Chicago and Peach Grove, 1910
Halley’s Comet blazed ’cross the last of the night sky, a fiery snowball flashing its tail in the light from the coming sun. Redwood marveled at the journeywork of stars. Everywhere, miracles and blessings and challenges—Mr. Walt Whitman and Dr. W. E. B. Dubois were whistling in her ears today, chastising her for feeling sorry and sad, when she had such a grand life, doing what she’d always dreamed of.
A Chicago Defender article on Dr. Dubois flew out the dressing room window before she could catch it. Redwood had gotten in the habit of reading newspapers and collecting headlines. It was an early morning ritual. She liked knowing what the world was up to first thing. She listened to the gossip at the butcher shop and to the workers coming home from the graveyard shifts in the town that never slept. At the laundry, she listened to women complain while bringing in dirty sheets, breeches, and the secrets of their customers. On the trolley she soaked in the chitchat between the stops. People held on to each other for a few seconds with their humble, breathless reports. She wasn’t searching for news of Jerome Williams anymore, but searching all the same, ’cause when she found it, she would know. This morning she only had time to flip through her recent collection of headlines:
1910—MARK TWAIN BLAZED IN AND OUT WITH HALLEY’S COMET!
GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA DECREES: NO NEGRO TO WEAR A UNIFORM.
GIRL GOES TO HUNGARY TO BE WITH FATHER WHEN COMET COMES.
MORRIS WINS COLOR-LINE SUIT. NEGROES TO HAVE SEATS IN ANY PART OF THEATRES IN ILLINOIS!
MEXICAN ELECTIONS—FRANCISCO MADERO HOPES TO OUST PRESIDENT DIAZ.
WOMAN DECLARES: “THAT NEGRO BEAT ME, SAID HE’D KILL ME, SO I SHOT HIM, AND THEN I SHOT HIM SOME MORE!”
Redwood sighed. The theatre was dark on Mondays, and her day off would be long, waiting to get back onstage, waiting to be somebody other than herself, waiting for the audience to set her free. At least she was going out bright and early with Clarissa to do good work, healing at the settlement house. Putting on her mojo bag, she thought of Subie, Aidan, and the wild child she’d been back in Georgia. She reached her hand toward the fading comet and felt an icy burn as she traced the tail. She drew her hand back quickly. The fingertips were an angry red.
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
The halls of the settlement house echoed with squeals, groans, and heated conversation. Fearless Clarissa strode ahead of Redwood into a chamber so jammed there was barely room to walk. Hundreds of colored men, women, and children, recent arrivals from all over the South, had come for help in making a home in the windy city.
“They all get here today?” Redwood stepped over smelly bundles and raggedy children.
“More coming all the time. Looking for the promised land.” Clarissa scanned the bustling horde.
“In Chicago? Just like me.”
“To hear George talk, anything’s better than where they’ve been.”
“George talk all kind of stuff, you know.”
“I know who I married.” Clarissa found her direction and marched on.
Folks frowned as the two women plowed through the room. These backcountry farmers were ’fraid of their own shadows and even more hostile to what they’d never seen before. Redwood knew them like the back of her breath. They whispered disapproval of Clarissa’s upper-class corset, lace, and starch, and of Redwood’s bohemian, theatrical flair. Babies gurgled and cried. Children ripped through the crowd, dashing between the sour chat and grunts. Redwood caught a few sly eyes sizing her up and offered them a sparkling smile. She did a little turn to show off her Oriental silk dress and jacket.
“I’m an adventure out of the Arabian Nights.” She stroked a turban borrowed from Saeed to seal the Persian magic.
“Don’t start.” Clarissa gritted her teeth at such a shameless display. Redwood wore the dress for Clarissa’s sake, but sister-in-law didn’t approve of foreign fashion or so much free-moving flesh, even if it was all the rage. Well, Clarissa’s high-boned collar didn’t make skittish farm folk warm to her, and Redwood had ’em smiling!
