Lucian thrust the shovel into the mound of earth and led the way into the barn. The two men reemerged, dragging between them a heavy load wrapped in a length of homespun, taking on the color of the earth as the mud slathered onto it. They dropped it into the gaping latrine. Without speaking, they shoveled the muck back over their mysterious load. The task done, they leaned on their shovels to catch their breath and watched the dawn soften the sky. By the time a few more hands joined them in the field, there remained only the rest of the latrine to cover. Talk among the men focused on the soldiers who had come and gone out of their lives, on the visceral realities of the military and their mission, on who among themselves had followed after the troops. They speculated as to what these men, whatever their cause, actually felt about the coloreds they encountered. Lucian walked toward his cabin. A few of the men stared after him. The latrine was closed, the stench barely diminished.
* * *
A skillet, half full of bacon fat, sizzled on the back burner. With a piece of scorched quilting, Ginny clanged open the fire door and shoved in a stick of wood, jabbing at the coals. As she backed up, Ginny stumbled against Rosa Claire, who straddled a small pan, stirring some make-believe concoction with a piece of kindling.
“Rosa Claire, what you doing in my way? You gone get us both burnt up.” Ginny exhaled as she hiked the child onto her hip. Her apron strap drooped. She yanked it back with her thumb. As she turned toward the door, the sizzling grease stopped her. She yanked the skillet off the burner. Rosa Claire squirmed, whimpering and then wailing, as Ginny jerked her away from the stove.
“Jessie,” Ginny shouted across the empty porch to the yard where she spotted the other woman, lugging an armload of kindling to the wash pot. “Get this child off me. And see she don’t harm herself. And nobody else neither. I got okra to fry and she all over my kitchen underfoot. Gone trip me up sure.” Ginny tugged Rosa Claire from her hip. “Where your young’uns’, Jessie?”
“Gone with they daddy.”
“Gone? Gone where? You know it ain’t safe ’round here.”
“I don’t know. Said he had something he had to do and the childrens could go and play along the crick.”
“You don’t know where he gone? With them children? And you let him? All them Yankees round about? And who knows what Seceshes spying for runaways? And what about playing at the crick by themselves? Ain’t you got one lick of sense, Jessie?” She handed down Rosa Claire. “Somebody gone wind up dead.”
“Nathan just say he had to go. Said it was time and he be back.”
“Well, don’t be letting this one go off nowhere. I got work to do.”
* * *
The inventory of foodstuff seized by Beckwith’s troops from the hidden reserves trailed three pages in Emily’s ledger. Freedom felt scant now. Ginny was withdrawn and sullen. The quarters teemed with disgruntled complaint and gossip: Who’d gone missing to follow the Union troops? Who had headed North? What was to be had from abandoned cabins? How to make crop, short-handed? In all thirty-eight people from the Matthews place had disappeared in one direction or the other.
Three days after Beckwith’s unit marched off to the west, the sheriff rode into Emily’s yard. She gripped the porch railing as she watched him approach. Though she knew this man’s integrity, the sight of him evoked unbounded agony in her. She steeled herself to stand still. As Mason dismounted, he surveyed the place and nodded, almost imperceptibly. He stood at the foot of the steps, holding the reins loosely in his hand.
“I’ve got news, Miss Emily,” he said. “For you and your man Nathan.”
Puzzled, Emily motioned him onto the porch and sent Ginny to fetch Nathan. Mason declined a chair and stood.
“Mrs. Slate,” he said, in his slow, deliberate way. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you plainly for some time now. I just didn’t quite have the gumption. I didn’t know how you might receive it.” He hesitated. “I know it’s nothing you need, just the opposite, most likely, but it’s something I need right badly. I failed you, ma’am. I’m sorry and I need you to know that.” Mason stared at a fragment of brown leaf caught in a crack between the floorboards. “More than sorry. I’m full-out grieved.” He waited to find his voice. “I couldn’t stop your brother’s mob, and I couldn’t go off to arrest him in the middle of the Confederate Army. Couldn’t ever pin anything direct on Conklin, either, but maybe justice has a route of its own. I know in reason I couldn’t have made it different, but knowing it don’t help. My failure haunts me. Lots of nights I don’t sleep much and when I do, I’m pestered with nightmares. Wake up in a sweat. But you don’t need to know all that, Mrs. Slate.” Mason raised his face to hers. “I just need to tell you straight out how deep my regret goes.”
