Mason waited.
“Sorry.” Judge Matthews shook his head as if to clear it. “I was headed somewhere. Ah, yes, the absence of a written document on inheritance. Pure negligence, I’m afraid. And now Belinda is beside herself. Goes on incessantly about the land. Jeremiah too. He can’t even deal with the thought that Emily should inherit land from me. Only the males in his head. And looks like Charles is taking on Belinda’s cause. She vacillates between cloying dependency and hysterical anger.”
“At you, Judge?”
“Hell if I know, Mason. One minute she hates me; next, she adores me. Depends on the day and what time the clock says. I try to contain myself, but I blame her for Will’s death. Her and Charles. And Jeremiah is fit to be tied. No containing him. Never has been. I don’t want Emily to have to deal with my feelings toward Charles, but I know she does. I try to reason with myself. I know in the end it’s possible no blame exists at all. But in my heart, it’s there. Maybe Belinda’s irrationality about the land is just a diversion for her. Easier to deal with than Will’s absence. Better to be angry with me than with death. At least it gives her someone to blame. Same with me.”
Judge Matthews stood. He seemed to return to the room from somewhere else.
“I beg your pardon, Mason. You came to extend friendship, not to hear my woes.” He sighed. “I bear this loss so poorly and I haven’t anyone to discuss it with. I took advantage.” He extended his hand.
“I came to see a friend, Judge. No advantage taken.”
* * *
The Mississippi heat descended early and shimmered over the fields of young cotton as Charles rode toward Greensboro. He unbuttoned his coat to the artificial breeze he and his sorrel gelding stirred up. As he passed a few white pedestrians, he tipped his hat. He ignored the slaves along the way, his gaze concentrated past the horse’s ears. He began to whistle tunelessly as the horse trotted into town.
A drab, heavyset man with red suspenders, known about town for loafing his time away, ambled out into the street and waylaid the doctor. “Been having some problems with my stomach, Doc.”
“Well, now, why don’t you come on out to the office and we’ll see what we can do for you?”
“Well, I seen you trotting in here and thought maybe I could just ask? Figured you could script me some sort of remedy.”
“Now, you know I don’t practice medicine from the saddle in the middle of the dusty street. But offhand, my first prescription would be to spend a few less hours a day at Jenkins Saloon and a few more in the open air.”
“Coolest place in town, Doc. Heat’s no good for a body. You coming in the saloon?”
“Seeing a patient.”
“One that don’t have to come out to the office?”
“I don’t have all day to stand here chatting. You think about what I told you.”
The man ambled into the shade of the overhang at Jenkins Saloon and watched Charles tie his horse, walk away, then circle back in the direction of the town brothel. Instead of going into the saloon, the man thought for once he might take the good doctor’s advice, stay in the open for a while. But after half an hour, he wandered inside, anyway, ordered a whiskey, but unusual for him, didn’t have much to say. When he exited, Charles’s horse was still tied at the same post.
“Hmff,” he said under his breath, “can’t do his doctoring in the street, but looks like the whorehouse is a different proposition.”
* * *
From the second-floor window of the courthouse, Judge Matthews checked to see Charles’s horse still tied where it had been the better part of the afternoon, same as every Thursday. Marriage had changed nothing. He lowered the shade. And then he lowered his head, wiping at his eyes. What have I let happen, he thought. He dropped into his chair, rested his forehead in his hands, massaging the bridge of his nose with his fingertips. He nudged his spectacles up on his nose, lay back against the smooth leather, turning his head from side to side. I should get up now, he thought. I should be waiting for him when he comes for his horse. He raised the shade again. A deep inertia overwhelmed him. What use would a confrontation be? Out there in the street for people to see, to add to their gossip, to reach his already sad daughter. No, he hoped in spite of the small rifts in the marriage he noticed that Emily did not suspect her husband’s whoring. Making it plain would not protect her. Nor did he think it would bring James to the cross. His only true choice to care for her and her child was his silence.
Judge Matthews rose and tidied his desk, straightened the corners of papers and books, brought order to what he could. He took his hat from the coatrack and locked the door. Somehow the subtle clank of the keys as he pocketed them brought him comfort. For all the rest, he would wait.
CHAPTER 14
“You didn’t save him, Charles,” Belinda said. She was sitting in a dim corner of the parlor, staring. Charles sat down beside her on the blue-striped divan and took her limp hand. Her eyes looked almost bruised, but her dark gaze was direct and unreadable. The velvet-trimmed widow’s garb hung loose on her thin body and her pallor shook him. He put a hand against her forehead, then against her throat.
“What are you saying, Belinda?”
The autumn heat hung in a brilliant stillness in the house and across the surrounding fields. It was Sunday afternoon. Charles had left Emily visiting with her father and had ridden to Belinda’s.
“I trusted you.” She gripped her hands in her lap. ”You said you could save him and you didn’t. It makes me crazy. I know you couldn’t help it, Charles. Well, I think I know you couldn’t, but then sometimes I don’t. I see Will’s face and his fear, and I see Judge Matthews and your mother asking if the medicine was wrong and if Will could die if you kept it up and you did and he died.”
