She made a disgusted noise and almost leapt out of my arms, but I held her firm.
“You know, don’t you, that you have to forgive a man some things? That is, a man who’s not a milk-fed pup and who took as long as I have to find the woman he could call his wife. Because, you see, I wouldn’t settle for anyone else. I waited all these years for you, and I want us to tell the truth and feel free to say anything. Can you do that?”
She closed her eyes, like she was not sure she should forgive me anything. Finally she looked at me boldly. “You wretch.”
But she was smiling, and I pulled her down and kissed her till she relaxed. To seal the pact, I gently ran my hand up the whale-bone corset caging her bosom, reached the top, and slid one finger between the buttons of her blouse to touch a tiny square of her bare skin, smooth as a crocus petal and warmer than the sun, her heart shuddering beneath.
IT WAS TIME TO SHEAR the sheep, a filthy, sweaty job that kept both me and Tim occupied, along with two hired Irishmen. Every move I made reminded me of my father, and sometimes as I worked, tears mixed with the sweat, to think how easily he had been reduced to the sack of inert flesh and broken head I had found in the snow. He was not a demigod, just a strong man, morally and physically, and human strength is an illusion, fragile underneath. Every animal has an Achilles heel. For a horse, it is slender legs that have to carry so much weight, propelled by so much muscle strength. For a man, it is an eggshell skull around a heavy brain, easy to crack and kill the finest mind.
But not even my father’s muscles had been passed along to me. He could hoist a sheep by its rear legs and peel away great swathes of wool like corn off of a cob, until the sheep was bare, skinny, and unhurt in a few minutes’ time. It took me ten or fifteen minutes to do one, and if I went faster, I nicked their skins. It took days to do them all, and every night I was caked with tufts of wool, sheep blood, manure, and a heavy mutton smell, and I had to stoke the stove with wood, heat gallons of water to pour into the copper tub, and scrub it off.
But I was glad I had taken that precaution, because the day after we were done, Martha rode to where I was in the sheep meadow. We talked easily awhile and laughed, and she seemed to have forgiven me my lack of ignorance. Before the afternoon was over, I led her into the woods and kissed her against a tree, and she slid her hands inside my shirt to feel my skin and even let me press one leg between her skirted knees. She seemed breathless and amazed at the feeling that gave her, and I was pretty stupefied myself. Maybe it was being finally in love. I never knew that it could make even kissing that much more intense.
After that she met me in the meadow any afternoon she could, and as the summer grew hotter, the days long, we lost ourselves more and more. Sometimes we dispensed with the preliminaries and went straight into the woods, rolling and panting on soft moss, though still in our clothes. This could not go on forever, but it was so sweet, I didn’t want to rush. And anyway, how much longer would we have to wait, only a few months?
The first week of July, I received a letter from my father’s bank in Lancaster, informing me of several mortgages I did not know he had, plus penalties for my not paying them down. They threatened to liquidate the flock and repossess the farm, the woods, the land.
I broke the news to Martha one day as we sat on the big rock in the sheep meadow. “I have to sell a little piece of land or try to get better prices for the wool. I suppose I may have to sell some sheep. And that’s before I can think of taking on bigger responsibilities. I’ll need to do that just to break even. I’m sorry, but we’ll have to put the wedding off.”
She gazed at me calmly before saying anything. “What can I do to help?”
“I don’t deserve you,” I said, meaning it. “You should have picked a richer man.”
She shrugged this off. “I knew you weren’t rich, and it’s still you I want. But I think we should get married and face it together. Why shouldn’t we? I would sleep in a barn with you, and maybe there are ways that I can make things easier.”
“You already do.”
I closed my eyes and pressed them into her shoulder. Why did I feel reluctant? I had thought of moving us into the attic. But women were expensive to maintain, and I had five already. The attic had a low ceiling and only a small window at each end, so it was scorching in summer.
