After a time, Dr. Tom stood up and reached for more wood in the bin. “Shitfire,” he yelled, throwing himself to the side. “Snake.”
Coiled, with head raised, the diamondback at its thickest was as big around as Nate’s wrist. The strike came, missing Dr. Tom by a handbreadth, and the head recoiled again, but higher up, raised a good six inches against the wall; the rain-dampened rattler buzzed fitfully.
The three of them backed out through the door and stood shirtless under the dripping eaves with the horses.
Dr. Tom said, “It’s not like it hadn’t been warning us for the best part of an hour.”
Shivering, the three reflected for a moment, considering their options. Deerling finally said, “I’ll go back in and get the pistol.”
Dr. Tom shook his head. “Tell it I said hey.”
Nate said, “No. I’ll do it.”
He walked back into the house, grabbing a sodden shirt off a peg. The lantern light was weak; he couldn’t see the snake on top of the bin anymore. He hoped it had slipped back between the kindling and not onto the floor nearby. He stood quiet for a moment and listened. There was an empty rain bucket close to the door, and Nate picked it up and gently toe-heeled towards the stove. A renewed buzzing low down told him the snake had crawled back into the wood bin and would have to be coaxed, or driven, out. It was cold in the room, so they couldn’t sleep in the house without expecting the snake to make for the warmth of their bedrolls.
The stove had little wood in it and had already smoked itself out. Nate opened the wood latch and, using the wet shirt, scooped up a few pieces of wood, still glowing and hot. He dropped the steaming, wadded shirt with the embers into the bucket and closed the wood latch and the damper. He then set the bucket on its side, some distance from the stove, with the open end toward the bin.
Dr. Tom called, “Nate? It’s cold out here…”
Nate looked out the open doorway onto the porch and saw the two rangers wrapped in horse blankets and shivering. He picked up his Henry rifle and, with the butt end, began striking the woodpile, opposite the side where the bucket lay. He heard the distinctive, angry buzzing, and soon the snake emerged at the far end; it crawled towards the warmth of the embers and into the mouth of the bucket.
In four strides Nate had his boot on the bottom ridge of the bucket, upending it, trapping the snake inside. He secured the bucket with several heavy logs and stepped to the door, motioning the rangers back into the house.
Dr. Tom stood over the bucket. “Now, that’s one I haven’t seen.”
“Don’t thank me yet. It’s your shirt in there with the snake.” Nate sat down on the floor, rubber-legged.
“What do we do with it?” Deerling tapped the bucket with his foot, setting off the dull thud of a strike from inside.
“We go to sleep. He’s not goin’ anywhere.”
“You gonna kill it?”
“No, sir.” Nate reached over and grabbed his bedroll, then pulled it around his shoulders. “I believe I’ll leave the killing to you. You seem so eager for it.”
He crawled to a dry spot, lay down, and shut his eyes. Behind closed lids, he thought of his wife. He remembered a day in the first few months of their marriage, remembered her crouching with him outside their small field of corn. Her face was close to his, her breath fogging the morning air. She whispered, “This is the way the grandmothers do it. You don’t kill the snake. He eats the mice that eat the corn.” One of her arms encircled the capture barrel, the thin silver bracelet he had given her bright against her skin. “You make him rest beneath the barrel for an hour while you pick what you need.” She pointed to the warm embers inside the bucket. “The snake is drawn to the warmth.
“Like all living things,” she had said, her fingers tracing heat across his forehead, proving the point.
Chapter 9
The students of Middle Bayou were twelve in number, eleven on the frequent days that May did not attend. The oldest was Lavada Waller, a girl who, in Lucinda’s estimation, was almost stunningly thickheaded; the youngest, a sweet, placid boy named Pete who stuttered badly.
On Lucinda’s first day, Euphrastus presented her to the community with an introduction so lengthy that half the students, along with a good number of the parents crowded into the overheated schoolroom, nodded off. He intoned a speech on the virtues of Southern education, which had been cut short during the “War of Northern Aggression,” and revisited in agonizing detail the resultant evils of Federalism, reinforced by Reconstruction.
