Stand the Storm (34 page)

Again and again Annie saw the rosy times gone and again and again she faced the sight that must have been: Gabriel and Mary smashed on rocks and battered to death against them and drowned. They were close to home and had become careless or unlucky or pompous in their joy of their daughters. They had died so nearby that their bodies were recovered and turned over to their people in complete defiance of the probable.

The horse had misstepped at the Virginia side of the bridge to cross into Georgetown. She, too, had forgotten herself in excitement to be home. The wagon had tipped for being unevenly weighted. On the road to Hampton the wagon was burdened with wares and the girls’ belongings. It had become lighter when they left off the daughters at Hampton. Joy and pride had buoyed their return trip, though Mary had cried at leaving the girls. It was her own idea to send them for schooling, but the separation was punishing. Now she was sensitive of Gabriel’s annoyance at her crying.

“Clam up, Mary. Quiet yourself. We have done as you wanted. We have left them to their schooling. When you see them again they will be women like yourself,” Gabriel had said gruffly. But in the next moment he had pinched her arm and laughed at her crying. “No more, old girl. You have other chickens at home.”

Mary’s answer had been to nod and sniffle and paw at her own face to dry it.

The wagon had turned over on the slide down to the riverbank. At the bottom of the bridge, the horse had regained her feet and, confused, plunged into the water, pulling the shreds of the buckboard and with it Gabriel and Mary clinging. This dashing had battered the legs of the animal on rocks and had cut the things she towed through the rough, stirring up bloody foam.

Ah! He was cut up! Both were. Annie gave over dressing the bodies to the mortician, for she could not look upon them. The sight rendered her silent—grudging with her words. She then slipped into a narrow precinct as she’d done during the war. She gave out her directives as to the work, but said little more.

Long ago in Gabriel’s childhood, Annie had all of him in her hands. Did she think that her first and foremost handling of him meant she could always have him so? Yes, she did. A mother thinks so. She recollected the momentary hardness of his tiny penis when she first put his heels in warm water. She pinched his scrotum and teased him and he kicked his fat legs, splashing water in her face and shushing pee over her neck and breasts. This renegade thought she drove off quickly, but wanted to savor some. If Gabriel were like his father, his member would be shrunk in the laying out. The liveliness gone from it! Huh! Death, the thief! Death will snatch up everything —even what the master covets. Ha! ’Tis a comfort to the hard-suffering ones!

Annie feared herself in danger of being forgetful of Gabriel. A silly panic! His stamp was upon her. She would have mental pictures of him and phantom words and potent hauntings for all her days when she lay down to sleep. This was certain! He had cut her just as she had cut him.

And still the sensation of his little body knifing through her unused womb—opening her up and changing her body forever—returned in memory. The desperate, fearful inevitability of it was what caused her crying and moaning testimony. But, too, there was the twitching of pleasure that seemed as if she were feeling what Bell felt in his shuddering climax and the same as the other one that grunted and sweated. The sullen midwife cut her eyes sideways at Annie, but was occupied to catch the child who worked his way to daylight between Annie’s thighs with such agency. This little bitty one changed her body more and more completely than the others.

Annie touched her privacy and thought of her babe. Oh! This one would teach her her own body again at this advanced time? Recollecting Gabriel brought her back to her own body. And the exercise of it puzzled her. The thoughts coming were fearsome. It was confusing to feel herself thinking, dreaming of Gabriel, her son, this way. Beyond the veil what relation is there? Longing for the loved one has no cast—it is only longing, pulling, piercing, and skewering.

And then she feared being forgetful of the time before Gabriel was born—before he had come to change her life. Between these times there was only left the present time of painful loss. Annie was stuck and planted in a hurting present. She felt the pain of it as a knife blade in her chest. She was forfeit of half her life without Son Gabriel! Mary! Mary! Mary!—an afterthought—shameful that Mary was an appendage to her thoughts. Beloved Mary had perished alongside her husband, leaving all of her little chickens! Oh, Mary! Oh, Gabriel! Annie keened their names, but it was Gabriel that she mourned.

