Roadwalkers Page 4

  So Joseph had been out there after all. Close by. But he was lost now, lost forever in the tightening circle of shouts and crashing boots.

  It was his favorite knife, she thought dully. His favorite. How would he get along without it.

  THAT cold November, on the back slopes of Aikens Grove Plantation, Baby ended her wandering days. Shaken, tumbled, cursed, she entered the world of houses and jobs, of lives lived in one place. A world of order, of continuity, a world whose people knew what tomorrow would be like.

  She was a stranger in a strange place, drifting, drowning. Stiff as a possum with fear. Not knowing where she was. Nor who.

  A pair of tired, bloodshot blue eyes stared at her. Charles Tucker, like a midwife, dragged her into the world of humans, his world. He knew exactly who he was: Charles Tucker, son of Hiram, grandson of Onslow. From Clark County.

  THE PEOPLE OF CLARK COUNTY

  ONSLOW TUCKER CAME TO Clark County the first spring after the war, in early April 1866. A time of poverty and fear and uncertainty, when sensible people minded their own business and asked no questions.

  Before the war, Clark County was a prosperous place. There was one large plantation, called Aikens Grove—thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves. There were a dozen large farms, twenty or so slaves on each. (And there were three times that many sand-trap farms, poor land, poorly kept, where hunger always hid in the shadows of the washed-out gulleys.) In late summer the wide fields were white with cotton; in fall the gins roared and clanked all day and half the night while barges waited for loading at half a dozen river landings.

  In those days Clarksville was a thriving town, with a three-story county courthouse and a town square of green grass with a white painted bandstand in the very center. There were two banks, a hotel and dining room, a dry-goods store with a very large selection of ladies’ dress goods—the county had a lively social life. There were two churches on Main Street and a Second Baptist Church around the corner near the schoolhouse. There were three law offices, a feed store, two general stores, three livery stables. There was a doctor’s office and a pharmacy with a jar of leeches in the window. Off Main Street there was an area called Newtown, a settlement of free blacks—Redbones and Freejacks, people of mixed black and white and Indian blood—who did the fine blacksmithing and bricklaying and carpentering and cabinetmaking and elaborate coffin building. Their wives were the fancy dressmakers and milliners and confectioners who had their own small shops with their own small signs over the doorways.

  (By 1866 Newtown was gone, only three or four houses and a few old people who whispered of the wonderful life their children had found in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and New York.)

  The owners of Aikens Grove left for England soon after war began: master and mistress, sons and daughters and inlaws, unmarried aunts and feeble old cousins. Twenty or so of them and almost that many personal servants. Parasols open against the June sun, the ladies stepped into carriages drawn by teams of matched grays. The men, all heavily armed, pulled their wide-brimmed hats over their eyes and mounted their horses. The Irish valet and his wife the seamstress drove a cart with crates of family silver. The black nurses and the white babies and the white governess and the younger children crowded into two small carriages. The servants settled themselves carefully, stiffly (not to crease their new travelling clothes) in the remaining baggage wagons. Behind them in the house, workmen were busy hammering and sawing, crating everything—furniture, rugs, china, paintings—for shipment. The house would be left closed and empty.

  For a year nothing changed. The overseer, Silas Fortier, ran the plantation just as he had done before. He and his wife and four children still had Sunday dinner at the hotel dining room. Crops were still good, but by the second year of the war there was no way to get them to market. Silas Fortier built temporary warehouses by the river and filled them with the gray-brown cotton bales. That same year he took his family, all five of them, to Arcadia Landing and saw them on the packet boat for New Orleans. They would have to pass through the lines of two different armies, but the travelling was safe enough. He himself stayed another year, still having his Sunday dinner at the hotel dining room. There was little he could do. Slaves ran away in groups of tens and twenties. Stock disappeared every night, all the poultry and hogs, the cattle and the mules and the horses—excepting for the two teams of matched grays, which he drove, one dark night, to the Reasor farm, twenty miles away, a marshy place dotted with secret sheltering islands; they would be safe and well cared for there. At night he stabled his own mount in his dining room while he slept on the floor with two guns at his side. Finally he too left—for New Orleans, where he took the Union Oath of Allegiance and went to work for a drayage company.