Lucinda looked over the sad, wilted gathering of settlers, the women in faded dresses, the men in their work denim, and recognized in all of their faces the tenuous look of hope, pale and limpid, painful in its degree of uncertainty, inadequate as a counterweight to the years of starvation, of violence, of sudden death.
During the war, she had worked for a short time nursing the amputees who filled Confederate hospitals. Their missing limbs horrified many of the other volunteers, the women preferring to dote on the soldiers whose wounds were less disfiguring, finding comfort and purpose in feeding their hopes of a return to life as whole men.
To Lucinda, the amputees’ rage—at their dependencies and helplessness, at the dawning knowledge that they would never reclaim their lives as they had been or be without their graceless infirmities—was as familiar and unthreatening to her as her own face. She had recognized the fearful, condemning looks given to them by the hospital visitors and felt her own rage welling up in sympathy. She remembered all too clearly the faces of onlookers and curiosity seekers at the asylum where she had spent her youth. Gawkers who were repulsed and yet fascinated by her wild contortions during a fit and who were irrationally fearful of contracting her violent tremors and deathlike stupors as they might a camp fever. She had learned as a child that nothing could unseat the God-fearing volunteers from their ministrations as quickly as the discovery that they were in close proximity to an unexplained illness.
She had played cards with the soldiers; had held their hands or their arms, or their shoulders if their hands and arms were gone; had changed the seeping bandages on their lower extremities without blanching or turning away. She had fought on their behalf for a fair share of blankets, of food, of medicine. And in fighting for them, she had claimed what had been denied to her as a child.
But she had to look away from the terrible rawness of the settlers of Middle Bayou as they gazed in pride at their offspring, their thin, ragged hopes for the future, and focus her attention back on Euphrastus’s droning speech. When it ended at last, the farmers clapped politely and, after shyly wishing Lucinda well, walked back into the light, away to their fields and homes.
When she turned to face the children, Lucinda was surprised to see that the Wallers’ son, Elam, was still at the back of the room. Sephronia reappeared at the door uttering apologies, saying she had walked halfway down the path home before she remembered her stranded invalid. She cheerfully waved and then wheeled the chair from the schoolhouse as though she had merely forgotten a tea cart after a party.
In the silence that followed, Lucinda wrote on the slate board balanced on an artists’ easel Miss Carter. She then turned to her students. “Over the course of weeks, you will be practicing reading and mathematics, geometry, in particular. Nothing of nature or in man’s designs for roads or bridges or even surveying can be appreciated without an understanding of the spatial relationships between one thing and another.”
She smiled at their blank, uncomprehending faces and then turned once more to the board. Below her name she wrote, in elaborate looping letters, In one page, describe your greatest hopes and fears.
Having handed out the copybooks, she seated herself in the chair behind the large desk. For the better part of an hour, she watched her charges struggling to put their thoughts into words, brows furrowed, lipping pencil nubs like anxious horses. She occasionally nodded encouragement and answering a few simple questions from the younger children. When the last child had completed
the assignment, she collected the books and, to the students’ delight, turned the class loose for the day.
She stood in the door waving good-bye. Experiences with her own teachers had shown her that there were no greater tools with which to control young minds than their weaknesses and their fears.
As the days passed, she learned their names, their habits, and their histories. Several of the students were bright; most gave no trouble. The two oldest boys, fourteen and sixteen, were brothers, and aggressive in their early defiance of her. But after Lucinda complained to Euphrastus, the older, Jack, was severely caned. For a week following the caning, she went out of her way to show excessive kindness to the younger brother, Sam—praising him for his work, ruffling his hair, smiling at him fondly—ensuring that the brothers’ grudges and resentments would be turned towards each other.
At the end of the week, the resulting fistfight in the yard saw both of them expelled entirely from the schoolhouse.