In a room with sick and wounded people, Redwood donned a white smock over her silk, sucked a deep breath, and set a broken bone. Her patient passed out. Clarissa, also in a white smock, hugged a scared little boy as Redwood finished the job. She pulled as much pain as she dared, but didn’t want to spook anybody and didn’t want to get tired out before the day was half over. Folk always held on to their hurting. Pulling pain was like wrassling a juicy bone from a bear. Back in Peach Grove, Redwood only had to persuade a few patients at a time to let their hurting go, not hundreds of people.
Redwood drew Clarissa aside. “It’s a shame people got to suffer so when I know doctors have drugs for the pain, so you don’t feel so bad while you’re getting healed.”
“We’ve run out of aspirin and laudanum. Too many people flooding in, wounded and sick,” Clarissa said. “Colored aren’t welcome everywhere, and Provident Hospital’s overflowing. Not enough colored doctors or nurses to go ’round. We make do except for the worst cases.” She dropped her voice. “Do you know how much they charge?”
“Don’t tell me.” Redwood groaned.
“These are poor people.” Clarissa smiled at a skinny toddler tugging on her. “Barely can afford the air they breathe.”
“Hush.” Redwood raised her hand. “I don’t want to get mad while I work.”
“Colored doctors have a right to earn a living.”
“Don’t everybody?”
“White doctors charge even more.”
“So? I’m doing this for free. These folks work hard and don’t earn nothing.”
“It’s ‘doesn’t everybody have a right.’” Clarissa corrected Redwood’s grammar and avoided the argument. She did that all day. “We have to be a model for the less educated, for the less fortunate.”
“I know your grammar,” Redwood said. “I just don’t feel it. Everything you got in you to say, you can’t always say it right. Proper ain’t the only talk there is.”
Clarissa nodded as if she understood this for once. “The rest of the world can’t always see or doesn’t even care what you have in you. You can’t give them ammunition against you. Besides, women are naturally more generous than men.”
Redwood snorted at this, but for her sister-in-law’s sake, she decided to apply herself to this role of model colored woman uplifting the race. “Okay. It just seem—seems wrong somewhere.”
Why put all this effort into being like the white people, like the rich people, when they the ones raining down misery and pain? If she thought too much on that, she got storm mad. Fortunately, when working the roots and healing somebody, time went almost as fast as onstage. She could forget ’bout the evil things people took for granted. Model Negro woman; that was just another role.
Redwood inspected a newborn while the anxious mother watched. “She’s only a child her ownself,” she whispered to Clarissa.
“The wages of sin,” Clarissa said, “snatches your innocence from you.”
Redwood didn’t know what to say to that.
She stitched a bloody gash on a young mother’s neck and shoulder. Clarissa held her toddler till Redwood finished. The gal tried not to wince or flinch too much with her little boy looking on and ready to cry hisself. “I’m called Belle.”
“My daughter’s name is Belle too,” Clarissa said.
“I’m called Sequoia. It’s a Cherokee name for a great wise man of their tribe.” Clarissa and Belle gaped at Redwood. “Did I say something out the way?”
“Belle means pretty in French,” Clarissa said quickly.
“My man done left me anyhow.” Belle tugged Redwood’s arm. “They say you a hoodoo. You got a spell to bring him back?”
“I got a spell to take away lovesickness. You want that?”
Belle nodded. Clarissa watched, horrified, as Redwood handed her a small pouch. Belle stuffed it down her bosom.
“If you get a powerful urge for him, put that on your tongue. Nasty taste does the job.”
“Gal in the corner got a man who thrashed her something awful. She probably on her last heartbeat.” Belle pointed. “She asked for you.”
Redwood turned. The flap of turkey buzzard wings obscured her view, a lazy shadow crossing the room. The boneyard baron’s cold breath slithered down her neck.
“What is it?” Clarissa hesitated, feeling something too.
