Sweetsmoke (2 page)

    She
was not to view her son's remains. Perhaps because she could not picture him
dead, a dreamy part of her was able to imagine the war as unreal, envisioning
John-Corey alive on his own plantation outside Lynchburg, or here, in the big
house, hiding as he had as a child. As long as she did not see his body, she
could pretend that the war did not exist, certain that all this foolishness
would soon be revealed as a test of character. On such days the house people
would hear her humming, alone in a bedroom, through an open door down a long
hallway, and they would look at one another and disguise their anxiety with
covert, derisive laughter. Missus actin strange, Missus goin off in her head,
Missus havin one'a them days so watch out. Reality would eventually intrude, in
the form of the
Daily Whig
with war news, or she would see a soldier on
the road or hear the sudden hum-rumble of cannon that sounded close but would
actually have come from somewhere far to the north.

    But
nothing brought on the reality of her son's death as much as the arrival of his
people.

    Two
weeks before, two of John-Corey's negroes had come to Sweetsmoke Plantation in
a wagon. John-Corey's other people had been sold, but John-Corey had left
instructions that these people were special family and should be kept together.
He had neglected to mention his personal body servant in these instructions and
so Lewis, who had been by his side when John-Corey died at Manassas and had
returned to his plantation to bring to the family the news of his death, had
been sold with the others to a cotton and rice plantation in Georgia.
John-Corey's last two negroes had spent the winter and spring with John-Corey's
widow closing up the big house at Howard Plantation. When Stephanie returned to
live with her parents, John-Corey's people had been sent to Sweetsmoke. Two
weeks now and Ellen had yet to meet them. Half a dozen times she had called
them to the big house, but each time she had been overcome with nervous
emotion. John-Corey's special people brought back the pain of his death, so
each time she sent them away without seeing them. She even used the excuse she
had heard whispered among her people, that the girl was bad luck, a contagion
carried from her son's plantation. Ellen knew the girl had been a good house
girl, and the man, her father, had carried the keys. Ellen had not had a butler
in the house since her second son, Jacob, had taken William, the plantation's
butler, to be his personal servant when he had joined Turner Ashby's 7th
Virginia Cavalry. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow I'll feel stronger and I'll
speak to John-Corey's people. In the meantime, they went to the fields with the
others.

    Perhaps
it was no surprise that Ellen was incapable of meeting her son's people, as her
life was now a series of superstitious gestures designed to keep Jacob safe and
alive. She had let down her guard for John-Corey. Now she was afraid to alter
any of her activities in case doing so should endanger her beloved second son.

    In
the afternoons she sometimes worked with watercolors, upstairs with the windows
open to catch the breeze. Before the war, her paintings had been of flowers and
landscapes, but once her oldest son had gone off to fight, she began to create
fanciful scenes of the Garden of Eden, incorporating many of the flowers and
plants she had painted before, as if her previous body of work was but a
premonition. Lately, purple storm clouds crowded the edges of her paintings,
and more reds were evident in the trunks of the trees and branches, as if their
inner cores were heated, athrob with light. In fact, amid the shortages brought
on by war, she was low on blue and green paint and had an abundance of red. Her
husband fretted over her work, but the new red pleased her and she reached for
it willfully.

    Ellen
paused in her reading to her people after the pleasure of speaking the words
"Gaines' Mill," feeling the syllables in her mouth as her tongue
formed the final
l
with a rubbery push off where the top of her mouth
met her teeth. The wind changed then and brought the new smell through the open
window and she lost the track of the sentence. Her body servant Pet smelled it
as well, and unconsciously imitated Missus Ellen's rigid pose. Ellen recognized
the smell and envisaged field dirt and sweat, moist body crevices and hidden
hair and oil and blood and feces. She waited for the odor to pass. She closed
her eyes, her upper lip pronounced, nostrils arched.

    "Pet,
in my dressing table, bring the bottle."

    The
bottle from Paris, Missus? said Pet.

    Ellen
nodded slightly and Pet went to her table. Pet was darker than the others in
the big house, thus Pet was anxious about her position, even though she had
worked there for four years. When Pet was out of her missus's sight, she opened
the drawer and took up the bottle of perfume. But she moved Missus's best
petticoat and found the other bottle, the one that held the laudanum, the
bottle Missus was using just a little more every day. Pet looked at that bottle
longingly, then covered it over with the petticoat and with her hip pushed in
the drawer. Pet had yet to connect her missus's humming with the laudanum. She
returned to Ellen with the Parisian perfume bottle in both hands.

    So
little left, said Pet.

    Ellen
took it. She hoarded the precious liquid, chose carefully the occasions to wear
it, and even then was miserly when applying the scent as the bottom of the
bottle came into sharp focus. She tried not to desire the way she felt when
wearing perfume—elegant, chosen, French—but this other smell created nothing
less than an emergency. She put the smallest possible dab in the hollow of her
neck between her clavicles, and when that was insufficient, tipped the bottle
to her fingertip and brought it to her philtrum, just a touch of wet applied to
her upper lip beneath her nostrils. Her grandson continued to call for her,
using that tone, but she did not answer.

    Cassius
was not aware that his hammer drove nails in time with the field song. Even
when the wind came around and brought the song, he heard it the way he heard
the sun on his shoulders or the sound of his own breathing. They were in the
near fields this afternoon, within a mile of the big house.

    He
heard the song change. He rested a moment and turned his head and listened to
the new song that told of death. A surge of apprehension drove into his chest.
He rested the head of his hammer against the dirt, and the surge pumped in his
palms and fingers and made them weak.

    He
looked down the hill knowing there would be a rider on the road approaching the
big house.

