‘No, no, come with me.’
As she passed him he felt on his ear her hot brandy breath. In the Valley you drank in the morning only if you had to go out at the peak of winter, or had had an overnight fever. Yet in the Carolinas, he could tell, it was booze for breakfast, summer or winter, well or ill.
She led him through a kitchen garden. Beyond a narrow road were the shacks of the slaves, a whole village of shacks, shingle roofs, unglazed windows, fading whitewash. Garbage middens stood by the doors, heaps of oyster shell, old rags, broken boots and crockery and chicken feathers. Some old slave-wives sat by the doors laughing their laugh. Their laugh was melancholy and rich and feminine. They tended almost naked pot-bellied slave children, future workers for the Kearsage plantation.
‘I sometimes feel badly about your uncle, boy,’ Mrs Kearsage said. ‘I see him little enough. I hope he understands I have my duties to the slaves. People talk of my having so many slaves. I tell them it’s the slaves who have me. Morning, noon and night I’m obliged to look after them, doctor them, and tend to them in this way and that. If Calhoun and Yancey are right, sir, and we ever have to fight for our way of life, I reckon I can manage the commissary as well as the medical side for the whole militia of this glorious state. There’s your uncle’s place. I won’t come in. But you’re to give him my warmest and best wishes.’
She turned and walked away, an elegant gait. The hut she had pointed to wasn’t much different from those he’d seen in the slave-quarters, though one of its windows was glazed. Flakes of white on the grey and weathered surface of the timber showed where – about 1845 Usaph would guess – whitewash had once been put on. He knocked. He knew there would be no liveried negro answering at this door.
A white girl answered instead. She was dressed in an old crinoline. She was dark-complexioned and her eyes were dark. There was something wifely in the way she stood on the doorstep – that was Usaph’s impression, that she was a young wife his uncle had picked up and since she was so beautiful he felt a spurt of jealousy for his uncle. Later, after he’d married this dark-eyed girl, that impression – that she’d opened his uncle’s door in so wifely a manner – still tormented him.
‘Miss,’ he said, ‘I am Patrick Bumpass’s nephew, Usaph.’
‘You come right in then, Mr Usaph.’ She stepped back, hanging her head shyly as if she didn’t believe in her own beauty.
He passed into the murky, torpid interior. The floor was of packed mud. On the undressed walls were unframed prints of Jefferson and Ole Hickory and various fire-eating Southern Democrats. It looked as if Usaph’s Uncle Patrick, having lived by the peculiar institution of slavery, was determined to die by it, with pictures of its patron saints all over his walls. The uncle lay on a bed by the one window. He’d once been a big man, and his wasted jaws jutted aggressively even now, while he was hard up for breath. He watched his nephew. On a stool by his bedside was a copy of the Charlestown Mercury and a near-empty bowl of oatmeal. Usaph knew the lovely girl had been feeding it to him.
‘Sir,’ said Usaph reverently, ‘I’m your nephew, Usaph. I’m your brother Noah’s boy from Shenandoah County, Virginia.’
The man’s breath rasped. ‘You are welcome, son,’ he said and tears came into his eyes.
‘My father – Noah – is poorly. But he wanted you to have a few comforts …’
Usaph got a bottle of brandy from the valise, and a deer-skin purse with ten dollars in it. He put the bottle and the purse on top of the Charlestown Mercury. The dark-eyed, dark-haired girl watched, and Usaph smiled at her in a tortured way. If the luxuriant, humid, magnolia-drugged lowlands ever got together to create a lush woman, this woman was close to what might result. She had already infested Usaph’s blood, she was already a lowland fever in him and he found it hard to look at her.
‘I saw you once,’ said Uncle Patrick Bumpass. ‘It was at the depot at Charlottesville and I looks up and sees my brother and his bride toting a littl’un and waiting for the Staunton express. And goddam if that littl’un weren’t yourself, Usaph … Usaph it is, ain’t it?’
‘Yes, Uncle Patrick. Usaph.’
The old man began weeping. His tongue darted in and out of his mouth as if to catch tears.
‘Thank my little brother,’ he said in a slow voice you could barely hear. ‘Tell him that-there’s my monument money.’ The tears increased. ‘Tell your daddy you found his brother living in a nigra’s hut. All his savings lost in a damnfool enterprise called the Combahee Drum-Fishing Company.’