He was gone and dead now. The cruel joke had been played. Look here. Look there. Around the corner comes the trouble and for that one brief moment your head is turned and lifelong caring is gone for naught. He was gone. Was there yeast in her to keep on—to gather up these others and go on? Through a bad headland they had all come. Yet it was now—when all was calm and quiet and looking forward—that Gabriel and Mary had died? Now that the cruel turn had come?

Annie had long been a patient bitch alert to trouble, poised to lash out to keep him safe—to come to his defense. For so long she had been caring for Gabriel. She’d shorted Ellen in looking out for Gabriel because she reasoned that the man—-because he was a man—needed more of her maternal agency. She had loosed him to come to the city and then she had loosed him to the war and fighting because of the times. She’d had no choice but see him go. He was a man she had made to stand on his own legs and go and do and he followed that trail. She’d suffered without him, but took it as her portion. She put little hope in his survival in the war, for their luck had been so good thus far—in the scheme of things. It surely had been used up. But he’d surprised her—delighted her. Son Gabriel had come up with more luck. He had come back from war with all of himself intact. His survival was the most improbable turn of their lives until this last inexplicable turn.

With once sharp, clear eyes going toward rheumy, Jonathan Ridley came to inventory the shop directly after Gabriel’s funeral. Neither an early arrival nor one who stayed to see the dirt cast on the coffins, Ridley waited in the tailor shop for Annie and the others to return. His blurry eyesight and uncertain speech were most often achieved at late afternoon. But this day had begun early and he’d fortified well with ale before the service and the cemetery. He expected to be forced to look at Sewing Annie and her brood. He’d endured the gaudy funeral they concocted for Gabriel and his woman.

The one most distasteful was the one he tried to avoid: Sewing Annie. But she dominated the funeral proceedings. She was central to the mourning. That ugly, old amulet! His silly wife had wailed in sympathy with the old woman. She’d said how she imagined Sewing Annie’s heart to be broken to lose her precious Gabriel.

He was happy for the chance to sneer at his wife’s idiocy. “ ’Tis clear you know nothing of these niggers. That old thing will never give over to grief. She will never be like your sister-in-law. She’ll never lie abed sniveling for something that can’t be changed! She will miss her Gabriel to lean on, but she’ll not pine for him.” By his account the true cost of war had been just this: gone the fecund loins and the happy women. All that was left were the silly and the weak and the worthless slaves free to do as they wished!

Annie was the first one who turned to leave the cemetery, staying only to witness the first dirt to be thrown. This privilege she gave to Gabriel’s own girl, Naomi, the oldest and strongest of them. The girl did rise up firmly and toss a hand of dirt for each of them: Mary, then Gabriel. At this signal Annie turned to walk away and the obedient girls followed. They wore pleated black sashes across their bodices as though they were widows. Annie regretted the exhaustion of her long-preserved black cloth, but she used the last virginal clod of it on these banners and the drapes for the funeral bunting.

Ah, and the funeral dress did live again! The rescued remains of Widow Campbell’s mourning dress were brought forth. Annie had been a bigger-sized woman once, too, when last she wore this. Now the garment hung from her.

Annie led them a parade—promenaded from the graveyard without turning her head to note what she passed. Daniel Joshua caught her elbow and tried to guide her, or keep her steady, but his ballast was not needed, for she was firm. She continued on the thoroughfare straight to the front shop window. She stopped and seemed to eye the door, then eye the window. She saw Ridley seated inside the shop and looked at him impertinently. He returned the look and stayed in his seat. She remained looking through the window at him defiantly—contrary to all accepted custom. She saw him sitting—low in the chair—in some measure collapsed. The girls stood behind her, well hidden from view, though they’d not been told to do so. Daniel Joshua was prudent and quiet and smaller in stature in his mourning dress and made himself invisible behind Annie. She turned her head as if considering entering through the front door—as if taking her own counsel on the issue. She watched Ridley’s face awhile through the picture glass, but gave up the menace. She turned about and walked to the back of the store. She walked into her precinct and took possession there.

In his state of drunk and resignation, Ridley was easily turned away from the things that Annie coveted—the belongings in the shop that were Gabriel’s. He put his hand to a store of linens and quilts and coverlets and his gesture stung her.

