Across the Spectrum (15 page)

The supper passed without Jenny tasting any of it. When the
sun hid itself behind the crooked hills, Mr. Johnson’s slave lit the lamps that
hung on poles around the yard. The musicians set themselves down on their
stools and began tuning up. Mr. Cooper stood up front, opened his frog mouth
and let out, “Choose your partners all for ‘The Wild Irishman.’”

The soles of Jenny’s feet itched as all the young men walked
by with other girls on their arms. The yard filled up with squares of couples.

“May I have this dance, Miss Fletcher?”

Ancient Mr. Johnson held out his withered arm. Jenny took it
gladly and they walked into place as the side couple in the final square. Right
after them, the fifth man, their “Wild Irishman,” stepped into the center of
the set.

Jenny had to look twice to be sure her eyes weren’t playing
tricks. But no, it was Tom Hawkins who stood there in a new suit the same deep
brown as his eyes.

She barely had time to get her jaw closed before the music
rang out overhead and Mr. Cooper’s voice started up the rhythmic call.

“Wild Irishman, swing at the head.

Wild Irishman, swing at the foot.

Wild Irishman, swing at the side.

Wild Irishman, swing at the side.”

Tom moved easy as breathing. He swung Meg Carey ’til she
giggled and spun her back to her partner just as he turned to take up Laurie
Jones. While the grand right and left flowed round him, Jenny saw him looking
at her and remembered the barn dance in the spring where she’d seen that gentle
look before.

Tom swung Tully Price and then turned to Jenny. Her hands
were already out for him to grasp. The music carried them around. A breath
later, he set her back in her place. He had stepped back into the center before
she had time to blink.

The dance had barely finished before folks set up a
breathless clamor for another.

Jenny’s gaze hadn’t left Tom. The musicians struck up a new
tune. After the first few chords, Jenny recognized the merry “Devil’s Dream.”

Tom took her hand without asking and walked her into place
at the head of the line.

“Hands around,” Mr. Cooper sang out. Jenny and Tom circled
with the next couple down the line. The music lifted Jenny as soon as they
began to move.

“First couple out to the right, and circle four hands round.
Gent leave his lady there, go on to the next alone. And circle three. Put that
lady on your right, on to the next, and circle four!”

Jenny’s soul soared. The music spun into the movement and
raised her clear to the watching stars. But as high as she flew, Tom stayed by
her side, his warm, strong hands over hers, his firm stride keeping time with
her lilting step.

The final notes drifted off into the night and Jenny stilled
her feet. Her hand was still enclosed in Tom’s.

“Do I win, Jenny?” he asked, although every ear in the
gathering was turned to them. “Will you have me?”

A hundred emotions swept through Jenny’s soul, surprise,
delight, fear at what she’d said and done, and what lay before her now. But
memory of her own promise and of Tom’s dancing made only one answer possible.

“I’ll have you, Tom,” she said. As Jenny spoke, though, she
caught a glimpse of Tom’s father, Jay Hawkins, and the glare he levelled at her
made the breath catch in her throat.

Jay Hawkins was still looking the same way three weeks
later, when Reverend Cook married Jenny to Tom. He stomped off before the
ceremony was over.

At the wedding breakfast, there was dancing the like of
which had never been seen. Jenny danced every dance in her husband’s arms and
shook off the feel of his father’s knife-edged stare.

Jenny scarcely got her things moved into Tom’s four room
house before the winter rains began pouring down. Wet, grey days faded into
black nights over and again while they learned to live together. Jenny came to
respect her husband’s careful ways. He thought hard before he made any
decision, whether it was buying up the corner patch of the neighbor’s land, or
taking aim at the wolf that broke into the pig pen in late January.

One of his decisions seemed to have been to make Jenny
happy. He complimented her meals and housekeeping. He told her about any new
thing he saw when he was in town. When he could afford it, he’d bring back
little gifts, like a comb for her hair, or embroidery thread for fine work.
Many dim evenings in front of the fire, they waltzed slowly to the music they
hummed under their breath. At night, under the quilts, he cradled her as gently
as if they were dancing close.

The tenderness he put into his courting won her the way the
deeds themselves never could have. By the time March came and the rains slowed
their pace, Jenny was firmly in love with her husband.

