The Rebel Wife (23 page)

“Damn it, Hill, you’re putting it out!”

I gripped Mama tighter, and she looked at me in astonishment, letting the gun fall to her side.

“Hill?” she whispered, looking at me. And then louder: “Hill?” she called and raced into the kitchen with me at her heels.

Buck and Hill stood surprised, with smiles on their faces. They were in the dark, trying to light a fire from the last embers in the kitchen stove. Mama started crying, and I did, too, and pretty soon, with all the noise, Emma and Cora came from their basement rooms and started hugging everyone like a big reunion. Cora put on coffee made from parched corn and yams that smelled like earth. Emma made corncakes and fried thick slabs of cured ham. Buck and Hill looked as skinny as beanpoles and as shaggy as dogs. They were filthy with lice and fleas, infested with every type of vermin imaginable, but they just kept their smiles and their laughter as if there were no war and we weren’t hiding in the dark in the kitchen.

We asked them about the battle, and Hill joked that Bragg had won a victory with a retreat. They were camped down the railroad around Tullahoma. Hill was sure they’d make a stand and retake Murfreesboro and Nashville, too. He promised they’d beat back the Yankees. The Yankees would never get past Tullahoma. They’d never take Albion again. Buck agreed, and they exchanged a look that showed more doubt than their words.

Since they were so close to home, Buck and Hill had left their company to come to us. A lot of boys did it, they said. Half the company had been killed or wounded at Murfreesboro, and the other half had run off home on what they joked was unofficial leave. Their captain had to turn a blind eye to it. If they didn’t come back, that was a different story, but they would only stay the night and leave the following evening in the dark. They would rejoin their company in Tullahoma and pretend they had not been away at all.

Buck would stay with us that night, too. We listened to their stories until the early hours, laughing with them to keep from crying. Listening to their portraits of Beauregard and Pat Cleburne. They talked about Bragg and his meanness and how all the soldiers disliked him. They told us about the strange religious blaze of Leonidas Polk’s eyes and the prayer meetings he led every Sunday and how the whole army went to them.

When we were all exhausted and frayed from the talking and the coffee, we went to bed. Cora had run upstairs to lay a fire in Hill’s room and put down fresh linens. Buck and Hill laughed about how it was the first bed they had seen since they left the university over a year and a half ago.

I kissed them both good night and went to my room, but I couldn’t sleep. I was too thrilled to have Hill home, too excited from the coffee or love, and I tiptoed back across the hall and tapped on the door. Hill whispered for me to come in, and I entered as silently as I could.

The small fire gave out a faint yellow glow, and the room felt warm from it and their breathing. They gave out a musky, humid odor. They lay side by side in Hill’s bed. He leaned up on his elbow and said, “What now, Gus? Can’t you sleep?”

I knelt beside him and grabbed his hands, which were so warm they took the chill off mine. “Oh, Hill, I just can’t believe you’re really here!”

Buck leaned up on an elbow and laughed. “Hey, now, don’t leave me out! I’m here, too.”

I blushed and said I was so happy they were both here.

“Can’t you stay, Hill?” I asked him, almost begging. “Do you have to go back to the army?”

Hill looked over at Buck with a wry smile and turned back to me. “Yes, Gus, I guess I do. We haven’t finished up yet.” He looked grim suddenly, and far away.

“When will it all be over?” I asked. I gripped his hands almost as if I were praying.

“I don’t know when, dearest. But you don’t need to worry about a thing. We’re going to whip the Yankees right out of Tennessee, and then we’ll all come home, and everything will be the way it used to be.”

“That’s right,” Buck agreed. “You don’t think my pa would let the Yankees stay down here for long, do you?” We laughed, low whispering laughs. “Have you heard the original gorilla has freed all our darkies?” Buck was smiling in the faint light, and his long mustache and whiskers curled up over his mouth in a shaggy smile.

“Who said that?” I said, honestly confused.

“Abe Lincoln! That’s what they call him.” He and Hill laughed.

I didn’t understand.

“But what does Jeff Davis say?” I asked in perfect sincerity, which made Buck and Hill laugh even harder.

“Jeff Davis says it ain’t so,” Buck said, grinning at me. “So you should feel safe, ’cause that’s who’s in charge here. And we’ve got the guns to back him up.” Hill nodded and squeezed my hand.

