s family. Henry said it was the first grown decision John Henry had ever made, and about time he took responsibility for himself and his career—not a compliment exactly, but better than the criticism he’d been prepared for.

  Mattie, however, was not as happy about his move to Griffin. She would miss him terribly, she said, and made him promise to come back to visit as often as he could. And when she cried at his leaving, John Henry felt a bittersweet mix of emotions—sorry to be causing her any pain, glad to know that she cared about him so. But until she was out of mourning there was nothing much he could do about his feelings, or hers. So he kissed her on the cheek, like a good cousin, and took himself off to Griffin.

  While the money he’d made from selling the Iron Front was no great fortune, it was enough to support him and outfit his office. And since he’d arranged with Mr. Phillips to leave a portion of the upstairs floor of the building available for his own use, his office rent came free. There was some expense in getting the space ready for dentistry, however. He had to hire a carpenter to put up board walls to enclose his corner of the second floor, separating it from the main room where Phillips planned to have his saloon. He had to hire a brick mason to turn the west window of the space into a doorway, with a narrow iron staircase going up from the alleyway beside the building to make a private entrance. But once completed, his little office was more than adequate to his professional needs, with two long windows facing south across Solomon Street to let in sufficient light. When the furnishings were ordered and delivered, he had a respectable dental office, though he still couldn’t afford the expensive equipment he was accustomed to using in Dr. Ford’s office. Instead of the heavy cast-iron dental chair, he had to make do with a headrest attached to a wooden armchair, and his tools were stored in something less than a glass-fronted rosewood cabinet. But he did have enough money left to buy one of the new belt-driven Morrison Dental Engine drills, a box of gold foil and jars of porcelain powder—and even to have his name painted in large black letters on the wi
ndow overlooking Solomon Street, and J.H. Holliday, D.D.S. was in business at last.

  There were several nice boarding houses in Griffin and two first class hotels, but as he had relatives who owned property in town, he didn’t have to spend much on his living expenses. His Uncle Tom was part owner of a little cottage on Broad Street, just across from the tracks of the Macon & Western Railroad. The cottage happened to be vacant at the time, so John Henry had the good fortune of getting a house to himself for less than the cost of a boarding house room. Of course, a house didn’t include meals the way a boarding house did, but some of the saloons near the depot had lunch counters so he was able to keep himself fed and watered at the same time and play a few card games as well. But he was careful not to drink or wager too freely in public. He had a reputation to make in Griffin if he expected to build a profitable dental practice.

  As he had promised Francisco, he visited in Jenkinsburg often, spending nearly every Sunday with the Hidalgo family. He’d arrive just after they returned from morning services at County Line Baptist Church, then stay on for dinner and sometimes supper as well. Martha and the children seemed to appreciate his visits, and he enjoyed the rides out from Griffin so much that the obligation actually became pleasant. For though he still refused to consider himself a farm boy and declined to help with the plowing and planting, he was country boy enough to love the freedom of riding across that quiet countryside.

  There was another ride he made often while living there in Griffin, and another promise he had to keep, so when he wasn’t working or visiting with Francisco’s family, he rode out past town to Rest Haven Cemetery, where he pulled the weeds from his sister Martha Eleanora’s grave and made sure her small gravestone was swept clean.

  It was a solitary life he had fallen into, but he found he didn’t mind it all that much. After sharing a room with his cousins in Atlanta, the privacy was refreshing, giving him space to think and breathe again. For much as he enjoyed the excitements of a city, he was discovering that he needed his quiet, too. When he and Mattie married, they might even live away out in the country like the Hidalgos did—though he had no intention of actually farming the land. He should have been born in the plantation days of his Grandfather McKey, when slave labor did the farm work and the master of the house spent his days riding and shooting and making love to his wife.