Stand the Storm (21 page)

Gabriel had ordered Mary to put the children up and go to bed. The tense atmosphere had chased Ellen from the room and Delia had followed her.

Sewing Annie remained behind the others and looked at her son to take his temperature. Tonight in the workroom his eyes betrayed a deep shock and fear. They lighted nowhere, only flickered from one hand to another, one wall to another. She could not engage his eyes—pin them and probe them for an explanation. He rubbed at a spot an inch from his heart. Annie feared he was stricken with an infirmity, but the rubbing caused a sound of crackling and she realized a paper was in his breast pocket. He rubbed it over and over.

Reluctant to engage displeasure, Annie went to her bed. Gabriel insisted he wanted to agitate the problem alone. Let him be alone then!

Annie sat on the edge of her bed. She listened to Gabriel scratching on paper and blowing breath with exasperation. She, too, agitated. She pitied her son for what she saw from the upstairs window. Back and forth he went to the outhouse. The evening’s stew would not stay with him. It was Gabriel’s point of greatest vulnerability—his gut. It was where his fear and anger lodged, but would not settle. A cup of tea might help him. But his puzzling annoyance was potent. She’d like to brew tea for him, but would not test his nerves or her own.

Annie sat upon the side of the bed wearing her night shift and shivering some despite the stiff, hot summer air. She rubbed absently at her breasts. She strained to hear Gabriel and she pictured his moves about the room below. Aye, tonight he was as impatient and disagreeable as the mother had ever known him.

Annie rose, dressed again, and wrapped herself in a shawl. She descended the stairs, went to the front of the shop without a lamp, and left by the door that opened onto the street. She did not come and go by this front door in daylight, but would claim some action this evening. She chafed at being barred from the kitchen workroom by Gabriel’s fulminations.

There was a short, wide tree stump of little consequence a few steps from the front door of the tailor shop and Annie sat on it musing. A dim light on a pole beside the stump illumined the night.

In summer, in Washington there is always the fear that the thick, humid air carries illness to swirl around the heads of residents. Little relief comes with the dimming of the sun, for the haze thus caused produces a miasma. Inside the constricting house at Bridge and High Streets, it was as though one was facedown in straw and suffocating.

Annie looked out from her seat on the prospect overlooking the riverbank, pulled on her bottom lip, and deposited a dollop of snuff there. She brushed the powder from her hands. She circulated the snuff in her saliva and considered the scene. She spat and watched. Around the clock, the thoroughfare was choked with outbound men and provisions. Inbound the wounded and the detritus flowed.

In step with soldiers and frightened bondpersons lumbering into town was a legion of rats. These were heartier than most of the folk walking, plodding, and trudging alongside them. They were fatter by far. They were as well mud-covered and dragged their long tails through copious puddles and piles of garbage. Stubborn vigilance had once driven them out of Georgetown. But they were returning now with a bit of impudence in their demeanor.

The rats sought transport on any moving thing crossing the river away from south. Likely they were escaping a frying pan in Virginia. Since the conflict had begun, much news of starvation in the Virginia countryside had reached Georgetown. Even rats were clever enough to know that there was now more edible garbage on this side of the Potomac River. Carts, wagons, and small skiffs hauled wounded soldiers back from the battles and rats rode on the litters to dine on gangrenous limbs. In barrels and haversacks they rode and leaped ashore as soon as they reached the shallows. They’d been seen riding atop bodies floating downstream. The nearly dead and deadly exhausted humans the rats accompanied into town had little spirit to fight with them. Some of the wounded were so grievously hurt and dosed with laudanum that a rat’s bite went unnoticed. Escaping from Confederates emboldened the rodents or as likely had culled the weak from their numbers. And these rats, devouring rotted flesh, could be said to perform a good service as the number of soldiers’ bodies brought from battle lines to the capital far exceeded the capabilities of the town’s embalmers. This was true even though the number of morticians had swollen with the war.

Uphill the rats climbed from riverfront to the pavement at Bridge Street. Annie pondered the many in their limitless army she had fought and displaced in the root cellar of the tailor shop. She’d chased them with burning tapers and had clubbed, knifed, and hung pelts to drive them out—to gain the place for the family’s own hiding and provisions. The rats had left the cellar to her superior vigilance, as there were places to go where people cared less. Now, when the women and Gabriel might need to go down for shelter and safety, the rats were returning to reclaim their precinct.