“But aren’t you scared fighting?” I asked, and it seemed like the most important question I had ever asked. “Aren’t you afraid at all?” Hill looked at Buck again, and they smiled at each other with the same look they’d given in the kitchen.

“Sure,” Buck began. “We all start out scared. You never leave being scared, but—” He paused, thinking, and Hill picked up his thought.

“But you forget about it. You realize you’re there to do a job, and that’s what we do. We try to kill as many Yankees as we can, and you forget about being killed yourself. I tell you, at night when we sit across the field from them, sometimes it seems like a great big joke. You can hear them singing and see their campfires and the pickets calling to each other from across the river. But when the sun comes up—”

He paused, and Buck and I waited.

“It’s so freezing cold, Gus,” Hill continued. “Bitter freezing cold, so that you can’t feel your fingers to load your rifle, and some of the men’s shoes are so torn up they leave bloody footprints on the snow and ice. When it’s that cold, I swear the ice can cut you like a razor. Everything you do hurts a hundred times worse when you’re that cold. But we lay down in the woods that morning as the sun came up, and it was clear and bright through the trees, and we knew the Yankees were over there not making a sound. Everything was ghostly white, the fields and the ice in the trees. The tree branches would brush against each other and make a far-off sound like glass. Then all of a sudden a herd of white rabbits—white, Augusta, as white as snow—came running from the woods where the Yankees were. They came running across the field toward us and then shied away to the right and vanished back into the woods. And you feel at those moments—you feel when there are moments like that, you feel that God is speaking to you. You know that He’s watching. He’s there and He’s with us and you forget yourself. You forget your fear and everything, and you just do what you have to do, ’cause God is with us. They’re the enemy and God is with us.”

Buck had turned his head toward the fire and nodded without looking away from it, staring so deep into it, his thick black whiskers moving up and down with his head and those dark eyes that I thought were so deep they were bottomless.

“If anything should happen,” Hill said, looking into the fire with Buck. “And nothing will happen. Buck here’s the one who likes to get shot up.” He laughed, and Buck did, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to find the humor in it. Buck had been wounded at Shiloh. A minié ball cut him against his ribs by his chest, missing the bone but leaving him stiff-armed in the cold and lucky to be alive. “If anything should happen to me, Buck here will take care of you. He’ll make sure you are taken care of. He’s promised me.”

I nodded and felt myself crying again. I took a hand off of Hill’s and wiped my eyes. Buck looked at me solemnly and nodded, those dark eyes just watching me.

SIMON CANNOT BE HAPPY
with me. I should not have let Dr. Greer give me the laudanum. I don’t know how long I slept. Drifted, really. And then lying in the dark for hours waiting for the sun to rise. I should not have taken the laudanum. Perhaps Simon does not trust me now. Perhaps he found the money and won’t tell me. I hope he comes to me soon. How could Emma not know where he has gone?

I open Eli’s desk drawers. They are cluttered with papers, old-fashioned quills, and the newest type of mechanical pens. Some of them have bled from their nibs and left spots of ink on papers and the base of the drawer. There is the pocket watch that stopped, the one from Eli’s desk at the mill.

Other drawers are filled with ledgers that date back for years. Some of them are labeled with the years of the war. I thumb through the grid-lined pages covered in Eli’s script. His penmanship is almost illegible, but I can read the names of families I knew then. Families who came to his funeral, too. In 1864 there are loans to the Sheffields and McQuinns, pledges on silver chargers and teapots and platters. There is my mother’s name, with Emma in parentheses, an exchange of money and foodstuffs for a gold locket and chain. Was Pa’s picture in that locket? Other families turned over carriages and paintings and furnishings. Glassware, guns and sabers from the Mexican War. All of it filtered through Eli’s hands and gone to God knows where. The Yankee soldiers for greenbacks. Silk dresses that they brought home to their wives and sisters. He even had Confederate bonds received from families in town, a foolish venture, but his markings suggest he bought them for pennies of their stated worth.

In 1865 there are more notations, and the collateral is more important. Horses, cotton lands in the county. At first in small parcels and then larger ones associated with people who were once the wealthiest in the county. The Griffins. The Collinses and Cobbs. The Porters. And the Hepperts. Judge’s name jumps out at me like a snake. Everton Heppert. Bonds. Land. His house on Elm Street. Everything, it seems, that he could muster, mortgaged to Eli—the only source of cash at the time.