  Before he left, following orders the owner had given him nearly three years before, he set fire to the full warehouses by the river, then to the empty barns and the stables, and finally to the houses, one by one, and watched them burn into heaps of black timbers and matchstick chimneys, shelter only for small animals and nesting birds.

  All through the county, fields went back to weeds that rustled together like dry bones in the winter ice. Hogs, run wild, thin, and scrawny, rooted along rain-washed gullies. The houses—those that were still occupied—and the smaller farms seemed shrunken and drawn tight in on themselves. All the young men were gone, both slave and free, leaving only the women and children, the old and the sick and the war crippled, those who had managed to find their way back home. They raised hogs and chickens on carefully fenced small plots, newly cut out of the pine forest, hidden from the Jayhawkers who roamed the roads. Kitchen gardens could be grown in dooryards, in plain sight. Jayhawkers didn’t have a taste for vegetables, never stole them, though they sometimes rode their horses through them, trampling out of pure meanness.

  The war itself passed by Clark County. There were no battles, no skirmishes. Once scouts from Sherman’s army appeared on the high ridge overlooking Clarksville, but that was all. The two main armies, shadowing each other, passed to the east and to the west, not stopping, leaving a trail of dysentery and graves behind.

  In March—the last month of the war—the courthouse burned to the ground. Some people, hearing trotting hooves and jangling tack and harness, peered though their curtains. They saw a dozen men, torches in hand, hats pulled low, and clothes of butternut color, riding horses smeared with mud to make them unrecognizable.

  The men released two prisoners (the jail was the back wing of the courthouse), smashed chairs and desks into kindling, broke a few lower windows for a good draft, and set their torches to the varnished wood. They watched, hunkered down on the new spring grass of the town square, passing a jug back and forth between them. When the fire grew large enough to explode windowpanes on the second floor and run long red fingers up the edges of the roof, the men gave a cheer—small against the voice of the fire—mounted up, and cantered away into the dark.

  The people who had watched all this stayed in their locked houses until long past daylight, happy that there was no wind to spread the glowing cinders over the roofs of the town.

  In early spring of 1866 Onslow Tucker was a young man, tall and blond and pale blue eyed. Not handsome but not ugly either, strong looking and enduring. He drove a mule and wagon. The mule was young too, a lively pretty cotton-field red. The wagon was a small light rig, more like a city toy than a farm wagon. It was painted blue, new painted so carelessly that the original varnished wood showed clearly. Onslow Tucker was in his shirtsleeves, because the day was warm, but his clothes were new, and all civilian, not one piece of government issue from either side. His boots were solid and only just a little bit dusty. He had a Sharps on the seat next to him, and a revolver at his belt and a derringer in his boot. The roads were dangerous. A traveller had best be prepared.

  Onslow Tucker drove his fine young mule and his silly light wagon into Clarksville one April afternoon, clucking and talking to his animal as he eased down the grass-clogged street. He passed
the line of empty shops: the cabinetmaker’s, shutters hanging lopsided on their hinges; the livery stable, doors standing wide to the empty courtyard and the ruined stalls beyond. He passed the burned-out courthouse without turning his head, and pulled to a halt at Wharton’s General Store.

  Young Tom Wharton was sitting on the front railing, swinging the stump of his left leg back and forth. “Morning,” he said politely.

  Onslow Tucker lifted his hat. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could maybe give me some directions.”

  Tom Wharton shifted his seat on the railing. “I might could.” He saw Onslow’s eyes reach to his missing leg and hang there for a second. “Shiloh,” he said.

  “Grass grows green on blood at Shiloh,” Onslow said, “with the Lord’s mercy.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yes,” Onslow said. “I am looking for the Widow Andrews. Her husband was Seth Andrews and he was a miller here. I have heard she takes in boarders.”

