VALDOSTA, 1866
BUT VENGEANCE WAITED WHILE DICK FORCE LANGUISHED OF HIS gangrenous wounds and the winter came on even harder than the one before, the weather so cold that cowsmilk turned solid in the milk buckets and crops froze right in the ground. Deer made bold by a lack of forage came out of the woods and down into the farmyard to share the horses’ feed, and yellow-eyed possums slunk under the porch, looking for remains of the cats’ dinners. Even the people seemed like feral creatures, lean and hungry and desperate. The only good news was the end of the Yankee occupation and the slow awakening of the businesses in town, though times remained almost as hard as they had been during the war.
“Might as well live away up in the mountains, for this cold,” Henry Holliday said as he came in from the orchard one evening, chilled and rosy-cheeked from the frigid wind. “Get me a drink from under the sideboard there, John Henry. I may lose this crop, too, if the weather doesn’t break soon, damn the weather and the Yankees both. I’ve got enough trouble already, what with the cut worm and the boll weevil and the rust.”
John Henry opened the sideboard door slowly, hoping that his father wouldn’t notice how much of the liquor had disappeared. Though he’d stopped stealing his father’s whiskey for himself following his mother’s chastisement, he’d borrowed enough for the Captain to nearly empty the bottle.
“Where’s my drink, son?” Henry said, and John Henry poured all that was left into a tumbler. Enough, he hoped, to satisfy his father.
“Looks like it’s almost gone, Pa,” he said with studied blue-eyed innocence as he handed his father the glass. “Guess you’ll be needin’ to get some more.”
But Henry seemed, thankfully, not to be paying attention to him as he pulled off his heavy great coat and thick woolen gloves. “Damn that fool Congress up in Washington with their Constitutional Amendments! First the Thirteenth to free the slaves, now this Fourteenth they want ratified givin’ all coloreds the rights of white men. Freein’ the slaves was one thing, but making them equal to whites! ‘Civil Rights’ they call it. What about my civil rights? My people helped to build this country. My grandfathers fought in the Revolutionary War. Hell, I fought for the United States, myself, back in the Mexican War!”
John Henry was used to his father’s tirades and usually didn’t pay much attention, but his ears perked up when Henry mentioned Mexico. Those stories were still his favorites, far more adventurous and romantic than the cold reality of the War of Secession. In exotic places like Vera Cruz and Monterrey, in the wilds of Texas and the paradise of California, the Americans had fought against foreign imperialists and added a million square miles to the American territories. The Mexican War had been a hero-maker, giving glorious careers to future Rebels and Yankees, both: Winfield Scott, George McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant, even General Robert E. Lee, himself. Henry Holliday had fought beside all those men, and come home a hero, too.
And Henry had brought more than just his brave stories home with him. He’d brought an unusual souvenir as well: a Mexican orphan boy named Francisco Hidalgo, whose parents had been killed in the fighting. Henry, who was still a bachelor at the time, had given the boy a home and sent him to school, and Francisco had repaid him by serving as his valet and teaching him the tricks of the Mexican card game called Spanish Monte. It was a complicated game that matched suits to a dealer’s hand, and the American soldiers had picked it up and tried to cheat using marked cards. But the Mexicans knew how to win with straight cards, and Francisco had passed the skill along to Henry, and it had paid off well in the saloons of Georgia.
Francisco was grown and married now, living on a farm in Jenkins-burg, near to Griffin, and until John Henry’s family had moved away to Valdosta, they had paid him regular visits. Henry treated him like one of the family, kin almost, and Francisco returned the sentiment, naming one of his own sons John in honor of John Henry. And when Francisco went off to defend the Confederacy as a private in the Georgia Volunteer Infantry, he took one of Henry Holliday’s pistols with him. But John Henry’s fondest memory of Francisco Hidalgo was the Spanish he had learned from him as a child. Being able to understand and speak a little of a foreign language gave him a certain status among his schoolmates who were still struggling with English rhetoric and basic Latin grammar.
