The Handsome Road (14 page)

“I ate ice-cream once,” said Corrie May.

“Did you? What’s it like?”

“It ain’t so much. The way milk would be if it had sugar in it and was froze over.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“At Ardeith.” She added, “Ice ain’t so much anyway. You tie the milk bucket to a string and put it down the well and it keeps just as good as if you had ice.”

The ladies came out on the balcony over their heads. Servants brought chairs for them. Fine gentlemen who were not in the army stood behind the chairs and handed the ladies glasses of wine. They were all chattering and waving Confederate flags over the balcony-edge. Far down the street Corrie May heard a band playing Dixie.

She and the others crowded to the edge of the sidewalk. The big road was cleared of carriages. The men came marching toward them. Coming down the road they looked perfectly grand, the officers on horseback and the boys carrying great big flags. Corrie May couldn’t remember the names of all the states that were in it, because she had never heard of some of them before she heard about secession, but it was a big war, and her pa was marching in line with his fine uniform just like a gentleman, only he didn’t have any stars on his collar. The band played Dixie and everybody sang.

On the balcony overhead the ladies and gentlemen were throwing roses for the soldiers to walk on. Here came Colonel Sheramy on a horse. He took off his hat and bowed to the ladies, and Corrie May heard Ann exclaim, “Oh, father! He never looked so magnificent before!” and looking up she saw Ann throwing kisses. Colonel Sheramy bowed till you’d think he’d fall off his horse, and the ladies flung roses under the horse’s hoofs. Then there was Captain Denis Larne on a horse, and the ladies threw roses at him, and then came several others she recognized from having seen them at Ardeith. It was going to be a gentlemen’s war, all right, and Corrie May was proud her pa was in it to have flowers thrown at him. At last she saw pa, marching along proud as anybody, though he was in the ranks, and Corrie May sang Dixie till she thought her throat would burst, and pa looked at her and grinned. The soldiers all had nooses tied to their guns, to catch Yankees. The ladies on the balcony flung flowers, and one of them hit pa’s shoulder, just like a gentleman’s shoulder. There were bands and flags and bright sunshine, and Corrie May had on her best dress. It was a grand war.

2

Corrie May had never been so joyously busy since the day she was born. Days she did not work at Ardeith she spent in Rattletrap Square with her girl friends, knitting socks and mittens and sewing shirts for the brave defenders of her country. Some of the girls said they thought it was mighty noble of Mr. Denis to go right out and join up with the army just like everybody else. Corrie May did not think it was so very noble of him and said so. “It’s his country same as anybody’s,” she retorted, “and if they come down here and burn up everything he’d stand to lose a sight more than most folks.”

Well, there sure was something fine about a war all the same, the other girls said, the way it leveled people and made rich men and poor men just alike. Dixie land was everybody’s country and a poor man could tote a gun same as a rich one and they were all friends together in the army.

Corrie May had to admit there was something to that. Once they got into their uniforms you couldn’t tell the difference, and certainly the rich ladies were working for the soldiers with all their might. They organized knitting clubs and met at one another’s houses to work and didn’t seem to mind at all. When the knitting club met at Ardeith the ladies had the jolliest time you ever saw. They came in their carriages with pretty workbags on their arms and sat a long time in the parlor, laughing and talking at a great rate; and though they fussed because the dye from the yarns stained their fingers, and said this war was going to be the ruin of their hands, they were so patriotic they seemed to enjoy it. In the afternoon there was a clatter of horses in the avenue and up came a group of young officers from the camp, and other young gentlemen not in the army, and Ann and her brother Jerry took turns playing the piano so they could dance till supper time. They gathered around the piano and while Jerry played—for he could play any tune he had ever heard, and do it better than Ann for all her music-masters—they sang rebel songs till the walls rang.

“As long as the Union

Was faithful to her trust,

Like friends and like brethren

Kind were we and just;

But now when Northern treachery

Attempts our rights to mar,

We’ll rally round the Bonnie Blue Flag

That bears a single star!”

The young ladies shed tender tears and the young gentlemen kissed them—not very secretly either—and at last they went in for supper, at which one or two of the soldiers drank enough to be very noisily patriotic indeed, but nobody seemed to mind. But at last when the guests had left, Napoleon came to Corrie May and told her the mistress wanted to see her in the parlor.