“No!” Annie hollered at him because she’d lost all care for caution. She marched about the room pointing and designating which things belonged to the Coatses. The master was so completely affronted that he could not speak. Nothing more important could be lost to her than Gabriel. He was all and all was gone. No more need for caution or care.

And the task was accomplished, for Ridley was put back on his heels and flinched at the vehemence in Annie’s voice.

“Don’t touch!” she screamed. It stopped him. For the first time some word or movement of hers had stopped this man. The words were simple, emphatic, but they were momentous in her mouth. For the first time a flame of true anger came forth and she braced for a quick, paralyzing reprimand. Annie put her hands on her hips and opened her chest to him, facing for a blow and wanting to take it full on and at once—to be struck and die on the spot.

Ridley’s face was dumb. His eyes were puzzled rather than flashing angry. He looked hard at her as if straining to be certain it was Annie who had spoken. She started to belch and snort with stamping her feet, and hot tears came out of her eyes, for it was with great strength that she held from striking him. Ridley’s look continued incredulous. He thought he saw froth at her lips. The sight caused him to waver—to pull back his hand. Annie bared her teeth at him and he noted chaff in her hair and that her skirt was soiled and frayed at the hem where it dragged the ground. A puzzling Annie! Just come from the funeral and disheveled. Ridley retreated from her. He left her to her piles of things touched by Gabriel.

“A good thing gone and wasted, your Gabriel,” Jonathan Ridley said from the door. “A good effort made and then no fruit. Go off, old woman,” he said to her, who was a girl under him the first time he put his full manliness in her mouth. Was he so old now that he did not remember this?

What had been between them came back into her mind in a spit. It was a bestial picture! Him a rigid dowel and rocking her cheeks and pounding her throat—him letting his slop down her throat and over her face.

“If you use your teeth, I will throttle you,” he had seethed, though his eyes were bright-flecked. These eyes had danced a tarantella in dark-blue passion as he had plunged himself down her throat.

Slumped and wallowing now, Ridley sneered again, “Take what you want and go off. A pity you pinned all of your hopes on this pup. Now you are old to start again. ’Twould be a kindness to give you the quilts and bed linens and such. ’Tis your boon, old gal,” he slung at her. His stomach rested on what used to be his heroic thighs, and Annie thought to kick him or lunge at him and cut his gut open. But she did not. A bone of caution broke through all else. The dog backed off and she, the bitch, crawled forward to take her advantage. She took the linen treasures.

“Waste no water on it. Swab yourself and think no more of it,” Knitting Annie had said to her. Because she had followed and watched, the old woman knew the young girl had come to no especial harm from Ridley. She had escaped the fate of another such one with sad little milk teeth that had collapsed and died with his knob in her mouth—choked to death in the midst of the master’s pleasure.

Annie credited her stand as her one act of defiance of Jonathan Ridley. But she’d defied him first when she went to Bell with love and permanence. This was the thing he’d robbed the women of—the slave women on his place—a hearth fire and their own children ringing it. Ridley split and splintered children in his speculations and caprice, even children he’d fathered. Annie stole that from him—her Gabriel. Bell was lost, but she’d kept Gabriel beside herself and trained him up some measure. This had been her first defiance.

Annie looked at Ridley’s lazy belly now and she remembered him otherwise. He’d been a strong and demanding stallion once. His dangling bits and pieces had some beauty in those youthful days. He was slyly admired by some of his concubines on the place. Vain of his attentions, they competed to brag on him and his endowments and his stamina.

He had done the other for Annie first, too. On one night when she was a girl—a night of big hilarity at the end of putting up a crop of beans—all hands were singing and dancing. She stood at the edge of the crowd of laughers and singers, for she was reticent. She had never been raucously gay and capricious. She was wedded to the solitary work at Knitting Annie’s side. She kept away from the circles of big fun. Ridley came behind her and grabbed and clamped on her upper arm. He drew her away from the others and smashed his fist into her chin and stunned her. When she dropped he hoisted her to his shoulder and took her into the loom house. There he lashed her to the spinning mule and had her upon the wheel.