Wash (36 page)

Maybe they both would have made it if she’d had the right care but there was no knowing that now. Richardson had not even found out until a full year later when he was released and headed to her parents’ place first thing. But they didn’t let him step across their threshold. All they did was send him out in the country to the same maiden aunt they’d sent their daughter to for her confinement. So no one would know.

When the aunt finally came to the door, she didn’t invite him in either. She just handed him back the tied bundle of letters he’d sent Susannah from that prison ship. His letters full of his plans for their life together. But he’d been thinking only of himself and he hadn’t even known it. The last third of the letters hadn’t been opened.

He’d stood there in front of that maiden aunt’s house for a long time after she’d shut the door in his face, trying to let the truth of Susannah’s death sink in, but it never would. And it still hasn’t. Here he is, nearly fifty years later, drinking through the belly of the night so he won’t have to go to his own bed and discover once again that she is not in it.

He picks up the Bible that Mary keeps digging out from under piles of paper on his desk to set in plain view. He flips back and forth, hunting. The thin pages shudder and cling to his fingers. Candlelight falls across them and their red edges look stained. Eventually, he has to go to the table of contents to find the passage.

There it is.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

He draws in a ragged breath, touches his glass and reads on.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

This is what he hates about the Bible. Just as soon as you find a line that rings good and true, you bump right up against a knot. He continues skimming, prepared to be disappointed, and sure enough, there is the usual talk of kings and the upright. His eye catches on
I am black, but comely
but he forges ahead. Soon bored by the recitations of amounts of jewels, he’s about to give up. But he keeps reading one more line, just one more line. Then he falls into it as into Susannah’s long smooth back.

A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me
. . .

The passage strikes him so strongly he goes back over it several times. He does not realize he’s reading aloud until he hears himself say
our bed is green
. As he feels his voice move through his chest, his eyes swim and he is shaken. He closes the book and, for the first time in a long while, gives thanks. If not to God, then to something.

A yowling snarl rises close to the house, then another joins in, drawing him downstairs. By the time he and Emmaline and Mary gather outside the back door in the deep middle of the night, the two raccoons that trapped the big orange tomcat in the basement have made short work of him.

Richardson notices his wife staring at him, her broad face suddenly pleased above her long hair hanging still dark and young down the front of her nightgown. He glances down at himself, wondering what she sees, and realizes he still holds the Bible in his hand, with his index finger buried in its pages up to the last knuckle, holding his place in the Song of Solomon. He slides his finger out from between the pages, letting it take its place alongside his other three fingers, clasping the book shut against his thumb as he clears his throat to speak.

“Emmaline, shut that basement door. Nothing left to bury. Have Ben set some screen over the grate and put traps out tomorrow. Now let’s get back inside.”

He heads for his study knowing Mary won’t ask him in front of everybody when he’s coming to bed but he does wonder how he will react if she starts quoting scripture to him again.

Richardson

My wife ran my house exceedingly well but I knew better than to try turning her face to the storm. All she’d do was try to turn mine towards the Word. Her habits of faith always differed from mine but I thought I’d convinced her it should be possible for us to leave one another alone about those matters.

Once she began meeting regularly with a new minister, his influence on her grew steadily. When it became apparent he also had designs on me, I made it clear to both of them that the children were the only ones in need of religious instruction.

One Saturday morning, as I sat in my study catching up on my accounts, Mary was teaching our Lucius some bars on the piano we kept in the ballroom. I’d left my door open so their conversation came and went. I don’t know how they made it to the troublesome topic of slavery. Must have been all that time my boy spent tagging along behind Wash.

I can still hear Mary patiently explaining, in response to Lucius’s questioning, that the negroes had become our slaves as the result of a curse. For having been the sons of Ham. But when Lucius asked her what this Ham had done to bring this curse upon himself and his descendants for so long, all the way up to now, Mary started to hem. I didn’t have much use for the Bible but I certainly relished its way of placing its many adherents in occasional discomfort. I set down my pen to hear how she was going to tell our boy what had actually happened.

The story goes that Noah, overjoyed to have dry ground under his feet, had taken himself on a tear, embarrassing both himself and his family through too much wine, and when Ham lifted the veil of his father’s tent, instead of looking away to preserve their father’s pride like his brothers did, Ham had held the veil up and he had looked. Ham stood there staring upon his father’s drunken sprawling nakedness. And for his refusing to look away like his brothers did, Ham was cursed. Him and his. Forever.

Nice story for a child. I’d always told Mary to watch out for that Bible. I’d warned her that using it the way she did would land her in hot water. And sure enough, she simply told my son that young Ham had been headstrong, disobedient and disrespectful towards his father. All I heard Lucius say was oh.

After Mary versed them in Bible stories, I spent endless mornings with my boys, going over my duties as land surveyor and tax collector, using some of my own records as examples. There was much I didn’t tell them and more I didn’t show. I was waiting for the right time, even as I was beginning to doubt it would ever come.

Cassius took to it like a fish to water but he had limited vision and was rapacious enough to make me miss William, despite all his ideals. Lucius had to keep dragging his considerable mind back to the numbers. He was so like William, interested only in finding his own frontier and never very good at concealing his intentions.

Too bad Livia was born a woman. She’d have left her brothers in the dust. She and Augusta both. But Adele, Diana and Caroline made a trio. I saw early on that they’d just want nice things. And Mary Patton would always need tending, long after Mary and I lay dead and buried. So maybe it was best for all of us that Cassius kept his hungry eye on the bottom line.