And thinking of English and Latin, he remembered something the town boys had told him. “Pa? Did you know there’s a new school opening up over in Valdosta? The Valdosta Institute they’re callin’ it. I hear the teacher’s as good as anybody up in Griffin or even Atlanta.”
“I heard about it.”
“Well, Sir, I’d like to go, if you could spare the money to send me.”
“You know there’s nothin’ to spare, boy!” Henry thundered. “Everything I had was Confederate, and Confederate’s gone bust now. Be lucky to find enough to pay the taxes on the place this year. Where do you suppose I’ll get money for a luxury like school?”
“But school’s not a luxury, Pa! I need my schoolin’, if I aim to be a doctor like Uncle John one day. I need to get my education . . .”
“You need to learn to work harder, and earn what you get in life. I haven’t noticed you puttin’ out much effort to help around here. Looks to me like you spend most of your time ridin’ off to go shootin’.”
“I do my chores, Pa. I help take care of Ma, too. And you’ve got the darkies to do the field work . . .”
“Don’t you listen to anything I say, boy? We haven’t got any darkies anymore! Half the hands have run off to join the Yanks, the rest want me to pay them royal wages for their work. Pay them! Hell, I’ve paid for them over and over again already, buyin’ them off the auction block, givin’ them homes and clothes, feedin’ them. And where am I supposed to get the money to pay them with? Between the cost of seed and this damn winter that won’t break . . .”
“I’m sorry, Pa,” John Henry said quietly, trying to assuage his father’s growing anger. “I didn’t know . . .”
“What you don’t know could fill a book, boy! Now pour me another drink. This one’s not makin’ a dent.”
But there was no more whiskey to be poured. His father had already drunk the last of what was left in the bottle, and John Henry felt a wave of dread come over him. Henry was angry enough already without learning that his own son had been stealing from him.
“There . . . isn’t anymore, Pa,” he muttered, not daring to look his father in the face. “I reckon you’ve already drunk it all.”
“Hell if I did,” Henry said, his steely eyes narrowing. “I know how much I drink, and how long the liquor will last. I had enough ‘till next month, unless someone’s been sharin’ it with me . . .”
But before his father could make the accusation that would lead to a beating, a gentle voice spoke from the bedroom doorway.
“Someone has been sharin’ it with you, Henry,” Alice Jane whispered hoarsely as she steadied herself with one hand on the doorframe, her white nightdress draping around her like a shroud. “I’ve been drinkin’ a little, now and then, to help with the pain. You needn’t take on after John Henry about it.”
“You?” Henry asked, his dark brows lifting in surprise. “I’ve never known you to touch a drop of liquor in your life.”
“My brother James suggested it,” she said. “Shall I write to him that you disapprove?”
“James told you to drink?”
“Yes,” she said, and John Henry was surprised by how coolly she could lie. He was sure she had never touched a drop of the whiskey herself, and was only saying so to protect him from his father’s wrath. “Now what’s all this fussin’ that woke me? Surely a little missin’ liquor can’t have made you so angry, Henry.”
“It’s my fault, Ma,” John Henry said quickly. “I just asked if I could go study at the new school in town. I didn’t know that things were so hard around here.”
“Spoiled, that’s what he is,” Henry said. “Thinks the world comes on a golden platter. That’s your doin’, Alice Jane, yours and your sisters’ for dotin’ on him all the time. Thinks the world owes him everything.”
“You’re right, of course, dear,” she agreed. “We do dote on him over much. But that’s because he’s the only child. You know I would have been thankful for more children, if the Lord had seen fit to bless us. Is this new school so very expensive?”
“Everything’s expensive these days,” Henry replied, but his hot temper seemed to be cooling some in his wife’s gentle presence.
“But surely we can find the money somewhere,” Alice Jane said. “You know how well he always did in school.” Then she added in measured tones: “You know how I feel about his education, Henry. If I leave him nothin’ else, I want to leave him educated, as a gentleman’s son should be. I want to know I did the best by him, when I am gone . . .”
