The Rebel Wife Read online

  “You look like a real queen, Miss,” the woman with the accent says. She takes pins from her mouth and sticks them into her white apron near her breast.

  “Thank you,” I say, and step down from the stool. They gather their cases and small, delicate scissors. They nod as they depart, taking the back stairs, leaving me alone with the girl. An awkward thing, a country girl with crooked teeth that make her “shh” through her sentences. I believe her name is Mary.

  She approaches me with a veil, spreading it out across her arms to avoid catching the smooth, sheer cloth. I drape it over my small hat of shell-shaped black chip. The veil is exquisitely black, trimmed with a fringe of tiny jet beads that descend in shameless luxury almost to the hem of my skirt. The beads click against each other, a soft, comforting sound.

  “I will keep all these for now, Mary. I’ll send the ones I don’t want back to Miss Graves tomorrow.” Mary makes a graceless curtsey and takes the back stairs, too. I am alone.

  The voices in the hall and the noise of shuffling feet travel up the stairwell along with the thud of horses’ hooves in the dry, dusty street. There is a breath of air through the door to the sitting room that faces Greene Street. The windows are wide open. A chair sits near the window with a view onto the street and the lawn, and I move it back so as not to be seen. An old oak creates a shade for me, and I watch through its tortured branches as if they are a Spanish screen.

  Carriages line Greene Street. Mr. Weems has Negro groomsmen taking horses and holding reins as the mourners arrive, flocking the sidewalk in blacks and grays and lavenders. The men gather on the lawn, old men whom I have known since childhood. They idle with their sons, now adults, all on their way to infirmity. The women pluck at their black skirts and wield black parasols against the sun. They do not bide their time outdoors but rush inside, hoping to escape the heat. The men kick at the turf and spit tobacco juice on the roots of the oak. They talk and laugh as if they are on the square at court day. They talk about cotton and the heat and the lack of rain. They talk about John Breckinridge, who died two weeks ago, but the news still seems fresh. He ran for president in 1860, one of the candidates who fractured the Democrats. He lost like the others and fought for the Confederacy, always insisting Kentucky would follow him. It didn’t, but they talk about him like he was a hero. They talk about Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the adultery trial in Brooklyn, laughing at the Yankee scandal. They talk about Senator Spencer—Eli’s friend, an important friend—and the investigation into how he bought his Senate seat with bribes and threats and even begged President Grant for more troops in Alabama to help the Republicans win. They talk about a Negro man who was hanged from a bridge in Nashville after he was beaten. They say he attacked a white woman. They say his body is still hanging off that bridge God knows how many days later. Let that be a lesson to them, they say.

  And always before the war. They say it again and again. Before the war. Before the war. It is our common currency. The only way we understand things. What do I know of before the war? I was barely more than a child. It seems that nothing really existed before the war, certainly nothing that I was aware of. I remember the house full of servants and Pa always writing something, scratching his pen against paper. Hill laughed all the time, pulling pranks. I remember going with Mama on her calls and Cicero, our old coachman who drove us. He ran off with the Yankees in ’64 and died of typhus at their camp in Nashville.

  All those things remembered are nothing next to what I felt before the war. Back then everything was certain. Like the rising and setting of the sun each day. Like the seasons and the rains that come and go. I guess I remember most the garden on Allen Street, spread out around our home with groves of trees and trimmed boxwoods and wide lawns that went to the bluffs over the river. You could look across the valley to the hills in the distance and almost see forever.

  That feeling of before the war, that sense of being in this quiet town on the banks of the Oosanatee, a name like so many Indian names that blanket this place, a name that seemed to dictate the languid cadence of the days. Oosanatee. I remember late summer, when the air moved so gently it was like a caress. I remember lying on the shade-dappled lawn, somnolent in the thick clover, feeling my body vibrate with the buzz of the earth, the beautiful, almost fluid warmth of the sun soaking through me. The river, flat and winding through the trees below, glittering with sunlight. The little Oosanatee set deep in a forested valley with the scent of clover and jasmine in the air like the land of the lotus-eaters.