“We’ll see.” Redwood wasn’t ’fraid of the baron. She respected him, so he wouldn’t call her up before her time, but there wasn’t no use worrying when death was coming for you. She kept on walking. The woman on the mat was all beat up, inside and out. Her skin was so thin, barely holding her spirit. Her eyes had almost gone dark. She didn’t want to look on this world no more.
“Why ain’t—isn’t she with the doctor?” Redwood said.
“Doctor isn’t coming till Thursday.” Clarissa kept her distance.
“Be too late then.” Redwood took the woman’s hands. They were cold as snow and didn’t weigh nothing. “What’s your name?” Redwood pulled all the pain she could.
“Sarah,” the woman whispered. “It’s my time, isn’t it?”
The baron stood beside her, an icy wind in a black top hat. Diamond teeth caught a glint of sunlight and froze in a grin. Redwood shuddered—she’d never seen him this plain before. Death wasn’t a stranger to her no more. Clarissa quavered.
“You want to go, Sarah, or you want to stay?” Redwood whispered.
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Can you help me stay?”
Bartering with the baron for more time was a powerful spell. Redwood had seen Garnett do it when she was a young gal, had even helped her one time. That was before, and truly seemed more a story or a dream than a real-life event. And she hadn’t seen the baron, just felt him. Miz Subie didn’t dare try a death-defying spell but once in her whole long life. Who was Redwood to help this Sarah wrassle with death? Baron might take both their lives for spite, for Redwood thinking herself too big.
“I don’t never say I can do what I can’t.” Redwood tried to look the baron in the eye. His cold countenance burned so, she cast her glance down. His laughter almost cracked her skull open. Her storm hand throbbed, as if it was fixing to bust apart.
“Help me go then,” Sarah said.
“I—I don’t dare do that either,” Redwood mumbled.
“That’s right. God sets the time of our coming and going,” Clarissa declared and then whispered in Redwood’s ear. “Make her comfortable as you can. Sometimes there’s just nothing else we can do. And this is also a blessing.”
The sun was gone from the sky, not even a taste of pink lingering in the clouds. Clarissa and Redwood hurried down a hall in the settlement house carrying their dirty white smocks. Streaky green walls and scuffed floors looked weary from holding so many hard-luck cases, from catching so many dreamers who got lost in Chicago nightmares, who got beaten to death by someone who should’ve loved them. Redwood passed her hand in front of her eyes. Gloomy thoughts were tainting her vision. Plenty of colored dreamers be riding high in Chicago. Look at George making money hand over fist, look at her and Saeed stepping onstage six nights a week and soon to be in a moving picture, look at Morris winning the Color-Line Suit and Negroes sitting where they please all ’cross Illinois.
Settlement Negroes weren’t the only Negroes in this world, and conjuring wasn’t the only good life.
“Sister Redwood, you look weary.” Clarissa eyed Redwood’s mojo bag. Just before the door at the end of the hall, she pulled Redwood aside. “Clubwomen do good work, for our people coming up.”
“Yes, sound like Georgia back in there.” Redwood sighed, almost homesick.
“We’re bringing the colored woman and the colored man into the twentieth century, trying to shake off backcountry ways.”
“Don’t worry.” Redwood tucked her mojo bag in her skirt. “I ain’t dare do no real hoodoo conjure since—”
“Since what? I’ve seen plenty today.”
“No, you haven’t.” A powerful spell ’llowed to work a heavy trick on a great conjurer, leave a mark on her soul, even if she take good care. Clarissa didn’t know much ’bout hoodoo. “How can I explain what you don’t believe?”
“We got to trust each other.” Clarissa stood tall, stood close. “I want the truth.”
They stared into each other. “All right. Hot-foot spell and such is just snagging folk with what they’re already ’fraid of. To do more, a conjure woman has to be wild, risk big. You can’t know everything beforehand. Hoodoo is an improvisation, like onstage, making up the next moments as you go. If you’re touched by the spirit in everything, no telling what miracles and blessings you can do … or what tragedy. You can’t control a powerful spell, so, I hold myself back—setting bones, stitching wounds.”
