The Rebel Wife Read online

  He is working at one end of the grape arbor. Though the catalpa tree shades him, it is still so hot. He wears leather gloves and rips at a large weed, pulling it up and tossing it aside. The weeds grow in clusters with hairy stems and spiked leaves. He uproots them and then digs into the soil with a trowel, searching for the pale roots that look like undergrown white radishes. He wipes his arm across his forehead. This heat goes on. It’s too early for this kind of heat. So heavy and damp. The air feels thick, as if you have to drag it in to breathe.

  He stands and grasps a bundle of the weeds and heaves back. They snap and leave their roots behind. He tosses the weeds on the pile. They seem to wilt right away. Some of them have small purple flowers just starting to bloom. The grape vines are a tender green.

  “These weeds will spoil the grapes if I let them go,” he says. He nods at the pile, his hands on his waist and his face streaked with sweat.

  “Simon, you shouldn’t be doing any work today.”

  He nods, looking at the weeds. “I’d rather keep my hands busy, ma’am. And this vetch won’t wait for me.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It must have blown in here this spring from across the way.” He nods at the Sheffield garden. Their carriage house is weathered with split boards. Masses of the purple flowers and spiky leaves climb its sides. He lets out a sigh. He is waiting for me, but I can’t speak.

  “Is there anything wrong, ma’am?”

  “No, Simon.” How on earth can I ask him? It’s so inappropriate. I was Eli’s wife. I should know these things.

  “Can I help you with something?” He frowns at me.

  I must look a fool, sweating like mad in this black dress. “Yes, I...”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Simon, were you familiar with Mr. Branson’s business affairs?” This is ridiculous. Asking a Negro man about my husband’s business.

  Simon’s face doesn’t change. He kneels at the vines and picks up the trowel, digging into the earth with a sharp stroke. “To some extent. Did you have some questions about Mr. Branson’s business?” He doesn’t look at me. He levers up the trowel, and the dirt spills over his hand. The earth falls away and leaves a bundle of the white radish-like roots. Simon handles them loosely. He brushes off the dirt and throws the waste on the pile of dead weeds. It’s so hot out here. He shouldn’t be working at midday.

  “Well, I guess I do. I don’t know.”

  He sticks the trowel deep into the earth and lets it go. He looks up at me. “Did you speak with Mr. Heppert about it?” His expression is bland, and his eyes are calm. But his voice. There is something knowing in his voice.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “He came to you very quickly. Did he have anything to say about Mr. Eli’s business affairs?” He goes back to his work, feeling deep in the earth with the trowel and levering it up, searching for more roots.

  “Yes, he did. Some things that I find confusing.”

  “What was confusing?”

  “He said that—Well, he said that Eli has gone bust.”

  Simon separates the dirt from the roots and throws them back on the pile. He puts a hand on the grass to push himself up and stands in front of me. “It’s very warm out here. Maybe you’d like to sit under the arbor?”

  “Is Eli—is he in so much debt?”

  “He had some difficulties in recent years. What did Mr. Heppert tell you?” Simon wipes his hands on his pants, leaving behind traces of earth. He watches me as if he can see the answer in my features, in the number of times I blink or the pace of my breath.

  “He said that Eli’s estate is tied up with debts. That Eli nearly made the bank go bust. Is it true?”

  There is no one around. We are alone.

  “I don’t know. If it is, I am sure Eli had a good reason for it.” Simon looks down at the holes around the grapevines, looking from one to the other as if he is asking them my question. He doesn’t even say “Mr. Eli.” He is too familiar with everyone. The sticky black earth clings to his gloves.

  “I don’t see how Eli could be in trouble like that.”

  “Well, ma’am, I guess politics is an expensive business. People spend a lot of money to keep things running.”

  “Politics? Judge said it was the panic.”

  He looks up at me. “Is that what Mr. Heppert said?” He considers for a moment. “I guess he’s right, too. He knows as well as anyone the cost of politics.”

  He goes too far. Is he insulting Judge?

  “Judge doesn’t need to spend money in politics. He’s very respected. He always has been.”

