I was not sure why this was such bad news, though I knew it was. I pressed on. “And when you left there and came here, why was that? Why did you move?”
His face clouded over, and he shrugged. It was clear he did not want to say.
I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t ask again, just worked beside him until dark. It was still against the law in Maryland for blacks to speak out against whites, and he might also be ashamed. If some white man had taken advantage of his sister, he might have wanted to remove her from his proximity. I wondered if my father knew that when he took Tim in, and how much else I could not see when it was right in front of me.
As for who exactly that white man might have been, I did not like to think. I already knew a great deal more than I wanted to about G. Richard Cairnes.
I KEPT THIS NEWS from Martha all that winter, and we had many happy evenings at my brother’s, in company, but with kisses stolen in the pantry or the hall, during games of hide-and-seek that amused us all. We staged Shakespeare readings, but only comedies this year, me as Malvolio in crossed garters or as poor Bottom wooing in a donkey’s head improvised from a brown sweater and a wool cap with socks attached for ears.
At last it was the first sweet day in spring, and she rode over to meet me at the rock. After a hungry hour of kisses, she seemed to read my mind.
“Tell me,” she asked, “do you know a freedman named Tim? I saw him riding with your father once. At least I think it was your father. He was a tall, stern-looking man with your eyes, skinny, like Ichabod Crane. He had a rifle with him, and so did Tim.”
I had to confess. “My father took them in, and I never thought to ask him where they came from. He helped a lot of Negroes, most of them from farther south. But Tim told me lately that they used to live with you.”
She stared at me. “You really didn’t know they were ours? I grew up with Tim. His mother was wet nurse to all of us when we were babies. They’re like members of my family.”
I nodded, wondering if she knew how true that might be. “Did his sister live with you as well? She has a little baby now.”
She gasped and sat up, alert. “A baby? No. That can’t be.” She held stock-still a moment. “Have you seen it? What does it look like?”
Something about this question worried me. “Oh, well, you know, all babies look alike.”
“Did it have light skin?” she asked impatiently. “Lighter than Sophie’s?”
“Is that his sister’s name? I couldn’t say. It’s just a little mite. I didn’t get a good look.”
“Tell me what you saw. A general impression is enough. Call the baby up to mind and tell me if its skin looked brown, or beige, or more on the rosy side?”
She seemed to have a theory, and I wondered if it was too late to keep her innocence.
“Well, I could be wrong, but it did look somewhat rosy.”
She was excited now. “I knew it! It’s so strange. You know Creolia, Tim’s mother? I saw her mother once, and she was really black. But Creolia is only brown, and Tim and Sophie are just tan, and now it sounds like this baby is lighter still. What do you think, could it be evolution, from living here, in a colder climate? I mean, northern Europeans are the lightest skinned, and Spaniards and Italians are darker, with the darkest people farther south, in Africa.”
I was trying not to laugh at her, something I never wanted to do.
But she smacked my shoulder anyway. “What? What are you laughing at?”
“I’m not laughing. You’re adorable.” I pressed her chin between my thumb and forefinger. “I want you to stay the way you are. The world could use more innocence.”
I had another reason for not telling her—I didn’t want her stirring up a hornet’s nest at home. And if anyone was likely to do that, it was my fearless Martha Jane.
Now she was offended and pulled away from me, sitting by herself. “What is so innocent? I bet you can see it, too, in other Negro families. They start to look more like us over time.”
I tried tickling her, holding her down, and tonguing her ear, which made her laugh and squirm, but she would not give up. When I put my tongue in her mouth, she bit it.
“Ouch!” I said and pulled back. “That’s a nightmare, that is. If that shows up in my dreams, it will be your fault.”
“Serves you right for making fun of me.”
I stuck my tongue out and tried to look at it. “Is it bleeding?”
“Not yet,” she said and bared her teeth in a growl.
I leaned back against the rock. “Come back here and behave yourself.”
“Not until you tell me.”