‘Don’t fuss yourself, Mr Bumpass,’ the girl said in a low, soothing way.
‘This-here’s Ephephtha Corry, nephew,’ the old man told him. ‘Her daddy’s been my truest friend. He sends her in each day to nurse and housekeep.’
For some reason the idea repelled Usaph. ‘Mrs Kearsage,’ he said to change the subject, ‘Mrs Kearsage said to send her wishes.’
The old man laughed at this. ‘Mrs Kearsage. There was a time when Mrs Kearsage liked being around me more than now. But we run headfirst here into one of them ironies of the God-ordained system of slavery. An ailing overseer ain’t worth the nursing, since he has no value on the market.’ He laughed again, but it turned into a choking fit.
‘If I had market value,’ he went on, still chuckling and choking, ‘the way a nigra has, I’d get nursed then by Mrs Kearsage; I’d be an investment, see, and she’d feel anxious for me. Them slaves, she wipes their fevered brow, but if it weren’t for Ephie here my goddam fevered brow could go unwiped till my poor ole brain rotted.’
His chest heaved as he tried to get back the breath he’d expended on this speech. ‘When a man is young and lusty he don’t think on these peculiarities of our way of life.’
Then, not being strong enough to grip, he laid a hand on top of Usaph’s. ‘You ought to wed this Ephie, nephew, she’s by way of being a tender girl.’
Behind them, Ephephtha Corry laughed awkwardly. It seemed as if she was shamed somehow by this endorsement from Uncle Patrick. ‘Mr Usaph Bumpass don’t need no swamp girl, Mr Patrick. Mr Usaph is a plain-as-day gentleman.’
He could tell she meant it. He was no gentleman to Mrs Kearsage but to this Ephephtha Corry he appeared a well-mannered and well-off visitor from the mountains. He liked himself in the role; he felt himself get more worldly as he sat there. It’s been said that if a woman gives a man a new picture of himself, then that’s the start of infatuation. A nervous infatuation had already got itself going in that little shack, and Ephie’s view of Usaph as a gentleman certainly helped it along.
‘He can do his own arranging,’ Ephie said in a whisper, both shy and savage, to the uncle.
Now, two and a half years later, in the lines before Richmond, it still worried Usaph that the first idea of a closeness between himself and Ephie came out of the mouth of his dying uncle.
While the old man slept, he and the girl sat together in the sun. Her mother had died – she told Usaph – when she was three; she’d been raised by her father who fished the estuary of the Combahee River and sold his catch in the local villages. He was to have been Uncle Patrick’s manager in the ill-omened Combahee Drum-Fishing Company. Uncle Patrick planned to buy a nice cutter, to bring wealthy men to the Combahee and take them out to sea to find drum fish, for drum fish were a great Southern sport.
Miss Corry was serious, shaking her head slowly, when she spoke of this folly. ‘God didn’t mean it to succeed,’ she said.
‘Why not, Miss Corry?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, her head still hanging. ‘I jest know He didn’t much care for that enterprise and that’s all.’
‘Doesn’t the Lord like Uncle Patrick?’
‘I don’t think He likes too many of us Combahee river-rats. And He don’t much like some gentlemen neither.’
‘You mean me.’
She grinned slowly, looking up under her black lashes, her smooth forehead. ‘No, not you. Other gentlemen he don’t like.’
She had the look of a girl who’d b
een allowed to raise herself. So she was an odd mix of rough and polish. Her hair was clean, and her dress; but the dress was old, maybe one of Mrs Kearsage’s cast-offs, patched with sacking. You almost expected her to be barefoot, but she wore little black mules on her feet.
Somewhere she’d got some education and knew something of the Bible and enough of her letters to read the editorials in the Mercury aloud to the uncle. Fishermen and raftsmen and their women, on coastal rivers or on the fabled Mississippi far away, were said to be shiftless and lacking in morals, and the idea that she might not be a virgin was already starting to torture him even as they sat there.
During the early days of that stay in the region of Pocataligo, he could not look her full in the face, his desire was so cruel. One noon when they strolled the river flats she pressed up against him almost by accident, but he started away. He thought, if I caress her here, I’ll be lost. I’ll be out of all control in a strange land. So he tried to pretend for a while that the only thing uniting them was that they both tended and comforted his wry and dying uncle.
