Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) (5 page)

She shook her head and turned back into the house. Matthias or not, there was work to do, and it was going to be hard and would test every bone in her body. She knew that well enough by now. If men like her husband thought the war didn’t really matter to the women at home, then they were fools.

She couldn’t have been more right. When it came, the war came to everyone.

The fighting dragged on much longer than Richard Clairborne or most Southerners had figured it would. But Katie’s mother was not surprised. She had seen it coming. And she knew it would get worse. Rosalind Clairborne did her best to hold everything at Rosewood together, but daily the hardships increased.

Especially for rich folks like the Clairbornes, who had been insulated from the harsh realities of life, the difficulties of the war spread like a creeping rot. At first everything on the plantation continued pretty much the same. But without the master and his sons overseeing the slaves, they gradually slacked off, working at a slower pace and accomplishing less. Even Mathias, who had always been as faithful as any black man could be to his master, couldn’t keep the lethargy from setting in.

The first year’s wheat eventually got harvested and sold, and the cotton crop was about normal. When Mrs. Clairborne and Mathias and Jeremiah took the three loaded wagons of harvested cotton into Mr. Watson’s mill, the money for it was good enough to keep the Clairborne account at the Shenandoah bank full for another year, feeding Katie and her mother, along with the slaves, and providing for some winter repairs about the place. They had most everything they needed.

But by the following year, Rosalind Clairborne was beginning to see inevitable signs that the work was falling behind. The crops were slow getting sown, and as the summer progressed the fields weren’t as well attended. Fences were starting to require attention, and more than once she had to run through the fields herself to chase away deer nibbling at the shoots of wheat. Sometimes Leroy was late to milk the cows. And she even had to watch Beulah and Elvia a little more carefully with the kitchen and household chores—something she had never had to do before. A drought through most of July didn’t help matters. As a result, the year’s crop was less than half as plentiful as the previous year, and Katie’s mother was feeling the financial pinch. She knew the plantation was suffering. One of the wagons was old, and her husband had talked of buying a new one this year. But now she wouldn’t be able to do so. And throughout the previous winter they had to slaughter more cattle, chickens, and hogs than she would have liked just to feed themselves and the slaves. They couldn’t continue this way or the stock would eventually dwindle down to nothing.

It was during that second year that she was forced to start borrowing from the bank. As she did, she silently railed at both her husband and her brother, the one for putting her in this position, the other for having the means to help but being so irresponsible that he had disappeared without a trace. She ought to just—

No, she said to herself. Things hadn’t gotten quite that bad yet, and she would pay off the bank with the next year’s crops.

Mrs. Clairborne was forced to understand much that she’d heard from her husband for years, and realize why he’d complained about the slaves, the weather, the fences, the constant drain of cash, and a hundred other things. And always more bills appeared than she could manage—where did they all come from? It wasn’t easy managing a plantation, she had heard him say many times. Now that she had to do it for herself, Rosalind Clairborne realized just how hard it really was.

She vowed that she would roll up her sleeves and go down to the slave quarters every day and get the work started herself . She would supervise them throughout the day too. How many times had she heard her husband say, ‘‘If you don’t stand over their shoulders and make them do what you tell them, nothing will get done.’’

She had been lax. She had assumed everyone would do just as she said. A lot of what had happened this last season was her own fault. From now on she would watch things more closely, even if it meant getting out in the fields every day and working right along with them. If that’s what it took to keep the cotton hoed and free of weeds, that’s what she would do.

She would make them work. If her husband could do it, she could. She couldn’t afford another bad year.

It was a bewildering and lonely time in Katie’s life. At one time she came upon her mother, uncharacteristically exasperated with Beulah or Elvia, another time just sitting and crying from sheer exhaustion. Yet her mother’s attempted explanations made little sense in Katie’s ears.

And Mrs. Clairborne’s irritation with Katie’s innocence occasionally boiled over.

Katie was out next to the pasture one day, playing with a doll and talking to a cow grazing on the other side of the fence. Rusty lay curled up asleep at her side. Mrs. Clairborne hurried up to them.

‘‘Kathleen, what are you doing!’’ exclaimed her mother in frustration. ‘‘Do I have to do everything around here myself? What am I going to do with you if you’re always in your own little dreamworld?’’

Katie was confused at her mother’s outburst.

‘‘The dream is over, Kathleen,’’ Mrs. Clairborne went on, hands on her hips. ‘‘You’re going to have to be in charge of your own home someday. It’s time you learned to do some things. And I need help around here. So we’re going to start right now. I’m going to teach you to handle a team of horses. It will be a big help to me if you can go down to the slave quarters with a wagon of food now and then. Come with me while I hitch up the horses.’’

Katie complied and learned to do whatever she was told, though at the end of this day, when the lesson with the team and wagon was done, she went to her room, sat down with Rebecca and Peg and Sarah in her lap, and started to cry.

Why was her mother so irritable? Why had she said those things today?

Her mother never read to her now, and hardly ever smiled. There used to be music in the house all the time, and they used to go to concerts. The war had made everything so dreary. She didn’t feel like playing her violin or the piano all by herself, and her mother never sat down at the piano anymore either.

T
WISTER
6

R
OSALIND
C
LAIRBORNE READ ABOUT
M
R.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the Greens Crossing
Clarion
in January of 1863, and it didn’t help matters for her. Though only a few of the Rosewood slaves knew how to read, and they never got their hands on a newspaper, somehow they learned of the proclamation within a few weeks. How news traveled so fast among slaves was a mystery to Katie’s mother.

