The Rebel Wife (33 page)

We search the office, but halfheartedly. They have beaten us to it. Did John tell them to come here? They were at the house today, hoping I had gone, so they could search there. They must have come here tonight.

Anger pulses through my veins, seeping out of my pores with my sweat. Judge has won and by a few hours, no more. The old goat has the money and the list of names and the havoc he will wreak with them—when they should have been mine. By rights, I own them, and he has stolen them from me like he has stolen everything else—all of it—from me.

Is this defeat? Is this what Hill and Buck felt at Shiloh? Or later at Atlanta or Nashville? To be beaten and pushed back again and again, only to rally, haggard and wasted, for one more hopeless charge?

“Ma’am,” Simon says, his hand on my arm.

“They won, Simon. They must have just been here.”

“I don’t know. This seems like it didn’t just happen.”

“How can you tell?” The room is so devastated.

Simon kneels down and wipes a finger across the bottles in the floor, showing a fine layer of cotton dust. “I think this hatch was pried open a day or two ago.” He looks at me, but I cannot read his face. “You should go back to the house.”

“What?” I ask. “If they were already here—if they didn’t find the money here...” My feet are unsteady on the litter of torn pages.

“I don’t think they have the money. John must have it. He must have taken it. I have to go to them.”

“How is that possible?”

“I should have known all along. I should have thought of it.” Simon’s fists are clenched tight, and his jaw flexes. “John has the saddlebag. He must. I don’t know why they stayed here. Maybe to avoid raising suspicion. I don’t know. But they are in danger now.”

“I told Judge they were headed to Kansas. He can’t have gone after them.”

Simon doesn’t answer. He walks out of the office. “Put out that lantern,” he says.

I snuff it out quickly with my fingers. He rushes across the mill floor and outside.

“I’m going with you,” I say.

“No, ma’am,” he says, climbing on his horse. “Get back to the house. Who knows what might be happening there. I’m going to try to catch up with them. They can’t be that far up the road to Tullahoma.”

“No, Simon, I’m going with you.” I pull myself up onto my saddle.

“It’s too dangerous. You should get home and wait there for me.”

“It’s too dangerous for me to go with you but not too dangerous for me to ride through the woods back to town alone?”

There is doubt in his eyes but little time to argue.

“All right, then. Stay behind me and keep quiet.”

I mount the horse and kick into her sides, slapping the reins against her neck. We follow a trail that skirts a branch of the mill creek, a worn wagon trail to Hayfork. Simon crosses over the creek at a small bridge, looping back west into the woods—Judge’s woods. His land starts out here somewhere. Simon keeps the campfires on our left, far in the distance. To ride hard through here might attract attention, so we trot, easing our way under the trees and through the open spaces bordered by corn and cotton fields.

I no longer know where we are. We are farther out than I have gone, beyond the old trails of years ago into an unknown land, but Simon leads us with certainty. How old are these trails? Are these the trails he took, leading slaves? Or did he ride them between the farming villages on his canvass for Negro votes—when the Negroes still voted?

I see the Tullahoma Pike. We are riding parallel to it, hidden in the pines. Simon picks up to a canter and I follow him, hurrying the horse to keep pace. The horses pound against the dry earth, kicking up dust. I pull Helen to the side to avoid it. The stars have shifted above the black heads of the trees. It is late, sometime in the morning. Does he know where we are going or what we are looking for?

The army camp is miles behind us. We cannot be far from the Tennessee line, but Simon keeps moving, weaving east, then west, sometimes approaching the pike and then veering sharply back into the woods, crossing other trails that vanish in unlikely directions, up into the black depths of the forested hills, around a narrow bend, or down toward a shallow cut by a creek. The forest is quiet but for the horses’ drumbeat, a steady rhythm moving ever faster. Simon leans forward, all alertness, looking ahead and left and right all at once.

He stops, and I pull hard on the reins, nearly tumbling over the horse’s mane.

“What is it?” I whisper.

He shakes his head, looking into the depths of the woods where nothing is visible. He inhales deep through his nose, looking left, then right. He inhales again. I smell it, too. The faint, acrid odor of smoke from a fire that could be anything, a kitchen fire or a campfire. He looks at me and jerks his head forward. I follow him with the reins and bit rattling. The horses snort, nervous and unsteady in the darkness.

