The Emancipator's Wife (13 page)

This evening he sat smoking in the gloom, listening to the muted burble of the creek. Betsey had retreated early to bed with a headache—she was, Mary suspected, increasing yet again—and Mary herself shivered at the far-off sounds of thunder.

But she sat on one of the cane-bottomed chairs beside her father, and said, “Is Mr. Clay going to run for President again, when Mr. Jackson's term is up?”

Her father grinned, and pinched her cheek. “Always the little politician, eh?” He sighed. “Maybe. Jackson's a sick old man. Even if he could, I don't think he'd court accusations of being a dictator by running for a third time when Washington was content with only two.”

“Mr. Clay is against slavery, isn't he, Papa?” Mary leaned against her father's arm, taking comfort in his bulk and size, in the scent of tobacco and Macassar oil and horses, the faint sweaty smell of manhood in his coat. “Yet he owns slaves, the way you do.”

Her father sighed again. “A man can be against slavery and still not be a crazy abolitionist, Molly,” he said. The darkness, broken only by the faint glow of light from the kitchen windows, seemed to bring them closer; Mary treasured the delicious quiet of the moment, the man-to-man matter-of-factness of her father's voice as he spoke to her. Like a woman and a friend, not like a child.

A closeness better than all the sapphire pendants in the world.

“Slavery is evil. I don't think you can argue that. But simply turning all the slaves loose would bring down a greater evil, in terms of poverty, and chaos, and lawlessness. Darkies aren't like you and me, daughter. They don't understand principles—you know how you have to keep instructions to Chaney or Judy very simple, if you're going to get anything like what you're asking for—and in most ways they're like children. Even a smart darky like Jane isn't more than a few generations removed from the jungle, you know. It wouldn't be any kindness to them to turn them loose to fend for themselves, any more than it would be to let loose your sister Frances's pet canary in the woods.”

Thunder rumbled above the hills. The metallic drumming of the cicadas in the trees seemed to accentuate the heat and closeness of the dark. Mary shivered, hating the electric feel of the air that pressed so desperately on her skull, as if the lightning itself flickered in her brain. Nelson emerged from a side door, descended the back steps, and crossed through the garden to the coach house, in whose attic he and Pendleton had their rooms while the women slaves slept above the kitchen. “But couldn't they do their same jobs at wages?”

He shook his head. “It doesn't work that way, sweetheart. No planter could make a profit if he had to pay wages, and if the wages were low the darkies would go looking for higher ones, and drive white men out of work. No, Mr. Clay's scheme is best. You don't free the Negro race until you're able to provide a home for them. Either colonize them out in the West beyond the Mississippi—which would certainly spark problems with the Indians or the Spanish—or set up colonies for them in Africa, where the benefits of what they've learned in this country will gradually civilize the heathen tribes around them.”

“Wouldn't that be like letting loose a canary in the woods?” asked Mary.

“Of course it would, baby.” Her father patted her gently, and glanced longingly at the cigar he'd stamped out the moment Mary had appeared in the dark door to the house. “That's why we have to do this slowly. It's only the abolitionists who want to rush pell-mell into things, to solve the problem
their
way, in
their
time, the minute they think they see a solution. They're not thinking about the consequences, to the country or to the darkies themselves.”

Lightning leaped white across the sky, blanching the leaves of the chestnut-trees. Mary screamed—at the same moment the trees bent in the rushing wind, as if reaching for the walls of the house, and thunder ripped the darkness that dropped like a smothering blanket in the lightning's wake. Trembling, she retreated to the house as a second blast of lightning split the night, and torrents of rain began to fall. Her head aching in earnest, she ran up the stairs to the guest-room, flung herself fully clothed on the bed, covered her head with the pillow so she would not hear.

But she did hear. And she saw, through the pillow and her shut eyelids, the white blasts of lightning that ripsawed the night. She heard, too, the hammering of the rain, until it seemed to her that the house and the whole town would wash away. Once she crept from her bed and looked out the window, to see the spring at the bottom of the garden overflowing, its waters spilling everywhere, glittering in the lightning's blue flare. She remembered her dream, of overspilling water bringing poison, bringing death.