  The memory is so real to me. It brings tears to my eyes. And then I married Eli, and we all became afraid of each other. My family. My friends. The people I had known my whole life. Our world had changed so much, I guess none of us knew whom to hate and whom to love anymore. We became afraid of our neighbors. Afraid of our freed slaves, people we used to say were our family. But we have learned to live with fear. We have become accustomed to it. We gladly traded the chaos of the war for it. Better to know what to fear than to fear all the things that you don’t know.

  “Miss Gus.”

  Emma’s voice. She is watching me from the door.

  “Miss Gus,” she repeats. Her skin is dark—not coal black, but dark brown, like a chestnut. She has grown thick as she has aged, and she was never tall to begin with. I guess I didn’t realize how much older she is than I. Probably by twenty years. Maybe a little less. She doesn’t know her age herself, since she was purchased as a young girl to help in the kitchen when my parents were first married.

  When I was born, she must have been young. A young woman. Maybe my age when I was first married. But now the gray has grizzled her hair, which she keeps pulled back in a tight chignon. There are deep lines that crease from her eyes to the corners of her mouth. And her hands are thick and calloused. Tough hands that have seen years of work. She stands at the door wearing the same simple black dress she always wears, as if she is in some perpetual mourning. She looks at me as if I were twelve again. Just like the days before the war. I wonder if she would go back there as easily as I would. I can’t imagine what her answer would be if I asked her, and I would never ask her.

  She has been with me my whole life. I have never been afraid of Emma. Never. She is devoted. Quiet. Sad. She smiles at me, a faint smile. It is because of the new dress. Or this veil. “There are ladies downstairs asking for you. I’ve been putting them in the music room.”

  An irrepressible smile spreads across my face and I pull down my veil. I must look like some sort of haunt. Emma shakes her head, still smiling, and I follow her down the stairs.

  The hall is filled with voices from the front parlor, masculine voices that make little effort at being subdued, although the coffin must be there by now. Mike is there. His voice is higher than the rest, loud and slurred. Buck is not among the men I can hear. Perhaps he will not come. If he were here, surely I would feel it.

  The music room is across the hall from the front parlor. Emma weaves through the crowd. They fall silent as I pass, and soon there is a hush. Emma opens the door to the music room.

  It is dark. The shadows and black cloth seem to blend. Great swells of bombazine and barege fill the room, along with flurrying ribbons of crape and velvet and great veils pinned against black bonnets. They are like so many crows picking their way under the trees. Black-gloved hands reach out for me, resting on my arms and head. Soft black kid falls on my cheeks and against my hair. They lift my veil from my face as the door closes behind me.

  “Poor dear,” they murmur, and “Poor darling.” “Come sit.” “How are you, dear?” and “It’s been too long, Gus.” They speak in soft whispers of consolation. Jennie Heyney puts her arm through mine and walks me into the room. They surround me. We are all in black and time has stopped. The dark shadows of the shuttered music room and the blackness of the cloth hide whatever might be threadbare between us. They pet and coo at me like a foundling child. And all I can think is that Eli left no money. How can it be?

  “Gus, wha
t a beautiful veil.”

  “Gus, what a lovely dress.”

  “Augusta, you look so young. Why, you could be sixteen.”

  “Gus, with those eyes, you won’t wait long.”

  “Great blazes, let her sit, won’t you? Bring her here to me.” The women part like the Red Sea to reveal Alabama Buchanan. She sits perched on the edge of a high-backed side chair and pats a gloved hand on the seat next to her. “Here, Gus. Come and sit.”

  How many years since Bama spoke to me so familiarly? And that name. Her overenthusiastic father was a delegate from Albion to the state convention in 1819, when she was born. The Buchanans have always been an important family in Albion, but childless Bama lost Colonel Buchanan at Gettysburg and never remarried. She recovered his body—some unwitting Yankee farmer plowed him up, and a note was found pinned to his coat with his name and company written on it, legible after six years. The colonel is buried in the New Cemetery along with the other recovered sons. After all that, Bama found herself fairly destitute, like the rest of us. Like I may be again. At least she held on to her plantations. Virtually everyone around me, these ladies, is supported by the meager cotton crops that have been pulled by tenant farmers from what remains of their families’ lands. Cotton is not what it used to be.

