The Handsome Road (22 page)

“Ten?” Corrie May echoed in wonder. Things sure were going on in the courthouse now that these Northern men were in charge. Maybe that was the kind of wages they’d paid up North where there hadn’t been any slaves working for nothing. She felt Mr. Gilday’s hand on her knee again.

“Ten,” he was assuring her.

Corrie May smiled. She lifted his hand and looked straight at him. “Let’s say I work for five,” she suggested, “and you keep your hands in your pockets.”

Everybody kept laughing, including Mr. Gilday; apparently they had reached the mellow stage where almost anything seemed funny. “Ah, make it ten anyway,” Mr. Gilday agreed jovially, and he opened a big ledger. The pages were ruled for names, and at the top of each page was a colored picture of the flag. He dipped a pen into a bottle of ink. “What’s your name?”

“Corrie May Upjohn.”

“Age?”

“Twenty.”

He wrote, mumbling the words as he did so. “October third, 1865. Corrie May Upjohn, twenty, cleaning courthouse, ten dollars per week.” He reached into a drawer for a Bible and held it out to her. “Put your hand on here. Do you solemnly swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States and faithfully abide by all laws passed by Congress and all proclamations of the President unless reversed by the Supreme Court?”

“Why sure,” said Corrie May, “but what’s that got to do with me cleaning up the courthouse?”

“Ah, get along with you,” Mr. Gilday exclaimed in high good humor.

Corrie May slid off the desk. “Want me to start today, or do I come around in the morning?”

“Now, now,” murmured Mr. Gilday sympathetically, “you ain’t even got no shoes.”

“It’s warm weather still,” said Corrie May.

“Better get some,” said Mr. Gilday. From his pocket he drew a roll of bills about two inches across and peeled off one of them. He laid it on the desk by her hand. Corrie May chuckled. It was like a game. With her thumb and forefinger she flicked the bill back toward him.

“Never mind, Mr. Gilday,” she said. As the men kept on chuckling, she added with amusement, “After it gets dark you take a stroll along the wharfs, headed downriver. And if you don’t like what comes along you keep going till you get below the Valcour warehouses, and if things ain’t changed since the war you turn in at the third street below the last warehouse. But,” she continued, pleasantly but clearly, “that ain’t where I live. Well, goodby. See you all in the morning.”

Followed by their laughter, she went out and shut the door behind her. She didn’t know who they were or what they were doing down here, but she liked them. They were all right. As for keeping off that funny Mr. Gilday, that was no trick; she had been doing that sort of thing successfully since she was about twelve years old. To be dressed so lowclass, he sure had a lot of money. Ten dollars a week, imagine. And he’d written it down in a government book, so it must be right. Corrie May began to whistle as she went toward the back door.

“Get the job?” a friendly voice asked as she emerged.

She looked up at the broad pleasant face of Jed Lindsay. “I sho did,” she returned. “Go to work in the morning.”

“Well now, that’s fine,” said Jed. “Expect I’ll see you then.”

“You on guard duty here every day?” she asked.

He nodded. “Can’t do much else with one arm. Just tell folks where to find the men inside. They paying you fair?”

“Mighty fine. Ten dollars a week.”

“Holy—jumping—Jehosephat!” marveled Jed. “They sure pitch money around, them government agents, don’t they? Wish they’d give me a job.”

“That better than the army?”

“Humph. Nineteen dollars a month.”

That was puzzling. If the government could pay ten dollars a week for a cleaning-girl, it would seem they could pay at least that much to a maimed soldier. Jed added,

“Where you suppose they get so much money?”

“I reckon they’s rich,” suggested Corrie May.

“They don’t hardly look it. Must be the government in Washington gives it to them.” He studied the back street and the people passing. “Want an apple?” he offered.

“Thanks,” said Corrie May.

He took a couple of apples from his pocket and they sat down on the back steps.

“We don’t see apples much around here,” said Corrie May. “Where’d you get ’em?”

“My mother sent them. We got some trees in our yard.”

