The Abolitionist's Daughter

by Diane C. McPhail

  “Yes’m. Told me not to wake you. Said when you got up, tell you come on up to the office.”

  “Thank you, Ginny. Rosa Claire, want to come with me?”

  The little girl held out her hand as Emily lowered her to the ground.

  At the steps to the office, Rosa Claire let go, tucking herself into a squat, hands between her knees, squealing at a beetle scurrying in the dirt. Emily sat on the steps, watching.

  “Emily?” Charles’s face emerged from the dimness of the office. He glanced down at Rosa Claire, poking her finger at the bug. He came down the step to Emily and extended his hand. She took it and stood. He put his arms around her. After a moment, she surrendered. What else was she to do? He was her husband, the husband she had chosen for better or for worse. She had been too innocent to consider it might be always for the worse. Now there was Rosa Claire and this new one on the way. She would make the best she could of the choice she had made.

  In the days that followed, Emily would move to Adeline’s. Her pregnancy would advance. Charles appeared and disappeared sporadically. Belinda grew more agitated about the land. On November 22, in the afternoon, Hammond would ride off with Charles to Belinda’s, and Emily’s life would be torn asunder.

  BOOK TWO: DEATH

  NOVEMBER 1861

  CHAPTER 20

  It should have been an ordinary night: the late cicadas whirring in the chilling air, three women by the fire, waiting for the men to return—Adeline knitting, Emily jabbing a needle in an awkward attempt to embroider a red rose on a linen towel, Ginny darning a sock for a man none of them knew was dead.

  No one had spoken for the last half hour. All three turned in their chairs at the creak of wagon wheels and thudding steps on the porch. Adeline pushed the green wool back on her knitting needles and held up a hand to stop Ginny from rising. Adeline was already halfway to the door when the knock came, tentative, then insistent. Emily was quick behind her, in spite of the late pregnancy that made her awkward. Ginny held her mistress’s elbow to steady her.

  At the open door, Benjamin stood clutching his worn jacket around his throat, his face contorted in grief. He nodded. “Miss Adeline, I got real bad news for Miss Emily. You too, ma’am.”

  Adeline took a step back. Emily reached her hand toward Benjamin’s familiar strength.

  “Miss Emily, Dr. Charles done shot your daddy. He’s dead.”

  The world slid into silence. Emily stared at him. In the distance a hoot owl called.

  “Charles?” she said at last. “My father? Dead?”

  Adeline covered her mouth as if to stop herself from vomiting. Emily clutched at her bulging middle and her body went slack. Benjamin bent to help Ginny ease her mistress into a hall chair.

  Benjamin righted himself and spoke to Adeline. “I’m real sorry, ma’am.”

  “Oh, God, Benjamin, where?” Adeline said, her hands moving in the air as if searching for something to grasp. “What happened?”

  “Over to Miss Belinda’s place. Some of the judge’s slaves seen it. Sheriff Johnson got Hammond and Dr. Charles in the jail.”

  Emily stumbled up, pushing at whoever was near. “I have to go,” she said. “Benjamin, take me home.”

  “No, Miss Emily.” He took a step back. “You don’t need to be there now. Not tonight.”

  “Then take me to the jail.” Emily’s words caught in her throat. She was speaking through sobs that merged into a wild wail.

  “You’re in no condition to go.” Adeline nodded at Ginny to calm her mistress. “There is nothing you can do.”

  Adeline motioned Benjamin back into the night, where the wagon waited. Adeline refused his hand as she mounted the wagon and took the reins he handed up, familiar as her own palms, seasoned by her sweat and the oil of her skin. Her arms trembled. Emily’s cries pursued her into the night. Adeline refused to heed those cries, nor could she cry for her own sons, for the life she had struggled so long, so hard to attain. She left Benjamin standing, his arms hanging at his sides, and turned the wagon toward the jail.

