Jacob's Ladder (3 page)

Perhaps the fields were stony and the fences in poor repair. Perhaps the south end of the barn canted alarmingly. Perhaps the chimney smoked and perhaps the team had been foaled in 1826, that sad year when Thomas Jefferson died. Uther Botkin had never been happier.

Because of his learning, which the mountain planters thought deep, pleasantly old-fashioned, and (if the whole truth be told) inconsequential, Uther and Martha were invited to balls at Warwick and Stratford. Mrs. Dinwiddie of Hidden Valley thought these considerations too nice, and neither the old schoolmaster nor his bride were ever invited to view “the finest balustrades west of the Blue Ridge.”

Uther was far too happy to be snubbed, wouldn't have recognized a snub if it smacked him in the face. Martha, Uther, and the boy, Jesse: in the twilight of his life, Uther had found the family he'd always yearned for, and those who might have wished to humble him were deterred by the radiance of his countenance, his gentle speech, the unassuming nature of his learning. Why, certainly he would instruct the Gatewood children—most happy, most happy, your humble and most obedient servant, sir.

Uther and young Jesse hacked out a garden and planted it. They cut the scrub brush from ten acres and fenced the pasture with chestnut rails exchanged by Samuel Gatewood for his children's education.

Uther's wife sang as she weeded her garden and tended the pinkish Globe and early Danver tomatoes. She sang as she scrubbed Uther's Sunday shirt and his woolen socks. She sang all through her pregnancy. And six months after Baby Sallie was born, she sang no more.

An old man and a boy tended the baby, changed her, soaked a handkerchief in milk to give her suck. The boy, Jesse, did what heavy work got done.

If Samuel Gatewood hadn't supplied provender—hams, corn, oatmeal, beans—the little family might have starved. If he hadn't brought in hay and grain, their few animals certainly would have. Next spring, Gatewood's servants plowed and planted the little garden. They completed the rail fence around the new pasture.

In May of that year, Samuel Gatewood arrived, a colored woman of indeterminate age in the back of his farm wagon. Samuel Gatewood announced that he was offering the woman for rent at half the usual terms, just forty dollars per annum, payable at Christmastide, plus a pair of good leather shoes to be supplied the woman annually. The woman, Gatewood averred, would make life easier on Botkin's plantation.

Uther demurred. Like Mr. Jefferson, he said, he wished an end to slavery and meant to emancipate Jesse Burns when the boy attained his majority.

Samuel Gatewood replied that whatever his qualms, Mr. Jefferson retained his slaves, all of whom were pledged against extensive debts and sold within a month of the great man's death. He noted, further, that Virginia laws had hardened and emancipation was not the simple matter it had once been. Master Botkin could pursue whatever course he desired, but the servant woman in the wagon, Opal by name, was barren and of a shrewish disposition, and if Botkin didn't wish to rent her, Gatewood intended to offer her for sale—the slave speculator Silas Omohundru being in the neighborhood. Uther's eyes toured his dirty cabin, the mound of unwashed clothing, yesterday's grease congealing in the frypan, his sleeping daughter, and the twelve-year-old boy his only helper. “I accept your generous offer, sir,” Uther said.

After Gatewood left, Uther welcomed the woman to his plantation, humble though it was.

She said, “Don't know if I ‘barren' or not. Never met no man ever made me care to be fertile.”

“I shall endeavor to treat you fairly,” Uther said. “I pray we can lessen the inherent awkwardness of this situation.”

“I wash your dishes and I cook your meals,” Opal said. “But I ain't no good at it. You a hand with livestock?”

“It is a skill I admire in others.”

The woman grinned a gap-toothed grin. She wasn't as tall as the schoolmaster but possessed more girth. “Then maybe we get along after all.”

Every morning, Samuel Gatewood's daughter, Leona, arrived for instruction, and his son, Duncan, came too when he turned six, and Botkin's daughter, Sallie, toddled onto the porch to be with the others. On the porch in warm weather, by the fire in winter months, the children puzzled over their slates and calculated sums. Uther was a teacher again and knew it was for the last time.

Duncan was a harum-scarum boy who had to be persuaded away from his horses in favor of learning. Leona prayed she was pretty but feared she might not be. She learned because the others learned. And, to Uther's unconcealed delight, little Sallie loved learning—especially natural philosophy. After Jesse finished morning chores, he joined them, and though he rarely volunteered a question, he was soon able to read. This peculiar school seemed perfectly natural because to Uther Botkin it was perfectly natural.