I sighed. “All right, but don’t blame me if you don’t like it. If your idea was right, people who changed continents would also change color over time. But that only happens from one generation to the next, and it works because children inherit traits from both parents. If each generation gets lighter, it’s because of white blood mixing in. White fathers, in this case. There, are you happy to know that?”
“What a disgusting idea!” she cried, leaping to her feet. “How can you think that?”
She walked away across the grass and stood with her arms crossed, glowering. I knew she would have to huff awhile, to save herself from understanding that Creolia’s children might be half siblings to her and Richard, the new baby nearer still. I let her take her time.
After a while she came back but would not sit. She asked where Tim and his family lived, and I pointed to the woods. Then she left, not kissing me goodbye.
SHE SOON FORGAVE ME, and we met as often as before, in the sheep meadow or woods every chance we got. As the spring heat beat up, I felt her resolve slip and recklessness move in to take its place, and though I liked to think that I would let her plunge all by herself, I was not in charge of everything I did. Something in me knew it was not wrong for us to be together naturally, and it would be soon.
One Sunday morning when no circuit preachers were scheduled close to us, I drove my mother and sisters to Bethel Church, all of us still dressed in starkest black mourning, though I was happy at the thought of seeing Martha there. I found a spot beside the graveyard for the wagon, hitched the horse to a post, and was just helping my mother down when a big, open landau pulled up out front, filled with ladies in gay frocks and wide, almost translucent hats, all in shades of the palest yellow and cream. A black groom in dove-gray livery drove a pair of beautifully matched chestnuts with braided manes, and a second black groom in the same attire clung to the landau’s running board in back.
It was the sort of picture no one in these parts had seen since before the war, and I gazed at them awhile before I noticed Richard Cairnes beside the carriage on his horse. My eyes flew to the ladies then—yes, amazingly, one of them was Martha Jane, in a spring dress I had not seen before. Beside her was a young, fair-haired man in a gray coat—Rebel gray, it looked to me. She appeared to be laughing at something he had said, and I took exception to that fact.
My mother touched my arm. “We’ll leave you to this, dear. Don’t be long. It’s time.”
My sisters took her arms to escort her inside, and I stood in plain sight of the carriage, determined to remain till my intended noticed me. The groom who had been riding on the back opened the carriage door and bodily lifted the young man down. Now I could see that his legs were gone, his trousers sewn closed, and it came back to me: the boy she had been taking to a neighbor’s in her pony cart the day that Lincoln died. He would be two years older now but still a boy. And yet somehow he gave off an air of command despite his youth and lack of legs, lost no doubt when he was also wearing gray or butternut. The servant held him unobtrusively and seemed trained to turn him so that he faced wherever his eyes looked, and it was Martha he was looking at, gazing up to where she still sat as Richard helped the other ladies down. Why had I not grilled her more about that day she drove him in the cart? There clearly was a story there, and it was not entirely in the past.
The three other ladies rushed to where
the legless boy hung suspended aboveground, brushed him off, and arranged his yellow hair behind his ears. He seemed to suffer them in a good-natured way, his eyes on Martha all the while.
“Darling girl!” he called in a soft drawl, every syllable prolonged. “Won’t you come rescue me from all these fussing women?”
Martha flushed rosy pink, her big eyes shining as she shrugged off Richard’s hand and stepped down by herself. But as soon as her foot touched ground, she noticed me, flushed darker red, and froze. Abruptly she started toward me, but her mother caught her arm.
“Why, where are your manners, honey?” Mrs. Cairnes said in an accent worthy of Louisiana, though I had not heard her speak that way before. “You don’t want to leave poor Mr. Bailey by himself, now, do you, dear? Here, take his arm. We’re late enough, I’m sure.”
She took Martha’s hand and planted it on the boy’s sleeve. Richard took up a place behind as if to shoo her into the church, casting me one slow, scornful glance, and in a moment they had all swept past, her mother’s eyes proud, victorious. Martha looked at me helplessly, her eyes red, and shook her head as if to say that nothing was as it seemed. I nodded with my eyes before she disappeared, trying to look calmer than I felt.