  Adeline was a good horsewoman. Her father had given her that, if little else, even if the price of the gift had left her flesh and her spirit scarred. “Adeline,” he’d shout, from where he stood with a stick in his hand, “you hold them horses. And don’t you sit. You stand that wagon, you hear me, girl.” Though she tried, when she had failed, had sat, her brother had paid the price for her with his life. She stood the wagon now, her father’s vicious tones in her ears, steering the horses toward Greensboro, forcing her mind to go still and empty. She could not fail. The drone of the cicadas clotted the air above her head, their thrum echoing the shock inside her. By instinct, she stretched toward the sound, toward some remnant of ordinary life. She forced herself into a numb focus on the horses, their breath swirling into the deepening chill. A faint click of her tongue pressed the horses on. There was no lurch. She rode like that, standing, across the field.

  In the shadows of a lone oak left in felling of trees for the town, Adeline dropped the reins, her hands loose at her sides, and stared at the jail. Its weight, the very structure itself paralyzed her: the ponderous logs, the untold ax blows it had taken to fell them, the knotted muscles of men lifting them into place, and a sudden realization that nothing short of fire would undo them now. She gathered her skirts and dismounted the wagon, bracing herself against its side as her foot sought ground. At the step she stumbled and sat hard on the stoop. For a moment she did not move. The definition between earth and sky receded in the fading light. She struggled to her feet. A shooting pain pierced her knuckles as she rapped on the heavy door.

  A narrow, barred window in the door opened onto the sheriff’s half-lit face. Adeline knew this stark, lined face far too well from countless trips to fetch her husband home after some drunken brawl. Over time the humiliation of such dealings waned. Tonight Adeline’s mission had nothing to do with drink. Men recovered from drink, sobered up, nursed their hangovers, and made peace with one another or not. Tonight was about death, spread around her like brambles in an endless swamp. And there is no recovering from death, she thought.

  “Mrs. Slate.” Adeline absorbed his formality, the way he fortified their distance. “I can’t let you in. Nobody here to sober up.”

  The darkness surrounded her.

  “I got rules,” he said. “You go on home now. Go do whatever you can for Emily. She’s bound to be needing you.”

  The memory of Emily’s desolate wail poured through Adeline’s head, as it had poured from Emily’s mouth at the news. Adeline tore herself clear of that memory and concentrated on the shadowed face in the barred window.

  “I’ve come a ways, Sheriff. You know how far. I won’t be long. I can’t.”

  “It ain’t safe, Mrs. Slate. Now, just you go on home. You come back in the daylight.”

  “Mason,” Adeline said, cutting through his formality, “you’ve got sons, some good, some not. If one of yours, let alone two, was locked up here, not safe as you say, would you be bound to see them?”

  Adeline could hear Mason fidget. Resolute, she locked his eyes in the dim rectangle that framed his face.

  “Adeline,” Mason said, “you are one hard woman. I may be responsible for your sons, but I can’t be responsible for you. I told you now. Don’t push me no more.”

  The steady chant of cicadas saturated the quiet as Adeline’s voice came clear. “And will you be responsible for my grief if—” She stopped. “Will you?”

  Adeline breathed deep when Mason did not close the shuttered window and walk away. She heard the clinking of his key ring, saw in the faint light how he stared down at it. At last he fumbled a key into the latch and the door opened. Adeline slipped inside. And so the thing was done, with no undoing now. Behind her Mason extended his lantern into the darkness outside, and in her mind Adeline chided him for seeking some nonexistent comfort in its impotent flicker. The wooden bolt slammed across the door like a gunshot.

  Adeline set her boot on
the unpainted tread of the first step. She shivered. Her sons would be chilly in the big cell at the top of the stairs. She knew Mason would not have separated them. Adeline stepped aside for the sheriff to pass. Inside the murmur of Charles’s voice became apparent. Wordless she followed Mason up the stairs and heard Charles go quiet at their footsteps. She kept her eyes on the key as Mason opened the cell, and started when the door clanged shut behind her. The key scraped as Mason removed it. He returned the ring to his pocket, the keys hanging loose and jangling as his boots echoed down the stairs.

  Adeline saw Hammond first, his clothes stained dark with blood. He stumbled against the far wall and covered his eyes with his forearm. His low moan mingled in her head with the memory of Emily’s anguished cry. Adeline reached for him, lost in those sounds. She felt Charles’s grip on her arm. She stared up at him as if at a stranger and pulled Hammond into her arms, his face buried against her.

  “Did you kill Judge Matthews?” she said at last.

  Charles did not answer.