When I am gone, John Henry’s thoughts echoed silently, surprised to hear his mother allude to her own mortality. For though the family all knew now that she was indeed dying of the consumption, the sad truth of it was never mentioned aloud. But now she was using her own illness to fight for his happiness.
Henry sighed as though unaccustomed to acquiescing. “All right, Alice Jane, if that’s what you want. I’ll scrape the tuition together somehow, if I have to sell off some of the farm to do it. God knows, the land’s not worth much to me these days, anyhow, without enough hands to work it. Hell, maybe I’ll even hire myself out to the Freedmen’s Bureau. I hear the government is lookin’ for local agents, now the occupation is over.” Then he turned his gaze, cool as blue steel, on John Henry. “But I’ll expect you to prove yourself deservin’ of the honor, boy. I want to see top marks in every subject, and perfect attendance as well. No use joinin’ the battle unless you plan to fight to the end.” Then his gaze shifted to the old sword that hung over the fireplace, the sword great-grandfather Burroughs had used in the Revolutionary War, and he sighed again.
“I had hoped you might follow me into the military one day,” he said, “fight for your country like your forebears did. But I don’t reckon there’ll be much call for Southern soldiers anymore.” And as he spoke, there was such sadness in his voice, such wistfulness for those glory days gone by, that John Henry felt a pang of remorse.
“I’ll do my best in school, Pa,” he vowed. “I promise I’ll make you proud of me.”
“You do that, son,” Henry said heavily. “Our pride’s about all we’ve got left, these days.”
The Valdosta Institute was located in the remodeled old day school building and run by the erudite Professor S.M. Varnedoe and his sisters, Miss Sallie and Miss Lila Varnedoe, newly arrived from Savannah, and dedicated to bringing modern education to the backwoods boys and girls of Lowndes County. The coursework they offered was challenging, combining the basics with a heavy dose of classical language and literature. While penmanship still counted, composition and recitation became the true test of knowledge, and the students spent every Friday in written and oral examinations. But despite the rigors of the routine, the students quickly came to love and admire their new instructor. Professor Varnedoe’s techniques stirred his pupils’ sense of pride and ambition, and their reward was his benevolent smile and happy laughter. Learning with Professor Varnedoe was a joy.
The highlight of the school week was the Friday afternoon recitation contest, when the students entertained each other by reading their compositions aloud and reciting the long poems Professor Varnedoe assigned to them : William Tell, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, The Death of Napoleon. The best orators in school were Willie Pendleton and Constantia Bessant, Major Bessant’s pretty young daughter, but Sam Griffin was John Henry’s favorite, hands down.
Young Sam had a fervent love of the South, a fervent hate of the Yankees, and a way with a patriotic theme that could make an audience burst into applause. And as the son of the owner of the town’s general store, he often came prepared with cinnamon bark candy in his pockets to share, as he did one school day in spring.
“For the ladies,” he said with a brown-eyed grin, sneaking some out at recess time as he and John Henry loafed in the schoolyard. “Give a bite to Thea Morgan over there, I’ll bet she gives you a kiss for it.”
“Thea?” John Henry asked in surprise, stealing a glance at the skinny, pale-eyed girl who stood staring back at him from the shadows near the outhouse. “Why’d she do such a thing?”
“She’s sweet on you, don’t you know?” Sam replied with a laugh. “Constantia Bessant told me it’s so, and if Constantia said it, you can bet it’s true. Any girl with the grit to stand up to that Yankee soldier the way she did is bound to be tellin’ the truth.”
John Henry’s head shot up, the cinnamon bark and Thea Morgan forgotten all at once. “What Yankee soldier?”
“Why the one that arrested Dick Force, back last fall, didn’t you hear? It was Constantia Bessant first found out about the Captain bein’ in jail. She was passin’ by the jailhouse that day, goin’ home from my Pa’s store, when one of those uppity darky soldiers pushed his bayonet at her and told her to go on and git. Well, you know Constantia. She wasn’t about to git just ‘cause some Yankee darky told her to, so she turned around and told him he could go on and git himself right back up to Washington. And that was when she saw who it was that darky was guarding.”
