Sarny (14 page)

She rested for an hour when the lawyers were done and by the end of that day ’most everything was ready. I brought my blanket in and put it on the floor that night and started to sleep there but she stopped me.

“Please, Sarny, sleep on the bed, will you? Next to me? I have some fear …”

So I did and was next to her just at dawn the next morning when she passed. I was awake, thinking on coffee and breakfast, wondering should I do it, just lying still next to her hearing her breathe, and I looked over in the weak light coming through the window. Sun wasn’t up yet but starting to get close and her eyes were open and she was looking at me and she took my hand and said, “Oh, Sarny, I did so like beautiful things.”

And she died. Closed her eyes and her breathing stopped and I thought, no, God, not yet. But He took her and I thought bad on Him for a minute, but He still took her.

Felt like I’d lost another Delie, another
Martin, another Stanley. Thought my heart was already broken from the others but it wasn’t. Broke again, just broke and I laid there crying next to her, holding her still hand, smelling the lilac in her hair, wishing I hadn’t had to see so damn much misery. Feeling some sorry for my own self and wishing I could slide time backwards and have it not happen.

Didn’t matter.

He took her anyway.

Went just like she planned. Tyler and little Delie they had to help me with the wake and the funeral because Bartlett he fell apart just like Miss Laura said. Just sat in the corner of the kitchen crying softly, looking out the small window. Nothing to see but the building next door but he sat there a whole day and would have stayed longer ’cept that I took a bottle of cordial and a glass and put him in his room and made him drink it. The whole bottle.

He slept then but still wasn’t good for much and during the funeral parade out to the cemetery we had to give him a ride in a carriage because he couldn’t walk. Just kept crying and hanging on the hearse and falling down. He loved Miss Laura so much that he almost died himself. When the funeral was over he took to his bed and didn’t get up for almost a week and I think would have passed ’cept that I brought him soup and soft bread and made him eat.

Miss Laura she had her burial vault picked. Didn’t surprise me ’cept that I thought she was so young and it didn’t seem a young person would think on death. ’Course she wasn’t that young after all.

A week after the wake and funeral Brune he came to call. Had a case full of papers and folders and set them all on the table. We were still in Miss Laura’s. She didn’t own it but the rent was paid for a year and I slept at home but kept it up for Bartlett. He was coming along better but still couldn’t think straight. Never saw grief that deep.

Brune he put on small spectacles and coughed to clear his throat and looked on Bartlett and told him what Miss Laura she had done for him. Bartlett set off crying again, moaning, and I helped him to his room and came back out to the table. Little Delie and Tyler they were there and Brune he asked them to leave.

“They can stay,” I said. “They’re my children.”

He nodded. “I know. But Laura wished for you to hear some of this alone. I’m sorry, but those are her instructions.”

“We’ll go back to the house,” Tyler said. “We can come back later.”

Brune he waited until they were gone, then cleared his throat again and pushed the spectacles
up his nose. Red face. Red nose. White and red. Saw those things and couldn’t help thinking on them though they had nothing to do with what we were doing.

“Sarny, you are now a very wealthy woman.”

I nodded. “I know. I’ve been saving for years. It adds up.”

“I mean the estate. I’m not sure you understand, but Miss Laura left you everything.”

I nodded again. “I know. She told me before she passed over.” Couldn’t say died, couldn’t think it. “But there isn’t much of an estate. She rented this place and I don’t know that she owns much else.”

“She owns—
you
own”—he took out some papers—“four rental properties here in New Orleans, five rental properties in St. Louis, half interest in two riverboats, one-quarter interest in a bank here in New Orleans, a substantial number of shares in different businesses. She was very shrewd and all the shares are in Northern companies. I think she knew the South would lose the war and didn’t wish to go down with them. And she owns quite a large amount of land situated here and there—some seven thousand acres.” He took a breath. “She also left money in gold in approximately the amount of eighty-five thousand dollars. Add to this the fact that all the
income properties and land bring in an added approximately forty-seven thousand dollars a year and, as I said, you are a very wealthy woman.”

Just sat, trying to think. Couldn’t. So much I couldn’t even think on it, couldn’t take a guess. “But …”

He smiled. “She said you would have trouble believing it. She instructed me to advise you until you wish me to stop.”

“But …”

“Don’t worry. I’ve already been paid for whatever I do for you. I would have done it for nothing. I thought very much of Laura and on several occasions asked her to marry me. I don’t know how I’ll handle her loss.…” All in the same tone. Businesslike, straight out, but I could see his eyes were misting up and knew he meant it.

“But what do I
do
with it all?”

Was all I could think to say.

Went to St. Louis.

Not right away. I had to stay in New Orleans near a year just to figure things out. Brune he worked with me as he said and I brought Tyler and little Delie into it so they could help me and they did fine. Little Delie she got to colting—she was eighteen—but she was more like me than Lucy and kept her head to business
even when the other parts wanted to take the bit and run.

She brought home a man name of Isaac and wanted to marry him but wouldn’t without my say-so. I talked to Isaac for a spell and he seemed better than most, had a good head on his shoulders and was working at the market steady, so I gave a nod.