And now I saw a vision of her in the kitchen with the five women whose territory it already was. My sisters squabbled constantly over the chores, and my mother shouted over them and argued with my aunt, whom she could not stand, though they had to share a bed. The house had only three bedrooms, and all three of my sisters slept in the second one. True, the third was mine, but it was too close to the others for privacy, or for the kind I planned to need when I finally got Martha in my bed. Like all young men, I had feverish dreams to bring to life, and I wanted us to feel as free as leaping off the barn roof and knowing how to fly.
I knew she was growing more willing to just act naturally. But I was careful not to press her, wanting her to come to me freely. Instead I took cold baths at home, standing at the pump naked, preferably in a chilling breeze.
And I concentrated on the mortgages, which seemed to have a similarly anti-aphrodisiac effect. In any case, we made it through the summer, her virtue still mostly intact.
THAT FALL, ON A LOVELY autumn afternoon when we had planned to meet, she did not appear. I rode along the trail she took to Isie’s, got all the way to Kirkwood place, and skirted it discreetly, hoping to see Butter tied in front, but she was not there.
Disappointed, I turned out to the road and had not gone far when I met Martin Jarrett, who told me Martha’s cousin Sam was dead. He shook his head sadly.
“They took him off treatment a month ago. Martha Cairnes did. She told me they didn’t want me letting out the excess blood, though I told her it could kill him. What they should have done was send him north,” he said with evident distress. “Consumption just festers here.”
I resented his implying that it was Martha’s fault and not his own, when he had drained out half the poor man’s blood. When he drove on, I turned back toward Isie’s, feeling bad for Martha but sure I should not intrude on the family’s grief. I hardly knew Sam, though I had gotten glimpses of him before he went south, when he was the sort of cocky, good-looking boy that mostly got his way with everyone.
It had occurred to me to wonder what exactly Martha felt for him, and I had observed her closely the one time I saw them together. It was a day like this, a year ago, and I had met her pushing him in the wheeled chair, not far from where I now sat on my horse. I had dismounted and walked with them a ways, and I deliberately told them some news I had read. My father had subscribed to several northern newspapers, and they still came in the mail.
“It seems three men jumped a Negro near Annapolis and beat him up, just for driving a wagon on his own. And right here, someone apparently burned down a colored cabin over by Shawsville and almost killed the tenant.”
I said this not to bait Sam but to see which side Martha would defend. I needed to know if I could separate her from the traitors in her family.
“Why don’t the Bel Air papers tell us things like that?” I mused out loud.
Sam was pale and thin, lying back in the chair, wrapped in a heavy blanket, his eyes closed, and I thought he was asleep. But he raised his head and twisted around to glare at me.
“Because it’s a damn lie, that’s why!” he rasped out, hoarse. The effort sent him into a coughing fit, and he continued to glare as he coughed, face red, then gray.
We walked in silence a few steps, and I glanced at Martha, her cheeks slightly flushed. She looked at me apologetically. “Yes, it could be. But some of our neighbors say the same things. I have wondered that, too, about the local papers.”
Sam’s jaw set at that, and he glared straight ahead, maybe feeling outnumbered.
I thought she had given me my answer, and, exhilarated, I went on.
“The reporter blamed the Irish, be
cause they supposedly hate blacks for working cheap. The Irish show up dirt-poor here, and I guess they’re afraid of never getting a toehold. I did hear of a few who helped to run off some poor black fellow because he went to work canning oysters for three bucks a week. But I don’t think it’s just the Irish. As far as I can tell, it’s veterans, and not just from the South. From both sides, guys who might have killed each other two years ago. Even Union men, who were supposed to fight to set the Negroes free, they all hate them.”
Sam grew incensed. “Nobody fought for that!” he shouted and started to bay again.
Martha waited till his cough had calmed. “What did the Federals fight for, then?”
She gave me a quick glance, and I knew she had come over to my side.
Sam inhaled deeply, and his voice came clear and strong, as if cured by rage. “To steal our land and make us into nobodies, nobodies like them, like all their mongrel hordes! Steal our woods and fields and put up factories instead. Destroy our way of life—for money! Damn you if you can’t see that!”