“You mean the Captain?”
“Sure enough!” Then Sam Griffin started into an oratory to rival anything he’d ever presented in school. Sam was an actor at heart, and he could copy almost anyone’s voice, as he did now, letting his voice go high and flirtatious like Constantia Bessant’s.
“‘Why if it ain’t the Captain! Whatever are you doin’ in that jail cell, Dick?’”
When John Henry laughed at the mimicry, Sam changed characters, his voice growing low and angry like Dick Force’s. “‘They say I choked a darky, and I am under arrest.’”
Then, quick as a wink, he became Constantia again.
“‘Well, I am goin’ home and choke two or three of them myself, and then they will arrest me, too. And as this building belongs to my father, we will just turn them all out and take possession.’”
John Henry, playing along with the performance, looked concerned as he asked: “And did you get arrested, too, Miss Bessant, Ma’am?”
“Hell no!” Sam laughed in his own boyish voice. “But Constantia did go right on home and tell everybody that Dick was in jail. It was just awhile later that Alex Darnell and Jack Calhoun came and helped him to escape. So I reckon you could say that Constantia showed those Yankees what’s what, helpin’ get Dick out of jail.”
John Henry nodded, a hot light in his clear blue eyes. “I sure would like to show those Yanks a thing or two, myself! The way those darky soldiers parade up and down this town is more than a man ought to have to bear, and pushin’ a gun at a lady like that . . . Why, if my Pa wasn’t agent for the Bureau, workin’ with the Federals and all, I might just teach them a lesson in manners!”
“I’m with you, there, John Henry,” Sam agreed. “Too bad we’re not old enough to join up with Alex and Jack. I’ll bet we’d see some fightin’ then.”
“What are you talkin’ about, Sam?”
Sam looked around quickly, then spoke in hushed tones. “I’m talkin’ about vigilantes! That’s what Alex and Jack are puttin’ together. I heard ‘em plannin’ in the back room of my Pa’s store when they came in for a drink the other night. Alex and Jack and the Captain all fought in the War together, so they know somethin’ about fightin’. They say that if the Captain dies, there’s gonna be trouble, one way or another. I tell you, John Henry, I sure would like to join up with them and make some trouble myself!”
“Vigilantes,” John Henry said, the word rolling off his tongue with a satisfying sound. “Vigilantes! For the honor of the South!”
“For the honor of the South!” Sam Griffin repeated. Then he shrugged. “But us being only fourteen and all, they ain’t gonna take us in. Hell, John Henry! Sometimes I think I’m gonna bust before I get a chance to do a man’s work!” But Sam’s mood could change like quicksilver, and he let out a sudden laugh. “But I know one thing we can try that’s man’s business . . .”
“And what’s that?”
“Kissin’ women! Tell you what, you give that piece of cinnamon bark to Thea Morgan, and I’ll bet you two bits she lets you kiss her at the next barn dance.”
“You’re on,” John Henry readily agreed. Since his childhood days with cousin Robert, he couldn’t resist the thrill of a contest—especially one where a wager was involved. “And how about you, Sam? You gonna try for a kiss, too?”
“Sure am,” Sam said with a grin. “I aim to kiss Constantia Bessant!”
John Henry let out a whistle. “You do dream big, Sam! Constantia’s the most popular girl in school. What makes you think she’ll kiss you?”
Sam grinned again as he pulled a paper-wrapped wad of sticky candy from the pocket of his homespun trousers. “Cinnamon bark, John Henry! She’s got a real sweet tooth, that’s what I hear. And I’ve got the best supply of sugar in town. Why, by the time I’m done passin’ around candy to all the pretty girls, Valdosta’s gonna be needin’ a dentist.”