And I tried to do what my father taught me. I did. I was determined to build my city on a hill. Got myself so deeply invested in Memphis, it had to prosper or we were sunk. But we faced suddenly steeper odds, once the county seat was denied me.

I can see now that I must have known it from the start. This location on the route west, along with its river connection to the New Orleans market, would make the trading of negroes a booming business, whether I wanted any part of it or not. I do remember hoping to avoid it. But looking back from this distance, I think I must have suspected it all along. Some piece of this trade might prove to be our salvation.

But diversity on this matter raged at the time, even within my own family. William was becoming more open about his abolitionist sentiments, no matter how often I cautioned him against it. Ever since he was a child, William had tried my patience with his pursuit of integrity, honoring the bonds forged with his pickaninny playmates well beyond what was appropriate. I thought it was merely a case of youthful idealism, but this dangerous trait of his wore on into adulthood with the persistence of a lingering cough.

And when Celeste came along, I had hoped he’d leave her down in New Orleans, but if he had to keep her with him in Memphis, I told him repeatedly, he certainly didn’t need to marry her. William kept insisting that Celeste was different, reminding me that she spoke French and could talk politics with any man. Not that those attributes could count for much when she was colored. Maybe they counted in New Orleans but not out here. In fact, in Memphis, they only made matters worse.

I’d heard the rumors about his drinking but I decided they were just that. People find all kinds of things to say about those who try to stand outside the status quo. And once William decided to let his negroes earn their purchase price, so as to remove himself and Celeste from the whole business altogether, the gossip rose to a loud buzzing.

He and Celeste were such likable people, most folks tried to forgive them their mixed marriage. Even their abolitionism. But the whole landscape had already started to change after Denmark Vesey scared all the whites in Charleston half to death, despite his rebellion never getting off the ground. Just the simple fact of his standing up had shifted the balance. I tried to warn William but he remained sure he’d be exempt.

Meanwhile, Cassius worked steadily with Quinn to increase our reliance on negroes. My second son insisted on their profitability and continually denied the endless difficulties associated with them. He maintained that the road to success in this field lay in proper management. He kept telling me it was simple, saying you’ll see.

I tried to listen but I remained astonished by the blindness of youth. It had begun to dawn on me that you cannot do very much for your children after all. What I could do for mine was try to reduce debt and create income, leaving them with as little burden and as much opportunity as possible. After that, it would be up to them.

So when that tall redheaded Scottish woman named Miss Isobel Bryce swept into my foyer talking about her plans for a farm, a kind of utopia which would allow us to rid ourselves of what she called the stain of negro slavery, I knew immediately we were all in trouble, and William and Celeste particularly so.

Her plan was to buy two thousand acres near Memphis in order to set up this utopia. And she had backers. Certainly LaFayette and Jackson. Maybe even Monroe. So many slaveholders had assured her they wanted out badly enough to donate their negroes to her cause, she felt sure she’d have plenty. Plenty of the halt and the lame, I wanted to say. But I bit my tongue as she talked on.

While all those donated negroes worked on her farm to earn their freedom, she would teach classes to ensure they’d be civilized enough to handle their liberation responsibly when it came. Freeing both owned and owner in one fell swoop, she said. As soon as everybody saw how simple it was, she told me that night in all seriousness, replicas of her utopia would spring up everywhere and we’d soon be rid of slavery once and for all.

Miss Bryce was charming that night at dinner but she was relentless. She aimed her gaze at me as brightly as a child while she hammered away with questions whose answers she thought she held in her own uncallused palm.

Did I know that our Founding Fathers, as we now called the men I’d fought under, had been deeply vexed by the problem of slavery? Did I know that many had predicted trouble but that others refused to listen? That Jefferson had even twisted himself into the indefensible and illogical position of blaming the King of England for our dilemma?

Did I know?! I remember a feeling of great hollow emptiness inside. Words surged up like waves but they were useless in the face of such innocence. I saw Mr. Jefferson standing there, holding our snarling wolf by the tail, looking ridiculous.

All I could bring myself to tell Miss Isobel Bryce that night at my dinner table was that slavery was something to be endured for the sake of our brand new and extremely fragile Union, which we’d all agreed upon as the higher priority by far. And yes, I was well aware we’d tried to get ourselves out of it and failed dismally. Hell, I’d tried to get myself out of it and failed. Dismally. Moved nearly a thousand miles west to get away from the messiness of it, only to find it right on my heels.

It tried my nerves to entertain people who knew so little about the world yet remained hell bent on educating others. But I’d long since recognized this subject for the quicksand it was, so I let her talk herself out. It was hard to listen to her plans for her experiment, knowing as well as I did what the outcome would be. I just hoped she wouldn’t drag William and Celeste down with her. All they had done thus far was befriend her but I suspected even that might be too much.

Sure enough, not nearly so many men actually donated their negroes to her as had promised. There’s only so much generosity you can afford. Once the first theft occurred within her compound, she found herself having to give the stripes to two of her pitiful crew and her utopia began to unravel. Soon she and her farm were an utter wreck. She took off for wherever she came from to recover, leaving us to clean up the mess she left behind.

Yet it remains difficult for me to watch the young lose their innocence, no matter how dangerous that innocence might be. Miss Bryce was glorious in her earlier days, reminding me of both William and Lucius. The way their idealism shone while they so earnestly insisted upon all my compromises having been unnecessary, when they had absolutely no idea about any of it.