Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  Suddenly the butter churn went still, and around the corner came Creolia, like she could see with her back turned. Thin and brown, she wore a patchwork dress she had made of scraps, blue gingham, pink linen, and green plaid arranged like a quilt, her gray hair tied in a rag. Her wide face seemed playful till you saw the mouth, locked tight with lips so hard they looked scarred, as if from holding back words. Creolia had been a gift to my mother when they were both three, but my mother had freed her and her children years ago, and she now paid Creolia the queenly sum of $10 a month. Creolia had wet-nursed my brothers and me while she raised her son and daughter in the back apartment of the house, and she had been patient with us all. Once I caught her boy riding my hobbyhorse, shoved him off, and broke his nose. She had not punished me but led me to the bed, where he lay sobbing with a bloody rag against his face, so that I could see the damage done.

  Now she strode to the pony, took hold of the reins, and examined Mr. Bailey with bright eyes. She knew someone had been ill in the attic, but we told her it might be typhoid and she should not go up there. “What you think you fixing to do this time?”

  Mr. Bailey sat up straight on the cart seat and touched the brim of my father’s hat. “Miss Cairnes has offered me a ride, to help me on my way back home.”

  Creolia slowly smiled and went on with an air of geniality, as if to draw him out and find out who he was. “No stopping this one if she set her mind. If she say she gone move the barn, you best make sure you not in the way. Stu-u-u-u-born, yessir, she is.”

  I ignored her and got into the cart. People said things like that about me, as if I were some kind of mule or bolting horse, “willful,” “headlong,” and “heedless” being three other words I often heard about myself. In my mother’s version, I had scared off all eligible men, my chances shot now as an old maid of twenty-four. In a family of plump, fair, placid girls, I had somehow grown up skinny, scrappy, and quick, an incurable tomboy. I had dark eyes and hair, and my skin tanned so fast, some said a Cherokee was hidden in the family tree, or a sailor from the Spanish armada wrecked off the coast of Scotland in 1588. At a clan reunion when I was three, to which cousins rode from as far as Ohio, my father had felt the need to hang a sign around my neck reading, 100-PROOF SCOTCH. Even after I’d grown into a woman, long past futility, my mother wanted me to live in hats and lay cucumber strips across my cheeks to bleach the brown, though that never worked.

  Creolia’s eyes shifted to me and lit up as if at the thought of my mother’s frustration.

  “Where your hat at, Missy?”

  “Never mind.” I had on the same old work dress I had worn since dawn to milk and collect eggs, no hoops or bonnet, and that would have to do. Slapping the reins across the pony’s back, I drove it down the stony lane, wood wheels chattering our teeth.

  “You gone get the cucumbers,” Creolia called gleefully.

  I did not look back, and soon we rolled between two pastures filled with itchy grass, a smell of wet dirt from last night’s rain. The lane was long, rising and dipping almost half a mile, fields on both sides that had once grown hay and wheat, worked by slaves and then freedmen. But no men worked here now, and the fields lay choked with milkweed and berry vines.

  I felt Mr. Bailey turn to look at me, so close that I smelled my father’s lavender shaving soap. “Miss Cairnes,” he began and sighed. “If you only knew how dear—”

  “Look! There’s a foxhole.” I pointed to a bank beside the road, a dark hole just visible under blackberry vines. There had been a fox in there long ago, though if one was there recently, some army would have shot it by this time, and “foxhole” had a different meaning now.

  Briskly I went on. “Now, Mr. Bailey, if those legs hurt you, boil some potato peels and soak them in the potato water, hot as you can stand. Is there someone who can do that for you?”

  I was so relieved to have avoided him, I did not hear what he said next. I had a feeling underneath my ribs as though I were a paper lantern with a candle lit inside that burned me even as it lifted me into the air. Oh, not for Mr. Bailey, no. I knew who it was for. I slapped the reins again, although the pony was already trotting at top speed, past woods where trees stood bare as skeletons with only a faint haze of yellow green.

  It had been a day like this, three years ago, and like now, it had smelled of just-thawed ground, when I had walked with cousins in the woods until we found a deep pool in a creek and an ancient apple orchard next to it, where bluebells tinged the air.

