The Abolitionist's Daughter

by Diane C. McPhail

  Charles wrenched himself from his mother’s grip. Her hands grasped at the air as he whirled up and around, in a single motion, his fist slamming into Jeremiah’s jaw. The closest man grabbed Charles’s arm and twisted. Jeremiah jerked him across the cell. Mason lunged after, but someone shoved him back.

  “You’re a dead man, Charles Slate,” Jeremiah said. He raised his gun, inches from Charles’s head.

  “For God’s sake. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Charles struggled, but his arms were pinned. “Don’t make my mother see any more. Are you sane, man? Have some mercy.” He lunged his shoulder at Jeremiah, but his captors jerked him back, his hands imprisoned behind him. Adeline grabbed at the nearest pant leg, but the man’s swift kick loosened her grip.

  “Mercy?” Jeremiah said. “Like the mercy you and your half-wit brother had for my father? And you want mercy?” Jeremiah shoved him again.

  Mason inserted his body between the two men. “You’re putting more blood on your hands, Jeremiah,” Mason said. “You’re as good as putting a noose around your own neck. And you,” he said, raising his voice at the quieted mob, “get on out of here and get yourselves home. Jeremiah’s leading you into the pit. Leave Charles to the judge. If he’s guilty, he’ll hang by the law.”

  “Not me who’s going to swing, Mason. I don’t give a shit for tomorrow or a new judge,” said Jeremiah. “My father was the judge and he’s dead.” He waved his pistol. “Tonight I’m the judge and I’m the law. And Charles Slate is swinging.” Jeremiah wrestled Charles toward the door. “Bring the sheriff along. As to his mother, she can witness it or not. I don’t give a damn. Now move.”

  Adeline raised her eyes to Charles. She struggled to stand without losing her hold on Hammond. She cried out, one hand stretched in the empty air. Charles turned toward his mother as Jeremiah heaved him toward the stairs. She saw the pleading in his eyes as he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. Weeping, she laid her forehead against the bloody remains of Hammond’s face.

  The mob parted. Jeremiah rammed his prisoner down the stairs. Someone shoved Mason ahead, struggling and shouting uselessly above the crowd. An outbreak of gunshots ripped the night. Adeline heard Mason’s voice cry out in pain. The noise of boots and breakage dulled as the men spilled onto the packed earth outside. She strained to hear what she could no longer see. A wavering light from the torches below flickered up through the window of the cell. She stared up at it, rocking her dead son. From below, the sounds registered in distorted familiarity: men’s shouts, the stamp of a horse’s hooves, a terse command for Charles to mount. A moment later the crack of a whip sliced the night. Adeline imagined a hesitation in the horse before its burden lifted. Its hoofbeats halted and her body stiffened like the already dead. She imagined she heard the horse exhale. Someone cleared his throat and coughed. Muffled voices reemerged. Then no one spoke. Eventually, the tread of boots and hooves faded, leaving the cicadas shrilling in the night. Alone with Hammond in the dark, Adeline watched the darker bloom of his blood soaking through her skirts to the flesh from which he had come.

  Adeline struggled to her feet and pulled Hammond toward the stairs. Descending backward, she dragged his body down, his head shrouded in her skirts. At the base of the stairs, she stopped, her breath ragged, her heartbeat thrumming in her ears. There remained the door, and outside in the night, three steps down and then the high bed of the wagon.

  A gurgled cough punctured the dark.

  “Adeline?” Mason’s voice splashed into the darkness.

  She waited, nausea rising in her throat.

  “I tried to make you go.” The sentence was garbled. Another wet cough.

  “Don’t you die here, Mason,” she said. “Just don’t you die.”

  A jagged piece of wood from the splintered door tore at Adeline’s hand as she struggled past the threshold. Two steps now to the ground. Adeline stared at the high bed of the wagon. Beyond it, hanging from the oak, Charles’s body twisted against the sky.

  “Mrs. Slate?” There was kindness or something like it in Michael Lambert’s unexpected voice behind her. “Let me help you.”

  Numb, Adeline nodded.

