CHAPTER 23
Lambert stabled the mule, pulled his coat around his neck, and headed toward the house he shared with his brother, Asa. When their parents died months apart after more than forty years of marriage, the two maintained the farm and house together. Asa was the elder. Even now, he took a protective stance toward his younger brother, amusing most days, but considerably annoying on others. Michael Lambert, who had come to be called by his last name, tended the chickens and collected the eggs, but it was Asa on whom it fell to kill them. Lambert fried them up, crisp and salty. Though Lambert was always at hand in October to help slaughter the hogs, he had a tenderness toward the chickens, almost as much as for the tricolor shepherd, who followed him most everywhere he went. The Lambert boys had become two old bachelors, taking care of life and of each other: companionable, incisive, industrious, respected in the community and beyond.
Asa was the primary cook, except for the Sunday chicken, and had quite a way with ham and vegetables. Good at crisping cornbread, too. During the sheriff’s convalescence, the brothers brought the supper plates into the bedroom until Mason could join them at the table. When he was on his feet again, the three lingered over supper by the fire, long silences interspersing their comments. The war news from the upper east confounded them.
“Well, we may have us a president,” Asa said. He folded his napkin, pressed his fingernail along the crease, and laid it beside his place, ready for next morning. “Leastways, this Confederacy does, but looks to me like he’s presiding over doom—all these defeats. An unworthy cause. Union is looking strong.”
“How many now?” asked Mason. “Fort Henry, Roanoke Island, Fort Donelson. Lost three key defenses—gives the Union an open door on the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and a good part of the coast.”
“And Grant driving for unconditional surrender. Hear that’s the nickname his initials stand for these days.”
“Not looking hopeful,” said Asa. “I don’t understand this war.”
“Nor I,” said Lambert. “The will to maim and kill confounds me.”
“The will to violence doesn’t require war,” said Mason. “Jeremiah Matthews, prime example.”
“You are right about that,” said Asa. “And you victim to it, too. Goddamned coward, running off to the Confederates. Right in the face of his daddy’s memory and all he stood for. Can’t you send some bounties?”
“Now, Asa, you know damn well I can’t do that. Illegal, first of all, and crazy as hell to boot. You figure I go creeping ’round those troops to find him and they just turn over a rich, slave-owning planter to some jackleg sheriff like me? The man’s got more protection now than Jeff Davis himself. They’d have me scripted before I got my mouth open.”
“I know, I know. Just wrong, is what it is. Man getting away with murder. Maybe he’ll get him a Yankee bullet. War just seems like such a separate thing, alienated from life someway.”
“Well, for the moment, it also seems distant,” said Mason. “It’s all happening a hell of a ways from us to be so absolutely about us. Like a bad dream come real somehow. Like you want to just wake up from it. Of course I feel that way about a lot that goes on right here in town. Good folks and wild folks all drawn to frontier promise. Including me, I reckon.”
“You mighty quiet, Michael,” Asa said, probably the only person to call Lambert by his given name.
“I’m just listening.”
“You take Mama’s chair to the widow?”
“I did.”
“She like it? All that work you put in it?”
“I don’t know. She’s not doing well, I gather. Just gave it to Adeline.”
“Don’t know anyone who could do well after such violence as that,” said Mason. “How was Adeline?”
“Seemed sturdy enough; holding up, I reckon. Asked about you, Mason.”
Asa maneuvered a toothpick between his back teeth. He studied both men without speaking and grinned. Lambert shook his head, slapped the tabletop, and rose.
“I’m turning in,” he said. “Asa, make sure your patient there gets some sleep.”
* * *
The always irregular post arrived. Adeline did not recognize the slave who brought the letter to Emily, nor the handwriting. But she recognized the fear and the sick blanching of Emily’s face at the sight of the soiled envelope. Adeline bent to take the baby and left Emily, the letter trembling in her fingers.