Her cleverest student was Pete. He was no more than nine or ten but had the eyes of an old man. He had a bad stutter, but she found that if she stood behind him with her hand placed firmly on his shoulder, he could speak reasonably well. Those who teased him for it were given the onerous task of cording wood for the schoolhouse stove or liming the outhouse.
She let the majority of the students pursue their own interests and spent the most time with those few inclined to mathematics. In this regard, May was bright, but easily bored, often wandering away without permission or explanation.
At the end of the second week, on a rainy afternoon, May lingered after the other students had left. She was bent over her workbook, her face close to the page, completing the last of the day’s assignments: an essay on the legends of Middle Bayou. Lucinda in that instant realized that May was quite shortsighted. It made the girl seem vulnerable, and Lucinda was surprised to feel suddenly protective, knowing that the otherwise perfect girl had such a flaw. She asked, “Are you near finished?”
May looked up, stretching her neck. “I could go on and on.”
Lucinda reached out her hand for the return of the book and smiled warmly. “I’m certain you could.”
May shut her copybook and returned it to Lucinda. She sat on one corner of the desk, swinging her feet, the hem of her dove-gray dress hiked above her knees.
Lucinda asked, “Another new dress, May?”
May pursed her lips. “It was La-va-da’s.”
Lucinda laughed at the near-perfect imitation of Lavada’s drawl. “That was kind of her.”
“Kind had nothing to do with it. Her mother was going to pitch it in the rag barrel.” May leaned back on her elbows. “It kills her that it looks so fine on me.”
Lucinda reached out and slowly pulled the hem of the dress down over May’s knees. May arched her brows and laughed. “Do you have a gentleman friend, Miss Carter?”
Lucinda shook her head.
“I only ask because I saw that you’d gotten a letter.” May pointed to a pocket in Lucinda’s dress.
A cautioning reflex held Lucinda’s expression in check. A letter had been delivered to her the day before, and she had kept it hidden in her clothing, reading it only when she thought she was alone. “Why would you think it from a gentleman?”
May shrugged. “Receiving mail in Middle Bayou is as eventful as the slaughtering of the autumn hog.” She smiled, a sly curving of the mouth. “I saw the writing on the envelope.”
“As it happens, it’s from my brother.”
May looked disappointed at the news but asked, “Is he handsome?”
“Yes, I think so.”
She shifted onto her side, lying full out on the desk as though it were a couch, her head propped up on one hand. “Mr. McKenzie, our neighbor, is handsome, or would be if he wasn’t frowning all the time. He has only one arm, you know, from the war, and his place has been reduced to a few pitiful acres, though he had thousands in Georgia. I think I should let him kiss me if he had two arms. What must it be like, do you think, to be kissed by a one-armed man…”
“May.” Jane stood in the open doorway. She saw her sister reclining on the desk and frowned. “I’ve been calling and calling.” She held out a hand.
Diffuse sunlight from a breach in the clouds haloed around Jane’s face and hair as she stood in the doorway, and Lucinda thought that she was actually pretty. Then May came to stand next to her, and the impression was diminished.
Jane asked, “Miss Carter, would you please have supper with us tomorrow at six? My father has yet to meet you.”
May circled one arm tightly around her sister’s waist and added, “And we have a piano, so afterwards I can sing for you.”
Lucinda tried to imagine a piano within the forlorn walls of the Grant home; her most recent sampling of such entertainment had been inside a bordello, the songs explicit and, for the less knowing, instructive. Any opportunity to avoid the lackluster talk at her employer’s dinner table, though, would be welcome. She inclined her head in acceptance and, gathering up the copybooks to read in her room, said good night to the sisters.