“That’s good discipline, and we’re grateful. We’re saving up to afford a proper doctor more than once a week.” Clarissa cleared her throat. “What sort of improvisation is giving out bags of hoodoo tricks?”
“You think that gal don’t—doesn’t need help steering clear of a man who cut her up?”
“Yes, but superstition won’t uplift the race.”
“Who care what you call the help I give?”
“We do good Christian work, no truck with the devil.”
“If you think the devil be in my hands, in my heart, what you bring me here for?”
“You’re a good woman, but you’re wild, like George. You should get married and settle down with a good man.” Felt like Clarissa smacked her upside the head.
Redwood slid down the wall to the scuffed floor.
“Get up! Somebody will see you.” Clarissa fanned her as if she were feverish.
“Sarah still had a spark in her. I should have wrassled the baron with her.”
“Who?” Clarissa scanned the empty halls. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m a coward.” Redwood hugged her legs to her chest. “And I feel so lonely sometimes, like I’m lost in a swamp with gators for my only company.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. The floor is filthy. You’ll ruin your nice dress.”
“You and George and plenty folks coming and going in Chicago, the promised land, and I’m stuck in mud.”
Clarissa tried to pull her up. “Children and a husband change everything.”
“Turkey buzzards just waiting till I drop down and don’t get up.”
Clarissa shook Redwood’s shoulders. “A wife can’t just worry on herself. You know what each minute is worth when you’re managing a family.”
“I don’t try to change you.” Redwood grasped Clarissa’s arms.
“No, you don’t.”
Redwood stood up. “I got a broken heart. Men touch me and nothing happens.”
“Oh.” Clarissa was embarrassed by this confession. “You do say anything, don’t you?” She fussed over Redwood’s dress and jacket as if the floor had done worse to it than stitching up bloody wounds. “Don’t go ’round talking that to everybody.”
“Ain’t—aren’t you my sister now, my friend?”
Clarissa’s high-boned collar squeezed her neck so tight, it was hard to swallow or breathe, yet she made herself do both before she spoke. “You know, I’ve seen almost forty summers, not thirty-five. George thinks we married because of his ambition.”
“George don’t want less than any rich man got.”
Clarissa spit on a handkerchief and wiped Redwood’s cheek. “He doesn’t mess in what I want to do.”
“And any ruthless thing George do, he can blame on love for you. Yeah, kill every last egret for feathers to keep his wife in style.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Clarissa rubbed at something on Redwood’s nose.
“Killing birds is how George got his stake to come north.” Redwood clutched her hand. “Sometimes I want to be ruthless too and just twist everything my way.”
“And do what?”
A group of clubwomen in clean smocks descended on them, all chattering at once.
“Have you read in the news?” one very black woman said. Even though sleek, straight hair was piled in dark clouds on her head and the lace on her dress cost a fortune, she wasn’t the right color for this crowd. “Murder! If laziness, superstition, and voodooism weren’t bad enough.”
“Voodooism?” Redwood said. “Isn’t that what white folk call—”
“Those hoodoo colored fools going around tricking and conjuring, yes,” she replied. Glint in her eye said she knew Redwood was a hoodoo. “Spreading goober dust, taking your money, not doing any real harm, I guess. But now these Georgia and Mississippi Negroes are cutting and shooting and killing each other.” She gossiped on to eager ears, a fire catching in dry weeds. “Over nothing too. Stick you in the heart, shoot you down dead, just because they don’t fancy how you say, ‘How do’! The Negro women almost as wild as the men. Pulling out a shotgun and blasting your head off.”
“Worse than the Italians even,” a pale companion chimed in.
“You don’t say.” Redwood recalled the headline: WOMAN DECLARES: THAT NEGRO BEAT ME, SAID HE’D KILL ME, SO I SHOT HIM, AND THEN I SHOT HIM SOME MORE. “If a man push you too far, he get what he deserve.”
