The Rebel Wife (29 page)

In Eli’s office, I sit again in his chair. Simon offered it to me as a matter of course, as the most natural thing in the world. There is no sense to be made of his stories. Eli working for Judge all those years. Eli protecting Judge’s secrets? That must have been the only thing that ended up protecting Eli from Judge and from the Knights of the White Cross. But it could not protect Simon—or at least it protected him to a different degree. So many Negro men have been killed for less. Like Rachel’s brother-in-law.

Rachel must not be sleeping now, either. How could she, with their departure set for tomorrow? She deserves more than what I did for her tonight. I swear she saved my life when Henry was born. She surely deserves better. Eli would have done better by her. I am ashamed of myself. Ashamed of listening to Bama about Henry and Little John. Ashamed of being so lost to myself that I did not see these other things, of accepting it all as the way things are. As the way they should be. That is what Judge would have me do—accept his ordering of the world as he dictates it.

Eli sat in this chair across from men and women, more black than white, but certainly his share of white men seeking help or favors. Did he do it without a thought? Did he think that he was doing right? What was it all for? Judge would say Eli did it for power and gain. Eli did make money. He did get power. Was there more in it than that? Even if he didn’t intend it? But he was a slave trader. He hunted people down. And Simon helped him. He hunted Simon down and kept him. Who was Eli really? Who are we, any of us?

All of these secret panels. What was this room to him? This house? My hand gropes in the drawer for the spring that reveals the false bottom, but I can’t find it. The walls are smooth under the windows. There are wooden panels under the bookshelves on the inside wall. Eli’s gun closet. Small panels that don’t even appear to be doors, yet with slight pressure, they swing open to reveal a dozen guns mounted on pegs. Tiny derringers and larger guns from the war, Colts and Remingtons. The handle of a pistol is made of mottled horn colored black and white. The barrel and cylinder are shiny even in the shadows. It feels heavy in my hand. The thin crescent moon casts pale light over the garden, making it appear as if it is under dark water.

Simon has a gun. Unlike most of the colored people. Their weapons were all taken from them. All those colored men who went away to the war. Who died in the fighting. And the rest who came home thinking they had won freedom. They’re not really free, like Rachel said. They have to leave here to be free. Like me. Do I have to leave here? If only we could find that money.

The sliver of moon shines off the barrel with a dull glimmer. I raise the gun and aim as if I am going to fire it. Does Rachel have a gun? Or Big John? How could they? The roads can’t be safe for a group of colored people emigrating west. She could use a gun. She doesn’t seem like a person who would be afraid of firing it. I want to see her once more before she goes. She saved my life when Henry was born, I am sure of it. I should go to her. I cannot leave things as they are. Eli would have been better to her than I have been. I can at least try.

I almost wish I were going with them. Going away from Judge and Greer and Buck. If only I had that money. We could get away for a while—and if the mill weren’t closed, I might never have to come back. But where else could the money be? We should go to the mill again. There must be a way to get into Eli’s office alone.

In my room, the blue bottles look at me like a pair of eyes. Perhaps I should take the gun and shoot them out. I can’t, that would be like shooting myself. No, I could shoot them, and my body would still be whole. If only I could sleep. Just a drop of it in a glass of water. Just one drop to help me sleep. That would not be too much. Just to ease me out of this anxiety.

I won’t. Rachel would not succumb like this. I must be up early to see her. I owe her that. I almost died the day Henry was born. Five years ago. Less—he was born in August, the hottest month of the year. He was early, the doctor said. I was here in this room with the pink-ribboned wallpaper, confined away, and yet there seemed to be so many people around me.

I labored for hours in this bed. Rachel and Emma tied a rope between the posts of the headboard for me to grip when the pains came, and Rachel gave me a slat of smooth wood marked by teeth from other women who had used it. The spasms came hard and went on for hours. A blur of sweat and blood and agony. The bedclothes were soaked, and my nightdress, too, that was pushed up over my knees so that I lay shamelessly exposed before Mama and the servants and Dr. Greer. More than once, he asked Emma and Rachel to leave, but I shook my head in panic, wild with pain and exhaustion and, more than anything else, fear. I was sure that I was dying.

