Jarrettsville

by Cornelia Nixon

  Gravely Mr. Jones paced back to his seat.

  Judge Grason seemed to sigh and shake himself. In a quiet voice, he charged the jury with their task, and when the jury stood to leave the room, they looked so solemn, they might have been a dozen pallbearers with a coffin on their shoulders.

  Beside me, Isie gasped for breath, her hot fingers now like part of my own.

  “That can’t be it,” she cried. “They can’t go out on that note!”

  But the sheriff was already there, jail keys clanking on his belt.

  “She’s gotta come with me, now. Just her, not you,” he told Isie, who wailed.

  “Where are you taking her?”

  The sheriff’s jaw set grim. “She’s gotta come across the street with me.”

  Isie clung to me like eelgrass in a riverbed. But the bailiff disentangled her, and he and the sheriff took my arms and hustled me away so fast, I dropped the bouquet and had no time to find the veil. It didn’t matter. Let them see my face.

  My head up, eyes toward the sky, I saw nothing as they pulled me through the crowd outside and across the street, into the jail. The sheriff no longer seemed afraid to put me in a cell, and he clanged the iron door shut behind me and walked away.

  The cell was a relief at first, no eyes. Mortar crumbled between the stones in the walls, and the floor gave off a smell of lye. Nearby someone whistled a sad tune, notes echoing, though I could not see who it was.

  After a while, the cold of the stones began to creep into me, and I knew it was true: Stark wood already stood behind this building, holding up a rope. My heart skittered, and I tried to regain my resolution.

  Instead I felt an urge to press up through the ceiling, see the sky and breathe the air, like a crocus poking up through snow. Stepping to the bars, I wrapped them in my hands—cold iron, like the bars of the calfpens, that day when Tim and I had let them out. I pulled on the door but it did not give.

  The low ceiling started closing over me. I lay down on the bench and closed my eyes. I knew I only had to get through a few hours. It was my punishment to feel this way, more than my death would be. My breath came loud, and dirt seemed heaped into my mouth. My lids flew up. Dear God! Would someone make sure I was dead before they buried me?

  I calmed myself. When I was dead, nothing would matter anymore. Far better death than to go on living. If I had to live, a thousand days would ooze by, one by one, another thousand after that. Never to kiss Nick or even to look at him—always to see him gaze across the porch at me. Having to live cloistered, alone and in disgrace. Always to be a murderer.

  But I could not breathe, thinking of the rope. I knew this was the worst, imagining before the fact. When the thing occurred, it would be less than I thought now. I would lift my chin to help them slip the noose over my head. I would smell tobacco and the fear felt by the Negroes who had died before me on the rope. Would I pray? I could pray like Anne Boleyn: “Father, into Thy hands I deliver my soul to be a perfect living sacrifice to Thee.” But so much about that was a lie, my soul not perfect and my death no sacrifice.

  No, the prayer I had to pray was far more difficult. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”—could I say that? It might be an easy thing to say I had forgiven Nick, now that I had shot him dead.

  But I could not ask forgiveness for myself nor forgive those who had told those awful lies about me nor my first forefather who ever bought a slave. Imagine a world where slavery had never been! No humans sold like meat, no Rebellion, no War Between the States. Nick and Richard not so bitterly opposed. My family’s prosperity was all mixed up in it, a knotted web, and there was no going back to where forgiveness might be real for any one of us.

  The sheriff trod back heavily, and this time he kept his hat on. His lower lip trembled, and for a moment his scarred face looked kind. He had brought the pimply guard from the hotel, and the boy stood by holding a rifle.

  The sheriff unlocked the cell door. “The jury’s come back in. You gotta come to court.”

  I touched his arm. “Mr. Bouldin, I want you to know that I forgive you in advance for whatever you have to do to me.”

  He looked ashamed, and sweat trickled down his temples. “Thank you, miss. Now, you come quietly.”

  The walk was cruel, across the sunlit street and up the stairs and back in through the throng. Pink faces leered at me, some sad, some ready to jeer, all with leaping eyes.