  Simon almost smiles at me. “Yes, ma’am.” He shows a corner of white teeth where his mouth curls on one side. “I am sure he can answer all your questions now that he has taken charge of things.”

  “Judge is a very accomplished man, Simon.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You could not find yourself a better adviser.”

  Simon is full of sarcasms. His tone is flat, but he means to be snide.

  “Eli himself respected Judge. Why else would he name him trustee?” The sun is so hot. The sweat streams down my temples so I can’t wipe it away fast enough.

  Simon raises his eyebrows. “Eli made Mr. Heppert the trustee?”

  “Of course. It’s in his will.”

  “Have you seen his will?”

  “No, Judge told me. He said he would bring the will to show me.”

  Simon looks back at the earth. He kneels down and picks up the trowel, poking it at the dirt. “Oh,” he says, “that is interesting.”

  “What do you mean?” My Lord, I sound like my mother. But Simon will answer my question. I won’t stand for this impudence. He has told me nothing.

  “Nothing at all. I did not realize Eli had so much trust in Mr. Heppert.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  Simon looks up at me again, his mouth stretched as if he is repressing a smile. “Miss Gus, it cannot have escaped your understanding that Mr. Heppert and Eli were on opposite sides of a very wide political chasm.”

  “Yes, I know that, Simon, but they managed to be civil and respect each other. Which is more than you are being to me right now.”

  His face changes, and he rises to his feet quickly. He is no longer laughing at me. He seems surprised. “I am sorry. I did not mean any disrespect to you, ma’am. Please forgive me if I have offended you.”

  At least he knows enough to apologize.

  “You mentioned that Eli had some money before. When he was sick.”

  Simon’s eyes indicate no recognition or surprise. He is watching me.

  “Did you find the money?” I ask. My stomach churns, and I cover it with a hand.

  “No, ma’am,” Simon answers with no inflection. “I think I must have been mistaken.”

  “There was a package, wasn’t there? Did you find it?”

  “No, ma’am, I did not.”

  “But you have looked for it?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did some looking. As I said, I think I was mistaken.”

  He looks at the pile of weeds, his hands at his sides. He must be hiding something. There must be more that he knows.

  “Excuse me,” Simon says, “I’ll be getting back to my work.” He turns his back to me and grasps a thick clump of vetch. He pulls at it, tearing again at the soil and tossing the plants aside.

  The laudanum is working. I should have kept it with me. Why did I put it back in Eli’s room? I can barely breathe in there, but thank God Weems got the work done. Eli’s face is like a wax mask. Poor Eli. Ten years with him, and what did he get? What did I get? No one seems to know.

  I should stay away from the laudanum. Eli did not like it. Mama never did, either. But I need something for this headache. And no one saw me cross the hall. It was a small dose. It is because of this tremendous heat. What is left for me after almost ten years? And what will Henry get?

  Unanticipated shocks? I could almost laugh at Judge, although he would never abid
e laughter. And he is the only one to know. I should not have asked Simon. Foolish of me. What could Simon tell me anyway? Yes, Judge knows the shocks. He knows that I know them. Since Pa died, it has been nothing but shocks. The war. Hill going to battle with Buck. The deaths and the loss.

  When North Alabama fell, we could hardly believe it. That was all after the battle at Shiloh. I was still at school in Huntsville. Our soldiers seemed to give up without a whisper of a fight. The whole Tennessee River and the Oosanatee along with it abandoned to them.

  I was fourteen. Albert Sidney Johnston rode through Huntsville on his way to join Beauregard and the western army at Corinth before the battle. My girlfriends and I lined up along Eustis Street, waiting for him to pass. He was dashing, with a large feather waving from his hat and his long mustaches hanging to his chin. A few weeks later, he was dead. The horrible numbers of dead and wounded flooded into town on the railroad. And then nothing. The trains stopped. There were rumors everywhere, and as if on the breeze suddenly the Yankees were around us. Soldiers on leave and politicians still in their nightshirts ran from their homes before dawn. We weren’t even surrounded, we were simply overwhelmed.

