The Rebel Wife Read online

  “Hello, Bama. How kind of you to stop in,” I say.

  “Gus, you should take a firmer hand with your servants. I walked right in the door with nary a soul to stop me.” She shakes her umbrella at me.

  “I’m so sorry, Bama. But they run the house, not me.”

  Bama sits in the parlor, dressed in pongee silk and black drap d’été with an old round bonnet on her head. We both fan ourselves in the heat.

  “The estate is that extensive, then?” Her question is indelicate, but she does not seem to care. Rather, she looks directly at me.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “I was never privy to Mr. Branson’s business affairs.” Perhaps she has already heard something. Word travels fast. What grim pleasure those women would take in the truth. The black embroidered handkerchief in my hand is already damp.

  “I imagine you’ll be making arrangements to be off. As you should. Some time away will do you good. You have no one traveling with you?” She speaks pointedly.

  “No, just myself and Henry. And Emma, of course.”

  “Yes, of course. My niece and I—you remember Emily Whitcomb? She was a Banner before she was married. She and I are traveling up to Viduta on Monte Sano in a few weeks’ time. You are welcome to join us there, if your travel plans allow it.”

  “Thank you very much, Bama. I’m much obliged.” Viduta. There will be so many Albion people there. They only go there because they can’t afford to go further. “I have to wait, of course, until I’ve spoken with my cousin.”

  “Your cousin? He is traveling with you then?”

  “No, he is overseeing the estate,” I answer, confused. She meets me with her own confusion, and the black ribbons of her bonnet shake.

  “Oh, you mean Judge. I thought you meant young Mr. Heppert.” I feel myself color and Bama remarks upon it. “You know, there was talk of a union there at one time. I have no doubt you made the wiser choice. Time has certainly proven it.”

  I look away. “Yes,” I say. “I suppose it has.” Buck did not even speak to me at the funeral.

  “Women have their ways, don’t they, Gus?” She smiles at me, showing the missing teeth in her upper jaw. “And there’s time yet for you. You’re still young. And now very, very marriageable. Don’t you think so?” She laughs out loud.

  We sit quietly for a moment. Bama seems to wait for an answer I will not give. I shift in my chair.

  “Have you had many callers?” Bama asks.

  “No, none to speak of. Some of the Yankee women have left their cards, but I don’t feel obliged to return the call.”

  “No,” Bama says with her nose pinched tightly as she shakes her head. “No, no reason to do that. No reason not to, of course, but no reason to do it, either.” She picks at her skirt with fussy hands. “How is Henry?”

  “He’s well. Thank you. He’s so young. He doesn’t understand. He spends much of his time with John, Rachel’s boy. They’re very close in age.”

  “Don’t let him get too used to that. You don’t want him to grow up niggery. Time for him to go to school soon, isn’t it?” The bones in her hands stand up against her skin. She keeps plucking at her skirt, gently lifting it between a gnarled thumb and finger, then letting it drop.

  “Yes, I was hoping that after we had gone away for a while, I might start him in school.”

  “Here in Albion?”

  “I suppose. Where else?”

  “Nowhere else. Just wondering. None of your old friends have been by?”

  “No, I don’t expect them. It’s been so long. I’m not sure what we’d have to speak about.”

  She nods with thinly pressed lips. “It will take some time for them. That’s all. But you are one of us again. Don’t ever doubt it.”

  One of us. I don’t feel like them, but I don’t feel like an other. I don’t know what I am in Albion anymore. “Was it so bad that I married Eli?” My voice catches on the words.

  Bama looks at me hard from under her bonnet. “Bad?” she hacks out, gruff and contemptuous. “Bah. Bad is nothing. It wasn’t marrying Eli so much as what he was up to. Helping the Yankees. Taking our money and our land and handing it out to the Negroes and the bluecoats. And then the voting. My God, the day they let a colored man vote. I know Colonel Buchanan was turning in his grave. If he were alive, he’d have dug his own grave, he would, rather than see that. Somebody’s grave, at least, wouldn’t he?” Bama laughs through the gap in her smile. “But that’s all in the past, isn’t it? Dead and buried with Eli. And you’re back with us. You can’t blame them for finding it difficult—you understand. Your mother understood.”