Cold winters on Ridley Plantation had been instructive. Annie thought to set a trap for these Georgetown rats. A time might come when they would be a delicacy.

Frogs, too, had become numerous. Frogs at the riverbank, an ordinarily sonorous group, now croaked at their loudest and most constant until the air was full of them. The sound was raucous and was rattling to the nerves and sounded as though a fear had taken hold of them. The practicing artillery fire, the stomping and marching that rumbled the ground, and the frantic, nervous people had frogs harrying the quiet. The hopping fools should have been more careful. Folks were reminded of “frogs in a pot, frogs in a pan” and the croakers’ numbers would, in a few hungry weeks, be vastly reduced.

Sewing Annie had reckoned hundreds of the beasts before she realized for herself what she was doing. It was habitual to count—to tote up, to reckon things. It was the habit of her labor and her son’s. In fact, she mused with some humor, between them all it was the thing they mostly did. The stitches and the buttons and the lengths and the bites and measures—the whole box and dice of it was their occupation.

There was this, too: the perfume of baking bread in the air wafting regularly as the wind blew it from the direction of the downtown. A seat high and dry was good to catch this aromatic bread breeze.

Ah! There was much competition for stinking up. The increasing number of horses in town perfumed the air considerably and the diseases that plagued them and numerous mules and the odor of gunpowder and machine oils and rotting flesh were bundled together. The smell of cook fires, too, pervaded and the smoke from these stung the eyes. Most any animal that had lived within the city’s limits could be found on a spit above a fire now. In back of every thoroughfare, a crude encampment with crude cook fires was burning fetid fuel. The fainthearted could not stand it.

Annie surprised herself with longing for Ridley Plantation. She missed it. It was air she missed. Even on the most stifling days in the loom room at Ridley, the air was not so stagnant as here; rather, it was sweetly redolent of clover. It contained clarity of fragrance that the tumbled-up city of so many people could never have. Though Annie had been shut up at Ridley and not inclined to sit upon a stump and muse, she had been able to spread her lungs without coughing and peer through a window and see far afield. This exercise—encouraged by her mentor—had relaxed the sockets of her eyes, so strained in close work.

Annie’s eyes got moist when they succumbed to tiredness. She mashed and rubbed them. Recollections of her years beside the old woman Knitting Annie came and buoyed her. This city living would have flummoxed the old one. She would have had no idea about this place. She had been a sweet old blossom and her resting back at Ridley is what kept the place dear to Annie.

Annie drew knitting needles from the slit pocket in her skirt. She pulled them from deep in the needlewoman’s hiding sleeve—a place every daughter of Dorcas would cut into her clothing. She settled and ran her fingers along the needles before employing them. These were especial ones made of bone that had been given to her by Gabriel. He had saved aside to give her a fancy present of carved bone knitting needles. Ah, they were beautifully cut! And they were rubbed but still untempered, and she drew them out for rubbing throughout the day. Her fingers glided into the work and oriented her. Her fingers were about their accustomed business and the exercise regulated her breathing and clarified her thoughts.

What was plaguing Gabriel?

Turning a sock on the needles in her hand, Annie pondered the noisy paper in Gabriel’s pocket. She trembled a bit to consider a paper that could cause such a change in her constant son. Why hadn’t he confided in her as he’d always done? But of course it had come, Annie thought wryly. A day comes—a moment of realization. The son has gone over to his nature and is no longer yours to guide and influence.

And what of the so-called contrabands—those slaves following the Union soldiers into town? Every artery in and out of town was choked with them. Their faces showed profound relief when their feet touched the town. They considered it done and well done when they reached Washington, the capital and Father Abraham Lincoln’s home. They hoped—their eyes were full of it!—they had reached a home for themselves.

Annie’s eyes got moist for them with knowing how long their travail. Who blames a drowning man who grabs at anything floating? She snorted ruefully that grasping would cause a piece of floating debris to sink and take the one who grasps with it. The city of Washington was, for these ones leaving slavery, a precarious log in an agitated sea.