I close the ledger, sick, and look up to see Simon at the garden door, holding newspapers in his hand.

“Are you feeling better, ma’am?” he asks as he enters. He takes a seat across from me and lays the papers on the desktop.

“Yes, Simon. Thank you. I have been waiting for you.”

“Emma told me you were here.” The open doors and windows make me nervous, and I lower my voice.

“Did you find anything in Eli’s room?”

“No, ma’am. I looked through everything, although after you went to bed, I had to leave. Emma was suspicious of what I was doing.”

“I’m sorry.” My face feels hot. I hope I am not blushing. “Greer is going to the mill today with the mayor and the aldermen. There have been more people there sick.”

He nods, digesting the information. “That’s what I hear.”

“You’ll all be gone to Kansas soon, won’t you? When we find the money.”

“Yes, ma’am. I hope so.”

“And to get away from the fever.”

“That, yes. But our hope had already started to run out. Being afraid of a sickness is just being afraid of dying. And living here, I think all of us are already afraid of dying.”

“Afraid of dying? Why?”

Simon looks at me with an ironic lift to his eyebrows. “Well,” he says, “we believed—The freed people believed that there was an important change in the weather back at the end of the war. It seems the climate remains just as inhospitable for our well-being as it ever was.”

“You’re talking politics again,” I say, irritated by this recurring conversation.

“Yes, ma’am, to a certain extent. And I am talking about the way we live.”

“The way you live?”

“The way all of us live.”

“I think you’ve done quite well with Eli, Simon,” I say tersely. “It appears to me he always favored you—went out of his way for you. To hear you talk, someone would think you were ungrateful.” I rest my hand on the ledger, resisting the urge to tap my fingers against it. I don’t know why I am angry, except maybe for Simon’s tone—so familiar. There is a condescension in it that I hear from all men, but I cannot accept it from Simon.

“I apologize, ma’am,” he says quickly. “I am in no way ungrateful for the affection and care that Mr. Branson showed me. We are all indebted to him in one way or another, aren’t we?”

My face goes hot again, and I pull my hand off the ledger and into my lap, lacing my fingers together tightly. “Are you afraid of dying, Simon?”

He looks at me with a sort of smile in his eyes and laughs a little. “Some of us are afraid, I guess. But I’m not.”

The newspapers lie between us. The
Advocate
and the
Register
. They are several days old already.

“Rachel does not seem afraid. Not really. She seems like a very strong person,” I say.

He does not respond, and the moment stretches out. Simon seems like a strong person, too. But all those years with Eli. It bothers me.

“How did you come to be with Eli?”

Simon nods and looks at the floor, taking a long breath. His face softens. His eyes lose their hardness, almost melting with melancholy. He looks at me and asks, “Do you really want to know how we met?”

I nod, but my brow knits together. I am not certain that I do want to know.

“I was born on a plantation down on the Cahaba River. I didn’t know my daddy, and when my old ma died, I ran away. I was fourteen or so and decided to run away. I made a pretty good go of it. Got up around Florence, running through the woods and along the back roads at night, eating what corn I could steal or what I could scavenge from the woods, always feeling the urge to move, always listening for the dogs behind me. But the exhaustion got to me. I was too tired. I thought I might go ahead and lay myself down to die. And so I did. That was when Mr. Eli caught me.”

“He caught you?” I ask.

“He was a slave trader, ma’am. He’d chase down runaways when he had the chance.”

“Runaways? Eli was a slave catcher?”

“Yes, ma’am. That is what he did. He traded slaves from up along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, and he’d march them here and south of here. Down deep into Alabama and Mississippi. And sell them.”

Sitting in the sunny office with the hickory and magnolia trees on the lawn, with the irises and peonies and the bright white paint of the house, it doesn’t seem possible. It doesn’t seem real.

I grew up with slaves, we all did. I saw them sold away south more than once. Sold from my father’s estate to pay off debts after he died. Sold by Mama when she wanted a new carriage or for money for a trip to White Sulphur Springs. It was a heinous act, to sell off your own people. An ugly, cruel act unless you were in the direst of straits. And the men who profited from that misery, the conniving dealers who would shackle them together, whole families chained one after another, marching off under the bloody eye of the slave trader, selling them downriver where the weather and the overseers were so punishing. It always made me shudder to think of those men. And Eli was one of them.