twelve
MONDAY MORNING SCHUYLER AND LEVI met downstairs for a breakfast of fried eggs, slabs of bacon, and crusty bread, all washed down by the Tavern’s ubiquitous bitter coffee. They’d gone to church together yesterday, met a few people, asked some questions, and then spent the afternoon resting and planning a strategy for the coming week.
Turned out it was a good thing they did. Just as Schuyler was pushing away his plate, full as the proverbial tick, a snow-haired gentleman, sporting a matching venerable mustache, rolled through the front door.
“Morning, Judge Teague!” called out a couple of diners. They wandered over to shake hands, slap the judge’s back, and linger for a few moments’ conversation. But most of the patrons turned their backs and pretended not to notice his entrance.
Interesting. Schuyler took himself to the bar, according to previous plan, and pretended to nurse a pint of ale. Levi waited until the judge was alone, then approached him.
Schuyler had spent three years of college watching his fraternity mates imbibe copious amounts of alcohol, then try to carry on a conversation. By graduation, he had become quite adept at mimicking the sloshy diction and convoluted syntax of the chronic drunkard while maintaining a sober head, a talent which had come in handy on more than one occasion.
Remembering Levi’s favorite Pinkerton quote, that the human mind could not maintain a secret, he propped his elbows on the bar. “Pssst.” He beckoned the bartender over. “Who’s the gent with the mustache?”
The bartender’s lip curled. “That’s the Honorable S. Marmaduke Teague, circuit court judge for Tuscaloosa County.”
Schuyler looked over his shoulder at Levi hobnobbing with the judge. “Huh. Seems to be getting along well with my Yankee friend.”
“Not surprised. Teague was federally appointed under Reconstruction laws. Liberal.” The disdain coating that last word told Schuyler all he needed to know about the barkeep’s opinion.
Schuyler attempted to look both wise and soused. “The Yank is my lawyer. He’s a liberal too.”
“This county’s crawling with scalawags and carpetbaggers.” The barkeep leaned in, the classic gossip. “You heard about that dustup last week? Right outside my door.”
His father’s murder a “dustup”? Schuyler wanted to leap over the bar and throttle the man. He grinned instead. “I heard it was one of those scalawags you mentioned, got himself put six feet under by a stray bullet.”
Barkeep nodded. “A politician from Mobile. Mayor Samuel’s idea was to get federal troops down here to control the Klan. But he just wound up stirring up more trouble.” He made a disgusted noise and called Ezekiel Beaumont an ugly name related to his relationship with Negroes.
Schuyler decided he’d better turn the conversation a bit, or he would not be responsible for the state of the barkeep’s nose. He hiccuped. “Yessir, my sentiments ezzackly. Can’t understand why rich white men wanna waste time with uppity coloreds like that preacher and the militiaman that was up on the balcony with him. Whoever did the shootin’ didn’t aim too good!”
The barkeep laughed. “Now, now, son. Reverend Thomas ain’t a bad man. I see him in town on occasion, and he’s always nice and polite. Even seems to be somewhat educated. Don’t know the one called Perkins.” He slopped his towel onto the bar and wiped. “Now that you mention it, though, it does seem odd that Beaumont was the one directly hit.”
Schuyler put his finger beside his nose. “I’d be willing to bet somebody decided to put a stop to his interference. Heard there was a lot of armed men out there.”
“Well, if you want to know who did it, I’d attend the hearing this morning. That’s why Judge Teague is in town.” Barkeep glanced over at the table where Levi sat engaged in conversation with the judge. “You mind me asking what you’re doing here—and what you need with a Yank for your lawyer?”
“That’s personal, but you seem to be a man who can keep a secret.” Inwardly cringing at the inanity of that statement, considering the dump of information he’d just pulled from the garrulous bartender, he lowered his voice to a mild roar. “I’m in a little trouble with the federals myself. Just a little . . . ‘dustup,’ as you say, over a lark with my fraternity brothers over in the colored part of town.”
