Wash (35 page)
He set his sights on Memphis next, no matter how deep Chickasaw Bluffs sat inside Indian Territory. Once he secured the federal commission to draw the boundary line, he and his partners acquired the title soon enough. It was a substantial investment but promised to yield a good return. They drew up a map and marked out lots in preparation for the upcoming sale. Lobbied the commissioners hard to make sure they made Memphis the county seat.
But now they’ve just denied him. After all that money spent and liquor sent, he’s ridden all the way to Nashville to be told that the commissioners want some dusty spot in the middle of nowhere for the county seat instead. They insisted the other town was more central than Memphis but Richardson suspects they did it mainly to thwart him.
Act like you know was what his father always said to do, but this time it didn’t work.
Seventy years old and Richardson dreads having to write his father about losing the county seat. He can already hear him saying opportunity lies all around, you have only to bend it to your hand. The old man is nearly ninety himself but keeps writing that he wants to visit. Even take a tour of Memphis. Richardson can only imagine what he’ll have to say when he sees the second family store sitting in its sea of mud, next to the old fort tilting like a crooked tooth at the top of the steep slick embankment that is still the only way up from the river.
Memphis will grow but not as fast as he’d hoped. Not as fast as he needs it to, with all the lots he has to sell and the sale right around the corner. Not much time to recover from this blow. Maybe he does need another traveling negro and soon. Just not another Nero. It’s either that or find a way to wring more money out of Wash.
His hands chill from being held for so long under the mountain coolness of the water but he does not move them. He turns his mind toward the ache that comes from the cold, hoping the pain can tell him something. At least this pain is located. Specific. Unlike that other ache which coils around him like smoke and is difficult to understand.
He comes to by realizing he’s damp all down his front. Some of the drops glancing off his hands have been falling onto the moss but almost as many have been falling on his breeches and his boots are soaked from the splashing. It strikes him once again how tired he is. Cold, wet and dirty, too.
He flings the water from his hands then wipes them dry on his dirty britches. Bolivar snaps his head up, knowing home is just over the next ridge. Wads of rich green grass with clods of dirt still attached swing from his mouth. Richardson tears the clods loose as he gathers the reins tight to keep the gelding from walking away while he mounts. He lifts his left foot to the stirrup and buries one hand in the horse’s thick black mane so he has a good grip. As he swings his leg over the horse’s back, sure enough, Bolivar starts off before Richardson gets settled in the saddle. Irritation rises sharp and hard, twining around the pain shooting from his hip through his ribcage that seems to be here to stay. He steers his horse toward home.
When he rides through his own gate, a motley little cluster of white people stands waiting for him. They’re on him as soon as his feet hit the ground. The taller of the two women steps forward saying they have papers for him to sign.
Papers for him to read first and then sign, he corrects her. He doesn’t yet know who these people are, or which case this is regarding, but he does know his hands need to be cleaner than this if they plan to file these documents at the statehouse.
He does not have to read very far down the paper the woman holds out to him before his eye catches on the name Charlotte. Damn that case. He has already sent the family of the murdered couple a check from the state, reimbursing them for the value of the woman, but apparently they’re already fighting over it. Needing it legitimized and in a hurry. He steps back, aggravated. They’d have all the time in the world if it was them owing him but with this state restitution money, they hover close.
Thank goodness for Emmaline. He sees her walking to the table under his biggest elm, carrrying a second basin of warm water with a clean white towel over her shoulder. He waves the group off with one small motion. They step back and fall quiet as he walks over to Emmaline’s two steaming basins.
The soap and the nailbrush lie right where they should and he feels her standing beside him as he lowers his hands in the warm water to scrub dirt so ground in he has to use the brush on his palms and knuckles too. He lifts his gritty hands from the now gray water, letting them drip well before lowering them into the next basin. Traces of soap scum spread across its clear surface. He bends to splash some of this cleaner water onto his face.
Straightening up, he lays his wet hands palm down on the towel Emmaline holds out for him. As much as this closeness to Richardson has cost Emmaline over the years, it has helped her protect her three grandsons so she intends to hold on to it. She folds the towel over the back of his hands and rubs them between the two layers. Not looking up at him once. Rubs between his fingers good and halfway up to his elbows then hands him the clean backside of the towel as if to say dry your own face.
Soon as he’s done, she takes the towel from him. He nods thank you but she has turned away. When he heads toward the group to deal with their business, he can hear the tearing sound of Emmaline pouring her basins of dirty water at the foot of the old elm.
No sooner does he get that paperwork sorted out than he finds himself walking in on the tail end of his wife’s Bible study. The ladies seem particularly flustered on this Wednesday because somehow they found themselves deep in the Song of Solomon. Their buzzing hums like bees and then falls quiet as a blanket when Richardson steps into the front hall where they stand gathering their things. His wife shoos them out quickly but the obvious discomfort some of the women show upon his arrival piques his interest. He steps close to ask Mary about it in a low voice with a small smile but all she says is I will not be baited.
Richardson makes it through dinner without mentioning the bad news about Memphis. He lets Mary carry the conversation as he counts his drinks and bides his time until he can go upstairs. These days, it is not until he retreats to his study with its window facing the big barn that he can start to know his own mind. He thinks if he can just get in there with the door shut behind him and a drink in his hand, he will be able to see more clearly. But he doesn’t know what he’s hunting and holing up like this puts him at the mercy of a past he’d just as soon keep buried.
The urge to be down in that dark barn talking to Wash tugs at his sleeve. But the last time he went, he’d felt eyes on him as soon as he rounded the corner. He paused to look up and saw Pallas sitting with Wash in the shadowed opening of the loft window. The pale soles of their bare feet hung from the ledge. They had looked down on him with faces so impassive Richardson could not bring himself to hold their gaze. He continued his circuit, acting like he was checking on things, even as all three of them knew better.