  The twelve gentlemen sat tall in their box, the three judges high up on their bench, the room as full of people as the walls could bear. The judges waited till I went inside the dock. Isie had been removed somewhere, and I did not sit down.

  “The accused will stand to hear the verdict of the jury,” Judge Grason said and peered at me over his spectacles, as if he thought I might sneak down into my seat.

  “I am standing, Your Honor,” I said clear and strong, and a few people laughed.

  Judge Grason nodded in acknowledgment and turned to examine the spectators all around. “Let me remind you all, no demonstrations will be tolerated either way. If necessary, arrests will be made.” He glared around the room, but no one even seemed to breathe. He nodded. “All right. The clerk will poll the jury.”

  The court clerk stood, a fair, balding man dressed in black and wearing wire spectacles. He had to clear his throat three times before he read out the names of the jury.

  “John D. Alderson.”

  The answer came from one of the fresh-scrubbed, bearded men seated in the jury box.

  “Present.”

  “Do you freely agree with the verdict rendered?”

  “I do.”

  “Thomas G. Archer.”

  “Here.”

  “Do you freely agree with the verdict rendered?”

  “I do.”

  One by one he asked them all.

  “Andrew Boyle.”

  “Isaac W. Coale.”

  “Albert Davis.”

  “William H. Harward.”

  “William B. Hopkins.”

  “Owen Michael.”

  “Henry Osthine.”

  “Edward Scarborough.”

  “Henry A. Silver.”

  “J. Crawford Thompson.”

  “Present,” each one said, and then, “I do.”

  Judge Grason asked the foreman to stand. He was the smallest of the twelve, a man perhaps forty-five years old, with fine white hands and neat gray hair and trimmed mustache, no beard. He wore a dark blue jacket, unlike all the rest, whose coats were brown or black. I wondered, with an odd joy in simply being able to think, why the other gentlemen had picked this man.

  “How does the jury find?” Judge Grason said.

  The small neat man in blue looked nowhere but at Judge Grason. “Not guilty.”

  A roar swept over me. Too much light rushed in my face. I seemed to fall through space. Screams came from the gallery, but the judge silenced them.

  “Not guilty on what grounds?”

  The foreman paused, and his eyes seemed to fill. He seemed to steel himself.

  “Not guilty on grounds of justifiable homicide.”

  The attorney general and the state’s attorney shot out of their chairs as if to shout objection one last time. The audience was on its feet shouting. Voices bellowed.

  “Why did they even need to leave the room?”

  “They should have said that in five minutes from the jury box!”

  Judge Grason banged and banged his gavel, barely getting back control. “The court thanks the members of the jury for their service, and they are dismissed.” He turned to me. “The prisoner is free to go.” The gavel tapped. “Court is adjourned.”

  Cheers filled the hall, and from the lobby came a massive screech of the Rebel yell. “Hoooooooooah-hooooooooooool!”

  “No!” I cried. “No! Not that!”

  Isie fought her way to me, sobbing, and clamped hold of my arm. “Don’t think. Walk.”

  Colonel Stump immediately grabbed my other
arm. “There’s a back door out. This way.”

  It couldn’t possibly be true that I could go.

  Stump hauled us past the judges’ bench, along a dark passage, and out a door that opened on a miracle of a May afternoon. The sky was blue, the sunlight gold, picket fences white. Small pink roses twined up trellises, peonies nearby in frilly bloom. The air smelled of cut grass, horse manure, fried chicken.

  Above my head, Isie and Herman Stump said bright, gay words, but I could not hear.

  Stunned, I found myself at the hotel, where Stump guarded the door and Isie folded my things into a trunk. I stood where she had left me in the middle of the room, as if I had no will to move my feet. Coming toward me, I could see a slow drip of days, empty, miserable, nights so empty I wanted to end my life.

  But then I remembered Orlind, how his smooth baby cheeks had crumpled into tears as his nurse carried him away from me. My chest felt filled with dying coals buried in ash, but now a door flew open, air rushed in and made the flames ignite. Orlind would be mine, and I could keep him with me openly. What did it matter if he had Nick’s eyes? I could not wait to hold his sweet weight in my arms.

