by Denney, Hope
The next week immersed everyone in ease. Every afternoon Fairlee arrived at Orchard Rest and stayed until sundown. She picnicked with Joseph on the deserted front lawn of Orchard Rest, took him for rows on the lake, and wheeled him down to the blackberry thicket where they engaged in lengthy recollections about days past as they filled their pails. She invited Somerset and Victoria along for parts of the day and tolerated Jim’s presence as chaperon on all their excursions. They drove the wagon to Tuscaloosa to catch a play, peeked in on Helen to see the new baby, and waltzed through the day without a solitary care, leaving everyone with the impression that the days were better than before the war.
The only person who didn’t partake in the magic was Ivy Garrett. Somerset knew she should go see her, but imagining the small, forlorn figure ensconced in her own loneliness at Maple Pool, she decided against it. There was nothing she could say to comfort Ivy. Fairlee and Joseph were discussing wedding dates in a cheerful, aimless manner, contemplating the fun of a summer honeymoon one moment only to backtrack and revel in the idea of a January wedding the next. Fairlee, Somerset, and Victoria even went through the fashion plates every evening, complimenting the splendor of wedding fashions they would never be able to afford.
“I’ll tell you who I haven’t laid eyes on,” said Fairlee as she leafed through a Peterson’s and ate a peach. “I haven’t seen Ivy Garrett at all. Shall we run up and say hello tomorrow?”
“Let’s,” agreed Victoria, who was growing accustomed to getting off the plantation and spending time with Somerset’s and Joseph’s friends. She was lazing on the davenport with her bare heels on the arm.
“No, she isn’t home,” lied Somerset.
“That’s unfortunate. I wanted to see about borrowing her dressmaker’s die. She always had the best one. I wanted to start trying patterns for a wedding dress.” Fairlee licked the peach juice from her fingers. “Mrs. Garrett brought it home from New York.”
“None of them are home. The house is closed.”
“Oh well,” said Fairlee. “I never could think of anything to say to her. She’s sweet as can be, but somehow I’m always uncomfortable around her.”
Blanche relaxed when she found Joseph dressed for Sunday morning services with Fairlee. As far as she knew, he hadn’t set foot in a church since the war. The cardinal sign that Blanche softened was she stopped referring to Fairlee as “that minx” or “that yellow-headed strumpet” to Somerset and Thomas, and soon after, she allowed Fairlee to stay for supper and sent her home with small gifts.
Joseph entered the room without his cane. He looked more helpless without the cane than with it despite his belief otherwise, but he was full of determination to regain his independence with Fairlee present. She cast aside her magazine and stood by the piano while Somerset brokenly picked out a waltz. Somerset was a pathetic musician, and Joseph said she played as though her hands were broken.
“I’d give anything to have a dance like in the old days,” he said.
“Remember how tight you held me and how mad you used to make your mother? She’d pull you behind the potted palms and lecture you about propriety.”
“What’s propriety?” grinned Joseph.
“Is that what you told her?”
“No, I told her I feared for my virtue when you held me close.”
Fairlee’s slow laughter filled the room.
Joseph extended a square brown hand.
“You can’t dance on that leg,” protested Fairlee.
“Somerset’s taking so long to find that next note that it doesn’t matter,” countered Joseph. “You can lead. I’ll look demure and sway in time to the music.”
***
Somerset’s week ended with the event she had looked forward to since Blanche’s dinner party. She and Sawyer trysted every two weeks when he was home, in addition to the calls he paid her at Orchard Rest. They began this in the early months of a tremulous courtship when she questioned whether she could be with Eric’s friend, much less a family member. Then as she saw young women marrying best friends and siblings of the deceased, their relationship matured and he began taking her to dinners and dances. While it was true that they had been courting for years, most people viewed the relationship as casual. Others wondered when Somerset was going to throw him over and marry a distant relation in her mother’s or father’s family. No one gave their partnership a serious thought and most declared Somerset “just killing time” while others said Sawyer “was moving too slowly to be serious.” The bored citizens of Century Grove would have been sick with regret to know that Somerset and Sawyer were conducting a romance under their noses.