He walked to the fireplace and grasped the mantel, waited before he spoke. He did not remind her that the decision to continue the digitalis had been essentially hers.
“Yes, Will died,” he said.
Belinda threw up her hands and stood. “You could have listened, Charles. You could have told me I was wrong. I needed Will to live.”
They both sat back down, at opposite ends of the divan. Neither spoke until he said, “Hiram Blakeny came by this week. About you. And the settlement of Will’s estate.”
“That scoundrel lawyer? He came to you?” Belinda rallied somewhat.
“He apparently accosted you with questions on the acreage Will had been farming.” Charles pressed his hands on his knees, studied his fingernails, raising one finger and then another.
“Well, I have a right to it,” Belinda said, looking away from him. “But I can’t imagine how I would manage that land if I had it, all by myself. Even with slaves.” She wiped at her cheek with the back of her hand, pushed the disheveled curls from her forehead. “Besides, it’s not even the land I care about. I belonged to Will’s family. And now he’s dead and I don’t.”
“Belinda, you belonged to a family well before you even knew there was a Will.” Charles gripped her shoulder. He felt its bony thinness through the crisp silk of her sleeve.
“Well, yes, of course I had a family. I don’t need you to tell me that.” She threw a dismissive hand in his direction. “But Pa was—well, I don’t need to talk to you about Pa. And Mama was good. She stayed by me when I was weak.” She rose and took two steps away, her back to him. “Well, truth be told, I don’t even know that. Pa says she would have let me die when I was born. But Pa says what he wants. He’ll say anything. And there’s you and Hammond, of course. It’s family, I reckon, but something was different being a Matthews. Something substantial. I am still a Matthews. I am Belinda Matthews. But now the judge, who I thought cared for me—I did believe that, Charles—he treats me like it’s my fault Will is dead.” She sobbed into her cupped hands.
Charles came to her, took her by the arms, lifted her chin with his forefinger. “I could help you manage the land, Belinda. Maybe even Pa. If he hadn’t lost the farm in Ohio, he might be a different
man. Maybe if he could help you with this farm—”
“Oh, Charles,” she said, shaking herself free of him. “Talk sense. You don’t have time to manage any land, and Pa can’t do one thing unless it’s wrong. Mama has to follow around in his tracks rectifying everything he’s spoiled—that is, when he puts some drunken effort into doing anything at all. You know that.”
“Well, try to imagine him sober.”
“Oh, Charles, for pity’s sake!”
“Yes, for pity’s sake.” He was shouting. “You never knew him then, but he was a different man and a good daddy to me.” He quieted himself and walked to the window, gazing out across the half-picked cotton in the field. “He just lost himself when he lost his farm.”
“You make it sound as if you want that land for him, not me. Maybe for yourself. Is that it, Charles? Was I your path to Will’s land? Maybe you think I still am.”
“Belinda, get hold of yourself.”
“Well, it’s being a Matthews I care about. And that land would show that I am a Matthews.” Belinda flicked the hem of her skirt. “Anyhow, I expect one day very soon, when his grief eases up a bit, the judge will invite me to come live with him, as his daughter. Of course, he will. He just needs to get past some grief. He’s all alone, just like me. It’s taking time, that’s all.”
“Belinda, now you talk some sense. It’s long past saying it will just take time.” Charles glared at his sister. “You are right about that land. It belongs to you and I intend to see that it is yours. It’s long overdue for this to be settled and for you to buck up. I mean to see this finished and finished differently. That land is rightfully Slate land now.”
Belinda glared in return. Her voice grew flat. “Slate land? It is not Slate land. It is Matthews land and I am a Matthews. This is not about you, Charles. It is about me. I used to be so scared and mealymouthed and more than a little crazy, truth be told. But being Will’s wife changed me. Being a Matthews made me somebody. It gave me a life of my own. My own, do you hear?”
“Let’s not argue, Belinda. I’m going now. We’ll talk again when you are less agitated.”
“Yes, you go,” Belinda said. “And when we talk again, I hope it is not about this.”
* * *
Indeed, talk everywhere in the fall of 1860 turned to conflicts far larger in scope than the perceived wrongs of Belinda’s inheritance. November came and with it the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. On December 17, the First Secession Convention gathered in the Baptist Church of Columbia, South Carolina. Because of a smallpox outbreak, the Convention adjourned to Charleston, where three days later that state declared itself free of the Union. January of 1861 arrived and with it the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, the grounds for secession being the economic basis of slavery. Mississippi had been a state of the Union less than forty-four years. Judge William Matthews had been seven years old when Mississippi became a state, old enough to remember the celebrations.
Now he paced the floor of his study in front of his daughter. “I am sick to death over this,” he said to Emily, who had come the moment she heard the news, knowing how distraught her father would be. “Second to secede. Without Mississippi falling into South Carolina’s misguided footsteps, perhaps this insanity would collapse of its own weight, or lack thereof. But now it is done and the South will go down like a row of dominoes.”