Barkeep chuckled. “Oh, a ’Bama boy, huh? I think this is only the second time I’ve seen you in here. New student?”
“No, sir.” Schuyler listed to the left on his stool. “I go to Ole Miss. But things got a little hot, shall we say, over in Oxford. My pa said I’d better get across the state line until things calm down.”
“I’d tell my boy the same thing. And I’d also tell him to go easy on the ale before noon.” With a wink the barkeep responded to a request for service at the other end of the bar, leaving Schuyler to reflect that what he’d just heard served to confirm the sheriff’s account. And to congratulate himself that he’d established his relationship with Levi as business underlaid by mutual contempt.
He’d wasted quite enough time here. Jerking his tie and collar into a semblance of Hixon’s state of perpetual disarray, he left a two-bit piece on the bar and meandered out to the street. Levi could follow at his leisure.
Schuyler stopped to look up at the clock tower on the west end of the courthouse, located on Sixth Street just south of the old capitol. He should have time to talk to the accused before Judge Teague started the hearings at nine. A short walk took him to the two-story jail next door to the courthouse. As the door was ajar, he knocked and pushed on it.
“Hello? Anybody here?” Poking his head in, he found a scruffy bejowled deputy reading a newspaper behind a battered oak desk.
Looking like a hound dog who’d been awakened from a nap, the deputy scowled over the top of the paper. “You’re in the wrong building, son. Saloon’s down the street.”
Was there something on his forehead that said “Intoxicated college boy below”?
Schuyler gave the deputy an amiable, sloppy salute. “Yes, sir. I found it. But one of my professors back in Oxford is related to Mr. Frye, and I promised to check on him before his hearing.” He reached into his pocket for another two-bit coin, flicked it upward with his thumb, and caught it. “With your permission, I’d like to talk to him.”
“Frye is one of those Negro-lovin’ Lincolnites. I doubt he’s got any friends.”
“Didn’t say ‘friend,’ I said ‘relative.’ You don’t choose your kin, know what I mean?” Schuyler flipped the coin again, and it landed on the desk. “Oops.” He let it spin there as he stumbled toward the stairs. “Kindness is kindness, and I really want an A in that class.”
The deputy shrugged and went back to his newspaper. “First cell on the left.”
At the top of the stairs, Schuyler found two rows of cells lining the barnlike building. Two of the cells on the right contained well-dressed Negro men, and on the left he found a squirrelly white man with thinning brown hair and large, innocent brown eyes behind a pair of rimless spectacles. Seated on his bare cot with a Bible on his lap, he wore an ill-fitting suit of brown worsted and boots that looked like they might have been cobbled during the War of 1812.
Schuyler walked right up to the white man’s cell. “Mr. Frye?”
The man stared at him with myopic disinterest. “Yes. I’m Frye. Do I know you?”
“No. I’m Schuyler Beaumont. But if the deputy asks you, you have a cousin teaching physics at the University of Mississippi. He sent me to see to your needs.”
“That would be a lie.”
Schuyler nodded. “Yes, but it’s my lie, not yours. Besides, I am going to send over a meal from the tavern after the hearing. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“They’re taking care of our meals, so there’s no need to do that.”
Schuyler sighed. Some people were entirely too legalistic for their own good. “Fine. No food—”
“Better send some, young boss,” interrupted the elder of the two black men. “Schoolmaster’s been giving us his meals, since they barely fed me and Perkins after they threw us in here last week.”
Schuyler stared at Frye. Scrupled and legalistic. “I’m sorry to hear that. All right. I will. Now, Mr. Frye, I’m going to tell you the truth here, since you seem to be fond of that commodity. My father was the one killed in that riot last week. I don’t think you did it, and I don’t think you beat up that third colored man—what does he call himself?”
“Moore,” said the Negro who’d asked for the food. “Harold Moore.”
“Thank you,” Schuyler said. “And what’s your name, sir?”
“Josiah Thomas.”