  “And glad to have them.” Tom Wharton hopped down the steps to point out the way.

  Onslow Tucker and the Widow Andrews, whose name was Selena, stood talking at her front gate for such a long time that her four cats left their hiding places and came to rub about her skirt. Finally she nodded; they shook hands, and Onslow Tucker carried his rifle and his two bags into the house and led the mule to the small barn in back, where there hadn’t been an animal since Seth Andrews went off to war.

  He didn’t have to go. His wife, Selena, wept and argued and told him he was an old fool, but he went off with the other men from town, marching away down Main Street, straggling columns with a young boy banging a drum at the front. He didn’t write—he was never very good at writing—but he did send her a picture of himself in his sergeant’s uniform. She kept it in the drawer of the parlor table.

  In the third year of the war, Seth Andrews died and was buried somewhere in Tennessee. She never could remember the name of the place—she never looked at the letter again, not after that first time when she read it in her parlor, sitting up straight and formal in her usual chair. When she finished, she let it drop from her fingers to the floor. Her neighbors, who came as soon as they heard the news, folded the single sheet of paper and put it in the nearest drawer, which was the one that held the picture of him in his sergeant’s uniform. So in a way the news was buried where it fell, just like the man it concerned.

  Selena Andrews had no one to comfort her, neither children nor family in Clark County. She’d come from South Carolina to work as governess at Aikens Grove Plantation.

  Even in those days she’d been a churchgoing woman, faithful in attendance whatever the weather. (On rainy days she wore a brown-hooded cape, for all the world like a monk’s.) She came to Sunday-morning services, and she taught evening classes in Christian Endeavor. Her employers at Aikens Grove didn’t go to church in town—they were Episcopalian—but they saw to it that Selena had her Sundays to herself, and they provided her with transportation, a buggy and a slave to drive her. The slave, an old man named Josephus, spent his waiting time in the back of the livery stable, playing cards and drinking. Often, going home, Josephus fell fast asleep and Selena took the reins herself. She had always liked to drive.

  Seth Andrews, a bachelor in his late thirties, saw her one rainy day in her brown monk’s cape, courted her at fellowship meetings and choir practices, and married her within the year. She moved into his house in town and walked to church every Sunday, as regular and faithful as before.

  Beginning with his first Sunday as a boarder, Onslow Tucker walked to church with her. He looked, everybody said, very nice. His high stiff collar gleamed blue-white, his dark suit was brushed carefully and pressed. His hat was square on his head, and his boots were carefully polished.

  Some people whispered that Selena Andrews had given him her dead husband’s Sunday suit. But other people pointed out that Seth Andrews had been a good six inches shorter than Onslow Tucker. And, they said, not even the cleverest seamstress could make a suit stretch that far. So, the churchgoing part of the town decided, Onslow Tucker, whoever he was and wherever he came from, had brought with him his own good dark Sunday suit and fine Sunday boots.

  For three succeeding Sundays he and the Widow Andrews walked to church together through the warming spring air. They joined the crowd on the lawn after service, where all the talk was of weather and planting. (The farmers checked their fields every day, pressing their hands to the ground to see if the earth gave heat or took it away.) It was a perfect spring; the rains were gentle and windless. Moisture hung like smoke in the air. Mr. Patterson, the minister, mentioned the fine soft rain in his sermons. “The earth is grieving, healing our wounds with her tears, striving to assuage the pain and tragedy of these past years. God has given us an end to the war. God’s will be done.”

  And Onslow Tucker’s voice was loudest in the amens.

  Soldiers were still coming home, those who had been sick or hurt or had a long way to travel. With them came news of others, sometimes of death and graves, sometimes of new lives begun by men who had chosen not to come back, men who had seen the world and were no longer content with their home fields. At every Sunday service Mr. Patterson reported the latest news, beginning always with the same words: “Greetings from our brothers who have chosen to adventure across the vastness of God’s earth.” Josh Bledsoe, cousin of Adam Sillitoc, had found a farm in Victoria, Texas. Thomas Davis was now a blacksmith in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Andrew Patterson, the minister’s own son, had sailed from New Orleans for California; with him were three other Clark County men: James Provo and Edward Reasor and Joab Fowler. Ned Martin had been sick with fever in Atlanta, had recovered and found work as a carpenter there.…Mr. Patterson ended his roll call with the same prayer: “And for those of whom no word is heard, may God protect and restore them with his everlasting mercy.”