Emily bowed her head. She did not respond. She wanted to, but nothing came.
“Sheriff,” Nathan said, running up the path. His eyes narrowed. “Ginny say you need me, sir.”
“I got some news, Nathan. Not sure quite how you may take this, but I figured it was important for both of you to know. Holbert Conklin is dead. Old slave found him hanging from the rafters in his barn yesterday.” He watched Nathan as he waited for Emily to absorb the shock. “He’d been hoarding contraband cotton, against regulations. Useless to the troops when what they need is rations. Appears they headed over there when they left here. He wasn’t the only one hereabouts. Been smuggling it over to Bankston to the cotton mill. All gone now. Looks like Grierson set fire to the future on his way through. Damned near burned Bankston to the ground in the night. All but a handful of Conklin’s slaves loaded up and tailed the Yankees. Only ones stayed are too old. Conklin’s wife took their boy and a pair of slaves last week before the Yankees came and headed for Winona. Seems she’s got people there. Maybe she’d had enough of Conklin and the war both. Anyway, one of the old slaves left behind found Conklin yesterday morning. Had some kind of injury to the head, bad blow, looked like, maybe from the troops, maybe not, but looks like suicide, so that’s what I’m calling it.”
“Suicide?” Emily said. “What about the Yanks?”
“Could’ve been the Yanks. Could have been somebody else. Could’ve been someone we’d least expect. Head injury’s right bad, bad enough to’ve killed him, but I’m calling it suicide. Wouldn’t want to call it anything else. Justice, maybe. Man should’ve been hung a long time ago.” Mason slapped his hat against his leg. “Anyway, I thought you both should know. Especially you, Nathan.”
Mason mounted his horse and nodded. “Oh, and keep a sharp eye for a Union deserter. Probably long gone by now. But just in case. Can’t be too cautious.”
CHAPTER 34
By the time the last two letters arrived, gloom had fallen over Greensboro, even for those who longed for this rebellion to end in failure and the preservation of the Union. Deprivation touched every house and cabin. Emily recognized her brother’s hand, though only just, scratched and blotched as it was.
Vicksburg
July 8, 1863
Sister,
As you must surely know, as all God’s hell must surely know, Vicksburg is four days surrendered to the Yankee devils and I am taken captive. We shall have no need of hell hereafter, except to punish these damned Yankees. The conditions here are hell itself. No food, filthy water, filthy clothes, fleas, lice, men in filth from every sort of horrible disease and sickness. Men are dying everywhere and not from wounds. The rain and mud make the stench itself enough to kill a man.
I am in urgent need of rations and clothing. The blanket you sent is long gone to rags. I had as soon pitch it except it is now my only bed. There is no protection from this excessive heat. Men are dying from that alone. I am in an agony of discomfort. There is no remedy for my current debilitation.
Your brother,
Jeremiah
The handwriting on the second envelope was unfamiliar, the paper ragged on the edges and dirty. Emily stared at it for some minutes before she opened it. She squinted to decipher the scrawl.
&nbs
p; Nigh onto Vicksburg
July 1863 to the best of my knowing
Dear Mrs. Slate,
Your brother Jeremiah Slate is dead. We got captured together at Vicksburg and suffered prison alongside one another and got released the other day. I’m not sure what day that was. We have lost all sense of time in there. Your brother took the fever again and he did not make it far. He was mighty weak and I am shamed to say, though I woke to see it in the night, it was one of our own cut him with his own little knife and made off with the grab or two of goods your brother still held on to. We found some wood from a nigger shack close by and laid him on it. We didn’t have no hammer or nails, but we laid a ragged blanket over him that he said one time come from you and we buried him deep enough so you shouldn’t worry.
I know it would be right of me to say I’d help you find him, but I am not yet 20 years old and have a wound in my leg, but it is not so bad I can’t walk with a stick. I am going home to find my Mama now and I am not ever going back near Vicksburg again.
