The Angry Wife (3 page)

“How is he?” she whispered.

“You don’t have to whisper,” Bettina whispered. “When he sleeps he hears nothing.”

They stood looking down at him, side by side.

“He’s so young,” Bettina said.

“I heard them say twenty-three,” Georgia answered.

“Then he went when he was nineteen. How long was he in prison—did you hear them say?”

“That I did not,” Georgia answered.

They lingered, looking at his face, at his hands, lying helpless on the white coverlet. “He has nice hands,” Georgia said, “I like a man to have nice hands. Remember Father’s hands, Bettina?”

Bettina nodded.

“Shan’t I take a turn with him, so you can sleep?” Georgia asked.

Bettina shook her head. “I want to be here when he wakes,” she said.

She gave her sister a gentle push. “You go to your bed,” she commanded her. “It’s me that she set to nurse him back to health and strength.”

She watched her sister’s figure glide across the floor and she watched while the door latched. Then she sat down again in her seat by the bed, her eyes fixed on his face.

Down the hall Georgia walked, barefoot, without sound. She passed “their” bedrooms—her mistress’s and master’s—She remembered what he had told her.

“Surely, I’m free,” she thought. “I could go away. I don’t have to take even their wages.” She heard voices murmuring, and under the door a crack of light showed. The high transom was bright. They were still awake! But she had waked, too, out of dreamless sleep. The house seemed strange now that the master had come home.

“That’s what he is,” she thought, “even though he tells me I’m not to call him that. A house must have a master.”

She had always come and gone into that room, and her mistress had never seemed to care. It was as though she were nobody at all, until now. But now the whole house was different. Her mistress was different, too. Women were always different when men came into the house.

She went noiselessly past the door. Then she reached the attic stairs. “God help me they don’t creak,” she thought.

It was the one thing she and Bettina had asked, that they might sleep in the house instead of out in the quarters. Her mistress had looked at them coldly. They had stood, hand in hand, waiting for her question. But she had not put the question.

“Very well,” she had said in her cool voice. “You may sleep in the attic. But you’ll have to be quiet. I don’t want to hear even your walking around.”

Up in the attic she and Bettina had made a home for themselves. They had found an old rope bottom bed and a discarded bureau. Rags they had made into rugs and they had crocheted covers for the bed and the bureau top. But they had learned to walk as softly as shadows in the top of the great house and to talk in whispers.

She took off her dressing gown and crept into the bed. Still she could not sleep. She lay quivering, aware, feeling, not thinking. There was no use thinking in a life like hers. She was a creature in the sea, tossed here and there by tides she did not understand.

“But wherever you are,” her mother had said, “begin to live right there and look after yourselves. Only thing, I hope you will always be together.”

Her mother had died so long ago she could remember her now only by summoning her consciously to memory. All she saw was a dim dark face, darker than her own or Bettina’s, dark but beautiful, more like Bettina than like her, more Indian than Negro. But her father she remembered well. He was an old white man, always old. They had lived with him in a great house with pillars to hold up the heavy roof of the porch. Once there had been a white mistress in the house but never had there been children. She and Bettina were his only children. He had treated them as his children, too, and had made the slaves treat them so after his white wife died. It had been easy, for there were no visitors. Long before Georgia’s memory visitors had stopped coming. She and Bettina both knew that it had happened when he took their mother into the house. She had not been one of the slaves. She was a stranger whom he had bought in New Orleans and she had kept herself a stranger always. But she had been wise. She had lived in the house but she allowed none of the slaves to wait on her or on the children. She had made herself a housekeeper, and she thanked the slaves carefully when they helped her, and she never gave an order. It was always “please, will you”—and “I’m sorry to ask you”—Behind the extreme courtesy they had lived together, the three of them, separate from everyone, even the father.

“He’s your father, but you can’t act like his children,” she had told them, “even if he does treat you right,” she had added.

So she and Bettina had grown up as solitary as orphans, even when the tall thin old Englishman had held them on his knees and kissed their smooth golden cheeks.

