The Mirk and Midnight Hour (6 page)

Mischief sparked in his washed-out hazel eyes.

“What will you give for it?” he demanded, holding the cake above my head.

I stared. “I beg your pardon? My gratitude, of course.”

“What if that’s not enough?” He edged closer still. “You ladies always want to support the soldiers—wouldn’t you like to kiss a colonel?”

I stepped backward and would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed hold of me with one damp hand. He smirked unabashedly. “You’re a pretty girl; sometimes don’t you want to be a naughty girl as well?”

At times I labored under the misconception that unattractive people would automatically be nice, humble people. Pratt’s
face loomed closer to mine. I jerked out of his grasp and ducked under his arm. My hair snagged on one of his brass buttons. “Mr. Wilcox—”

“
Colonel
Wilcox.”

“I can’t imagine what I said or did to make you think—anything.” I painfully yanked my hair loose, scurried toward the corner of the church, and flung over my shoulder, “And I don’t even want any of that stupid cake.”

He sputtered, then came back with, “And you’re not all that pretty.”

I stepped out with Pratt following just behind, painfully aware that both of us were red of face and that my hair was disheveled. Sunny was holding court among a cluster of young people in either gray uniforms or outspread hoopskirts on the side lawn. They all looked up. Sunny’s bright, curious eyes took in our appearance. She gave a meaningful smile.
Oh no. Oh no
.

And there sat Ben Phillips, who had paid so much attention to me last year until I began to really like him and then had instantaneously transferred his attentions to Mary Clare. I had thought all was flourishing between us till the day I showed up at church and she was sitting with him in my place. Now whenever I saw Ben, I felt acute embarrassment, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. At least not that I knew.

I hastened over to Nannie Kate Smith, who, as usual, was standing on the fringes, bless her poor heart.

“Will you come with me to get a plate?” I asked urgently.

She nodded, visibly relieved to have someone to talk to.

As we made our way toward the refreshments, I fumbled to
retwirl my now-limp ringlets. I thought glumly that Nannie Kate and I made a fine, dowdy pair. Her thin greenish-yellow locks were plastered to her head with sweat, and her sallow complexion was extra sallow today due to the unpleasant shade of pea green she wore.

The bridal couple was seated beneath a latticework arch at a small private table. I watched how Miss Elsa and my father responded to each other. When she was with him, she laughed occasionally and looked more animated. My father beamed down at his wife. He was truly smitten and had not told the complete truth when he claimed he was remarrying for my sake. I
was
happy for him.

Everyone else was to dine standing or sitting in the grass. The church grounds were full of chattering, eating people. From somewhere the church ladies had procured a feast nearly fit for a wedding in the grand old Southern style. There was duck with a sauce of stewed peaches, beaten biscuits, and terrapin stew. The plummy wedding cake was dusted with sparkling white sugar.

Nannie Kate and I took our filled plates and huddled near the throng of young folks. Sunny was in her element. I couldn’t help watching in fascination.

She stole a lieutenant’s hat. “There,” she said, setting it on her head at a coquettish angle. “Wouldn’t I make a fine soldier?”

“A devilishly stunning rebel!” exclaimed the lieutenant. “The Yanks wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Oh,” Sunny said, fluttering her fan, “you’re exaggerating.” A moment later, she announced “I’m bored” in a challenging tone. Immediately young men vied with each other to increase their level of charm and rescue her from such a wretched state.

Nannie Kate whispered from behind her hand, “Look how she touches the men. She’s constantly fixing their hair and
patting
them. Nauseating. Oops!” Her fingers flew over her mouth. “She’s your sister now, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said bitterly. “More’s the pity.” I scorned the piece of me that wished for a few shabby little wiles of my own.

“She paints her face, doesn’t she?”

I nodded.

“I knew those rosy cheeks couldn’t be natural. Not with the rest of her complexion so white.” Nannie Kate sniffed. “Does she use arsenic to make it that pale?”

