The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart (8 page)

D
AY AFTER DAY THE DREARY GRAY CONTINUED
, and the rain kept falling from the sky. Everything was gray and brown. The two brown rivers and lake of water surrounding us met the endless gray of the rain and sky off in the distance in every direction you looked, broken only in a few places by trees.

And still the water from the lakes surrounding us from the river and Katie’s stream kept rising and getting closer and closer to the house. Three days after Katie and I had gone to look at it, the water from the main river had not only reached the furthermost slave cabin, it had completely covered the porch and floor and was rising up the outside of the wall and making its way to the others. On the other side of the house, the lake from the stream that went through Katie’s secret place in the woods was lapping at the grass and trees in front of the house only a couple hundred feet from the porch.

But as frightening as it was to watch the water getting nearer and nearer, the worst of it was that the water was now trickling into the barn from the low-lying pasture next to it. That field wasn’t connected to the river itself but had become a little lake of its own just from the rain. The cows were all clustered at the open and covered end of the barn where they could get out of the weather. We had no choice but to let the pigs take care of themselves in the rain and mud, getting what shelter they could in the little pig shed, where they crowded in on top of each other at night. Trying to feed them was horrible and messy but we did what we could. I suppose they were fat enough that a few days without food wasn’t going to hurt them anyway. And there was certainly plenty of water in all the troughs!

The main problem was the five horses. Their stables too were half covered from an overhanging roof of the barn and opened into the outside pasture, where they mostly stayed when it was nice. But even the covered area sat at the low side of the barn, and it was the first to get flooded by the water trickling in from the fields. Almost from the first of the flood we’d had no choice but to take them all the way into the barn. There wasn’t much room with all the equipment and the two full wagons of cotton, but there was no other place for them to stay.

But as the storm continued, though the cows made a terrible racket too, we knew the horses were most miserable of all. You could tell they were getting fidgety and restless, and though I was no expert about horses, I knew that when they got nervous they also got dangerous. Dangerous to themselves and to everyone else. And now with water seeping into the barn and turning the hard-packed dirt floor into a mass of mud, there was hardly a dry place for the horses to stand, and sometimes their hooves were two or three inches deep in mud and water because they didn’t have the sense to stand in the few dry places left.

It was Aleta who surprised us with how much she knew about horses by alerting us to the danger they were in.

She had bundled up in hat, raincoat, and galoshes to go out one morning and help me feed the animals. As we were feeding the horses in the barn, she spoke up.

“The horses’ feet are wet,” she said.

“I reckon everything’s wet,” I laughed, thinking nothing of it.

“It’s not good for them to be wet,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Their hooves can rot and get infected.”

“How do you know?”

“My daddy shoes horses. He knows all about them and I listen to what he says when he’s talking to people. He says there’s nothing worse than a horse with foot rot.”

“What happens?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Aleta answered. “But I’ve heard him say that horses aren’t like other animals, and that they need special care.”

I knew that too. Whatever made horses so beautiful and majestic also made them delicate. ‘

‘What should we do?” I asked.

“I don’t know, get them someplace where it’s dry.”

“But there is no place that’s dry,” I said.

“There’s the front of the house. It’s grassy there and isn’t so muddy.”

“But it’s raining. They’d get soaking wet and would still be standing in the wet. And the water’s only a stone’s throw from the house.”

“They could go up on the big front porch.”

“On the porch!” I said.

“It’s dry and their feet wouldn’t get wet.”

It sounded like a crazy notion to me. But if she was right about their feet, then I reckoned it was something that was worth thinking about. Later that same day I told Katie what Aleta had said and we went out through the parlor onto the front porch that looked out through the trees across the expanse of brown water.

The porch was huge and went the whole width of the front of the house and even around both sides between the big white columns and walls of the house.

“I think we could do it, Mayme,” said Katie. “There’s plenty of room for them here. They’d have more dry space than they do in the barn.”

“But how would we keep them here?” I asked.

“Where else would they go? Everywhere else is wet.

They wouldn’t go out in the rain or where the water is over there, would they? Wouldn’t they just stay on the porch to keep dry?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes animals have minds of their own. They can be ornery. I don’t know … maybe it’s worth a try.”

“How would we get them up on the porch?” asked Katie. “What if they don’t want to go up on the boards?”

“You put oats there,” said Aleta, who had been following us and listening to every word we said. “I heard my papa say that a horse will always follow feed if it gets hungry enough.”

Katie and I looked at each other.

“I reckon it’s worth a try,” I said.

So we set off to start making preparations. In an hour we had lugged a small feed trough around to the front of the house and put a bucket filled with water beside it. Then we dumped a bucketful of oats in the trough.

“Shall we bring the horses from the barn?” said Katie excitedly. I guess we were all excited just to have something to do after all the dreary days of endless rain.

“Probably not all at once,” I said. “We better let them get used to it a little at a time. Horses can get mighty jumpy when they get nervous.”

“Let’s bring one or two, then,” she said as we walked back around to the barn still wearing our rain clothes. “Red and Dover are older and calm most of the time.”

“That’s good,” I said. “We’ll start with them and when they get used to it, we’ll bring the other three.”

Five minutes later I had one of the big barn doors open and Katie was leading the two horses out with ropes around their necks. She was talking gently to them, but they seemed happy enough to go with her and get out of the barn, where they’d been cooped up so long.

They snorted and moved around as if the fresh air and rain and wind was filling them with energy. We walked around the house to the front, their hooves thudding and sloshing in the mud and wet grass.