Vicksburg
January 3, 1862
Sister,
I am enlisted in the Confederate Army, fortunately stationed near Vicksburg, where I reckon myself to be safe, though we move at inconsistent command. We are well positioned and our forces set at all costs to defend control of the Mississippi River, and we shall most certainly not fail. Vicksburg is unconquerable.
The weather is exceedingly cold and miserable. I have never known our South to be so wretched. As I departed in more haste than convenient, having avenged our father’s death and at the risk of my life, my two heaviest coats must be posted at once. Use the address on the envelope. The rains have been terrible and the sloughs are now frozen over, so that movement of the troops is treacherous both from the ice itself and from its breakage.
I must reconfirm to you that it is I who am primary heir to our father’s land and estate. Do not take my absence as your personal opportunity to misuse my property nor to misadminister it. It is your duty to obey my wishes, and you will answer to me for full responsibility of my property’s care.
See that you do not fail.
Jeremiah Matthews
Proprietor
Emily’s breath came short and fast. The letter lay precariously on her lap as her fingers gripped the arms of the chair. Jeremiah, the brother for whom her mother had died. A boy and now a man for whom no one should die. Jeremiah, who had taunted her all his life, made her wretched with his slights and outright insults, so unlike sweet Will. Jeremiah, still alive, and the brother she had loved so dearly gone, along with half her life. Now he goaded her from afar and insulted their father by joining Confederate forces, fighting against their father’s undying allegiance to the Union. Bragging to her that he had avenged their father’s death with this violence and tragedy and injustice. And now to pose himself in their father’s place? His treachery is complete, she thought, and has no limits. Her body filled with a wounded hatred she made no attempt to abate.
Emily ripped the letter in half. She tapped the pieces against her fingers, then tossed them into the fire. The paper caught, the torn edges charring, flaming. Fragments of the blazing words lifted in the draft and floated, directionless, onto the hearth. Emily kicked at them with the side of her foot, then stamped at those remaining, the sole of her boot hard against the brick. When her breathing had slowed, Emily went to Ginny with instructions for Benjamin regarding coats and blankets and provisions. And then she went to fetch her baby from Adeline.
* * *
A feeble January sun labored to lift the heavy fog, but failed to burn it off. The week had come and gone, and with it a tense continuation of life. It was Monday. The fire under the wash pot had reduced to embers, as Ginny slipped clothespins over the last of the sheets, diapers, and Emily’s pads, each discreetly covered by a diaper. They would all smell of smoke, she thought. Ginny retrieved the turning stick and propped it against the house. She ran her hands down the smooth wetness of a petticoat as she turned to the kitchen chores and dinner cooking. She was alarmed to find Adeline distraught and pacing. Ain’t like her, Ginny thought. Then she saw the knife from under the seat of the wagon. Adeline’s hands curled and uncurled around it, blood spreading from the dark blade across her roughened skin.
“Here, Miss Adeline.” Ginny held out her hand. “You give that to me.”
“What on God’s earth was he doing with it?” Adeline rubbed at her forehead with the back of her bleeding hand, the knife dangling loosely from her curled fingers. “He just cut some damned old thing and handed it off to me like it was nothing. Like it was nothing at all. How in God’s name could he do that?”
Ginny understood immediately that Adeline meant Thomas, who must have pulled the knife from the wagon seat, unaware, uncaring, or both.
“I have to be shed of this thing, Ginny.” Adeline’s eyes pleaded, her face distorted with grief, but she continued to grip the knife.
“I got it, Miss Adeline.”
Ginny took hold of the knife with one hand. With the other, she tucked a few graying hairs from Adeline’s face. Adeline whirled, the knife clattering to the floor. She kicked at it and it spun away, its heavy handle leading. Ginny stood very still.
“Bury that thing, Ginny.” Adeline grasped at the table for balance. “Take it somewhere I won’t ever come near. Somewhere I won’t ever know. Just get it gone.”