When I said I didn’t know, Nannie Kate sniffed again.

“Of course she does. And burned hairpins to darken her lashes, and belladonna to brighten her eyes. I bet she uses all the tricks.”

Amazing. I had never even heard of any such tricks.

“Painted up like an actress.” Nannie Kate shook her head in disdain. “I daresay we could all look just as good if we weren’t ladies.” She smoothed out her skirts virtuously.

As folks gathered around the newlyweds’ table to offer toasts, Miss Elsa stood. “Before we start …” She scanned the crowd. “Where is she? Where is my new daughter?”

Reluctantly I stepped out so she could see me.

“Did you bring it?” she asked.

I nodded. Michael dashed up, carrying my dulcimer wrapped in a shawl. Miss Elsa had wanted harp music at the wedding, but my father didn’t want to risk damaging my big harp by transporting it. It was he who had suggested I play my mother’s small cherrywood dulcimer, which she had brought to Mississippi from her Virginia
home, along with the harp. Miss Elsa and Sunny had feared it would be too rustic and the guests would scorn it, but my father had insisted.

A chair was brought for me. I seated myself and dropped the shawl from the teardrop-shaped instrument. I hesitated for a moment, as I always did after picking it up, running my fingers up the slender neck. Each time I played the instruments she had once used, I felt a connection with the mother I had never known well. I began to strum the four strings, two for melody and two for drone. In only a second I forgot where I was as I played and sang “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.”

When I finished, my father sucked in his cheeks and looked downward. Miss Elsa, tears streaming down her cheeks, clapped and begged in a tremulous voice, “Will you play ‘I Have Loved Thee, Dearly Loved Thee’?”

I did as she asked. Rather than their scorn, I could feel the audience’s spirits collectively caught up in the sweet music. They burst into applause and there was a flurry of requests.

I played a few more melodies. My stepmother hugged me when I finished.

Deacon Johnson invited us to raise our glasses in a toast to the happy newlyweds. “And may the joys of their ‘blessed union’ not make us any more tolerant of that other ‘union’ that is causing such misery throughout our homeland,” he concluded.

On the way home, Sunny turned to me with a knowing smirk. “You slyboots! You’re setting up a flirtation with Pratt Wilcox!”

“I’m not!” I cried. “I wouldn’t!”

She laughed through her nose. “Don’t be coy. I declare, you two go very well together. You’re both scholarly and—oh, I don’t know. You just seem to belong with each other. He’s leaving the same time as dear Papa William. One looks at a boy so differently when one thinks he may be killed tomorrow, fighting to preserve us.” She gave a sentimental sigh. “You know, of course, that you don’t have to actually
like
a beau to encourage him. No matter what, it’s good practice.”

Desperately I said, “Oh, look what we gathered up,” and uncovered a basket of leftovers from beneath the seat.

Sunny snatched a biscuit, split it, and stuffed the top half in her mouth. “Here”—she thrust a napkin-wrapped piece of wedding cake into my lap—“put that under your pillow so you can dream about your true love. I won’t need it. My head is
that
full of dreams already.”

I had thought I would never tell another soul about my encounter with Pratt, but before I went to bed, I found myself relating it to Laney.

She laughed and laughed, and her laughter took the sting out of the incident.

“The thing that annoys me about Sunny—” I started to say.

“Only one thing?”

I grinned. “Well, the thing that comes to mind right now is that she says Pratt would be a good match for me. Surely, surely I can find someone better than him, can’t I?”

Laney was trapped in the kitchen rocking chair beneath her sleeping baby. She beckoned me closer with her fingers. I squatted
down and she put one arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Of course you will.”

“If not, I vow here and now to remain an old maid forever.”

“You won’t be an old maid. You’ll meet someone. Your father waited a long time after your mama, but he seems happy with his choice.”

“I wonder if he thought about my mother at all today. I doubt it.” I pondered a minute. “Laney, how did you know Michael was the husband you wanted?”