We reached the steps leading up to the porch. There were only three steps.

The two horses hesitated as Katie walked up onto the porch. She gently tugged on the rope and then they came. But you could tell they didn’t like the idea of the steps or the feel of the wood beneath their hooves. They clomped up all agitated and fidgety, then one of them looked like it was going to rear.

“Look out, Katie!” I yelled.

“Here, Mayme, take Red,” she called back to me, tossing me the rope. “—Dover … Dover,” she went on to the skittish horse, “it’s all right … there are some oats over here.”

But by then Dover was moving all about, his feet kicking and clattering and making a racket on the wood.

Luckily I’d managed to get Red’s nose stuffed into the trough where we’d put the oats and I gently tied the rope around one of the porch columns and went to try to help Katie. Aleta, who had been following us, now began stroking Red’s nose and talking to her.

But Dover was getting more and more agitated every second.

“I don’t know why he’s so nervous,” said Katie. “I don’t think this was such a good idea! We need to get him off the porch so he can calm down!”

I couldn’t have agreed more. As content as Red seemed to be to eat oats out of the rain up on the porch, Dover was dangerously excited.

But just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse—they did.

Emma had been upstairs trying to get William to sleep during all the commotion and didn’t know what we were doing.

All of a sudden the front door of the house opened and out she walked, leaving the door wide open.

“What all dis racket?” she began, bumping straight into a huge brown flank that had backed up a couple steps just at the moment she’d come through the door.

“Laws almighty … what dis fool horse—”

But she didn’t have the chance to say anything else. And neither did the rest of us, for that matter.

Spooked all the more by Emma’s sudden appearance on the other side of him from where Katie was trying to calm him down, Dover reared and whinnied and yanked the rope from Katie’s hand. The next instant he bolted past Emma and through the open door, and disappeared into the house.

“Oh no!” cried Katie. “Mayme!”

We ran inside after him, Emma following us, babbling away with a flurry of questions.

Dover was clomping around the parlor in a frenzy of snorting and terrified whinnies and prancing hooves. He’d already emptied himself and made a big mess on the carpet and was in danger of breaking all the furniture and hurting himself really bad.

“Emma,” I said, “please go back outside.”

“But, Miz Mayme, what’s—” ‘

‘Please, Emma … right now.”

Fortunately for all of us, she was too scared to argue anymore and went back outside.

“We’ve got to calm him down!” I cried to Katie.

“How, Mayme!”

“Can you get the halter?”

“I’m trying … let’s sit down, Mayme. Let’s both sit down and maybe that will calm him some.”

Anything was worth a try. We sat down and stopped talking. By then he’d already upset several upright chairs and I was afraid he might even knock over the gun cabinet. He continued to prance around the room but gradually began to settle down. We kept sitting, and finally he seemed to notice Katie and began snorting and slowly walking over to her. Katie reached out a hand. Dover snorted and sniffed at it as gradually Katie started stroking his nose. Still we just sat to let him calm down some more. Finally Katie stood, the rope now in her hand again, and led him back outside through the door, straight off the porch, and down onto the wet grass.

I followed just in time to see Dover break loose again, obviously preferring the wet and rain to the parlor, and bolt across the grass in a full gallop. He wasn’t able to go far, however. Within a few seconds he had run out of grass and was splashing through the flood-lake amongst the trees.

Katie and I just stood watching, relieved to have him off the porch and out of the house. Then Aleta, who had been stroking Red’s long nose the whole time, spoke up.

“Somebody’s coming,” she said.

H
ENRY

10

H
ENRY HAD BEEN WORRYING ABOUT US EVER
since a couple days after he’d left us the day the rain had started. Hearing how bad the flood was and about several of the other plantations reported to be underwater, he’d gotten more and more concerned with every day that passed.

Where he’d gotten the small boat, and how he had managed to maneuver it across the huge expanse of water without getting swept into the river on the other side of the house, I couldn’t imagine.

But there he was, rain pouring down on him, rowing toward us over the water!

“It’s Henry!” cried Katie.

She ran from the porch and across the grass toward him. She kept going right into the water and walked as far as she could until the water was up to her knees and completely over the tops of her galoshes.

“Henry … Henry!” she called when she could go no farther.

When he was close enough he tossed her a rope and she pulled on it and began trudging back toward the house, tugging on it as she went.

Two or three minutes later, she and Henry were walking toward the rest of us across the grass. Katie was beaming, almost as if she’d rescued him from the flood.

“I figgered I oughta see how you ladies wuz gettin’ on wiff all dis rain,” he said. “I don’ mind tellin’ you dat me an’ Jeremiah wuz a mite worried.”

“So were we!” laughed Katie.

“But how did you get here?” I asked.

Henry began to chuckle. “Dat wuz a mite ob a challenge, all right,” he said. “Let’s jes’ say I went da long way roun’, up dere pas’ da Thurston place, den floated down dis way an’ made my way ’cross all dat water afore da river could git me.—So has dis flood done you no harm roun’ Rosewood?”

“No, we’re fine,” said Katie. “Aren’t we, Mayme?”

“I reckon so … all except for the horses,” I added, laughing.

“I see one ob dem up dere on da porch, an’ anudder runnin’ ’bout yonder. What dey doin’ dere?”

“We thought they might be safer out of the barn, where it was dry,” said Katie, who then briefly told Henry what we’d tried to do.

“An’ jes’ what put a noshun like dat inter yo heads, Miz Kathleen?”