  Bama grabs my hand, glove to glove, and pulls me onto the chair next to her. “It is hot, isn’t it?” she says. Her smile shows a gap on the side where the barber pulled three teeth. She squeezes my hand. “The fever will be coming up early from the river this year.” The room rustles with fabric and fans.

  “Mr. Branson didn’t die of the yellow fever, did he, Gus?” Sally Mabry asks.

  “No, Sally,” I answer. “It was a blood disorder.”

  “Oh, Gus,” she gushes suddenly. “It’s just so good to see you.” She behaves as if we were still at school in Huntsville. She rushes to me and hugs me impulsively. The women nod as if they agree.

  “That’s right, Gus,” Bama intones in her gruff voice. She grabs Sally’s arm and pushes her away without ceremony. “And rather than smother you with mourning, we want you to know that you are welcome back. Welcome home, Gus.”

  The pale, black-framed faces look down on me with sympathy, but they are reserved. That coldness, the bitterness of loss and deprivation, is in their eyes.

  “It came on so sudden, didn’t it?” Mattie Hearns shakes her yellow curls from the edges of her bonnet as she speaks, her blue eyes wide with excitement. “I mean his illness. I heard it happened so fast?”

  “It did,” I answer, looking around the room at their faces. “I—”

  Bama interrupts me. “Yes, and so it should be proper to bury him quickly. I quite think you are right to put an end to this sooner rather than dwell on it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Was it very gruesome?” Caroline Lensch speaks with her handkerchief to her mouth. “Was there a terrible lot of blood?”

  “Carrie, enough,” Bama interjects as I sit mute. “Let’s leave Augusta alone. It’s enough that she is burying her husband today.”

  Mrs. Mastin steps from the shadows. “But what was it, Gus? Was it cholera? My daughter is ready to pack up her boys and get on the train to Chattanooga. Lord help us, it’ll be just like after the war, when smallpox and typhoid was everywhere.” She trembles as Beth comes forward.

  “Mama, please,” her daughter says. “I didn’t say that!”

  “It’s from those shanties across from the railroad,” the old woman goes on. “Those coloreds and poor whites. Remember, Bama, after the war? It was like a plague over the whole town. The niggers and the soldiers brought it with them. And things are worse than ever over there. People living in squalor. Your husband mixed with that lot—out at that mill. We’ll all be sick from it soon!”

  “It wasn’t typhoid,” I say uneasily. “It was—it was a blood disorder—the heat—it affected Mr. Branson.”

  Bama casts a hard glance at the women around us. Their fear surprises me. The things they know surprise me. Bama coughs without covering her mouth, a loud hacking sound, and then speaks. “Ladies, if it was something for us to worry about, you know old Greer would have told us. None of us would be here otherwise.”

  “Well, Dr. Greer is talking.” Sally Mabry again.

  “He is talking some nonsense that we’d all best ignore. He’s not talking about typhoid or malaria or smallpox, God forbid, and we will leave it at that. We all know how Greer is now.”

  An uneasy quiet settles over the room. Their faces are half shrouded in shadow. Who are they? These are not the women I knew during the war. They are changed women—changed faces that I cannot recognize. The hard bite of circumstance has changed us all, and they look at me, too, as a stranger.

  “It is a shame, Gus,” Bama says with a long sigh. “If Mr. Branson had died two weeks ago, you could have come down to the cemetery with us for Decoration Day.” Someone gasps while someone else titters behind her fan. “Hilliard is down there, isn’t he?”

  I have to wait a moment before I answer. “No,” I say. “No, his body was never found.”

  It is quiet again. Bama reaches out for my hand and squeezes. “Yes,” she says. “I am sorry. I am forgetful.”

  “Miss Gus,” Emma says anxiously. “You should come.” She slipped into the room as silent as a ghost. The women step back from her and turn their heads.

