Dance with the Devil

by Victoria Wilcox

  He was lucky to get out of Galveston when he did, on one of the last trains across the railroad bridge before a Yellow Fever quarantine went into effect. The city had reason to be wary: the epidemic of 1867, just six years before, had killed nearly a thousand people, and since no one knew what caused the fever, no one knew how to stop it. The only certainty was that the Fever always followed a season of heat and rain, and that early summer had been particularly hot and rainy. The oyster shell streets filled and flooded, the open ditch sewers overflowed, and the city reeked of human waste and stagnating tide water. When the rains finally cleared and the island dried out in the summer sun, pools of fouled water remained in all the low-lying places breeding mosquitoes that hatched and swarmed and made life miserable for the citizens of Galveston. The city fathers tried every known remedy to remove the noxious fumes that rose up from those mosquito pools, even spreading lime powder on the streets as a disinfectant, but the Yellow Fever came anyway. By the time the quarantine was ordered, seven souls had already died and the newspapers were reporting a new death every day, and fear stalked the island.

  So John Henry was glad to be gone, leaving the sand beach and the Oleander gardens behind as the steam engine rumbled across the Galveston Bay Bridge and over the swampy mainland into the piney woods and Post Oak belt of east central Texas. He didn’t even bother getting off the train in the little village of Houston, quaint on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, for Washington County was only another sixty miles past that and he was eager to get there.

  He knew something of the place already, as he knew of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, as he knew of the Texas fight for freedom and the war cry, Remember the Alamo! For Washington-on-the-Brazos was the birthplace of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico following the massacre at the Battle of the Alamo, something every school boy knew about. The Declaration had been signed in a wooden shack on a muddy track that led up from the Brazos River, as primitive a beginning as there ever was for a new nation. But Washington County didn’t stay the seat of the new government for long. The Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna was hot on the trail of the rebels, and five days after its birth the new government moved to the safer, more settled regions of east Texas.

  When the Texans finally won their freedom at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Brazos River country started to fill up with settlers planting cotton and corn in the rich river bottoms. The Brazos was a natural passage through the unsettled countryside, and soon steamers and freighters were carrying thousands of bales of cotton from the new plantations along the river to the coast and Galveston. By the time the Republic of Texas voted to become part of the United States of America, Washington County was on its way to being the leading cotton growing region in the entire South. Although secession and Civil War put a temporary end to the cotton prosperity and the big slave-run plantations were broken up into smaller farms, cotton was still King along the Brazos and there were still wealthy landowners sending barges downriver heavy-laden with raw white bales.

  John Henry got off the train at the county seat of Brenham, asked around for directions to the McKey plantation, then hired a horse for the ride out to the Brazos River. He’d imagined his uncle’s place in every detail: the tall white house facing the river, the acres of cotton fields stretching beyond, the horse lots farther out where long-tailed Texas mustangs waited impatiently for riding. But when he got to the end of the road where the McKey plantation ought to be, he saw nothing but a tangle of trees along the river’s edge with a rough wooden farmhouse fronting furrowed fields. In the field nearest the road, two young girls in worn cotton dresses were working at the crops, and they stopped to stare as he reined in the horse.

  “’Afternoon, Ladies,” he said, tipping his hat. “Can you tell me the whereabouts of the McKey plantation? I seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

  He waited for an answer, but the girls just kept staring up at him in silence, so he asked the question again.

  “I said, can you point out the way to the plantation of Mr. Jonathan McKey?”

  The older girl answered then, looking up and shading her face with her hand. “What do you want to know for?”

  “I have business there,” he replied, uncomfortable at being interrogated by a child. With her thin body and old rag of a dress, it was hard to guess her age.

  “What kind of business?” the girl asked.

  “That is my own affair, Miss,” he answered sharply. It was clear the girl came from poor circumstances to be so rudely inquisitive of an adult. “Now can you point out the way to the McKey place or not? It’s gettin’ late and I’ve been travelin’ a long way.”

  “Maybe I can, maybe I can’t,” she replied. “If I knew what your business was, I might could say. How do I know you’re not a Yankee revenue agent or somethin’? We don’t like Yankees much in these parts.”

  “Do I sound like a Yankee?” John Henry drawled.

  “Well, not exactly. But you don’t sound like you’re from these parts, neither.”

  He took a slow breath, trying to hold back his irritation. “I have come a long way to find Mr. McKey. Now, if you don’t know where he is, maybe your folks do. Is your mother at home?”

  “Ma’s dead,” the younger girl blurted out, then hung her head.

  “Hush up, Eula!” the older girl chided. “How do we know he’s not a Yankee, anyhow? Pa’d whip us sure if he thought we was talkin’ to a Yankee.”

  “I am not a Yankee!” John Henry repeated, about ready to give up on his search for the afternoon and ride back to Brenham and try again in the morning. But as he pulled back on the reins, he saw a tall man come out of the treeline along the river, shotgun in hand.

  “That’s Pa,” little Eula said. “He don’t like Yankees.”