  Hastily I scooped up stockings, slips, and camisoles and threw them in the trunk. “Never mind all this, we need to leave quickly, before Richard comes. We’ll find someone to take us to your place.”

  I had made up my mind—I would not sleep another night inside my mother’s house. I would go to Isie’s, but it was too crowded there to stay for long, and too close to Richard’s place. My brother the reverend lived the farthest from Jarrettsville, up in Pennsylvania, but I doubted life with him would be supportable. Jimmy’s farm was inside Maryland, but well to the west, and I would ask his wife to take us in.

  With the heavy trunk between us, we were maneuvering the hotel hall when Richard burst up the stairs, grinning with exhilaration. “Mrs. Archer sent her carriage to take us home. Come on now. Mother’s waiting, and she’s been through a great deal.”

  Isie and I exchanged a rapid glance, and I nodded—it would be all right. When we got to Richard’s farm, we would collect my things and take the carriage on ourselves, alone. It was a closed landau, and my mother sat inside, closely veiled. Isie joined her there as Richard stowed the trunk behind and climbed up to drive the horses.

  I paused a moment on the grass to regard the outside of the hotel, a place I hoped never to see again. In the distance something thumped in cheerful rhythm and a trumpet blared, as if for a parade. The sheriff’s boy came running toward me across the lawn, and I turned to him, spared of my mother’s company for a few seconds more.

  “Miss Cairnes,” he cried, excited, “the Bel Air band is marching here to play for you! They done collected a purse of money, too. They want to give it to you now!”

  A band to play for me as if it were a thing to celebrate? A gift of money like you’d give a bride? Quickly I stepped into the carriage, to the corner farthest from my mother’s veiled form.

  The boy jumped on the running board and shoved his eager spotted face inside. “Ain’t you gonna stay for them?”

  “I murdered him,” I breathed.

  The boy gaped with lips ajar, until my mother’s arm jerked out and took the door handle, the boy springing free just in time.

  “No one will ever forget that,” she said and slammed the door.

  Epilogue

  CORNELIA NIXON

  Great-Granddaughter of George Andrew Cairnes

  MARTHA MOVED IN with her brother Jimmy and his wife in Hereford. Her son’s full name was Chester Orlind Cairnes, and in the census of 1870 he is listed as a member of James Cairnes’s household, but as a girl named Orlinda, probably because, like most baby boys of the day, he wore a dress. Court records of the time show the bastardy charges against Martha and the suit brought against Nick, and both say the child was male.

  Martha raised her son on Jimmy’s farm until her mother’s death, when she returned to the farm where she grew up. She never married, and she died at fifty-two of the tuberculosis brought home by Sam. When Chester Orlind Cairnes grew up, he moved to Baltimore, where he eventually owned a restaurant, his existence never acknowledged by most of the family.

  A few months after the trial, Isabelle and her daughter Rebecca both died of Sam’s tuberculosis, leaving Isie’s husband Cairnes Kirkwood with six young children. He left them with his parents and went to Iowa to seek his fortune, and eventually he set off to return to Maryland to bring the children west. But on his way to the train station, he was murdered, his body left in a ditch. He and Isie have many descendents.

  G. Richard Cairnes and his wife Annabelle had three daughters, one of whom died young, and the others never wed.

  Alex and Hannah Cairnes McComas produced seven children, six of whom lived, and they have many descendents.

  George Andrew Cairnes eventually married Cornelia Slee Haile of Baltimore, and they had eight children, the oldest of whom became the father of my mother. My mother’s family was so proud of itself that my mother always said to me as I was walking out the door, “Remember, your mother was a Cairnes,” and the family buried all traces of Martha Jane’s story.

  But in the 1950s, it appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and my mother and her brothers noticed it. They discovered Martha’s name on the family tree, though not her son’s, except in one family Bible, where he is listed as a son of G. Richard Cairnes.

