High Hearts (13 page)

“Funny, isn’t it, how we see but we don’t see? If you think about nothin’ on this earth but those pinecones, you see ’em for the first time. You can’t hear nothin’ if you do it right. If I was to fire a shot when you was riding in on them like that, you oughten to hear it. Everything you got has to be directed at those pinecones.”

“I understand.” She beamed. “And I’m grateful to you for taking time with me.”

Surprised, he said, “Hell, boy, I’m your man. I got to take care of you. You shoot the Yankee before the Yankee shoots you.”

They continued in their northwesterly direction.

“I been thinkin’ about the Bible lesson you read me this morning.”

“Judges.” Geneva was sick to death of Judges.

“Seems to me like Samson didn’t have the sense God gave a goose—gander, in this instance, when it came to women.”

“Guess not.”

“First he gets himself hot up over the woman of Timnath. His folks and people give her rat week, and then she finagles the answer to a riddle out of him, course she had to ’cause her own people said they’d kill her. Anyway, she gets burnt up in
her house. Samson gets het up ass over tit. Then he recovers himself and visits a harlot. Didn’t get far there. Then he finds Delilah. Next thing you know, Samson’s shaved clean as a billiard ball and has his eyes put out. Now I ask you, Jimmy, was he a fool for women or not?”

“Don’t you figure all men are fools for women?” She slyly winked at Banjo.

“If they’re lucky!” He tipped back his head and roared. “I had a wife once, and I tell you, Jimmy, the sun rose and set on that woman. When I would call to her, she would always smile at me like an angel. I swear to you on my heart that woman was a blessing on the earth.”

“What happened?”

“Died three years past. Like a little colt takin’ colic, she curled up in a ball, and Jimmy, that fast she was gone. I called the doctor, but he couldn’t do nothin’. A good man, warn’t his fault. Before she left, she looked up at me and said, ‘Forgive me.’ ‘For what?’ says I. The woman never uttered a cross word in her life. ‘I left you no children,’ she says. Oh Lordie, Jimmy, I took her sweet hand, I held it, and I cried. I cried ’til I was sick myself. If’n I had me a little girl or even a little boy, I’d have me a bit of Mary left.” Tears ran down his unshaven cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, Banjo.” Impulsively, she rode next to him and patted his shoulder, a distinctly feminine gesture.

Banjo nodded his head and reached up to touch her hand. “ ’Preciate your kindness, boy.”

Geneva withdrew her hand. They rode on in silence for a while after that. If Nash died, she’d kill herself. Love was a terrible thing. She knew she couldn’t live without it and wondered why it hit her so. When she met Nash, he didn’t make a big impression on her. First off, he wasn’t a good rider. Adequate, yes, but nothing special. He was determined to have her, and he paid court. Albemarle County marveled at how he paid court. She didn’t believe he cared about her dowry all that much. The few suitors she’d had before Nash had cared about it a great deal. Soon she noticed how the light glowed on his sandy hair. She admired the cords and muscle in his forearms when he worked outside. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was well built. His voice, so deep it made her backbone tingle, sounded like a melody. Before she
knew it, she was as much in love with Nash Hart as he was with her.

She thought on these things as she rode ever closer to her husband. It never occurred to her that she would find another man attractive.

From frost the temperature turned dramatically upward. The day wasn’t half over, yet the thermometer climbed into the low eighties. Sin-Sin grumbled. She spent the last three days feeding hard woods—hickory, mulberry, heavy oak, and even some walnut—into her firing barn. The fourth day was critical and here it was hotter than Tophet. The boys dropping in the wood began to lose pace.

A bright yellow turban on her head, the white handkerchief tied around her neck already soaked, Sin-Sin chewed them out. “You gonna wisht you was somebody else!”

“Yes, Auntie Sin-Sin.” Timothy moved a trifle faster.

Arms folded across her bosom, Sin-Sin could have been Scipio Africanus. These troops would obey! She was making an unusually large pot, and she was nervous. The glaze was a difficult color, almost a cerise, and would be mixed with fire streaks. She prayed the pot wouldn’t crack.

As a young woman, Sin-Sin gathered as much information as she could about pottery, ovens, and glazes. She constructed an underground oven twenty-eight feet long. At the end, a huge mound with a hole in it provided a draw. The project had taken one entire summer.

She’d been using the oven for thirty-five years. Every year she learned something new about her craft.

Lutie joined her. “Ernie June chased after Boyd today with a broom.”