  “Mama did? She’s why I married him.”

  “Of course, of course,” she says, and reaches out her hand and takes mine. She leans forward to place a kiss on my cheek. She is so close, I can smell the snuff and whiskey on her breath. She smells like Eli. “No need to dwell on the past. We’ve all suffered in so many ways. No need to think about it at all. Besides, you’re in an enviable position.” She looks toward the door at the sound of footsteps on the brick walk outside, then trains an eye back upon me. “Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed. And discussed.”

  She lets out a laugh and throws her head back, showing her missing teeth again.

  “Is that what people are saying?” I ask.

  “You know how the ladies are here in Albion, always have to be in everyone’s business.”

  We turn at the open door. Judge is there, his hat and cane in his hand.

  “Why, Judge Heppert, you old dog,” Bama exclaims. “I’m glad I imposed on Gus long enough to catch sight of you.”

  Judge blushes up to his ears. He presses his lips together in something that is not quite a frown but is still disdainful. “Gus. Bama,” he says, giving a slight bow to each of us.

  Bama rises from her chair and holds her hand out to Judge. She smiles, almost winking at him. She must have been a coy flirt in her youth. Judge is discomfited and takes unwilling steps toward her. He takes her hand and leans over it, placing cold lips against her papery skin.

  “There, now,” she says with almost a sigh. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” She laughs out loud again. “The Heppert men are always so courtly.”

  “And the Tunstall women are rightly known for keeping their beauty.” Though Judge does not smile, Bama is undeterred.

  “You must call on me, Judge. Imagine the compliments we could exchange!”

  Judge blushes again and looks at his shoes. Bama knows how to render a man speechless. She gives Judge a wide smile as if trying to expose the gap in her teeth and the ashen color of her gumline.

  “Well, Gus,” she says, turning to me, “I’m sure you and your cousin have much to discuss. I’ll leave you. And remember,” she goes on, taking my hand and looking into my eyes, “you’re very beautiful. You’ll have whatever you want. But take a trip. Come to Monte Sano. I hear the fever has already started—as I thought it would. This infernal heat.”

  “The fever?”

  Bama smiles and narrows her eyes. “The yellow fever. Nothing to worry about just yet as long as old Greer is doing his job!” She stomps her umbrella twice on the floor. “I’ll come again soon. And I’ll bring reinforcements with me next time!” She waves the umbrella like a standard-bearer on a charge. She gives a quick nod to Judge and a coquette’s wistful laugh. “I hope to see you again very soon, Judge.”

  Her coachman, sitting in the sweltering heat, hops down to take her to the next call.

  Judge grimaces and shakes his head. He turns his eyes to me and scans me up and down as if under instructions from Bama.

  “You’re looking well. Is that a new dress?” His mouth curls down to pinch his white beard at the corners. “Gather the servants together. On the back porch. I need to speak to them.”

  Seven

  THEY ARE TAKING THEIR time in coming. Even the shade is hot. A frayed palmetto fan lies on the glossy white planks of the porch. Henry climbs into my lap, and I wrap an arm around his
stomach. I pick up the fan. It moves the air but does little to cool.

  Judge stands on the gravel path, pacing. The servants arrive slowly. First Emma. Now Rachel comes out through the dining room with Little John. They sit on weather-beaten chairs arranged in a row.

  Big John takes a seat next to Rachel. He is not tall but is solidly built, with broad shoulders and big hands. He is a handsome Negro, square-jawed, with close-cropped hair that curls tightly against his scalp. He is darker than Rachel. His skin is close to Emma’s in shading, dark brown and even, like a chestnut. His eyes are pale gray, almost blue. Ghost eyes that suggest white blood in his veins, though we all pretend we don’t see it, like Rachel’s yellow skin.

  Simon ambles from the carriage house to the porch. Judge is impatient, walking up and down the path, watching the servants line up before him. He steps up to the porch and stands next to my chair, facing them. Henry squirms against me and I shush him.