The knife was old and worn, sharpened untold times, with a nick in the blade near the handle. Ginny felt the burden, the shocking heft of it. She walked into the yard past the laundry, holding the weight of what Mr. Thomas had done. Out past the lower field, deep in a grove of long pines adjacent to an ancient oak, Ginny dug into a dense bed of moss. The smell of damp earth rose around her fingers. She placed the knife in the depression, stood back, evaluating, then bent and retrieved it. Deeper, then deeper, Ginny dug. Could be setting a fencepost, she thought. Blade down, she thrust the knife into the ground. Dirt and moss replaced, Ginny studied the spot. She raised her eyes to the surrounding trees and the sky beyond, visible now that the fog had finally burned off. A bit of light shone through the trees. Ginny laid a flat rock over the disturbed earth, wiped her hands, and returned to her chores, as Adeline had to hers.
* * *
The days passed. The children slept, woke, ate. Soiled clothes got washed and dried and soiled again. Ginny observed a cycle of precarious tolerance set in, held together on the spare framework of habitual civility. Moments of temporary delight broke through the darkness that encompassed Adeline: Ginny watched her respond to Rosa Claire’s laughter, saw Adeline’s disconnection lift as she caught a kicking baby foot in the palm of her hand, recognized the blending of connection and loss as Adeline handed the baby back into his mother’s arms. She saw how the touch of these women’s hands in that exchange only separated them more. A matter of time, Ginny thought. And it ain’t long coming.
* * *
Mason, recovered well enough to ride, brought the second letter. Its envelope was muddy and the address smeared, but legible. The weather was bleak.
“You know there’s nothing I can do,” he said. Adeline watched as he put it in her hand and turned back into the wind, his collar pulled high over his uncovered head.
The spindled rocker creaked slightly where Emily sat by the window, staring into the gray world as she nursed the baby. On the floor Rosa Claire devised a game of hide-and-seek, flipping the edge of her mother’s skirt back and forth over her head. When Adeline entered, the little girl scooted under the skirts, waiting to be found, but Adeline only handed the envelope to Emily and left the room. Rosa Claire climbed out of her disappointment and hid herself behind the curtain.
Lonso’s hand went limp against Emily’s breast. She managed the letter into her pocket and disengaged her damp nipple. The baby’s lips sucked at themselves in his sleep. Emily rose and propped him between the pillows on the bed. With her back to Rosa Claire, she said, “Please don’t muss the curtains.”
The child pouted to come out of her hiding place, but neither did she want to stay. She wanted to give that baby back to somebody. Lonso should be her name. Maybe Mama had heard it wrong. Her mother shooed her off to find Ginny. The child dragged her feet down the hall toward the light of the parlor fire, where Auntie Gin would smile at her. She glanced back to see her mother leaning against the wall with her hand in her pocket.
The mud on the envelope left grit on Emily’s fingers. Alone now, she sat down in the rocker and dangled the letter at her side. Her fingers shook and she was tempted to toss it in the fire, a gesture of riddance to this brother who had forever been hateful. But he was her brother.
Near Port Gibson
January 18, 1862
Sister,
Again I take up my pen because your assistance is critical. My slave Ballard has succumbed to the fever, which is rampant in the camp.
Consequently I lack the care of a man from home and suffer exhaustingly from it. Being that I remain primary heir to Father’s estate, as I have reminded you already, and continue to have such rights thereof, I ask, even though I might demand, for you to send me a new man from among the slaves. I have no particular preference which among the inventory, other than that he be young, of reliable character, and strong. The food supply is abominable. There is much rot and mold, and the cold is excessive. One of my coats that just arrived has already been commandeered. Therefore, send a blanket as well. Or two. Whatever the man can handle. I need a ham and other such nonperishable foodstuff as he can carry, wrapped under careful concealment in clothing and the blankets. You will need to equip him with rations for a minimum of three days, a set of shirts and new underclothing from my goods, and papers of permission for him to travel. You will find a seal for the documents in Father’s library.
I am encamped a few miles to the east of the town and whatever buck you send will have no difficulty locating me, although he will require the utmost care in travel and must beware of inquiries as he nears our embattled position so as not to jeopardize my provisions.
Jeremiah Matthews
Proprietor