Each evening, after Ephephtha had cooked them their meal, she would leave to find her dug-out canoe and skim away downriver towards her daddy’s home. Uncle Patrick would grow sullen after she went. He never seemed to sleep much, and Usaph, lying in a bedroll on the packed-earth floor, would wake often to hear the old man raving or coughing or rasping like a saw.
‘What’s the matter with you, boy?’ Uncle Patrick wheezed in the middle of the third night.
‘There ain’t nothing the matter with me, Uncle Patrick.’
‘You wouldn’t goddam say so? Can’t you at least escort the lady to the riverbank? Or maybe go the whole hog and paddle her to her pappy’s place. If such a pleasant exercise is beyond your powers, then I pity your generation, boy, that’s all I say, I pity you all.’
The next day he did what his uncle suggested. It was more than a mile to the river. The dug-out felt unwieldy to him but he made her let him paddle. Sometimes she grinned at him because of the unfamiliar way he plied the instrument. She guided him under trailing magnolia and amongst swamp oaks and forests of dead trees rising white-trunked out of the black water. Soon Usaph was lost in these dark reaches of swamp, but Ephephtha Corry seemed to know where they were. He surely hoped so, for the light was going.
What sort of country is this? he asked himself as he steered the dugout. The frogs drum even in the fall. A great floppy rain-crow flew past, booming, and this ripe dark girl sat chortling at him from the bows of the canoe.
‘Do you have gators up in the Valley?’ she asked him.
‘We sure don’t. Do you have them hereabouts?’
She pointed at a spot about a yard from his left elbow. ‘What did you take that for?’
Well, as people do in books, he’d taken an alligator for a piece of swamp-rubbish, and he saw now it was a swamp monster there, shunting along on round about the same course as the dug-out.
‘Don’t you fret. They all know me, them gators and all their tribe.’
‘They know you?’ he asked, staring at her, and fearful. A woman who believed that giant armoured swamp beasts knew and wouldn’t harm her was in some danger. He looked again at the dim gnarled back and was himself afraid. He didn’t tell her that, he didn’t want to break any charm she had been travelling under.
‘They knew me,’ she said, ‘since I been four years old. We’s ancient enough friends, Mr Bumpass, them and me.’
The surface of the water broke well off to the right of the dug-out and a big snaky head rose with a mud perch thrashing in its jaws. ‘Why, that’s my friend Jefferson. Ole Jeff is the king of the whole Combahee. Two axe-handles, he is, across the shoulders and that’s no lie. Why the niggers’re so scared on him, the story goes they feed a baby to him each full moon. Now that … I don’t know if it’s true.’ She called across the water. ‘You fancy juicy slave-baby, Ole Jeff?’
But Ole Jefferson had vanished. He might well be under this dugout right now, Usaph thought.
‘There,’ she said. She pointed to a sandspit. A sort of house was there, propped up on stilts above the water and the mud. It looked to Usaph like the unhealthiest place any man could choose to live. There was no light showing from it, its windows were shuttered.
‘Oh Lordie,’ she said and looked at him with a real worried look on her face. ‘My daddy’s away.’
‘Where?’
‘Why he’s off on some tide,’ she muttered. ‘Meeting them drum fish.’ She closed her eyes and shook her lovely head. ‘He’ll come back soon,’ she said, but it seemed she didn’t really expect it.
‘I don’t know how to find my way back to Uncle Patrick’s,’ said Usaph.
‘That’s jest it. You can’t. But he’ll be back soon to keep you company.’
‘I’d be happy,’ he said, starting to go all sweaty with his daring, ‘with jest yourself for company.’
‘Yes, well …’ she said, and as the dug-out kissed the sand just beneath the stilt-house, she frowned again. And Usaph wondered, why did Uncle Patrick send me if he knew there was no way for me to get back?
They climbed a rotting ladder to the planking that served as a porch. Inside she found a lantern and lit it, while Usaph stood there twitching and sniffing the moist smell of mould and mud and fish-guts.
