Diann Ducharme (8 page)

The square lots looked to have a bit less than an acre apiece. Good-sized, if you ask me. But the split-log houses on the lots were right sad. I could see the cracks between the logs just by standing in the street. They all had clay chimneys and little vegetable gardens, half of ’em covered in weeds and rabbits, nary a vegetable in sight.

We rode up and down the empty dirt streets. He asked me, “Where is everyone? Don’t tell me they’re working?”

“Oh, but they are. Trying, at least. Fishing or progging ’round, I reckon.”

He snorted, looking down the street. “They got places of worship here?”

Seemed to me like he was looking for something particular, but he wouldn’t say what it was. I pointed through the streets. “I know of one church. Over yonder a ways, in a grove of trees off Burnside.”

We rode to the church, a small thing not much better than the log houses. But I liked the way it was situated among a few oak and pine trees. Mister Sinclair dismounted and walked ’round and ’round it, peeping in the windows and such.

After a good while of staring at the church from all different angles, we made to go back to the docks. Along the way I pointed out the falling-down schoolhouse, near the old Union headquarters. He shook his head sadly and said, “And folks like you—good, hardworking white folks—don’t even have a schoolhouse. That, Benjamin, is a travesty. What is this country coming to?”

I guess I could see his point. I always pined for a schoolhouse, and would have built one myself if I could have found a teacher for it.

He guffawed at the building in front of us. “By God, that is one pathetic schoolhouse. It hardly looks to last another winter out here.”

“Well, it don’t matter to them. They all want to learn their letters, and you really can’t blame ’em.”

He squinted his eyes as he looked me over. “Ben, think on this. Do you want the darkies to learn their letters before our little white children do? Would you prefer to hand over the white man’s land to former slaves? Just
give
them our hard-earned fields, our family’s land? How about our homes, our horses, and our places of business?”

His long arms made big sweeps through the air as his voice rose. His face was red and slick with sweat. “Hell, let’s just hand over our wives and children! Because they’re as good as Negro fodder if we don’t do something to stop them.”

My face burned like I’d been slapped backhanded. This black hate was surely a side of Mister Sinclair I never thought to see, even though I knew he was a well-to-do planter man.

He kept on with it, too. “I’m not the only white man who’s dismayed at the direction this country is heading in. We want what’s ours to stay ours, and we’re willing to do what’s necessary to keep things the way they always have been.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” I choked. A ropy knot had tied itself into my throat.

“Can’t exactly tell you that,” he said.

I looked off to the Croatan Sound, through the line of old barracks that lined the shore. The water shone so bright through the dark patches that I had to turn away. I closed my eyes for a second so I could think a bit more. It sounded like he was mixed up in one of those secret clans of men that were cropping up around the South. Bunch of sore losers, banded together in fear.

I swallowed a hunk of spit that had some trouble going down the pipe. “Well, if I get your meaning right, the freedmen on this island have riled you all in some way?”

“I guess I need to explain it all to you,” he huffed, and shook his head. “After the war, the native white folks here needed our help. They wanted their land back, because the good-for-nothing runaways just wouldn’t leave. Thought the land was theirs, fair and square. But it never was.
It never was, Ben.”
He leaned in so close to me I could see his red nosehairs. “The natives want the island to be like it used to be, without so many blue-blasted Negroes all over the place, taking what few jobs are out here and planting land meant for them, for their children. It’s time for them all to go.”

I fought down the urge to just ride away, leave him in the dust. Yet on he went, and with a smile on his face, too. “Our interest in this colony paid off. A real uppity darkie has come to our attention.” He started snickering, then lowered his voice, even though not a soul was about. “Friends of mine have been looking out for this man for years now, and there he sat, in plain view. But here’s the best part—from
what I’ve gathered, all the runaways follow him around like he’s made of chitlins and corn pone. If he goes, they all go. The so-called Freedmen’s Colony will be done for good, and things will be turning in the right direction.”

“But where will they go? What will they do?” I asked, my brain mired in a fog that wouldn’t rise.

He snorted. “I don’t give two handfuls of horse shit where they end up, as long as they’re back on the state’s plantations doing work that needs doing. This is a small island. A
family
island. It’s about justice for North Carolina.”

“And the man you’re after? What of him?”

His eyes took in the little rows of houses through the dust from the horses’ hooves. “We’ll get
our
justice, too. It’s been a long time coming now.” He spit out a hunk of tobacky juice and stared at me with squinty eyes, not answering me. “If you tell anyone about this little talk, white folks included, I won’t be pleased—and I don’t have to tell you that my friends are not a group of men to disappoint. But if you help me out when I need your services this summer, and keep real quiet, I’ll put in a word for you with Dexter Stetson. He’s the lighthouse construction supervisor. Choosing his crew as we speak, no doubt.”

I started to sweat bad, but not from the heat. I already knew that a crew was getting raised—word travels fast around here—but just the mention of his knowing Mister Stetson raised my interest. I had a gnawing feeling this was how things got done in the big world, knowing folks that mattered.

He watched me careful as he said, “I heard they need a crew to start building their own barracks and blacksmith shop, to get the site ready for work in the fall. And they’ll need good local men to build the crane, and the lightering boats and wharf. I thought of you right away.”

It was bad business, but the scenario sounded good to me, even so. Government paychecks steady in the mail. Two solid years of nonstop work, easy. They were laboring jobs, but still. I could work my way up to the better ones.

I gripped the reins so hard the leather almost cut my skin. “What sort of ’services’ would you have me do, to get me such a job? I ain’t a man-napper, if that’s what you’re after.”

