Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  A twig snapped far below—I held my breath. A limb creaked, and then another closer up.

  Needles began to shiver in the next tree over, and a straw hat appeared, a rusty black jacket under it. But it was a jacket I had lately worn myself, and the hand that reached to grasp a limb was long and brown. Tim pulled himself upright, level with me across a cloud of green.

  “All quiet on the field, cap’n. My, this be a fine fort. I knowed you was up here, long time ago. But I never knowed you was up here still. Your mama know?” He chuckled to himself.

  But I was spluttering, absurdly enraged. “Get down from here. Did you follow me, you spy? Is that what you did in the war, help Yankees spy on people and shoot at them?”

  Tim’s mouth went slack. “Why, scout we call that, missy. I was a scout and a right good one, too. Shot no man at all. No, sir. Buried some, though. Horses, too. That was a right bad job.”

  His lips shut firm, and his face grew solemn as he stared over my head. Something about it made my skin prickle—then I knew what. Somehow he looked like Major Henry Kyd Douglas, eyes fixed on heaven, filled with sorrow, murder, hate.

  I turned back to the view. But now I heard what he had said. Bury horses! It seemed the first real thing I had heard from any man about the war. Did Fancy end up dead and bloated on a battlefield?

  “I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. Oh, Tim, what happened to Fancy?”

  His jaw relaxed. “Don’t know, missy. It was a awful thing what happened to the ponies, what never hurt a worm.” He focused on me, his eyes going red. “When did you get so mean, missy? Everyone so mad now about everything, round this place.”

  My own eyes ached now, too. “Is that true? I don’t want to be.”

  He closed his eyes and massaged the lids. “You never paid no nevermind, old times.”

  It was true. I used to let him follow me—I followed him, in fact. “I know. I’m so sorry you saw horses die. I would give anything to make that not be true. You love horses.”

  My throat closed and I flinched hard, trying not to cry.

  A sudden sound made us alert—a clink of metal, like a stirrup or bridle. I froze, and Tim stared back at me. How loud had we been? We might be caught together in the trees, too soon after Nick had seen me laughing with Tim in the big farm’s lane. The impulse of a moment is the start of every error in the world, some wise minister had said, and it was true—I should have made him climb right down the minute he came up.

  His skin went the color of a creek in rain as he shrank against his tree. I was glad I wore an old skirt, its faded stripes once brown and green. Peering down, I scanned the ground, empty as before, and watched for so long that I thought I had been mistaken. No horse was in these woods.

  Without a sound, the big gray glided into the grove, Nick’s bony body loose in the saddle, his face hidden under a campaign hat. He drew up the horse and, moving light and quick like a man preparing for delight, swung from the saddle and sprang up the rocks. Pulling off his hat, he gazed around with hopeful pale gray eyes—but never tipped his face back far enough. I pressed into the trunk. Could he see my shoes? Could he see Tim’s army boots?

  Minutes crept by as no one moved. For the second time I had to send up silent promises to whatever unseen power might exist that if this could work out all right, I would make sure it never happened again.

  At last he stood, patted the horse’s neck, and swung into the saddle with a leather creak. Padded by the deep needles, the horse’s hooves made little sound as they went away.

  I did not look at Tim. But soon I heard the urgent slipping of his boot soles limb to limb, and in a moment all was quiet in the trees.

  SUMMER TURNED TO AUTUMN, with cooler nights and lingering, warm afternoons. We stripped the garden and boiled steaming pots to put up the last peas and beans. Hogs had to be butchered, nuts gathered, hams smoked, sausages stuffed. Richard and Tim put up a whiskey shed, dug a trench, and diverted the pasture creek for cooling purposes. Soon every breath we took felt alcoholic, stinking of sour mash, like oatmeal and molasses going bad.

  Each morning my mother marshaled her troops, Creolia, Sophie, and me lined up to listen as she laid out our plan of attack. “The rooster’s eating eggs again. Martha, you give him one with mustard in place of the yolk, that’ll cure him. And did you finish putting up those pickles yesterday? If not, do it today. Creolia and Sophie, you two clean the hearths and chimneys and start the smokehouse. We’ll do bacon later on and sauerkraut as soon as you get those cabbages.”