    Cassius
wondered why the rider had stopped in the fields to tell the Overseer. That was
how the hands would have learned the news; that was why they changed the song.
Big Gus the Driver would have been sure to stand by Mr. Nettle at the moment
the Overseer was told. Big Gus, one of the lighter-skinned field hands, worked
near Mr. Nettle, and Mr. Nettle let him swing the bullwhip. Big Gus whipped
harder than Mr. Nettle, to impress both him and the Master. Cassius pictured
the moment, Big Gus bursting with the news, clearing his throat to show off his
grand lubricious voice for the women—
I'm comin on to meet you, Lord
—drawing
it out so the hands knew he was changing the song. The work would not stop, but
the work song would abandon their tongues—
I'm comin on alone
—and spread
across the field like a sudden wind spreading a small chop across the glass
surface of a lake, and Cassius thought that the tobacco would grow tall humming
the song, and those who chewed and snuffed it would taste death—
I'm lookin
for to see you, Lord, That me a comin home.

    The
rider was close now, pink-necked, flush with news. Cassius knew him, Otis
Bornock, a poor white. That explained why he had stopped in the fields, Otis
Bornock knew Mr. Nettle. Otis Bornock and other town trash sometimes traded
with the blacks. They would trade for things made by the hands late at night,
or for things that mysteriously disappeared from the big house. That did not
make him a friend. Otis Bornock might benefit from the trading, but he was more
likely to turn on a black man than to help himself. Otis Bornock had once sold
Cassius a bottle of whiskey so vile and raw, that it had taken Cassius an extra
day to finish the bottle. Otis Bornock rode the back roads at night with the
other Patrollers, and until three years ago, Mr. Nettle had been their leader.

    Cassius
watched the man come. Who was dead, and how did this death relate to the
plantation? Any death that touched the planter family brought on an anxious
time of limbo for the blacks. When a white planter, his wife, or one of their
children died, ownership of slaves changed hands. Even the smallest peccadillo
in a white man, a gambling debt or an illegitimate child, could propel waves
through the slave community. Families might be broken up, wives sold from
husbands, children sold from mothers. If they were sold to the cotton states,
they would not be heard from again.

    The
pounding of the hooves slowed, the heat and perspiration of the horse crowded
the yard, and Otis Bornock swung out of his sweat-black saddle, the seat of his
pants clinging to leather, peeling away. The horse was thinner, surcingle
straps hanging long under its belly. Everyone was thinner now. Otis Bornock's
pearl-handled Colt Army revolver glinted momentarily in the sun, his sole proud
possession that he claimed to have won in a poker game. Others said he found it
on a dead man, and whispers that Otis Bornock had encouraged the man's
condition before "finding" the gun added to his reputation. Cassius
watched him hurry to the porch. Sweat rolled from his stained hat down the ends
of his hair and dripped to his collar. Otis Bornock removed his hat at the door
and ran his kerchief across his face. Pet came to the door, haughty and
superior in the face of white trash, but Ellen came up behind her and greeted
him graciously, even as Cassius saw terror in her eyes. Then she allowed him
inside, a man like that, Cassius thought, allowed in her home. Cassius saw that
she anticipated the worst possible news. Otis Bornock drew a letter from his
back pocket and it was wrinkled and moist and Cassius imagined it stank of Otis
Bornock's backside. Young Charles followed him in, quiet as a shadow. Charles
understood the impact of the visitor, preceded as he was by the song. Cassius
knew he would have to be careful about Charles. He had aroused an enemy, and
the boy would not forget.

    Cassius
listened for the owl screech of anguish, but the silence inside stretched and
he knew Master Jacob,
Major
Jacob Howard, was still alive. Cassius
breathed. The planter's family remained intact.

    Cassius
straightened his shoulders to relieve the strain on his back, where the scar
tissue was like a crust. He picked up a pail with fresh water and moved to the
chuffing horse, which dropped its nose and drank loudly. While he knew not to
water a sweating horse, this was Bornock's beast and Cassius was carrying out a
plan. Cassius looked toward the door to Mam Rosie's kitchen. Once the horse
finished, Cassius would walk to the pump by the kitchen to refill. By then, Mam
Rosie would know the news.

    Ellen
came out of the big house onto the porch, the rider standing behind her in the
dark of the room. She held the unfolded note in her hand.

    "Cassius!"
she called.

    He
set down the pail and stepped away from the horse into her line of view.

    Yes,
Missus Ellen, said Cassius.

    "Mr.
Bornock tells me the French gate leans."

    That's
so, Missus Ellen.

    Cassius
knew Bornock had said nothing of the kind, nor did he mention that the main
gate had been leaning since the day it was built, that it had almost certainly
leaned back in France on that vineyard.

    "You
go directly and straighten it out."

    Yes,
ma'am. Right after I finish this fence Master Charles knocked down.

    "That
will have to wait. You get on down there like I said. And do it right the first
time, Cassius, not like your usual."

    I
will, Missus.

    She
nodded to the rider, dismissing him. Otis Bornock returned to his horse and
remounted. Cassius was not to know the news. Ellen would wait for Master Hoke,
her husband, to return from Edensong later that afternoon to tell him. Young
Charles stood in the doorway, staring at Cassius. Cassius could not help
himself; he looked directly at Charles, and saw malicious satisfaction on the
boy's face. The identity of the dead was bad news for Cassius, and everyone
knew who it was but him.

    Cassius
collected his hammer and nails and a coil of rope. He listened to the horse
hooves fade down the hill. He did not fetch from his carpentry shed the tools
he would require to complete the work. He went directly down the hill to the
main gate. One of the house girls, probably Nanny Catherine, was crying in Mam
Rosie's kitchen. But he could not go there to discover why. Ellen Howard had
made sure that he would not find out.