  “Emily knows. Benjamin came to the house. He said the slaves saw it all.” Adeline bit down on the far side of her hand.

  “And you think those niggers know what they saw?”

  Adeline turned aside. “And Hammond? You dragged my boy into—”

  “God, no, Mama.” Charles’s fist pulled at the air. “He was just there. That’s all. You know damned well he wouldn’t—I wouldn’t . . .” Charles shuffled his feet. “Well,” he said, “you ought to know a lot of things.” He waved the back of his hand away from her. “Hammond tried to revive him. I had to pull him off. Make him mount up and ride into the thickets. But he kept trying to go back. So they got us.”

  “And now he’s here,” Adeline said.

  “I didn’t leave him, Mama. I could’ve gone, but I didn’t.”

  “And if you’d left him, would they have only come after you?” She searched his face, wanting to reach for him, wanting a way around the abyss.

  The silence was too heavy for either to hold.

  “Why, Charles? God help us. Emily’s father?” She wiped the side of her free hand up her cheek. “Your kin?”

  “Goddammit, Mama. Emily’s kin doesn’t make him mine. Not the way he’s done Belinda. Withholding her goddamned inheritance. Nothing settled right by her. Hell, Mama, Belinda’s your daughter. Am I the only one who gives a damn?”

  Adeline looked down at Hammond, moaning in her arms like a fevered child. “What was the judge doing at Belinda’s?”

  “She wanted him to come talk it out, get it settled.”

  “And you, why were you there?”

  “I said I’d help her.” He dropped his head. “I owed it to her.”

  The space between them grew heavier.

  “You know that land ought to be Belinda’s, Mama,” Charles said at last. Adeline watched his lips move, thought she saw words spill from his mouth, thought if her hands were free, she would pick them up and fling them across the cell. “Nothing but greed. Judge saying Belinda wasn’t entitled. Saying the land wasn’t hers to inherit. Only Jeremiah.” He hesitated. “Said even mine didn’t belong to me. Just to Emily.”

  She turned away, bracing Hammond’s weight against the wall to free the hand with which she pointed, not at Charles, but somewhere visible only to her. “It is not your land,” she said. “Nor Belinda’s. Belinda has what she has—her house and her slaves and her garden. That’s it. That’s more than she ever had before. And Emily’s farm does not belong to you.”

  Charles’s chin whipped up. “What’s hers is mine.”

  Adeline studied his unshaven stubble. “She didn’t come with a dowry, boy.”

  “She’s still my wife.”

  “And you believe your wife, your pregnant wife, will ever let you touch her again, touch your children—with hands that killed her father over land that never belonged to Belinda? Nor to you. And you shot him over that?”

  “Mama, I didn’t—” There was a wild pleading in his voice. “Now listen to me, Mama. It got into an argument. And a scuffle. And I had the gun. And then—”

  “And then you shot him?”

  “No, Mama. Listen now. You have to believe me. Things just happened—I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then who did?”

  From the streets below, jagged shouts and smashing glass shattered the night. A tumult of running feet rolled in like a distant storm. A flickering light of branch-shredded torches slashed across the ceiling of the cell. Adeline stiffened as an ominous pounding commenced at the door below. She stared at Charles while the jail shook with thud after thud, until the door crashed in, its bolt splintered and broken. Above the babble and scuffle of feet, Adeline heard Mason yelling one name and then another in an attempt to halt the flow of the mob. A crack of pistol fire pierced the tumult. Then another.

  Hammond slid to a crouch, toppling Adeline with him. She reached out to Charles, fear for her sons overcoming all discord. The shouting below rose like smoke, absorbing the air in the cell. The men shoved up the stairs, their heavy boots trampling on the bare wood, scuffling for purchase against the bars of the cell. Adeline stared up at the rage-disfigured faces, the fists rattling the bars of the cell. In her panic, these familiar faces blurred into a panorama of frenzied craze. She felt, more than saw, how she knew these men. At the door of the cell, the face of Jeremiah Matthews emerged from the throng. It was his hand that came into focus then, as the barrel of his pistol slid between the bars, catching the dull gleam of a lantern along its length. That dim reflection paralyzed her, imprinted itself in her mind. She would never not see it again. Her empty hand shot out into the air. Her eyes tore from one son to the other. Charles turned between her and Jeremiah, his feet anchored where he stood. She reached into the empty space between them. Hammond hunched low against the wall, an unintelligible sound caught in his throat. Adeline turned and cradled his face in her hands, lifted his chin, locked his stricken gaze to hers. A shot rang out. Above her powerless fingertips she saw the bullet as it pierced the temple and entered Hammond’s brain.

