High Hearts (48 page)

Kate reappeared in the sick room. “That ought to give us another two weeks.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Vickers.” Gunther’s eyes misted.

Kate said, “I’ll do what I can to keep you here, Private. Perhaps you can stay as an orderly once you’re really back on your feet. I hope so. But if you try and escape, so help me God, I’ll shoot you myself.”

“Yes, ma’am, I believe you would.”

“Those two are thick as thieves again,” Mars grumbled to Banjo. Geneva and Nash were once again on very friendly terms.

“I pay it no mind.”

“What stuck in my craw was that Henley Chatfield let Jimmy have his room for two nights. And I take it Nash stayed there, too.”

“Where’d the good colonel sleep?” Banjo picked burrs out of his horse’s mane, deliberately seeming uninterested.

“Over at the Windsors’. Our house, as you know, was like the depot.”

“Best party I ever attended.” Banjo grinned.

“Except for that black devil hanging himself.”

“Love takes a man in strange ways,” Banjo continued as they rode up the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad track. They were right outside of Richmond, waiting for battle orders. “Knew a schoolteacher oncet. He explained to me that in ancient Greece an older man would love and care for a younger man until the young one grew a beard. He said it was a noble love. I said it might be noble in Greece, but you won’t get far with it here.”

Mars threw back his head and roared. “Go tell that to Jimmy!”

“Think I’ll wait for the beard first.”

Phoebe Yates Pember sent a message to Kate to evacuate the strongest of the men. By nightfall, with tearful good-byes, every man was out of the house except for Joseph Rutledge and Gunther Krutzer. Beverly Fyffe and Gunther were distraught at having to part, but Beverly promised once the war was over they would visit one another.

Lutie bought a church almanac for each wounded man. She read them Matthew, chapter 3, as it was the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. She loved the part where John calls the Pharisees and Sadducees a “generation of vipers.”

Richmond was breeding its own generation of vipers, and no doubt Washington was, too. Lutie was especially disturbed at the behavior of the Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, who criticized Davis with spiraling vehemence. If you’re going to be a man’s Vice-President it would be prudent not to stab him in the back.

Watching the wounded men climb into carriages and wagons which would take them west of the city, Lutie overheard a soldier remark, “Heroism at the front; opportunism in the rear.” Surely these brave boys deserved better than that, or at least a Vice-President who kept his mouth shut.

Life changed like fluffy clouds. A puff of wind and the clipper ship in the sky turned into a dragon. Another puff and the dragon was a frying pan. Lutie had grown up in a society where individuality was prized above all virtues, individuality and courage. Now the government was secreting power to itself from the states. The Confederacy was becoming centralized. Lutie knew that once power was accumulated it would never be willingly dispersed. Her world was disappearing.

“Good-bye.” Kate waved to the last carriage,
“When do you suppose we’ll receive more wounded?” Lutie asked her.

“Soon. Both cocks are in the ring and spurred. They have to fight.”

“I think it’ll be worse than last time.”

“I do, too, and we have only a small surplus of medicines. I’ve asked Colonel Windsor for more.”

“We could break up a few large buckets of charcoal. If all else fails, putting that on the wounds might retard gangrene.”

Kate sighed. “Gangrene is what Richmond and Washington have. A plague on both their houses for the corruption those politicians have spawned.”

“Corruption is the beginning of change,” Lutie replied.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know what I mean—but I mean it.”

A light drizzle imprisoned Sin-Sin and Di-Peachy in the house. Both were stir-crazy from the absence of the men and the sudden gift of time on their hands. Everything was done that could be done. Bandages had been counted. Old sheets and fabric scraps had been searched out although there were few left since the onslaught of wounded from Seven Pines. Medicines had been catalogued and organized.

They sat in a gabled window high on the third floor overlooking Franklin Street. People carrying large umbrellas looked like black mushrooms as they hopped over puddles.

“Wasn’t that funny when Kate’s mother came to the party and criticized Varina Davis to Kate’s face?” Di-Peachy leaned forward conspiratorially.

“Uh huh.” Sin-Sin wore a violet and gold turban made from a piece of exquisite material Kate had given her.

“Said Varina aped royalty by putting her servants in expensive livery.”

“She knows Kate tight with the first lady. Jes needlin’ her.”

“Kate said, ‘What are we to do, Mama? Are we to level down or raise up? If servants don’t wear livery in the President’s house, they should go naked.’ I thought the old lady would pitch a fit, but instead she laughed. Odd family.” She paused. “I’ve always thought of you as my family, Auntie.”

