twenty-four
THAT AFTERNOON, TIRED, SORE, AND HUNGRY, Schuyler dismounted at the west side of the Beene’s Ferry crossing of the Tombigbee River. He hoped he wouldn’t have to wait long for the ferry to come for him. Tremont was another ten miles on the east side of the river, where he hoped to find the freedman Harold Moore and somehow convince the man to return to Tupelo. Three rain showers along the way had slowed him down some, but he’d taken only the necessary time to water and rest the horse. Otherwise, he’d pushed himself, eating in the saddle, enduring the jouncing of his wounded back because there was no other choice. Itawamba County had yet to connect to larger towns by rail, though the Tombigbee remained an important waterway for that part of the state.
After blowing the cow’s horn hanging from a tree branch near the landing to summon the ferry, he set the horse to drink from the trough left for that purpose, then stood watching the water roll south on its way to the Mobile River. Reared on the Gulf Coast and steeped in the shipping industry, Schuyler had once considered investing in steamboats. Over the past few years, as his interest shifted to rail travel and transport, he’d matured enough to understand that the depressed Southern economy might never recover enough to make branch railroads a viable reality. Funny how circumstances had turned his wanderlust to dreams of establishing a quality hotel in small-town north Mississippi.
Funny how a red-haired girl anchored him to that small town. Insane how impatient he was to get back to her.
He turned to look back in the direction from which he’d traveled today. For the last hour or so he’d imagined someone followed him. Several times he’d turned, thinking he heard hoofbeats behind him, but no one caught up or crossed his path. The riverfront was quiet, had been so since Schuyler arrived. It seemed odd that he’d seen no sign of the ferry, but perhaps the operator would return shortly.
He wasn’t good at waiting, but he had nothing else to do. He turned the horse loose to graze and sat down on a fallen tree trunk. Pulling out his pocketknife, he stripped a twig off the trunk and started to whittle it into a point. He had an uncle who could take such a tiny piece of wood and turn it into a rooster. The artistic bent, however, had somehow skipped his generation. Neither he nor Jamie could carve anything but useful tools like pointed sticks that could be fashioned into animal traps.
Ten more minutes went by, during which he planned what he would say to Joelle if he ever got up the courage to admit to her that he loved her to an embarrassing degree and would appreciate it if she’d lower her dignity enough to marry him. He had just about decided there were no words in the dictionary adequate to such an unlikely occasion, when he heard the distinct sound of hoofbeats coming from the west.
There had been somebody following him. He went to his horse and took his rifle from its holster, checking to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire.
A few seconds later a rider on a roan mare emerged from the woods and galloped toward him.
Schuyler lowered the rifle. “Jefcoat!” he roared. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot a hole through your empty head. What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
Jefcoat reined his horse down to a trot, then a walk. He didn’t seem disturbed by Schuyler’s anger. “It was a last-minute decision. The general sent me after you.”
Schuyler walked toward Jefcoat. “Why?”
Jefcoat dismounted. “Let me water this nag, then I’ll explain.”
Schuyler was forced to wait while Jefcoat loosened his mount’s girth and led her to the trough to drink. Finally he looped the reins around a low-hanging tree branch and left the horse to graze.
Squatting in the shade where Schuyler had been sitting earlier, Jefcoat grinned up at him. “You don’t look glad to see me.”
“I’m frankly puzzled. I can’t think of any reason the general would need me. I’m on an errand related to the hotel.” That wasn’t precisely true, but it was close enough.
“Well, sit down. It’s a little complicated.”
Schuyler wouldn’t have used the word “complicated” in any connection with Andrew Jefcoat. In fact, he had to think for a second to even come up with his given name. Jefcoat came from a farming family somewhere in northeast Mississippi. The triumvirate—he, Hixon, and Jefcoat—had become friendly during Sigma Chi’s freshman hazing week, and had from that point on done their best to drink their way through every tavern, ale house, and saloon in Mississippi.
But there had been little personal connection. Jefcoat possessed a sense of humor, or Schuyler would have long since ditched him. However, he would not have ascribed critical thinking or philosophical depth to his hairy, six-foot-tall, thickly built friend. Jefcoat loved beer, steak, dogs, and big-bosomed women, in roughly that order. He couldn’t even remember what Jefcoat had studied at Ole Miss. Law? Possibly, though he couldn’t imagine a judge or jury taking this inarticulate redneck seriously.
“I’ll stand,” Schuyler said, just to be obstinate. “I’m waiting for the ferry to come across.”
“It’s not coming.”
“What do you mean, it’s not coming?” Schuyler squinted across the sparkling river. “How would you know that?”
“Let’s just say the general wanted to make sure you didn’t get to Tremont.”
Real alarm jangled through Schuyler. “Jefcoat, what are you doing?”