Cox's snow was named after its best-known victim, a Lynchburg doctor, who returned home that night late, and some said drunk, and froze to death when his horse and buggy stalled in snowdrifts a scant half mile from safety.

At Botkin's plantation, Opal was first to notice the snow. Seated at the table, she slurped tea cooling in a saucer. Uther was at the dry sink, washing his cup and bowl.

From the first, Uther and Opal had adopted a division of labor: she did the livestock work and cooked, he advanced his studies and tidied up. Uther never complained about her cooking, which he accepted as his lot. Every year at Christmastide after he paid rental to Samuel Gatewood, ceremoniously, Uther presented Opal with a pair of new shoes. The cabin wasn't exactly spotless, but was orderly enough. Sometimes a person looking to perch upon a chair or settee must needs remove an article of clothing, but Opal's dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams in cheerful confusion and along the cool back wall, farthest from the fire, dangled hams cured last November and onions braided into ropes.

Light streamed through the two windows—it was thirteen-year-old Sallie's task to keep them washed—and dull coals glowed in the fireplace.

Opal said, “We're in for bad weather.”

“Opal, it is a mild winter. Every day I expect to see the first spring crocuses pop through the earth.”

“Snow about to cover them again. I tell Jesse bring the hogs down off the mountain. He shoo 'em into that lower lot, toss 'em some corn, keep 'em busy. I goin' to fetch the cows and the horses. The sheep can manage. They got their wool on 'em.”

Sallie set her book aside. “I'll help, Auntie Opal. The cows will be over by the woods fence corner.”

“And,” old Uther suggested, “I'll heat milk for hot cocoa upon your return.”

When Opal and Sallie stepped onto the porch, a gust of wind smacked them hard. That gust continued down the valley, skimming the frozen ground, skittering ice crystals against the dead broom sedge, turning the stolid sheep's faces away from the storm.

A half mile later, it reached Stratford Plantation, where it dropped into the valley the Jackson River had created, forming the alluvial subsoil that was Stratford's best cropland.

Samuel Gatewood's father, Thomas, had created Stratford. The Gatewood's original grant had been awarded to Samuel's grandfather (another Samuel) in 1768, but Thomas had tripled his family's holdings along the Jackson by purchase, exchange, and more imaginative means. Eighteenth-century surveyors had so muddled the original settlers' land grants and warrants that a determined man backed by a clever attorney (and Thomas Gatewood employed such a fellow) could claim land everyone thought had been granted years ago. Thomas Gatewood swore he didn't covet all the land in the county—only what was adjacent. The plantation he created was five thousand contiguous acres—the finest land between the Shenandoah Valley and the Tygart River Valley, three mountain ranges to the west. Alluvial fans at the foot of Snowy Mountain produced the plantation's fine oats. Although the river fields sometimes flooded in the spring, they grew fine wheat and better buckwheat, and the river never removed more topsoil than it deposited. Corn followed clover in the clay soils. A stone-lined millrace sliced through the river bend to power Stratford's overshot mill. Here, under Jack, Samuel Gatewood's excellent driver, fulltask hands ground corn, rolled oats, mashed sorghum, sawed logs, and, in winter months when no other work was available, crushed limestone rocks into particles fine enough to sweeten the croplands.

Stratford's wheat, sawn planks, and railroad sleepers traveled by wagon south to Millboro Springs, where the western ambitions of the Virginia Central Railroad had been checked by the impassable mountains.

Excepting the few weeks in winter when the race froze, the creak of that tall mill wheel and the growl of millstones were the living breath of Stratford Plantation. Day started when Jack the Driver opened the floodgate and stopped when he dropped the heavy gate into its slots again.

Forge, granaries, corn cribs, fowl house, and dairy clustered near the mill. Next came two great barns, each bulging with feed. Between the barns and the great house were the Quarters, a narrow street lined with one-room log cabins, each with its own wattle-and-daub chimney, each with a garden plot behind. The house and its dependencies stood on a low rise, facing south.

Meathouse, root cellar, and kitchen were behind the plantation house. The kitchen house was connected to the main house by a covered passageway—the “hyphen.”

Twenty-eight colored servants lived at Stratford. Children and elderly milked the cows, made the cheese, slopped the hogs, gathered eggs, killed and plucked chickens, and tended the kitchen garden. One very ancient servant, Agamemnon, had no assigned tasks, though he sometimes made up potions and salves. Middle-aged men and women worked the fields, and two gangs of timber cutters—“Rufus's gang” and “the old gang”—lived in the woods, visited weekly by Jack the Driver. House servants included Pompey, the houseman, a scullery girl, the cook, and Miss Abigail's personal servant, Midge, who looked out the window and shivered. “There's Master Duncan ridin' out. I expect he's goin' out to warn the woods gangs.”

