CHAPTER 14
“You didn’t save him, Charles,” Belinda said. She was sitting in a dim corner of the parlor, staring. Charles sat down beside her on the blue-striped divan and took her limp hand. Her eyes looked almost bruised, but her dark gaze was direct and unreadable. The velvet-trimmed widow’s garb hung loose on her thin body and her pallor shook him. He put a hand against her forehead, then against her throat.
“What are you saying, Belinda?”
The autumn heat hung in a brilliant stillness in the house and across the surrounding fields. It was Sunday afternoon. Charles had left Emily visiting with her father and had ridden to Belinda’s.
“I trusted you.” She gripped her hands in her lap. ”You said you could save him and you didn’t. It makes me crazy. I know you couldn’t help it, Charles. Well, I think I know you couldn’t, but then sometimes I don’t. I see Will’s face and his fear, and I see Judge Matthews and your mother asking if the medicine was wrong and if Will could die if you kept it up and you did and he died.”
He walked to the fireplace and grasped the mantel, waited before he spoke. He did not remind her that the decision to continue the digitalis had been essentially hers.
“Yes, Will died,” he said.
Belinda threw up her hands and stood. “You could have listened, Charles. You could have told me I was wrong. I needed Will to live.”
They both sat back down, at opposite ends of the divan. Neither spoke until he said, “Hiram Blakeny came by this week. About you. And the settlement of Will’s estate.”
“That scoundrel lawyer? He came to you?” Belinda rallied somewhat.
“He apparently accosted you with questions on the acreage Will had been farming.” Charles pressed his hands on his knees, studied his fingernails, raising one finger and then another.
“Well, I have a right to it,” Belinda said, looking away from him. “But I can’t imagine how I would manage that land if I had it, all by myself. Even with slaves.” She wiped at her cheek with the back of her hand, pushed the disheveled curls from her forehead. “Besides, it’s not even the land I care about. I belonged to Will’s family. And now he’s dead and I don’t.”
“Belinda, you belonged to a family well before you even knew there was a Will.” Charles gripped her shoulder. He felt its bony thinness through the crisp silk of her sleeve.
“Well, yes, of course I had a family. I don’t need you to tell me that.” She threw a dismissive hand in his direction. “But Pa was—well, I don’t need to talk to you about Pa. And Mama was good. She stayed by me when I was weak.” She rose and took two steps away, her back to him. “Well, truth be told, I don’t even know that. Pa says she would have let me die when I was born. But Pa says what he wants. He’ll say anything. And there’s you and Hammond, of course. It’s family, I reckon, but something was different being a Matthews. Something substantial. I am still a Matthews. I am Belinda Matthews. But now the judge, who I thought cared for me—I did believe that, Charles—he treats me like it’s my fault Will is dead.” She sobbed into her cupped hands.
Charles came to her, took her by the arms, lifted her chin with his forefinger. “I could help you manage the land, Belinda. Maybe even Pa. If he hadn’t lost the farm in Ohio, he might be a different man. Maybe if he could help you with this farm—”
“Oh, Charles,” she said, shaking herself free of him. “Talk sense. You don’t have time to manage any land, and Pa can’t do one thing unless it’s wrong. Mama has to follow around in his tracks rectifying everything he’s spoiled—that is, when he puts some drunken effort into doing anything at all. You know that.”
“Well, try to imagine him sober.”
“Oh, Charles, for pity’s sake!”
“Yes, for pity’s sake.” He was shouting. “You never knew him then, but he was a different man and a good daddy to me.” He quieted himself and walked to the window, gazing out across the half-picked cotton in the field. “He just lost himself when he lost his farm.”
“You make it sound as if you want that land for him, not me. Maybe for yourself. Is that it, Charles? Was I your path to Will’s land? Maybe you think I still am.”
“Belinda, get hold of yourself.”
“Well, it’s being a Matthews I care about. And that land would show that I am a Matthews.” Belinda flicked the hem of her skirt. “Anyhow, I expect one day very soon, when his grief eases up a bit, the judge will invite me to come live with him, as his daughter. Of course, he will. He just needs to get past some grief. He’s all alone, just like me. It’s taking time, that’s all.”