  Evenings my mother and I worked for the Southern Relief, knitting sweaters and socks to send south to war-ravaged areas before winter and embroidering clothes and doilies to sell at the church bazaar, the proceeds of which would go to purchase flour, ham, bacon, corn, beans, blankets, and boots to ship south. Anyone who knew a family in a needy area was to contact them, and my mother asked a friend in Virginia to tell her about the Baileys of Horse Pasture.

  Her friend sent back a very favorable report. “Fine old family, almost ruined in the war, and their only son tragically injured, as you know. But in a few years they may rise again.”

  My mother could scarcely think of anyone she would rather help than fine old families, especially those with unmarried heirs, however tragically injured, and she enlisted help from Ladies’ Aid Societies in every white church for miles around (excluding Romanist).

  ONE AFTERNOON AS THE SUN poured gold light over everything, I picked basketfuls of beans and peas, and after a while Tim brought out a hoe to dig potatoes, both of us working silently. I had not spoken to him since the day I ordered him out of my tree, and as for the idea of reading together, we had let that drop. But I knew it was my fault. I had let my feelings for Nick make me reckless of others, and guiltily I fumbled for a way to break the silence.

  “So,” I said, voice quavering, “have those good ladies from York come around lately?”

  He kept his eyes down on his work. “Once in a while, reckon.”

  Relieved that he had answered me, I went on. “Where do you see them, anyway? Do they come to your church?” I had never seen them on the farm, but I knew Creolia went every Sunday to the Colored Church, a humble building on a side road.

  “Yesssss,” he said, and drew it out as if unwilling to say more.

  “And do they still bring books round?”

  “Oh, I seed all the books they got.”

  “And do you like their books?”

  He sighed and resettled his hat on his head. “Well, like I say, I seed them now.”

  “Guess you need some better ones, with some sort of story to them.”

  He hoed in silence. But he did not say no, and when I took in a bushel of tomatoes, I looked at books on Richard’s shelves. Most were adventure tales with pictures, and they seemed wrong for a man who had buried horses in a war.

  But I took one out to Tim, ashamed. “There might be something in here. I don’t know.”

  He leaned his hoe against a tree and walked over to the barn steps, where the sun was warm, and started to thumb through pictures. I walked closer to see what he was looking at, a picture of a prancing horse decked out in gold-edged silk with tassels hanging down.

  “They put right fine raiment on them,” he said. “My, my. Fine raiment.”

  He looked pleased with the word—I supposed he knew it from the Bible. My father used to read it to us all, including servants, on Sundays, and the white ministers who took turns preaching at the Colored Church probably read it out loud, too. But I was pretty sure he would need help to read a text like this, though I was afraid I might insult him if I suggested it.

  At last he chuckled. “Reckon you need someone to read out this here storybook to you, since you don’t read right.”

  I laughed and sat down next to him on the warm steps. It was slow going, but for every word he puzzled out, he threw in a paragraph or two of his own.

  “It was a fine castle Mr. Ivanhoe lived in, with glass windows and them goose pil
lows, you know, and every kind of jam. He got hisself some pigs and chickens and a mule and whacked up a old tree for a plow, and fore you know it he got greens and ’tatoes and ham he done smoked hisself, so much he haul some into town on this here horse, and folks give him cash money for every bit of it. After a while he went round to talk to all the fine gentlemans, and they had a lection and said he the knight.”

  I felt drowsy, like a child hearing a story. He sat easy on the steps now, in loose trousers and an old blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, holding the book in front of him. His bare forearms were long, lean, and muscled—beautiful, in fact. That thought startled me awake—did it mean anything that I could think a thing like that? Thank God no one could read my mind!

  A hundred yards away the screen door to the kitchen creaked open, and Creolia’s voice called out, “What you doing there, boy? I asked you to hoe up them ’tatoes.”

