Chapter 32 Unbearable Competence
UNBEARABLE COMPETENCE
The fort was a sorry thing, more suggestion than structure.
They called it a fort, but I had been to church picnics more defensible.
Supplies were low, and the first officer overcharged us for cold coffee.
His buttons were mismatched; his face looked unfinished, like God had decided to scrap the project mid-creation.
The baby was coming, the mother was sick, and the whole ordeal was swiftly becoming the kind of situation I had spent my entire life avoiding. That is, one that required both improvisation and excessive sweating.
Major, bless him, had rolled up his sleeves and was now, utterly unbothered, boiling cloths like he’d been doing it since boyhood.
It was both infuriating and helpful. I chose not to tell him which.
When my hair was puffy from the sweat and fell in my face, Major pulled it away and tied it with his handkerchief.
The soft brush of his fingertips on my neck made the hair rise there.
Lessie drifted between groaning and prayer.
“Why’d you get off with me?” she asked suddenly, voice tight with pain.
I shrugged, dabbing her brow with a clean cloth and pretending not to hear the honest note in her voice.
I didn’t have an answer I liked—at least not one that wouldn’t lead to uncomfortable warmth or, worse, mutual respect.
What would we do when we parted ways on this trip?
Cry? I couldn’t open myself up to that. And truth be told, she shouldn’t be looking at me like I’m worth a hill of beans anyway.
I don’t know if a week ago I would have gotten off that wagon.
Lessie was dark as a rubber tire and poor as a mouse, and a big part of me is ashamed to know that would’ve once been reason enough for me not to get involved.
“I suppose I like a challenge,” I muttered, reaching for more rags and studiously not making eye contact. She snorted, then promptly grimaced into the next contraction.
She was tough in the way women are when life never gives them permission to be anything else. Just a body that knew how to survive.
“You hear this, Major? She”—Lessie groaned—“likes a challenge.”
Major ran a hand over her forehead.
“Mean as a wet cat.” Major said it with a warm smile. The combination of words versus his tone made her stomach wobble. He had been good during the labor, working wordlessly, boiling cloth, fetching water, and squeezing Lessie Mae’s hand with patience.
It was an unbearable competence.
I did what Spelman Seminary had trained me to do: I stayed clean, calm, capable. I counted contractions, watched breath patterns, adjusted angles. It was one part science and two parts guts and heart.
And then, blessedly, it happened.
The baby, a slippery, wailing little miracle, emerged without ceremony or apology. Thank goodness, it lacked Lessie’s talent for unnecessary dramatics. It screamed like it had already formed opinions about the world, and, if I’m honest, I respected that.
I wrapped it with one of the cloths from Major’s pile and placed the bundle into Lessie’s arms.
She blinked, eyes glassy with exhaustion, and then, with more pride than I’d seen from a queen in full regalia, she declared:
“Ferdinand Karol Montgomery.”
I froze.
“Karol?” I asked, like I’d misheard or perhaps hallucinated it under pressure.
She looked at me. Smirked. “Karol. With a K.”
My chest felt suddenly, ridiculously tight.
Major, standing beside me with a bowl of now-cold water, glanced over and said nothing. Just smiled in that solid way of his.
And I… I just patted the baby’s head, cleared my throat, and said,“Well. At least he has impeccable taste in aunties.”
I had delivered a baby in a fort held together by termite spit, and now there was a child with a name suspiciously close to my own to prove it. My eyes misted over slightly.
My name would mean something again, I had declared to myself. And so it did.
Major caught my eye, caught my wobbling chin, and his gaze wasn’t full of amusement or challenge for once. Just quiet understanding.
There were too many small moments. The way he caught things before they fell. The way he knew when to pass me something before I asked. The way he had wordlessly handed me his own coffee ration after I spent the morning delivering a baby.
I looked away.
“You hold babies like you hold books,” Major said, lighting a gas lantern. “Like they got chapters in ’em.”
I turned, finally meeting Major’s gaze in the flickering glow of the gas lantern.