“It’s a shame,” a wiry little woman said behind the others.
“Colored killing each other more than everybody else in Chicago combined.” The pale one quaked.
“Didn’t we have Georgia coming in today?” the dark lady said. Georgia was still in her country mouth and in her bold ways despite the hinkty Chicago overlay.
“Georgia coming in every day,” Redwood said, using her stage voice. “Strong stock, they’ll make it through whatever Chicago throw at ’em!”
They drew away from her. She shook her head. Clarissa and this crew were model Negro women doing good for the race, but frightened of raw colored folk, just up from the South. They didn’t believe in their own people. They were ashamed of Redwood.
“Do you have a report, Clarissa? Where do we begin?” The wiry woman chewed the side of her lip. “Mrs. Powell didn’t write down anything from last night.”
“We just have to find you the right man,” Clarissa whispered to Redwood and then turned to the women and their questions.
Aidan, looking clean and handsome and respectable, twisted a final screw and swung the front door back and forth. It worked good as new. Iris, in dusty coveralls, was picking up the last bit of a broken box in the yard. Otherwise everything was very orderly. Princess wandered toward the porch, her tail flicking at flies. Aidan pulled an apple from his pocket and tossed it to Iris. Princess headed for her.
Inside, the kitchen was clean and cozy. Aidan and Iris sat at a new table eating peach pie. Luella, Subie’s grandniece, had stopped by. She couldn’t stay, but left the pie. In between large bites, Iris balanced a spoon on her nose. Aidan laughed and tweaked her nose and the spoon clattered on the floor.
“I’m glad we’re staying here,” Iris said as Aidan lifted a hunk of pie to his face. “Aunt Elisa and Uncle Ladd’s was so full of good times gone by, everywhere you look, a shadow of somebody I miss.” She hunched her shoulders up and stared at him. “I didn’t want to be there no more. It was too sad.”
Aidan shoved the pie in his mouth and chewed slowly. “It’s a good thing to miss somebody you love.” He patted her hand.
“You miss Redwood too, don’t you? She ain’t even dead.”
“You feel her, do you?”
Iris nodded.
He grabbed his banjo and strummed. His fingers were stiff, but he didn’t stumble so bad ’round the neck. “I think ’bout your sister every day.”
Actually, he tried not to think on her, but that didn’t work.
Redwood stood in the back of the jammed ballroom of the Ace of Spades Hotel, stretching her tight calf muscles. She had persuaded Saeed to give her a set of clothes that a Persian nobleman might wear. With slight alterations the voluminous tapered pants and embroidered robes fit her long body well. Saeed was dressed in a similar outfit and danced from one foot to another trying to prevent muscles from going cold.
The Spades ballroom was more than a mere café saloon. The large square room had a thirty-foot-high ceiling, a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot raised stage, and a hundred tables with four or five patrons sitting at each. A balcony held more audience and creaked and groaned under the good time they were having. The musicians huddled against the rostrum. There were no wings, backstage, or dressing rooms, but Redwood didn’t care.
She scanned the folks enjoying the comedian act that she and Saeed would follow. She spied mostly colored folk, but everyone else too, and heard a welter of languages. This was a real Chicago Fair audience, just how she’d imagined. Several colored performers had come to see after-hours entertainment. Young working folk were out for a thrill or chasing a night of sweet loving. Out-of-town travelers were hunting down exotica, and so were a few nervous but rich-looking white men. Redwood could just see Doc Johnson at a place like this, on one of his travels somewhere.
Saeed grabbed her hand, and before she realized this was the moment, they danced through the tables and jumped onto the cramped stage. The musicians were Saeed’s friends and knew the tempo and tone to hit. Onstage Saeed and Redwood dashed over invisible barriers. They got tripped up and trapped, broke free, and ran again. The audience didn’t know what to make of this dance at first, but talk died down, drinks lingered at lips, and sweet cakes hovered in the air.
