The Rebel Wife (11 page)

“You all were loyal servants to Mr. Branson,” Judge says. “And he recognized that in his will, leaving each of you with a small bequest. A token.” He turns his head to clear his throat, then looks at each of them. Only Emma looks down at her hands, nodding to herself. The others look Judge right in the eye. His voice grows louder as he speaks, and he stares them down until John looks away, too, averting his gray eyes to the floor. Little John has the same pale gray eyes. He shifts in Rachel’s lap, curling up, although he is getting too big for her.

Henry squirms and says, “Emma,” in a whisper. His restlessness is so distracting that I must let him down. Judge watches, his cheeks suffused with red, as Henry clip-clops in his little shoes to Emma and climbs into her lap. He is next to Little John and seems happy because of it. Judge looks at me and grimaces, disapproving.

“They are not important sums,” he continues. “Simply tokens. But you should know that Eli was concerned for your welfare and left the disbursement of funds in my charge.”

Simon shoots Rachel a look, something critical, maybe disbelief, but Judge does not catch it—or pretends not to.

Emma nods. Her arm is wrapped around Henry. He dangles his legs and reaches an arm out to pinch Little John. Emma grabs his hand and holds it in his lap, making him giggle.

“The estate is very complicated, and it will take some time to unwind, so until then I will keep a record of the funds allocated to each of you. They will be payable after the settlement of the estate’s debts.” Judge looks at each of them evenly, challenging them.

Rachel knocks her knee against Big John, but he won’t look at her. She does it again and then puts her hand on his arm. She jerks her head toward Judge, but John won’t do what she wants. She is becoming agitated, and her boy starts to struggle in her lap, arching his back against her.

“That is all. You may go,” Judge says, and he waits for them to get up, but no one moves. Rachel turns to John and whispers something to him. Judge glares at them. Emma’s eyes, too, nervously dart to them.

“I have a question, sir,” Rachel says. Judge looks at her and doesn’t say a word. “How long before we get our money?”

Judge’s mouth curls down again. His nostrils flare. He turns toward the garden, scanning the lawns and flower beds, taking his time, then turns back to Rachel. “I can’t give you a time. It may take several months to go through your former master’s estate. There is a lot of work to be done. When it is done, you will be paid.”

“He was never my master, sir,” Rachel says with the thinnest veneer of respect in her tone. “And if the money is ours, why can’t we get it right now?”

“Because I said, that’s why,” Judge answers sharply. “Now go.”

“Thank you, sir,” Emma says, and she gets up, taking Henry by the hand and leading him into the house.

John gets up, too. “Come on, Rachel, enough now,” he says in a low voice. Simon shoots Rachel another look, and she nods back to him.

“I said enough, woman,” John says more forcefully. He takes her arm and pulls her up out of her chair. They go inside the house bickering, Rachel holding Little John like a sack of flour.

Simon gets up and turns away from Judge. He ambles back to the carriage house, his head high and his steps easy.

“Now, Augusta.” Judge turns to me. “We should talk.” He looks over at the office at the end of the gallery. He walks toward it, not waiting for me. He is in no mood for anything contrary. “Eli acted like he was a Chinese king,” he says, shaking his head and looking back at me. “I always thought he built that office so he could see whatever was coming at him.”

He must mean the windows. They make the small office seem so much bigger. Just after he bought the house, Eli added the extension “to modernize the old place,” he said. In his optimism, he added a nursery above the office, both connected to the house by an interior staircase. With Eli’s changes, the back of the house appears as a jumble of interconnected and interrupting blocks—kitchen, extension, a stretch of porch cut short by the office. I never liked the changes that altered it from what I knew before the war, though I never protested them. Rather, I gave Eli a cold consent and cursed him secretly for desecrating the Chapmans’ home.