Once he came upon them so quietly that he heard them before they heard him. He couldn’t quite make out their words, just a rising and falling murmur scattered with pauses. Every now and again soft laughter. Some back and forth but then long stretches of one telling the other a story.
He had stood there, one hand resting on the side of the barn, just before rounding the corner, embarrassed to find himself eavesdropping but nevertheless straining to hear, wondering what in the hell they could keep talking about for so damn long. He considered trying to get closer then realized the nickering of the horses would give him away before his foot reached the second step.
That memory keeps Richardson in his study tonight. Probably just as well. As he flips through his letterbooks full of his own careful looping track, each page numbered, each letterbook dated and segregated by category, containing copies of all his correspondence, he can call everything right back to him. All the details he has attended to and all the managing he has done.
He savors that remembered feeling of competency. Each time he sat down to write one of these many letters, the task had felt doable. Even now, he can feel the effort he has put in, almost literally, like a physical substance, a layer of intention that lies over and above the layer of ink under his fingers.
He never has understood those businessmen who do not keep copies of their correspondence. Their complacency has always irritated him. It makes trustworthiness regarding prices per pound and interest rates uncertain, even among old friends. He knows he cannot remember those numbers in enough detail, not in the different markets, and he doubts they can. It occurs to him tonight for the first time that maybe they’ve been relying on him all along to keep track of everything for them and this irritates him even more.
Going through his carefully ordered papers used to make Richardson feel calm and more sure of his world. Like a channel boat pilot going over and over his maps of the river bottom until he can steer through the maze on a moonless night. It used to give him confidence but the more he has lived through, the less sure he has become.
Now, when he sits in the quiet middle of the night, flipping through his letterbooks, seeking the comfort of overview, it feels like so much spilling. All that time and effort and management, pouring across the page and running off the edges. Rereading his letters from this distance, he can see now that this recipient or that one had never truly understood the issue, neither its urgency nor its complexity. And sometimes, more often than he ever suspected, neither had he.
It is galling enough to be reminded of the relatively few marketplace miscalculations he has made over the years, selling cotton and tobacco too soon or in the wrong market, but the worst are his letters to all those military men and government officials, practically begging for an official inquiry into his conduct which would clear his name. He’d had no luck but he had kept at it nevertheless. For years.
Some of the letters he wrote during that time are unbearable to read, the cravenness so humbling, that Richardson finds himself reaching for his knife as he opens that one letterbook until its covers touch in the back and its pages splay open. He holds the covers together by their edges with one hand and uses the other hand to press his blade flush against the inner binding. This way, he can out the offending letter without leaving enough margin to tip off any future readers to what he has done. Unless they are reading so closely as to notice gaps in the page numbers, which Richardson now regrets having inked in.
The house has fallen quiet by the time he pulls out Wash’s book and the small packet of current bills and notes not yet deposited. He unfolds the notes and smooths the bills flat. He always spends some time counting and recounting before he sends the notes off, either south to New Orleans for more merchandise from his store or west to pay for Memphis.
Then he turns to the book. There are four letters lying unfolded inside its front cover. Letters from men requesting Wash’s services with several dates suggested. As soon as Richardson logs the details, he responds with a short confirmation but keeps his wording vague so that his letter will remain almost meaningless to anyone besides the recipient. After sealing and addressing his replies, he burns each request. Exactly as expected. Theirs is an open secret but they figure there’s no need to borrow trouble.
Even though the last of his work is completed, Richardson cannot bring himself to stand up from his desk. Going to bed feels like giving in. When it gets late like this, so late that there’s nothing left to do but lay his head down on his pillow next to his wife, once and again the same thing as it has been for the past thirty years, it feels like defeat.
He can tell himself over and over why he married Mary but all he can think about is sliding under the covers next to Susannah. It’s been nearly fifty years but he’s standing in one of the many rooms they took, looking at Susannah curled on the far side of the bed with her dark red gold hair spread across the pillow. He sets his papers down and watches her sleep as he unbuttons himself. Hangs his clothes loosely over the back of the chair and then steps quickly, tall and thin and pale, across the pool of lamplight. Bends to lift the heavy white cotton coverlet by its corner to slide in next to her, loops his arm gently around her hips and pulls her against him.
He buries his face in the nape of her neck as she murmurs in her sleep. As she relaxes into him, he reaches to turn down the lamp. The two of them lie there entwined, skin to skin, breathing into one another, so easy and relaxed and endless, the next thing he knows the rising sun beams through the window, bright and creamy in the cold morning grayness.
In his twenties, he’d been the best recruiter between Baltimore and Philadelphia, signing up men to fight his Revolution, and the work gave him more chances to see Susannah. She would slip away from home and ride to meet him dressed as a man. Wherever he was. And it had not mattered to her when he was taken prisoner in one of Washington’s bungled retreats and was sitting filthy and chained to Thompson on that stinking boat instead of soldiering through at Valley Forge like his brother David.
She’d come to see him anyway. Bursting with the news of their pregnancy. Wanting to make plans. Pick out names. But he had not known what it was she’d come to tell him so he’d had the guards turn her around. Hadn’t wanted Susannah to see him like that. Not until he could ride up to her parents’ house on his horse in his colors and carry her off.
She’d come because she had tried to contact him several times through his parents but his father made sure to let her letters fall by the wayside. Said he never had thought much of her people. When Richardson had first told his father about Susannah, the old man had cut him off, saying yes, but what will she bring you? His father had his own small empire outside Baltimore by then and wanted a more advantageous match for his eldest son. By the time his father finally wrote him to say she’d been by several times asking after him, their baby boy had already come and gone, dragging Susannah away with him.