Miss Abigail clipped a pattern from
Godey's Lady's Book.
“If you wish to improve your speech, dear, you mustn't drop your 'g's.”

Midge flushed. “Yes ma'am. I forget myself.”

“Modest and pleasant speech always produce a favorable impression. Midge, I feel a headache coming on. If you fetch a cool cloth, I shall lie back and you shall read to me. When you encounter a novel word, spell it for me.”

Midge took up the lady's magazine reluctantly. Speaking correctly was easier than reading. She had a knack for imitating speech, and last Christmas when Cousin Molly visited, Midge soon had Cousin's Molly's Tidewater drawl duplicated perfectly. The snow pelted the bedroom windows of Stratford House as the young Midge read aloud an account of a fancy dress ball in London, which,
Godey's
noted, Prince Albert had attended. A draft brushed the crystal pendants dangling from the lamps, and light sparkles danced across the veneered mahogany wardrobe and the settees commodious enough to seat three males shoulder to shoulder or one lady in hoops. Several treasured articles—Miss Abigail's dressing case, a hat box—rested on the stairs to the nursery on the second floor. These stairs were three-quarter-size, the latticework balustrades too close for a child to slip through. No child had used them since Duncan.

Abigail's husband, Samuel, slept in his spartan office. Every morning, Abigail Gatewood dressed carefully before passing through the parlor and across the hall to the dining room, where Pompey had her breakfast.

“Master Gatewood already out?” she'd ask, surprised. Though he invariably was, Miss Abigail was always surprised.

The afternoon of the snow, Samuel Gatewood was at his mill.

“Comin' down hard, Master Samuel,” Jack the Driver said.

“The last time a January storm came from the east was in '35—the year before my father died. I don't care for it. Send boys up the mountain after the hogs. Toll them in with corn. We'll want the big barn prepared to receive the milk cows and horses. See to the partitions. We'll feed more than customary ration tonight. Send Franky through the Quarters. She must ensure all have sufficient meat, cornmeal, and beans. Many woodboxes are nearly empty. Set some hands to the slabwood pile—it may not burn long, but it burns hot. After the firewood is cut, close the millrace—I misdoubt we'll be milling tomorrow. If this storm is less severe than it appears to be, our precautions will appear foolish, but . . .”

“Master Samuel, look yonder. Cows all lying down. Critters know better'n we do what's coming.”

The Botkin plantation was ready before its downriver neighbor, but doubtless that was because there was less to ready. By four o'clock, when falling snow was precipitating the night, Opal, Jesse, Sallie, and Uther were seated at the pine table with their hot cocoa and a stew warmed by the fire. There was a chicken in it, and potatoes and carrots, and it smelled rather wonderful, but that may have been due to their exertions and the snugness induced by wild weather outside their plank door.

At Stratford, in the last minutes before darkness was complete, Jack said, “Master Samuel, if you don't leave for the big house this minute, I believe you'll spend the night with me.”

The lantern in Stratford House's parlor window blinked through the blizzard. Samuel Gatewood trudged home through foot-deep snow, aware, suddenly, how weary he was.

Although Rufus had offered a bed in the woods cabin and begged him to stay, young Duncan hadn't. Emergencies pleasure young men, and at four o'clock, just as the Botkins were settling in, Duncan turned Gypsy's head back down the mountain. In the hollows and the west-facing ridges the horse could still find good footing and Duncan's eyes were young and sharp, and it wasn't until they reached the wheat bottom that Duncan lost track of everything. His hair was frozen, his eyelashes stuck to his face, the thick reins stiffened in his hands. Gypsy shifted her feet. Duncan's heart jumped and he could not seem to catch his breath. He waited until panic subsided before saying, in almost his normal voice, “Well, girl, I hope you know the way because I surely do not.” He loosed the reins, gave Gypsy her head, and clucked. The horse stayed still for a moment before turning her head sharply left and proceeding. When she stopped of her own accord, Duncan dismounted to open the gate; a gate Duncan prayed opened into the lower barn pasture. When Gypsy stopped again, Duncan could see no better, but he heard animals inside the barn chewing and belching. A horse nickered, and Gypsy nickered back.