“My father thought that, too,” Martha said evenly. “He didn’t think most people in the North really cared about the slaves. He said they only wanted to bring Southerners down a peg, like the immigrants up north, destroy their way of life, because they had it too good.”
I liked this less, but at least she did not say “we” in reference to the South. “I suppose those were some people’s motives, same as the South wanting to keep its money and its property. I like to think it was all high motives, but of course it never is.”
Sam tried to speak and could only cough. Martha touched his shoulder, but he shrugged her off. For a minute I could see the cocksure boy he used to be, his spirit still the same, though he looked like he had been replaced by his own skeleton.
NOW I WAS SORRY he was dead, not just for Martha’s sake. I would rather he had lived and let me convince him. I wrote my sympathy to her and asked if there was anything I could do.
She wrote back a long, rambling letter, tear-stained, about how horrible it was that he had died like that, from a massive hemorrhage while she was there, cupping his back. “What kind of world is it where men shoot each other and cage up boys of nineteen to starve and die of disease? It’s never going to end. Isie’s coughing now! And she’s just had another babe. If it’s consumption, both of them will die, all from a damn Yankee prison camp! If there was a God, He would not let men do things like that to each other. So I know there isn’t one. It’s all a myth. Like you said, we’re just vultures tearing out each other’s eyes.”
I was not sure I had said that, and the way she sounded worried me. No one at the funeral would exactly welcome me, but I decided I would go, pay my respects, and try to steady her.
When the day arrived, it was a golden morning, autumn sun on red and yellow leaves, full blown on every tree, a day to think of harvest and full granaries and not of death.
But Bethel Church was jammed with mourners, filling the aisles and nave, the rustle of black taffeta and crinolines almost drowning out the bitter eulogies. The county’s best-known orators all had Rebel sympathies, and today they had come out to speak of this new casualty and the tragic end of that most beautiful of empires, the Confederate States of America.
“He was the flower of our youth, cut down by a heartless and immoral foe who does not fear the laws of God or man,” intoned Henry Farnandis, a tall, white-haired man with a rich, deep voice, who had served as a Secessionist state senator and fled the country when he was indicted for burning railroad bridges early in the war.
“He was a loving son and brother, gentle friend to man and beast, kept in chains and starved until he broke. Words alone cannot describe the perfidy of this injustice nor repay for it. But we can rest assured, legend will not neglect him, and through the ages, when deeds of valor are recounted, his name will resound. He is in our hearts from now until eternity.”
His younger colleagues spoke in the same vein, but less well, and it needled me that I could not see Martha, who must be in the front row. I was sorry I had not already married her and removed her from their reach. When the orators finished, I maneuvered to a position where I hoped to snag her as the family followed the coffin out.
Tears streaked the faces of the pallbearers as they bent to take it up, Richard in front, with Isie’s husband on the other side. Behind Richard came George Andrew Cairnes, and across from him was Archer Jarrett, founder of the Harford Light Dragoons. Federal troops had imprisoned him for months when he refused to tell them where the militia hid its guns.
Last, lifting the coffin’s end, was Herman Stump, organizer of the Harford Rifles, a tall, dashing blond cur who liked to affect the name of Colonel Stump, a rank achieved by treason in a Rebel militia. He had boasted of burning railroad bridges and leading raids against The Maryland when it carried Union troops, and the military government had placed a bounty on his head. But he had evaded capture, danced at balls, and written taunting letters to the newspapers. He had divested himself of the titles to his Harford County property, knowing the Federals would just as soon seize it as capture him. Some said the governor had supplied his unit with an armory of guns, paid for with state funds. A Bel Air paper had printed a treasonous letter from the governor, in which he asked of Stump and his militia, “Will they be good men to send out to kill Lincoln and his men?”—a desire the governor had needed to retract when Lincoln sent troops to keep Maryland in line, and Stump had exiled himself to Canada until the war was done.
