Come Juneteenth (4 page)

To think that Granville had come to my aid, Granville who, at twenty, was already above it all and distant and just a little bit jealous of what I had with Gabe ... I don't think I ever loved him so much, either.

T
HERE WERE
times, too, when Gabe and I got into mischief together. I particularly recollect the incident of the onions in the stew.

No, Gabe would never outright disobey Pa, and he always reverenced him, but there were times when he teetered on the edge and gave in to boyish impulses, and this time he took me with him.

It was simple. Pa hated onions. Now this may be unseemly for a Texan because most Texans like spicy food, but Pa always hated onions in his food. Ma had to be careful how she cooked, when she did cook, and had Old Pepper Apron trained not to put onions in the stew or the sauces or the salads. Pa's "system," she said, couldn't take them.

The boys missed the onions. They had always had them "back in the states" at school. Oh, Old Pepper Apron made them special salads, but still, a pot of stew bubbling over the hearth on a cold day tasted just as good with or without onions.

Gabe had an ongoing argument with Ma that if she chopped the onions real tiny, Pa and his "system" wouldn't know the difference. Ma held that they would.

This was the spring Fort Sumter was fired upon. I was ten. Sis Goose was thirteen. The war hadn't yet officially started, and Pa and the boys could still disagree over something like onions and consider it worthwhile. This was back before Gabe was killing Indians and Granville was shooting Yankees.

It was a chilly day and Old Pepper Apron was down with some malady. Ma was cooking a stew and it was just starting to bubble on the hearth. She had left me in the kitchen to stir it every so often while she and Sis Goose took some chicken broth to Old Pepper Apron in the quarters.

Gabe appeared in the kitchen doorway.

"This is too good to be true," he said.

"What?"

"I can prove my point today. I can chop up an onion, real small, and put it in the stew, and Pa will never know. What do you say? Are you with me? If we get caught, I'll take all the blame."

"Where will you get the onion?"

"From the root cellar. Others eat around here. The servants use onions. You just keep sitting there and I'll be back in a minute."

And he disappeared. True to his word he was back with one onion, which he commenced to chop up in the most tiny pieces while he told me to keep an eye out for Ma. I did.

I never saw such tiny onion pieces. Where did he learn how? "Sometimes," he said, "when I'm out on the prairie, searching for runaway cows for Pa, and I camp out overnight, I shoot a wild turkey and roast it. I fry up a potato I bring along with a wild onion. Lord, it's good. Even the dog I bring along with me loves it. Now there." And he scooped all the onion off the wooden table and dropped it into the beef stew.

"Stir it," he ordered me. "Do your part."

I giggled and did so.

"Now remember. Don't say a word to anyone. Especially Sis Goose. Don't act strange or laugh or anything. Don't stare at Pa or he'll know something's going on. Hear me?"

"Yes." I said. And I could scarce wait for supper.

A
MELIA WAS
the first to remark on how good the stew was. "Ma, you're going to have to teach me how to make a stew like this before I get married," she said.

"You getting married?" asked Granville. "When? Can I have your room for an office?"

Those two were at it constantly. For some reason, Amelia did not get on with her brothers.

"Leave your sister alone," from Pa.

He was enjoying his stew. He wore a white linen napkin around his neck so as not to dirty his snow-white cravat. He spooned his stew into his mouth carefully. "This stew is excellent, Luanne," he told Ma.

I sat across from Gabe. Under the table he kicked my black, laced-up boot.

I giggled and lowered my head over my plate.

Immediately Pa saw something. "You two, behave yourselves. I've got Granville and Amelia at each other's throats and you two giggling like two geese at a pond full of fish. The only one who's behaving is Sis Goose. Now all of you behave or you can leave the table. Luanne, I've never tasted such wonderful stew."

This time I kicked Gabe's boot. He cleared his throat. I giggled and choked on a piece of bread.

Pa scowled. "Luli, you want to be spanked?"

"No, sir."

Pa threatened but he never acted on it with me.

Sis Goose gave me a very superior look because she knew I was up to something with Gabe and she was jealous she wasn't in on it. But she was comforted because she knew I'd soon be in trouble.