There was a pause as they munched. Corrie May liked him. His simple directness reminded her of Budge. She looked regretfully at that empty left sleeve of his. Jed began telling her about his home. Just a little place in a village, he said, but it was tidy. He and his mother lived there, and he had had his smithy. No, he didn’t know what he would do when he went back. Couldn’t shoe horses. But he expected he’d think of something. Yes, it was fine up North, he told her proudly. No slaves. Some places up North used to have them, old folks had told him about it, but they found out it was wicked and so they passed laws setting all the Negroes free. Ever since he could remember, everybody had been free up North. In Indiana, now, where he lived, everybody was free and equal. Sure, some people were richer than others, but that didn’t make any difference. Everybody was the same before the law.

“It must be a grand place, the North,” Corrie May said wistfully. “It ain’t never been like that down here.”

“But that was what the war was for, miss,” Jed explained. “To make everybody free and equal down South like they are up North. That’s the way it’ll be.”

She smiled with hope. “I sho will be happy if I live to see it.”

“You’d like it better up North,” Jed told her, “where things is already that way.”

Corrie May sighed. “I reckon I would.”

But as the shadows began to lengthen she told him she had to go. It would be dark as soon as the sun was set. Jed said yes, that was something that always astonished him, the way it got dark all of a sudden in Louisiana. Up where he lived it took a long time to get dark. Corrie May laughed and said she couldn’t see that it made much difference one way or the other, and he said no, he expected not; anyway, he’d see her in the morning. She thanked him again for the apple and started off.

As she had no place to sleep she made her way down to the Valcour warehouses, where she got under a shed and curled up on a cottonbale. In the darkness of the shed she lay and thought. Things had been dreadful, but they were going to be different now. The South was going to be like the North, everybody equal. Jed had said so, and who should know what the war had accomplished if not a Northern soldier? As for her, she’d probably get married and have some children to bring up into this new order of things. She would tell them from the beginning how different it was now from what it had been when she was growing up. Nowadays if you worked and stayed honest and minded your business you could get some place in the world.

2

The job turned out to be splendid. Corrie May did her work and Mr. Gilday paid her every Saturday. Of course the government agents pestered her some, and that Mr. Gilday, he was just one of these fellows that couldn’t keep their hands off any woman that happened to be around, but she didn’t really mind, for she was adroit at keeping herself to herself. She rented a good room to live in, with a woman who had lost her husband in the war and was glad to give lodgings to a good girl who paid her regularly. It wasn’t in Rattletrap Square, but in one of those modest respectable streets above the wharfs. And on her wages she could buy neat clothes and look tidy.

She went down into Rattletrap Square to ask about her mother. But Mrs. Gambrell said why, didn’t she know, her mother was dead. And as for old man Upjohn, he just hadn’t turned up since the war. Maybe he was dead, maybe not. You know how it was, in those battles there was so much confusion they didn’t always keep up with the private soldiers. There were lots of men that just hadn’t been heard of. Corrie May shed a good many quiet tears about her mother. It was a shame, ma had never had anything, and now that she was getting such high wages and could have made things a little easier, ma was dead. It just seemed as if everybody was gone from her as well as everything that had any connection with those years before the war; it was almost like being without any past.

Nothing was as it used to be. Even the familiar streets around the wharfs were somehow different. The whole town had an air that was at the same time festive and sullen. There were flags about everywhere, that same striped flag you used to see before the war, only then it had been displayed only in front of a few public buildings, but now it streamed all around so common you got plumb tired of the sight of it. When folks from the great houses came downtown they’d walk around the block to keep from passing it, for the law said every time you passed it you had to salute, and how they did hate that—a circumstance that amused Corrie May mightily. They had lost their war and lost their slaves and they were taking it with a bewildered resentment, just as if they had always thought they had a private agreement with heaven that nothing would ever happen to them and now the Lord had cheated them.