  Adeline folded over him, cradled his wounded head in her lap and rocked. Charles stood abandoned, sequestered, his face and clothes spattered with a web of blood and brains. He knelt and laid his hand over the obscene, intimate opening in Hammond’s skull. Flickering through Adeline’s memory, a faint image: Hammond’s head at birth, her several babies’ heads, the blood, the mucus, the soft spot in the newborn skull unclosed and vulnerable.

  The chaos dissolved into stunned silence as the men took in Adeline’s presence. She turned toward them, her face stained with Hammond’s blood, recognizing neighbors, townsmen, Conklin—all Jeremiah’s cronies. She knew their names, their faces, altered by carnage. While she stared, Charles offered his body as a flawed and impotent shield against her seeing. She wrapped her arm around him, her face buried against his shoulder. She held him as if she could.

  “Break it up now.” Mason’s voice cut through the crowd. “Adeline? I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  She searched for his face. The crowd shifted and the sheriff broke through, his eyes on her and not on her gruesome burden. “I’ve got a son alive in here,” she said.

  Mason was unarmed, his gun snatched from him in the mêlée. She saw, however, that his authority exerted a force of its own, establishing a momentary island of sanity.

  “Where’d you pull this mob together, Jeremiah?” Mason said to the men. “You fools let him rile you into this? You’d follow him straight into hell, would you? Maybe that’s what you’ve just done. Think he’s going to take care of you when you hang for killing an innocent?” Mason pushed his way among them. “Get out of my way, Willy, you’re drunk. Now, go on home and sober up. Jonas, get him out of here. Conklin, what are you doing here, anyway? Haven’t earned your way to hell on your own? Truman, hand me back my gun. Come on now, son, give it to me.” Mason held out his hand and the boy was on the verge of giving up the gun when someone knocked it to the floor. T
he boy backed away and fled down the stairs. Conklin scooped up the gun. The men jostled, muttering. Mason turned to face Jeremiah. Above his head, Jeremiah jangled Mason’s keys, pilfered in the confusion. Jeremiah’s long body twitched, his hand opening and closing on the ring of keys. The other held his pistol. The men struggled to see as the cell door clanged open, its hinge creaking. Adeline lurched, but failed to rise.

  “Hand over the gun,” Mason said. “Enough. You’ve got one killing on your head. You’re a dead man if Hammond was innocent, which I feel sure he was. That’s one cold murder, Jeremiah. Don’t add another one.”

  “Innocent, my ass. These two bastards gunned down my father. Hell, you can see his blood all over them. My slaves saw it all.”

  Charles twisted from Adeline, though she held to his coat. “Your niggers were clear off on the other side of the yard. You think they know what they saw?” Adeline pulled at his jacket, threw him off-balance. His knee hit the floor beside her.

  “Yeah, my niggers, Slate.” Jeremiah slammed open the door. “Matthews’ niggers.”

  “They couldn’t see, you bastard. Hammond was innocent.” Charles struggled against Adeline’s hold.

  “Innocent? With my daddy’s blood all over him?” Adeline cringed as Jeremiah pointed the gun at the body she held. “You bastards. Set my father up at Belinda’s and ambushed him.”

  “Nobody ambushed anybody. And I didn’t shoot—”

  “So who did? One of the slaves? You son of a bitch. You trying to whip it up we got us a slave uprising. Hell, it was the slaves brought him to me.”

  In relief, Adeline saw Mason struggle in behind him. “Give me the gun, Jeremiah. Leave Charles to the law. If he’s guilty, he’ll hang. Judge Simpson’ll be here tomorrow. Think about Emily, goddammit. He was her father, too.” Mason glanced at Charles. “She’s got enough to deal with already.”

  Jeremiah twirled the key into his palm. He eyed the men around him. “I reckon she’ll live with what she has to. But I intend to see her shit of a husband dead this night.”