“Belinda, now you talk some sense. It’s long past saying it will just take time.” Charles glared at his sister. “You are right about that land. It belongs to you and I intend to see that it is yours. It’s long overdue for this to be settled and for you to buck up. I mean to see this finished and finished differently. That land is rightfully Slate land now.”
Belinda glared in return. Her voice grew flat. “Slate land? It is not Slate land. It is Matthews land and I am a Matthews. This is not about you, Charles. It is about me. I used to be so scared and mealymouthed and more than a little crazy, truth be told. But being Will’s wife changed me. Being a Matthews made me somebody. It gave me a life of my own. My own, do you hear?”
“Let’s not argue, Belinda. I’m going now. We’ll talk again when you are less agitated.”
“Yes, you go,” Belinda said. “And when we talk again, I hope it is not about this.”
* * *
Indeed, talk everywhere in the fall of 1860 turned to conflicts far larger in scope than the perceived wrongs of Belinda’s inheritance. November came and with it the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. On December 17, the First Secession Convention gathered in the Baptist Church of Columbia, South Carolina. Because of a smallpox outbreak, the Convention adjourned to Charleston, where three days later that state declared itself free of the Union. January of 1861 arrived and with it the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, the grounds for secession being the economic basis of slavery. Mississippi had been a state of the Union less than forty-four years. Judge William Matthews had been seven years old when Mississippi became a state, old enough to remember the celebrations.
Now he paced the floor of his study in front of his daughter. “I am sick to death over this,” he said to Emily, who had come the moment she heard the news, knowing how distraught her father would be. “Second to secede. Without Mississippi falling into South Carolina’s misguided footsteps, perhaps this insanity would collapse of its own weight, or lack thereof. But now it is done and the South will go down like a row of dominoes.”
“What will we do, Papa?” Emily said. On the edge of her chair, she fidgeted with the pleats of her skirt. One of the rosettes at her sleeve hung loose. As she fiddled with it, the stitching gave way. She tucked the tiny flower into her pocket.
“Nothing,” her father said. “Nothing but wait. The Union will prevail. Peace will prevail, I believe. Anything else is insanity. The South hasn’t force enough to go against the United States Army. Nor do we have the righteous cause. And yet they are claiming the righteous ground, calling this vile institution ‘the greatest material interest in the world.’ Pronouncing officially that we are engaged in ‘the most important commerce in the world.’ I pray this may lead to the end of slavery, but God help us, if it should come at too high a price. The wages of sin, perhaps.”
“Is there really nothing to do?”
“Only to wait, my dear. This won’t last long. It isn’t feasible. Months, I expect. The Union’s too strong.”
Emily pulled at her ear. Judge Matthews thought how typical that gesture was, since her early childhood, whenever she felt insecure, adopted when she was no longer allowed to suck her thumb. He smiled.
“What if you are called up, Papa?”
“Highly unlikely, Emily. We have not come to arms yet and if we do, I am too old. This will be done with before they get desperate enough for the likes of me.”
“And Charles and Jeremiah?”
“Don’t get ahead of your horse now, Emily. Time will take care of this without you. Before you can worry yourself too much, we will have a new peace. And the freedom this country was founded upon.”
“Do we have a country now, Papa?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, Emily. You just see to Rosa Claire and leave the peacemaking to the experts.”
“Well, I will do that, Papa, but not without the strength and intelligence to do it well. Do not think, because I am a woman, that I am oblivious to the world around me.”
Judge Matthews kissed his daughter on the forehead and bid her goodbye. By late spring, Abraham Lincoln would be the president of the country to which she held allegiance, but in which she no longer lived. The Confederate States of America would have unleashed a war of unprecedented proportions. And Emily would be overwrought about bringing a second child into an uncertain world. She would still be waiting without an answer—belonging to no country to which she could give a name.
On March 4, 1861, Lincoln would be inaugurated as president of a country divided, whether or not against itself to be decided on the battlefield with unparalleled bloodshed and horror. The newly formed Confederate States would fire on Fort Sumter, and Emily would announce her second pregnancy to her husband. Other small or large or seemingly insignificant details would have been either noticed or passed over. The seeds of fate would begin to sprout into a deadly and poisonous growth. The harvest would be unprecedented.