Freeman (4 page)

Prudence unfolded it carefully; the creases in the paper were nearly worn through from repeated handling and she knew that sooner or later
the letter would tear. There had been a time, especially in the awful weeks after his name showed up in the listing of the dead in the newspaper, that she had read this letter every day. It gave her comfort somehow, made her feel she was with him and he with her, still. Then time had passed, days piling into weeks and weeks into months, and months, finally, into years, and the need to read his words every day had dulled some. As had the pain.

But that need had returned today. So she held the letter before her, though by now she knew its every word by heart. The war was over, the cause won to which he had given his life. So it seemed right somehow,
necessary
somehow, to read Jamie’s letter again, to hear his voice again in these first days of peace. She lifted the pages up to the light coming through the window. Jamie’s manly scrawl was comforting in its familiarity.

The letter strove, as his letters unfailingly had, for a light tone. There was the usual effusive expression of his love for her, the usual reminder of how terribly he missed her. The following pages he filled with amusing anecdotes of life in camp; he recounted with horror the bumptious customs of the men from the rustic areas of the state, told how his days of marching had given him a new appreciation for the simple pleasures of a cup of tea, a good book, and a warm fire, and groused about the incompetence of a captain who marched his men 20 miles in the wrong direction.

Prudence’s smile as she read these things was mixed with as much regret as amusement. She recognized it now, though she had not before, for what it was. He had been performing for her, minimizing the fear and the hardship so she would not worry for him.

In every letter, he had done this. And it wasn’t until here, at the very end of this letter, that he allowed the façade to slip. It was as if he knew, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, that it would be his last. He wrote:

The sound of laughter brought her head up from the paper. Down below, a young couple was walking in the little fenced park that occupied the middle of the square. The woman held three fingers to her mouth, daintily amused at something her beau had said. He was looking quite pleased with himself. They held hands. To Prudence, they seemed so young. She, at 26, had not felt young in years.

She returned to Jamie’s letter.

He was killed twelve hours later in a place called Gettysburg.

Prudence refolded the letter and put it back in the box. She brushed at the tears on her cheek, noting absently that the trees in the square were leafing out quite nicely.

Tomorrow, she was going to the South. She did not know if she would ever return. The realization left her feeling oddly weightless, like a dancer suspended in mid-leap, not yet knowing where she might land. Her uncertainty must have shown on her face, because Bonnie stopped in the doorway and asked, “Are you all right, there, Miss Prudence?”

Prudence smiled. They were as unalike as two women could be. Bonnie was slender and pretty, with skin the color of walnut shells and a cautious, deliberate manner. Prudence’s skin was pale and flawless but for a dusting of freckles on her cheeks. She had hair the color of October leaves and where Bonnie was careful and thoughtful, Prudence was driven by a native impulsiveness that (so she had many times been told) bordered on suicidal. Yet, for all their dissimilarity, there was no one in the world to whom she was closer. Not even her own sisters.

Prudence sat on the bed. “I am well, Miss Bonnie,” she said.

It was an old joke between them. They had known each other since they were little more than toddlers, since the day Prudence’s father, the late John Matthew Cafferty, had brought Bonnie home with him. The two girls had taken to one another from the start, had grown up together, roughhoused together, trusted one another with all the secrets of their hearts. But the Negro butlers and cooks and footmen who hiked over every morning from their side of the Hill to wait upon the wealthy whites on this side had seen this relationship and worried over it, wanting Bonnie to know that all white people—
most
white people—were nothing like the Caffertys.

So they had sought to school Bonnie in habits of deference, to prepare her to take what they assumed would be her place in the world. The result was that after a time, Bonnie had stopped addressing Prudence simply by her name and had begun calling her “Miss Prudence” instead, and nothing Prudence could do or say would make her stop. Finally, fed up, she had started calling her friend “Miss Bonnie” to teach her a lesson.
We’ll see how she fancies it
.

As it turned out, she fancied it just fine.

Bonnie had never found that “place in the world” the colored servants assumed she would. Instead, she had remained in the Cafferty household all her life, becoming John Cafferty’s fourth daughter in all but actual fact. But she and Prudence still used the stilted honorific in the privacy of their friendship; it amused them to do so.