He wiped his brow with a crisp hankie, then looked down at it to see what he had mopped off. “I like you, Ben. I’ve seen the way you move around these islands. It’s like you’re made of sand and seawater instead of bones and blood. Never seen anything like it. You’re a natural, son. Fact, you remind me of my brother, Jack. He was a born farmer. He was happy as long as he was out of doors and tending to the land. Not such a hardy soldier, though, as it turned out.”

I nodded, sweat pouring down the small of my back. “Sorry to hear that.”

He stroked his beard real slow. “I stick out like a sore thumb, especially around these parts. Can’t just do what I want without folks taking too much notice. You, my boy, can help me. So just sit tight, ’til I determine what the course of action will be. It won’t be long.”

I stared off and couldn’t make my mouth work. I hadn’t given him a yea or nay.

He laughed. “I’ve never seen you think so hard before, Ben! Don’t get yourself in a bother. It’s not much, in the grand scheme.”

“As long as I ain’t breaking the law.”

He kicked his horse happily and rode on. He looked so pleased with himself that a looker-on would think he’d just stumbled upon a buried treasure. It was a letdown to realize he wasn’t as grand as I thought he was, not by a long sight. In fact, he was the worst kind of racist, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it, either. What had the folks in
the Freedmen’s Colony ever done to
him?
He made it sound so personal.

But I couldn’t see how I could get out from under him now. He had some kind of devil hold over me. And the worst part of it was, I still found myself wanting to do good for him. I couldn’t make a lick of sense from the feeling.

I left Mister Sinclair on a bar stool after we got back to the hotel, a burn growing slowly on his cheeks, and dragged my dead legs over to the Sinclair cottage without washing up. I didn’t want to be late and get the housekeep into a pucker.

But no one was there to answer the door, so I walked ’round back to the porch and there in the breeze sat Miss Abigail Sinclair, wearing a dress that spilled in all directions over her chair, and reading that same big book, as natural as you please. Made such a picture I almost forgot about her pap.

Did she even know how powerful strange it was for me to see such a fine young woman reading a book like that? I wished I could somehow crawl right inside her brain to see what all else she knew about, because it had to be a lot, by the way she carried herself all upright.

She jerked at my appearing so out of the blue like I did, and had to grab on to the book with both hands to keep it from flopping over to the porch. “Oh my stars, Mister Whimble, I didn’t hear you walk up. The sand sure does muffle footsteps!” she said, her face flustered.

“Now, I told you to call me Ben, so unless you want me to send over my pap, you best cease and desist with the Mister Whimble. If my comrades heard you calling me that, they’d crack up ’til Christmas. I’d be Mister Whimble ’til I was pushing up daisies! They’d carve it on my headstone!”

She grinned a bit, showing her pearly whites, and seemed to relax her backbone some.

“All right … Ben.” She paused and squinted at me, kind of like she would a beetle she was thinking on squashing with the heel of her nice boot. “How old are you? I’m sorry to say that I can hardly tell,” she said.

“Well, I’m nineteen years of age, but I probably look seventy-nine, being out in the sun all day. It’s common knowledge ’round here that fishermen start growing scales on their faces after a few hard years on the sea.”

“You do look older than nineteen, I will say. But I don’t see any scales.” She laughed and called into the house, “Mama, Mister Whimble is here!”

She rolled her green eyes at me and said, “I mean,
Benjamin
. I’ll get used to it.”

But the house was quiet as a tomb. She said, “Mama isn’t feeling well at all today. We might be on our own.”

I shrugged. “Okay by me.” I’d just as soon not have the woman listening in.

So we set to work with no one to eavesdrop except the gulls. Out loud I listed every single letter in order. Then I set to writing them all down on the slate, big ones and small ones. I only made one bitty mistake, much to Miss Sinclair’s astonishment. Forgot to cross the little
t
. I said that wasn’t a circumstance, but she said it was important to do so, or folks would think it was the little
l
.

Then she set to schooling me on the sounds of the letters, writing short words on her slate and pointing out their sounds to me with her clean, white fingers, and that’s when I started to get confused.

Con-sonnets were all right. Having the same sounds word after word, you usually knew what to expect with them. But those vowels were tricky little sons-o’-guns, changing up their sounds to suit their
places in a word. Or that silent
E
, the way she plops herself at the end of a word, like “Lookie here, I’m the letter
E
!” but she don’t even make a sound. I’ll be doggoned if that makes a bit of sense.

But I tried hard to learn all that she tried to teach about the sounds of letters, either by themselves or paired up with others, until finally she declared that I had learned more than she had expected me to in just one day.

She then wet the nib of her pen in ink and wrote down my whole name on another piece of her real nice paper. She told me to take it home and learn it and to come back tomorrow knowing how to write it by heart.

“But I don’t own a writing instrument, Miss Sinclair. How am I to practice?”

She thought on this snag a moment, her rosy lips pursed up, then said, “You can take one of my pencils home, and some paper, too, for practice. Free of charge.”

“Free of charge? That’s a good one.” I laughed.

She cut her eyes at me. “Well, paper isn’t cheap these days. I just can’t be handing it out whenever you have a need for some.”

“My, my, aren’t you the thrifty one. I never would have thought a lady wearing yards and yards of rich cloth would care about the price of paper!”

She looked down at her slippery green dress. “It’s just that times are hard lately.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, sure, it’s a rough life for you. Let me fetch my fiddle. A big house on the beach don’t look too hard to me.”

She looked up at the porch roof over our heads and started to grin. “You should see our home in Edenton.”

“She’s a big one, huh? I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said. “What’s she like, then?”

She said real soft, almost to her own self, “Oh, it’s a lovely home. Old, and so grand. You should have seen it in its prime, before the war.”