  We had sung all the songs we knew and teased each other as we walked, refusing to talk about the war—though my cousins had brought along two brothers, sons of an Abolitionist rumored to have helped slaves escape across the line into the North. I had assumed they would be stiff, unpleasant young men like my second-oldest brother, who was a minister up north in Pennsylvania and a stern Abolitionist. Our parents’ oldest had been born a deaf-mute, and our reverend brother maintained it was God’s punishment on them for having once owned slaves.

  But these young men were not like anyone I knew. All my life I had been surrounded by my family, where half the men were baptized George and therefore called by their middle names, and half the weddings were between first cousins, so we were all related to each other in several ways. Imagine if your mother’s sister married your father’s brother, and your father’s sister married your mother’s uncle, whose first wife had been your father’s aunt, and each union produced eight children, who set to courting each other at once. All this had been going on for generations, the family tangled in a snarl. Names repeated so often, sometimes a Jane Hope Bay married a John Hope Bay and didn’t need to change her name at all.

  But I was not related to these brothers, and it was exhilarating just to look at them. The younger of the two, Nicholas McComas, was a handsome fellow with black curly hair and clear gray eyes, lashes drooped across them as if to screen his thoughts. He seemed to carry a repose with him, alert in stillness like a deer pausing to stare at you, hoping to be invisible, but still drawn to you. My cousins had said he lived at home and helped his father feed a family of daughters on a farm that was not large. They said he had read everything (“even the dictionary!”) and would keep his nose inside a book through parties, picnics, even church, making clear where he would rather be.

  But instead of looking haughty and earnest, he was gently playful, ready to take delight in anything, wildflowers and baby squirrels that clung to a tree trunk. He had a good tenor voice, though he used it modestly, not forcing anyone to hear, and even when we ran out of good songs and had to resort to “Sing a song of sixpence, pocket full of rye” and “Hush-a-bye, baby, in the treetop,” he would lead the descant willingly. I had given him as many chances as a man could need to walk with one of my cousins instead, but he had stayed beside me all that afternoon as if attached by a new kind of gravity, unbroken by trees or rocks or people in the way. We talked of books, Hamlet, the Bible, Paradise Lost. I had read most everything he mentioned, and he seemed to like that fact.

  My cousins cut out photos of the Rebel heroes, mourned “Old Blue Light” Stonewall Jackson and the gallant John Pelham, dead at twenty-three. Among the living they could not decide who was more handsome, fearless Jeb Stuart or boyish Henry Kyd Douglas, hero of Gettysburg, who in his photo had his eyes fixed heavenward, filled with sorrow, murder, hate. But after I met Nick, I cut no pictures from the newspapers.

  I had seen him only once since then, one wintry afternoon when his brother married my first cousin in the parlor of her parents’ house. I stood beside her and held her flowers when it came time for the ring, and Nick stood by his brother, both in blue uniforms. I knew his brother had enlisted with the Federals, but I liked to think that Nick would not join either side, as I certainly would not have if I were a man. It was true, he had joined not the army but a local militia, formed to keep order in the absence of so many men, though they sided with the Federals. Militias invented their own uniforms, and some wore gaudy braid, gold buttons an
d gloves, eagle-headed spurs and swords, wide hats with flowing peacock plumes. Nick’s at least was subdued, almost Quakerish, the buttons blue, no sword.

  But whatever their uniforms were like, we had learned to dread all men in blue. When they stopped by the farm, they might make off with chickens, eggs, cows, pigs, sacks of grain, barrels of beans, bacon, blankets, lumber, buggies, and even horses, including my own chestnut mare, Fancy, and leave us nothing but some worthless paper promises. They eyed me and my mother as if we were fat hens on the chopping block, and they let us know they had the right to take us into custody if we overstepped their martial law—as they had done around the county already, seizing Rebel flags and arresting farmers and their wives if they so much as breathed a word of Southern sympathy. If Nick had become a man like that, I did not want to speak to him.