“. . . more than kisses, letters mingle souls,” John Henry recited, and though he should have known what to say next, his mind kept drawing a blank. “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls. . .”
“Yes, yes, Mr. Holliday,” Professor Varnedoe said, “you have already said that. The next line, please.” The professor looked at him patiently as did a classroom of young faces, all waiting while John Henry struggled with his final Friday recitation. Professor Varnedoe had assigned him selections from the English writer John Donne, and until this last poem, John Henry had been making a competent presentation. But though he’d read the words of the poem dozens of times and recited them to himself nearly that many times more, until this very moment, the meaning of the lines had alluded him. Now he stood suddenly understanding what the poet had meant, and feeling so overwhelmed by the truth of it that he could think of nothing else.
“. . . more than kisses,” Professor Varnedoe prompted, and John Henry took a breath and tried again.
“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For, thus friends absent speak.”
“Very good, Mr. Holliday. Now, that wasn’t so very difficult, was it? Class, you may offer Mr. Holliday a round of applause. Next, I believe we will hear from Mr. Albert Pendleton, Jr.”
And as the class clapped heartily at his dubious achievement and the next reciter came forward, John Henry quickly took his seat on the bench behind his wood plank desk. Sam Griffin, sitting on his right side, leaned over and winked, and pointed to where Thea Morgan sat across the aisle on the girl’s side of the classroom. Thea was looking back, her cheeks in a flush that made her skinny, pale face seem almost pretty. Why did she have to blush like that? John Henry thought, and right here in class, too. Surely, everyone would guess what she was blushing about and would think that she and John Henry were sweethearts.
His first kiss had been nothing, really, and he almost felt bad about taking Sam’s wagered two bits for accomplishing it. Thea Morgan was as meek and mild-mannered as she looked, and she didn’t put up any fuss at all when he held her by the hand and led her behind a bale of hay in the barn near the Darnell’s Livery Stable the night of the spring dance. Getting her there, out of sight of the chaperones, was easy enough, and getting the kiss wasn’t much harder. After stalling a bit out of his own nervousness, wondering just how he ought to go about it, he figured he might as well get on with it and he just up and kissed her. It was over almost before he realized that he’d done it, and there was Thea, looking at him with her pale eyes shining and a funny-kind of smile on her thin lips. But there was so little of anything remarkable about the feeling of kissing those lips that he reckoned he might as well have kissed the family cow or his favorite riding horse. So though it was the first kiss of his young life, it was nothing much to remember.
What he did remember from that warm evening in mid-May was Colonel William Bessant interrupting the barn dance to announce that Dick Force had died. It had taken five long months for the Yankee bullets to do their work, but the slow poison of the gangrenous wounds had finally killed the Captain, as sure a murder as if he’d died the same day he was shot. And without Colonel Bessant there at the dance to soften the news and try to calm the angry young crowd, there would have been trouble in Valdosta that night for sure, for murder demanded justice, or vengeance at least. But Colonel Bessant reminded them all again that the Lord would surely repay what they could not, and it was best for the townspeople to keep their tempers and their tongues. In the heated atmosphere of the times, even a rumor of revenge could bring down a flood of Federal soldiers on them all.
The dance was quickly dismissed, as was school for a few days, and the students sent home to cool their heels and their hot heads. But for John Henry, living away out in the country, seven miles from school and Sam Griffin and the rest of the boys, the time away only made his anger grow. Dick Force was only nineteen-years-old when he died, just five years older than John Henry himself, and too young to suffer such a lingering and loathsome end. Why, if he’d had any say in the matter . . .
But he had no say, nor even a chance to talk out his frustration. His mother was sick in bed most of the time, too ill to be disturbed. His father was busy with business and the job he had taken as local agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau—and even that rankled John Henry. Working for the Bureau was nearly as bad as being a Yankee, in his mind, and he tried not to remember that his father had only taken the Bureau job to make the money to send him to school.
He was still in that solitary and sorrowful mood when a letter came for him from Jonesboro. Cousin Mattie had finally written to tell him how things were going back in her hometown—a hometown that she hardly recognized anymore since Sherman and his soldiers had swept through.