After their mother died, when she was eleven and Bettina nine, they had gone on alone together, growing up, slender, silent, obedient always to the old man. “Sir,” they had always called him, neither master nor father. He used to look at them. She remembered and never could she forget how he used to look at them, pitying and frightened, as though something he had done in a moment had surprised even himself.

“I don’t know what’s to become of you two girls,” he used to mutter. He was very old, then, too old to do anything but let them wait on him.

“Don’t worry about us, sir—” she had always said. That, too, was her mother’s teaching … “Don’t ever let men get to thinking you trouble, father or husband. Men don’t like trouble with women.”

She had kept these teachings in her heart and had taught them to Bettina who could not remember the least image of their mother.

After a while the old man had given up even his worry. He grew older and slept more often, and had taken much waiting upon, until the day when he died in a moment and they had found him dead.

“What’s goin’ to become of us, Georgia?” Bettina had asked.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” she had answered.

“Maybe he’s left his will for us,” Bettina whispered.

“Hush,” Georgia said. One of the teachings of her mother had been, “Don’t expect anything. Then what you get seems good and enough.”

But there was no will and no mention of them and when a cousin came as the next heir, he sold the house and the land and the slaves, and they were sold, too. If they had not been slaves before they now became slaves.

Thus had they gone into the next great house. It was no question there—they were slaves. And then, because they had worked well and always in that deep silence which they kept about them like a dark velvet curtain, Miss Lucie had brought them here when again the great house fell. Great houses always fell. She lay gazing up into the thick beams above her head. Would this great house fall, too?

Pierce, waking just after dawn, got out of the bed. He moved as stealthily as he knew how, but Lucinda waked.

“Go to sleep, Luce,” he commanded. “It’s the middle of the night for you.”

“Where are you going?” she asked. Her blue eyes opened wide at him.

“I’m going for a ride,” he said. “I’ll be back in time to breakfast with you.”

He stooped and kissed her mouth. Her breath was not quite sweet in the morning. He knew it and yet it always shocked him a little that it could be, so fastidious was she in every detail of her person. Inside the lovely shell of her body surely there should be no corruption. She was asleep again, lying placidly on her pillow, her hands on her breast. Lovely she was, and he had no complaint against her. By the time he got back she would have washed her mouth with one of her fragrant waters. He had no need to notice an offense not greater than the scent of a faded rose—he who was fresh home from the stench of dying men on a battlefield! Yet that stench had so pervaded him for four years that now his nostrils were always to the wind, like a dog’s. He smelled what he would never have noticed in the days before he had smelled death.

He splashed in his wash basin in his dressing room, blowing out gusts of bubbles through the water, he sponged his body, brushed his teeth and put on clean garments under his riding suit. Clean he would be so long as he lived. He had had enough of filth.

Clean to his marrowbones he went out of the door and into the great upper hall, down the winding stairs which were one of the beauties of Malvern, and into the lower hall. The hall ran through the house, and front and back doors were wide open to the morning.

At the table by the door Georgia was putting white and purple asters into a yellow bowl.

“Hello, Georgia,” he said.

She turned her head, and he saw with discomfort that she was really very beautiful. He did not want a beautiful slave in his house. Though she wasn’t a slave any more—“Good morning, sir,” she said.

“A fine morning,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, sir.”

“I suppose nothing’s been heard of Tom yet? I didn’t go in—didn’t want to wake him.”

“No, sir,” she replied. “Bettina hasn’t come out. Likely he’s sleeping.”

She pronounced her words so purely that he was curious to know where she had learned them so. But he refused himself the luxury of curiosity and went on down the steps, into the cool bright morning. At the stables his groom was already brushing his horse.

He looked up with a grin. “Sure is good to have somepin like a horse again, marster.”

“The stables are pretty sorry, Jake,” Pierce agreed. “But give me time—I’ll be looking around for some real horseflesh in a month or so.”

“Sure will be good to git the stables full,” Jake said.

He slipped the saddle on the mare, steadied her with his hand on her neck, murmuring and hissing through his teeth to soothe her.