  Lambert had happened into town to fetch his neighbor’s young son home from a saloon on the outskirts of town and had heard the mêlée. His horse panted from Lambert’s charge toward the scene, but it was done, and he was sick to see the size of it. Nothing to offer but his impotent assistance. Lambert was lithe and uncommonly strong for his age, from his long years as a farmer. He lifted Hammond to his shoulder like a child and rolled the body onto the wagon bed, arranging the arms and legs as if he might yet make Hammond comfortable. He stepped back and Adeline mounted the wagon. He offered a hand. She did not take it, but reached for the reins. Lambert handed up the hitching line.

  “Let me help you with Charles.”

  “No,” she said.

  At her soft click, the horses moved and she turned the wagon. The heavy branch swayed with Charles’s weight. Adeline halted under the tree, feeling beneath the seat for her knife, which would never again be an innocent tool for her chores. She whispered to the horses as she climbed onto the seat and grasped the rope. The long knot did not give easily. At the third slash, the rope separated and the body dropped askew over Hammond’s. Adeline cringed, but she knew it made no difference to the dead.

  “Lambert?” Her voice was thick, like a dreamer rousing from sleep. A gust of wind whirled the name away.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The sheriff is in there in the jail,” she said. “Trying to die. Don’t let him.”

  She flicked the reins and rode away, standing as she had come, her sodden petticoat stuck chill against her legs. Her body weighed her down, but she dared not sit. Her grief would crush her now and she might never rise. The wagon rolled out of the emptied town and she entered the deeper darkness of the woods. She held the reins high as if they supported her and not the reverse.

  A faint light emerged ahead and the wagon rolled into the bare yard. As the horses stamped and whinnied, Adeline’s torso curled over the blackness drying in her skirts. If she fell, she would not get up, and she was falling now. Adeline gripped the side of the wagon and held, breathing hard. She groped her way to the ground. Ginny stepped down from the porch, a lamp in her hand.

  “Oh, God, Miss Adeline.” Ginny’s voice reached Adeline in a muffled rasp, her hand over her mouth. The lamp trembled. Adeline took it and set it on the raw wood of the step.

  “Go find my husband,” she said. “Tell him I’ve brought his sons home. Tell him they’re dead.”

  Ginny’s hand still covered her mouth.

  “Go, Ginny,” she said. “I’ll be with Miss Emily. Don’t let him come in there. You just fetch me. I’ll come out and speak to him.”

  Ginny took a deep breath. “Mr. Thomas in the shed with a bottle. Since ’fore you got gone.”

  “Just go find him, Ginny. Emily must know. So must he.”

  * * *

  Late in the night Adeline piled her dress in her arms, Hammond’s blood against her breast. She stood in the cold kitchen beside Ginny, her fingers stroking the fabric.

  “Is the fire lit?” Adeline said.

  “Yes’m. Not big, like you said. But burning hot, leaping up like it want to lick the sky.”

  “Thank you, Ginny. Now go and see to whoever needs you.” Adeline closed the door as she went out into the night.

  Alone in the dark, Adeline studied the fire. In a slow arc she suspended the dress above it. The hem flared. Flame rent its way like reverse lightning up the skirt. She refused to release the dress as the blaze leaped up the bodice. Her right hand beat against the air, but the left would not surrender its hold. The flames licked at her skin and she opened her hand, the blazing fabric flowing downward to the earth. She stood with the heat on her face until the flames went out and only cinders glimmered in the night.

  Ginny waited in the doorway.

  “Leave it till morning,�
�� Adeline said, as she passed through the door.

  In the kitchen, Ginny soothed cool lard over Adeline’s burnt hand and wrapped it in torn white muslin. Adeline was as silent as if she were alone.

  “Put the ashes in Hammond’s coffin,” Adeline said at last. She left the kitchen and went through the yard toward the house.

  CHAPTER 21

  In the dining room, Ginny braced her back against the table. The intermittent sounds of hammer and saw in the shop rang out into the dark. Ginny imagined Benjamin and his Lucian at work on the two coffins. She could almost hear the sizzle of great brown moths drawn to the light of their lanterns. The bodies lay side by side on wide planks atop the trestle table against which she leaned. She flapped open a pillowslip to wrap Hammond’s head. It proved too small. She lay it loose over his ruined face. As she pulled fresh sheets over the bodies, a slight sound in the hallway startled her.

  Adeline appeared in the doorway.

  “I must wash them,” Adeline said to no one in the room. She reached for the corner of the sheet, but Ginny caught her hand.