Redwood and Saeed rode a horn solo up into air. Twisting and twirling, bending and bowing, they finally landed with a whisper on the creaky wooden floor to stunned applause. A banjo player with simple jug accompaniment took over. Banjo player was clumsy, but that didn’t matter. Saeed chanted softly in Farsi as Redwood, feeling right as rain, sang one of Aidan’s songs:
Running won’t set you free
Yeah, a man could still be a slave
On the loose and-a acting brave
In shackles he just don’t see
Noooo, running won’t make you free
In the bedroom, Aidan sang “Running Won’t Set You Free” and strummed his banjo rather poorly till Iris fell asleep. He set his banjo on Aunt Caitlin’s heirloom trunk, tucked the sheet under Iris’s chin, and stood a moment listening to her breathing. He kissed her forehead and slipped out the room into the kitchen.
Sitting at the table, Aidan pulled out his journal. It’d been a while since he kept good counsel with hisself. The orchid Garnett had left on his rocking chair was pressed in the center. In four years, the flower hadn’t dried out. After scratching one word on a blank page, his head ached. His skin burned and itched. He stopped writing and stared into the dancing fire. The cavorting flickers and shadows jumped him—fire imps, jabbing his body with red-hot pokers, laughing and hissing. One big fellow with a boar’s head and stubby gator legs took to clubbing Aidan with a burning birch log. Setting down the pen, Aidan pushed away from the table. Pain blasted his body. He closed his eyes, hugged his chest, and shuddered. The stabs of pain weren’t so bad if he didn’t also have to watch the fire imps.
“Jesus.” He groaned out loud and then bit his tongue so as not to wake Iris.
If some god could spare Iris from two deadly afflictions, Aidan had figured he could put down the jugs for good. He just hadn’t figured how hard it would be. After the fever and cough epidemic, he’d stuck to colored Peach Grove where the neighbors smiling in his face hadn’t set torches to Garnett’s feet. In fact Aidan thought of settling down with a good colored woman, Subie’s grandniece, Luella, if she’d have him. Luella was a handsome, strong gal he could respect. Whenever he checked in on Subie, Luella was there checking on her too. Luella could make a man nervous, eyeing him with a crooked smile and devilish hips.
Could such a fine woman want a busted-up drunk? The imps laughed in his ears. Aidan opened his eyes. The big guy with the boar’s head just kept clubbing him with the burning birch.
“Luella be trying to make me fat with her pies and jars of jam!” Aidan told them. Luella had lost her husband, Bubba Jackson, to the coughing sickness. Seeing her dragging ’round, so sad, tugged at his heart. Singing at Iona and Leroy’s one night, Aidan did a song ’bout losing the one you love, just for her. Ever since, Luella looked back at him with hope. She was nothing like Redwood of course, but they could raise Iris, have a few sweet babies of their own, and turn a profit with his farm. That would make a good second life. Yes, sober in Peach Grove would be all right once he fought through the delirium tremens. Sweat streamed from his head, stinging his eyes. Demons didn’t look tired of tormenting him.
Shaking and wheezing, he stumbled to the door and stood in a cool night wind. The fire imps got blown back by a stiff gust. A shower of falling stars lit up the dark. Such a beautiful sight, and they’d been racing through the sky every night this week, ’less his eyes were playing tricks on him. Watching celestial fireworks calmed him a bit.
Iris shrieked from the bedroom. Aidan ran back in to her. Still half in dreamland, she stood at the window, banging and hollering and pulling at the new curtains.
“Wake up now, honey, wake up.” He drew her from the cool draft and hugged away the screams. When she looked him in the eye from this world, not dreamland, he set her back on the bed. “Tell me what’s wrong, sugar. So I can help.”
She clutched her feet.
“Breaks my heart, you suffering and me not doing anything.” When she still said nothing, he resorted to threats. “You don’t want me going back to the drink, do you?”
She shook her head. “A demon posse be hounding me out of my dreams.”
Felt just like a bottle upside his head. “Who is it?”