“I wish you’d sit down. That’s the thing about you, Beaumont. You think the world revolves around you. That nobody else has a viable opinion, nobody else has an idea worth pursuing.”
For the first time maybe ever, Schuyler looked right into Jefcoat’s eyes—past the indeterminate color, into a soul riddled with resentment—and realized that his friend had just spoken a hard truth to him. He dropped to squat on his heels. “I wish you’d told me that a long time ago, Jefcoat. I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t have listened. But I want you to know that my father’s death has changed me, changed my priorities, changed—everything.”
“Your father.” A sour smile twitched up the side of Jefcoat’s bearded mouth. “Rail baron, financial pillar of the Confederacy. Yet he still managed to come out rich on the other side of the war. Explain to me how that happens, Beaumont, outside of corruption? My father lost everything. Property, slaves, livestock, all of it. The Yankees stripped the plantation of every bit of food we had, tore up the machinery, then burned down the house. The only way I managed to finish college was through the generosity of one of his commanders, who saw something useful in me.”
“Useful? Meaning a tool for revenge?”
Jefcoat shrugged. “Revenge is part of it. But pride and independence mean everything. It makes me sick to see our conquerors come down here and take what we built. They throw us out of office, refuse to let us grow our economy back in the only way we know how. They let stupid, ignorant Negroes lord over us. And people like your father, caving in and licking their boots, make it worse!” More than general disgruntlement laced those words. Real acrimony simmered in Jefcoat’s eyes.
Suddenly something bubbled to the surface of Schuyler’s memory. He lurched to his feet. “Where were you all day, the day of the opera?”
“You know where I was.”
He suspected he did but hoped to heaven he was wrong. Jefcoat had met him and Hixon in Memphis that night, arriving at the opera house after the start of the performance. “Were you in Tuscaloosa?”
Jefcoat smiled. “Everybody thinks you’re so smart, engineering and physics and mathematics, all that. But you’re really stupid about people, Beaumont. You don’t pay attention to what’s right under your nose.”
Schuyler heard a metallic click behind his head. He turned his head to find the mouth of a pistol at his temple. Looking up, he saw a small-framed black man in nondescript clothing holding the gun. “Hello, Mr. Moore. This is a happy coincidence, since I came all this way to talk to you. And since the ferry doesn’t seem to be available, it’s a good thing you already crossed the river.”
The Negro smiled. “Don’t get too chipper, Mr. Beaumont. You not gon’ live to enjoy the rest of the day.”
One gift he knew he’d been blessed with was talking, and Schuyler figured he’d better make use of it right now. “Jefcoat, you have been my friend for a long time, and I’ve kept you out of jail enough times that you owe me a chance to change your mind about what is looking to be one of the worst decisions you’ve made in your life.”
“I dunno,” Jefcoat said. “I’ve thought this situation through pretty carefully, and I believe I’ve got the clear advantage here. Put your hands behind your back.”
Schuyler didn’t move. “You realize people in Tupelo know where I am. They’ll come looking for me if I don’t come back by tomorrow night.”
“You’ll be dead by then,” Jefcoat said matter-of-factly, “and I’ll be long gone.”
“My future brother-in-law is a Pinkerton detective. You think he won’t make the connection?”
Jefcoat snorted. “You can’t have a brother-in-law if you don’t live to get married.”
“You seem overly obsessed with my early demise.” Schuyler looked up at the gun again. “Would you mind moving that, Mr. Moore? I’m getting a little concerned that it might go off.”
Moore’s lips tightened. “Since he’s paying me and you’re not, I think I’ll leave it where it is.”
“That explains a lot. I suppose everything ultimately comes down to money. I wondered what would make a freedman turn on his brothers as you have done. I saw you in that courtroom, Moore, accusing Frye and Perkins and Thomas of beating you and setting fire to the livery stable. Who really put those marks on your back? Was it my erstwhile friend here? Did he threaten to do it again if you failed to help him in this crime?”
“Shut up, Beaumont, you don’t know what you’re talking about as usual. I don’t have to beat people to make them do right. And I don’t have to pay them off.” Jefcoat lunged for Schuyler, pushed him face forward to the ground, and shoved a knee into his back.
“But murdering one of your best friends isn’t beneath you?” Still trying to catch his breath, Schuyler found his hands cuffed.
With the toe of his boot, Jefcoat flipped Schuyler onto his back and looked down at him dispassionately. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. I’ll just dump you in the river, and that should take care of it.”
Panic wouldn’t help. Schuyler gathered himself to act, made himself think. “Before you do that, you should know you’d be drowning a piece of information the general has spent a considerable amount of time and effort looking for. I know where Lemuel Frye is.”
Both Jefcoat and Moore froze.
Moore hauled Schuyler to his feet, then backed off with the gun still leveled.