  Tim clapped the book together, handed it to me, and returned to work.

  But I left it lying on the steps, and later, when I looked again, the book was gone.

  WITH SO MUCH WORK TO DO, Nick and I wrote less often, though he did send me a fine drawing of the wool cleaning and carding that absorbed them on his place.

  But one cool night past dark, as I was finishing inside the dairy room, straining whey to set in cheese moulds, my lamp went out as if the wick had burned up, though it was still new. A moment later I felt a warm hand on my arm and caught the scent of leather, horse, and sheep.

  “Don’t be afraid, it’s only me,” Nick’s voice said warmly in my ear. “I couldn’t stand not seeing you, and here you are, so hard at work, such a good girl.”

  I gave a startled cry, half laughed, and turned into his arms.

  “How did you ever manage to get here? Richard will shoot you if he finds out.”

  “I’m sure Richard has never actually shot anything,” he said drily. “At least not anything he was aiming at. Let’s hope he doesn’t do himself an injury. But come on, let’s find someplace safer than this.”

  In the seamless blackness of the unlit barn, I felt my way through the familiar milking stalls, past calf pens, up the simple wooden stairs to the loft and the hand-hewn, uneven rungs of the loft ladder to the top, where the new-hay smell was intense, so green that it had a tang like licorice, sticky to the touch. He caught me and surrounded me, tugged me down till we lay side by side. He kissed me thoroughly awhile, and through my clothes I felt all of him stretched against me. I don’t know what possessed me, but I slid one finger between the buttons of his muslin shirt and found his skin, a silky shock after the roughness of his cheeks. How long we lay like that I could not say. It seemed to be a dream, over in a moment, lasting for all time.

  A screen door banged in the distance, and lantern light began to wobble in the high window of the loft. That would be Richard coming to secure the barn for the night, or my mother wondering why I was so long with the cheese and my lantern gone dark. We lay still and listened to the footsteps in the milking room, as light leaked through gaps between the old rough planks of the loft floor and threw shadows on the walls.

  My mother would call my name, and since no one called, I knew it was Richard. The wood steps groaned as he climbed into the loft, and I put my hand over Nick’s mouth, held my own breath. Richard walked into his tack room, where he kept rifles oiled and ready on the walls. We heard the clack as he shot the chamber back on one, clicked in more balls. The heavy loft door rumbled back and forth, and his lamplight receded toward the outbuildings.

  “You had better go,” I whispered to Nick.

  Playfully he slid his hands down to my skirt and pulled me against him. “Why? I’m not afraid of that puppy.”

  “Maybe not, but I have to live with him. Is your horse out there where he can find it?”

  “No, at Smithson’s,” he said, naming a tavern on a neighbor’s farm. He paused for a bit as if considering something. “If I come again tomorrow night, will you be here?”

  This made me happy, and I laughed quietly. “What if I said no?”

  “What, you’d rather stay in the house and write letters? It’s going to be a long, cold winter, and there will be times when we can only write. I need your letters, but they won’t keep me warm. That’s your job, in person,” he said, chuckling, and pressed me close again.

  I forgot everything and kissed him for a long while, filled with a new bodily pleasure I did not know was possible—though this was hardly what I meant when I said he should come to call, and I knew enough to try to put him off.

  “I’ll come back,” I said finally. “But not tomorrow night. Let’s see, is tonight Wednesday? I’ll come out again next Wednesday night, as soon as I can get here, after dark.”

  He sighed. “All right, I’ll live for Wednesday then.”

  Meekly he followed me out through the dairy, where the door did not rumble, and once outside we went our separate ways. A few strands of hay had stuck in my hair, and I plucked them out and smoothed it down. Now it seemed safe to let my spirits rise, because he had come all that way on foot to see me, and I walked with light steps to the house.

  AT THE FRONT DOOR, I greeted the collie noisily, like it was any other night. Richard was not in evidence, all dark upstairs, but candles burned in the kitchen and I heard voices there, my mother and Creolia arguing as they put away the clean supper dishes. My mother murmured fiercely, half-covered by the clank of crockery, and I moved closer to hear.