Thomas. The minister who’d been on the balcony with Schuyler’s father. “Reverend Thomas, what are you and Perkins accused of?”
“Arson and disorderly conduct. They said we set fire to the livery stable.”
“But they let Moore go and kept you two? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No sir, it sure don’t,” Perkins said. “None of us ever saw Moore before that day. Just showed up here in town, apparently for the rally. Then when he got rounded up with us two after the fire, he goes to screamin’ that Mr. Frye had beat him up. All Mr. Frye ever done was teach our children how to read and write.”
Schuyler gave the schoolteacher a thoughtful look. “That true, Frye? Did you lay a hand on Moore?”
Frye laid his Bible on the cot and folded his arms. “I’m not sure I’d recognize him if he walked in here.”
“Why would he accuse you of such a thing?”
“There are a lot of folks around here who want me to go away, Mr. Beaumont. They say educating Negroes is equivalent to handing them a club to wield over white people.” He shrugged. “I disagree, and I’m not going away.”
Schuyler knew a certain red-haired young lady who felt the same way. Looking through the bars at Frye’s pale, hungry face, marred by a swollen welt running from his cheekbone into his hairline, Schuyler felt a chill of foreboding shiver through him. What if Joelle drew this sort of censure from her Tupelo neighbors? Because of her femininity and stature in the community, no one would get violent—he thought—but there had certainly been gossip about the “odd” Daughtry women.
“Hey, you three,” came a voice from the stairway. “Time to go.” The deputy appeared in the doorway, a hand on the pistol at his belt. “You’d best get out of here, boy, so I can take my prisoners over to the courthouse.”
“Yessir, I was just leaving.” Schuyler peered through the bars of Frye’s cell. “I meant what I said, Mr. Frye. I’ll be at the hearing, and I’ll be by to check on you afterward. Godspeed, sir.” He stepped around the deputy and clattered down the stairs.
Joelle rubbed her scratchy eyes with cramped fists. Since Selah was checking linens in the big house with Horatia, Joelle had taken over the desk in the office of the manager’s cottage. Usually she wrote piled up in bed in the little bedroom she shared with Aurora, blocking her sister’s chatter with wads of cotton stuffed into her ears. But today she’d felt she needed a more concentrated work space and access to her father’s library. Papa had been a coldhearted blackguard, but he had good taste in literature.
She had worked on the article all afternoon on Sunday and late into the night, then she’d risen with the first cry of the rooster and dressed in the dark. Leaving Aurora sound asleep, she visited the privy, then tiptoed over to the kitchen to wash her hands and face. Horatia and Mose hadn’t arrived for the day, so she found a loaf of bread in the larder, spread it with butter and fig preserves, and headed back to the cottage, munching. Then she’d settled in to write.
Waving her notebook to dry the ink, she glanced out the window, open to the breeze. Her story still wasn’t finished; in fact, there were a few more people she wanted to interview before “T. M. Hanson” turned his masterpiece in to Mr. McCanless. But it was nearly noon, she was hungry, and if she didn’t get up out of this chair, she was going to atrophy. Yawning, she went to the bedroom to stuff the notebook under the mattress in the center of the bed. Should be safe there. She’d been hiding manuscripts in the attic of the big house since she was little, but lately there had been too much renovation activity to make that a viable choice.
She ought to find out if Selah or Horatia needed her for anything, but it occurred to her to wonder about Charmion’s progress on her new dress. Grabbing a sun hat off the hook by the door, she headed for the Vincents’ new cottage over by the blacksmith shop. Daughtry House was fortunate to have secured the ablest blacksmith in the county and his wife, a gifted dress designer and seamstress.
Through the open screened windows, Joelle could hear Charmion singing a hymn. She stood on the little porch listening for a moment, enjoying the rich alto, but as Charmion reached the end of the verse, Joelle knocked. “Hello, Char, it’s Joelle!”
