Chapter 12
12
It was Plutarch who wrote that the Spartans brought the dead back from the war on their shields. Weybridge recalled the quote, a mother to her son: “Either this or upon this.”
But it was utter nonsense. He taught Plutarch, and if he lived and taught Plutarch again, he would stress to his students with a passion they would find unexpected that this was but a poetic conceit. No one was going to carry a reeking corpse home on a shield. No mother would want to see her son’s decomposing remains after days—or weeks—in the Mediterranean sun.
Or amidst the humidity here.
Far away, Weybridge heard the girl’s voice. Jubilee’s. He opened his eyes because her voice wasn’t a dream, and he listened, focusing on her both because he was acutely aware of his vulnerability and because it took his mind off the throbbing aches in his hand and his leg. The bedroom door was shut, the sound was bubbling up through the open window.
“There ain’t nothin’ to see,” she was saying. “My aunt will be back this afternoon. And Sally’s just down by the river.”
“Where is she? Your aunt?” It was a man’s voice, southern. Husky and deep.
“Getting some part fixed for the mill.”
“What part?”
“No idea. I got me too much to do around here already.”
He heard a second voice, another male, but he couldn’t quite make out what this other person was saying. But the men knew who lived here, and Weybridge assumed that was a promising sign. At least he hoped it was. But the idea that Jubilee was telling them there was nothing to see here was ominous. It suggested that whoever had come, had come to see…something.
“And I sure ain’t seen any Yankees,” Jubilee continued. “If I did, I can promise you I’d whip ’em good. Send ’em runnin’ like squirrels.”
“Well, please tell your aunt that Lieutenant Morgan sends his regards. I’ll try and return another day.”
“She’ll be here. We’ll all be here. That gristmill won’t run itself!”
And then he heard this Lieutenant Morgan and whomever was with him turning their horses and riding off. It was possible they were looking for him because that doctor had told someone he was here. Or someone had been aware of him when he’d been dying on the floor of that abandoned house and the word had trickled out.
But he may have been catastrophizing. Perhaps this Lieutenant Morgan was a quartermaster and there was supposed to be a grain delivery today. Or perhaps he was a friend of Jubilee’s uncle, Libby’s husband, a friend whom the girl hadn’t yet met. Maybe the man was bringing word of the prisoner.
He wondered if next he would hear the girl’s feet pounding their way up the stairs, either to inform him of what had just transpired or to ramble on about nothing. She did love to talk. But instead he heard only the sound of the chickens as, no doubt, the girl was continuing her chores and feeding them.
Sally brought him a bowl of broth, telling him that if he could keep this down, they could try catfish again a little later. She used pillows as bolsters and sat him upright so she could spoon the watery soup into his mouth from a chair beside the bed.
“You’re looking peaked in this light,” she said. She sounded worried. “You sleep?”
“Yes.”
“After you eat some, I’m going to look at your leg and your fingers. The doc may come back tomorrow to see what Mrs.Steadman has rounded up.”
The broth was weak, but it was warm and felt good on his throat. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “Earlier…I shouldn’t have assumed you were a slave.”
“Reasonable thing to suppose,” she said.
“Well, thank you.”
She handed him the spoon to let him use it himself.
“What time is Libby due back?” he asked, after swallowing some more. His voice was hoarse, and he tried to clear it. He’d expected the soup to soothe it.
“It’ll be late, I suppose. Hoping it’s before dark. But already the sun is setting lots earlier than last month. So, maybe not.”
When he had eaten all he desired, which wasn’t much because something was still wrong with his stomach—he felt nauseous and the liquid was making it worse—Sally pulled back the coverlet and the sheet and studied the dressing above where once he’d had a knee.
“How does it look?” he asked softly. He was no longer modest. There wasn’t a point.
She remained mute and sniffed at the ticking. Her silence unnerved him. He felt weaker than he had last night. And yet earlier today, when Jubilee was visiting, he’d seemed to be getting stronger. Now he was less sure. He hoped he could keep down the broth. He repeated his inquiry.
“It’s draining. Again. That’s good. You in pain?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“A little.”
“I hear you’re a professor.”
He nodded.
“You want something to read? I can bring you my Bible.”
“You can read?” he asked, a reflex, and instantly he regretted it. He felt a pang of self-disgust.
For a moment, she said nothing. She smoothed her dress and then answered, “Not a miracle. People read.” Again, there was a sharpness to her tone that was slight but clear.
“You’re right. I’m wrong. I was just thinking of the law,” he murmured. “I know in Virginia that slaves aren’t allowed…”
“Tell me: You figure I was illiterate because of the color of my skin or because you think so little of Libby that you believe she’d marry a man whose kin wouldn’t let us learn?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” he admitted. “I hadn’t meant to insult you.”
“Or Libby or her husband or his family.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Remember, Captain. I’m a freedwoman. But I could read just fine even before I was freed.”
“I understand.”
“So: you want that Bible?”
“Thank you. But I’m not sure I could hold a book,” he answered. “Maybe later.”
“If I had time now, I’d read to you,” she said. Then she stood and repeated back to him his own words. “But maybe later.”
Was it the idea that Sally could read or the fact that Libby and Joseph went to Harper’s Ferry that conjured for him John Brown? Or, to be precise, “John Brown’s Body,” the song, which, in turn, instantly summoned a vision of the man himself?
A memory came to him in Libby’s great bed.