  Jennie Heyney’s father took us both back to Albion in a great barouche with a safe passage from the Yankee general. Mr. Heyney died in the sickness that came after the war. Cholera or dysentery or something. Mama squeezed me so hard when she saw me, and Emma was crying, too. Mike kept asking if I’d seen any dead bodies, and we had, though I didn’t tell him. Two men in blue jackets and homespun trousers dead in the woods off the turnpike. Stragglers or sharpshooters or bandits. Mr. Heyney told his coachman Old George to drive on fast. But we saw them, Jennie and I. Faces upturned, bloated and black in the sun, swarming with flies and God knows what else, left there to rot among the pines.

  That was the war. Albert Sidney Johnston killed, along with thirty thousand dead and wounded. Six times the number of people in Albion. Inconceivable. Horrible beyond comprehension. Who were they all? Where were their families? Didn’t it mean anything? But it was the war. We had to defend ourselves. Jennie had a brother in the 26th Alabama, like me. Even Mr. Heyney looked gray.

  Who was I then? Am I still that girl?

  I am Gus Sedlaw. I cannot forget my name. Augusta Belier Blackwood Sedlaw. And then Branson, a name I will bear like the mark of Cain until I die. Eli’s name that was put upon me. Ten years ago, I was not married. But wanted to be, I think. Who knows what I wanted or what I was thinking. That day did not seem possible until it happened. Like Eli dying. When I talk about my marriage, it will be about a thing that no longer exists. Ten years gone in a moment. None of that matters now, anyway.

  Mama wanted it so. She knew Eli was not a good match. Not by the old standards. The war wiped away all that. Our name meant something before. And I suppose Eli thought it meant something, too. For Mama, our name meant nothing if we didn’t know how we would eat or if we would keep our home. The blood of the Blackwoods and the Sedlaws to be united with the scalawag Branson, and in the front parlor of the house my father had built.

  Sedlaw is a fine old name. Pa told me he came to Albion from Nashville when he was a young man, just as his father and mother had come to Nashville from the Virginia Tidewater with their old names. They bought virgin lands, leading gangs of slaves who burned the forests and tore up the charred tree stumps. They planted cotton, tobacco, and corn, and they speculated in tracts along the Cumberland and Harpeth rivers, the Duck and the Elk, along the Tennessee and the Oosanatee. Pa said he inherited five hundred acres in Riverbend County and fifty slaves. When he died, he owned 234 slaves and 2,500 acres. He was a planter and a politician. A gentleman.

  There was no difference between Pa’s family and Mama’s, even if Mama and Judge shared the Blackwood name. Mama’s parents came with Judge’s, their mothers Blackwood sisters. They must have been rugged women. Tough and tireless, traveling overland in a long wagon train to the Oosanatee valley from up-country South Carolina. They cleared out the Indians with a gentle push from President Jackson. “When I was a boy,” Judge always says, “there was nothing here but Indians and rattlesnakes.” The rattlesnakes are still here.

  Sedlaw. Blackwood. And Belier, from my mother’s grandmother, who is buried somewhere in the swampy rice lands of South Carolina. Wardwell, from my mother’s father, like Judge is a Heppert from his father. They are names of quality of which I am proud. I was taught to be proud. This town that they built, Albion, was a place of which they were proud. My grandfather Wardwell and great-uncle Heppert and our Blackwood kin. They came here with their families, white and black, to carve civilization out of the raw wilderness. And they did make a civilization here. If anything, they were too proud of what they had made.

  But the names go on in spite of anything we do. Adams, Hilliard, Belier, Blackwood, Wardwell, Sedlaw. And now Branson. From father to son and mother to daughter. Like in the Bible. I am connected to the past by these names, as if all the actions of my father and his father and his father’s father are contained in my veins, are pulsing in the blood pushed by my heart. The names go on forever if you look deep enough. An honored name is a tradition of greatness. Of achievement, like the Blackwoods, who have been governors and senators and held positions of power even before there was a United States. But all that’s past now. Pa is gone and Mama is gone. Hill is gone and the house on Allen Street. My name is different.