They married but little Delie she kept her head for business and I was glad because Tyler he wanted to leave and go to school to be a doctor. He went off and pretty soon little Delie she was running things as well as I could and I went to St. Louis to see the properties up there.

Took the steamship
Henshaw
up the river. Had to ride in the colored section again but I rented a room. Tiny little thing and cost more than I wanted to spend but I like my privacy and what with stopping and starting and finding firewood for the boilers we were three weeks getting up to St. Louis and I was glad to have a room.

Passed my fortieth birthday on the river. I wasn’t sure of my birth date but knew it close so I made it June ninth because I like the first part of June—soft summer nights, early summer birds and bugs singing. Had a cup of sassafras tea with my grits for a birthday party and missed Tyler and little Delie. They had
their own lives and I thought on all that had gone, sitting there on the river, the paddle wheel churning as the riverbanks slid past like they were greased.

St. Louis it was a sick place. Never saw so many bodies coming and going without a war. Some kind of influenza was there and the whole city smelled of mud and vomit and death. Saw to things and then found a boat heading south and took it. Wasn’t there a week and wished I hadn’t come. The properties were taking care of themselves and I couldn’t stand the smell or the crowds. Everybody not dead was hurrying to get somewhere. Too fast and not in a friendly way, like down South. Everybody edgy.

Back in New Orleans it was slower and I stayed there a year just doing business but felt bad, even though Delie she had a new baby name Samuel. Couldn’t figure why I felt bad but little Delie she told me one morning. We had taken to having coffee of a morning like I had done with Miss Laura. Little Sam he sucked on a sugar sock and we sipped our black coffee and little Delie said, “You need something to do.”

“I’ve got plenty to do. Money coming in, money going out—it all takes something.”

“I can do all that. You need to work with people again. You need to teach.”

And she was right. Knew it when she said it. Dead right. Wanted to be teaching and after that day I thought on it. There wasn’t a need in New Orleans anymore. People learning, teaching each other. Those that wanted to learn could.

Had to go somewhere else and I couldn’t see it until Tyler he told me. He was home from school up North and he had a friend going west.

“A lot of black people are going to Texas,” he said. “There’s work out there and places to live.”

And that’s how I came to be in Texas.

Left New Orleans and headed west by train and coach. Took three dresses and a box full of writing tablets and pencils and two more boxes full of books and stopped at the first town in Texas where there were black people.

Cruller, Texas.

Mostly cowboys and I had to laugh later when I saw my first movie about the West and all the white cowboys. Most of the cowboys I saw were black men. Boys, not men. Just boys. Headed out there to find those wild cattle and drive them north to railheads. Old joke said a cowboy was a man with a ten-dollar horse and a forty-dollar saddle. I saw them with no saddles and some with no horses. Running on foot into thick mesquite to rope a longhorn
and drag it down. Wild as the cattle they caught.

But they had to learn too. They had wives and young ones and they all had to learn. Started a school in Cruller and in a year or so when some could teach others I moved on to the next town.

Beaufort. Same thing. Little Delie she sent me enough of my money to buy a small house for three hundred dollars and I turned it into a school and when one could teach another I moved on again.

Did that my whole lifelong life.

Did that until I was near eighty years old and had started maybe twenty schools. So many schools and so many faces looking up I couldn’t remember them.

Did that until little Delie she was an old woman her own self with grandchildren and I had great-grandchildren and Tyler he was an old man and then he passed on and I had to go back and bury him.

Hard to do. Bury your own children. Hardest thing to do. They’re meant to live longer than you. Your children. Tyler he had a good life. Too short, but good. He was a doctor for over thirty years and had a good practice, good wife, three good children, but it’s hard to bury your young ones just the same.

Little Delie she made the money double
again several times until I doubt even she could count it. She kept sending me checks but I didn’t need but forty dollars a month and money for books and five-cent tablets and penny pencils. Bit of chalk now and again. So most of the checks I just kept in a book and didn’t cash them in.

Then came a day my body it didn’t care what my brain told it to do. It was too tired to do more. Just too tired. So I found this home outside Dallas where the sun comes in the east window in the morning. Put myself in here. They don’t let me drink coffee but I think on it, think on drinking coffee of a morning with Miss Laura and write these words on a tablet and wait.

Wait to go visit with Delie and Nightjohn and Miss Laura, and maybe see Martin again and Stanley and Tyler. And those four soldiers shot in the belly. I worry on them sometimes before sleep. Just boys never got to be men.

Wait to go visit my friends.

That’s my whole life.

As is
Nightjohn
, the first book about Sarny, this story is fiction, though everything in it is true in the sense that it happened to someone. And in that same sense all the fictional characters could in a way be considered real—or based on real people and real events—with the stipulation that events and characters have been moved around and renamed in the interest of story and flow.

I have tried to avoid the oft-used “big picture” concept, which I think is detrimental to many works of historical fiction. As an example, though Sarny witnessed what she thought were Civil War battles, in reality they were little more than skirmishes. A young woman newly freed from slavery would probably not be familiar with large events in the outside world and would see things from her own perspective
and evaluate them with her own abilities.

I have written this book in this way in the hope that I will provide a more accurate and intimate look at what a life like Sarny’s was really like.

Gary Paulsen
White Oaks, New Mexico
January 1997