“Bad men…”
He finished for her. “Men of ash and smoke, burning the backs of horses, chasing behind a haint.”
“Every night. They don’t scare you none?” She gripped him.
“Makes me mad is all.”
“A tall lady with swamp-grass hair. She wear a gush of muddy river water for a dress, face is all shadows and smoke. A turkey buzzard be sitting on her shoulder smacking some bloody lips.” Iris was a baby when they lynched her mama, too young to remember her face, but Garnett Phipps still haunted the little one. “A purple orchid be burning in her hair.”
“I seen her too,” Aidan said slowly. “Don’t need to be ’fraid of her. She’s a good spirit.”
“How you know? Ain’t she chase that preacher down his own well?” Iris was a spooky child. Everybody say, she know things nobody should know.
“Preacher drove his ownself down that well,” Aidan said. “Couldn’t stand what he see in the mirror every day.”
Outside branches rustled and snapped.
Aidan glanced at the window. “Probably just the wind.”
“Uh-huh.” Iris looked up at him, no more convinced by this explanation than he was.
“All right.”
Iris wasn’t going back to sleep till he scouted ’round the house for danger. He hurried through the kitchen, grabbing a shotgun as he went. His fingers kept slipping on and off the trigger. No whiskey drowned his bloodlust—he wanted to kill somebody. He wanted to go hunt down the rest of Garnett’s posse and shoot ’em in their beds, only three out of twelve were left. He could do it in one night. A branch snapped, and whirling toward the sound, he almost sent a load of buckshot through Miz Caroline Williams standing a few feet in front of him, holding her gray horse. Her face was moonlight and fog, her hair, a knotted spider web. She looked like a ghost.
“Good evening,” Aidan sputtered.
“Middle of the night, actually,” Miz Williams replied. “I saw your light.”
Aidan grunted, still eyeing her through his shotgun sight. Her kin took part in every misery that plagued colored, Indian, or poor white Peach Grove for a couple hundred years. Shooting her might feel good.
“That sick gal you carry up to my house a while back, dry as death then, be doing fine now.” She stared down both his barrels. “She asked after you.”
She threw him off guard mentioning a good deed. He glanced ’round for other nightriders. Wind scattered dry leaves, and shooting stars cascaded ’cross the sky. They were alone in the night. Aidan lowered the gun.
“Why you riding so late? All alone?” he asked.
“Folks say, you be leaving here. Taking Iris Phipps up north, into winter.”
“It’s spring all over, even in New York City, and I ain’t selling you my land in the middle of the night any more than I would in daylight.”
She thrust an envelope toward him. “For Jerome and … and his wife, for my grandchildren. You’re a good man. I trust you’ll do right.” Miz Williams hadn’t talked this much in years. Not to Aidan.
“Everybody calling me a good man all of a sudden, and it used to be Crazy Coop.”
“They say you put the jug down and take in Iris Phipps. I call that good.” She talked like a normal, decent person.
“Why you steal all them people’s farms from them?”
Caroline bristled. The hand holding the envelope shook. Aidan didn’t touch it.
“My husband’s land,” she said. “I was just taking it back.” She looked at him without blinking. “So will you do me this kindness? Since you’re leaving anyhow, can you do right by Iris’s sister and my Jerome?” She couldn’t even say Redwood’s name. “This is just between you and me. Nobody else needs to know.”
“I’ll do what I can.” He took the envelope. “Everybody but me know I’m leaving.”
“I hope Jerome didn’t ruin it by now.” She got back on her gray mare. “Nothing like the yellow fever to make a body glad for any future we been offered.”
Aidan should have said her son was dust. No use her carrying false hope ’round like that. But she galloped ’cross the creek, stirring up murky water—gone before he could form the words. Maybe that was better. He went back into the house and threw cold water at his face. He was so steamed up, it didn’t make much difference.
Iris slept sound, curled in his arms. Aidan was wide awake the rest of the night, wrassling with hisself till finally he couldn’t fight no more. The time to leave had come.