"You tell Old Pepper Apron she's outdone herself this time," Pa said.

"She didn't make it, she's ailing today," Ma told him. "I made it."

"Luanne." Pa put down his spoon and looked at her across the table. "After all these years, I never thought you could cook again like you used to."

Gabe couldn't take it anymore. He started laughing, and to hide it he covered his mouth with his white linen napkin and pretended he was choking.

"Drink some wine," Pa said. "Drink some wine, boy. For heaven's sake, it'll put hair on your chest, make you more handsome, the girls will be crazy over you. Give this family a good stew and they can't take it. Reminds me of the kind Edom would cook for me on the way to Mexico. Luanne, what's wrong with your children today?"

"I don't know," Mama said slowly. But she was looking at Gabe and then at me, slowly, knowingly, as if she
did
know, and I got scared. Still I started to laugh again until tears came to my eyes.

Pa slapped his hand down hard on the table. "Enough!"

I stopped. Gabe stopped.

"What in the name of the devil's purple ears is going on here with you two?"

"Sorry, sir," Gabe said. "I just had a choking fit."

Pa accepted that. "And you?" he asked me. "You just had a laughing fit?"

I knew when not to reply.

"You leave the table, little girl," he said. "Now. And take your muddle-headed brother with you. Both of you, out of my sight. Here we have solemn times. Fort Sumter's just been fired on by that fool Beauregard, South Carolina has seceded, and we're going to discuss this with our apple crisp and coffee for dessert. But you two won't be present. That's your punishment."

We didn't laugh, leaving. I'll say that for us. We didn't laugh until we got into the hall. Pa didn't understand. Both boys would soon be gone for soldiers. There was little time left for laughing.

W
ITH
S
IS
G
OOSE
though, there was always time for laughing. She and I, growing up, were always in some mischief together. You would think, being nearly three years older than I, that she would have more common sense. She did when it suited her. But most of the time it didn't.

The only time it did was when she and Gabe became smitten with each other. Then those three years she had on me seemed like a hundred. She had entered a world that was a universe away from me and left me like a falling star, burning out, with a tail like tears trailing across the sky.

But that would come later when I would realize that what I had with Gabe was nothing compared to what she had with him. And that she had knowledge I did not have. That alone killed me.

When I was about ten, the year the war broke out, Sis Goose decided she wanted to know more about the birds and the bees. Young girls, of course, were supposed to be kept innocent. Ma was forthcoming with nothing except
what we were to expect when we got our women's time of the month.

She didn't tell us why we got it. We were in total ignorance. It isn't as if we didn't associate with enough girls our own age to gossip about such things. We'd been to balls, hunts, horse races, taffy pulls, weddings, Christmas parties, and even corn huskings over the last year. But other girls our age didn't know any more than we did.

All were hungry for knowledge.

"You have to look in books," Lucy Raleigh of Peach Point Plantation wisely told us at a taffy pull.

When we got home, Sis Goose was after me to use Pa's library.

"It won't be in there," I told her.

"Then where?"

I thought a while. "Gabe's bookshelves," I said. "He's got all sorts of books. And he gave me permission to use them if I need to for my schoolwork. As long as I'm careful with them and put them back in place."

"What makes you think Gabe has a book like that?"

"Well, I don't know for sure. But Gabe knows everything. Where do you think he learned it?"

"Back in college."

Both boys were out of college now, working for Pa on the ranch, overseeing the men in the fields and the barns and corral, inspecting the care of the Thoroughbred horses. Sometimes riding out on the prairie to supervise
the mending of fences. They left the house early in the morning and didn't come back until supper time.

Sis Goose took charge, as she was wont to do when she understood a situation. First she checked on the whereabouts of Ma and Pa and Amelia. Satisfied that they were out of the way, she led me quietly to Gabe's room and we sat on the Persian carpet next to his bed and beside his cherry bookcase.

I marveled at it. It spoke so much of Gabe, with the books lined up neatly and the book covers titled in gold writing.