Their first meeting was an accident, when Sawyer found Somerset weeping over Eric’s picture on the back porch as he traveled past to Margaret’s Glade. It took only one chance encounter to decide they wanted friendship. They always met at the Unnamed House that Eric had been building for Somerset when he died on the Chickamauga. What began as awkward false starts to conversation and silent blushing evolved into conversations that took multiple meetings to finish, catching up on each other’s lives from week to week, and ultimately a kiss that was completely unlike the impetuous one at the Atlanta hospital.
Somerset visited the Unnamed House from the time Eric presented it to her as a Christmas gift. It was her future, a castle in her imagination materializing before her eyes. After Eric’s death, she returned to it to remember him and daydream about what might have happened. She loved the house, and she wished someone inhabited it so that they could love it and care for it. It was a small thorn of contention between her and the Rutherfords although she didn’t say so, for she loved them much more than her blood family.
Eric built the house for her, but he left no will. It was sitting on the Rutherfords’ property because they hadn’t deeded it yet to Eric when he died. They owned the house in every sense of the word. Yet everyone felt that the house was really Somerset’s. Eric’s parents hadn’t set foot in the unfinished building since the day he perished in the hills. People on the road saw her sitting on the front porch, chin clasped in her hands, all by herself. People whispered that Paul and Margaret really had enough in assets and that if their daughter Caroline didn’t want it, it would really be best to let Somerset take it and maybe bring her sister and the boy for company.
Somerset sat in the Unnamed House for hours waiting on Sawyer to arrive. She wasn’t bothered when she was still by herself after an hour. Sawyer sometimes ran late due to unfinished business on the farm. For the next hour she walked through the house, running her hands over the bare but dusty walls and bannisters with the same reverence she would apply to a cathedral. She wandered through the entryway and meandered through the double parlors and loitered in the library, cognizant of but not quite believing that the beautiful house had been intended for her. She walked upstairs and peered out of the beautiful picture window through the thin clumps of oaks and birches surrounding the place. There was nothing and no one ascending the gravel path to the house and the sky took on the masculine green shade that foretold dusk and warned her she would have to return home soon or Blanche wouldn’t believe she helped Ivy put up okra through the afternoon. She dashed away a single tear as she turned from the window and clattered down the steps and out the door. Sawyer was not coming for her.
“I should have known he wasn’t coming. Why doesn’t he want to be with me anymore?” she asked herself as she hurried back to Orchard Rest as the sun sank into the turbulent hills behind her. “All he ever wanted out of life was me.”
The sad fluid notes of nesting birds met her ears in reply.
Cleo shot her a look brimming with suspicion and alarm when she opened the door for Somerset.
Victoria even cried out “Are you ill?” as Somerset pulled off her hat and gloves and stashed them in the little chest where all the girls stored their things.
“I think I’m catching a cold,” said Somerset and rubbed her reddened eyes.
Victoria sent Cleo for tea and Blanche deman
ded Somerset take a warm bath and go to bed with a warm compress. Somerset obeyed with such compliance Blanche feared Dr. Harlow should be summoned. When Somerset tucked herself into bed with a flatiron and a dose of Blanche’s cherry cough syrup, she let the tears flow in rivulets out the corners of both eyes, run down the curvature of her neck and soak the pillow behind her. It was a gift to allow her feelings to surface, to let the weight of the sadness out.
She was no one, nobody wanted her, and she was about to be packed up and given to the richest man in Richmond with interest in her because she was almost an old maid and her own fiancé wouldn’t speak up and claim her. She fell asleep just as the moon cast its calming beams across the window pane.
She dreamed she was with Eric in the olden days.
***
They rode Juno through the woods together. The ground was slick with melting frost and her breath froze in delicate crystals on the back of his neck and in his coarse black hair. She locked her arms around his waist as the horse bore them up the path.