  “You ain’t doing this, Miss Adeline.”

  Adeline raised her head. “You forget yourself, Ginny.”

  “I ain’t never forgot myself, Miss Adeline. But you ain’t doing this. You don’t need no more in your memory. It’s enough. I’m gone wash them like they was my own. You go on out of here now. You got tomorrow coming.”

  Adeline’s tears came at last. Ginny guided her to bed, where she lay curled, face to the wall, her burned hand cupped in the other. Ginny loosened the dark, heavy hair, just graying, and smoothed it away from her face. Adeline relaxed her hands against her breast, and Ginny turned back toward the task of the night.

  Ginny had prepared any number of bodies for burial, but none like these. Benjamin and Lucian had cut away the fouled clothing, but the odors of death—blood and urine and feces—assailed her and she gagged. For close on half an hour, Ginny sat motionless. Her nausea subsided. She could not wait any longer. Even in the chill of the night, the stiffness would soon set in. Ginny raised the pillowslip and washed what was left of Hammond’s beautiful face, his muscular body, and covered him with a fresh sheet.

  On the other side of the table, Ginny held her breath. Heavy saliva and the bitter taste of bile filled her mouth. She sloshed her rag in the bucket, wrung it, and began to wash Charles’s body by feel, not looking at the rope-ruined face. When she was done patting the bodies dry, she took her bucket out back, flung the fouled water across the hard ground, and threw the washrag into the trash pit to be burned.

  Back inside, Ginny struggled to maneuver fresh clothing onto the bodies. But the weight of death was more than she could manage. With Adeline’s scissors, she cut through the shirt collars, ripped the fabric down the center back, and slipped the stiffening arms into the sleeves. She slit the trousers and laid them over the bodies, tucking the raw edges underneath. Like making a bed, she thought. She could not cut the boots. She left them under the table. Ginny laid Adeline’s handkerchief, embroidered with violets, atop the pillowslip over Hammond’s face. No matter how she adjusted it, the neat blue-striped shirt collar failed to hide the bloody furrow on Charles’s neck, his face a strange dark hue, a bizarre almost black, blotched in a coagulated web of broken blood vessels. Ginny had never seen a white man lynched. She dropped the sheet onto the floor and padded away to her narrow room.

  * * *

  Bars of colorless late-morning sun slanted through the narrow pines. The coffins jolted in the wagon, banging against one another. Thomas Slate held the reins slack, hunched forward, making no effort to avoid the ruts. The meager procession of mourners followed on foot.

  Behind the wagon, Adeline supported her bandaged left hand in her right, as the group trudged toward the graveyard. She carried nothing, no Bible, no prayer book. Steps behind her, Emily held the weight of her womb under her heavy skirts, her feet sluggish, dream-like. At the rear of the group, a fine cloud of red dust rose around Ginny’s dogged footsteps, made heavier by the weight of the little girl in her arms. Rosa Claire’s stockinged legs protruded from under the blue woolen shawl Ginny had wrapped around them both. She hummed, her dark hand stroking the girl’s pale curls. Ginny’s tears were silent.

  The coarse cawing of a blackbird broke the air. The sky darkened with the harsh flapping of a hundred unexpected wings. No one raised an eye except the child. She rubbed her eyes and buried her startled face back into Ginny’s shoulder. The wagon turned from the uneven lane onto more level ground, punctuated by fallen leaves piled against an array of angled headstones and rough crosses.

  “Whoa, you devils, whoa.” Slate’s snarl was broken by a rasping cough. His flick of the reins confused the horses. They halted, stamping and restless. The wagon lurched. Slate pulled on the reins. Behind him, only the horses caught a faint click from Adeline’s lips. They snorted and held.

  “Goddamned, stupid beasts,” Slate muttered, as he slung himself from the wagon. He grasped at the footboard to maintain his balance. He cursed again and slapped his hat against his thigh, raising dust that brought on another bout of coughing. He hunkered against the spasm. The hat dangled at his knee. The women watched while Slate staggered upright. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pulled the hat low on his head.

  “Where’s them goddamn niggers?” he said, and coughed again.

  Adeline gazed across the cemetery at the newly dug graves, two at hand and one far across the field.

  “Benjamin is here,” she said.