  “And he don’t like us talkin’ to strangers, neither,” the older girl said. “You better git, Mister, unless you’re a better shot than my Pa.”

  “I doubt he’d let loose with y’all standin’ right here beside me,” John Henry answered coolly, the sight of the shotgun not bothering him nearly as much as those two unmannerly children.

  “Eula! Lotti!” the man called as he walked toward them through the cornfield. “You girls get inside right now!”

  The younger girl turned quickly and ran toward the house, but the older girl—Lotti, John Henry reckoned—hesitated a moment, almost smiling.

  “Better not be a Yankee, Mister. My Pa don’t much like Yankees,” she said again. Then she turned, too, and ran through the fields toward the shelter of the farmhouse.

  The girls’ father was a tall man, thin like most farm workers but better dressed than most, and he wore a felt hat that looked like it had once been meant for better things than farm work. He stopped short of the edge of the road, the shotgun held loosely in the crook of his arm.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, as he closed the breech of the gun.

  “I’m lookin’ for Mr. Jonathan McKey. I understand he owns a big plantation down this way.”

  “He used to, ’till the damn Yankees stole it away.”

  “Then can you tell me where I might find him?” John Henry asked, afraid that his journey had all been for nothing, that he had come west only to find his uncle moved on or dead.

  “That depends on who’s askin’. I don’t recall you introducin’ yourself.”

  John Henry sighed. These Texas country people were a difficult lot, almost as suspicious as Georgia folk had been after the War.

  “Jonathan McKey is my mother’s older brother. I’m his nephew, John Henry Holliday. I’ve come all the way from Georgia to find him. Do you know where he is?”

  The man pushed the hat back off his face, and for the first time John Henry could see the man’s eyes clearly, sandy lashed and china blue like his own. “Why, you’re lookin’ at him, son. I’m Jon McKey. And I sure never expected to meet family out here in Texas.”

  John Henry was speechless. His uncle was nothing but a poor dirt farmer,
no better off than any Georgia cracker! But more surprising than Jonathan McKey’s poverty was the look of age about him. Though Jonathan was only a couple of years older than his sister Alice Jane, he somehow looked much older than John Henry had expected he would. His thick sandy blond hair was heavily streaked with gray, his face tanned to leather from long hours of working in the hot Texas sun, his blue eyes wreathed in wrinkles. He looked to be nearly sixty years old, though he must have been only in his late forties that year, and John Henry realized with a start that his own mother would be getting old now, too, if she had lived. He always liked to remember her the way she looked in photographs—her white brow smooth and unlined, her eyes clear and serene—before the illness that had overtaken her and drained her life away in that hard, bloody cough.

  “So you’re Alice Jane’s son, are you?” Jonathan said. “Why, I haven’t heard from her in years, seems like, not since she moved down to south Georgia during the War. I’m a poor correspondent, I’m afraid. How’s she doin’ these days?”

  John Henry cleared his throat, holding back the cough that suddenly tried to come up from his lungs.

  “She’s passed on, Sir. She died in ‘66 after the War.”

  “Ah, poor Sis!” Jonathan McKey said, shaking his head. “I reckon the War years were hard for her. You favor her, though there’s somethin’ of your father in your face, as well. What brings you all the way to Texas, John Henry?”

  “I’m here to practice dentistry, Sir,” he said, giving as much truth as he dared. “I graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery last year. Heard tell Texas is full of opportunity for a young man like myself. I’m aimin’ to set up somewhere around these parts, so I thought to pay a visit on my kin along the way.”

  Jonathan looked at him carefully. “I’m surprised you could find us way out here.”

  “I almost didn’t. Those girls didn’t seem too happy to give me directions.”

  “They’re just mindin’ my orders. We’ve had our share of trouble with Yanks here, so I make them be careful.”

  “But there wasn’t any fightin’ all the way out here was there?”

  “Not durin’ the War, no. Our trouble came after, with the Reconstruction. The Yankees near to ruined Washington County, burned half of Brenham then took our land and gave it away to the Nigras.” He nodded to the farm across the road where fields of cotton fought against the encroaching line of trees. “That used to be my land over there. Had two-thousand acres, mostly all in cotton, before the Yankees came through. They stole most of it away, gave it to the coloreds I had working on my place, like they had a right to it. What was left they sold to some German immigrants. Mighty hard to see my land run by Nigras and folks that can’t even speak English—land my father’s inheritance money paid for.”

  He stared off into the distance, then shifted the shotgun in the crook of his arm.

  “I hate them Nigras,” he said sullenly. “But I hate the Yankees worse, dirty land-stealin’ bastards. I’ll get my land back one day, or there’ll be hell to pay. Well, come on in the house, then, John Henry. Can’t leave my own kin standin’ out in the road all day.”

  It was clear that Jonathan McKey was a bitter man, but he had good reason to be. He was the oldest son of the oldest son of a wealthy Southern family and had been raised to expect that life would treat him well, and for a while it had. When his father, John Henry’s grandfather William Land McKey, had died, Jonathan took his inheritance money and went west to Texas buying up those two-thousand acres of prime cotton land along the Brazos River. But then the War came, and Jonathan signed on as an officer with the Second Texas Cavalry, leaving his wife behind with two small children and another on the way. When the War ended, Jonathan came back to Washington County to find his plantation ruined, his wife Emma and her baby both dead of Yellow Fever, and his two small daughters being tended by neighbors.