  She leads me into the hall. Sunlight floods in from the open front door. The brightness is painful after the shadows of the music room. There are more visitors, men and women. I don’t know half of them. There are the Yankee officers, although most of them no longer serve in the army and have put away their blue uniforms. They have businesses here, or land in the county that they call farms. The bankers and newspapermen are here with their wives. They crowd the hall with their beaver hats and fans trimmed in ivory and feathers. They jostle me and excuse themselves. But for my dress, many would not even know who I am.

  Outside, the men are still on the lawn. Eli’s coffin is visible through the open front windows, sitting in the middle of the parlor crowded with mourners. The men have stopped talking and face the street, cigars poised in their hands. Some stand on their toes. Just beyond them, Judge’s voice is booming. He is on the sidewalk, practically in the street, shouting and waving his hat at a group of Negroes from town. Some of them used to hang around the kitchen door, asking to see Eli or idling with Rachel and Emma.

  “Now, get on with you all,” he says, and he sounds angry. “Only friends and relations here. Get on with you!”

  Emma pushes forward through the last line of mourners, and one of them calls back at her, “Mind yourself, nigger.” His voice has a Northern twang. The hometown men have their eyes trained on Judge, some with hands on their hips, as if reaching for pistols. My God, bringing guns to a funeral? It’s indecent. But they would line up in military formation, like in their army days, with a single gesture from Judge. They must be here for him. They are certainly not here for Eli.

  We reach the black fence that runs along Greene Street. I grab hold of the pointed finials and lean against the cast-iron palings. “Judge,” I call. “What’s the matter?”

  “See here, Augusta,” he says, approaching the fence. “You don’t need to be out here exposing yourself like this. You go on back into the house.”

  “What do they want?” I ask.

  “They say they want to pay their respects to Eli.” There are two dozen Negroes in the street. Some of the men wear suits, and some are dressed no better than field hands. Some wear black armbands and hold their derby hats in their hands. There are women, too, in black dresses and others in somber calicos and osnaburgs, dark colors like their dusky skin. They watch with stony faces, stubborn and resistant. “Augusta, you get on inside,” Judge repeats. “You don’t need to be bothered with this nonsense.” His face is red, and it makes his whiskers turn pink, like the skin of a white rabbit. He turns back to the gathering group. “If you don’t want any trouble,” he
says to the crowd, “you’d better get going.”

  Emma eases closer to me. “Miss Gus,” she whispers low, so no one else can hear. “Ain’t they got a right to mourn Mr. Eli like anybody else?” She meets my eyes evenly. “Don’t you remember when Old Master died, didn’t we all—all his people—get to walk with him to his grave?”

  Mama and I rode in the carriage while Hill and Mike walked behind the hearse. Behind us, the whole town and virtually every servant in the neighborhood walked in silent mourning, such was the great love my father’s people felt for him. They came all the way from the farthest plantations in the county simply to walk him to his burial place.

  Emma watches the men and women in the street. “It ain’t no different here, Miss Gus,” she presses. “They just want to give him their respects for all the things he did for them.”

  “Judge, please,” I call. “Let them pay their respects.” My face is hot and everyone’s eyes are on me. “When Pa died, his people gave him his due. They want to do the same for Mr. Branson.”

  Judge looks hard at me, his nostrils flared. He is caught, though it is not my intention to trap him. He can hardly defy a widow’s request in front of the whole town. He knows too well how petty such behavior would seem.

  “Fine, then,” he mutters and turns back to the Negroes in the street. “You stay behind this fence and you keep your distance. You show your respect. You hear?” He sneers at them. The Negroes stand stonily silent. Everyone is silent. The men on the lawn have stopped their nattering and part for Emma and me. Simon is at the back of the hall, tall and somber. He nods to me, just as stony as the Negroes on the street.

  Pastor Peekum stands in the front parlor near the casket, rubbing his thin bony hands around a worn leather Bible.

  “We’re ready for the service, sir,” I whisper in his ear, and he nods coldly. Bama comes and sits beside me. Rachel has brought Henry from the nursery, and I squeeze him against me. He is mystified, awed by the people in the house and how they handle him. They squeeze his cheeks and his plump arms, declaring they see the Sedlaws or the Blackwoods in him yet.