Very truly,
Gilbert Adamson
Outside across the field where Emily fled, heavy clouds hung above the horizon like the smoke of a fire gone out of control. The grass was seared. Brambles tore at Emily’s skirts and ripped her hands. She sank to her knees. Her mother lay bloody in her vision, the women turned away with the baby, her mother unmoving and white except for the blood, Jeremiah wailing. And this was what had come of it all. Emily clutched her ribs as she rocked, her cries piercing the semidarkness, ripping her, gutting her. Surely she must die; she was bewildered that she was unable to. Emily rocked more slowly. Her forehead touched the ground. She felt her hands go blind.
From down the side row, a man approached. He leaned toward her. His strong hands gripped her arms and raised her to her feet. Through her tears she recognized Michael Lambert. She stumbled toward home, his arm around her waist for support.
Lambert waited on the front step until Jessie came to say that Emily was calmed. Putting on his hat, he nodded and walked away. A week later, he came again. Emily sat on the porch beside him.
“What were you doing there, Mr. Lambert? How did you find me?”
“I was out helping Asa hunt a new hound he just got from old man Everett over off the Bellefontaine Road. Just a pup. Not more than six month old. I reckon he was headed back to where he thought was home. I was up the field there and saw you go into the woods way off. So far off, I wasn’t for sure it was you. You didn’t come out and then I heard you crying.” Lambert hesitated. “Well, a little more than just crying, maybe. I thought you’d run up on a cat. I started running. Seemed like the crying got worse; then it just stopped. Felt like I was in one of those dreams where you get to running and your legs get slower and slower till you’re not going anywhere at all.” Lambert scratched his head where his dark hair was thinning at the temples. He pulled at his collar as if he needed more air. “Got real quiet then. Without the sound, I couldn’t tell where to find you. I got right scared and I was running again, keeping my eyes on the woods, listening, and I saw a speck of blue cloth. Flapped just once on a puff of air. I reckon you must of tore your dress.”
“Yes, I did.” Emily stared along the horizon. The sun was beginning to set. “Did you find the dog?” she said.
“No, ma’am. Hound turned up next day back where he came from. Asa went and got him. He’s on a tie now till he gets used to thinking of us as home. Looks to be a good dog.”
Emily stood. Lambert rose, his tall, angular body blocking the sun from her eyes.
“I was just there, Miss Emily. That’s all,” he said.
“Mr. Lambert, I want to thank you.” She faced him, her head tilted up to his height.
“Yes, ma’am. I know—”
“I don’t believe you do, Mr. Lambert. Not for bringing me home. I am thanking you for being there.”
“Well, that’s a comfort to me, ma’am. I felt kind of like I’d trespassed holy ground.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Lambert. I’m not sure this ground is holy, but it is private.”
“I’m sorry. I regret—” he said.
“There is nothing to regret, Mr. Lambert. You brought me home. And strangely, I am surprised at the comfort in having someone witness how I really am.”
Emily went into the house and left him standing on the porch, staring at the door.
* * *
“Miss Emily, we got us a stuck calf.” Ginny was breathless. “Out of Bliss. Well, not exactly out, and there lies the problem. You got to decide, do we save the calf or the cow? May not can save either one. But you got to say.”
The fringe of Emily’s shawl caught in the chair spindles as she whirled and dropped a bowl of peas half-shelled.
“Where you going, Miss Emily?” Ginny said.
“To the barn.”
“That ain’t no place for you. Just answer me. I ain’t got time to fool with you.”
Emily jerked at the shawl as Ginny tried to free it, their frenzied hands at odds, peas crunching underfoot.
“We can’t afford to lose that cow!”
“Then we’ll save the cow,” Ginny said.
“And we have to have that calf! We have to last this war.”
“Well, now, that ain’t no answer.”
“Send Jessie to fetch Granny Sonja. She’s birthed enough babies. A cow can’t be so different.”
Emily unsnagged the shawl and kicked at the peas.
“You don’t know what you getting into,” said Ginny, her mind back to Miss Liza’s death, the screaming baby, the blood, and Emily watching. She stood full height, her eyes penetrating. She breathed deep. “Then again,” she said, “mayhap you do.”