The following day, Sunday, the bells of McChord's Church were tolling. Her father came in while the family was seated at breakfast and said, “That was Jim Rollins outside, coming up from the University. There's a woman down on Water Street, where the Town Branch flooded last night, down sick. They're saying it's cholera.”

Betsey clicked her tongue. “Nonsense. They can't tell so quickly.”

But Mary glanced over at Eliza, cold terror gripping her. Last summer's newspapers had been filled with reports of the cholera that had killed thousands in New York and New Orleans, like the ravenous plagues of medieval Europe. Frances set down her spoon rather quickly, and said, “I know Mary has a few weeks of school yet, but if some of us could go down to Crab Orchard Springs early this year she could join us as soon as she's done.”

And little Margaret, glancing from face to face of her shaken seniors, asked, “What's cholera?”

“It's a sickness, sweetheart.” Betsey stroked her eldest daughter's blond curls. “A sickness that only bad people and poor people get.”

“Aunt Hannah wasn't bad, or poor,” pointed out Mary, “and she died of it last year.” Betsey looked daggers at her, but Mary turned to her father, whose sister Aunt Hannah had been. He didn't admonish her for contradicting her stepmother.

Instead he said, “I think I'll just ride over to the University, and see what they're saying at the Medical College. I won't be long—and I think it's probably best if no one goes outside for now.”

Just before dinner he was back, with the news that ten other cases of cholera had been reported in the town. Nelson was sent to the market to buy tar and lime: “The disease seems to spread through the night air, according to Dr. Warfield,” said Robert Todd, to his wife and children assembled in the family parlor. “Until we can get packed, and get out of town, I think the safest thing we can do is stay indoors, keep the windows shut, spread lime on all the windowsills and thresholds and burn tar to cleanse the air. I think the Mentelles will understand if you leave school a few weeks early this term, Molly,” he added, glancing over at Mary. “I understand the air is better in Crab Orchard Springs. If we leave now, we can probably get a cabin there, until the epidemic is over.”

But the next morning Mary came down to breakfast to hushed whispers and bad-news voices. “Pendleton is sick,” her father told her. “We've got him isolated and I've called Grant Shelby to take a look at him”—Grant Shelby was the local veterinarian, who also handled slaves—“but Mammy Sally says it looks like the cholera, and from what I've seen I agree with her. I'm afraid there's no question of leaving town now—or of leaving this house.”

There followed three of the most nightmarish weeks Mary had spent in her life. The summer's heat lay on the city like a soaked blanket. The air was unbreathable from the white streaks of lime on every window- and doorsill, and from the flambeaux of tar that Nelson made up and burned all around the house. In the dark of the shuttered house the smells thickened daily, hourly, in every stuffy, shadowy room. Mary felt the stink of it would never leave her throat. Yet she was forbidden to so much as venture out into the yard, though Betsey crossed back and forth to the coach house a dozen times a day, to help with Pendleton's nursing.

Mary herself felt very little fear that she would catch the disease. She feared it far less than she feared lightning-storms, or the silence that lay over the stricken town. Generally the creak of wagons and carriages, the clop of hooves and clamor of voices from Main Street, reached to every corner of the big house, shutters or no shutters. Now Lexington was silent, and under the summer's heat the only sounds that could be heard through the shutters were the occasional creak of a single wagon passing, or the tolling of a funeral bell. If she had no fear for herself, she was frantic with fear that Frances, or Ann, or Eliza would come down sick, or that, when the quarantine was over, she would hear the news that Mary Jane or Meg or Nate Bodley was dead. Every night when she prayed—as Granny Parker had instructed her from earliest childhood—she added to the rote litany of OurFatherWhoArtinHeaven...the fervent request that her friends be spared.

But she had no sense that God heard her. The last time that she had truly petitioned God was when she was six, that her mother return to comfort her, for she needed her so.

God apparently had not heard.

Nearly as bad as the smells was David's crying, which went on and on, sawing at the terrible silence. That, and the fact that as fruits and vegetables were thought by some to cause the disease, in the height of the season of peaches and mulberries the family lived on beaten biscuits and beef tea. After the first week there was no more newspaper, for so many of the men who printed it were either sick or tending the sick in makeshift hospitals. Betsey, wraith-thin, took to her own bed with exhaustion, and was snappish and impatient, and Robert Todd spent most of his days at her side. Mary kept to the semi-dark of her shuttered bedroom, reading books from her father's library to shut out her fears, or peering through the chinks in the shutters to watch the dead-carts rumble by below. One afternoon the noise of clumping and thumping in the hall brought her to the door, and she saw her father and Nelson bringing trunks down the attic stairs.