“I loves you.”

In a sudden outburst, Di-Peachy said, “I wish I’d known my mother.”

Sin-Sin stared out the window. “She was a kind soul and very beautiful.”

“Do you remember your mother?”

“I see her face plain as I sees yours but it is queer to me, I cannot ’member one word my mother spoke to me, not nary a word. I ’member she brought me hot pot licker and bread in the mornings when I was small; but I been tryin’ to ’member some words she spoke to me and I can’t.”

“Was she sold away?”

“No. Lucius Chatfield, Henley’s father, din’ believe in breakin’ up families. Momma was killed in an accident with one of the horses. She was standin’ by the big carriage—”

“The coach-in-fours?”

“That one. Arnold, Ernie June’s daddy, dressed to sparkle, hung on the back. One of the horses went crazy rearin’ and screamin’, and the traces tangled up. He knock Momma down. She drug under those traces before Arnold could get her out. He was brave, that Arnold, ’cause he went right for the horses.”

“I’m sorry.” Di-Peachy rested her hand on Sin-Sin’s.

“Honey, that was a long yesterday—”

“And a far tomorrow,” Di-Peachy cut in.

“You gots the far tomorrows, not me. Tell me now, I knows you from little on up. What’s workin’ on your mind that you askin’ me ’bout the past? We haven’t had one minute to put our heads together since Mr. Henley told you the truth.”

“Auntie, I feel I have the sin of both races in my face.” She covered her face in her hands.

“Hush. I doan want to hear such talk! You got no stain on you. He got the stain. Yo’ poor Momma got no stain on her neither.”

“I knew, I always knew. Do you know what it’s like to be loved, but never to belong?”

“You belong. You belong to Chatfield. You belong to me.”

Tears ran from underneath her hands. She pulled her hands away from her face to wipe her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “I’m not black, and I’m not white.”

“Thass a hard road. God provided you for it by giftin’ you with a wondrous mind. Solomon was black. Simon of Cyrea,
he was black and he bore Christ’s cross as he wagged up Calvary Hill. You not useless. That brain in that body, no, thass not useless. Yo’ think you the only café au lait on this earth?” A light tone crept into Sin-Sin’s voice.

“No.”

“You be here to do good. Doan be wastin’ yo’ time cryin’ that you neither here nor there. You gots me and you gots Geneva and yo’ beau.” Sin-Sin wasn’t so certain about the beau.

“I know I have you. I love you.” More tears fell through her hands. “But Geneva—she’s changed. We’re in two different worlds now.”

Sin-Sin noticed a gust of wind pull an umbrella over a man’s head. He stood in the rain, furiously trying to bring it down.

“Geneva told me,” continued Di-Peachy, “that Henley is going to free everyone at Chatfield on Christmas.”

Sin-Sin took this quite calmly. “Zat a fact?”

“But you know,” Di-Peachy spoke, “much as I want that for everyone, I think Henley’s doing it for his vanity. He’s more worried about his soul than he is about us!”

“See what I mean ’bout your brain? Don’t hate the man for why he’s doin’ it. Good always mixed up with bad. He’s doin’ something! Thass more than you can say for most.”

“And Lutie doesn’t want him to do it. She thinks someone like Braxton could go and make a living, but someone like Frederica would be crushed. Lutie’s subordinating the larger issue to individual people. Henley subordinates people to the issue.”

“Who cares so long as we be free.”

Di-Peachy wiggled in her seat. “If we were treated the way people in the North think we’re treated, it would be easier. We’re not bound by chains, Auntie Sin-Sin, we’re bound by ties of love. You love Lutie, and I love Geneva!”

“I loves Lutie.”

“Don’t you see, it would be so much easier if we could hate them.”

“Hate’s cancer. Eat you right up. Listen to me, it take a long, long time to develop mother wit.” Sin-Sin smiled. “Lutie be worth my love. You worth it. I could no more break my invisible chains than fly! Love be my honor.”

Di-Peachy said, “They say niggers and women have no honor.”

“This nigger woman does!” Sin-Sin blazed. “Don’t envy the whites. They got chains, but they thinks they free. Least I knows my chains.”

“I don’t want any chains!”