Nearly the whole town is burnt up, she wrote, her neat handwriting filling the front, back, and margins of the one small sheet of stationery, an economy necessitated by the high price of writing paper since the War. Broad Street is changed so, you’d hardly recognize it. Where the rails used to run down the middle of the road, there’s two roads now, one on each side of the rails. The Yanks lowered the town side of the street and dumped the dirt on the McDonough side to raise it, which they supposed would make it harder for us to get around. They burnt the old train depot, up on the north side of town by Aunt Martha Holliday Johnson’s house, and tore up all the tracks along through there, but there’s talk of building a new depot when there’s any money for it. My father’s warehouse where he had his mercantile is just a pile of bricks and charred boards, like most of the rest of downtown. The Courthouse is gone, and the Academy, and lots of folks lost their homes. Our home is still standing, though in disreputable shape, the wall plaster is broken and full of holes from gunshots and the clapboards were stolen by the Yanks for firewood, so we hear. Mama said she told you about the graves in our vegetable garden, Captain Grace and Father Bleimal. How sad it all is! When I went to the convent school in Savannah, I left a pretty white house with flowers in the yard. Now I’ve come home again, but it hardly seems like home anymore. I miss the way things used to be. Do you feel the same? How I wish we could talk to one another again . . .
He knew just how she felt, and wished so much, as she did, that they could talk again. But Jonesboro was so far away, farther even than Griffin, and he was buried out in the quiet of the countryside. If only he were older, he thought for the thousandth time, and had some say in his own life.
But at least he had Mattie’s letter, and reading it over again and again until he almost had it memorized made him feel closer to her. Dear cousin Mattie, who understood him and cared about him as no one else seemed to. So on this final day of Friday recitations, the last week of the school year, the poet’s words were alive in his heart:
“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For, thus friends absent speak.”
Thea Morgan could smile at him all day if she wanted to, and dream a hopeless dream that he would ever kiss her again. It was cousin Mattie who had his heart and always would.
Summer came too soon that year, and with the end of the school session, John Henry found himself alone again on his father’s farm with only the field hands and his horse for company. Most days, as soon as his chores were done and his piano practice was over, he’d be off riding somewhere, shooting at rabbits or fishing in the green waters of the Withlacoochee. But wherever he’d gone to spend the days, he was always home again for his evening devotional at his mother’s bedside.
It was there by his mother’s side that he celebrated his fifteenth birthday, while Alice Jane lay coughing with the consumption that racked her ravaged body. And though the August day was sweltering, even the heat of the south Georgia summer didn’t seem to warm her anymore, and she shivered as she lay under a heavy quilt.
“I am so sorry, my dear,” she said breathlessly, “I should have planned a party for you . . .”
“Don’t be silly, Ma. What do I need a party for? I’m nearly a man now. Besides, who’d come all this way just to celebrate with me?” And though he tried to make his voice sound light and uncaring, there was something wistful in it. Who would come out so far just to see him, anyhow? Only Sam Griffin maybe, and Sam was busy helping out in his father’s general store that summer, where he was no doubt filling his mind with thoughts of vigilantes and other town-boy excitements.
“Nearly a man . . .” Alice Jane echoed. “Look at you! My sweet boy, so grown up. I am glad there is so much McKey in you . . .” She reached her hand to his face, fair and freckled from the summer sun, then touched his sandy hair, threaded with traces of reddish-gold.
He did look some like his mother’s side of the family, that was true, with the McKey’s Scots-Irish coloring and clear china-blue eyes, the graceful gait and aristocratic bearing. But the rest of him was all Holliday, with his father’s high cheekbones and squared jaw, his peaked hairline and hair-trigger temper.
“I do have something for you, though,” she whispered, “a birthday gift.”
“What gift, Ma?” he asked, as his gaze went quickly around the little room, falling on washstand and chair, wardrobe and trunk before settling back on the quilt-covered bedstead. “I don’t see any presents.”