The winter mud had not quite dried when Tom returned
hard-faced from a trip to town. He did not raise his hand to her as he led the
horse to the shed. He did not kiss her when he walked through the door.

“What’s happened?” she demanded.

“War,” he told her grimly. “Fort Sumpter’s been fired on.
Government’s calling up troops to put the rebels down, and they ain’t going
down easy. It’s war, for certain.”

He walked past her and sat down by the fire. He didn’t eat
supper, and he didn’t come to bed. Jenny tried to sleep for awhile, but sleep
didn’t come. Finally, she wrapped a quilt around herself and went to sit in the
rocker beside him. Together, they watched the coals shine until the ashen
morning light oozed under the door.

Tom turned his head and looked at her with his steady brown
eyes. Jenny’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Jenny, I’m going.”

After a moment, she nodded. Of course he was.

The morning clouds made a lid for the mountains. Jenny
wrapped up corn bread, salt meat and coffee, all of it flavored with her tears.
As she tied his pack shut, Tom laid his calloused hands on her shoulders.

“Why’re you cryin’, Jenny Hawkins?”

She turned around and said the words she hadn’t thought to
say before. “Because I love you, Tom.”

He kissed her for a long time. Then, without another word,
he picked up his hat, his pack and his gun, and he walked out the door. Jenny
stood in the threshold and watched until the piney hillside swallowed him
whole.

She wasn’t watching alone. War cut a bloody gash down the
valley. Men streamed out to where the fighting was. Some went to wear blue,
some to wear grey, some to make up for the choice their brothers made.

Every Sunday, women, children and old men held prayer
meetings in the church. There was no service. Reverend Cook had gone off to be
a chaplain for the rebels.

Jenny worked around her home until she fell exhausted into
bed at night. Wearing herself clean out was the only way she could wipe away
thoughts of Tom and get any sleep.

A month dragged itself by, and another. A year. And another.
Letters came now and then, but Tom did not. Jenny spent hours staring up into
the pine woods along the path Tom had taken, wishing him back. Every empty
night, she knelt by their bed and prayed to God he’d live long enough to come
home.

In the middle of muggy July, while she prayed at her
bedside, a sickly wind slid through the open window.

“Why you cryin’, Jenny Hawkins?” murmured a voice.

“TOM!” Jenny whirled around on her knees. But she was all
alone with the candle’s flickering shadows.

“Why you cryin’, Jenny Hawkins?” Tom’s voice breathed again.
“Why you cryin’?”

Her throat pulled itself tight and her heart stopped dead.
The world went grey and red in front of her.

Next thing she knew, Jenny was out the door running. Her
bare feet flashed white across the ground. Up ahead, the glow from the fire in
Mr. Hawkins’s cabin cut the darkness. Jenny ran up to the door and hammered at
it.

“Mr. Hawkins!” she gasped. “Mr. Hawkins!”

The door jumped open, revealing to her the pinched old man
in its threshold. “What you want?” he asked flat out.

“Tom’s dead.” Her whispery words shook worse than her knees.
“God have mercy, I heard his ghost. Tom’s dead.”

The old man’s pointy jaw worked itself back and forth. “Damn
you to hell, Jenny Fletcher!” he shrieked.

Jenny took a step back, her eyes wide and staring.

“God as my witness, I hope you burn like you sent my boy to
burn!” Spit flecked his lips and tears streamed down his sunken cheeks.

Jenny just choked on whatever she thought to say.

“Didn’t stop to think where Tom learned to dance that way,
did you?” Jay Hawkins sucked in a ragged breath. “He was sick for love of you,
the fool boy! He went . . . He sold his soul to the devil for
you!”

“What?” Jenny croaked.

“He went out at the dark of the moon. He climbed up the west
hills. I didn’t see him for three days, and when he did come back, he told me . . .
he told me . . .”

Jenny tottered back until she hit the porch rail. Her jaw
wouldn’t close. Her eyes couldn’t blink.

“Damn your soul, Jenny Fletcher, ’cause you surely damned my
Tom’s!”

He slammed the door. The sound slammed against the
mountains.