  They sit in front of me, in front of both me and Judge. Simon. John. Rachel. Emma. They are my household now. The things that I once called Eli’s, I may now call mine. What a strange reversal. I look at their black faces, shaded so differently but all black. These are not slavery days, not anymore. Life has not changed so much as all that, I guess. They are free, but they work for me, don’t they? The work they do is for me. There is something satisfying in that. Judge can have his few minutes to lord it over them. To lord over me, too. With Eli gone, he is the paterfamilias. He is so old-fashioned, but he will do right by me. He is my kin. I just have to learn how to handle him. I can’t help a smile as he steps up to the porch. He rests a hand on the back of my chair. Of course he makes me wait until he has talked to the servants. He must know I am wild about the money.

  “You all were loyal servants to Mr. Branson,” Judge says. “And he recognized that in his will, leaving each of you with a small bequest. A token.” He turns his head to clear his throat, then looks at each of them. Only Emma looks down at her hands, nodding to herself. The others look Judge right in the eye. His voice grows louder as he speaks, and he stares them down until John looks away, too, averting his gray eyes to the floor. Little John has the same pale gray eyes. He shifts in Rachel’s lap, curling up, although he is getting too big for her.

  Henry squirms and says, “Emma,” in a whisper. His restlessness is so distracting that I must let him down. Judge watches, his cheeks suffused with red, as Henry clip-clops in his little shoes to Emma and climbs into her lap. He is next to Little John and seems happy because of it. Judge looks at me and grimaces, disapproving.

  “They are not important sums,” he continues. “Simply tokens. But you should know that Eli was concerned for your welfare and left the disbursement of funds in my charge.”

  Simon shoots Rachel a look, something critical, maybe disbelief, but Judge does not catch it—or pretends not to.

  Emma nods. Her arm is wrapped around Henry. He dangles his legs and reaches an arm out to pinch Little John. Emma grabs his hand and holds it in his lap, making him giggle.

  “The estate is very complicated, and it will take some time to unwind, so until then I will keep a record of the funds allocated to each of you. They will be payable after the settlement of the estate’s debts.” Judge looks at each of them evenly, challenging them.

  Rachel knocks her knee against Big John, but he won’t look at her. She does it again and then puts her hand on his arm. She jerks her head toward Judge, but John won’t do what she wants. She is becoming agitated, and her boy starts to struggle in her lap, arching his back against her.

  “That is all. You may go,” Judge says, and he waits for them to get up, but no one moves. Rachel turns to John and whispers something to him. Judge glares at them. Emma’s eyes, too, nervously dart to them.

  “I have a question, sir,” Rachel says. Judge looks at her and doesn’t say a word. “How long before we get our money?”

  Judge’s mouth curls down again. His nostrils flare. He turns toward the garden, scanning the lawns and flower beds, taking his time, then turns back to Rachel. “I can’t give you a time. It may take several months to go through your former master’s estate. There is a lot of work to be done. When it is done, you will be paid.”

  “He was never my master, sir,” Rachel says with the thinnest veneer of respect in her tone. “And if the money is ours, why can’t we get it right now?”

  “Because I said, that’s why,” Judge answers sharply. “Now go.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Emma says, and she gets up, taking Henry by the hand and leading him into the house.

  John gets up, too. “Come on, Rachel, enough now,” he says in a low voice. Simon shoots Rachel another look, and she nods back to him.

  “I said enough, woman,” John says more forcefully. He takes her arm and pulls her up out of her chair. They go inside the house bickering, Rachel holding Little John like a sack of flour.

  Simon gets up and turns away from Judge. He ambles back to the carriage house, his head high and his steps easy.

  “Now, Augusta.” Judge turns to me. “We should talk.” He looks over at the office at the end of the gallery. He walks toward it, not waiting for me. He is in no mood for anything contrary. “Eli acted like he was a Chinese king,” he says, shaking his head and looking back at me. “I always thought he built that office so he could see whatever was coming at him.”