“Your gift isn’t here. It’s back in Griffin. I wanted you to have it as part of your inheritance from my father’s estate. The money may do you good one day. You remember Indian Creek, your Grandfather McKey’s plantation?”
“Sure, Ma, I remember.” How could he ever forget? Indian Creek had been like paradise to his childish mind, and at the mention of it, he could almost taste the Muscadine grapes that grew on the arbor, almost feel the breeze blowing over the endless acres of cotton and corn and sugar cane. Paradise lost, he thought, like everything else he loved. Like his mother, who was dying.
“I tried to keep some of the plantation for you,” she went on, struggling for breath, “but all that’s left now are the house lots in town and the Iron Front . . .”
“The Iron Front?”
“It is . . . a business building . . . my father invested in it . . .” her voice broke then, torn by a coughing fit, and John Henry pulled the covers closer around her.
“Don’t talk now, Ma,” he said gently. “You can tell me later.” Or never, he thought with a shudder. What did he care about a building, anyhow? Even Indian Creek Plantation wouldn’t make up for his mother’s fading life, or his own frustrated one.
“Yes,” she whispered, “later . . .” and she closed her eyes. “Happy Birthday, my dearest . . .”
“Thank you, Ma,” John Henry said. And as he bent to kiss her cool damp brow, his heart repeated her words, “Happy Birthday . . .”
The one pleasure that he could offer her in her failing days was the piano music she so loved, though she was too weak to play for herself anymore.
“You play for me, John Henry,” she would whisper in her breathless voice. “I do love to hear you play.” So he would open the sheet music that she had taught him and stumble through Schubert and Liszt. But as the days passed and September and Indian Summer came on, Alice Jane no longer had the strength to ask him to play, or even to listen, and the music ended altogether.
It was an awful death that came to take Alice Jane Holliday that warm evening in September, slipping from consciousness as her lungs filled with water and she lay drowning in her bed. Her sisters and brothers, come up from Florida to be with her at the end, tried to comfort one another by speaking of that peaceful land beyond the grave where Alice Jane would live forever in eternal light. But all John Henry could see was the darkness of the world that only his mother’s company could chase away, and in the darkness, the end finally came.
He waited in the shadows outside her room, listening to the hushed voices beyond the door. He recognized his father’s voice, and Uncle James McKey who was her attending physician, and heard the muffled sound of his aunts’ weeping. And he wanted to go in and wanted to run away at the same time, so he sat transfixed, listening but not wanting to hear. In his hands he held a small, leather-backed photograph of a beautiful young woman in a ruffle-lined bonnet. She held a baby boy in her arms, fair haired and wide eyed, cuddling against her for comfort. He could hardly remember his mother looking like that, young and serene, but he could still feel the warmth and safety of her arms around him, and knowing that he was losing her was more than he could bear.
Then the bedroom door swung open and his aunts shuffled past him, clinging onto each other and not noticing him through their weeping. His father noticed him though, as he sat on the floor with his back against the wall, his shoulders shaking with the emotion that he could not control.
“No cryin’, boy. I will not have you cryin’ like some girl. Do you understand me?”
“Yessir,” John Henry said, his words trembling out.
“Your mother has gone on to a better life, God rest her soul. A better life than I ever gave her. Maybe she will finally find some happiness now.” And for a moment, his father seemed to be looking right through him and into some other place. Then his eyes focused again on the frightened boy before him, and he said sternly: “Get up from there and do somethin’ to help your aunts. I don’t want to see you cryin’ anymore.”
John Henry pushed himself up from the floor and tried to wipe the tears from his eyes without his father seeing, but Henry wasn’t looking at him, done giving what little consolation he would, and John Henry hurried past him down the hall to find his aunts. But what he wanted was to go back into that sick room, kneel down by his mother’s bed, and cry himself to sleep at her side.
His mother would have understood, and let him cry.