  Soon they discovered that the trial was covered in detail by the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the Bel Air Aegis. Some records report her name as Martha Jean (instead of Jane), Jeanette having been the name of one of my great-great-greatgrandmothers, who first emigrated from Scotland, and Jean being my mother’s name. (And by pure coincidence, my father, Harold Nixon, was always known as Nick.)

  My mother waited till I was sixteen before she told me Martha’s story. We were flying back to California, where we lived, after a visit to the family farms in Maryland, and a purple sunset preceded us for hours out the window of the plane, as we leaned together whispering and speculating about what the story meant. She wanted me to write it, but she died before I mustered up the nerve to try.

  Eventually I inherited family papers that include a photograph of Martha Jane, a pretty young woman in shining silk, scowling at the camera. The photo was printed in sepia tones, but before it came to me someone took a red crayon to her lace collar and cuffs, perhaps to show she was a scarlet woman. The papers include those of my mother’s grandmother, who was not a Cairnes but a Robinson. Rebecca Robinson lived on a farm near Jarrettsville and was a friend to Martha Jane, and Chester Orlind Cairnes once wrote to her. She apparently had written to tell him of his mother’s death and ask if he would like to have her possessions. Chester Orlind Cairnes wrote back on the stationery of his restaurant and thanked her but declined his mother’s things.

  Near Jarrettsville, in the cemetery of Bethel Church, stands a gravestone of creamy marble, engraved with a weeping willow, eight lines of rhymed verse and the words:In the memory of our murdered friend,

  Nicholas McComas

  who was murdered April 10, 1869

  in the 36th year of his age

  Just a few yards to the west of it stands a white marker of such porous rock that by the twenty-first century the words have nearly worn away. It says:Martha Jane Cairnes

  Born Jan. 16, 1841

  Died May 23, 1893

  At Rest

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  MAY 9, 1869

  THE MARYLAND HOMICIDE

  Trial of Miss Carnes for the Murder of her Alleged Betrayer

  Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun Belair, Hartford Co., Md., Thursday May 6.

  The trial of Miss Martha J. Cairnes for the murder of Nicholas McComas, her alleged seducer, on the 10th of April last, at Jarrettsville, commenced here yesterday. From the large number of talesmen summoned and the regular jurors, (after the rejection of a good many on account of having formed an opinion,) a jury was impaneled. The p
risoner, a good-looking woman about 28 or 30 years of age, pleaded not guilty.

  Attorney-General Jones opened the case for prosecution, setting forth the facts expected to be proved as establishing the crime of murder. Henry W. Archer, for the defence, then addressed some general and pathetic remarks to the Court and jury on the peculiar character of the case.

  The first witness called was John Ware, who testified that he had been acquainted with McComas, but not with Miss Cairnes, though he knew her by sight; while at Jarrettsville, on the 10th of April, he saw her cross the bar-room and come rapidly to the door, looking upon the porch where he and McComas both were; the latter was about ten feet to the right of the door, and Miss Cairnes, leveling a revolver which she held in her hand, fired in the direction of McComas; then stepping backward, and apparently preparing to fire again, said: “Gentlemen, you all know what it’s done for;” did not know McComas was shot; witness told McComas to run, but he staggered backward, catching hold of an upright of the porch, he grew pale, his eyes glazed, and he soon had the appearance of a dying man; Miss Cairnes advanced and fired a second time, when McComas fell off the porch, and while he was lying upon the ground she fired two more shots at him; she then passed into the bar-room; witness helped take McComas up; they carried him into the house, but never heard him speak after the firing commenced; it was found that one ball had penetrated the left breast, near the heart, and another the upper portion of the thigh.

  John T. Street, sworn—Resides at Jarrettsville; knew Miss Cairnes and McComas; was at home when McComas died; it occurred at my house; she asked me if McComas was there; I told her I thought not; she sad, “Yes he is;” when I left the parlor, I went into the dining-room and stood at the table until several shots were fired; I then walked out, and some one said, “He is a dead man;” the time of the shooting was not one minute from the time I saw her until it took place; when I got out of the door of the dining-room into the bar-room, McComas was lying on the ground; he was picked up and taken into the parlor; I was too much confused to recollect anything about the windows.