We had no chance to speak after the service, both of us embedded in our families. But that afternoon after dinner, I dismissed Tim and watched the flock alone, reading the same paragraph of Fenimore Cooper over and over, my mind refusing to take it in.
After a while hooves thudded so hard on the woods trail, I heard them well before a yellow horse came at the gallop, its rider sitting sidesaddle in bright blue. The gate into the sheep meadow was shut, but she did not get down to open it, just stared at it as if willing it to open by itself, her mare prancing impatiently. Throwing an exasperated look my way, she circled her horse to pick up speed and galloped toward the gate. The mare looked startled but jumped well and cleared it easily, and they galloped all the way to me, both sheepdogs charging up as if to herd them back out toward the gate.
“Well,” I said, laughing. They had arrived so fast, I still lay reclined along the grass over the book. From this angle the mare looked several stories tall.
Martha leapt to the ground, already talking at a frantic pace.
“It was a plot by our unspeakable mothers. It’s as if they don’t believe I am betrothed. My mother invited Mr. Bailey and his mother and sisters to come visit, and they drove up all the way from Virginia so that he could propose to me. It seems he has land down there and a sawmill and I don’t know what all. I tell him every day I am not free, and he just looks patient and goes on about how prosperous he is. He’s rebuilding the big house and says he will do it exactly as I choose. My mother says I am a fool.”
This started a slow burn around my heart, but I reached for her hand and pulled her down. “Perhaps you should accept. Far be it from me to stand between you and your own sawmill.”
She gave a disgusted gasp and sat aloof from me. “Don’t you start, too! What do you mean, saying that? Here I’ve told Mr. Bailey I can’t give him hope. I told him I’m as good as married already, and you should have seen the shade of white he turned, as if he thought you had ruined me. He got that look, you know, like Henry Kyd Douglas, transfixed with hate? Ready to murder every Federal and desecrate his body afterwards. He said I was practically his sister, and if you had dishonored me, it dishonored him as well. He got all puffed up and said, ‘This has to be addressed.’”
She dropped her voice to imitate him, though I doubted his voice was very deep. Then she stopped and stared at me as if afraid to go on.
“I haven’t told you this, but I nursed him back to health. Richard brought him home and we hid him in the attic for months. Him and two others, but the others died and we buried them in a back pasture. There, now, go ahead, arrest me for aid and comfort to the enemy.”
I pressed one finger to her lips to make her stop. “Hush. Of course you nursed him. I might have, too, if he had shown up half-dead in my home. And no wonder he loves you. You saved his life.”
She gave me a look of wonder and started to cry. “All this time I thought you might not marry me if you knew.”
I sat up to put my eyes level with hers and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “What else have you not told me?”
She flushed and blinked hard to clear her eyes so that she could stare at me earnestly. “Absolutely nothing else. That was my one secret.”
“Then the sooner you send Mr. Bailey packing, the better. That is, if you are sure you want to live in a small house with five other women and no servants at all. Or maybe I could get myself a suit of livery.”
At that she flashed a watery grin, pushed me back down to the grass, and kissed me so hard it almost knocked me out, right there in the open meadow where anyone might see.
IN JUNE MY MOTHER, aunt, and sisters wanted to attend a three-day Methodist camp meeting twenty-five miles away. It would be held where the Gunpowder and Bush rivers converged at the Chesapeake, and I would have to go to protect them. Methodists let Negroes worship alongside whites, and every Segregationist group in the nearest five counties was expressing hostility to the idea of an overnight meeting, both races in one camp. I groaned at the thought of going, having spent interminable hours at tent revivals in my youth.
“Nothing but hymns warbled,” I told Martha in the meadow. “And then there are the ones who have to shout in tongues, and other forms of mild insanity. I may die of stupefaction.”
“Then maybe I’ll go, too,” she said, lilting and light, as if she knew the thrill that would shoot into my veins. “I could use a change of scene.”