After closing the schoolhouse door, she walked down the path to the Waller settlement. A short distance away, she stopped and slipped inside an old greenhouse. It had been used only for storage by the family but, as some of the glass was broken, nothing of value had been placed inside, and the door was never locked. Lucinda had taken to hiding in it occasionally, to write and read her letters unobserved. Her room in the Waller house was sometimes unexpectedly invaded by Lavada or Lavada’s mother wanting to engage her in conversation, and the little shed was the only place that gave her the quiet that she craved; a counterweight to the years spent with no privacy, no solitude, no peace.
She sat on an old piece of burlap and took the missive out of her pocket. The distinctive writing on the envelope, its letters controlled and angular, was decidedly mannish, but May’s observations had disconcerted her. The letter inquired about her progress in the settlement; it was cordial enough, and yet a note of impatience was already in evidence.
She then opened the first few copybooks and scanned the sometimes precise, sometimes uneven essays completed in class, mostly to do with the legends of the local islands. “The Legend of Wild Man Island,” “The Tale of Red Horse Island,” “The Story of Broken Neck Island”—as though the flowing stream of notable history had been trapped and congealed on those small bodies of land surrounded entirely by the brackish waters of outlying bayous.
She picked through the books until she found May’s essay and she began reading. Halfway through the second page, Lucinda smiled and whispered, “Good girl.”
The rain was dissipating, blowing southward, and Lucinda looked through the murky glass that made up the ceiling. Enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s pants, she remembered her father saying, his description of a clearing sky.
As she looked, she became aware that she could see the outline of a man in one of the small panes of glass. Or rather, the pane contained the reverse image of a human silhouette, hazily white against a darkened background.
She let her eyes focus on an adjacent section of glass and realized it, too, had the faint but unmistakable figure of a man. She stood up, the hairs on her arms rising, and strained to see the images more closely, finally coming to understand that every pane was a photographic negative of a soldier in uniform. When she visited the shed earlier, the cloud cover had kept her from perceiving the original purpose of the glass; she had thought the darkened areas of the ceiling to be the grime of years.
She stepped onto a crate to examine the negatives more closely. The boxed-in panes of glass showed men of all ages, and more than a few boys, each posing in front of the same static background, some sporting pistols, others holding rifles, all hinting at the prideful, boastful sentiments in those moments before they had ventured into armed conflict. If the resulting photographs had been printed and framed, elaborately or simply, draped with medals of sacrifice or bands of black crepe, they would
have held a kind of paradox: the appearance of life but inexorably a proof of what had departed, never to return.
The sun had begun to bleed out the images of the soldiers. It had been five years since the end of the war, and some of the portraits would have been made at the start of the conflict, in ’61. Soon the plates would be scoured clean, and it would be a kind of second death. She would never again believe the glass was merely dirty. She would always see the men floating above her head.
Lucinda stepped off the crate, imagining ghosts and the legends of ghosts. She would have the chance the following evening to question May about the topic of her essay: the story of pirate’s gold—chests full of it—buried within a few miles of the settlement.
She picked up the scattered books and stepped out of the greenhouse. She smelled the tang of tobacco filling the air and, curious, followed the scent. On the ground, still smoking, was the discarded butt end of a crudely rolled cigarette. A motion caught her eye, and she saw a black man walking quickly across the fields. She watched him for a while before he turned briefly to look back, but he soon disappeared into a stand of trees close to the water. She stamped out the glowing end of the cigarette with the ball of her foot and continued on her way to the house.
Chapter 10
The men spent three days in Austin. One day for church, and two to allow Dr. Tom time to recover from a damp lung the cold rain had inflicted. They slept in barracks shared by a few federal soldiers and local policemen. Nate was left on his own for a good deal of the time—Deerling restlessly joining the local police on surveillance rides to the south—and, after making his official report, Nate walked up and down the streets, in and around the main thoroughfares, looking at the saloons, dry-goods stores, and hotels filled with men and women finely dressed. They had a boldness about them that the small-town settlers lacked. Congress Street, the main road that was plotted from the river all the way to the capital building, had, Dr. Tom said, grown so rapidly in the past few years that he hardly recognized it.