“What is it?” she asked. “What's happening?”

“Old Solly the gravedigger's outside,” said Nelson. “He's asking for whatever trunks and boxes folks have, since the coffin makers can't make enough coffins for those that're dead.”

Shoulder to shoulder in the lamplight, both men were dirty and dusty, shirtsleeved and daubed with the smuts of burned tar: black man and white man, of the same age, in the same household, feeling the same fear—helping others as well as they could. Mary opened doors for them and helped them maneuver the heavy trunks down the stairs, with a sense of seeing the front-parlor world of the whites, the shadow-world of the back alleys and kitchen-yards, merge....

Do men like Papa and Dr. Warfield think they're going somewhere different than Pendleton and Nelson when they die?

Pendleton recovered, though he was weeks in bed and lost a good thirty pounds. By July the funeral-bells had quit tolling, and Robert Todd packed up his family and took them, belatedly, to Crab Orchard Springs. Later Mary heard that five hundred people had died in Lexington, including half the patients at the lunatic asylum that stood beside the University.

C
OMING BACK THAT FALL TO
L
EXINGTON,
M
ARY HAD THE SAME
unsettled feeling that she had had at Mary Jane's wedding: a sense that fear and upheaval were all being swept tidily away out of sight. Fate had asked questions about the two dusty men bringing trunks down from the attic, and those questions were put aside unanswered. White men and black men had died, but when the shadow of death withdrew, business at Pullum's Exchange revived more quickly than at any other establishment in town. When Mary would go down to the perfumers and milliners on Cheapside with Frances or Mary Jane, she would see the hickory whipping-post beside the Courthouse, the place where disobedient slaves were chained and flogged, and she would sometimes look at her companions and think,
Don't you see? Don't you understand?

But how could they, when she didn't really understand herself? All the argument that year was about the National Bank, and Andrew Jackson's iniquities, and the takeover of Indian lands in the West. Perhaps her father and Mr. Clay were right, she thought, and freedom was something to be given to the darkies only with due care, and not handed out rashly....

But the sight of slavery still sickened her.

One night shortly after the family's return, just before Mary was to go back to Mentelle's, she was waked again by the distant rumble of thunder. Her sleep was never sound, and some nights she would lie awake until nearly dawn, listening to the soft breathing of Eliza and Ann, whose room she shared in summer so that the guest room could be kept ready for visitors. Neither of the other girls stirred. For a time Mary lay silent, listening to the slow ticking of the clock in the hall and wondering what time it was and what had wakened her....

Voices, she thought. Voices, and the sound of a door opening in the yard.

Silently, she slipped out of her low trundle-bed. The night was hot, the smooth old wood of the floor cool under her feet as she stole to the bedroom door and out into the hall. The door was a bone of contention between herself and the other two girls, for since childhood Mary had been unable to endure an open door—even of a closet or armoire—in a room where she slept. She opened it now, and slipped into the upstairs hall, knowing that if she opened the bedroom shutters they would awaken, too.

Moving by touch in the dark she unlatched the shutters of the window in the hall. There was no light in the yard below, but by the moon's gleam she could see figures moving at the bottom of the high kitchen stairs. Mammy Sally, Mary thought, identifying the woman's figure though she wasn't wearing the headrag that kept kitchen soot and grease out of the hair of the women servants. And the tall man with short-cropped silver hair could be no one other than Nelson. They faded back into the shadows of the wall, but having seen them, Mary could see them still.

Waiting.

Curious, and wide-awake, Mary eased the shutter back into its place. She knew she ought to go back into the bedroom for a wrapper or a shawl—Betsey had repeated over and over that for a lady to move about in her nightgown was only a half-step above walking about naked—but to do so would risk waking Eliza and Ann. Besides, Mary frequently made surreptitious nocturnal expeditions to the outhouse clothed only in her nightgown—when she'd already used the chamber pot two or three times in the night and didn't want to risk Ann or Eliza deriding her—and didn't think it so horrible. She was covered, after all.