The Measure of Katie Calloway,: A Novel
Read The Measure of Katie Calloway,: A Novel Online
Authors: Serena B. Miller
© 2011 by Serena Miller
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3411-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
To Lyle Edgar Bonzo—sawyer and woodsman.
God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1:7
1
September 18, 1867
A drop of rain seeped through the sodden roof of the Georgia cabin where Katie Calloway lay. The raindrop fell on her bare foot—a small, welcome kiss on her bruised and battered body.
She had survived another night.
Maybe there was a God in heaven after all.
Katie eased her head to one side, hoping not to awaken her husband, but her caution was unnecessary. Harlan was gone. Thank God.
And yet, this struck her as odd—it was rare for him to leave without first demanding breakfast. But she didn’t dwell on the fact. She was too grateful that he was no longer lying next to her. Limp with relief, she inched her body off the ancient feather-tick mattress, grimacing from the pain. Harlan had been roaring drunk when he staggered home last night. With all her heart, she hoped that her eight-year-old brother, Ned, had not heard the blows she had silently endured.
A note lay on the rickety bedside table. She reached for it, stifling a groan at the pain. Her eyes squinted as she tried to read the note in the dark cabin. There had been a time in her life when she would have lit a candle without a second thought, but candles were scarce these days. She seldom used one unless Harlan demanded it. In semi-darkness, she carried the scrap of paper outside the cabin into the faint, early morning light.
To her surprise, it said that Harlan would be spending the day in an adjoining county visiting relatives. The note was written in careful, well-penned words. This, too, was strange. It was not Harlan’s habit to be so thoughtful as to give her a hint where he was going, let alone to leave her a message.
As she pondered this, she traced the spiky penmanship with her finger. There was a light mist falling. The paper had grown damp, and the homemade pokeberry ink smeared when she touched it. In a sudden fit of anger, she rubbed at the words until they were a purple blur. With all her heart, she wished that she could erase her bond to Harlan as easily.
Ever since he had returned from what he called the War of Yankee Aggression, he had treated her—born and reared in the North—as though she were the enemy. He even enjoyed taunting her about the fact that her father and brother, both valiant Union soldiers, were lying in the ground.
Tears welled in her eyes, and she roughly dashed them away. Grieving would not bring her loved ones back, nor would it make her life any easier. It was wiser to focus on caring for the brother she had left.
Her mother, a world away in Pennsylvania, had taken to her bed over the loss of her husband and oldest son and had never again arisen. A courageous member of her parents’ church had made the trip South, bringing Katie’s precious little brother to her after her mother willed her soul to flee this earth.
Harlan was furious over this small addition to their household. He had not been pleased with having another Yankee under his roof, even if that Yankee was only a child.
In the distance, she heard her two Jersey milk cows bawling for relief from swollen udders. She threw the crumpled note into the ashes of the fireplace, donned her old choring dress, grabbed her tin milk pails, and limped through the autumn drizzle to the barn. She would use the fresh milk to make a thick mush of cornmeal for Ned’s breakfast. It was a luxury to have a full bag of cornmeal—a luxury she would never again take for granted.
If nothing else, Mr. Lincoln’s war had taught her that hunger burns and gnaws until even she, a gently reared minister’s daughter, could wring a stray chicken’s neck and gut the carcass with as much gleeful anticipation as she had once opened a box of chocolates.
Unfortunately, Harlan had also learned things during the war. Things he enjoyed describing in bone-chilling whispers in her ear at night. A large, powerful man, he had fought in hand-to-hand combat and often boasted that he had enjoyed it.
Now, with only the three of them living in the cramped overseer’s cabin and with no servants as witnesses, Harlan’s anger toward her seemed to know no bounds. She had hoped and prayed things would change, but Harlan possessed a streak of brutality so broad and deep she marveled at the fact that he had ever managed to sweep her off her feet.
Frequently, she thought of the many choices once open to her. There was a time, a weary lifetime ago, when she had been extraordinarily pretty—at least that was what she had been told. Many sweet boys in her home county had come courting. None had interested her. Instead, she had caught the attention of her brother’s dashing friend from West Point—the sole heir of Fallen Oaks Plantation.
Her head had been filled with romantic notions about the life of a plantation mistress. Harlan, at six foot two, with golden hair and a perfect physique, had been stunning in his West Point uniform. At seventeen—fool that she was—she had been incapable of seeing past that uniform. Dazzled by his veneer of well-born Southern gentility, she had not seen the cruelty buried within.
“I’m coming. I’m coming,” she mumbled as she hurried along the path to the ramshackle barn.
Although their plantation house lay in ruins, this barn, the small overseer’s cabin, and a few slave shacks had been overlooked during General Sherman’s slash-and-burn march to the sea. She had hidden away, deep within the forest along with the pitiful remnants of their livestock, watching her home go up in flames while Sherman and his men stormed through Georgia, ruthlessly cutting a wide swath of destruction, breaking the back of the Southern rebellion.
Surviving the devastation had almost broken her back as well. By the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox, she was so sick of war and deprivation that she no longer cared how things ended—just as long as they did.
And yet the end of Mr. Lincoln’s war had brought no cessation of struggle to her life. Within one week of her husband’s return, the beatings had begun. Discovering that his ancestral home had been burned to the ground had pushed Harlan into a dark fury that never left except on those nights when he passed out, benumbed by alcohol.