The Raven
by Edgar Allan Poe. He had a lot of Poe books.
The Vicar of Wakefield.
He had his collection of Charles Dickens, too. And
The History of Texas
and
The Conquest of Mexico
and so many others. There were school-books on Latin and Greek, on science, trigonometry, and the study of the heavens, and Shakespeare, and so many others I cannot name them.

There were copies of
The Spectator
from when he visited Williamsburg and theater programs from that town and biographies of George Washington.

And then there was a book called
Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior,
which he'd told me about. George Washington had read it and abided by it.

"I've got it," Sis Goose said triumphantly. And she held up a pamphlet. "Imported from England." She showed me. "Oh, how wicked," she said.

In it were all the words and explanations we wanted to know.

We bent our heads over it together.

"Oh, look," she pointed, "there's the one I wanted to know.
Pimp.
Do you know what a pimp is?"

"No."

So she read it to me. And so I learned that afternoon, all the words that most young women from respectable families who were not married, and many who were married, did not know. "What does
ravished
mean?" I asked her.

"Well, here, read it; it's right here."

And so I learned another word. And I saw the pictures. And my face paled and I felt faint.

But in the next moment when I looked at Sis Goose, she started laughing. And I started, too, and soon we were both helplessly laughing and rolling on the floor. And the more we thought about it, the funnier it seemed.

"Do Ma and Pa do this?" I asked her.

"How do you think you all were born?"

I thought of Pa, stern, strict Pa, and I started another laughing fit. "Oh, oh, please," I begged her, "put the pamphlet back before I wet my pants."

She secured it in back of some books on the shelf where she'd found it. "Naughty Gabe," she said, and I had another thought. "Oh, I won't be able to look at him at supper without bursting into laughter," I said.

"What about your pa?"

"Oh please, Sis, don't look at me at supper, please."

She didn't.

W
E DID THINGS
together like that, all the while we were growing up. We stole cookies from the pantry and ate them in our room at night in the dark. We told each other ghost stories in my bed, with the sheets over our heads, when we were supposed to be asleep. When the grownups were talking and laughing downstairs in the back parlor and we were supposed to be abed, she showed me a place she had discovered on the floor in our room, under the rug, where a trapdoor opened and the floor underneath was so thin you could hear every word said downstairs distinctly. She had a knack for intrigue, which, she said, she got from her father, the ship's captain.

One day Sis Goose took me into Amelia's room and we did each other's faces over with the face and lip rouge Amelia sometimes wore when her beau took her out. I can't imagine what Ma would do if she caught us. She was down in the quarters, helping to deliver a baby.

It was Gabe who caught us. He leaned against the doorjamb. "Well, you both look like tramps I've seen in New Orleans," he said.

We stood, stunned. We'd learned what a tramp was from Gabe's pamphlet. "You going to tell, Gabe?" Sis Goose asked.

"Tell who? Ma or Amelia?"

"Both."

"Love to tell Amelia. But no, I won't if you all take it off right now and promise not to do it again."

We promised. We kissed him. I wondered if he'd become friendly with the tramps in New Orleans.

W
E WERE
like sisters, Sis Goose and I, but we couldn't trade clothes because she was older and because she became a woman first. And then, at social gatherings, she started attracting the attention of young men. She was almost white, with just a hint of honey color, as if she'd stayed in the sun too long, and her complexion enhanced her beauty, added something to the clothes she wore. All the young men wanted to dance with her at balls and weddings. Oh, they danced with me, too, but that was part of the social scene, to be polite.

Pa said it was up to Granville and Gabe to keep their eyes cast in our direction. They were always watchful of us at gatherings, of course, but there was one occasion where Gabe had to come to Sis Goose's defense.

It was at a dance held after a morning's hunt. Of course, the women didn't go on the hunt. We languished about and lingered over breakfast; we displayed our musical skills; we rode for three or four miles. The men returned and after a lavish dinner there was dancing. The musicians were playing a waltz. Brit Borden was about the
only young man of the planters' class who couldn't hold his liquor, and it was a mortal sin for a young man not to be able to hold his liquor.