Simon rides through a bramble, and I urge Helen forward into it. We emerge onto the wide and rutted pike, staying close to the road’s edge in the shadow of the trees’ canopy. We see the glimmer of firelight ahead, several fires. Simon kicks his horse, leaping into a gallop, running far ahead of me.

He is already off his horse and in the middle of a roadside clearing. It was a campsite before and is a battlefield now. Through the smoky haze are the wagons, lined up in a phalanx and tethered to their mules, as they were this morning, though the mules are dead. The five of them lie one before each wagon, still harnessed but dead, as if someone walked to each one of them and shot them through the head. Their fat tongues protrude from their open mouths. Their skulls are shattered and blood-covered to blackness where their brains were blown out. Two campfires smolder with dying embers and savaged tents are burning, cut to pieces. The cargo of the wagons is thrown aside, littering the ground, clothing, bedding, kitchen utensils, pots and pans, furniture, chairs and tables, hoes and farm tools cluttering the field, some of them smashed to pieces.

And several bodies, Negroes, black heaps lying facedown, dead like the mules, as if they were nothing more than that. In the smoke and darkness, it is like a mirage, too horrible to be real. What happened here? Simon was right. They were in danger, and it is all over now. Could they have known the danger?

“Who is that? What’s she doing here?” a Negro man is shouting at Simon. He came from the edge of the woods. I slide off the horse and hold her by the reins as I walk toward them. Simon is trying to calm him.

“She did this,” the man shouts and points at me, his eyes wild and filled with hate. He lunges as if he is going to attack me, but Simon grabs him by the shoulders and talks to him in a low voice.

“She loves Rachel,” I hear Simon say. The horse bumps against me and shies away, whinnying and shaking her head.

The Negro man glowers as Simon holds him. The hate in his face is raw, a hate that blocks everything else out, as much hate as Judge. And he is crying, in a mad rage, like a wild dog.

What is Simon saying? Where is Rachel? The bodies are scattered across the field, their arms cast wide, motionless. There is a woman in a plain dark dress, crumpled behind a wagon, her turban loosened and her shiny black hair undone and falling from the bright cloth. I must see her.

“You keep your hands off of her, you white bitch. You keep away from her.”

The gun is in her hand, a pistol with a black and white horn handle. Her hand has clawed into the earth, and I take it, bending the fingers out straight to hold it between my hands. It is so cold.

Oh, Rachel. I am sorry for this. They should not have done this to you. You should be on your way to Kansas. You should have your farm and your children and live long. But not this. I am sorry they did this to you, Rachel. What can I do to right this? These wrongs that we have done to each other will never be right. If only you could speak to me again and tell me what I can do to change it all for you and your poor boy.

Simon is beside me. He rests a hand on my shoulder and takes my arm, pulling me up. The other man stands back from us with clenched fists. He looks as if he will leap forward at me. What did Simon do to stay him?

“Gus, are you okay?” Simon asks.

“He’s right, Simon. This would not have happened but for me.”

“That’s not true.” He takes me by the shoulder and looks into my face. “None of this is your doing. You helped Rachel. You can’t stop Judge.”

“Is John dead, too?”

“Yes, John and Rachel and two others.”

“What about Little John?”

“Little John is safe. Back in the woods with the other women and children.”

“That poor boy. Can I see him?”

“Don’t you tell her anything, Simon.” The man is shouting, stepping toward us. “Don’t you tell any white person anything about us.”

“Garson, it’s not her fault,” Simon says. “She isn’t like the others. She gave Rachel that gun to protect herself.”

That is John’s brother, Garson. I can see him now, his pale eyes, like John and their boy. He has a right to his anger.

“She used it, too. Two of those Knights are dead. One rode off into the woods, but Rachel shot him right in the heart. Those crosses make a fine target. If I had my choice, all of you would be dead. Every single one of you run off the earth like dogs. Rachel was right. God is punishing you all with this sickness, and I hope it kills every one of you.” Garson spits at my feet.

“Garson, stop,” Simon says. “John stole that money from the old man. That’s why they came after you. It isn’t her fault. She had nothing to do with it.”