For reasons she could not comprehend, he equated the fact that she had been born a Yankee with having everything to do with his losses. Harlan couldn’t be convinced, no matter how hard she tried, that there had been no more chance of deflecting Sherman’s men from their grim purpose than one could have of holding back the ocean. He threw at her apocryphal accounts of brave Southern women facing down Union soldiers, shaming the invaders into leaving their precious homes alone.
From what she could tell, he also held her accountable for failing to stem the tide of slaves who had melted away—abandoning Fallen Oaks in the days after he rode off to fight a war to keep them enslaved.
For a while, she had been pleased that she had managed to save two cows and a few bedraggled chickens by hiding in the forest as Sherman’s men rampaged through the countryside. With little to work with, she had tried hard to make the overseer’s cabin habitable, but Harlan had been disgusted with her pitiful attempts to have a home waiting for him when he returned from war.
As she squatted on a stool, resting her forehead against the Jersey’s warm belly, a fateful slant of light drew her attention to a thin wire she had never seen before. It was attached to the end of a loose board on the bench where she always set the heavy buckets after finishing the milking. Following that wire upwards, she saw that it was attached to a massive oak beam balanced ever-so-carefully directly above where she always stood while straining the milk.
The hair on the back of her neck prickled. So
that
was why Harlan had left before dawn—to have the privacy to set up the final blow to her body. Her knees grew weak as her mind tried to wrap itself around the realization that her husband intended to kill her.
Once her breathing returned to normal, she chided herself for her shock. After the way he had treated her, why should she be surprised? No doubt he had hoped to discover her body here today, the barely discernible wire easily removed and himself a handsome widower.
Harlan frequently informed her while spewing venom about her failure to produce an heir for the crumbled Calloway throne that lonely war widows now filled the countryside—women who would be happy to welcome him into their homes and beds. If it weren’t for her.
He was right, of course. The war had wiped out an entire generation of Southern men. She often caught local women casting envious glances at her virile, living husband. Two were still mistresses of intact, if moldering, mansions—homes that had somehow escaped Sherman’s notice.
They would be welcome to him.
She found herself almost envious of her own former slaves.
They
were now free, but there would be no war fought to emancipate her.
It was futile to even think about petitioning the courts for a divorce. Locals considered Harlan a war hero. Judges would laugh at any accusations that she, a Yankee, might make against her husband.
Deep down she knew, without accepting the fact until this moment, that the only way she would ever get out of this miserable marriage was if one of them died. Obviously, Harlan had decided it would be her.
He would get by with it too. The Calloway name alone would protect him in this county. It always had.
Her father’s words came to mind—the ones with which he had tried to dissuade her from the headstrong decision to marry her brother’s fascinating friend. Marriage, her father had advised her, wasn’t like choosing a dress pattern that could be discarded when she tired of it. Marriage was forever. Marriage was for life.
“That’s what I’m afraid of, Papa,” she spoke into the chilly autumn air. “I’m afraid I won’t
have
a life if I stay with Harlan.”
Hurriedly, she stripped milk from the cows’ udders while frantically casting about for a plan. She knew that Harlan would never think to take care of their animals—something he considered a slave’s job—or, barring slaves,
her
job. Carefully stepping around the wire, she drove the cows into the larger pasture beside the river, dumped the milk into the lone hog’s trough, and left the gate open so the poor thing could get out and root for itself.
Then she remembered her flock of chickens shut up for the night in the weasel-tight chicken coop. They wouldn’t survive if she didn’t release them. She wrenched open the door and pounded on the roof, frightening the biddies and startling the rooster, who strutted, slightly befuddled, out into the morning drizzle.
Bruises and aches forgotten, she ran to the house.
“Ned!” she yelled as she burst through the door.
Her brother’s tousled brown hair and dark eyes peered over the loft. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Get dressed. We’re leaving.”
“But . . .” His eyes went wide with fear.
“Harlan is gone. We have to go.”
The look of hope and relief on his freckled face made her want to weep. Although she tried to protect her little brother, Ned had also experienced the sting of Harlan’s hand.
She began stuffing her few clothes into a sack and stopped. What was she doing? There was no time to pack. In spite of the note, there was no telling when Harlan would be home. Releasing the animals had taken time she didn’t have. They had to move fast.
She pulled on her “good” black dress, now worn and rusty. Then she jerked on a pair of Harlan’s britches beneath her dress, rolled up the pant legs, and cinched the waist with a piece of twine. She tied on a black bonnet and dug her threadbare cape out of the closet.
Now, all they needed was food. And money.
She swallowed hard. There
was
money in the cabin. Harlan’s money. Funds he had received for selling two hundred acres on the back side of the plantation. If she took it, he would follow her to the ends of the earth to punish her.
If she didn’t take it, he would follow her anyway.
Visions of that heavy oak beam swam before her eyes as she pulled a box from beneath the bed and took out a pouch of silver coins.
This was the money he planned to use to get Fallen Oaks back on a paying basis again—land he had once ridden over like a young prince. His boasts were empty, of course. Without slaves, Fallen Oaks would never thrive. It would never again be the well-manicured Eden into which she had ridden as a young bride. She knew these coins would be used to buy strong drink until the money was gone.