There were soldiers all over the place all smartened up in their blue uniforms, only it was kind of silly, for the war was over and they had precious little to do but hang around and they were sick of it. They kept saying yes, they’d saved the Union all right and now why the bloody hell couldn’t they go on home? Some of the soldiers in the Union army were Negroes, and they sure did strut. What they were intended for she didn’t know, unless it was to show off and remind the slaveowners that they’d lost the war in a mighty way. And of course there were the other Negroes, all over the place too, acting uppity and too good to work and just being an infernal nuisance. The blue army had a camp for them out of town where they tried to keep the poor things fed and orderly, but the Negroes didn’t like staying there; their heads were bursting open with fool notions about now that they were free the government was going to give them carriages and big houses and champagne. It all made Corrie May want to laugh. For while she didn’t pretend to know much about it, any halfwit could see the agents around the courthouse didn’t have any such intentions in the back side of their minds. The Northern soldiers and Northern government men talked about the Negroes fine, sure, but they didn’t like them as folks and they didn’t want to touch them.

Well, it wasn’t any of her business and she didn’t care what they did. She was concerned with getting along herself personally. As the months passed she felt more at ease than she ever had.

She was making a good living and enjoying herself; she liked Jed, and several other soldiers he introduced her to, and they had picnics in their time off and sometimes went to see a show. And in the courthouse there were the government men, making jokes and keeping things lively. Mr. Gilday got very entertaining sometimes, and often when she was cleaning up his office he’d stop writing in his books and pass the time of day with her. Sometimes he invited her to a show or a party, but she always declined, and though he laughed at her for preferring the company of Jed and his fellow-privates, who had so little money to spend, Corrie May merely laughed back at him.

She and Mr. Gilday got to be on rather friendly terms after awhile. There was very little pretense between them; she understood perfectly well what he wanted, and though she was flattered by his persistence she was also amused by his self-confidence. She continued to prefer Jed, who had been brought up to have some respect for a good girl. She kept at her work, and remembered to make a proper curtsey every time she passed one of those flags.

The government men liked having the flags up, for they enjoyed watching that wave of cold silent anger that crossed the aristocrats’ faces when they had to stop and make obeisance three or four times in the same block. “Why don’t you take down some of them stupid flags?” Corrie May asked Mr. Gilday one morning when she had been working for him about a year. She was brushing up the floor in his office. “It’s just a nuisance,” she added, “making the people stop so often.”

He knocked out his pipe so the ashes fell on the floor. “Oh, don’t hurt to keep ’em reminded they lost the war,” he told her easily.

Corrie May smiled a little. She got on her knees to brush up the ashes, and lowered her head so he wouldn’t observe her smile. But he had seen it, and he bent nearer her.

“What’s so funny?” he inquired.

“It ain’t none of my concern,” she replied, brushing unnecessarily hard at the floor.

“No, go on. You’re not going to make me mad.”

She sat back on the floor, her brush in one hand and her dustpan in the other. “Mr. Gilday, I ain’t got no love for them that was the big slaveowners before the war. God knows they kicked me around like I was a stick of wood. But you can make them salute your flags and you can let niggers shove them off the sidewalk till the Judgment Day, and they’ll still be
them
, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, go on,” said Mr. Gilday as she paused. He was thoughtfully stroking his chin.

Corrie May hesitated, but she remembered that everybody was equal now and she could say what she pleased, so she continued, “Mr. Gilday, you ain’t really going to get at them people till you hit them in the place where they keep a little private contract with their private God that they’re better than other folks. They got education and manners and I ain’t saying them things ain’t fine to have, I wish I had some, but them Larnes and Sheramys and their sort, they honestly think the reason they’re like that and you and me ain’t is that the Lord God made them out of a different kind of dust from us. It ain’t never been in the back side of their mind that if you and me had been started off like them the day we were born we’d be elegant as them now.”

Mr. Gilday’s little black eyes narrowed as he studied her and his mouth stretched in a sort of smile that he made without parting his lips. After a moment he asked, “Where’d you ever learn so much, Corrie May?”

She was getting to her feet. “I ain’t never been accused of having nothing the matter with my head, sir.”

“Nor have you,” said Mr. Gilday. He looked her over as she stood whisking the trash from her dustpan into the wastebasket. “You sure are getting to be a nice-looking young lady, Corrie May,” he remarked.