Corrie May went in and found Ann curled up in a big chair looking around with dejected irony at the threads and scraps of yarn littering the rug. Ann asked abruptly,

“Corrie May, do you know how to knit?”

“Why yes ma’am,” said Corrie May. “Sure.”

“Will you teach me?” Ann asked.

“Why Miss Ann, don’t you know? I sho thought I seen you fooling with some needles.”

Ann laughed tersely. “That’s exactly what I was doing with them—fooling. I can knit a straight piece if I’m lucky enough not to drop any stitches, but I don’t know any more know how to set a heel or turn glove-fingers—we’re a fine lot of patriots, we are. Look at this masterpiece Sarah Purcell left here.” She pulled out of a workbag a shapeless gray object, put her finger through it and gave a jerk. The stitches raveled into a ladder down the middle.

Corrie May laughed too, in derision. “What’s it supposed to be?”

“I don’t know—a muffler, I think. Will you really teach me how?”

“Sho,” said Corrie May, “I’ll teach you. You got some needles handy?”

Ann took them out of her workbag, together with a ball of yarn, and told Corrie May to sit by her on the sofa. Corrie May set about giving her a lesson. In about thirty minutes she was so exasperated she had difficulty keeping her temper. She had never in all her born days seen anybody so stupid as Ann. Those dainty white fingers of hers seemed utterly unable to perform any task at all, even one so simple as throwing thread over a needle. She knotted the yarn, she dropped stitches, she forgot to count and purled in the wrong places. And what was worse, she didn’t seem to know how to give her attention to what she was doing. In the middle of an explanation she looked out of the window and said how pretty the moon was as it came up. Corrie May recalled her and started to explain all over again, but before she was half done Ann had jumped up to examine an unusual moth flying about the candle. Corrie May did not dare call her a dunce, but she did say, “Miss Ann, I can’t teach you nothing if you can’t set your mind to it more than half a minute at a time!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ann apologized, laughing at herself. “I don’t seem to have any power of concentration at all. You must think I’m very dimwitted.”

That was exactly what Corrie May did think, but she said tactfully, “Oh no ma’am, only I reckon a lady like you that’s always had things done for her has a hard time trying to do anything herself. Now you just be quiet and listen while I tell you, please ma’am.”

After that Ann listened more attentively, as though ashamed of herself, and though her head seemed very slow at accepting instruction she did learn something before the evening was over.

However, Corrie May did have to admit that for all her foolishness Ann did have an astonishing power of perseverance. She knitted all the next day, pausing only for meals and for occasional romps with little Denis, and though she had to ravel most of what she accomplished, when Corrie May was ready to leave that afternoon and came for her wages Ann proudly held up an inch of wristband on four needles.

“Look, Corrie May! I’ve been around eight times and haven’t missed the purling once!”

Smothering her contempt for a lady who found such difficulty in so simple an accomplishment, Corrie May came over politely and examined it. “Yes ma’am, it’s very nice.”

“Is it really all right?” Ann asked anxiously.

“Yes ma’am,” said Corrie May with some impatience, for she was tired and wanted to go. “Except some stitches is slacker than others. You got to learn to hold the yarn always the same.”

“Oh. I’ll try.” Ann carefully did six more stitches, counting each one with a little bob of her head. “I’ll do it right if it kills me,” she said half under her breath.

“It will if you work that hard at it,” said Corrie May laughing. “The trouble with you, Miss Ann, is you ain’t never learned to do nothing and so you think things is a lot harder than they are.”

“I suppose that’s true. But it
is
hard.” She purled twice.

“Could I please ma’am have my money?” Corrie May asked.

“Oh yes, of course. Here it is.”

She took her purse out of her workbag and handed Corrie May a couple of yellow bills. Corrie May turned them over doubtfully. She stood first on one foot and then on the other, running her tongue over her lower lip and examining the bills. Ann looked up from her knitting.

“What’s the matter?”

“Er—Miss Ann,” Corrie May ventured, “excuse me, please ma’am, but this here—is this money?”

“Why certainly it is! You don’t think I’m trying to cheat you? Oh.” She began to laugh. “That’s the new money. Confederate money. Don’t you see what’s printed on it?”