On Eli’s days at home, I would stay upstairs with Henry in the nursery or the front sitting room. The colored men would line up in the garden outside the office or along the porch. They would sit on the back steps or skulk around the kitchen door. On days of bad weather, they would line the hall and the back parlor, waiting for their opportunity to see Eli to ask him for a favor or help. As the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war, Eli was seen as some sort of benevolent protector. He gave out the food rations provided by the federal government—and not just to the freedmen but to the poor whites who came into Albion after the spring of ’65, starving and desperate. Eli negotiated contracts for the freedmen, too. He decided who would work and where. All with the backing of the United States Army. The motherless young colored girls, he indentured to the homes where they had been slaves a year or two before. He set the terms of the contracts for the Negro families who took twenty acres from their old masters so they could grow cotton and corn and then give away half of it as their rent. Eli would intervene on behalf of the Negro tradesmen in town who insisted the white men weren’t paying them fairly. He saw them all and profited mightily by it, skimming off the top, taking money to push through a contract here or to place the best laborers on his friends’ farms. After the bureau was shut down, he remained a man revered by the Negroes, and they kept coming, wandering about the lane and the carriage house and sitting on the benches—those, at least, who were not so impudent as to ring the front bell.

Judge takes Eli’s chair behind the desk without hesitation, his back to the door into the house. What a curious thing for him to say about the windows, but he’s right. When Eli sat at his desk, he looked at windows on three sides of him and could see the whole garden and anyone who might be lurking outside.

Judge opens the leather portfolio. There are dark wine-colored stains on the leather. “Augusta, I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you today. I will work things out. You will never have to worry, but a prudent economy is what is required. No more of these spendthrift ways. Eli is not alive anymore.”

His tone is harsh. I study my hands. They are small and delicate and white. I have been lectured by Judge before. Does he resent me for asking his clemency the day of Eli’s funeral?

He turns the pages in the portfolio one after another. He scans them from top to bottom. I lean against the wooden slats of the chair, my hands folded over the stiff black material of my dress. Judge grimaces at me. He presses his lips together, and it ruffles his beard like a chicken’s feathers. “I’m sorry to say it. There’s a selfishness in the Sedlaws, a greed that rises up now and again. I encourage you to banish it from yourself. I saw it in your father, in his desperation to pull off any kind of trickery to win, and it is a most unbecoming trait. I don’t say you have that quality, I know you have a fine character, but I see hints of it, and I wish your Blackwood blood would overcome it.”

His chiding galls me, but what can I say? He always has to sermonize. He carries so many resentments. He has carried them a long time. I have nothing at my disposal to counteract them, least of all the pride of my father’s name.

Judge rests his hand on the papers. His eyes are ice blue and seem to bore through me. He drums the papers with his fingers. “These papers,” he continues, “contain the various investments Eli has—or had. Some of the bonds are still worth something. The Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad notes were never exchanged for the new road, and I think we can pursue that. But there are heavy mortgages on his county lands, and it will be years before they are unencumbered. Eli’s pressure on Mr. Stephens almost caused the bank itself to suspend payment. It’s unclear what happened to the capital of the Freedman’s Bank. Whatever was left in specie was meant to be distributed to the account holders. He may have taken some of it to shore up his debts and deposited it at the Planters and Merchants Bank. It’s going to take a while to untangle.

“What is reassuring—what should reassure you—is that the mill remains profitable, although burdened with some debts. It will take time to recover, but I am certain it is possible at this point. Any thoughts of travel and extravagance, however, should be put aside. A prudent economy is the course you should set for yourself. I am certain you will remain comfortable, if temporarily... constrained.”

“Eli stole from the Freedman’s Bank?”

“Well, perhaps I spoke too soon. You know Eli headed up the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he was the president of the branch bank that was chartered here. When the Freedman’s Bank collapsed last year, the assets and specie were suspended. Mr. Stephens suggested that Eli was able at critical moments to come up with payments to him in specie. We assume they came from the Freedman’s Bank. It is unpleasant.”

A shiver runs over me. “The mill at Three Forks?”

“The mill at Three Forks. A cotton mill.”

I know the area, hidden out in the woods, almost. I used to ride there with Buck.

Judge shifts in his chair, irritated. “It was a venture started a few years ago. He had partners in the mill, which is why he could not use it as a pledge at the bank. He did inquire with Stephens about that. It’s been running profitably, and I’m confident it will produce dividends for you.”

“That’s all that’s left? A cotton mill?”

“Not all. We have to figure this out, and then we will know where things stand for you. I feel obliged to say, if we find more, there is a chance you and Henry could have much less.”