She shrugged. “Instead of liking him less and less the more he was around, I liked him more and more. And that’s still how it is, even though sometimes I want to hit him over the head with the skillet.”

I was taken aback. “I’ve never seen you get mad at Michael.”

“That’s because I won’t be a whiny baby about my man. But when he won’t tend Cubby for five little seconds while I’m doing something I need to do—whooee!—bring on that skillet.”

We sat together comfortably in silence as Laney rocked Cubby and I looked into the fire.

“You know,” Laney said suddenly, “your features are actually nice as Miss Sunny’s. Fact is, though, she flounces around silently telling everybody, ‘Look at me! Aren’t I gorgeous?’ and folks believe her.”

“I don’t know how to announce such things silently, and if I did, no one would hear.”

“It’s the way she totes herself so wiggly and prissy, and how she looks at men, inviting them. Try it sometime.”

“Like this?” I said, and sashayed across the room, wiggling energetically.

“ ’Fraid not, sugar,” Laney said. “Menfolks don’t want a girl jiggling like a catawba worm on a fishhook.”

“Don’t men like that sort of thing?”

“Well,” she said doubtfully, “maybe
white
men …”

We both laughed again and I helped her stand up with Cubby.

Afterward, in the comparative safety of my bedroom (it was only comparative now because I could hear Sunny moving around on the other side of the wall), I debated using the cake-under-the-pillow trick. Such danger. What if I discovered my One True Love really
was
Pratt? Or the Chicataw coal deliveryman? I placed the slice firmly on the bedside table. Then, in case that was still too close and some night vision might manage to make the leap from there into my head, I moved it to the table in the hall.

My father’s knapsack lay at the bottom of the stairs, bathed in golden light streaming from the hall’s amber glass sidelights. He had returned from his honeymoon the day before and was leaving for his regiment shortly. He had barely mumbled two words to me, which was worse than it had ever been before.

Through the dining room doorway I could glimpse Miss Elsa draped over him as he sat at his breakfast. She was probably salting his eggs with tears.

“Vi-let!” Sunny called from the parlor, where she lounged gracefully in her wrapper on the scratchy horsehair sofa. Her rumpled, uncombed hair only made her more picturesque. “Will you tell that girl to bring my breakfast in here?”

I stepped into the room. “Why?”

“Obviously I’m not about to eat in the dining room with the lovebirds.”

“Go get what you want from the kitchen yourself, then.”

She stretched like a languid lioness. “That’s not something a lady
should do. Anyway, that girl doesn’t know her place. She’s so bone lazy I have to remind her to do everything for me and Mama. Had to slap her the other day.”

I stiffened. “You hit Laney?”

Sunny gave a delicate yawn. “She had the impertinence to say she needed to finish feeding that baby before she tightened my corset.”

“Don’t you ever,
ever
touch Laney or Michael. Never! You hear?” I was shaking.

“Gracious, child, of course I hear you, all shrill and screechy as a jaybird. You needn’t worry—I doubt I’ll have to discipline her again, now she knows she can’t get away with insolence around me. Don’t feel bad; you just don’t know how to handle Negroes.”

I made myself take several deep breaths. “Laney and Michael are considered family. That’s how they should be treated.”

Sunny rolled her eyes. “Y’all have always been outlandish here at Scuppernong. As if the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Remember how you and Rush used to go to Miss Reed’s school barefoot? Even through the mud.”

I laughed a little in spite of the anger that still smoldered in my breast. “No one at home knew about that. Our shoes raised blisters, so we usually took them off and stuck them in the bushes on the way.”

“It didn’t matter to you how often Miss Reed told you that shoes must be worn.” A pucker appeared between Sunny’s brows. “Rush always stood a little in front of you when she scolded. He made me wish I had a brother.” The wrinkle smoothed out. “I was sure a silly little goose.”

It was time to return to the subject. “About the corset—I told you before that Laney hasn’t time to be your lady’s maid.”