  “Cousin,” he said, turning to me when the vows were done. “Kissing cousin?” he asked as if it were a solemn matter, a grave smile extending to his eyes.

  My face flushed hot, giving me away, and mortified, I could only murmur a polite few words, pick my skirt up off the floor, and walk away.

  “MR. BAILEY,” I SAID as we swayed to the clop-clop of the pony’s hooves, “there are unfriendly militias everywhere. You have to say you were a Federal or that a farming accident took your legs. Can you do that?”

  The black pupils in his eyes swelled round, almost crowding out the blue, as if to let me see into his soul. “That would be right hard. The Confederacy will never surrender. We’ll dig into the woods like partridges and rabbits and go on till we wear them down.”

  I wanted to shake him. “The Confederacy has already surrendered, and the army has collapsed. What if you meet Sherman on your way? He hasn’t signed the truce.”

  Sherman’s concept of war was to kill anyone with Southern sympathies, down to the children in the yards, burn crops and trees, and salt the land so nothing could be built or grow again. “Every home a nest of vipers,” as he liked to say.

  “You must promise me you’ll tell anyone who asks that you have been visiting a loyal Federalist family who sent five boys with the First Maryland. That much is true at least. You mention Bob and Billy Cairnes and Will and Archie and Henderson Kirkwood. Most of them are in the ground, but someone might have heard their names.”

  He sighed. “If I do, it will be only because you ask, Miss Cairnes. And I will always—”

  “No! Don’t mention that again. Think of your mother down there waiting for you. You go home and take care of her.” Though what I meant by that I was not sure—chop wood? Plow fields, with both legs gone?

  At last the stand of sassafras appeared where the rougher mill road branched off toward the neighbor’s farm. But as I prepared to make the turn, the pony stopped and snapped its head up as a soldier in blue uniform stepped from the woods. He might have been from some detachment of the military government, but something was wrong with how he looked. He was too dark, too dark overall—it was his skin, covered with road dust but not tanned merely from marching in the sun. He was African. But what was he doing in Federal uniform and boots?

  “What in the name of . . .” Mr. Bailey murmured.

  The soldier fixed his eyes on mine, squinting in the yellow light. “Missy,” he said.

  I knew the voice. It was Creolia’s son, Tim, taller than when I saw him last but with his nose still bent where I had broken it. He had grown up to be good with horses and had trained the ones we rode, including my mare, Fancy.

  Scrambling from the cart, I took hold of his scratchy blue wool sleeve, half shaking him. “Where have you been? How were we supposed to manage without you?”

  The outrage I felt was out of all proportion—my mother had freed Tim and his sister at the same time as Creolia. But what about loyalty? What about helping the family that had housed and fed him all his life, with the barn and field hands gone, my father dead, and Richard usually far from home, doing God knew what?

  Tim opened his eyes wide and let me shake him, though he was now much taller than I was, tall and thin. He seemed not to notice what I said.

  “Missy, Mr. Lincoln been shot dead just yesternight. Some crazy man shot him in the back of his head and jumped down on the stage and broke his leg and blood was everywhere. He’s gone. Oh, Lord, he’s gone.”

  I gaped at the wildness of the tale. Hadn’t it swept the county several times before, that someone had shot Lincoln, burned the White House down? It was never true. It was like the stories Richard used to make up when we were children, about bands of Gypsies kidnapping and eating children or runaway slaves killing for a pound of bacon. He liked to act out stories from the Wild West in the barn, with Indians who wanted to stake your tongue to the ground. Tim had to play the Injun every time—or the Gypsy or the runaway slave—while I pretended to keep house and Richard saved me from him.

  “That’s just a wild rumor,” I said impatiently.

  “Ain’t no rumor,” Tim said, low and intense, and went almost pale.

  But now he stared past me up the road and took hold of the harness as the pony started to dance. This was the Tim I knew, with one long hand on the pony’s nose, a soft word in its ear as he led the cart into the stand of sassafras.

  “Mind, missy.” He nodded in the direction he had looked, and I felt a rumble in the ground.