Sin-Sin vastly appreciated this indication of familial disharmony. She paused to bellow at Timothy, “Haul, boy!” He trotted over to the woodpile. “Those chillun like to drive me wild. I never could understand why God made chillun. What’d Boyd do?”

“She forgot to put the raisins in the raisin bread,” Lutie gossiped.

“Ha! Mebbe that’ll shut Ernie June’s trap for a spell. I’m worn out from hearin’ what a wonder Boyd is.”

Lutie fanned herself. “Sin-Sin, if we don’t get out of Judges soon I think I’ll go mad. We’ve been reading that for, weeks. And I count on the New Testament to make me feel better. Today’s lesson was just awful.”

“That business ’bout people talking from their graves on Judgment Day?” Sin-Sin shook involuntarily. A vision of graves yawning open, spilling out their contents made her sick.

“No, today’s lesson. That was yesterday’s.”

“I doan want to be talkin’ to no dead people!”

“You’ll be dead yourself then.”

“I still doan want to be talkin’ to no dead people even if I is dead! Then I be wearin’ a white turban!” Sin-Sin emphatically nodded her yellow-turbaned head.

“Sin-Sin, I don’t think this is an immediate worry.” Lutie fanned Sin-Sin as well as herself. “It was the part about the wells without water and clouds carried with a tempest that bothered me. Peter 2, Sin-Sin.”

“Our well never runs dry.”

“They were talking in symbols.”

“Then why get your bowels blocked over it? It’s not your well!”

Lutie stomped her foot. “I hate it when you get bullheaded with me!”

“Youse the one being bullheaded.”

Lutie stormed off. Sin-Sin stayed at her oven for another ten minutes so as not to look too worried. She then went back up to the big house. Lutie was pacing the long hallway with the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Lutie, what’s got into you?”

“Nothing.” Lutie knew she was being unreasonable.

Sin-Sin sat down in a pretty wooden chair, painted white. She waited.

“I told you nothing was the matter with me.”

Sin-Sin said nothing.

“Well, I got a letter from Poofy. Daniel left. He equipped an entire regiment, if you can believe that. The wealth of those Livingstons!”

“I knows you miss your sister, but I doan see as how that gets you wrought up.”

Lutie paced. She stopped. “Sin-Sin, I have to break a confidence. Oh, I hate to do this!”

Sin-Sin leaned forward. Lutie rested her hand on Sin-Sin’s shoulder. “Geneva cut her hair and ran off to war disguised as a man to be with Nash.”

“No!”

Lutie sat across from her servant. “Didn’t Di-Peachy tell you?”

“That girl didn’t tell me nothin’. Di-Peachy keeps her word.” Sin-Sin defended her.

Lutie’s eyebrows raised. “Well, I was just checking. I promised Geneva I wouldn’t tell, but, Sin-Sin, I haven’t heard a word from her! You’re the only person around here with sense. Besides, I can never keep anything from you.”

Sin-Sin gloated. “Uh-huh. Why she want to do a crazy thing like that?”

“Says she can’t live without him.”

“Lord, I ’spect I felt that way over my first man, but I can’t remember it.” She sighed. “Sure not goin’ to feel that way ever again, and I thank the good Lord, too.”

“I thought she’d be turned back. I thought someone would see through her.”

“She’s tall and lean. She might could do it.”

“Sweet Jesus, Sin-Sin, I don’t want her going to war!”

“You can’t stop her.”

“Someone will find her out. It has to happen.”

Sin-Sin folded her hands. “She has a mind of her own. Mebbe she’ll tire of it or him.”

Lutie tacked. “Do you know what Jennifer Fitzgerald said to me at Geneva’s wedding? I was talking about how people are drawn to one another, and I said, ‘Men fall in love with their eyes; women with their ears.’ And do you know Jennifer said, ‘Not this time.’ I could have shot her dead.”

“She got a mean tongue in her head.”

“Well, she and her mean tongue will be here in two days.”

“As is the way of Barabbas.” This was Sin-Sin’s stock phrase for somebody ignorant.

“We can’t let anyone know what’s happened here. We’ve got to start making up stories about Geneva in England. Surely, I’ll have some kind of letter from her soon.”

“We gotsto be careful of Jennifer Fitzgerald coming about with the searchin’ eye.” Sin-Sin patted her turban.

“Don’t I know it!”