“Coming!” Slow, heavy footsteps approached, and the door opened. Charmion, a hand supporting her large belly, greeted Joelle with her big white smile. “Oh, I’m glad to see you! I’m working on your dress, and I wanted to try something on you.”
Joelle couldn’t help staring at the round shape under Charmion’s gingham housedress. “How much longer before the baby comes? You look like you’re about to explode!”
Charmion laughed and backed up to let Joelle in. “Maybe another month. Nathan swears I’m taking up enough room in the bed for three people!”
“Well, that’s rude.” Joelle laughed at herself. “I guess I was rude too. I’m sorry!”
Charmion sighed as she cleared a pile of scraps off a chair for Joelle. “Don’t matter. It’s true. I’ll be glad when this little mite gets here so I can put him down occasionally, ’stead of lugging him around twenty-four hours a day.”
“I can imagine. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.”
Charmion grinned, used to Joelle’s meandering style of conversation. “Yes’m. Now let me show you what I’ve been putting together. This is the prettiest material! You have such good taste!”
“Aurora picked it out,” Joelle said, watching Charmion handle long swaths of the shimmery brown fabric. “I don’t know voile from sateen.”
“You should learn,” Charmion said. “Girl with your coloring could wear just about anything except pink.”
“Even I know not to do that!” Joelle laughed. “I’d look like a flamingo!”
Charmion snorted. “Come on, stand up, let me slip this over your head.”
“Over my clothes?”
“Yes, we measured before I began, remember? I just want you to get an idea of what I’m doing here.”
Joelle submitted to being draped, reflecting that the dress she had on was so thin from washing that it was close to being underwear anyway. Charmion pinned and hummed and twitched and muttered to herself, and after a few minutes she stood back to survey her handiwork.
Charmion sucked in a breath. “Oh, Miss Jo. You gonna turn a head or two.”
Joelle did not want to turn heads. Generally she wanted to fade into the curtains and hope nobody noticed her. But if she was going to take on some of the responsibility from Selah, she had to look more like a professional hotelier than the second upstairs maid. And she had noticed that when she made an effort with her appearance, certain people took her more seriously.
She didn’t see a mirror, which was just as well. Her hair was probably a rat’s nest of red curls, which she had wadded in a net at the back of her head in the dark. She looked down at the rows of tiny pintucks cinching the waist of the princess-style dress, the elegant gores of the skirt sweeping to her feet. Gleaming copper fabric puddled on the floor around her. She lifted her arms to admire the medieval bell sleeves, falling under the arm to a graceful point.
“There will be some simple tatted lace edging on the sleeves,” Charmion said, “and a little bit along the neckline. I didn’t want to take away from the beauty of the fabric.”
Joelle blinked at the Negro girl, once her slave and now her friend. “You are an artist,” she breathed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll tell everybody who made it.” Charmion laughed.
“Of course I will. Where did you get this idea? I haven’t seen anything like this outside of my fairy-tale book.”
“That’s what made me think of it. When we were girls, I’d sneak in your room after everybody was asleep and get that book and find a patch of moonlight and just stare for hours at the pictures.”
Joelle swallowed, crushed by guilt. She tried to speak, but Charmion put out a hand to brush the sleeve of the dress.
“You don’t know what you don’t know, Joelle. I’m so happy now, Nathan and me, and you and your sisters gave us this chance.”
“I’m glad you’re happy. But you know, if I could crawl inside your skin and feel what you feel, I’m sure I’d do things differently every day.”
Charmion cupped her hands under her belly. “If you could crawl in my skin, you’d be looking for the privy every five minutes. But I appreciate the thought.”
They laughed together, and Charmion began to unpin the dress so that Joelle could slip out of it. “This is so exquisite, I’m not sure I’ll want to wear this for daily—”
Joelle, back to the door, turned to find big, muscle-bound Nathan Vincent leaning in. Sweat poured off him and his face was grim.
Charmion dropped the material in her hands. “What’s the matter?”
“I got to go out to Shake Rag. The church has burned down.”