Destitute was how most of them arrived—trudging, slogging, and dragging. Descriptions in the papers of slaves fleeing at the advance of the Union army sounded like an account of dandies on parade. They were said to be preening themselves and promenading down the thoroughfares of Washington decked out in frothy skirts, scarlet frock coats, and gray hats festooned with feathers.

But the true picture was something else. The women trudged with their arms tugging at stumbling children, and children taller than a hickory stump were carrying babes on their backs. A common sight was a man who had made himself into a mule by putting a strap on his forehead so that he could carry his old grandpa or granmam on his back. Step upon step he would lug the old one, who was yet mere bones sparsely covered with skin. If they had worn a fine coat when they left, it had been stripped away long before reaching the banks of the Potomac or the Eastern Branch. Even if they came from lands nearby, they had likely crisscrossed these places again and again—hiding and running from combatants and hostile irregulars. Most that Annie saw arrive were barely clothed and a long time away from their vittles.

Annie was ashamed to think that she had feelings of longing for the Ridley place. But the most joyful times she and Gabriel had known were the brief forays in the clear air to the upland knolls at Ridley to collect plants for their dyes. Then, if mother and son had managed to reach an open stretch with no one watching, Annie would release the boy to run and explore and fill his mouth with laughter. The two would dare to plunge their faces into beds of plants and smell and look aplenty and satisfy themselves with the beauty of the places. Their strong bond was nurtured on the collecting trips that were few and far between the long days Gabriel spent holding and dyeing yarn and spinning it to balls alongside his mother.

Going back in her mind she recollected when, as a child on the place, there was much production of wool yarn. Sheep were raised at Ridley Prospect, an inland hilly farm that Master kept for the purpose. The beasts were coddled in their own meadow. Their yearly shearing was a fearful excitement that all the hands watched. Some festivity was attached to shearing and much liquor got passed around. Luxe wool from the back and shoulders of the sheep was separated from the dirty wool on the animal’s undersides and was spun to ultrafine balls by the needlewomen. Stomach wool was combed free of whatever clung to it by the needlewomen and wound to balls, too. Wisps of detritus clogged the nostrils of Annie and the other small girl combers. They were stuffed with holiday vittles and they became nauseated and dizzy. They were also festive, happy children at sheep-shearing. A clutch of stomach wool would make Annie recall it in deep detail and long for it.

Gabriel sat with pen and paper but couldn’t keep his seat. He would not sit in the chair. He cared not to sleep. He sprang up and paced about his kitchen workshop in the dark. He allowed himself only one short candle’s worth of illumination as he struggled to compose his letter. Unlike some who fought to find adequate expression, Gabriel Coats struggled with an excess of words for his plight.

Above all Gabriel wanted a calm, quiescent freedom—to work at his trade. Many thought it unseemly for a colored to embrace a calling. He had persevered against that tide. In his workroom—his sanctuary—a piece of paper had stolen the calm.

Gabriel cringed at recollection of his own loud voice sending dear Mary off to bed—shouting at her tender attempts at ministration. His sharp words and tone had frightened the babes and set off a brief tizzy. Ellen and Delia scattered like chickens as well and he felt compunction.

But he could not have them before his eyes when he studied this document.

KNOW ALL MEN BY THEIR PRESENTS THAT I, William A. Eberly, am working on behalf of Jonathan Ridley in the matter of compensation for former slaves.

The following persons formerly held as slaves in the District of Columbia and having been manumitted by edict of the Congress of the United States shall report to the offices of Eberly and Co. for inspection and valuation.

Gabriel yearned for a cup of drink, but the fire in the hearth was too low to boil water. During the time of his apprenticeship, his most important evening duty had been to keep water at boil for Abraham Pearl. The man was fond of a hot drink at night.

Gabriel Coats’s solemnity was exacerbated by the darkness of the room on this evening. He had lit a single taper and had this near his elbow. It brightened only the page he wrote on and a small circle outward from his hand. The rest of the room disappeared into a netherworld beyond the candle flame. Gabriel was superstitious that full illumination would give the pernicious, official paper the more power. He removed it from his breast pocket and pushed it nearly to the edge of the table—far away from the light. His own writing seemed weak—powerless beside it. It was a commanding document. It was a document for taking away from himself and his women—his family—their souls, their lives in freedom, their dignity. They had had none—he had purchased it or a semblance of it and now this document would take it back.