  “How can you let her run wild, right here in front of me? It’s disgusting. Who is the man? I demand to know!”

  Amazement made me dizzy—had Richard told her I was in the loft with Nick? He had not let on that he had noticed us. But how else could Mother know?

  Creolia laughed. “My baby girl’s not wild. But you best watch your own.”

  Wait—could they be talking about Sophie and not me? The relief was so intense I almost missed my mother’s reply.

  “She most certainly is. I saw the man myself, or nearly, as he was running off. It was dark, but I saw his skin. Couldn’t miss it, he was stark naked! It’s too disgusting to say, but I will. He was white. White! A decent man! And there she was, with her dress all undone, the hussy! You have raised a Jezebel, and she has corrupted some poor weak man!”

  There was a sharp crack, and my mother gasped. Could Creolia have slapped her? Or just smacked a wood spoon on the iron stove? I had seen her do that, though there was nothing usual about the rest of this. Sophie was born past Creolia’s middle age, when I was old enough to wonder how she got a baby with no husband. That time my mother had only shrugged.

  “It doesn’t do to look too closely into the relations of servants,” she had said calmly, “so long as they’re good in other ways. They bring forth like the Virgin Birth. And besides, we can always use the extra hands.”

  But this time she seemed unable to take her own advice.

  “Hush,” she hissed and called out, “That you, Martha dear? Where have you been?”

  I stepped into the doorway, and they both faced me with closed lips, Creolia’s head wrapped in a tablecloth she had appliquéd with purple flowers to hide a mulberry-wine stain.

  “Oh, just stargazing,” I said. “It’s a fine night.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s time for bed. We have another day tomorrow. Creolia, come upstairs with me. I have more to say to you.”

  Creolia leveled a flat glance at her but left the kitchen with her head held high.

  When they were out of sight, I heard my mother hiss, “Have you no shred of decency?”

  Creolia spoke clearly, a note of triumph in her voice.

  “You all be happy I took pity and stayed round here long enough to work this sorry farm, else you be starve.”

  THE ARGUMENT RESUMED next morning, my mother oblivious to all else.

  My mind was full of Nick, until I saw Sophie kneeling at the washboard in the backyard, her slender arms exposed. She was pretty, lighter skinned than her mother, and with long
hair that was almost straight—Creolia was proud of it and did it up in many tiny braids.

  But she looked more child than woman. Had some man really lain with her? The thought made me flush, and another feeling vied with my disgust—could it be jealousy? So young and already she knew so much. But she was ruined, or would have been if she were white. Maybe she was ruined in the black church, too. Either way, how could I envy her?

  Now a thought struck me so hard, I could not move. Because who could the man have been? Only one white man lived on this farm, and I could not imagine Richard doing such a thing. Hothead he might be, but only when it came to guns and foolish causes. If he had ever shown an interest in a girl, I did not hear of it.

  Now my heart ratcheted up a notch—because, yes, one other white man had been here last night, and did I know him well enough to say that he could not do that? Men had impulses, and he was over thirty, with no wife. It was a crime for a white woman to lie with a black man, but not for the reverse. A white man could lie with a black woman, risk free—though under slavery, if he did so with another man’s slave, the owner had the right to horsewhip him.

  A few days later, Tim, Creolia, and Sophie all failed to appear for work, and when my mother went around back to their door, she found the apartment empty, all their clothes and bits of crockery removed. Richard rode to several Negro cabins in the neighborhood and came back with no word of them. He got back on his horse and thundered out the lane again.

  My mother was struck dumb and seemed unable to get dressed. She sat at the kitchen table in her flannel robe and stared out the window as if her eyelids had been pinned up to her brows. The nightgown she wore had been embroidered by Creolia, just the way she liked, white edelweiss on clean white lawn, and how long had it been since anyone besides Creolia laid the fire in the cookstove?