“Then you don’t want to live, girl. We bound to one another hand and foot. This whole human race, I don’t give jack shit ’bout they color nor they sex, we bound hand and foot, and we goin’ to walk to glory or we goin’ to walk to hell! I used to cry ’bout bein’ a slave. Oh, yes, you wouldn’t know it now. I hated it. I still care but I’m an old woman. Makes no sense fo’ me to care too much. One day I heard God. I heard his sweet music in my soul and ever since then, I doan care like I used to ’bout what happens to this husk. No one owns my soul. You gettin’ like the white folks. You gettin’ seduced by they money and they power and they land, but they have no peace.”

“The war will be over soon.”

“For a smart girl you sure dumb. War be on the outside. Peace be in the heart. I pity white folks. Doan be imitatin’ them else you lose yo’ heart and you lose yo’ soul.”

“But I’m swept up in their madness.”

“Even Jesus swept up in madness, chile.”

Di-Peachy looked at Sin-Sin’s dear face. “I think I have to live more before I can accept, if I ever can.”

“You thinkin’ I laying down like a wiped dog? You think thass what I’m talkin’ about? We each climbin’ a mountain, and the top be where God and his angels waitin’ for us. Everybody climbin’ this mountain, Di-Peachy. Even little Chinamen climbin’ this mountain. The rich man, he stop to admire or grab glittery rubies and diamonds and whatever he can. He ain’t gettin’ too far. But I climbs straight up. This mountain is in our hearts. Acceptin’ doan mean you lie down. I ain’t no weak woman. I changes what I can. What I can’t, well, I prays for another day or another person someday, when I dead and gone, to change things. I can’t do everythin’, but I can climb. You can climb. We can redeem ourselves. Jesus shine a light for you on that mountain, but you gotta climb it!” Sin-Sin finished. A silence.

“I’m thinking.”

“Must be that whirrin’ sound I hear.”

“Sometimes I feel such a sadness wash over me. It’s like a tidal wave of grief, but I don’t know where it comes from.”

“It means somebody dyin’ way off somewhere, and we doan know it.”

“Someone I don’t know?”

“God give each of us little pieces of other people’s souls even when we doan know them. When you sad like that, one of ’em dies. You see, honey, we all part of one another. Thass white folks’ terrible curse. They cuts off everyone from them. They thinkin’ they superior but they jes alone, and when they hear that coffin’s hollow moan, it too late.”

Just before sunrise, Lutie, Kate, Di-Peachy, Sin-Sin, and the other ladies of the Vickerses’ home hospital were awakened by the boom of cannon. The windows shook in the house. The ladies, together with the servants, Joseph and Gunther, quickly assembled in the conservatory. The cannonade rattled the glass with consistent rhythm.

“It sounds quite close,” said Jennifer, who was observed talking loudly to thin air before she descended the curving stairway.

“We knew the battle had to begin sometime.” Hazel sniffed the odor of redeye gravy coming from the kitchen.

Bebe Austin entered the room. “I rushed over here as fast as I could. My information is that our men under John Bankhead Magruder have opened fire upon the enemy.”

Rise whispered into Miranda’s ear. “Last night’s pillow talk.”

“We might as well get used to the sound. It’ll go on all day,” said Lutie.

The ladies dismissed for breakfast. They thought by nightfall the wounded would begin to arrive.

Sin-Sin counted and recounted supplies. She couldn’t stand being idle. Di-Peachy finally pulled her aside.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday.”

“Good.” Sin-Sin beamed.

“Does that apply to Ernie June? Is she climbing a mountain to God?” A malicious twinkle danced in Di-Peachy’s eyes.

Sin-Sin bristled. “Even the Good Lord’s allowed a few duds!”

Geneva and the regiment picked up General Stuart as they rode north on the Brooke Turnpike. The territory was familiar to everybody. This time the force was two thousand sabers plus Captain John Pelham’s battery. Another force of cavalry was assigned to watch the right flank of the enemy. These men covered the road to Charles City, Williamsburg, and the James River.

Geneva again had three days of corn and bacon in her haversack and tea in her canteen. No baggage trains followed the column, so Geneva knew they’d be traveling light. If anything went wrong, they’d live off the land. If they were fortunate in battle, they’d live off the enemy.

No Federals were in sight. The column, marching through intermittent rain, passed Yellow Tavern, perched in the middle of fields. By the afternoon they’d crossed the Chickahominy at Upper Bridge alongside the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad. An entire brigade of infantry waited there. The men hollered at the horsemen. The cavalrymen usually didn’t deign to holler back, but they waved their caps.