“What will we do, Papa?” Emily said. On the edge of her chair, she fidgeted with the pleats of her skirt. One of the rosettes at her sleeve hung loose. As she fiddled with it, the stitching gave way. She tucked the tiny flower into her pocket.
“Nothing,” her father said. “Nothing but wait. The Union will prevail. Peace will prevail, I believe. Anything else is insanity. The South hasn’t force enough to go against the United States Army. Nor do we have the righteous cause. And yet they are claiming the righteous ground, calling this vile institution ‘the greatest material interest in the world.’ Pronouncing officially that we are engaged in ‘the most important commerce in the world.’ I pray this may lead to the end of slavery, but God help us, if it should come at too high a price. The wages of sin, perhaps.”
“Is there really nothing to do?”
“Only to wait, my dear. This won’t last long. It isn’t feasible. Months, I expect. The Union’s too strong.”
Emily pulled at her ear. Judge Matthews thought how typical that gesture was, since her early childhood, whenever she felt insecure, adopted when she was no longer allowed to suck her thumb. He smiled.
“What if you are called up, Papa?”
“Highly unlikely, Emily. We have not come to arms yet and if we do, I am too old. This will be done with before they get desperate enough for the likes of me.”
“And Charles and Jeremiah?”
“Don’t get ahead of your horse now, Emily. Time will take care of this without you. Before you can worry yourself too much, we will have a new peace. And the freedom this country was founded upon.”
“Do we have a country now, Papa?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, Emily. You just see to Rosa Claire and leave the peacemaking to the experts.”
“Well, I will do that, Papa, but not without the strength and intelligence to do it well. Do not think, because I am a woman, that I am oblivious to the world around me.”
Judge Matthews kissed his daughter on the forehead and bid her goodbye. By late spring, Abraham Lincoln would be the president of the country to which she held allegiance, but in which she no longer lived. The Confederate States of America would have unleashed a war of unprecedented proportions. And Emily would be overwrought about bringing a second child into an uncertain world. She would still be waiting without an answer—belonging to no country to which she could give a name.
On March 4, 1861, Lincoln would be inaugurated as president of a country divided, whether or not against itself to be decided on the battlefield with unparalleled bloodshed and horror. The newly formed Confederate States would fire on Fort Sumter, and Emily would announce her second pregnancy to her husband. Other small or large or seemingly insignificant details would have been either noticed or passed over. The seeds of fate would begin to sprout into a deadly and poisonous growth. The harvest would be unprecedented.
CHAPTER 15
In the quiet dark of the barn, Benjamin rose from milking the cows and nodded to his son. Lucian took the steaming buckets of milk up to the kitchen, where Ginny covered them with cheesecloth. She rested her hands on the sides of the buckets, soaking up the residual warmth. Mopping his forehead, Benjamin appeared in the doorway. Without a word, Ginny handed him a glass of the warm milk. He turned it up and took the whole in one draught.
“Where’s Samantha?” Benjamin asked.
“She be along,” Ginny said. “She gone to deliver a basket to Miss Belinda. Some early things. Carrots, radishes, lettuce, and peas and such. Can’t you keep up with your woman?” Ginny eyed Benjamin.
“All right,” he said. “All right now.” He shook his head and laughed.
Today, Benjamin and Samantha would wed, sure and legal with Judge Matthews presiding, though they would jump the broom after. And in spite of general disapproval among the slaves. Samantha’s demeanor from previous abuse had softened little, and her gratitude at her rescue was mostly absent. She carried her past like a hundred-pound sack of cotton.
Before dinner, Samantha returned from Miss Belinda’s. Her broad face glistened in the sunlight. She fanned her face with her apron and sat heavily on the cane chair beside the hearth. Handing her a cup of tea and a bowl of peas to hull, Ginny stood with her arms folded.
“How come you all tuckered out?” Ginny said.
“That woman is touched in the head.” Samantha continued fanning and scooted the chair away from the hearth. “Plain-out touched. Something wrong with her other than a dead husband. Just being a widow woman don’t make a body that crazy.”
“What she say?” Ginny said.
“Don’t ask me
what she say. Ask me what she do,” Samantha said. She stretched her feet across the floor. “I’m at her door with my basket of goods, nice and polite, like Miss Emily say, and some young slave I don’t know, she open the door when I knock and say thank you and how you folks over to the big house and here come Miss Belinda, that wild hair a flying everywhere and she say, what that nigger woman want with us. That gal show Miss Belinda the basket and Miss Belinda go to yanking, say what that for, so a widow woman won’t starve? I ain’t no charity case. I’s a Matthews. She say, you get on out a here, nigger, but you tell Miss Emily I say thank you, anyway. You just tell her that and don’t you say no more, you hear me, nigger? Me, I’m backing down the steps and I hightail out of there, but I hear something clunk, clunk, and I turn round and that crazy woman throwing chunks of lettuce and carrots after me. Throwing everything right out that basket. Yelling, I don’t need no nigger woman coming ’round here with no vegetables. I got a garden of my own. I’s a Matthews. What I need with this garbage? You hear me, nigger?”
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