  He must mean the windows. They make the small office seem so much bigger. Just after he bought the house, Eli added the extension “to modernize the old place,” he said. In his optimism, he added a nursery above the office, both connected to the house by an interior staircase. With Eli’s changes, the back of the house appears as a jumble of interconnected and interrupting blocks—kitchen, extension, a stretch of porch cut short by the office. I never liked the changes that altered it from what I knew before the war, though I never protested them. Rather, I gave Eli a cold consent and cursed him secretly for desecrating the Chapmans’ home.

  On Eli’s days at home, I would stay upstairs with Henry in the nursery or the front sitting room. The colored men would line up in the garden outside the office or along the porch. They would sit on the back steps or skulk around the kitchen door. On days of bad weather, they would line the hall and the back parlor, waiting for their opportunity to see Eli to ask him for a favor or help. As the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war, Eli was seen as some sort of benevolent protector. He gave out the food rations provided by the federal government—and not just to the freedmen but to the poor whites who came into Albion after the spring of ’65, starving and desperate. Eli negotiated contracts for the freedmen, too. He decided who would work and where. All with the backing of the United States Army. The motherless young colored girls, he indentured to the homes where they had been slaves a year or two before. He set the terms of the contracts for the Negro families who took twenty acres from their old masters so they could grow cotton and corn and then give away half of it as their rent. Eli would intervene on behalf of the Negro tradesmen in town who insisted the white men weren’t paying them fairly. He saw them all and profited mightily by it, skimming off the top, taking money to push through a contract here or to place the best laborers on his friends’ farms. After the bureau was shut down, he remained a man revered by the Negroes, and they kept coming, wandering about the lane and the carriage house and sitting on the benches—those, at least, who were not so impudent as to ring the front bell.

  Judge takes Eli’s chair behind the desk without hesitation, his back to the door into the house. What a curious thing for him to say about the windows, but he’s right. When Eli sat at his desk, he looked at windows on three sides of him and could see the whole garden and anyone who might be lurking outside.

  Judge opens the leather portfolio. There are dark wine-colored stains on the leather. “Augusta, I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you today. I will work things out. You will never have to worry, but a prudent economy is what is required. No more of these
spendthrift ways. Eli is not alive anymore.”

  His tone is harsh. I study my hands. They are small and delicate and white. I have been lectured by Judge before. Does he resent me for asking his clemency the day of Eli’s funeral?

  He turns the pages in the portfolio one after another. He scans them from top to bottom. I lean against the wooden slats of the chair, my hands folded over the stiff black material of my dress. Judge grimaces at me. He presses his lips together, and it ruffles his beard like a chicken’s feathers. “I’m sorry to say it. There’s a selfishness in the Sedlaws, a greed that rises up now and again. I encourage you to banish it from yourself. I saw it in your father, in his desperation to pull off any kind of trickery to win, and it is a most unbecoming trait. I don’t say you have that quality, I know you have a fine character, but I see hints of it, and I wish your Blackwood blood would overcome it.”

  His chiding galls me, but what can I say? He always has to sermonize. He carries so many resentments. He has carried them a long time. I have nothing at my disposal to counteract them, least of all the pride of my father’s name.

  Judge rests his hand on the papers. His eyes are ice blue and seem to bore through me. He drums the papers with his fingers. “These papers,” he continues, “contain the various investments Eli has—or had. Some of the bonds are still worth something. The Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad notes were never exchanged for the new road, and I think we can pursue that. But there are heavy mortgages on his county lands, and it will be years before they are unencumbered. Eli’s pressure on Mr. Stephens almost caused the bank itself to suspend payment. It’s unclear what happened to the capital of the Freedman’s Bank. Whatever was left in specie was meant to be distributed to the account holders. He may have taken some of it to shore up his debts and deposited it at the Planters and Merchants Bank. It’s going to take a while to untangle.

  “What is reassuring—what should reassure you—is that the mill remains profitable, although burdened with some debts. It will take time to recover, but I am certain it is possible at this point. Any thoughts of travel and extravagance, however, should be put aside. A prudent economy is the course you should set for yourself. I am certain you will remain comfortable, if temporarily... constrained.”