Schuyler stood swaying, trying to regain his balance with his hands behind his back. The horse was too far away. His knife was in his boot, and he couldn’t reach it. He’d even dropped the pointed stick he’d been whittling.
Jefcoat eyed him belligerently. “Where’s Frye? It won’t do any good to lie—”
“Never mind that,” Moore interrupted. “I want to know where my sister is.”
Finding a place to stash Mr. and Mrs. Frye turned out to be a bit more complicated than anyone could have foreseen.
“Who is looking for him?” had been Joelle’s first question after she was introduced to the frail, mild-eyed schoolteacher. He had obviously been born a white man, but his skin had been darkened to make him look like a Negro from a distance.
Horatia wasn’t really sure. “We’ve been hiding him with Reverend Boykin in Shake Rag,” she said. “But after Mr. Schuyler came to visit—”
“Wait. Schuyler was there? When?” Joelle leaned against her desk. Her knees felt wobbly after the close call with Hixon nearly following her into the schoolroom.
“Yesterday,” said Shug. “He came to our afternoon prayer meeting and stayed for supper.”
That did not sound like Schuyler at all. “Schuyler came to a prayer meeting?”
“Yes, ma’am. Sure did.”
“Do you know what happened to his back?”
Shug and Horatia looked at one another.
“He didn’t tell you?” Horatia asked.
“There seems to be a lot he hasn’t told me. Never mind, we’ll get to his injuries in a minute. You were about to tell me what happened after he came to visit y’all yesterday.”
Horatia nodded. “He told us the Klan is spoiling for another showdown of some sort, and he’s afraid it might come back to Shake Rag. We all decided our village might not be the safest place after all for such an important witness. So we brought him here to see if you could find somewhere else to hide him and his wife.”
Joelle had stared at Frye, who just blinked at her from behind his glasses. Who was this man?
Things only got more complicated when she met Georgia Frye. A lifetime of established taboos roared to the surface. There simply was no road map to tell her how to navigate this strange new world in which she found herself. Education was one thing, but interracial marriage seemed both bizarre and unnecessarily dangerous. She couldn’t help wondering if Horatia had some of the same reservations, considering her previous objections to her daughter marrying the ebony-skinned Nathan Vincent.
There was no time to worry about it now, though. Georgia was easy to disguise as a kitchen maid hired for the party preparations. Nobody would take a second look at her, but Frye himself presented a trickier problem. He seemed neither fish nor fowl—a well-mannered white man with no trade besides that of educator, he would not pass for a servant, but because he was hunted, could not openly live in the hotel as a guest. She could hide him in one of the outbuildings—the icehouse or even the bathhouse, for example—but some guest would inevitably walk in on him, as Hixon had nearly done this morning.
Trying to get to the root of the problem, Joelle sat down with Frye at the kitchen table and listened to his account of the couple’s harrowing odyssey from Chattanooga to Memphis to Tupelo. “Believe me when I say I understand your passion for teaching,” she said when he’d finished his tale. “I’ve been exploring ways to keep my little school afloat amidst the lack of funds and supplies, not to mention the opposition of my neighbors. But help me understand your reluctance to leave the South. You could travel west, perhaps find a homestead to develop, where you and your family would be safe and you could found a school with little to no drama.”
“Of course we’ve discussed that very thing, many times.” Frye glanced at his wife, who quietly helped knead and shape bread dough into loaves across the room. “But as I told Mr. Beaumont, I have proof of certain federal crimes that my conscience will not let me ignore. I am waiting for these men to be brought to trial by the authorities so that I may testify. Until then, United States Marshals have tried to protect me with only moderate success. Twice I’ve barely escaped with my life. My wife’s own brother is one of their pawns and can most certainly identify us both. If he discovers where I am this time . . .” Looking troubled, he shook his head. “I don’t think we’d survive another attack. Mr. Riggins said if we began to suspect Shake Rag was no longer safe, we should apply to you. Miss Daughtry, these are very dangerous men, and I deeply regret putting you and your family in peril. I simply don’t know where else to turn.”
“Of course you did the right thing. I wish Schuyler were here . . . but he isn’t, so we’ll just have to improvise. Levi will be back by Wednesday. Until then I’m going to put you in my own room in the manager’s cottage. No one would think to invade my private space.”
Georgia Frye turned, looking horrified. “No, Miss Daughtry, we could never—”
“Yes. You could, and you will. I insist. Otherwise, I couldn’t live with myself. I’ll just make up a bed here in the kitchen by the fire. I’ve slept here many times while the cottage was being renovated.”
Frye frowned. “But what if someone comes in here early and discovers you sleeping here? Won’t they consider that odd?”
“I assure you,” Joelle said dryly, “this is by far one of the least odd things I’ve done in my life. No one will think a thing about it. Now tell me how I can get in touch with the Missionary Society about securing a qualified teacher for our school.”