The way she said it made it sound like code for something far more sensual—three days, three nights!—and I cheered up at once. “That would certainly put a different face on the experience. But will your mother let you go?”
She grinned. “I’ll say I feel the need to renew my faith. I have a Methodist aunt who is very devout. She’s probably going. I’ll see if I can go with her.”
A few days later it was arranged that she would ride with her aunt and stay in her aunt’s tent, and now I could hardly wait. As the women in my household washed, ironed, and packed their summer clothes, I pitched in with rare zeal, loaded the tents, cots, parasols, foodstuffs, dishes, and pots into my one wagon. My brothers would drive the women in their buggies, and I would follow like the humble supply wagon at the end of a brigade.
The day was hot when we set off and hotter still when we reached the high road of the long, narrow peninsula, where green meadows sloped down to broad rivers on either side, a white farmhouse each few miles. We joined a throng of buggies and wagons inching toward the encampment, which had been spread on the last slope, facing the Chesapeake, a wide meadow flanked by woods, white sails on the water gliding calm beyond. Many had arrived before us, and hundreds of tents with peaked roofs gleamed white in the sun, exactly like an army camp, except for the ladies in hoopskirts meeting and embracing here and there as tent walls rippled around them in the light salt breeze.
I did not find Martha and her aunt till evening, inside the main worship tent, two hundred people singing hymns while a foot-pedal organ pumped the melody. In front knelt an ecstatic throng, white as well as black, blond heads bending next to brown. Martha and her aunt sat on a rug some ways back in the crowd, and they slid over for me. Close to Martha, I sat and secretly stroked the fine skin inside one of her wrists. The sun began to set, turning the air gold, then pink, then blue. The wheezy organ launched into the melody for “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.”
In the silence of the benediction, I leaned near Martha’s ear and whispered, “Abide with me tonight when the others are asleep. I’ll wait for you at the pine grove above the tents.”
She looked at me and nodded with shining eyes, her cheeks pink, and with electric limbs I helped to set up tables for the picnic supper, carried plates of cold ham and biscuits, cheese and pickles, then scurried off to wash the dish
es in the creek. Twenty ministers were present, and one of them stood on a chair to offer up a meditation on the parable of the loaves and fishes. In the deep dark, children dashed around the grass catching fireflies in jars.
Soon the children were put to bed in tents, the benedictions said by candlelight, and the campfires banked. I went to the creek to splash myself with cold water, not for the usual reason, but to make myself presentable in nothing but my skin. Dressed in a loose shirt and clean breeches, I walked up the hill. The line of pines stood halfway up, and I found them by smell.
After a while all light had been extinguished, no sound but the soughing of the pines and frog song from the creek. The air was warm, a veil of mist across the stars, but I could see and hear acutely, even as my heart raced at twice its normal speed.
I saw her before she saw me, the glimmer of her pale wrists and face as she climbed blindly, almost passing me. Her head snapped up, aware of me, and she stepped to my side.
“I couldn’t find you in the dark,” she cried breathlessly.
“You weren’t seeing much. I could have had your scalp.” I reached for her and felt rich silk all over her, a sort of robe. “Good God, what is this marvelous garment?”
“Do you like it? It’s my best treasure, a kimono from Japan. My aunt in Baltimore gave it to me. She had it from a sea captain.”
I felt silk threads lavishly embroidered on the back and the wide sleeves that hung down. “What’s embroidered on it? I wish I could see!”
“I’m sure you will someday. It’s dark blue, with white cranes flying across the back and red chrysanthemums on the sleeves. And feel this, it has frog closures.”
I set to work industriously to undo one. But I felt a cool stab of misgiving and paused.
“You do know, don’t you, that I’m a miserable wretch? I’m poor and my house is overrun with women who will probably never leave, and they may not be nice to you. I am no bargain. You should turn around and go back to your aunt’s tent.” A giddy impulse to laugh took hold of me. “Your aunt’s unsullied tent. Her immaculate tent. Her pristine—”
Jarrettsville Page 14