But soon enough she saw signs that they had heard about it and were wondering what it was going to mean in their lives. After that it became yet more difficult to get the work of the plantation done.

All through the South, colored folk were restless. And white plantation owners were nervous.

By now Katie was getting to an age where she could be of some actual help with the chores around the house. She still could be distracted with daydreams, but for the first time in her life Katie’s white cheeks were often stained with dirt and her dainty hands wore blisters. With money scarce, there were no more pretty dresses or new dolls.

Another year went by.

Things on the plantation did not improve. Still the war dragged on. Rosalind had heard nothing from her husband for over six months when a brief hurried note was passed along to her from a wounded soldier returning home. Mr. Clairborne was still alive—at least he was then.

In the fall a rare tornado swept through North Carolina.

As the day progressed and the wind rose into a howling frenzy, Katie’s mother kept close watch on the dark horizon. Finally the wind whipped into such a fury she wondered that the roof didn’t blow off. Then she saw the shape of the wind funnel. It appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly there it was just a few miles away!

‘‘Elvia!’’ she cried to the Negro cook, who was younger and about half the size of Beulah. ‘‘Run to the slave quarters and tell everyone to hurry up here as fast as they can.’’

‘‘But, Miz Clair—’’

‘‘Now, Elvia! Run as fast as you can. There’s a twister coming. Everyone—especially the little ones . . . hurry!’’

The eyes of the terrified woman were now as big as two white saucers in the middle of her brown face. Finally grasping the urgency of her mistress’s command, she turned and left the kitchen at a run.

Mrs. Clairborne yelled for Katie, then ran to the middle of the parlor, pulled back the rug, and opened the hinged door in the floor that led to the underground cellar. She didn’t stop to wonder what her husband would do in this situation. There’d never been a tornado this close before. She knew it wasn’t proper to bring any but house slaves inside. None of them but Beulah and Elvia had ever set foot in the plantation house.

But she couldn’t worry about that now. She’d think about the right and wrong of it later. If her husband was angry that black folks had come into his home, so be it. Right now she had to find a way to keep them all alive.

But before they came to safety she had to make sure they saw nothing that shouldn’t be seen. She hurried down the narrow stairs.

‘‘Mama,’’ she heard a voice through the trapdoor a few moments later.

‘‘I’m down in the cellar, Kathleen,’’ she called. ‘‘Come down the ladder.’’

‘‘May I bring my doll?’’

‘‘Yes, Katie—just hurry.’’

While Katie climbed down, her mother finished her business.

‘‘Wait for me here, Kathleen,’’ she said as soon as Katie reached the bottom. ‘‘I’ve got to run back upstairs and bring Beulah and the others down. I’ll be back soon.’’

‘‘What about Rusty?’’

‘‘Rusty will have to take care of himself.’’

By the time Mrs. Clairborne reached the kitchen again and looked out the window with Beulah at her side, already she saw a line of black folks running toward the house, some of the women carrying babies, the men hurrying them along as fast as they could. Behind them, the black twister was maybe only two miles away, close enough that she could see the swirling wind whipping up bushes and small trees and debris inside it.

‘‘Hurry . . . into the house, all of you,’’ she cried. ‘‘Beulah—show them where to go!’’

In ones and twos they ran inside, hardly thinking what they were doing. A few paused long enough to wipe their feet. But they were quickly interrupted by their master’s wife.

‘‘Don’t worry about the dirt, Jeremiah—just get into the cellar . . . Jeb . . . Mathias—come everyone, hurry!’’

Minutes later Katie’s mother let the trapdoor down to the living room floor from the bottom and climbed down the narrow stairs to join the others all huddled together on the floor. A lone candle flickered in the darkness.

Then they waited, listening. Someone started to pray, and others joined in. Beulah hummed a few bars of a song, then the group began singing, ‘‘All night, all day . . . angels watching over me. . . .’’

The wind could be heard faintly moaning up the stairs. Mrs. Clairborne knew if the tornado came close enough to take their house, they would hear a roar louder than any wind they could imagine. But she heard nothing like that. Gradually the moaning and whistling sounds above them died away.

After a few minutes, she rose, crept up the stairs, and lifted the trapdoor a crack.

The air was still. She lifted it the rest of the way and climbed up. The house was just as they had left it. She clasped trembling hands together and whispered, ‘‘Thank you, Lord.’’

‘‘It’s passed,’’ she said into the cellar. ‘‘You can come out.’’

Slowly the slaves made their way up the ladder, now pausing to look around them at the rich furnishings and huge fancy house where the master and his family lived. Silently they all filed outside and back to the shacks that were their homes.

‘‘Mathias,’’ Mrs. Clairborne instructed as they left, ‘‘give me a report on the damage, will you?’’

‘‘Yes’m,’’ replied the black man as he walked away.

He returned an hour later with the news, which wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The roof of one of the slave buildings had been blown off, he said. A path had been torn through the wheat, ruining about a third of the crop. A couple of trees were down. And two sections of fence had been ripped into kindling.

Mrs. Clairborne took in the report with relief.

‘‘Well, see to it all, Mathias,’’ she said.

‘‘Yes’m.’’

‘‘The roof first of all, then the fences.’’

A V
ISITOR
7