“She’s raring to go,” Pierce said fondly. “But it won’t be to war any more, Beauty—”

“Sure is good they ain’t any mo’ wa’,” Jake said.

“You’re going to get wages from now on, Jake, like all the rest of the sl—servants,” Pierce said.

“I’d rawther you kep’ the money, please, marster,” Jake laughed, and his open mouth was like the inside of a watermelon.

“You’ll be having to buy your food, though, and clothes for you and Manda and the children,” Pierce said. He tested the stirrups as carefully as though he were going into battle. A horseman was no better than his stirrups. He heard a gasp from Jake.

“You ain’t goin’ to feed us no mo’?” Jake’s face was lined with terror.

“Now, Jake, what do I give you wages for?” Pierce demanded. He leaned against his horse. This sort of thing was going to take a mighty lot of patience!

“I don’t want no wages,” Jake wailed. “I wants our food and does like we allays had had!”

“Great day in the morning!” Pierce shouted, “why, the war was fought so you could be free, man!”

“But my food and cloes!” Jake moaned.

Pierce broke into sudden laughter and leaped on his horse. “Oh well, I reckon you won’t starve at Malvern,” he said. “And if you want, I’ll give you food and clothes instead of wages.”

“Thank you—thank you, marster!” Jake bellowed after him.

That was the trouble, Pierce thought. You fought a war for people, you all but died, or you rotted in a prison, the way Tom had rotted nearly to death, and you come home and the people don’t know what it’s all about, or why you fought and rotted. They want everything just the way it was before.

In the brilliant morning sunshine, cantering across his own lands, his face grew grim. “I’m going to live for myself from now on,” he muttered.

He looked across the lands of Malvern, his land. Two hundred years ago his great-grandfather had come from England, a landless young son, and had bought this valley set high in the mountains of the Alleghenies. He had cut the forests and ploughed the earth, he had built the foundations and the heart of the big house. The soil was rich, and the encircling fields were still fringed with virgin forest, great oaks and beeches and maples.

“I will restore my soul,” Pierce said to himself.

He turned his mare’s head away from the line of cabins to the north of the road. He did not want to see his own black folk, not even to hear their greetings. He was tired of them because he had fought to keep them. Hell, he had lost and they were free. He still believed that it was the wrong way to free them. That was what he would have liked to have told that tall gaunt man in the White House, had he not been killed. All during the war he wanted to go and tell Abe Lincoln, “Man, I don’t want slaves! I’ll be as glad as you could be to have everyone of them free and wage earning. But it’s got to be done slowly, the way our family has been doing it, freeing the men when they get to be thirty-five, freeing the women when they marry. Then they’re fit for freedom. The Delaneys have been freeing their slaves for fifty years.”

Well, almost freeing them! They had their papers, even if they didn’t get real wages. They were like Jake, still wanting their food and clothes and cabins. It scared them if they had only cold money in their palms. They couldn’t imagine money turning into food and clothes and cabins.

His horse picked her way delicately about something in the road and he looked down and saw a yellow backed turtle slowly making its way across the dusty stretch. It went on, regardless of the peril it had so narrowly escaped. He laughed at its earnest persistence. It was the comforting and delightful thing about land and forest, and beast and bird—they went on, oblivious of wars.

“I’m going to be like that,” he thought. He lifted his head, gave his mare rein and she broke into a gallop. He brought her home an hour later in a froth, and leaped up the steps to have breakfast with Lucinda and the little boys. They were already at the table, when he had washed and dropped into his seat. He had not changed his riding things. After breakfast he wanted to go out again, this time on business. But he must see Tom first.

“Hello, you two,” he said to his boys. He reached out his hands and rumpled both blonde heads. “See how pretty your mama is?” They turned at the question and stared at her.

“Are you pretty, Mama?” Martin asked, surprised.

“How pretty, Papa?” Carey asked.

Lucinda bore the scrutiny of three pairs of male eyes with lovely calm. She smiled at Pierce as the one most important.