  That first night with Eli, he brought me to this house. It was the Chapmans’ house before. They moved to Nashville so Hugh could find work in spite of his one leg. I had sung a duet with Carrie in the parlor downstairs at the war’s start. Carrie sang so sharp.

  “Better for them to go than stay here and starve,” Eli said. He put a hand on my shoulder and walked me inside. Emma was right behind us. It was dark and dusty in the house but still the same. The paintings were mostly gone, but the tables and chairs, lamps and ornaments were all there as they had been four years before. The pianoforte was still in the music room. It was like a ghost house, filled with the past.

  Emma took my arm. “Let me help her out of these clothes, Mr. Branson,” she said. We knew the house better than he did. She took me up the stairs, holding my hand and almost pulling me along. She closed the door and came to me, wrapping her arms around me.

  “Shh, now, honey,” she said over and over. “Don’t worry, Emma is here. Emma will take care of you.”

  I cried into her breast like a baby. “Emma, what will I do? I can’t do it. I can’t.”

  “Shh,” she said. “Don’t worry, honey. It doesn’t take long.”

  “Emma, I don’t know what to do.”

  Emma wiped at my face with the edge of the cloak. She removed Mama’s garland of wax orange blossoms that I had half crushed. “You don’t have to do anything, Miss Gus. And if you don’t want his baby, you don’t have to do that, either,” she said softly. “There are ways to keep from it. I know some ways.”

  Emma pulled a piece of cotton wadding from her pocket. It was smeared with sheep fat, and she told me how to use it. She knew medicines, too, bottled medicines that could bring on my flow. That was the answer I needed. I was sick from the medicine for a week after I took it. I thought it might kill me, but I would not have minded then.

  “Do you have them with you?” I asked her, and she nodded. She looked at the small carpetbag packed with her things.

  Eli knocked at the door and Emma opened it. She curtsied to him and left us. I was silent. I knew what he came for. My God, of course that was what he came for.

  And that first night, how awful it was. Awful and groping and wet. That first night, I felt like I had died in that bed.

  Five

  THE SEAMSTRESS STABS ME with her needle. The pain is sharp, like a bee sting. We look at each other until she turns her eyes away, the needle suspended in her fingers between us.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Branson,” she says. She has a mountain accent, was probably a refugee during the war who came to town
and never left. “Please stay as still as you can.”

  Eli will be buried soon. In an hour or two. Mourners are arriving, waiting for me downstairs, but I won’t hurry the women. I shift a little on my feet, slowing their hands, risking another barb from the needle.

  Another woman on her knees works at my hem. They have been sewing for two days, virtually since Eli died, to make the dress. The pattern came with an engraving from Godey’s where a young widow with drooping eyes holds a bunch of lilies in her hand. Godey’s painted it in shades of gray and lilac, but for me it must be all black. The perfect picture of mourning. There is an art to mourning. We have all learned it well. There is a cost, too. Judge will have to settle the bills.

  We are in the room with the pink-ribboned wallpaper, across the hall from Eli’s room, closer to Henry. The wallpaper has garlands of climbing flowers entwined with the ribbons. A white girl has brought boxes of veils and lays them across the bed and on the backs of chairs, reminding me of the house on Allen Street during Mama’s funeral. Black veils of the gauziest tulle and sheerest English net shimmer in the sunlight. The room is so beautiful swagged in black. I want them all.

  Judge was in such a rush to see me after Eli died. Not a word from him since then. How can any of it be true? He says he will take care of everything. He will find out what Eli has left. For Henry and for me. Judge can say what he likes, but I know it is not really for Henry, not while Judge is the trustee. Judge is the owner. The real owner. I want to see the will. To see the words written in Eli’s hand. To see his signature. And to see who the witnesses were.

  “There you are, ma’am. All done.” The women get up from their knees and look at me. They have finished, and it is a lovely thing. My reflection eyes me from the mirror, turning from side to side, assessing me, appreciating me. A fragile figure in black grenadine with a polonaise trimmed in low flounces over a black satin underskirt. Dozens of silk-covered buttons line the sleeves and the front of the basque up to my throat.