Sam had weighed so little at the end that when five strong men lifted the coffin, it seemed to fly up from their hands. They rested it on their shoulders and swayed up the aisle, hands folded in white gloves and eyes cast down. The dark, polished coffin had been draped with the crossed Stars and Bars of the Confederacy, and the crowd jostled to touch it with reverence, women in black pressing in as close as their skirts would allow.
Now the family came slowly after it, Isie first, draped in a black veil and sitting in Sam’s wheeled chair, pushed by one of their uncles, two babies on her lap. Three older children grasped some portion of the chair, and Martha followed, also veiled and carrying a small, red-haired child who must have been another of Isie’s, its head against her shoulder, mouth slack.
Too many members of Martha’s family had crowded in between us, and I could not reach her without causing a scene. She didn’t even seem to see me as she passed. I wedged in the first phalanx of mourners behind the family and inched out to the cemetery yard.
Not even the glorious fall day could disguise the hole dug deep beside the graves of Sam’s father and brother, not far from those of my father and Martha’s, and it exhaled a smell of cold, wet clay. Martha stood at its edge and seemed to waver unsteadily. But I could not get to her, and her arm was taken by one of the Harford Light Dragoons.
In the dense crowd it was impossible not to step on someone’s grave. My father’s was only a few yards away, covered with new sod, and I watched helplessly as boots trod on it. The minister intoned a prayer, and the pallbearers began to let the coffin down on ropes.
Suddenly Martha burst away from the Dragoon and rushed to the front end of the coffin.
“Is this his head?” she cried and placed a hand on the wooden lid, looking horrified.
The cemetery yard sloped down, and I knew at once she wanted to make sure he would not lie head-down for eternity.
But Richard only stared at her as he held a rope. His face was haggard, and his overlong red hair hung limp, swinging as he jerked to stare at the coffin, half-inside the hole.
“Stop!” he cried. “Stop! Stop!” He tried to haul his rope back up.
Martin Jarrett elbowed from the crowd and took the rope from him. “It’s all right. His head is on this end, uphill. I put him in the box myself. He’ll be all right.”
But this was so far from the truth that even my eyes ached, and around me people sobbed.
I COULD NOT EXTRICATE her from her family that day, and she l
eft in a closed carriage with Isie and the children. I did have the chance to comfort her a few days later, and every few days after that. But the approach of winter meant major chores for both of us, Martha canning, smoking, pickling, me carding wool to sell, and we could not meet as often as we liked. With the proceeds from the wool, I leased a neighbor’s pasture to expand our grazing space, and Tim and I started a new fence, continuous from our meadow and enclosing the new land. I wanted stone, the kind we had in front, and we quarried shale down by Deer Creek and dragged it home.
One cold afternoon as we stacked the stones, trying to be artful in the old way, Tim’s sister walked across the pasture, probably returning from work in a neighbor’s house. As she got closer, I saw that she was no longer pregnant, and she had the baby slung across her back, wrapped in a shawl. It appeared to be several months old, well grown enough to hold up its own head, and it had rosy skin and a dusting of red hair. I supposed it had to be her own child, the one she had been carrying before, and it looked lighter than she did. Its skin was almost white.
When they were gone, I turned to Tim, feeling foolish not to have asked before. “Where did your mother and sister live while you were away with the army?”
Tim was wrestling the shale into tight formations, and he didn’t answer right away. When he spoke, it was in better English than I had heard him use before, carefully pronounced.
“My mother was a slave to Mrs. Cairnes, but she got freed a ways back, before Emancipation time. That’s where we lived till we come here.”
I was not sure I wanted to know which Mrs. Cairnes he meant. “Mrs. Will Cairnes?”
He did not seem in any more of a hurry to answer than I was to be corrected, and I had stopped expecting it when he spoke.
“No, sir,” he said, drawing it out. “Mrs. George Cairnes. Mr. George Cairnes died, and now she live alone with Mr. Richard and Miss Martha Jane. She’s their maw. Believe you know Miss Martha.”
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