The room was hot. The windows were shut tight, and candles guttered in the steamy atmosphere, thick with the stench of sweat and excrement. Mama sat by the bed, worrying herself and me with a handkerchief always at her eyes or under her nose. I could smell the choking, putrid scent of the cologne water she had soaked it in. Lemon verbena, an odor that I cannot abide to this day. Mama looked disapprovingly at Rachel and Emma. She clucked her tongue and shook her head and called it silliness. I was afraid. I could not listen to her. I could not allow her to take charge. After I cursed at her to leave Emma alone, she and the doctor resigned themselves to Emma and Rachel’s presence. Emma took cool rags and washed my face down, murmuring to me to keep breathing, that it would be over soon.

I heard Rachel arguing with Dr. Greer. She wanted to give me a cold tea she had made from roots, but he refused and dosed me with tiny grains of calomel that gave me convulsions between the contractions. I began vomiting.

“To hurry the child on,” he said, his red whiskers wagging over my face. I felt hot and suffocated and sick. The light of the room was a blur. It seemed to move against the walls like a magic lantern. I felt dizzy and would have cried if there were tears left in me after the sweating and sickness.

The waves of pain came crashing over me. My muscles flexed. I had no strength to reach for the rope. Emma and Rachel each took a hand and told me to squeeze as hard and as tight as I could. Dr. Greer knelt at the end of the bed, looking between my legs, and I whimpered in shame and suffering. God, the horrible indignity, the shame and awfulness of it. That shame seems so ridiculous now. But the pain, as if each muscle were stretched taut to snapping. I cried out but could not hear myself or feel the sound come out of my throat. The pressure in my belly, the hard flexing pressure, like red-hot hammers beating down on me all at once. Dr. Greer said, “I see the head. He’s coming.” And I thought, My God, it’s a boy. It’s a baby boy. But Greer could not have known then, he could not have seen until minutes later or hours. I could not tell the passage of time, only the screaming pain and those hands over mine. That was all I could tell, just the grip of the black hands in mine as I pushed harder and harder. Not pushing really at all, squeezing, pulsing, and panting out my breath, the desperate desire to expel this thing from my body and to survive. To outlive this moment. To try to forget it like everything else. And then there was quiet. That live stabbing pain was dead, and instead I felt a raw throbbing in its place. I was alive. I looked down at the blood-soaked nightdress and sheets, and Dr. Greer held this small purple animal in his bare hands. He dangled him by one leg.

It was a boy, my God, it was a little boy, and the pale and purple cord ran from his belly back inside of me. Dr. Greer slapped his rump and the baby boy—Henry, named Henry like my father—he let out a wail like a rebel yell. A wild holler that filled the room. I could hear Eli’s feet pacing outside, just outside, excited. I didn’t want to see him. I wanted Henry. To hold him. To see if he was real, if he was truly alive, this screaming red and purple thing, slick and wet and alive. Dr. Greer cut the cord and Henry wailed. Rachel bundled him quickly in cotton blankets and brought him to me. I could have cried again but for my weariness and shock.

Mama leaned in and looked at him. “He’s a screaming thing,” she said. “He’ll get bigger, I suppose. When Hill was born, he was a little giant. He nearly killed me, but what a cry he had.” We both looked up because Rachel and the doctor were arguing again. It was a surprise to me to hear a servant girl argue with a doctor.

Emma sat at my other side and smiled at me and the baby. She held out a finger to him, played with his tiny hand. He grasped her finger, and she looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, Miss Gus, Rachel knows what she’s saying. Her mama birthed more babies than Dr. Greer.”

Dr. Greer didn’t hear, though. He was red-faced like the baby, and Rachel stood in front of him, her arms crossed and her face set hard and determined.

“You ain’t cutting her with that thing,” she said, and she pointed at a scarificator in his hand.

“You nigger fool,” he said furiously. “Get out of the way. If she doesn’t get bled immediately, she could die.” The doctor held a small wooden box in his hand. It had a spring lever that activated a row of tiny razors. When the lever was tripped, the little blades popped up, cutting a row of incisions about an inch long, freeing the blood from an engorged area. Dr. Greer is a committed bleeder, and bleeding the fresh wounds of a new mother after childbirth is a common practice for him. He wanted to place the scarificator between my legs and cut me. He insisted that the birthing forced blood down there, and now it was concentrated and needed to be relieved. Rachel was adamant.