“I can’t go away, then. I can’t go anywhere.” Judge looks away from me. “There are so many bills already, Judge. Is there enough to go to Monte Sano, at least?” It seems pathetic that I should find myself begging Judge for money. It can’t all have vanished. There must be money somewhere.

He smiles at me as warmth creeps back into his face. “I am sure we can find a way to get you up to Monte Sano.” He takes his hand from the papers and reaches out to me, patting my hand on the desk. The papers are ragged at the edges from clipped coupons, others scrawled spidery with black ink like hieroglyphs.

He rises from his chair and places the papers back in the leather case. “I will come back to you as I know more. I wanted to acquaint you with what I knew at this point.”

“Thank you, Judge. I’m sorry, I just can’t believe this.”

He watches me with discomfort. “It will all work out. I will see what we can do to get you up to Monte Sano.”

“How soon can I get the money? And the will. Did you remember the will?”

He frowns as if he’s drunk sour milk. “I’ll let you know about the money as soon as I can. And the will. Does that satisfy you for now, Augusta?”

“Thank you.” He is leaving. There are too many questions for him to leave. “It’s just that Bama Buchanan said the yellow fever has started.”

He looks back and shakes his head. “It won’t be too long.”

He leaves me with a curt nod. Through Eli’s three walls of windows, I watch him stalk down the garden path and up the lane.

Even with the windows and doors open, the office is as hot as the kitchen. The heat is thick and wet. The sun streams through the glass panes, searing the floor. I don’t want it to touch the black of my dress. I feel like I will combust. Judge is unfair. I can’t believe what he says. He didn’t like Eli, Simon is right about that. With Eli gone, Judge says what he wants with no one to stop him.

Pa never liked Judge. Seventeen years after Pa is dead, Judge still hates Pa. What a fantasy about Pa using trickery. I don’t know where the enmity started, long before I was born. Mama talked like Judge had courted her at one time. She hinted that Judge’s father disapproved of a match between them, they were so close in blood. Mama seemed to have considered it a possibility—even after Pa’s death, she hinted that she would be open to a proposal of marriage. Maybe that’s why Mama didn’t want me to marry Buck.

Pa was a peaceful man. A man of thought and word. Judge was always a man of action. I imagine he was like Buck when he was young. That confidence, a certain dash. A hotheaded cavalier. Pa was never hotheaded. He was a gentle man. Firm when he needed to be, tough when he was in his cups. But when he was not drinking, he was a just and honorable man. If nothing else, they are both men of honor.

I was young, but I remember the election of 1856, when Pa and Judge ran against each other. Just one seat from Albion in the Alabama statehouse, and they both wanted it. And then to have them lose the election to an old tinkerer. He came from the mountains and spoke in silly parables that made the farmers laugh. Mama would take me to listen to Pa’s speeches. Cicero drove the open-topped Victoria, and we followed Pa around the county. We would sit at a distance, watching young men chase after a greased pig or grasp for the slippery neck of a goose hung by its feet high in a tree. Pa would pay for a whole ox to be roasted on a spit and great black kettles of stew. And, of course, whiskey. The crowds could get wild from whiskey and opinion.

Fights were common. The feel of the frontier was never really lost in the county, until the war finally killed its spirit. Pa would mount a block, sometimes half tipsy from the slugs of whiskey forced on him by the county men—the small farmers, the blacksmiths and other mechanics on whom he depended for his election. With the raucous crowd around him, sometimes so noisy that we could barely hear a word, he would talk about the value of the Union and our place in it.

Once a ruffian booed and called Pa a Yankee lover. Hecklers were frequent, and Pa always swore that Judge paid them. A knife fight broke out near our carriage once. The men, both drunk, began to scuffle, and a crowd opened into a circle for them, cheering them on with whistles and obscenities. The two men nearly cut each other to ribbons. One had an eye gouged out. Pa was furious at Cicero for bringing us too close to the crowd. He beat him horribly that night, his voice slurred from the whiskey. Mama was terror-stricken when he came back to the house. He smashed a mirror in the parlor. He threw a porcelain vase of cherubs and rosebuds straight at it. We all hid in our beds, terrified he would come up the stairs. The whiskey always made him rage. He could have a terrible temper. But he was a good man.