“I ain’t so good at reading,” said Corrie May timidly.

“I see.” Ann took the bills from Corrie May’s hand. “This line across the top says ‘Confederate States of America.’ It’s just as good as the old kind.”

“You mean it’ll spend just the same?” Corrie May asked, relieved but still hesitating.

“Why of course.”

“It’s just different because of the war?”

“That’s right.” Ann returned to counting stitches.

“Yes ma’am.” Corrie May curtseyed and went out to the back where she climbed into the wagon on which she was to ride to the wharfs. The wagon was half full of molasses-kegs. She sat down in the back, and as the driver clambered into his seat he looked back to tell her he had to go out the side road on an errand before going to the wharfs. She sighed, and leaned back against the side of a hogshead to wait until it suited his master’s pleasure for him to take her where she wanted to go.

The side road was bumpy, for people who lived out here were poor and the road had no need to be leveled for carriages. The plots were small and had a half-hearted appearance very different from the thriving neatness of the great plantations. The houses were whitewashed cabins in sad need of repair. This was St. Clair property: instead of working their land themselves the St. Clairs let it out to tenants and lived on their rents. Corrie May had seen at Ardeith a young gentleman named Bertram St. Clair and a young lady named Miss Harriet St. Clair, and she had marveled that they seemed like such agreeable people, for their name was such a horror to everybody she knew that she had pictured the St. Clairs as greedy ogres counting with long yellow fingers the rents they squeezed out of Rattletrap Square and their tenant farms. For all her glimpses of rich people at Ardeith, she had never made it clear in her mind how they could be so ineffably cruel and at the same time so very kind. There was a woman in Rattletrap Square whose husband had been killed in a fall from a scaffolding, and she had been turned into the street with four children because she could not pay her rent to the St. Clairs, and yet the very next day Mr. Bertram St. Clair came to dinner at Ardeith with his mother, and he was so attentive to the old lady that he might have been held up as a model of devotion. It was all very puzzling.

The wagon was passing a field of cotton. Corrie May looked at it with surprise, for this was good cotton, as well worked as the cotton of Ardeith. Whoever rented this piece was a thrifty fellow, proud of himself and meaning to get some place in the world. Near the road she could see his cabin, so neat it might have been built yesterday, with bean-vines climbing up the front. Around the house was a vegetable garden where a man was working. She thought there was something familiar about his back, then as he turned to look at the wagon rumbling by Corrie May gasped and started, for the man was Budge Foster.

She had not seen Budge in a long time. He hardly ever got to Rattletrap Square these days. She felt her face get hot, for she was remembering how she had talked to him when she told him she would not marry him, and she wished she could duck behind a hogshead so he wouldn’t see her. But Budge had caught sight of her already. He waved his hoe, saying “Well, well, well,” and came down the path to the road. The driver, nothing loth to do a bit of idling, drew back on the reins and let the wagon stop. Budge leaned on his hoe, grinning with welcome that was only faintly self-conscious. “If it ain’t Corrie May,” he said. “How you been making out?”

He looked healthy and right well pleased with himself. His face and arms were so sunburned that he was reddish-brown like an Indian in a picture book. He wore a blue shirt, open at the throat and with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and homespun breeches neatly patched at the knees. His bare feet were hard and crusted with good rich earth. Corrie May found her eyes going from his face to the patches at his knees. Needn’t tell her any man could patch as neatly as that. There was some woman taking care of him. Not that she should mind, and she assured herself that she didn’t, but she did.

“Hello,” she said bashfully.

“Don’t you look grand,” said Budge, “riding in the Ardeith wagon. I heard tell you was working out there. How they treat you?”

“Oh, pretty good,” said Corrie May. She wished she could keep her eyes off those patches. “You look like you was doing pretty good yourself.”

Budge grinned proudly. “Oh, I’m doing fine, fine,” he said heartily. He swept his arm toward his field. “Look. Ain’t it a handsome place? It’s a shame you ain’t seed it since I got the land working. Made half a bale to the acre last fall. Do better than that this year. Is you in a hurry? Come on, I’ll show it to you. Got corn in the back, and tomatoes—”