“And you hold them like a pro. You probably have a wife in every territory.”
“No wives, no young’uns, either. Just the son of a midwife.”
“So that’s why you’re so insufferably good at everything,” I murmured.
Major tilted his head, considering me. “You say that like it’s a flaw.”
“It is a flaw,” I shot back, smoothing the creases in my skirts with precise, practiced fingers.
“Competence is an invitation. It means people will ask things of you. Expect things of you. You can’t just be good at something one time.
” I glanced down at the baby, now sleeping soundly against Lessie Mae’s chest. “Look at me. I delivered one child, and if it gets out, I’m going to be sawing off legs in a second civil war. ”
Major chuckled, a rich, warm sound that ran straight through me. Tickled something buried. My pulse tripped over itself trying to catch up.
“You’ll do it if you’re asked, though, won’t you? I told you before that I seen you,” he said, and I wondered where he had gotten the straw between his teeth or why I was all of a sudden focused on his mouth.
I only sniffed. “Well, I see you, too.”
He turned, brow lifted in amusement. “Do you now? ’Cause from where I was sitting, you’ve spent this whole wagon ride trying not to. What do you suddenly see?” he pressed, teasing but not unkind.
I gestured vaguely at his dusty shirt. “That you’re smart enough to be a Negro doctor. Or know enough law to sit behind a desk, not chase fugitives through the brush. Why?”
Major considered me, the corner of his mouth twitching. That damn straw moved with it, lazily wicked.
“Same reason you’re not some rich man’s wife, living soft in Nawlins,” he said.
I hadn’t thought of Toussaint D’Arcy in so long. The face passed through me like water through a sieve. No residue.
“Poor decision-making?” I guessed.
“Insufferably good at everything,” he countered, and damn it all, the man smiled.
I rolled my eyes, but the corner of my mouth betrayed me, twitching upward.
“Well,” I said, standing and dusting off my skirts, “if you plan to keep up this infuriating habit of being good at things, you may as well make yourself useful. I’ll need someone to steal some proper medical supplies next time we stop.”
Major raised a brow. “Steal, is it?”
I arched a delicate brow in return. “They won’t sell them to Negros.” I looked at his amused face, then said, more softly, “Oh, please. Don’t act scandalized. We were sandwich thieves once.”
His grin, crooked at the corner, was lazy and private.
I had this feeling of great anticipation like when the preacher is climbing to the high point in the sermon, and the organs start going.
He stepped forward, just slightly, barely a shift of boots on dirt but suddenly I could feel it in the space just above my skin.
“And there’s honor ’tween thieves?” he said, soft.
I let the question hang, but I suddenly needed a whole pitcher of tea.
Our eyes locked. Every nerve of mine was alive and listening.
He stepped a hair closer. “What else, I wonder,” he said slowly, “might be between thieves?”
The world tipped.
He leaned in slow. His fingers brushed my waist, the edge of my glove, nothing that could be called scandal but everything that would’ve kept me up at night. The straw in his mouth was gone, and his nose grazed against the racing pulse at my neck.
My eyes closed.
And then—
Some first officer (where had he been when we needed supplies?) popped right out of hell to holler, “Wagon coming up fast from the south!”
The moment cracked like porcelain.
Major stepped back with military precision, hands retreating to his pockets. Behind us, Lessie swore under her breath as Freddie stirred. She may have been watching us because she turned her eyes when I looked toward her.
I said nothing. Just briskly began to pack our things.
I was taking something that didn’t belong to me. Something I had no rightful claim to.
I had once believed my dreams were stolen from me, that Eliza had swept in and taken the future I’d built piece by careful piece.
And now here I was, standing in her shoes.
It surprised me, how easy it was. No twirling mustaches, no evil laughter. Just hot looks in a moving train with a man who could guide a baby’s shoulders through labor like he was shelling peas.
Could I do that to someone else?
Apparently, yes.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about running up a tab with God—it’s that the bill always comes due.