  In that soft spring of 1866, the town and the county began to come back to life. Horses and mules and cattle and chickens, so long hidden in woods and hollows, began to appear in dooryards and stock pens. Some farmers even began building shoat houses for the sows and their twice-yearly litters.

  One month after his arrival in Clark County, Onslow Tucker bought a farm, a good farm, of middle size, part of what had been Aikens Grove Plantation. The cultivated fields had lain fallow for years, but they were still rich and not too resistant to the plow. There was good timber in the woodlots and smooth well-watered pasture—needing only a little work—sloping down to the Providence River. (For most of the year that stream flowed gently and quietly between its reddish-yellow sandy banks; at spring flood it grew deep and swift enough to float crops and timber to market.)

  Onslow Tucker built his house, helped by two men he’d hired in town. When he finished, he married Selena Andrews. The ceremony was performed by Mr. Patterson and recorded in the new Book of Records, which the church kept until the county got around to building a new courthouse.

  Selena sold her house in town and moved her furniture to the empty rooms of the new farmhouse. There, a year to the day after their marriage, she bore a son, a healthy screaming boy who shrieked for food day and night. Selena, her calm middle-aged face creased by pain and exhaustion, sent for a wet nurse. Then she sat contentedly and proudly in her rocking chair and watched her son suck at the black breast of the other woman.

  He was called Hiram, and he was her only child.

  Hiram grew to a man, tall and angular like his father, and married a preacher’s daughter from Webster County. He saw her one day by the bridge over Black Dog Creek. He and three other young men had been to a Jubilee, and they were walking home, weary and sick from moonshine. Hiram stopped to drink at the creek, asked to use her cup. She handed it to him with a shy small smile.

  “This water here sure makes a funny sound, don’t it?” he said when he’d finished drinking.

  “Hollow rocks,” she said. “It’s lonesome water here.”

  Hiram’s friends shouted for him, a
nd he left with a smile and a wave to the girl by the creek. But the spell worked, just as everybody said it would, the spell of lonesome water calling him back. Hiram couldn’t rest. Not through sorghum-grinding time, not noticing, not caring that the syrup turned out full and sweet. Not through slaughtering time while the smokehouses filled with fine pieces of pork, and the pantry shelves lined with jars of sweet white lard.

  “I drunk lonesome water from under hollow rocks,” he finally told his parents. “And I got to go back and get her. I don’t know her name, but I know where she is.” He took a mule and cart, figuring that a woman would have household stuff she’d want to bring along.

  Her name was Lucy Crawford, and she smiled at him in her careful lopsided way so that her broken tooth didn’t show. He so much wanted to be relieved of the spell of the lonesome water that he asked her to marry him at once, just where he found her, pulling the last of the turnips in the garden. She said yes just as quick, because she’d been dreaming about him too, the young stranger who’d passed on the road and taken a drink of water from her. And she wanted to leave her father’s house—the grandmothers and the eight younger children. She wanted a bed just for herself and her husband, and a garden where she could grow anything she wanted, and a flock of chickens to raise.

  They had their picture taken on the day of their wedding, him standing, hand in coat, her sitting next to a tall vase with ostrich feathers in it. They put the picture in the new Bible her father gave them and wrapped it tightly in oilcloth against the damp and put it in the wagon with her other things: an empty birdcage; her Sunday bonnet in its round box; an iron pot and its cover; a wash boiler; two hens and a rooster; a black trunk from her grandmother—in it were her clothes, a quilt her mother had made, a feather bolster, and a white linen case she’d embroidered against this very day.