  Lotti and Eula, Jonathan’s girls, must have taken after their mother, John Henry thought, since they didn’t bear much resemblance to the McKeys, though they had enough McKey in them to give them that natural Southern pride he had taken as arrogance. Jonathan never let them forget that they were Southern ladies, though his circumstances were too poor even to send them into Brenham for schooling. Still, he had hopes that they might find good husbands and help to raise the family back up from poverty. Lotti was fifteen that year, close enough for marrying age, and shy little Eula was thirteen and would be old enough soon. But the possibility of them finding well-off husbands in that part of Washington County was pretty slim, and chances were they would both end up married to sons of German immigrant families with almost as little as they had. Until they did marry, they kept house for their father and helped out in the fields, and looked less and less like Southern ladies every year.

  But they did their best to entertain their new-found cousin in a genteel manner, even setting the supper table with the few remaining pieces of their mother’s china dinnerware. And if it weren’t all so pathetic, John Henry might have laughed at the irony of it. He had come all the way from Georgia looking for a hand-out from his wealthy uncle, and Jonathan’s family was so destitute that they hardly had enough food to pass around the table. It was funny, all right, and too sad for words.

  There were only two beds in the McKey house: Jonathan’s downstairs in a little bedroom behind the kitchen, and the one the girls shared upstairs in the attic. John Henry would have been content to just ride on back to Brenham to spend the night in the hotel there and forget all about Washington County, but Jonathan insisted that he had to stay the night at least as he was family and all. So the girls made themselves a pallet out of blankets by the kitchen hearth, and John Henry took their bed upstairs.

  But he found it hard to sleep on that lumpy old mattress, with the rope-strung bed creaking every time he rolled over and tried to get comfortable and the air so close in the windowless attic that he could hardly breathe. It was no wonder that he started to coughing, with that stale air and the dust of the attic and the summer heat sweltering in.

  He had a strange dream that night as he tossed and turned in his troubled, fitful sleep. He dreamed he was back in Georgia again, a fair-haired boy sitting beside his mother at the piano in the parlor. She was young again too, and as beautiful as the Franz Liszt music she played.

  “Here, honey,” she said, laying his little hands on the keyboard. “You try it. You know how Mother loves to hear you play.”

  But before he could make a sound, he heard his father’s voice calling to him from somewhere outside, and the music and his mother both disappeared.

  “Leave that nonsense now, there’s work to do,” Henry Holliday said, and John Henry followed the sound of his father’s voice. Henry was busy building a sapling box and he handed John Henry a hammer and nails. “See if you can make some use of yourself,” his father said, as John Henry began to hammer at the wood. And as he worked, the sound of the hammering grew louder and louder until he wasn’t a boy anymore, but a man, full grown, and standing at the end of a long drive of trees in front of a beautiful home.

  It was his own home, he knew, though it looked like some Peachtree Street mansion, and he walked up the drive toward the wide front stairs. The door was open and he stepped into a house full of light, sunlight reflecting off oiled wood and polished brass, with every long window open to the air. But the beautiful rooms were empty, still and silent as a tomb.

  Then another sound came out of the silence, a sound sweet with memory and affection: Mattie’s voice speaking from behind him in the open doorway.

  “You’ve come home, John Henry!” she said, but when he turned to face her, it was an auburn-haired child who looked up at him with Mattie’s eyes and Mattie’s smile. He reached out to touch her, but she turned and ran away from him back down the tree-lined drive and into the wild fields beyond, laughing and calling him to follow.

  He ran after her, laughing too, but when he reached the end of the drive, he saw a railroad track
stretching out between him and the field. The child Mattie stood in the tall grass beyond the track, smiling and waiting for him to cross over to her, but he was too winded to run any farther and stopped to catch his breath.

  And then he heard the train coming, the sound of it growing louder and louder until it filled his ears with a roaring and rushing, and he tried to call out to the child to wait for him. But when he opened his mouth to speak, his words turned into a pain that tore at his lungs like a fire in his chest. He stumbled to the ground, coughing and gasping as the train roared on by.

  When he could finally lift his head, the train was gone and so was the child. And all that was left before him was an open, empty field that stretched out forever, endless, alone.

  He woke with a start. Someone was standing over him in a dim shadow of light and it took him a moment to realize where he was. The light came from the attic stair, and his little cousin Eula was by his bedside, a candlestick in her hand.

  “You sick, John Henry?” she whispered. “You been coughin’ all night long.”

  “No,” he started to say, but he had to clear his throat just to get the word out.

  “You sure sound sick to me,” she said, leaning closer, and as she did the light of the candle fell over him.

  “What’s that all over your face, John Henry?” she asked, then she pulled back and gasped. “Why, you’ got blood all over you!”