I told Buck and Judge. If I hadn’t told them, would this have happened?

“Garson, let me help you,” Simon says. Garson scowls at him. “We can hitch up a wagon and get people back to Albion.”

“You can go to hell,” Garson shouts at him, “and take your white woman with you. You’ll be next, Simon. Those Knights will come after you, running around with a white woman.”

Garson stalks away and then turns, coming back to us. I draw my arms close around myself.

“We aren’t going back to Albion,” he says to Simon in a hoarse voice. “We’re going to bury our dead—we’re going to do it by ourselves. We’ve got two of their horses, and we’ll hitch our wagons to them and take what we can and get out of here. We’re never going back to Albion.” Garson points at a Negro man standing at the edge of the woods, holding two saddled horses. One a gray and the other a bay and white skewbald that looks just like Mike’s horse.

“Garson, you should come back to Albion with me. Listen,” Simon says. He pauses to look over at me. “Gus?”

The horse is not tall, fourteen hands, maybe, and Mike is not tall. I do not need to see the saddle or the initials embossed on the leather. MBS. It is Mike’s horse. He was a part of this.

“Where is the man—the man they killed?” I ask. Simon does not answer. Garson looks by the last wagon and then stalks back toward the trees. Simon follows, taking his arm. They stand at the edge of the clearing, whispering fiercely to each other.

My feet carry me without my thinking. The contents of the wagon have been torn apart, strewn across the raw boards and on the ground around the wheels. There is a body in a blood-colored cassock, the face covered with a dark mask. I take his shoulder; it is too thick, but I must be sure. His body is heavy, the immovable weight of the dead. His mask is half off, and I pull it back to see his bloodied face with a yellow beard and glassy dead eyes. Not Mike. But where is he?

Simon is beside me again. “The horse that came from the woods,” I say. “The pinto. Did Garson say which way it came from?”

Garson emerges from the forest with several other Negro men.

“We should go. You can’t stay here,” Simon says in an urgent whisper. The men are watching us. They carry shovels and some of them axes.

“Mike is in the woods, Simon. That is his horse. I know he did this terrible thing. I know it. But we must find him. I can’t leave his body in the woods for animals.” I will not let him be like those two men on the road from Huntsville when I was a girl. Those two men, black and bloated, abandoned in the woods to rot.

The men stand in a row, leaning on their shovels, glaring at us. They do not want me here. Simon tugs on my arm, and I follow him into the shadows of the trees.

He scans along the edge of the woods. I don’t know what he can see in this darkness. He takes his horse’s reins and plunges into the brush. I take mine, too, and creep behind Simon as he follows some invisible trail.

I listen for Simon as much as see him while he pushes his way deeper, nothing more than a shadow ahead of me, pulling his horse along with the instincts of a slave catcher. My horse pulls back on the reins and I jerk at her, dragging her with me, demanding her obedience.

“There,” Simon says, and in the darkness under a tall pine is a black mass. I rush up to it and grasp the coarse cloth, pulling the body over to reveal a white cross that glows in the darkness. It is Mike. His face is still warm, and I feel the faint brush of breath against my hand.

“Simon, he’s not dead.” Simon stands over me, just behind me, his face emotionless, like Cicero when he watched Pa dying. Or is it disgust? “I know, Simon. He should be dead. But I won’t leave him here. I can’t.”

I tear at the cassock, which is warm and wet, tacky with blood. His shirt is soaked through from the wound by his shoulder just above the chest. I pull up my skirt and tear at my petticoat, ripping off strips of cloth to bind it.

“Simon, I can’t leave him here. I am asking for your help. I will not ask any more from you.”

“I understand,” he says. “He’s your blood. I understand. I will give him mercy for you. But this is all. There is no mercy left in me after this.”

THE BANDAGES HAVE DONE
little to stop the bleeding. Even the new ones I tore from the linen sheets have turned, spotting red at first and then growing until the entire dressing is crimson. There is no stopping the blood, regardless of how we bind him. It will keep flowing. Simon’s coat was soaked red where Mike was tied to him for the long ride back. I thought he would die on horseback, so much seemed to come from him, but he only whimpered and never once cried out.