“You stupid girl, get out of here,” Mama said, standing up. “This is none of your affair.” But I shook my head and Emma held my hand.

“No, sir,” Rachel said to Greer, nearly shouting. “Her flux should be packed onto her wounds to make it heal. How many women have you killed with your cutting machine?”

I shook my head again but could not speak. I knew only that I did not want to bleed anymore.

Greer’s face was thunderous. He went to the hall and got Eli. They stood over me, and Eli beamed with pride. He had a son.

Mama stood up and said to him as he approached the bed, “Mr. Branson, my daughter has borne you a little king.” She was smiling and so was Eli, but Greer frowned. He pointed his finger at Rachel and said ugly things. She stood solid and unmoved.

Rachel said, “Ask Miss Gus what she wants.” Greer scoffed at the idea. I could barely think myself.

Eli looked at me and I shook my head at him, looking into his blue eyes rimmed with pale lashes. Milky eyes, washed out and blurred from that horrible night. I shook my head again and said, “Rachel.” I couldn’t say more, but he understood. He took Greer out into the hall, and they raised their voices at each other until Greer finally left.

Mama stayed with me while Rachel and Emma banded the flux between my legs. Then they left, touching Henry first, playing with his little hands. Rachel whispered over Henry a chant that was like some sort of blessing. And then I was alone with Mama and the baby.

“You two should sleep,” she said after the servants had left the room. “You’ve been through enough.” Mama picked up her knitting that she had in a sewing bag, and she began work on a cap and jacket for the baby in gray yarn. “You’re a mother now, Augusta,” she said, her needles clicking together. “So I feel obligated to tell you, mother to mother, that you should be careful of Emma.” I looked at her weakly, not sure I understood what she was saying.

“Yes. You love Emma. She is a part of our family, but she’s not our blood. Don’t forget that. Ever since she lost her own children, she has been unnaturally fixated on mine.”

I must have looked confused, unsure, because Mama put down her knitting.

“Yes, Augusta, it’s true,” she said. “It was just before you were born. Emma had two babies. Two boys. Twins. I wasn’t going to have some screaming babies in the house upsetting us both, so I had your father send her down to Point Place. They got whooping cough or something and died. Both of them. It was a bad winter for sickness. She came back, and God knows she had enough milk for you and her others, too, if they had lived. Anyway, it’s all in the past. But you should be mindful of it.”

I nodded and turned back to Henry, sleeping quietly, still coated in a slick red wash, so tiny and delicate. The breath came out through his tiny nose. His nostrils flared open with each tiny exhale. I wrapped the blanket tighter around him and pulled him close on my chest, hugging him to me, watching him sleep until I, too, lost consciousness.

LIGHT HAS SLOWLY CREPT
into my room, thin and gray, so that I can see enough to dress myself. Emma will be up soon and so will Henry. Emma will tend to him while I am gone. The gun and a gold chain are in my pocket. Now Simon must take me to Rachel. I have been so impatient for the sun to rise that I have barely slept these past few hours. I think of nothing but Rachel. I only hope we get there in time.

They will be gathering up in the North Ward, piling their belongings into wagons for the trip to Nashville, where they will join other Negroes who are leaving the South. They will travel by wagon to St. Louis and then across Missouri to Kansas. There have been many colored families who have passed through Albion on their way west. Sometimes riverboats will not accept them, or they will be barred passage at river crossings. There are men like Judge who are nervous about these emigrants. They see the men and women who plow and pick cotton leaving. Without them, who will labor on the land?

Rachel will make her way. She is strong and tough, like my Blackwood grandmother. She will make a better farmer’s wife than she did a servant. I will make up for what I should have said last night.

The air outside is damp and warm. The sun is beginning to crest above the trees. No rain after all. No respite, either. The heat has settled in with the same oppressive force. The traces of mist that hang around the trees have been singed away by the sunlight.

I knock lightly at the outside door of the carriage house.

Emma’s attic window is open. There is no movement inside.