In the filtered light of the barn, Lucian knelt in the second stall. The fetid air was dense and stank of blood and urine. Around him, the hay was soiled with blood. Bliss lay exhausted, her breath erratic. From her rear, a single leg protruded.
“Coming backward,” said Lucian. Then he saw Emily, her hand over her mouth. “This ain’t no place for you, ma’am.”
“Is it breech?” Emily managed to say.
“I don’t know about no breech,” Lucian said. “It just trying to come foot-first, one foot stuck. Bliss done give out and I can’t get this calf turned. I can kill it and get it on out real quick like, once you say and go on back to the house. Coming like that, they don’t hardly live nohow. Save us a good cow. What you want, Miss Emily?”
“Get out the way.” Granny Sonja’s voice startled them. “What she doing here?” The old woman elbowed her way past Emily, who struggled not to vomit. “If she gone stay, she got to get out the way.”
Emily stumbled over the cow’s legs and knelt at Bliss’s head. She ran her hand up the white crest, folded an ear forward, and traced the soft eyelid with her fingertip. Bliss opened her eye. The exhausted resignation in the heifer’s gaze stabilized Emily.
Granny Sonja scowled. “Look like her labor stopped,” she said. “What else you tried sides turning?”
“Thought about a horse and rope,” Samuel said. “But that other hoof still stuck and I don’t aim to tear her. She dead for shore, do she start bleeding.”
“Fetch me some soap and water. Lucian, get me some lard. And be quick.”
The midwife slathered on the grease and thrust her arms into Bliss, her elderly body weaving as she crouched on her haunches. The cow’s eyes widened and its huge head lifted. Emily concentrated on those eyes, attached herself to the life in them. She murmured, trance-like, to the animal. The old woman’s shoulder muscles tightened and the calf disappeared into the depths of its terrified mother.
Granny Sonja’s leathery hand reentered the cow. She maneuvered the offending hoof back into the birth canal, aligning it with the other, and pulled them both out. “Can’t turn it,” Granny Sonja said. “We gone take it backside first. Get that horse and hitch him up here.”
Lucian grabbed a piece of torn stable blanket, swaddled the calf’s hooves, and bound them wit
h rope. Taking the bridle, he led the horse out slow. The calf dropped onto the hay.
“Well, now, alive and breathing,” Granny Sonja said. “Gone stand right on up. How’s Bliss?”
“I don’t know.” Emily’s voice was a hoarse whisper.
“You ain’t gone faint, now, is you?” Granny Sonja peered at Emily’s white face, while she cleaned the placenta and smoothed its bloody folds. “Where’s Ginny? Tell her to see to this woman.”
From the corner of the stall, Ginny studied Emily. She did not go to her.
“Bliss ain’t standing up,” said Benjamin, who had returned.
“Bliss done got herself cripple,” Granny Sonja said, wiping her arms on her apron. “She don’t supposed to be lying down for this. All right, Benjamin, you gone get this cow up?”
“I’ll make a sling, Granny. I can get her up. But might be days before she can stand by herself.”
Granny Sonja scrubbed at the calf with fresh hay. “Benjamin,” she said, “get this baby up to its mama’s nose. See what that do.”
Benjamin arranged the wet calf against its mother’s nose. Bliss extended her tongue to lick at the baby. She did not raise her head. With eyes closed, she continued her feeble efforts to nuzzle the calf.
The men maneuvered a canvas sling under the cow’s inert body and heaved the rope over a rafter. Knots secured, Lucian led the horse forward and the cow’s prone body rose. Simultaneously, the calf struggled to her feet, rump first. She swayed against her mother’s leg. Held upright by the sling, Bliss worked the calf with her great tongue. Within the hour, the calf was nuzzling her mother’s swollen udder.
It would take a good three days for Bliss to regain movement in her legs. According to Benjamin, that was “mighty quick like.” It would be another four before he risked letting Bliss stand without support. When the sling came off, Lucian led Bliss out of the barn. Ginny stood by the fence with Emily, watching as the calf followed, flicking its paintbrush tail, blinking against the glare of the sunlight.
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