She was buried in a plot in Sunset Hill Cemetery in Valdosta, where magnolia trees shaded the sparse grass and squirrels chased across the graves. And standing by his father, hat in hand and eyes swollen from two nights of silent weeping into his pillow, John Henry felt that his own life was over as well. He’d known his mother was dying; for years he’d lived with the pain of the knowledge of it. For years he’d listened to her struggle for breath until she’d suddenly stopped breathing. No breath, no life, only an empty silence, a void in his life where she had always been, a chasm in his heart that nothing would ever fill.
But the hardest part of his mourning was having to go back to school, knowing his mother would want him to do well in spite of his loss, knowing his father expected it. Perfect attendance and top marks were still Henry’s requirements for continued education, and John Henry had no choice but to comply, though he often found his eyes so clouded with emotion that he could hardly read the books before him. If only he could talk to someone, share the anguish of his loss, he might be able to handle it all better. But his father had ordered him not to cry, so he kept the pain inside and kept the tears to himself. And when the well-meaning Misses Sallie and Lila Varnedoe expressed their condolences and concern, he couldn’t even bring himself to thank them.
He was still mourning his mother’s death, feeling lost and alone without her and doing poorly at school because of it, when his father stunned the family by announcing that he would be marrying again. It had been only three short months since Alice Jane had died, and though the usual mourning period of three years might be shortened if the widower had small children at home who needed tending, John Henry was fifteen-years-old and hardly a child anymore.
“Your mother would have wanted it,” was all the explanation Henry offered his son on that cold December afternoon as he saddled a horse and rode off to marry young Rachel Martin, his neighbor’s daughter. The Reverend Newt Ousley, his mother’s minister, was to perform the ceremony—a deed that seemed nearly as disloyal as his father’s taking Rachel to wife.
Suddenly, all those visits his father had made to the Martin’s orchard seemed sinister in retrospect, and John Henry remembered the words his Uncle James McKey had thrown at his father one hot summer night: “I hear Mr. Martin’s daughter is comely, and available. If there is anything untoward goin’ on between you and Martin’s daughter . . .” But surely, Uncle James had been wrong. Surely there had been nothing between Henry and Rachel while Alice Jane was still alive. But the hasty marriage brought rumors that rippled all across Lowndes County. Three months was hardly any time at all to mourn a beloved wife. Three months looked more like a hurried engagement before a shotgun wedding, making an honest woman out of a married man’s mistress.
Though John Henry tried not to hear the talk in town, in the quiet of the country nights he couldn’t help but hear Rachel’s soft laughter from the room next to his own. He was old enough now to know what went on between man and wife, and the thought of Rachel in his father’s arms both fascinated and repulsed him. She was so different from his refined and cultured mother, a raw and earthy farm girl with little education and a fine lust for her new husband. But if the nights were hard for John Henry, the mornings were worse, listening to Rachel’s humming as she cooked breakfast over the big iron stove. And Henry, smug and smiling, would come out of their bedroom and look at her with satisfaction.
It wasn’t surprising, the way they were carrying on, when Rachel became pregnant. And though she miscarried that baby and then another one, she vowed that she would keep trying until she gave her husband a new son—a pleasure that John Henry secretly prayed she would never have. Henry Holliday already had a son to whom he paid little enough attention as it was.
But John Henry didn’t have long to suffer feeling like an intruder in his father’s honeymoon cottage, for Henry took a sudden desire to rid himself of the farm and move into town. The cotton crop was failing again, he complained, and business in Valdosta was starting to pick up at last. So the Hollidays sold off some of the plantation land and bought a town house across from the railroad tracks on Savannah Avenue, and just down the road from the store where Henry set out to sell buggies for a living. When the buggies sold well, he signed on as a dealer of tickets in the Georgia State Lottery, and soon he was able to buy his new wife a whole new set of furniture and some pretty new clothes to go with it. Life was good again for Henry Holliday, and John Henry wondered if his father ever even thought about Alice Jane anymore, or remembered that he still had a son who needed him.