“I can’t believe they gave you furlough so close to Christmas,” she sighed. She snuggled closer to him through the thick, coarse fabric of their homespun coats.
“Sometimes things in this world go right.”
“Franklin killed our last turkey for your dinner tonight,” she boasted. “I’m a disaster in the kitchen, but I’m trying to learn to cook just for you. I have endless plans for our time together. At the end of it all, why, I think you’ll desert and stay here with me forever. I’ve waited for you so long that I can’t believe you’re finally here. What excitement this is!”
“Your ability to obtain joy from the simplest of situations makes me the luckiest man alive. Most men are miserable trying to placate a woman, but you—you make a grand occasion out of every day. I’ve never seen anyone with the ability to be happy like you.”
“No, no,” she disagreed. “Happiness is something you feel, not something you learn how to do. It wouldn’t be fun at all if I worked at it. Besides, I belong with you and your family. It’s an example of some things in the world going right.”
She squeezed his middle and rested her cheek on his back.
“Now tell me, where are we going? We’re going to see your family, aren’t we? It looks like you’re taking me to Margaret’s Glade. This is the way we always go.”
“I’m not taking you to them today. We have more important things to do. Try to hold onto this moment, this day.”
Somerset tried to be silent for a few minutes. She always found herself chattering to Eric. She spoke freely in the moment to him, never running out of things to say. She knew that it was because she felt that he and his family accepted her for who she was as opposed to who she might become. They weren’t concerned with her potential; they were delighted with her just as she was. Eric would protect her from Blanche’s pretentious expectations and Thomas’s complete lack of interest. He would be a wall that they could never breach. He said so.
Juno plodded on as frosted limbs combed their backs, and limbs snapped as crisply under his hooves as the air felt. Somerset took in the distant side of Margaret’s Glade, Eric’s home. The concave glade that served as a front yard to the mansion was dull, brown, and shaggy. By spring it would burst into a lush growth of tiger lilies and irises. By summer it would die and spend the rest of the year growing more unkempt, but Mrs. Rutherford said it was all worth it for three months of complete beauty and that someday Somerset would be old enough to understand. The house beyond the glade was sprawling, whimsical, and somehow tidy looking. Somerset thought how she would love to be in the drawing room before a fire with a cup of coffee, gossiping with Mrs. Rutherford until Eric had to take her home again. The Glade tantalized her, just out of reach, and she knew what it was to be homesick for a place in which she never lived.
Juno turned onto Rutherford land and began navigating a wood without a trail. Pine trees flicked water droplets over them as they squeezed past packed trees, and the sawing of swaying trees met her curious ears as they wandered in dim light. She resisted the urge to ask what they were doing, and she nervously interlocked her fingers together where they met at Eric’s breastbone as the horse began to make finicky whinnies as it navigated the forest.
Then light filtered through as they broke into a less dense area. Felled pines and cedars lined the ground, silent dead giants in a quiet landscape. A compact clearing lay beyond all this, stacks of timber arranged to be hauled away, and a house.
“What place is this?” she asked. “It’s so pretty, such a secret. Why did I not know about it? Who lives here?”
“We live here.”
She slid off Juno’s back and ran at the building, half-skipping like a child with her wavy hair flying behind her.
“We live here!”
Eric built on her love of visiting Baton Rouge with her family, and he built her a house in the Italianate style that was the hallmark of Blanche’s home there. It was not so large as Somerset Manor or even Margaret’s Glade, but everywhere Somerset looked was a point of interest. She could not see it all. She ran a few steps forward and then a few steps back, pointing at the windows with pediments and the ornately crafted balcony. Cornices, quoins, and corbels graced every square inch that could be accommodated, and a compact tower rose from the right side of the house topped with a cupola. She knew it was their room.