  A company of cavalry came at the gallop, flooding the road with blue, and I stepped out of its way before it passed, thundering, clinking, churning up dust. In between two trees with the pony cart and Tim, I felt my stomach drop. Could the one on the gray Thoroughbred be Nick?

  A moment later he rode back, a heavy holster flapping at his hip, his face gaunt, the skin around his eyes gone cracked. My vision of him shone and wavered in the sun.

  He regarded me with his pale eyes, while the dappled gray chewed on its bit with a knocking like glass marbles. “Miss Cairnes, are you in need of aid?”

  “Not in the least, Mr. McComas. Please rejoin your company.”

  He glanced over Tim and Mr. Bailey. “Are you acquainted with these men?”

  “All my life,” I said defiantly, though it was true only of Tim. To prove it I laid one hand on his scratchy blue sleeve the way I might have done with a white gentleman.

  Hackles rose almost visibly on Nick. “Soldier, where’s your company?”

  Tim straightened tall. “Discharge, sir.”

  “Do you have papers?”

  “He’s our Creolia’s Tim,” I said quickly. “Born on our farm. He doesn’t have to show you anything.”

  Tim undid two buttons of his jacket, withdrew some folded sheets, and handed them to Nick. I felt the urge to demand to see Nick’s papers, to hold them in my hand. Did he carry them next to his heart? He was a grown man, at least thirty now. His chest would not be smooth and hairless like young Mr. Bailey’s.

  With a great creak of leather, Nick swung down and gave the papers back. On the ground he was not so tall as Tim, and he seemed to sag, exhaustion emanating from him like the smell of dust. He regarded me under his drooping lids.

  “Forgive me. This is not a day on which it seems possible to trust anyone.”

  And he proceeded to tell the same story Tim had told me, adding details: the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, a play, the shot, and the assassin’s leap onto the stage, the broken leg, and Mr. Lincoln dead. Tim joined in, and they both talked as fast as possible.

  “John Wilkes Booth—”

  “—he hole up—”

  “—swam to Maryland—”

  “—some swamp—”

  “—we’re going farm to farm—”

  “—if us ever catch him—”

  “—men out everywhere—”

  “—hanging be too good—”

  My head swarmed. Richard knew a Bel Air man named John Wilkes Booth. They were both members of the Harford Rifles, known for blowing up the railroad bridges, and Booth was now a stage actor in Washington. Could it be true that the president was dead, shot in the bac
k of the head, like a pig, on Good Friday? The war would start again, right here, and go on and on till everyone was dead. Blood left my brain as if a stopper had been pulled, and Nick and Tim both reached to catch my arms.

  “Forgive me, Miss Cairnes, for telling you this way—”

  “I done told you already—”

  The thought of Mrs. Lincoln hit me like smelling salts. Already mad with grief over her little boy, she had brothers fighting for the South, and now her husband had been killed by someone just like them—someone just like my own brother. If she could survive that, no one else should faint. My mind cleared.

  “Was Mrs. Lincoln there beside him in the theatre?”

  Nick looked at me and only nodded, his eyes shining.

  “And are you sure it’s true this time?”

  “The wires are full of it.”

  Tears streaked wet and brown down through the dust coating Tim’s cheeks.

  “Lord,” he crooned and rocked back and forth.

  My own eyes ached. “And has the war started again?”

  Nick looked at me as if surprised I understood so much. “There’s new fighting in Virginia, and Washington is bad. There’s been some fighting, and a mob has already strung up a few people this morning, though they probably had nothing to do with it. That’s why we may still need your man, to help us keep the peace and look for Booth.”

  I felt the urge to draw him off, like a lark pretending to have broken wings to hide its nest. Not only for Mr. Bailey’s sake, but for my brother’s, too—because wherever Booth was, Richard might be as well.

  “Let Tim go home and see his mother. You can find him at our place if you need him.”

  Tim tried to control his trembling lips. “I can help now.”

  Nick looked at him kindly. “It’s all right. Go on home for now.”

  Without another word Tim strode back into the woods, the shortcut to our farm. I climbed in the cart by Mr. Bailey, who stared down where his knees should be, his cheeks dull red. He couldn’t have looked more guilty if he’d shot the president himself.