Jenny stumbled and fumbled her way back home like a blind
woman. She curled up in the rocker beside the banked coals of her fire. No
tears came to ease her knotted chest.

Tom had sold his soul to the devil. For her. To win her
challenge and dance her to the altar. Her sharp, thoughtless words had sent the
best man in the world into Hell.

Jenny looked to the floor in front of the empty
hearthstones, at the empty chair by the table, through the window where in
daytime she’d see a carefully mended fence. She felt Tom’s skin against her and
smelled the warm earth scent that hung around him.

“No,” she said at last, and the word released all the breath
her body had clamped around. “I don’t care if Old Scratch himself does have
you, Tom. He can’t keep you.”

She got up and put on her working dress and boots. She
pulled Tom’s spare hat over her unbound hair. She didn’t take the lamp with
her, or think to bar the door. She just walked out across the yard and into the
forest, following her husband’s footsteps.

Day came up slow in front of her. She paid it no heed. The
hills rose and dipped so steeply she had to scrabble with her hands in the dead
pine needles and crumbly dirt to make her way along. Skinny pines rattled their
branches at her, filling the sticky summer wind with the smell of fresh resin.
Only the birds and the beasts saw her climbing between the trees and the
bracken, and they didn’t think to care. Night came and she slept without
shelter. Day returned, and she rose to walk again.

Round about mid-afternoon on the third day, she broke out of
the woods onto a twisty dirt road. She set her aching feet to follow it. Hunger
knotted her stomach and her throat felt like she’d been drinking sand. The echo
of Mr. Hawkins’s words, sputtering out what Tom had done, shoved her forward.

As sunset tinged the sky candy-pink, Jenny caught a sound
that stopped her in her tracks. Fiddle music. A jaunty tune rippled like a
spring creek from up ahead. Jenny hurried herself along the road, toward the
music, her heart pounding at the base of her throat.

She rounded a bend in the road, and paused. About a hundred
yards ahead, her road met up with another. At the place they crossed waited a
fine, white-walled church, with a cross on its door and a bell in its steeple.
The fiddle music streamed out of the church windows as if carried on the
orange-gold light that shone within. She heard the familiar sound of booted
feet stamping on floorboards, and the sound of a man’s voice crying, all in time
to the cheery music.

Jenny forced her spine to straighten. She wrapped her love
for Tom tight around her and strode up to the church’s open doors.

Inside, where there should have been pews, dead folks
danced.

Rotting hands reached across the reel line for the ladies’
chain. Soiled silks rustled as the torn shoes kicked up to balance and came
down to swing. The stench of it all hit harder than the grisly scene.

The caller’s moaning voice prickled across Jenny’s skin.

“Sashay down the center and back!” wailed the caller. “All
join hands and circle four!”

The dancing corpses circled round and parted. Jenny saw the
caller standing where the pulpit should have been. New shock rocked her back.
Reverend Cook stooped there, shaking as he blurted out the dance figures for
the dead.

“Everybody swing!” called Reverend Cook, and everybody did.
The smell of rotten meat filled the air until there was nothing left to
breathe, and Jenny’s tongue shoved itself back and forth inside her mouth
trying to clear out the taste of death.

The fiddler let off one final chord. The corpses bowed, low
and solemn, to their partners. Through their crooked bodies, Jenny saw the
fiddler stand, tuck his instrument under one arm and applaud the trembling
preacher.

“Oh, excellent, Reverend Cook!” His laughter was clear and
deep.

Jenny swallowed her fear in one lump and started up the
center of the defiled sanctuary.

Every lolling head turned. Rheumy, sodden eyes studied her.
She kept her own eyes straight ahead, and kept her feet moving until she stood
in front of the fiddler.

He was taller than most tall men she knew, and thin as the
trunks of the pine trees in the forest. He wore a long, black coat over black
britches and a starched white shirt and collar. His fair hair was slicked back
tight against his scalp. Eyes blacker than cast iron laughed down at Jenny and
pale lips turned up to make a pretty smile.

“Good evening, Mrs. Hawkins.” The fiddler bowed deeply to
Jenny. “I’m so glad you could come.” His voice touched her and left her hot.
She pictured Tom’s eyes and managed not to flinch.

“You the one I come to find?” she asked bluntly.