“I haven’t started the inside or finished the roof,” Eric said, his lips at her ear, making her insides quake. “The first order of business is to hack out the jungle it’s sitting in. Common sense would have dictated I made a road directly to it instead of hauling things up to the back of the lot from Margaret’s Glade, but I wanted to surprise you. I’ve never been able to surprise you. It’s only three minutes from the main road. Cutting a path to it won’t take any time at all.”
“We’re going to live here! We have a house to move into, and I was going to be satisfied moving into the Glade.”
“I had to take a loan from Pa to build it, and I haven’t finished it,” said Eric. “It may be a long while before we’re able to live here, but it’s waiting for us when we are married.”
“I wish we were married now. Let’s go visit Mr. Buchanan now and we’ll move in later today.”
“I think you would like walls dividing the rooms and other trivial features like solid flooring.”
“Nonsense. I’ll do well with a pillow and coffee mugs.” She clung to his arm. “This makes everything real!”
“Merry Christmas, Somerset.”
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him with the uninhibited joy that only a first love can bring.
The house dissolved away into the air. Somerset found herself in the Century Grove cemetery at the foot of Eric’s marker. She spun in circles, terrified. Joseph came walking up behind her. He was in uniform and carried his Whitfield, the trusty weapon that he burned upon the first day of his return home.
“Why are we here?” she cried. “I was happy. I was myself again, the person I was meant to be. Take me back.”
Joseph did not answer. He laid the Whitfield at the foot of the grave and knelt there, almost as if in prayer.
Sawyer came through the gate. She ran to him and tried to take his hand.
“I’m so glad you came. I don’t know why we’re here, but I’m ready to leave, Sawyer.”
Sawyer disengaged her hand. He went to the tombstone and knelt beside Joseph.
Teddie scaled the side of the iron fence and dropped down into the cemetery. He strode over, golden hair flapping about his brow, and surveyed the gravesite.
“Teddie, take me home,” pleaded Somerset. “Take pity on me. I can’t bear to see all of you together again without him. The Brotherhood you all had is dissolved and I don’t want reminders.”
A rhythmic sound like thunder met her ears and, turning, she was engulfed in a sea of blue more impressive than the ocean. Union troops, every single one who ever fought, surrounded the Century Grove cemetery. Th
ey pressed against the fence, swelling and multiplying as they closed in, a true cohesion of malice and strength. They stretched out to the horizons and then swallowed those. Somerset tasted the same sour fear in her mouth that she experienced when she burned the barn over the heads of Wilson’s raiders but not before they could get her sister.
“Aren’t you even going to load your weapons?” she cried. “No wonder I lost him! I hate you, and I know now that I would trade all three of you to have him back. I lost everything the day he was killed, and you are not worth a fraction of his life.”
They ignited her fury further by paying her no mind. She clenched her fists and raised them with furious words pouring from her, but it did no good.
The air changed with a whoosh that nearly knocked her down. Crows—flocks of black-feathered, sharp-clawed, wary birds—circled above them in the evening sky. No bit of sky peeked through as they moved in swirls above. Their caws filled her ears, the air and her body as she breathed.
“How do you know he was killed? There was no body. How do you know he was killed? There was no body. How do you know he was killed? There was no body.”
Somerset raced for her life, but there was nothing to get to past the gate but the soldiers. As she darted through the tombstones, a black bird swooped in her face and screamed.
***
She sat up in the darkness and tried to scream, but a hand clapped over her mouth, suffocating her. Somerset bit like a cornered bobcat at the hard palm over her mouth. A candle blazed in her face, and Victoria’s eyes appeared directly in front of hers.
“Goodness! You must be sick. I tried to shake you awake, Somerset, but you seemed delirious.”
“Oh no.” Somerset huffed out an unsteady breath.
“Maybe I should brew you some of Bess’s fever tea?”
Somerset held onto the soft hands that were stroking her forehead and shook her head no. She’d rather go on letting them believe she was sick instead of crazy.
“Maybe in the morning if it hasn’t passed,” she said. “I never sleep well when I drink it.”