A salmon-colored sunset softened the sky. Banjo calmly chewed on his Little Swan Rough and Ready plug. If he didn’t have time to sit and enjoy his pipe, he would jam tobacco in his mouth. Banjo couldn’t live without tobacco or a deck of cards. He kept both in the pocket over his heart. He attempted to initiate Jimmy into the delights of chew, but the boy didn’t take to it. With cards he was more successful. He reckoned that Jimmy wasn’t a day over fifteen. Not a hair on his cheeks, and his voice, while not high, hadn’t cracked into a reassuring baritone. He looked at the Shenandoah rushing into the Potomac. They’d have to pick their way down to the river and take a ferry over to the town.

Banjo could see the railroad tracks emerging from a mountain. Getting in and out of Harper’s Ferry was no easy task.

Geneva kept unusually quiet. Darkness enveloped the river; a light mist curled skyward. The two friends waited by river’s edge along with others. Women in good cotton dresses chatted with soldiers and civilians. Some of the men wore full uniforms, complete with facings to indicate their branch of the service: blue for the infantry, gold for the cavalry, red for the artillery. Others made do with no uniform at all, but since they carried firearms one assumed they were soldiers. Banjo happily struck up a conversation with these fellows. Geneva spoke to no one.

Men grunting and laughing were heard before the outlines of the ferry revealed itself. Slowly its squat prow jutted out of the silver mists. A lone, towering figure stood forward, a huge rope coiled in his hand. His face wasn’t visible. As the ferry pulled closer, another figure labored at the rear. Geneva thought of Charon ferrying across the river Styx. Was she being taken from the land of the living to the land of the dead? Wasn’t war the ultimate harvest of death? But quickly her thoughts turned to Nash. It was just as well.

When Geneva and Banjo reached the outskirts of the camp, whatever fears they may have harbored about the state of the Confederacy were confirmed. Men sat in the open around fires. Tents dotted the landscape but in no discernible order. No sentry barred their passing into this haphazard military area. The first man they came to was a black man carrying a sack of grain. Banjo asked him where the cavalry was. The man pointed left and continued about his business.

The moon, a day from full, flooded the camp with light. When Geneva and Banjo got to the cavalry area, they were relieved to find that one corner of it was organized. Tents, like corn, were pitched in straight rows. Horses chewed contentedly in square corrals. Behind every five tents was a small fire pit.

“Hey,” Banjo called to a white man bending over a trestle table. On one side of him were piled calfskins. Lanterns covered the table. He was sewing and mumbling to himself. He glanced up from his task with irritation.

“We’re looking for Nash Hart. Do you know where we might find him?”

“What makes you think I know everybody in this camp? I’ve got enough on my mind.”

“Jes what you doin’?” Banjo queried.

“Lining the inside of these britches with leather. Goddamn Mars Vickers, Major Mars, wants everyone under his command to have it. Says they’ll stick in their saddles like a burr. Well, I can tell you where I’d like him to stick it. He spent ten years in Europe in their armies. Says the Fifth Hussars and the First Lancers in France have a leather inseam. Do you know how long I’ve been in the army? Twenty-one goddamned years. I don’t care what they do in Europe. I’m beginning to think I would be better off in the Yankee army. Least I wouldn’t have to sit up night and day and sew!”

“Yeah, but look at the company you’d haf to keep.” Banjo grinned.

The balding fellow smiled. “You got a point there. Who’d you say you were searching out?”

“Nash Hart.”

Geneva found her voice. “He’s a nice-looking fellow with sandy hair.”

“And wet behind the ears like all the rest of ’em?” asked Bob.

“He’s old. He’s twenty-four,” Geneva said.

Banjo and Bob looked at her, then at one another and laughed.

“Well now, you might find him anywhere. That’s a pretty general description for such an old man.” Bob poked a skin with a big needle. “What’s he ride?”

“Short cropped, rose gray with a black tail.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Horses I remember. The men all look alike. Go down the third line of tents, and you’ll find him.”

Banjo tipped his hat. “See you tomorrow.”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” the tailor replied, pointing to the pile of skins.

Geneva put her forefinger to her head in a quick salute and fought the impulse to gallop wildly to the third row of tents.

“Banjo, once we find Nash, would you take care of the horses while I surprise him that I’m here?”

“Surely. That’s my job now, ain’t it? First thing tomorrow morning, we got to find this Vickers fellow and enlist proper.”

They rode slowly past each tent in the third row. The flaps were open. She saw Nash writing a letter.