  The little group stood like that, huddled, yet each one alone, waiting. At the edge of the woods a twig snapped and Benjamin stepped out, tall and easy gaited, his skin glistening with sweat from digging, his white hair catching the sun. Lucian followed, a younger version of his father, though a shade lighter. Benjamin tugged at his beard and nodded to Adeline.

  “Miss Adeline,” he said. Then again, “Miss Emily.” He nodded a second time.

  Benjamin focused on the wagon, gauging its contents. He did not speak to Thomas Slate, but nodded. He did not remove his hat. As he reached to take hold of the ropes, the welted scars of two different brand marks showed on the backs of his wrists. Without warning, Slate’s sallow hand coiled around Benjamin’s wrist, while the other knocked Benjamin’s hat to the ground.

  “Goddamned nigger,” he said. No one moved. Slate’s wracking cough crippled him again. Benjamin picked up his hat, dusted it off, and resumed his task, unwinding Slate’s inept knots, coiling the ropes in orderly piles.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” Benjamin’s voice was subdued and husky. He lifted a corner of the nearest coffin, testing its weight. “Lucian,” he said.

  Adeline backed away, her bandaged hand on Emily’s arm. Lucian applied his shoulder to the coffin as Benjamin slid it from the wagon. Emily flinched at the raw scrape of wood on wood. Benjamin paused to assure himself his son was secure before readjusting the load. As the full weight of the coffin slipped free of the wagon, Lucian staggered, then righted himself. The two moved slowly toward the nearest open grave.

  Slate, standing apart, coughed again as Benjamin and Lucian revolved in a strange dance beneath the coffin. In a singular movement, they shifted its burden from their backs and lowered the casket into a cradle of ropes secured by yellow pine stakes. The father and son stood back, their breath heavy, as Adeline guided Emily, stumbling and pale, into the space between the open graves. With the grace of habitual labor, the slaves anchored a rope cradle in the other grave. In minutes, the second casket lay in it, rocking. The two men stepped back.

  Ginny readjusted Rosa Claire on her hip, put her hand on Emily’s elbow, nudged her mistress forward. Adeline looked back at her husband. He shook his head, his feet planted where he stood. She regarded the faces of the women near her.

  “These were my sons,” she said. “I loved them.”

  That was all.

  Benjamin cleared his throat. Lucian loosed a coil of rope, holding it tight against the stake, its
fibers cutting into his palms. Benjamin braced his outspread legs and together father and son coiled and uncoiled the ropes. The coffin descended in small jolts until it hit the earth below. When the second coffin lay in the earth, Benjamin straightened his back and waited.

  Adeline filled her hand with dirt. She dropped most into Hammond’s grave, the remainder into Charles’s, brushing her hands against one another over his grave. The sound of the dirt falling onto his coffin was insignificant. Adeline nodded to Emily, took Rosa Claire from Ginny, and motioned across the field.

  “Come on, Miss Emily,” said Ginny. “Let’s us go.”

  Emily’s eyes were on the ground. The path round and among the headstones was a maze, and her feet caught on thick clumps of uncut grass. As she neared the other side of the cemetery, she raised her eyes and the assembly gathered there came into focus: numerous slaves, their faces familiar, some grim, some weeping openly; a band of people from the town, mostly business associates; and Preacher Morton, surrounded by a cadre of parishioners. Apart to one side, Michael Lambert removed his hat. Beside the grave lay an elegant oak casket.

  One of the elderly slaves came to meet the two women. Emily concentrated on his leathery hand as Old Benton led her to the open casket. An irrational fear seized her that the heavy cover might suddenly fall shut. She did not stoop. Benton waited as she studied the face in the casket, the cheeks sunken in death and devoid of color.

  Emily backed away, stumbling. Benton steadied her, then leaned forward to close the coffin. The ropes slid through the men’s hands as it lowered into the earth. The businessmen stood apart. No one from the church came near her, not even Preacher Morton. Emily nodded to the dark, familiar faces around her and turned away. Through her grief, she felt Michael Lambert’s gentle strength steadying her as he brought her back to the waiting women. Ginny followed.

  “Mr. Lambert,” she heard Adeline say as they approached. “Yet again.”

  Thomas Slate crouched retching at the far side of the wagon.