The house was simple as he’d expected. Against the far wall was a fireplace and a chimney made of beaten-out hardtack tins. Smoked fish hung like drying washing above the fireplace. A swamp rat had been feeding on a piece of cornbread and it looked up, and Usaph saw its mean little teeth. Yet the table was clear and showed the marks of being scrubbed daily. His mother used to say you could tell if a woman was a slut by whether her kitchen table was scrubbed good and regular. Ephephtha Corry had passed one of Mrs Bumpass’s tests.
The girl began to show him around, proud as a farm wife. Her father slept at the seawards end of the house – he said there were shifts in tides and currents that he could hear better lying there. Her bedroom was the far side of a length of canvas sail hung from the roof like a curtain.
She touched him first, taking him by surprise, as they sat at table eating bacon fritters. She touched only his wrist but it came to him like a permission. He began to kiss her in a manner that hadn’t ever occurred to him before, keeping his mouth as wide as he could, as if his intention was to devour. His hands raised her old green dress and cupped the fine melons of her buttocks and used them for their own sweet contour and also to drag her to him. He’d never acted like this before, so quick, so unshy, and he was already halfway frightened of him.
At first the girl was more than willing, lifting one leg from the floor, standing ostrich-like the better to fit him to her. But then her body and her mood changed, just like one of her father’s tides.
‘Please, Usaph,’ she said. ‘Please.’
Over Usaph Bumpass’s shoulder, she saw the walls of the shack the way she’d seen them the night those two drum-fishers misused her when she was but thirteen years. Her father had fetched them from the railroad at Jacksonboro – they were two Charleston gentlemen. They wore watered silk waistcoats under their jackets and they smoked Havana cigars and laughed all the time secretly with each other and took long pulls on sterling silver whisky-flasks they carried on their persons. Anyhow, Daddy Corry took them out fishing in his little yawl of a boat and got them back to the shack just as a hurricane struck. Ephie and her father and the two gentlemen sat up late listening to the wind howl and the downpour, and feeling waves – waves in the swamp! – breaking against the stilts of the house. The two gentlemen drank from their inexhaustible flasks. At midnight the little yawl was being whacked up against its pier, so Daddy Corry went out to moor it in the lee of the house. The two gentlemen weren’t capable of helping and he wouldn’t hear of Ephie coming with him. She was left to huddle here, here by this table where Usaph was now hugging her to the point of breathlessness, while the two businessmen coughed and whispered.
Then o
ne of them got up and went to the window, peering out at the bobbing light of Daddy Corry’s lantern. The other one also rose and walked towards the end of the shack, but as he passed Ephie’s chair, he bobbed to the side and grabbed her by the elbow. He lifted her then by both arms and sat her on the table and unbuttoned himself one-handed and brought forth the terrible red slug of his manhood. How she screamed, but Daddy Corry couldn’t have heard it, not with the hurricane winds and the crash of water, both from above and in the shape of waves as well.
When the first one was finished, the second came to her from the window and wanted his use of her. By now the first gentleman, who likely had daughters of his own and was a little sobered by what he’d done, said: ‘Why, Saul, she’s so tight and she’s bleedin’. I wonder if once ain’t enough.’ But the second man demanded his chance and told her he wouldn’t stand for her caterwauling the way the first had.
Ephie got so angry with her father for taking so long to save his yawl! When the second one had finished, he stroked her hair and said: ‘Now you get to your bed an’ sleep sound. Go on, get to your bed.’ And he made threats about what would happen to her if she told her father anything.
When Daddy Corry came in at last, looking like a drowned man, Ephie was in her bed, weeping secretly, and the two men sat sleepily at table. ‘Your daughter was feeling poorly,’ they told him, indicating the girl’s curtain and bed.
‘I’ll jest see if she’s warm,’ said Daddy Corry. Taking his lantern, he drew the curtain back and stood over her bed. He saw the vomit on her pillow and the quivering shoulders and the bruise on her cheek and knew what had happened. He touched her hair like a conspirator. Then he closed the curtain, said, ‘She’s jest fine,’ to the men, grabbed his shotgun and ordered them out into the storm. They went because they could tell how close he was to shooting them. Then he gave Ephie coffee that must have had whisky in it, for she slept, and all night the men were stuck on that little wharf, wailing for mercy, and their screams too being gobbled up by the racket of the hurricane. In the morning, when the wind dropped, he sent them off in a dug-out with them yelling threats of death and legal action at him.