“You do not look well, Miss Prudence,” said Bonnie now.

Prudence smiled. “Is that so?”

“Are you troubled with second thoughts?” asked Bonnie. Her voice lifted with hope.

Prudence shook her head. “No second thoughts,” she said. To emphasize the point, she closed Jamie’s letter in its box and dropped it into the steamer.

“It grieves me to hear that.”

“Miss Bonnie, this is something we must do.”

“We,” said Bonnie.

It was all she said, but it was enough. At Prudence’s insistence, they were traveling south together, but Bonnie did not want to go. Young as she had been when she left there, she had no memories of the South, but what she knew of it, what she had read and been told, had filled her with loathing and primitive fear.

Prudence tried to jolly her. “You would have me go down there alone?” she said, fluttering her eyelashes like a coquette. “Fair and delicate flower that I am?” Prudence’s lack of delicacy was legend in Boston society.

Bonnie would not be jollied. “I would rather if neither of us go down there, ever. The best day of my life was the day I left Dixie behind.”

Prudence sighed. “And my father, who brought you out of Dixie, made me promise before he died that the moment the war was over, I would go down there and build a school for colored.”

A lean, leathery face, a voice reduced to a rasp by the depredations of cancer, leaning close to her, the eyes alight, the stench of death on his breath. “Mark my words,” he had said. “When this war is finished, when the Union is restored, this government will do nothing for the colored man. It will free him and then it will leave him to fend for himself in a hostile and resentful land. It will require people like us, people of means, to fill in the gaps.” He had fallen back into his chair then, as if exhausted by his exertions. There followed a racking cough, and the sputum he spat into his handkerchief was flecked with blood
.

John Matthew Cafferty had arrived in America penniless and alone as a boy, his mother having died on the journey from England. On his third night of wandering the docks, he broke into a warehouse, seeking only a warm place to sleep. Instead, he found a life.

He had awakened to find the warehouse owner hovering over him. John tried to run, but the man snatched him by the collar before he had taken the second step. His name was Cyrus Campbell and he was a genial free colored man who had become quite wealthy as a furniture maker. To the boy’s great surprise, the black man didn’t box his ears or call the law. Instead he took pity on him. Over breakfast, he offered him an apprenticeship.

“What do you think, lad? Or have you a better offer somewhere else?”

Campbell had regarded him with a puckish expression. The boy understood the man was having sport at his expense and he replied with grave dignity. “I have no better offer, sir,” he said.

Cafferty remained with Campbell for 30 years, first as apprentice, then as an employee, and finally, as a partner and a kind of surrogate son. Several years after his benefactor died, John Cafferty, by now a wealthy man himself as the sole owner of Campbell & Cafferty Fine Furnishings, had gone to Buford, Mississippi, where Cyrus had lived on a cotton plantation until he escaped to the North, leaving his mother behind. Campbell had intended to buy her freedom, but had not been able to earn enough soon
enough and never saw her again. So Cafferty had bought that plantation and freed every slave on it. And thus began a tradition: every year on the same day in June, in memory of Cyrus Campbell, he went back to Buford and bought a slave.

He could never say how he chose them. He simply waited for some look in a dark eye or tilt of a woolly head that gave him the sense that here was a woman or a man not yet crushed by a lifetime of being owned, one with gumption and guts who would, if set free in a free place, be able to make a life. Sometimes, he bought entire families on the basis of one woman’s prideful posture, one man’s fierce glare. Some chose to stay on in Mississippi. Those that so desired, he took to Boston, helped them find lodging and gainful employment, and set them free.

Twenty-six years before, the very first beneficiary of his largess had been a woman named Mildred. He embarked from Memphis with her and her daughter, but Mildred took sick on the journey and died, as his own mother had so many years before. He buried her near St. Louis and brought her baby with him to Boston, where he raised her as his own. Bonnie Cafferty—when she was 10, she had asked if she might take his name—had come to love the tall, raw-boned man like the father whose name she never knew, for saving her from a lifetime of scars. When he died, she had mourned him unreservedly.