It had been spitting snow, and Vergennes was thirteen miles north of his home in Middlebury. Weybridge didn’t know what time John Brown’s actual body—the corpse—would arrive in Vergennes. Moreover, Emily had given birth that fall, and he had papers to grade. And while the college was a family business of sorts, with his father and his father-in-law both teaching there, it was his first semester in the classroom, and he could not afford to be late with his December exams. So, he had not gone. He’d wanted to, but he hadn’t had the time. But he knew of students and at least three professors who had ridden north in the cold to see the widow and John Brown’s casket with their own eyes. A state legislator from Middlebury had gone, too, one of the men who’d voted two years earlier to approve Vermont’s twenty-thousand-dollar appropriation to bolster the antislavery settlers in Kansas.
He’d heard that night that the crowds, first in Rutland and then in Vergennes, were among the largest ever gathered in those small cities: at least two thousand people in Rutland, one student insisted, and perhaps half that many in Vergennes. One of the young men had cut a souvenir piece of wood from the casket. It seemed a dozen of the more passionate abolitionists had done that. The student had showed off the sliver of pine as if it were a relic from the one true cross, and Weybridge’s father-in-law, when he’d heard the next day, had asked him what in God’s name the young fellow was thinking when he’d defaced a man’s coffin. But the student had assured the professor that Mary Ann Brown, the widow, hadn’t seemed to care. She’d understood why people wanted pieces of the casket.
Another man, old enough to be Weybridge’s grandfather—pencil-line-thin strands of white hair atop a bare skull, white also but marked by deep-brown smudges and specks—had placed both hands on the coffin as it paused by the common in Vergennes, as if he were laying healing hands on the sick.
This was almost five years ago now. December 1859. The idea he would live most of his life on crutches had never occurred to Weybridge that day or that he himself would be fighting a rebellion so close to where Brown was executed.
Downstairs, he heard Sally cooking supper, the sound of a knife on a cutting board. The chopping sounds were melodic, and the lyrics of the song came to him:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul’s marching on.
Marching. Even with two legs, was it ever pleasant? He’d heard men sing around the campfires (though not often), but rarely could he recall men singing as they went hay-foot-straw-foot for miles and miles in the dust or the rain or the heat or the cold, knowing that all that would greet them at their eventual destination was (best case) digging in for the night or (worst case) rebels who were already dug in themselves. In his experience, as the men walked, they talked casually when they weren’t frightened and with animated bluster when they were. They complained about the food and the mail and sleeping in tents. They grumbled about sunburn or wet clothes, they groused about the incompetence of the generals and Washington. Rarely did they talk about why they were fighting when they were on their feet.
And when they’d had enough, when they were too tired to talk (or sing), they lumbered along in ornery silence.
But there were exceptions. And one had occurred just this past summer. When the Vermont Brigade was marching through Charles Town, someone must have thought of Brown and his execution there, because a soldier with a gorgeous tenor started singing “John Brown’s Body,” and soon others followed. Weybridge joined in, too, and it sounded like the whole brigade was singing, and their step had more energy than it had in months.
He sighed at the memory.
He hoped that Libby and Joseph would return soon.
He hoped they would return at all.
It was dark now, and Weybridge wished that he had a lantern.
And as if the gods, if one or more existed, could read his mind, he heard Jubilee running up the stairs, the light flickering ahead of her and illuminating the wallpaper like dreams. She bounded into his room, planted the lantern on the dresser, and collapsed into the chair near the bed.
“So, Mr.Jackal, what have you done today to help out?”
He watched the shadows on the wall and on the side of her face. It was autumn, and so he replied, “I picked the last of the apples. Baskets and baskets.”
She leaned in to him. “How you know we got apples?” She spoke slowly, the way his father or father-in-law might challenge a student.
“Spying,” he said.
She slapped her knee. “I knew it.” Then she sat back and said, “If you Yankees weren’t here, we’d have apple butter right now. So much apple butter. Jars and jars. But, no, you all even ruin apple butter season.”
“My army’s taken your apples?”
“Both armies. And the apples the soldiers didn’t get, bandits and scalawags did. Feedin’ all of you is like feedin’ the ocean.”
“You’ve fed the ocean?”
“Ain’t even seen it. But I will.”
“I wouldn’t bet against you.”
“Don’t.”
“What time is it?”
“Near nine.”
He had the sense she was worried about her aunt. He felt the need to say something reassuring. “Your aunt will be back soon.”
“She will. Someone picks a fight with her or Joseph? She’s a wildcat. And he’s too smart to get killed.”
Was this whistling in the dark? Didn’t matter. He thought the girl was right: Libby probably could be ferocious, if she ever needed to be, and Joseph had a good head on his shoulders.
“Who’s Lieutenant Morgan?” he asked.
She leaned toward him. “Why you need to know that?”
“I’m curious.”
“You eavesdropping?”
“I heard the two of you through the window.”
“I don’t know him. But he seems all right. Army of Northern Virginia, after all.”
“What did he want?”
“Wanted to see my aunt. Wanted to know if we’d seen any bluebellies.”
“Any one in particular?”
She bit at a fingernail. Then: “You just think everything in this whole world is about you. It ain’t.”
“Good. I don’t want to get you or your aunt in trouble.”
“I did not say you were wrong, Jackal.”
The relief he had felt evaporated. “Were they—”
“I don’t know. I just knew I didn’t want to get myself killed because we’re hidin’ you. But, no, they did not ask, ‘You got any crippled Yankees bleedin’ all over your house?’?”
She stood up and brought the lantern to the bedside table. Then she sat back down and reached into the pocket of the apron she was wearing. She pulled out a deck of playing cards, and instantly he was catapulted back to memories of bored young men around campfires, and their games of poker and euchre.
“I suppose a professor like you can count. You can, can’t you?”
“I can.”
“Know how to play twenty-one?”
“Yes. But my hand is—”
“Wah-wah-wah. You just tell me if you want the card or not. You can play.” And, with that, she smoothed out the coverlet and started to deal.